Behind the generic titles of Rachel Ingalls’s stories lies an eccentric world of strange people who are just like you and me. I say “stories”, but the fictions in this new selection of her work, mostly from the 1970s and 80s, are really novellas, 50-80 pages long, a length that Ingalls, an American writer who lived in England and died in 2019, considered “unsaleable”. “Oh dear,” she added. “I would like to write novels.”
What Ingalls wrote instead were novels with the connective tissue removed – the sudden jolts created by this technique take some getting used to, but quickly become addictive. They often start with an odd premise and idiosyncratic people – a monk who has sex with the angel Gabriel and becomes pregnant, in Blessed Art Thou – and in whose responses to these extreme events we see something of ourselves. In Inheritance, a woman looking into her family finds a motley band of fascists whose skin causes priceless pearls to degrade.
Ingalls had a prescient eye for subject matter: In the Act features a sex robot coming between a husband and wife (battling couples are fertile territory here) decades before Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. At least half the pieces here are as satisfying as Ingalls’s masterpiece Mrs Caliban, which in 1986 was named one of the 20 outstanding postwar US novels by the British Book Marketing Council, alongside the likes of Humboldt’s Gift, Invisible Man and Song of Solomon.
Most of the stories are pacy and dialogue-heavy, so they slip down nicely just before a horrifying revelation makes them catch in your throat. An exception is the title story, an uncharacteristically dense and sombre tale of a family struggling in the aftermath of war. Elsewhere, the blackness of Ingalls’s vision is offset by brutal comedy, whether through rains of toads (Friends in the Country) or in her pitch-perfect ear for an ending, which never fails her. One story ends with people destroying “the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs” – but from such destruction Ingalls confects delicious creations.
No Love Lost by Rachel Ingalls is published by Faber (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
