If you are not in the habit of reading short fiction, Ben Shattuck’s extraordinary “The History of Sound” might make you a convert.
Rooted in New England landscapes and culture, the collection of six paired stories is structured along the lines of a “hook-and-chain” song format popular in 18th century New England. As with the two lines of a musical couplet, the second story in each set either amplifies or provides a twist to the storyline of the first. (That said, each story also stands on its own.)
A Massachusetts resident, Shattuck is an award-winning short story writer well acquainted with New England history. His nonfiction book “Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau” landed on many 2022 “best of” lists. For a nonliterary pursuit, he owns and runs Davoll’s in South Dartmouth, the oldest general store in America (in continuous operation since 1793).
The title story, an achingly beautiful reminiscence of first love, is set primarily in Maine in the summer of 1919. Two gifted musicians, Lionel, a singer and David, a composer, traverse the state to record folk songs and ballads with a new technology that captures voices on wax cylinders.
The story opens in 1984 when a much older Lionel, now a renowned music scholar, receives a box containing those cylinders at his home in Cambridge. The wife of a Bowdoin College professor had found them in the house they had recently bought and had tracked down his address. Stories in this collection often turn on a chance discovery, shifting a narrative in unexpected ways.
For Lionel, the delivery brings back vivid memories of his brief affair with David, cut tragically short. Lionel would go on to live a full life and to have other relationships, but no one else would ever compare to David. Though never as easygoing with people as David, Lionel had a deeper inner resilience. Of that long-ago summer, Lionel remembers “I didn’t experience the guilt that some men in my time would have. I just loved David and I didn’t think much beyond that.”
(Illustrating the cinematic nature of this story, a movie based on the story “The History of Sound” is slated for a 2025 release, starting Paul Mescal (“Normal People”) as Lionel and Josh O’Connor (“The Crown”) as David.)
Throughout the book, familiar New England locales provide settings that can feel recognizable or completely new: a smokey pub in Boston in the early 1900s; Deerfield Academy in the 1980s; the desolate wind-swept landscape of 18th century Nantucket and the elite enclave it has become now; the Harvard Peabody Museum in the 1800s with the new Blaschka glass flowers exhibit and the same museum now as a venerable institution; beyond the seasonal tourism that lifts up the Cape, the substance abuse problems that plague many Cape Cod towns.
The tales in each literary couplet are written in completely different voices, adding a great deal of texture to the reading. In a big-hearted tale of how an improbable sighting of an extinct bird reinvigorates the fortunes of a tiny coastal town, the first story, “Radiolab: ‘Singularities’” is all breezy entertaining conversation, a transcript of the popular radio show. Its tender companion story “The Auk,” about the heart-piercing gift a husband gives to his adored wife as she slips into dementia, is told in a gentle first-person.
Set in the present-day, “August in the Forest” is a wry, bruising character study of an insecure writer in search of creative inspiration. In a New Hampshire museum, he comes across an old newspaper article that highlights an unsolved mystery from the early 20th century: an entire camp of loggers found dead, lying in the snow outside their cabin.
It is not until the companion tale, “The Journal of Thomas Thurber,” set in 1907, that we learn what led to the loggers’ demise. Writing in an unadorned style, Thomas Thurber uses his journal to chronicle daily activities of the logging camp and to have a long conversation with his wife back in Concord. Entry by entry – in pages his wife will never see – he muses about their marriage while also noting the increasingly dark behavior of certain members of the camp.
“The Children of New Eden,” set in western Massachusetts in 1696, brims with trouble of a different kind. Karl Dietzen, the charismatic and corrupt leader of a self-styled new religion, has convinced a band of followers to build a New Eden on frontier land. Told from the perspective of some initially fervent believers, we see cult members descend into cruelly restricted, isolated lives as they await a rapture-like end to their time on earth.
Showing just how deceptive available historical data can be, the companion story, “Introduction to the Dietzens: Searching for Eternity in the North American Wilderness,” is written as a well-meaning, earnest academic text, about the same religious sect but that bears little resemblance to the contemporary tale that comes before.
The companion to “The History of Sound” is the multi-layered “Origin Stories.” Annie – the professor’s wife who mailed those wax cylinders to Lionel – is reassessing much about her life, including what she had always considered the destined, fairy-tale beginnings of her true love.
Her discovery, which proves to be life-changing, occurs when she is doing some mundane, necessary house tasks. In so many of these stories Shattuck brings you inside the rhythm of ordinary days and within the commonplace, crafts a pivotal moment. Not a sudden dramatic lightbulb moment, but one that is, like so much of the writing in this collection, graceful and true.
Ben Shattuck will be at Harvard Book Store on July 11 and Wellesley Books on July 24.
