It’s tough, being a writer nowadays. The art of letters is that of thought, and if there is a single word that describes the thinking of our age, it is “sophistication” -- of breadth, at least, if not of depth. Magazines feature stories about the toothpick as a metaphor of innovation and entrepreneurial canniness, poetry regularly takes off into weird spaces, and children’s stories deal with atheism and republicanism. The cheap paper on which genre works are printed belie their value: Walter Mosley’s hardboiled detectives are vessels for commentary on race relations; the vampires-and-spaceships vision of Peter Watts is an exercise in hard-science futurology. Setting out, the checkpoint where a story finally becomes interesting seems distant indeed.

With this in mind, it is hard to read Chua Kok Yee’s horror-inflected vignettes in “News From Home” -- the inaugural volume of Silverfish Books’ Malaysian Literature in English series, which also features stories by Shih-Li Kow and Rumaizah Abu Bakar -- and not feel as if they falter far short of the finish line. The last of his ten tales, “When There is a Will ...”, is a good example:

Mr Chua purchases talking exercise machine to get in shape -- but even the treadmill’s admonishments fail to stop his resolve from dying. Intervention comes in a form of a phone-call from a fitness company; the PTX3000, apparently, transmits physiological information back to its manufacturer. The company offers Mr Chua an experimental product: the Will Power patch. “It contains only pure willpower,” (the pretty saleswoman tells him) sourced from professional athletes.

There’s potential there. “When There is a Will ...” could have been many things: a look at the fact that we are, essentially, biological machines with easily-flipped switches; a cautionary exploration of privacy invasion and behaviour control in a consumer society (as opposed to totalitarianism -- which, at least, implies value in controlling people, and not just their resources).

Failure To Launch

What “When There is a Will ...” actually is, however, is patently ridiculous. Speculative allegories that deal with science are bait-and-switch affairs: a writer displays enough authority in his subject so he can persuade readers to believe in the impossible. But, in the case of Kok Yee’s story, it’s obvious that the writer hasn’t done his homework: willpower, unlike Austin Powers’s mojo, isn’t some simple extract; chemically induced self-regulation would require a tailor-made cocktail of ADHD and bipolar disorder meds. “Trust me, Mr Chua,” says the saleswoman, “You’re not going to believe if I tell you,” -- and we don’t.

Kok Yee’s other pieces are similar failures in imagination. “The Fox and the Dog” features a kitsune -- as if our archipelago didn’t already have villains’ gallery of malevolent ghouls. “The L-Word of the Beach” is a criminal waste of a delicious title. “Three Little Pigs”, a poor copy of the fairytale world-building in Bill Willingham’s comic epic “Fables”, ends with the Bad Wolf auditioning for a part in “The Roadrunner”:

“But the Boss just shook his head, and told me the kids nowadays are smart. He said even five-year-old kids can tell a wolf from a coyote. He asked me if I had heard of Animal Planet before.”

“Where’s that place?” asked Colin curiously.

Yeah.

All this would have been bearable if the storytelling was novel -- but Kok Yee, whose previous work was published in the pulp horror anthology “Dark City 2”, seems to fall into a common genre-writers’ pit: a reader detects his short-cuts and formulae all too easily. “Micky”, my least favourite of the book, ends by handing the protagonist a horrible revelation, conveyed by one pivotal phrase. Its last paragraph reads: “A loud cry of despair echoed through the bungalow.” You can almost see an agonised figure in a lit window, shaking its fists, as the camera pulls away.

That said, there is finesse when the writer actually applies himself. “The Crime Adventure of Mr Shrill and Mr Guttural”, a vengeance yarn with twin abductions, has a clever temporal device in its structure that pays off satisfyingly.

...

Good News, Bad News

The rest of “News From Home” is a mixture of hits and misses. Rumaizah’s contributions, taken together, are the weakest link: most of her ten (“Mat Taiqo”, “Tomorrow’s Headline”, “Singles’ Honeymoon”, “Drama on the Pelamin”) riff on loves found, lost, or cheated on -- but these read more like gossip-rag tales than stories which outline real emotion. Others are simple “premise + twist at the end” mechanisms -- though, to be fair, the boarding school girl-versus-boy shenanigans of “The 50sen Queens” are quite charming.

Shih-Li’s pieces are better. “Don’t Depend on Me” is a heartfelt account of woman seeking happiness; “Seeking Frangipani” draws out the directionless searching of a mid-life crisis in progress; “A Job to Love”, set in a humongous mall / amusement park called the Leisure Dome, builds a fresh world that is, nonetheless, instantly familiar.

The titular “News From Home” is the collections’ best: Disguised as letter to a sibling, detailing how the family cat’s grave has become shrine (“Some smart aleck came along and built one of those little red huts, like the one for ‘datuks’ at construction sites”) for gamblers, it hints at past estrangements (“I’ll tell Mama you asked about her health, if that’s alright”) and paints an empathic portrait of the losses of age. When Josie, the letter-writer, thinks she sees the ghost of her still-living mother playing with their former feline in the garden, she “drove to the brightest teh tarik place I could find”:

Then Mama walked into the kitchen this morning, beaming, and said, as though she’s seen God’s face, “I dreamt that I was in heaven with Patches and we were living in this beautiful red house surrounded by fruit trees.” What do you make of that?

