Short Story Craft

Lost Girls

2006-08-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

I've been on a little bit of a summer hiatus, partly due to a busy summer, partly due to my reading novels lately rather than short stories, and partly due to some uninteresting stories in the summer's issues of The New Yorker. Sorry, but I can't fake an interest in an exciting new short story from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

However, this week we have a new David Means story, "The Spot." I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed; I feel that I've seen this story before from Means--the story of a lost girl, misled by a bad man, engaged in criminal conduct, wallowing in hopelessness. And there's betrayal, always betrayal: in "Sault Ste. Marie" and "Nebraska," the girl betrays the bad man she has taken up with; in "The Spot," the girl (taught to turn tricks by Shank, her pimp/boyfriend) betrays a John by choking him to death with his bolo tie for no particular reason. The John hit her, but the real motivation seems to be that the tie spoke to her:

You know, those cold metal tips kept brushing me, and it was like they were saying, Here I am, yank me.

The tips of the tie (the aglets, for all you crossword puzzle fans) told her to strangle the guy, so she did.

The story winds up at Niagara Falls. The story is awash with water images, and the Falls provide the final one when Shank encourages the girl to walk out too far at the observation point and she is swept over the brink to her doom, echoing another incident in Shank's life when he drowned another lost girl while supposedly in the act of performing a river baptism.

Anyway, at the end of the day, is there much to this except some pretty writing and a bleak worldview? Not especially. But if you're up for some gritty crime fiction, "The Spot" will hit the spot.

Those Bad Men

2006-06-30T10:51:00.000-05:00

A quick note about this week's fiction in The New Yorker, "Carnival, Las Tablas," by Cristina Enriquez. This is the story of a pair of sisters who go to the Panamanian version of Carnival. Men are mean to them. Their father has left the family; one sister's boyfriend bites her on the face; the other sister remembers a boyfriend who cheated on her; etc.

As much as I enjoy and appreciate The New Yorker's commitment to publishing fiction, there are weeks when it seems a story has been selected purely on the basis of the author's name. Why work to find something interesting when you can just look for brand-name bylines, check to make sure the author hasn't been used in the past two or three months, and go to lunch?

Dubus on Vertical Writing

2006-06-22T11:00:00.000-05:00

It's taken me a while, but I finally tracked down a copy of On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. The book as a whole is sort of odd and haphazardly assembled, half essays and half anthology. The anthologized stories are mostly familiar, including (among others) "Bullet in the Brain," "A Rose for Emily," "The Things They Carried," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge." However, among the essays is one by Andre Dubus, titled "The Habit of Writing," which motivated me to look for the book, because it apparently appears nowhere else.

In the essay, Dubus describes his method of writing, a method he arrived at after 25 years of trying. "I gestate," he says.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it's there. I don't think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

Dubus tells of writing a story titled "Anna," about a young couple who commit an armed robbery, and how he could not get inside the character of Anna. He struggled.

Then one day or night I decided to try a different approach. I told myself that next day at the desk I would not leave a sentence until I knew precisely what Anna was feeling. I told myself that even if I wrote only fifty words, I would stay with this....

At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook.... In that moment I began what I call vertical writing, rather than horizontal. I had never before thought in those terms. But for years I had been writing horizontallly, trying to move forward (those five pages); now I would try to move down, as deeply as I could.

He also speaks of waiting until he sees the first two scenes before he begins to write. When he sees the scenes, "It means it is time. The story is ready for me to receive it." Readers of Dubus will recognize the significance of these words. Receiving communion, or the Eucharist, is a central theme in his work, and one of his better known stories, "The Curse," ends with the line "He wished he were alone so he could kneel to receive it." ("It" being the curse the protagonist feels he deserves for failing to stop the gang rape of a young woman in the bar where he worked.)

