Ambit #190

Ambit is a long-running, non-speculative fiction, UK magazine that comes in digest format with a smattering of illustrations and photography as well as poetry and fiction. From the issues I’ve read previously, I’ve found that its literary trappings are nonexclusive and don’t tie the magazine to a pretentious mast (something that can’t be said for similar magazines that I’d be ungracious to name). Within the heart of an Ambit story, there is usually a good read. And at the end of the day, it’s the story that matters.

This issue is American themed and features five pieces of fiction. However, with Geoff Nicholson as the fiction editor, it does seem somewhat of a contrivance that it is his story featured first. “Naked Women Eating Sandwiches in America” is so bizarre that it might well be true. A wealthy ex-TV star lounges by his pool and forms a relationship with a prostitute named Amber who he calls up just so she can eat sandwiches with him while she’s naked. The story has a composite feel: part Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind” (referenced in the story) and part “The Whore of Mensa” (by Woody Allen). It’s a well-written but ultimately unsatisfying piece—the circumstances lend themselves to more development if Nicholson had wanted—and the last sentence is less a revelation and more a statement of fact. A story of lost opportunity, it becomes just that.

“Ghastly Gert’s Ghost Party” by Matthew Licht is another story which could be real, based as it is upon a “genuine bogus supernatural incident.” The narrator is an invitee to East Village poetry gatherings hosted by Justine Wakefield, a razor-tongued poet whose entourage consists of hangers-on and the reverential—excited by, yet wary of, her every word. Our narrator savours her knowledge but disagrees with her vehemently on her opinion of Gertrude Stein—a poet who he believes is “devoid of soul and talent.” This sets the stage for a séance whereby he attempts to ask Gertrude’s ghost if “there is any point to what you wrote,” as a way to resolve the issue. Needless to say, this doesn’t go quite to plan.

“And what have you ever done, whore-writer, that you dare call the work of your betters into question?”

The thrust of the story is the relationship between Justine and the narrator, and the séance is seamlessly written into this. The writing is exemplary, touching, and pertinent; creating a wholly believable scenario that lets us a little bit deeper into the characters and makes us feel privileged to have the chance to be there.

“The Pig Did It” by Joseph Caldwell is an extract from his novel of the same name, which in itself is part of a trilogy that appears to tap into gentle Irish life in a comedic way, no doubt informing softly on its characters as it does so. Aaron McCloud, fleeing a relationship which never got off the ground, leaves America for County Kerry to “feel sorry for himself.” During the latter stages of his journey, his life is momentarily disrupted by an overturned pig truck. He wanders off, ostensibly to curtail the flight of one particular pig, while also musing over his life that is to follow. The story itself is okay but doesn’t fully engage, suffering from only being an excerpt. Novel extracts rarely work as standalone pieces—a short story is not so easily defined as merely “a story which is short”—and I found Aaron to be a boorish irritant who might prove his worth in a novel but failed to here.

“The Unadulterated Projectionist” by David Stromberg suffers a similar fate. Whereas Caldwell’s extract did form, at the very least, a mini-story, these three extracts are entirely disparate. And while they delve a little into the lives of their characters, they are too intangible to get a grip upon. Well-written, but unless you enjoy opening a novel at random and reading a page before putting it down, the lack of cohesive storytelling will probably infuriate. No disrespect to Stromberg, of course, simply a personal antipathy towards extracts which rarely inform on the whole.

Finally, however, D.W. Daniels’s “Little Sasha on Her Way to Jerusalem” picks the satisfaction level back up to where Licht’s story left off. It opens well:

On the twenty-third of August the grass turned yellow and the trees began to die. That day we shot seven poets, four in the morning, three in the afternoon.

The narrator is in charge of the execution squad but secretly longs to hear the last words that the poets speak. Set in a society which seems violently ramshackle, Daniels mixes the extraordinary with the mundane, creating a situation which can change from humorous to distressing upon a turn of phrase, a mistake. As a metaphor of the inability to destroy the poetic, it works well, but this is almost a by-product—something that isn’t sacrificed to make a point. What makes this work is the depth of characterisation; we want to listen to Daniels’s message: that life can be both beautiful and arbitrary, simultaneously. That is, in fact, what makes it life.