Hey Yeah Right Get A Life - Hardcover

Simpson, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224060821 ISBN 13: 9780224060820

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2000

Synopsis

A string of linked stories about millennial women at work, at home and on holiday. These ten stories display a multiplicity of London life glimpsed from buses, trains and the occasional taxi, with the Thames as a diamond-dusted ribbon seen from an aeroplane coming into Heathrow; also from behind buggyloads of babies, and from suburban back gardens with their barbecues and dawn revelations. There are wine-fuelled confidences between two teachers in a Polish cafe in South Kensington, waves of grief and rudeness during a performance of Orphee at Covent Garden, and a dreadful anniversary dinner for a timber merchant and his wife somewhere in south London. There is a corporate Burns Night in a Mayfair hotel where poetry and money collide catastrophically, and an enormous air disaster which starts by destroying the glasshouses at Kew and ends by obliterating the placid domestic streets for miles around. One woman passes on the secret of wurstigkeit to another in a shopping trip of unbridled sensuousness in the heart of Spitalfields. Seventeen-year-old Jade Beaumont walks towards the jewelled narrative of her future, fiercely resolved not to be like her mother Nicola, who has a succes

About this title

Review

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, Helen Simpson's third collection of short stories, is about the hectic day-to-day whirlpool of women's lives--women who want to improve their lot, women who yearn to "get a life" better than their own. When she writes about child care it is with a knowing honesty about the accompanying sacrifices and tribulations--from the highly efficient businesswoman who "had a beautiful house and she was never in it. She knew what the children were doing at every hour of the day and she wasn't there", to the stay-at-home wife who "would stand and wait for herself to grow still and the image was one of an ancient vase, crackle-glazed, still in one piece but finely crazed all over its surface". Simpson is superb at conveying the intense frustration and yet maddening love that children inspire.

Each story complements the others, even the rather macabre "Millennium Blues", as Simpson's characters bustle around, meaning well, and occasionally reappearing (Dorrie in the title story also features in "Hurrah for the Hols"). She doesn't waste a word and her ear for dialogue is acute--her description of a female banker's interpretation of a corporate Burns night in "Burns and the Bankers", for example, is both excruciating and hilarious--and she manages to blend both humour and poetry into the scurrying days of her characters.

In some ways, many of the stories feel more like a face-pressed-against-the-window peer into other people's experiences rather than finite stories and the reader longs to learn more about the characters and discover how things worked out. Hey Yeah Right Get a Life is a wonderfully written and involving collection of stories that will have a high-recognition factor for many readers. --Christina McLoughlin

Review

"Helen Simpson's prose demands to be heard...audacious, imaginative writing...exceptionally perceptive." -"Independent on Sunday" "From the Trade Paperback edition."

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224060821
• ISBN 13: 9780224060820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192