#11: The List of All Answers by Peter Goldsworthy
Available: The List of All Answers
In Another's words: "Goldsworthy is the Chekhov of his time and place...poised, controlled,acute, funny, mean, miserable." ~ Heather Falkner, The Australian.
Thanks to school curriculums, many an Australian teen will be introduced to Goldsworthy at an early age: his debut novel Maestro is a common high-school text, and has been for a fair while now. What's sad about this is that in reading and rereading Maestro, they may never get around to reading his short fiction. The stories in The List of All Answers are drawn from his earlier collections Archipelagoes, Zooing, Little Deaths, and Bleak Rooms, and run from his latest at the time (the incredibly creepy The Kiss) to his earlier works.
For anyone wanting to read or study Australian short fiction at its finest, I cannot recommend this book enough. His stories range from explorations of infidelity (The Car Keys) to notions of personal responsibility (The Afficmative Action Dinner Party), from family ties to selfish needs in times of a crisis. Throughout, Goldsworthy takes seemingly innocuous events and crafts masterful, engaging narrratives from them. And the title story, The List of All Answers, is no exception.
The Story
A year 5 teacher makes dinner with her husband, as her young son asks why onions makes his eyes water. Having answered questions all day, she wants only escape from further questions, when an alternate solution comes to her.
"Three," she answers.
"What's three?"
"The answer to your question is - three."
Three is, in fact, number three on the recently created "list of all answers" created by his mother, a piece of paper with one-size-fits-all responses to any number of questions.
At first, the list works well, stopping-short the infinite curiosity of a child. But as time goes on, the mother starts to realise that certainty is as evasive as the very answers she crafts day by day.
Why it Sticks
It takes a clever writer to start with a couple and their son, and then craft something completely unexpected from it. Though it is short, The List of All Answers draws both parents as complex and highly believable characters in only six pages. The list itself is a masterstroke, and says much both a human's need for structure in an essentially limitless world, and a parent's need to appear authoritative in the face of all manner of uncertainty.
Selecting a standout Goldsworthy story is indeed difficult, as his work is of a uniformly high standard. Though he may have arguably published better stories since The List (which was originally published in 1986), here he takes a seemingly standard parent-child interraction and makes it extraordinary, itself a feat to which only the best writers can aspire.