There are some minor missteps: “The Plan.doc” ’s narrative struggles to fit into its conceit; “The Geometry of Me” is an idea that doesn’t really bloom. However, among the “News From Home” three, Shih-Li is the one with the best grasp of the quality that makes text so affective: its inherent ability to communicate an emotional core. While Kok Yee and Rumaizah try at expansion, Shih-Li’s instinct is to dive. It is the correct one.

Silverfish New Writing

Perhaps Bangsar’s least conspicuous cultural fixture, Silverfish Books has moved -- onto Jalan Telawi, the street immediately behind its previous address. An evening two weeks ago, I mounted the staircase next to a pet shop and paid a call to the bookstore’s new premises. Raman Krishnan, Silverfish’s keeper, pressed a Charles Bukowski reader into my hands. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it,” he said, acknowledging my sweaty and bedraggled appearance. I sat down to read. It was all very familiar: the unremarkable classical music, odour of new print, and portraits of dead white men were virtually identical to when I first visited the store, in 2001, for the publication of Silverfish New Writing 1.

Raman’s publishing concern has grown since then, but his signature commodity is now defunct. The last New Writing anthology was published last October; after seven books its publisher has decided to retire the series. Its passing was much lamented by some (an anonymous poster on the Silverfish website wrote: “To those who had been published before: treasure the fact you are among the honoured.”); to others, the news barely registered. We were more concerned with judicial and social crises.

Over time, despite myself, I watched my own interest in the books dwindle. As the volumes progressed, they became less a product of my context -- beginning with SNW 3, the series started to include more and more non-regional writers -- than that of writing itself: Literature rendered in the rarefied uppercase. Malaysia got lost, somewhere. And, while there is nothing wrong with this direction (not being parochial is a good thing), it does mean that the works have to deserve the big L. It is a case of too much choice: quality is the only way they would have otherwise caught our philandering minds -- and there are reams of good new writing out there already.

...

Anyhow, there will be no more New Writing. The publisher’s rationale is arguably justified, regardless of its blinders: Raman set out hoping that the call-for-submission trappings of the series would draw out authors -- but, since he makes a pernickety distinction between “splashers” and “lappers”, it is true that not many of the people discovered by New Writing have had the stamina to continue producing work.

Always Choose “Retry”

The series that replaces New Writing -- clunkily (almost pompously) called Malaysian Literature in English -- is a different jab at an old goal: “News From Home” ’s three contributors are alumni of Raman’s own 10-week “Writing with the Right Side of the Brain” programme. More important than the lessons, however, is the opportunity to fling ideas at each other, and constant editorial handling. Hopefully, these will mean that our storytellers (nominally a slothful lot) keep telling stories.

Of course, it is vital that the Silverfish Writing Programme’s participants continue to adhere to the title of their firstborn. “News From Home” ’s biggest strength is just that: its stories are about us, here. English-language literature is the runt of Malaysia’s artistic library, mostly because it is an import that hasn’t yet found a distinctive voice in the region’s narrative. Recent attempts have had mixed results: Kam Raslan’s “Confessions of An Old Boy” has a globe-trotting anti-hero that can’t get Malaya out of him; conversely, Tan Twan Eng’s “The Gift of Rain” and Tash Aw’s “The Harmony Silk Factory” are in love with Malaysia, but never shed their Orientalist spectacles.

The canon, as a whole, has never been engaged enough to mark its own soil -- and New Writing did little to address this. Another anonymous poster on the Silverfish website exclaimed: “No Silverfish Writing 8? Just how will the literary world survive?” The implication, whether this comment was made in earnest or not, remains the same: it would make no difference.

Not yet, at least. A lot of it is hard work and concerted drudgery, since movements need time to gather momentum: more and more hands pushing our little corner of sophistication, more shovels digging deeper into who we are. Every little bit counts. That Silverfish put out seven anthologies (eight, if you count “Nineteen”, a collection of women’s writing edited by Joan Lau) and is still not throwing in the towel is the best sort of testimonial. That the Malaysian Literature in English series is about Malaysian literature is its guarantee.

Raman calls “News From Home” his new scheme’s “first report card.” It has quite a few red marks, at the moment -- but there is reason to believe that there will be more evaluations to come. I’d look out for these guys in the near future. Chua Kok Yee isn’t (as Raman puts it in his introduction to the volume) “our own Murakami,” -- but, with any luck, he’ll be our own Kok Yee. When there’s a will, and all that.

~~~

Zedeck Siew writes for Kakiseni.

“News From Home”, part of Silverfish Books’ Malaysian Literature in English series, features 30 stories by three authors: Chua Kok Yee, Shih-Li Kow, and Rumaizah Abu Bakar. In all major bookstores at RM30. Visit Silverfish Books’ website.