The Sound Waves

Viking

July 9, 2024

306 pages

It’s a long story. And 12 short stories.

Ben Shattuck tells those dozen stories in his new collection called The History of Sound. The stories span three centuries. They interconnect in pairs — sometimes in passing, through an old painting or field recording buried under floor boards, sometimes more directly in traveling back in time to reveal the full story of a mystery that has been reinterpreted and rewritten by later generations.

In the process, Shattuck is telling us one story, about our legend-laden region of New England. And about telling stories, period.

The 40-year-old Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum — who also owns what’s billed as America’s ​“oldest general store,” with a pub and bookstore added — began this collection a decade ago with the title piece, in which two young musicians meet and conduct a brief but torrid romance in Cambridge with a detour to conducting folk field recordings in rural Maine. The recording resurfaces in the book’s final story, in which a woman trapped in a stultifying marriage discovers the old recording in an old house she’s procrastinating in cleaning up, and in the process discovers inspiration to pursue her freedom and her own dreams.

Sandwiched between are pairs of stories linked at times by more direct connections: A send-up of a contemporary NPR ​“Radio Lab” segment has experts affirming what really happened when an extinct nesting great auk was said to have reappeared in a dying harbor town three decades earlier; the following story reveals a story about an innkeeper’s efforts to invent stories to engage and delight the failing mind of his declining wife.

A present-day aspiring young writer in a White Mountain cabin seeks to piece together a long-forgotten 1907 11-man die-off at a lumber camp based on spotty 1929 newspaper articles; the following story, taken from one of the lumberers’ journals, offers an adult Lord of the Flies-type drama with little resemblance to the new story published by the young writer. Another paired couplet tells different versions of a 17th century millennial religious cult told at the time and then more than four centuries later.

Shattuck has the gift of fleshing out main characters, developing engaging plot lines, and making us care what happens anew in each story as they wrestle with how to fill missing pieces of their lives.

In tying together he stories he’s also challenging our view of history, what we tell ourselves about where we live, who we are, and how we can ever know the truth of foundational stories.

“About halfway through the book,” Shattuck said Tuesday in an interview of WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program, ​“I realized, ​‘OK, I’m writing stories that aren’t broadly interconnected, but that are literally in pairs.’ There’s something about that, especially in historical fiction, that call and response, that duet feeling that you get as a writer, in which you’re in the present day. You’re writing about the past, but also you can feel changed by the past a little bit. …

The question the reader faces is whether, as new information or clues fill in missing pieces of past stories, are we getting closer to the truth? Or creating new ​“truths”?

“You think you know something about your family until you find something out about your great grandmother, and all of a sudden your family is totally understood and misunderstood. I remember learning that in elementary school, what a wonderful man Christopher Columbus was, right? How we frame the Civil War, how we frame so many parts of our own large cultural history, is constantly changed and misunderstood. I’m really interested not in just laying massive blame, but in the processes in which people who are keepers of history and historical stories transmit” them.

The question the reader faces is whether, as new information or clues fill in missing pieces of past stories, are we getting closer to the truth? Or creating new ​“truths”?

The ​“lit crits” would argue that new meanings we ascribe to old stories, whatever the original facts or the writer’s intention, are valid, are true, in and of themselves.

The Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe-esque ​“essential truth” historical-fiction crowd would tell us that a story’s truth lies not in (loosely presented) facts but in the deeper conclusions about human nature woven into the supposed facts — the way the lumber camp story, for instance, reveals the potential consequences of bullying vulnerable people.

I would argue that Shattuck has mined this field more deftly by avoiding historical fiction, but seeking to portray truths about human nature and infinitely layered lore through wholly invented stories loosely linked together around a single place on the map, if not a single place of time. We hear the ​“history of sound” in all these stories; it echoes long after the tide returns to the sea.

Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with author Ben Shattuck on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven. Click here and here to read two previous combo book review/author interviews.