‘Candy Glass’ stands out amongst the dazzling stories in May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break for two reasons. One is formal: unlike the other stories in the collection, which look fairly standard, ‘Candy Glass’ is presented as a script (it’s fitting—the story follows the relationship between an aging actress and a younger stunt double).
The other is stylistic. Tan handles long stretches of time superbly. Her dialogue is at its sharpest and most knife-edge in this piece. And I suspect that, if you were to re-edit this as a conventional story, the language would still stand out as almost filmic, it is so beautifully, immersively visual
In Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. Now also published by Sceptre
