By Giselle Leeb.
Clare Fisher, The Moon is Trending (Salt, 2023)
The book blurb says that the collection explores feelings of failure in our success-obsessed capitalist culture, but if the stories illustrate failure, it is the kind of failure called life (or the life of the present at least), where nothing is simple (or everything is too simple) and burning questions are never quite answered, or even found in the first place. It occurred to me when reading the book that the meaning of life, the purpose for us being on planet earth, is much harder to find in this late-capitalist mayhem.
The wordplay and structure of the stories excel in mirroring the meta-fragmentation of post-Internet/mobile/gaming life and late capitalist work modes, and the new, often distinctly odd, human behaviours that result from them. Many of the stories go into multiple asides before reaching their conclusions, capturing the sort of constantly interjected communication we now live with, the frivolity and baffling choice of infinite consumerism, information and distraction, and how these change the way we experience ourselves via our wandering concentration spans. In the first story ‘WTAF’, which starts with the titular sentence ‘The Moon is trending’, multiple stories run alongside and interrupt each other, each struggling for attention from the reader and the narrator:
The Moon is trending. There is a spider crawling across Sophia’s forehead…she will probably yell at me for not telling her sooner, which I could only do if I were to interrupt her story about her friend’s boyfriend and how he sets timers at three-hour intervals throughout the night so that he can ‘feed’ his avatar in some computer game to which he is unhealthily attached…
At the same time, beneath it all, we are, in the end, the same old human beings, worried about relationships and trying to communicate, however we go about it. Perhaps we just need to concentrate a bit longer to realise this.
I read the twenty-seven stories in chronological order and detected a kind of forward movement in the book — the discursive nature of the stories, and the entire collection as it circles back to themes, deepening previous thoughts and observations, works brilliantly. Although, to be honest, I think the collection would still have this effect if read in a different order.
The majority of the stories are very short. Some read like thought experiments, e.g. ‘Think Outside The Box’, others were whimsical and fun, playing with words for the sake of it, e.g. ‘The Real Meaning of Coffee’. Other, often longer stories, used more symbolism and evoked more emotion, dealing with the intensely personal — family issues, anorexia, sex and gender — although always interspersed with the author’s particular brand of humour. In ‘Last Dance’ the characters argue about a coffee stand, just before one breaks up with the other:
I looked at my phone. Somebody’s cat had adopted a flock of mice, even though mice don’t live in flocks and cats don’t have the legal capacity to adopt. Four different people had written books about mushrooms and how they would save us from everything.
I felt the author’s conversational presence and preoccupations throughout. At times, there were hints of Eley Williams and George Saunders, but the wonderful mixture of flippant-sincere, funny-serious, and open-ended, run-on expansive thoughts was all the author’s own.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Giselle Leeb‘s debut short story collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called (Salt, 2022), was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2023. Her short stories have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, and Black Static. She grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham.