Dubus is not alone in his somewhat mystical view of writing. Robert Olen Butler gives similar advice in his book, From Where You Dream. Butler says, somewhat cryptically, that a writer should never start with an idea, or a plot, or a character, or anything other preconceived plan, but should instead tap into the subconscious mind and let the words flow. That sounds a little too new-age to be trusted, perhaps, or maybe it's only meaningful to a writer who has reached the stage of unconscious mastery.

Out of Its Misery

2006-06-21T14:29:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Shiloh & Other Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason, originally published in 1982 and winner of that year's PEN/Hemingway Award. Mason, a Kentuckian, has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and especially for the dialect of her homeland. I can hear these people talking--and I know they're authentic, because I grew up hearing this speech--and Mason achieves it through careful diction and phrasing. Rarely will you find a dropped "g," and never a phonetic spelling. This is the way to write regional dialogue.

These stories are about family, and many, but not all, are about troubled marriages. The events of these stories are simultaneously momentous and subdued, as in "The Climber," the story of a woman who has discovered a lump in her breast. On the day the story takes place, the woman has an appointment to see a doctor about the lump. Some men have come to cut down an eighty-foot tree next to her house. She watches the elaborate process of the tree's removal, and eventually goes to the doctor, who informs her that the lump is merely fibrocystic disease, and nothing to worry about.

As she drives home, Dolores feels confused, surprised that her sense of relief feels so peculiar. There is nothing momentous in what she has been through. Nothing important has happened that morning. A tree has been cut down; her daughter has cut out a weskit; the doctor has made a routine examination; Dolores has forgotten to make lunch.

But of course, something momentous has occurred. In a sense, her life has been spared.

Throughout the collection, Mason presents ordinary people dealing with ordinary heartache and getting on with the business of living, the way people do, without making a big fuss. Reading these stories, I feel almost as if I'm crouching in the bushes outside someone's home, eavesdropping. Yet, it would be a mistake to label these tales "slice of life" stories. Things happen. Characters wrestle with decisions and take actions, sometimes small, but always revealing.

In "The Retreat," Georgeann is married to Shelby, a preacher who works as an electrician during the week to make ends meet. Georgeann has grown weary of Shelby and his devotion to the church; the highlight of his year is a weekend religious retreat, but Georgann's preparations for the retreat are reluctant. One Sunday, instead of going to hear Shelby preach at a funeral, she cleans out the hen house. One of the chickens is sick, unable to stand. She brings it food and water, although she thinks, "There is nothing to do for a sick chicken, except to let it die."

Georgeann goes to the retreat, but spends most of the time (and most of their spare money) playing video games. When they return home, they learn that Shelby has been assigned to another church, sixty miles away, meaning that they will have to move. Georgeann tells him that she isn't going with him.

"We're going to have to pray over this," he says quietly.

"Later," says Georgeann. "I have to go pick up the kids."

Before leaving, she goes to check on the chickens. A neighbor has been feeding them. The sick chicken is still alive, but it doesn't move from a corner under the roost. Its eyelids are half shut, and its comb is dark and crusty. The henhouse still smells of roost paint. Georgeann gathers eggs and takes them to the kitchen. Then, without stopping to reflect, she gets the ax from the shed and returns to the henhouse. She picks up the sick chicken and takes it outside to the stump and examines its feathers. She doesn't see any mites on it now. Taking the hen by the feet, she lays it on its side, its head pointing away from her. She holds its body down, pressing its wings. The chicken doesn't struggle. When the ax crashes down blindly on its neck, Georgeann feels nothing, only that she has done her duty.

Yes, you guessed it, an example of the Dead Animal Trope, but a fine one. When a chicken's that sick, it must be put out of its misery, just like a sick marriage. For another example of an animal acting as a stand-in for a doomed marriage, see "Rear View," by Antonya Nelson (mentioned briefly in a previous post: "Extra Credit for Marmots").

The Story of D.

2006-06-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

This week in The New Yorker we find "Innocence," by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This is a complicated short story, not so easily summarized, and the complications extend to the structure: it's a reminiscence about a novel translated by the narrator and written by a young man named Dinesh. The novel is based on a time when the narrator and Dinesh lived together (as fellow roomers, not romantically) in a boarding house in India. Dinesh appears in the novel as a character named "D." I've never understood that device, referring to a character only by an initial, as if to protect the character's privacy. I suppose in a confessional it might make the story feel more true.

This story is primarily about the man and woman who own the boarding house, Mr. and Mrs. Malhotra. Their past has been marred by scandal; they participated unwittingly in a gold smuggling scheme, and Mr. Malhotra served some jail time. Mrs. Malhotra, smelling quick riches, goaded him into his actions; hence, they are both to blame, and much of the story revolves around the lingering bitterness in their lives. The foreground of the story concerns Kay, a western (British?) girl who lives in the house for a while and stirs up all sorts of jealousies. (The narrator is also a westerner.)

The story as remembered by the narrator is interwoven with bits and pieces from the novel, i.e., Dinesh's memory of the same story. This allows Jhabvala to present two points of view in a first-person narrative, although very little is drawn from the novel. Is this complicated structure worth it? Couldn't Jhabvala have let the narrator tell the story as she remembered it, and left out the baggage of the translated novel? Probably so. It does, however, clearly establish the narrator's position as reminiscent, which adds the perspective of years to a story that, taken on its face, becomes somewhat melodramatic. Also, I admit, the extra layer adds credibility, especially to the narrator's observations about Dinesh (because she can glean his thoughts from the novel he wrote), and also to her knowledge of things that occurred after she no longer lived in the house. Perhaps the oddest thing is that the first-person narrator plays almost no part in the primary story; she is just an observer. So why didn't Jhabvala just have Dinesh tell the story, and leave out the female narrator? The only answer is that it would have been a different story, seen through the eyes of an Indian man instead of a western woman. Not a small difference.

A Little More Means

2006-06-15T08:33:00.000-05:00

The summer 2006 Zoetrope All-Story delivers "Nebraska," another David Means story. This story is as textually dense as anything you're likely to read. Nineteen paragraphs in 17 columns (two columns per page). The only dialogue is secondary (aka "reported") dialogue; i.e., the dialogue is related without quotation marks or paragraph breaks, as part of the narrative, perhaps as summary. Also, some of the sentences are extremely long, although Means resorts to liberal semi-colons in places to artificially extend the length. The next-to-last sentence in the story contains nine semi-colons, separating ten independent clauses. Why? It's not for the weak-stomached. Just looking at the long blocks of print can be daunting. But if you allow yourself to be sucked in, the lyrical, lush narrative rolls along with a pace and power that never lets up, and that is not often matched.

This is the story of a gang of self-styled revolutionaries who plan to rob an armored car. Things go awry. End of plot. Profluence is achieved in the same way it is achieved in any caper story. We read to see the crime committed, and to see if it will be successful. Although, in this story, we know almost immediately that the robbery has failed.

As unusual as this story is from a formal perspective, the first paragraph is a textbook example of how to begin:

Where else to begin but beneath the dining room table where she's hiding, dazed and alone, tormented by fear and loneliness, lost to time (it seems), most certainly to be forgotten? The annals of history won't record this lonely moment while the house cracks in the heat, aches high up in the rafters, snaps along the joists; the genuine linoleum in the kitchen glistens oily to the touch, the trees and grass sway in the wind off the river, and she hunches down beneath the table, where she at least feels safe, listening to the wind as it lifts through the trees to make hushed sound and then depletes itself so that a dog's bark, husky and dry, can arrive from far off, and then even farther away a soft hooting sound--someone calling--and then another dog, giving a sharper, more precise bark while she examines her knees, worn to white threads, and then extends her legs and says aloud as she touches her shins and ankles, You've got good long legs, fine, fine legs. She leans back and looks at the underside of the table, the battered legs and feet (Who left this grand artifact here?), and then, looking up, sees the words GRAND RAPIDS stenciled on the underside of one of the leaves.

