Known Unknowns
Author: Emmett Stinson
Published by: Affirm Press

The announcement of the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, imminent at the time of writing, is probably a good context in which to review Emmett Stinson’s debut volume of short stories, which Affirm has produced as part of its Long Story Shorts commitment to publish six such anthologies.

The Miles Franklin is given to “the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and which must present Australian life in any of its phases”. Controversially, the award excludes brilliant books written by Australians yet not explicitly concerned with Australian life, and it potentially includes books set here but written by foreigners. On the other hand, the Pulitzer Prize must be awarded to an American author, but works not explicitly about American life are still eligible.

Stinson has already won various literary awards in his native United States and in his adopted Australia, including The Age Short Story Award. Known Unknowns shows he has the talent to win more in the future. His prose is limpid and enjoyable, his voice shrewd.

But he won’t win a Miles if he keeps writing like this.

Set mostly in and around Washington, DC, Known Unknowns is primarily concerned with youthful alienation in the wake of September 11. The Donald Rumsfeld quote of the title quite elegantly evokes this era and suggests having grown wiser since. But the book’s explicitly American nature makes me vaguely uneasy to see it being published by an Australian press for Australian readers.

I don’t want to be one of those fuddy-duddies railing against ‘cultural imperialism’. But these stories seemed deliberately to evade universal resonances… or, worse, to assume that what resonates for an American is universal.

Throughout Known Unknowns, I had the same detached feeling I get when I read New York magazine or watch a Saturday Night Live skit. Or whenever I read the latest buzz novel from an overseas author. This stuff isn’t for me. It’s not just the small Americanisms – the brands and rituals we’re trained to read as glamorous exotica. It’s that America has highly specific ways of moulding its citizens – race, class, education, religion – that don’t mean as much for Australians.

Perhaps Stinson deliberately intended to alienate the reader: to dunk them in this world. Perhaps we’re meant to feel as lost as his characters. The stories are loosely related: the same bars and landmarks reappear in various ways and some characters are fleshed out over several appearances, such as Steve the hipster asshole and Andy Matter the alcoholic asshole.

My favourite stories (’Dry’, ‘Something So Helpless’) bottle a mood of grim impotence in an empathetic way that doesn’t try too hard. ‘Local Knowledge’, the longest in the book, was also the most elliptical and intriguing. I wonder if Stinson wants to tease it out into a novel, or has realised this is the furthest it’ll go.

In other pieces Stinson seems to be consciously playing with literary style. ‘Sickness Unto Death’ ticks familiar boxes – apocalypse; rural isolation; protective siblings. In ‘All Fathers The Father’, ‘The Weight’ and ‘The Sound Of The Fury’, Stinson flirts with well-worn themes of madness and murder. And ‘The Last Men’, starring Matter and his self-satisfied buds Rex Erection, Peter Diameter and Virginia Dentata, seems to ape Bret Easton Ellis.

It’s lame, I know, but I always feel more satisfied with fiction if it wears its technique lightly and its affects prominently. Perhaps the art lies in balancing an author’s knowing manipulation of language with the communication of ‘authentic’ feelings and experiences.

Knowing no better, an Australian reader must accept that, to some extent, we’re glimpsing fragments from Stinson’s own American life. Yet I don’t believe it’s accidental that the most mannered and intellectual story here, ‘All Fathers The Father’, is the least ‘American’, and that it was also the story for which Stinson won The Age’s short story prize in 2004. Welcome to Australian literature, Emmett.