The Review of Contemporary Fiction

People Like That by Agnes Owens
Susann Cokal

Agnes Owens. People Like That. Bloomsbury, 1996. 176 pp. £13.99.

They’re found in the gutted rooms of condemned buildings, the streets of decaying villages, and the servants’ quarters of seedy hotels—“We have them in here all the time,” a clerk says offhandedly, “people like that.” These are the welfare state’s leftovers: drug addicts, the elderly, the insane, and the occasional decent person trying but not succeeding in the lousiness of just getting by.

Agnes Owens is a definite success, part of the famous Glasgow literary enclave, friend and collaborator to the likes of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray (who did the jacket illustrations). Like her previous books—Gentlemen of the West, A Working Mother, and Like Birds in the Wilderness—the bare-bones, unsentimental, and heavily accented stories in People Like That examine the nooks and crannies of Scottish life, particularly as it’s lived in the dysfunctional working-class family. When a father abandons his wife and children, the narrator of “The Marigold Field” writes flatly, “Mother said she couldn’t bear to go back to that place where she had once been so happy.” But even among the marigolds, theirs has been a strange sort of happiness; coaxing his children into giving the camera a smile, the brutal parent calls them “the most miserable kids I’ve ever seen.” It’s all a tangle of addictions and accusations, and the narrative gaze is tough and unrelenting throughout; Owens refuses to put any stock in the daydreaming that might transform bitter experiences. Triumph, when it comes, is sure to seem perverted, the result of finally giving in to the dark side, as in the “accident” that concludes “The Castle”—a combination psychological thriller and comedy of manners, in which two sisters recently bereft of their father take a consoling trip to France and let their petty grievances tailspin into (gleeful) tragedy.

Owens’s stories almost invariably end with this sort of surprise: there’s a rape,or a secret is revealed or someone dies. The barrage of shock endings may exhaust the most willing reader’s suspension of disbelief—and perhaps that is Owens’s intention, the grand theme drawing her disparate narratives together: life is full of surprises, but in the end even they amount to very little. The shock, in fact, drifts quietly away into disaffection, as in “The Lighthouse” (a wicked update of the Woolf novel): after the swift and shattering climax, we watch a body make a hollow for itself in the sand, unobserved on a lonely beach: “No one came by that day and in the evening when the sun went down she was gone with the tide.”

One of the greatest surprises is that Owens is also, as Montaigne would say, the matter of her own book. The final piece appears at first to be another short story, but it’s really the abbreviated account of her life—how she went from squatter to author. Her terse account of raising babies by the light of a kerosene lamp under a canvas tent is easily as powerful as anything in the fictions, and it can serve as a metaphor for the writing process itself: a desperate attempt to nurture and thrive in a dimly perceived world, to make something out of unpromising surroundings. This piece and the best stories in the collection indicate that the author may have surprised herself more than anyone, perhaps even has found a version of the con-tentment that—like the lighthouse, the marigold field, and the castle—has eluded her characters. [Susann Cokal]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction People Like That by Agnes Owens Susann Cokal Agnes Owens. People Like That. Bloomsbury, 1996. 176 pp. £13.99. They’re found in the gutted rooms of condemned buildings, the streets of decaying villages, and the servants’ quarters of seedy hotels—“We have them in here all the time,” a clerk says offhandedly, “people like that.” These are the welfare state’s leftovers: drug addicts, the elderly, the insane, and the occasional decent person trying but not succeeding in the lousiness of just getting by. Agnes Owens is a definite success, part of the famous Glasgow literary enclave, friend and collaborator to the likes of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray (who did the jacket illustrations). Like her previous books—Gentlemen of the West, A Working Mother, and Like Birds in the Wilderness—the bare-bones, unsentimental, and heavily accented stories in People Like That examine the nooks and crannies of Scottish life, particularly as it’s lived in the dysfunctional working-class family. When a father abandons his wife and children, the narrator of “The Marigold Field” writes flatly, “Mother said she couldn’t bear to go back to that place where she had once been so happy.” But even among the marigolds, theirs has been a strange sort of happiness; coaxing his children into giving the camera a smile, the brutal parent calls them “the most miserable kids I’ve ever seen.” It’s all a tangle of addictions and accusations, and the narrative gaze is tough and unrelenting throughout; Owens refuses to put any stock in the daydreaming that might transform bitter experiences. Triumph, when it comes, is sure to seem perverted, the result of finally giving in to the dark side, as in the “accident” that concludes “The Castle”—a combination psychological thriller and comedy of manners, in which two sisters recently bereft of their father take a consoling trip to France and let their petty grievances tailspin into (gleeful) tragedy. Owens’s stories almost invariably end with this sort of surprise: there’s a rape,or a secret is revealed or someone dies. The barrage of shock endings may exhaust the most willing reader’s suspension of disbelief—and perhaps that is Owens’s intention, the grand theme drawing her disparate narratives together: life is full of surprises, but in the end even they amount to very little. The shock, in fact, drifts quietly away into disaffection, as in “The Lighthouse” (a wicked update of the Woolf novel): after the swift and shattering climax, we watch a body make a hollow for itself in the sand, unobserved on a lonely beach: “No one came by that day and in the evening when the sun went down she was gone with the tide.” One of the greatest surprises is that Owens is also, as Montaigne would say, the matter of her own book. The final piece appears at first to be another short story, but it’s really the abbreviated account of her life—how she went from squatter to author. Her terse account of raising babies by the light of a kerosene lamp under a canvas tent is easily as powerful as anything in the fictions, and it can serve as a metaphor for the writing process itself: a desperate attempt to nurture and thrive in a dimly perceived world, to make something out of unpromising surroundings. This piece and the best stories in the collection indicate that the author may have surprised herself more than anyone, perhaps even has found a version of the con-tentment that—like the lighthouse, the marigold field, and the castle—has eluded her characters. [Susann Cokal]

Search the full text of our books: