On Ben Shattuck's "The History of Sound"

It's good to, once in a while, read something bad, especially when others insist it's great. Ben Shattuck's collection of short stories, "The History of Sound," is just that—serviceable writing that has received heaps of praise since its 2024 release (The Boston Globe called it "polyphonic fiction" while Chicago Tribune dubbed it "masterful").

Broadly, these are stories where characters narrate exactly what they're feeling, and what they're feeling is bad. There's the father who laments his disconnect with his adult, opioid-addicted son. There's the mother who sees glimpses of her abandoned child in the face of another boy. There's a writer whose autofictional complaints about his crush are published in a literary magazine (which we're forced to read an excerpt of, and which Shattuck takes no interest in developing beyond his own narrative style). And there's the elderly man remembering that, as his life comes to a close, he only ever loved one person—a young man named David who died shortly after returning from World War I (this story was adapted into a movie last year).

But if no-risk storyshouting doesn't appeal to your interests, worry not, because there's a wrinkle in the narratives!—ah, you see, the stories unfold in couplets. One story begets another, which layers themes onto the first. The twelve stories are thus six pairs in which locations—and not much else—echo back and forth.

And... that's about it. There's also a bizarre false episode of the show Radiolab that reads as a pure transcript between the hosts, reporter, and interview subjects. I don't read fan fiction so I won't pretend I'm a suitable judge for whatever the fuck it is when you take real people and you write make-believe about them (*cough* "Lincoln in the Bardo" *cough cough*).

Most disappointing, however, is Shattuck's refusal to engage with the time period he writes about in any serious way, as one story delivers a first-person narrative during the late 1600s that sounds like it was written today. Language and speech evolve tremendously every century (this is extraordinarily apparent as I read the 1818 classic "Frankenstein" today) and there's absolutely no recognition of this in the text. What a bizarre failure, to have the opportunity to play with language and, as a writer, to leave it untouched.