Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Shattuck, Ben. The History of Sound: Stories. Viking, 2024.

Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound: Stories (2024) is a richly textured collection of twelve interconnected short stories that span three centuries in New England.   The structure is especially noteworthy: the stories are arranged in pairs (“couplets”), where the second of each pair revisits, reframes, or deepens something introduced in the first.  

Narrative Structure and Formal Innovation

The paired structure functions like a musical couplet or a “hook-and-chain” song form from New England’s historical folk traditions: each story stands alone, yet the pair together produces resonance, echo, revelation.   This design allows Shattuck to explore temporality, memory, and history not merely as backdrop, but as active, refracted agent: artifacts (wax cylinders, journals, paintings), landscapes (woods, orchards, the Maine coast, Nantucket), and voices from past generations surface in ways that reveal misremembering, loss, and the persistence of affect.  

Themes and Setting

Predominantly set in New England, Shattuck’s stories intertwine the natural world with human history, especially as it pertains to family, identity, loss, desire, and return.   The title story, for example, follows two musicians—Lionel and David—after World War I as they journey in Maine collecting folk songs via wax cylinder recording; later stories bring that past into the present, often when a character discovers an artifact (an old recording) that bridges their personal history to larger cultural or familial histories.  

Another recurring theme is how the past is misunderstood or obscured over time—not just through external loss but internal mis‐perception: misunderstandings, secrets, silence. The paired stories often uncover or recontextualize what was only hinted at before.  

Style, Tone, and Character

Shattuck’s prose is often praised for being lyrical yet restrained; evocative of place without being overly ornamental. The landscapes—forests, beaches, orchards—are vivid, but they often serve emotional or symbolic purpose, helping to situate characters in relation to time, memory, and loss.   The emotional stakes tend toward regret, longing, reconciliation, though the stories rarely indulge in melodrama; instead, moments of revelation or confrontation are often subtle, filtered through voice or artifact or landscape.  

Characters are varied—musicians, apple growers, aging spouses, people confronted by dementia, people cleaning out houses and uncovering pasts. Their identities are anchored in place, history, and often in material objects (recordings, journals, buildings).  

Critical Reception and Literary Context

The History of Sound has been well received. It won the Story Prize Spotlight Award for 2024.   It has also been shortlisted or longlisted for other major fiction awards (e.g. Mark Twain Award, PEN/Faulkner, Andrew Carnegie Medal).   Critics and reviewers have emphasized its elegiac sense, its formal inventiveness, and its deep evocation of New England histories—both visible and hidden.  

Significance and Contribution

Shattuck’s collection contributes to contemporary short fiction in several important ways:

1. Formal Experimentation: The paired structure across centuries creates layered storytelling that demands readers think about how history and memory are constructed and inherited.

2. Temporal and Material Mediation: Use of historical artifacts in narrative (wax cylinders, journals, paintings) underscores how the past is mediated—not fixed—and how it returns to shape identity and meaning.

3. Geographic and Cultural Place: By grounding stories in New England, Shattuck participates in regional writing, but also expands it: New England becomes both a setting and a palimpsest of many pasts.

4. Interplay of Intimacy and History: The personal is inseparable from the historical; love and loss, familial secrets, aging, mortality—all are woven into broader frames of cultural and geographical history.

5. Reflection on Storytelling Itself: The way stories pair, mirror, and reveal suggests that stories themselves (and the act of pairing) are ways of knowing: how we interpret the past often depends on what is revealed later; how revelation changes understanding retroactively.