There are many things one could praise in this impressive and powerful collection: how the stories describe the many shapes love can take in our lives as well as the pressures it exerts, how the stories are grouped in pairs that work as call and response, or how the choice of unusual and visually or, in a few cases, aurally rich detail contributes to a story's power. Instead, what I want to talk about is how the collection achieves an organic seamlessness I attribute to the deftly handled shifts, from story to story, in point of view.
Usually, when I read a collection, I'm aware of the author making shifts in point of view from one story to another. In Shattuck's collection, what I noticed instead were the shifts in time as the stories move between past, distant past, and present. All the stories are set in New England, and this variety in time periods deepens the regional focus in an unusual way. Most notable for me was the author's invisibility. Each story seemed to have been written by its protagonist (in the case of the stories in the first person) or (in the case of the third person), by its fictional narrator.
The knockout title story, "The History of Sound," is a good example of the invisible author. The first-person narrator, Lionel Worthing, is an old man when he decides, because of a bout of sleeplessness triggered by the arrival of a mysterious package, to write about the summer when he was twenty and he and a friend, both of them graduates of the New England Conservatory of Music, walk through the Maine countryside recording folk songs. It is 1914 and the recording equipment Lional learns to use and must carry on his back is weighty and primitive. David, who is a few years older, makes the introductions and conducts the business of getting people to sing for them. They go from person to person, following word of mouth, travelling by foot. It's a summer of adventure, sleeping in fields, bathing in streams. The story begins in Lionel's present, which feels contemporary, and then reaches into backstory. He speaks in a tone of regret for a missed chance and a wrong choice that still, in his old age, and now exacerbated by the arrival of the unexpected package, feels vibrant and unsettling.
The first-person point of view is the only way this story could have been told because there are mysteries about that summer and about David that Lionel will never fully comprehend. And the retrospective is absolutely the right distance to look back from because the revelations he comes to later in life, after he's had more experience in love, help him to understand what he missed. The narrow scope of the first person, with its blinders of subjectivity, keeps many of David's mysteries intact. This is necessary because the secrets of his friend's life, his upbringing and his relationship to his father, who was perhaps the cause of the "darkness" Lionel perceives in David, had contributed to his hesitations when he was younger.
Strangely, withholding information increases the magnetism of the character. David's sensuality, a quality first suggested by the music he plays, and Lionel's recollection of David at the piano, is heightened by the aura of mystery. What I don't know intrigues me. But David's sensuality comes with danger; that is evident in the way David seduces his friend after their first meeting at a bar where David was playing.
"His apartment was bare—only a bed, a piano, and a chair. Dirty plates and glasses were scattered on the floor, along with pages and pages of music...I asked him for a glass of water, because the room was spinning. He brought a water glass from the kitchen, said he only had this one clean one, took a long sip and then spit an arc of water at me. I opened my mouth to catch the stream. He did this until the glass was empty and I was wet but had managed a few sips. He placed the glass on the floor, and then walked to me, took off my glasses, folded them and put them on the windowsill. He pulled my wet shirt up over my head and led me to his bed" (6).
Playful, romantic, magnetic: this is what David is for Lionel. A wider perspective, the omniscient or third-person-limited point of view, would have allowed too much context to leak through. This way, the emotion is raw and there is something tender yet aggressive in David's seduction of Lionel. The narrative highlights the unknowns: why did David hide certain truths from Lionel? And how did the scar above his lip come about?
But of course, readers can intuit the answers because we know that homophobia flourished in those years, and life or fiction has shown us the many ways prejudice can turn inward. So, it's understandable that when the relationship between them is interrupted by the end of summer, the war, and other circumstances, the feelings they shared but rarely spoke about, drift into the sediment of Lionel's memory where they get buried. The retrospective first person voice is the perfect tool to bring them back to the surface. And in each story that follows this affecting and memorable opening, Shattuck uses a point of view so well suited to the story's subject matter, the narrative flows naturally, from story to story, with consummate grace.
Shattuck, Ben. The History of Sound. New York: Penguin Random House, 2024.
Filed under: Witholding information to create a magnetic character