In addition to establishing a tone of dread, the driving lyrical voice, and an omniscient pov with a metafictional overtone ("Where else to begin..."), this paragraph

gives us a character in trouble

establishes a mystery (why is she hiding under a table?)

creates a strong sense of setting, both interior and exterior (both local exterior--the river, the trees--and a geographical location (Nebraska, Grand Rapids))

provides additional sensory detail (the barking dogs, the creaking house, the underside of the table) that establish the tangibility of this world

Also, note how Means varies the psychic distance in these three sentences to give us a complete picture. With that first phrase, "Where else to begin," he establishes a point outside the story, above the fray, clearly looking back at the whole mess, and then quickly moves beneath the dining room table, in close physical proximity to this woman, then continues to a tight emotional proximity by revealing her emotions: alone, tormented, lost to time. Then he goes back, briefly to the long shot, to "the annals of history," then back to the house, the "genuine linoleum in the kitchen," then outside to the trees and grass, then back to the woman, under the table, and immediately back inside her head ("where she at least feels safe"). Then back outside to the wind and the barking dogs, then back to the woman looking at her legs, and finally to a place we haven't yet been, her consciousness, her thoughts ("You've got good long legs, fine, fine legs."). Note also the hierarchies observed: Means doesn't leap directly from the annals of history to the woman's thoughts. He progresses from layer to layer, from far to near a step at a time, as if he's twisting a zoom lens.

I can't overemphasize the importance of varying the psychic distance, especially in the opening. As a teacher of mine says about the beginning of every story, "The reader has just arrived on this planet." Accordingly, he wants to look around and to know where he is, who these people are, and why he's been brought here. Difficult to accomplish with a single camera angle.

The Immortal Goldfish

2006-06-14T15:37:00.000-05:00

I've been reading David Means' collection, The Secret Goldfish. I also just finished James Salter's collection, Last Night; going back and forth between these two will give you stylistic whiplash, but more on that later.

The title story in the Means book is probably the most well known. "The Secret Goldfish" originally appeared in The New Yorker and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2005. This is the story of a marriage, and its demise, as seen from the perspective of the family's pet goldfish. Technically the pov is omniscient, and there are some passages from the pov of the wife, but the overwhelming focus is on the fish. The fish is not excessively anthropomorphised; it doesn't know that the marriage in question is in trouble, or what a marriage is. The fish does not think about the people, or about anything, really.

All of this stuff, the history of the house, the legal papers signed and sealed and the attendant separation agreement and, of course, the divorce that left her the house—all this historical material was transpiring outside the gist of Fish. He could chart his course and touch each corner of the tank and still not know shit. But he understood something. That much was clear. The world is a mucky mess. It gets clotted up, submerged in its own gunk. End of story.

Will Fish survive? That's the question that drives the story. Fish lives in a murky sewer of a fishtank ("so clotted it had become a solid mass") that, apparently, gets cleaned about once a decade, until, finally, the divorce is final. Fish does survive. In celebration, the family (sans Dad) moves the fishtank next to the television, where, it is implied, the fish will be forever in the family's sight.

Is this a story? Yes. Is this a plot? I think you have to stretch the definition to find a plot; nothing happens except that the marriage and the fishtank get mucked up, and the wife and Fish survive. They don't do anything of note to survive. They just hang on. Yet, the story achieves profluence. We have to keep reading to see if Fish makes it.

Several of the other stories in The Secret Goldfish stretch the definition of story even further. In "Lightning Man," the subject, a man named Nick Kelly, is hit by lightning seven times. The story recounts each strike, and ends with Kelly awaiting Number Eight, the big one. It's entirely episodic, with no plot points, and no meaningful arc except the arcs of electricity that seek Kelly out. The structure of the story is a list, and this list structure is announced in the first sentence:

The first time, he was fishing with Danny.

