Mud

Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, by Michèle Roberts, Virago RRP£13.99, 229 pages

This is an exhilarating collection of stories suffused with a wry wit and a warm – even hot – heartedness. The situations are varied: the effects on the cranky household maid of Jane Eyre’s marriage to Mr Rochester; an on-off lover of a famous writer managing and not managing her paltry, often virtual romance; a young sex-worker’s attempts to make sense of the world of brutal exploitation her uncle has sold her into; a male vegetarian’s struggle to be taken seriously in France, a thankless task.

Everywhere you encounter startlingly fresh idioms that give you that jolt of missing a step when descending a flight of stairs. In “Mud”, the title story, moist soil is described by a food-lover as “buttery”. In fact, the writing is casually daring all the time. In the same tale the heroine remarks in the first paragraph: “I was a widow myself, in a manner of speaking (I’d run off and left my husband).” Roberts’ prose can be rueful, noisy, wayward, exuberant and celebratory, even when tackling the shipwrecked state that mourners inhabit, or the thin disappointments of love gone awry.

The fleshiness of life emerges freshly from each page. A dashing picnic between potential lovers is almost livelier than life: “a bottle of red wine in his pocket and camembert sandwiches in mine”.

When writing of loss and sadness, there is equal verve and brio. To a new widow intent on revisiting her Venetian honeymoon hotel, glimpsed hen-night street-vomit resembles 1970s sandwich spread.

Despite its regular fanfares, Roberts’ prose can also be very quiet and delicate when necessary, although that is not its natural register. A daughter grieving her dead mother puts it plainly: “She can’t mend herself.”

Writing of such a high calibre can make you feel that the life of the mind is everything, that the acute observation and intelligence of the writer is a sort of mirror to what most matters in life. Yet these stories constantly remind us, in their strong and lustrous prose, that in the fullest lives the physical realm is equally if not more pressing and important. When we think only of the mind there is so much that we miss.

Susie Boyt: Travels away from ourselves