There are two stories, or maybe you could call them novellas, in Smut: the first, which I liked better, is the longer of the pair, at 93 pages; the other is 59 pages. Both stories are, to a large extent, about secrets, or about things people think are secret that aren’t secret after all, and I think that the type and form of the secrets in each is a big part of why I liked the first story, “The Greening of Mrs Donaldson,” so much more.
In that first story, we meet Mrs Donaldson, a middle-aged widow who works part-time at a hospital as a demonstrator, acting out cases/symptoms for medical students to diagnose. Mrs Donaldson’s married daughter is a bit scandalized: she jokes that the job makes her mother a “distant relation of the artist’s model with some of the brazenness and even nudity that that occupation could involve” (8-9). “It’s a way of not being yourself,” Mrs Donaldson says (ibid.). But, as Mrs Donaldson learns, sometimes our ideas of ourselves are tied to past realities/circumstances, or are more limiting/limited than we might imagine. In addition to working at the hospital, Mrs Donaldson has two student lodgers, a guy and a girl who are dating, and when they fall behind on rent they suggest they might “put on a demonstration” for her in lieu of payment (21). She agrees, and then, having watched the pair have sex, finds herself thinking about it more than she’d expected to. She finds that “having a secret put her in a good mood, sheathing her against the petty annoyances” of her daily life: “hectic though the evening had been for Mrs Donaldson in retrospect it constituted some sort of refuge, a haven utterly set apart, a place of her own” (31). Mrs Donaldson’s voyeurism is a moment of connection, odd as it might be even to her, and is indicative of the freedom of her widowed life: she can figure out who she is and what she likes and what she wants.
The second story, “The Shielding of Mrs Forbes,” has at its center characters who are mostly more self-interested and less likeable than Mrs Donaldson, and their secrets are more like lies. Graham, a handsome young man who mostly likes other men, marries a less attractive woman for her money, much to his mother’s dismay. His mother, the Mrs Forbes of the title, is a piece of work: “I wouldn’t put it past her to be Jewish,” she says, of her son’s fiancée; she also says the fiancée, Betty, is “so dark people might think she was Asian” (96, 103). Mr Forbes (senior) gets the worst of it, though: his wife insists on calling him Edward when he’d rather go by Ted, and she polices his speech, telling him he’s “too old to say “tits”,” among other things (99). All the main characters, Mr Forbes and Mrs Forbes and Graham and Betty, wind up sleeping with at least one person who isn’t their spouse, though only one of the affairs actually stays entirely secret. While there was lots to laugh at in this story, and while I like Betty, who turns out to be savvier than Graham, I was glad this story was the shorter of the two.
Meanwhile, the cover of Smut, designed by Henry Sene Yee and illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal, makes me grin so much: it’s like a kama sutra of teacups, with really good type design. (This post on the cover designer’s blog shows some earlier approaches and sketches, all of which are fun but none of which are quite so great as the final result.)
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