We know that a second strike is implied, and then a third, and we read to reach the end of the line. Similarly, in "Dustman Appearances to Date," the nature of the story as a list is announced in the title; the story is a series of sightings of dustmen, spectres formed from dust and wind in the image of a rancher, a pirate, Richard Nixon, and others.

I think what makes a structure like this work is that the reader is able to discern a structure, or a pattern, early in the narrative. We know where we are going, to some extent, and that makes us comfortable. The traditional three-act plot structure does the same thing, but in a different way. It's like a piece of music from which we pick out a melody. We get a sense of what's coming, a sense of what we've gotten ourselves into.

Words from Kilgore Trout

2006-06-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I grew up reading Kurt Vonnegut novels. In an archived interview at the Paris Review (really an amalgam of four interviews), Vonnegut says this:

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away--even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.... When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone's wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.

Plots--ways to keep readers reading. Whenever the tedious old argument about plot v. character arises, this is what I say. A plot is a way, one way, the most proven, time-tested way, to achieve profluence (which is just a fancy word for that quality of a story that keeps readers reading).

You can eschew plot, but you have to create profluence in some other way. David Means does this in interesting ways. I'm going to look at some of his stories next.

The Juvenile Narrator

2006-06-05T16:52:00.000-05:00

This week The New Yorker brings us "My Parents' Bedroom," by Uwem Akpan. It's a story of African genocide, as told by Monique, a nine-year-old girl who sees her father murder her mother to satisfy a mob who would otherwise murder the entire family.

The story suffers from the problem of the juvenile narrator. The story is told in present tense, so the conceit is that the narrator "is" the first-person narrator, telling the story as it is lived. In other words, the author wants us to believe that the narrator is the same age as the protagonist, whereas in a story told in past tense, a first-person narrator is always older than the version of himself who serves as the protagonist. A "reminiscent first-person narrator" is usually an adult version of a character looking back on himself as a child.

These are interesting distinctions to keep in mind, because the language and perceptions of the story are dictated by the age and experience of the narrator, not the protagonist. I've had readers tell me that if I'm writing a story about a seven-year-old boy, I must use the vocabulary of a seven-year-old boy. Unless I intend for my narrator to be seven years old, this is not true. These readers have failed to grasp the distinction between the narrator and the character. Even in a first-person story, they are never the same.

The problem with a truly juvenile narrator, as seen in "My Parents' Bedroom," is that the narrative is stuck with the language and understanding of a child. It's almost impossible to render satisfying adult fiction under such constraints. In most cases, the language is drearily dull. The child narrator is usually too naive to be believed. And often, as is the case with this story, the result is a melodramatic portrait of the child as victim, beset by issues and problems she cannot understand. Oh the poignancy. Oh the heartbreak. I, for one, don't buy it. I am never able to forget that no nine-year-old could have told this story, with or without constrained vocabulary, and that serves as a constant reminder that the author is out there, or up there in the rafters, tugging at my heartstrings. Just use third person. Let the story speak.

Information, Please

2006-05-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

Here's your assignment. Write a story based on the following facts: a young woman marries an older man and they have three children. One night, after an argument, the woman walks out and spends the night at a neighbor's house. When she returns the next day, the husband has murdered the children.

Too melodramatic? Too gruesome? Too plot-driven? In the hands of many writers, yes; in the hands of a master like Alice Munro, not at all, as we see in this week's New Yorker fiction, "Dimension."

How would you write such a story? What questions would it need to answer?

Some obvious questions:

Why did the husband kill the children?

How did the husband kill the children? (Admit it, you're curious)

Who was this husband? Who was this wife?

What was their argument about?

What is the aftermath of this event?

