Book 38: Small Plates

Small Plates: Short Fiction

Katherine Hall Page

Though Katherine Hall Page is the author of a long-running mystery series, I decided to pick up Small Plates anyway, figuring that short story mysteries are somewhat difficult to find. I found it to be a remarkably even collection, although my overall feeling was one of disappointment. Most of the stories star her longtime heroine, Faith Sibley Fairchild, and while first-time readers can easily become acquainted with Faith and the other regular cast members who make frequent cameos, Page has a tendency to introduce too many background details into these stories. It's lovely that Faith is such a well-rounded character with a robust history, but too many stories offer unnecessary backstory that is not only distracting but also misleading; the overall effect is not one of solid character development but, rather, of tedious exposition that verges on bragging. Page's tendency to over-explain is on display throughout these stories, which is all the more frustrating because she often abbreviates her treatment of other, more crucial story elements, such as resolutions. Stories such as "Across the Pond", "Hiding Places", and "Sliced" spend too much time building up to the last-minute surprise and far too little exploring the consequences of said twist, often abandoning the narrative just when things get interesting. This becomes a more egregious error when you consider that many of these sudden turns are telegraphed, or at least fairly easy to guess; though they are, as a rule, interesting and appropriate for the story at hand, they hint at greater themes and more intriguing tales that remain unexplored, left to the blank page and the reader's imagination. The exception is "The Proof Is Always in the Pudding", an amusing, if overly clichéd, period piece that offers its solution during a mid-story flashback, only to have our heroine discover the (very same) solution a few pages later, in a way that adds nothing to the story; still, though, its ending- unlike most of the others- is entirely satisfying.

This inconsistency, I believe, highlights Page's central fault: though she has a fantastic knack for creating believable characters and bringing her suburban Boston, midtown Manhattan, and rural Maine settings to immediate, vivid life, she just cannot use subtlety to her advantage. The mundane is explained- often ad nauseum and usually in far more depth than a short story warrants- and the unique is suited only for cameo appearances that quickly lead to more tedium. Too many times I found myself backtracking over poorly constructed, confusing sentences, and the book contains a startling number of simple errors, misplaced words, and missing commas that an astute editor could easily fix. The writing is far from lazy- nor is it belabored, for that matter- but it is often marred by an inherent clumsiness, a lack of intuition for what information to include, when to include it, and how to effectively do so, all errors that are magnified greatly in short fiction. Likewise, the dialogue often rang untrue to me, with characters explaining things to each other that each surely must have already known and using strangely formal language that yanks the reader right out of the story.

All is not horrible in Small Plates, and I have no doubt that a certain kind of reader would be happy to gloss over some of these faults and appreciate the stories that lie underneath. Page's overly saturated prose does not mar the tactfully paced, appropriately tense, and emotionally effective "The Two Marys" and actually suits "The Would-Be Widower". The latter story is by far the collection's strongest, a darkly funny tale whose final twists resonated perfectly despite the fact that I had mostly predicted them about two paragraphs in. This story, and elements of the others, prove that Page has the imagination and some of the right instincts to write compelling, clever mystery stories; nonetheless, I still feel like she over-thinks her writing, trying too hard to cram everything in and not trusting her stories and characters to speak for themselves. Again, this kind of style can work in lengthier fiction, but short work magnifies the error of every extraneous aside, every misplaced modifier, and every unnecessary bit of information. I really wanted this collection to be fantastic, and I would really like to see Page step a bit more outside of her comfort zone to really explore what happens to her characters after she drops the curtain. As it stands, however, I fear that Small Plates- while showcasing the Page's cleverness, sympathy, and surprisingly dry humor- is a victim of its own prose, comprised of good ideas that get away from the author, strong characters who can't quite become believable enough, and compelling stories that are not allowed to simply breathe, or be, or truly embrace what they are.

Grade: C+