Munro answers the first four of these questions in fairly predictable ways. The husband is extremely paranoid and controlling; when his wife leaves, he smothers two of the children and chokes the third "to save them the misery... of knowing that their mother had walked out on them." Munro gives us an unsurprising, yet satisfying, backstory: the wife was sixteen when she met her husband, who was a hospital orderly tending to the wife's dying mother. He was an authority figure, an angel of mercy, and this vulnerable young girl was taken in. Thereafter, he mentally abuses her, controlling every aspect of her life. He forbids her to wear makeup. She may only laugh at something if he laughs first. She rationalizes his abusive behavior and hides it from others, telling herself that this behavior is simply his way, yet knowing how outrageous it would seem to an outsider.

The heart of the story is in the aftermath, as Munro explores how the wife attempts to deal with her grief and her guilt. Of course she feels guilt, irrational as it may be; if she hadn't walked out, the children would be alive. Munro wraps her remorse in an image: early in the story, we are told that "she had cut her hair short and bleached and spiked it...." Later, just before the story's climactic scene, when she is on the verge of forgiving her husband for what he has done and accepting that her only purpose in life is to be with him, she thinks

Aren’t I just as cut off by what happened as he is? Nobody who knew about it would want me around. All I can do is remind people of what nobody can stand to be reminded of.

Disguise wasn’t possible, not really. That crown of yellow spikes was pathetic.

A neat return to the spiky hair, her crown of thorns, her attempt to bear the burden of her husband's sin.

From a craft perspective this story could be analyzed in several ways, but the point of my title ("Information, Please") is to draw attention to the way Munro builds and sustains tension by parceling out the facts. How and when to reveal information is always critical, and Munro knows how to string us along better than anyone. In "Dimension," the story begins at a time well after the crime has been committed, but Munro gives us not information, but a succession of clues. In the first paragraph, we see that the wife is making a laborious bus trip to a "facility." In the second paragraph, we learn that she likes her job as a motel maid because it means she doesn't have to talk to people. In the third paragraph, we are told

None of the people she worked with knew what had happened.

Come on, Alice, we shout, what happened? But no, no; oh, no. We have to earn that information.

These and other clues lead us to suspect, eventually, that the husband has murdered the children, but our suspicions aren't confirmed until the halfway point, when we are given the scene in which the wife returns home and finds the children dead.

That Munro gives us this scene almost exactly at the halfway point is significant. It gives the story the shape of a pyramid, with the most significant event placed at the peak. If the story had been written in a strictly chronological form, the murder of the children would have occurred much earlier, perhaps a quarter of the way through the narrative. Munro begins the story with a scene from the aftermath, and then weaves more aftermath scenes with backstory to enhance the tension, but also to delay the murder scene. Once we see our fears realized (i.e., that the father murdered the children), the rest of the story, all aftermath, is a downhill ride.

A Rothful God

2006-05-22T09:53:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker this week delivers unto us a little Roth. No, not that Roth, the other one, Henry Roth, the one who died in 1995 at the age of 89. The one who, according to the note at the end of the story ("God the Novelist"), left behind a 2,000-page unedited manuscript from which this story was "adapted".

The story begins:

The Home Relief investigator called on Thursday: a dark-complexioned, middle-aged woman, Jewish, wearing glasses. As soon as she entered my room, having climbed three flights of stairs to get there, she made for a chair and, panting, ensconced herself.

The narrator is an aspiring writer of short stories, currently on welfare and sharing a wretched room with a colony of bedbugs. He tells the Home Relief investigator that he needs a better place to write in, and she promises to help. The rest of the story meanders from one comic scene to the next, without ever approaching any sort of resolution. He chats with an Irish friend about his problem. He goes to see his agent, Virginia, and shows her a story he has written for The New Yorker:

But Virginia was dissatisfied. I internalized too much. My feelings were like a lead coffin, she said.

“Well, how are you going to tell what the character feels if you’re not inside him,” I demurred.

“Oh, no” was her riposte. “God the Novelist knows, the narrator knows.”

At this point, the pov switches from first-person to third, with the narrator referring to himself as God the Novelist:

So, today, God the Novelist thought He’d better go over to the Home Relief Bureau and get His new identification card, which His investigator had failed to give Him.

God the Novelist spends the rest of the story trying, unsuccessfully, to find the Home Relief office, at which he can get a new identification card, and, we hope, a room better suited to a supreme being.

No summary will do the story justice; it's too funny, line-by-line, and filled with jokes for writers. It can still be read for craft, though. The story is very dialogue heavy--it's little more than a series of conversations--but Roth is always careful to give us interesting things to look at. He mixes little baubles of action into all the talk--from "herding" tobacco behind a character's upper lip to spreading jelly on toast to almost being run down by a car--simply to modulate the experience (i.e., to keep the story from being all dialogue) and to put all the talk in a physical context. It's a small but important thing, too often ignored.

Exploding the Moving Action

2006-05-18T20:11:00.000-05:00

I read two short stories today that, by pure coincidence, are based upon nearly identical events. These stories could have been the product of a class exercise; yet, the finished products are almost completely different. With any luck, a comparison of the two, and an examination of how one story succeeds and the other fails (or doesn't succeed as well) should be instructive.

Before I get into the stories, I want to talk about a straightforward technique for analyzing, or building, any traditional story. I'm going to call this technique Exploding the Moving Action.

The first step is to isolate the story's most important "moving action" (aka dynamic action). What's a moving action? There are three kinds of action in a short story (this is not my idea; I learned it from Justin Cronin): received action, which is anything that happens to a character; fixed action, which is anything a character does more or less automatically or habitually, from eating when hungry to performing his job to getting drunk (if the character is an alcoholic); and moving action, significant action taken by a character as the result of a choice. The choice may be a moral choice or a choice between two things a character wants, but it should have a cost. Choosing between a hot dog and a hamburger is not, ordinarily, a moving action. Choosing to commit murder, unless one is a hit man, is a moving action. Choosing to pat a murderer on the cheek because you suddenly recognize that he is like your own child (see "A Good Man is Hard to Find") might be a moving action.

Choosing not to stop and render aid after striking a child or dog with an automobile would be a moving action (even though the action consists, arguably, of inaction).

Once you have identified a story's most important moving action (and in many stories there will be only one), begin asking questions. Who is the character who acted? Who were the characters acted upon? Where and when did the action occur? And most importantly, why did the action occur? Any or all of the answers to these questions might lead to more questions. Pursue them all until you hit the point of diminishing returns, write up the answers, present them in a pleasing order and written in an interesting prose style, and voila, you have A Story.

By sheer coincidence, the two stories I read today both involve drivers who strike another living being with their automobiles (in one case a child, in another case a dog) and fail to stop and render aid. The first story, by William Trevor, and included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, is "The Dressmaker's Child." This is a successful story. The second story, "One Last Good Time," by Michael P. Kardos, and appearing in the Summer/Fall 2006 issue of Gulf Coast, is less successful. This shouldn't be seen as a putdown of Kardos's story; not many writers can keep pace with William Trevor, after all. Also, it's good to keep in mind that these are not the only hit-and-run stories ever written, and they won't be the last.

So, having identified the moving action, what questions naturally arise in these two stories (ignoring the when and where, which add interest and texture, but aren't crucial to the structure of the stories)?

Who is the driver? (i.e., what is his character, and what are the circumstances that makes this action especially meaningful to him?)

Who is the victim?

What caused the accident?

Why didn't the driver stop and render aid or take responsibility for the accident, if appropriate?

What are the ramifications of the accident and/or the failure to stop? (This might include the question, Did the victim die?)

There may be other questions, and the answers to these questions might obviate or raise other questions. But this is a good starting list.

The Trevor story proceeds in a linear fashion, and devotes a little more than half the story to the ramifications: the aftermath. The driver is a young Irish mechanic, a Catholic, named Cahal. The victim is the eponymous (love that word) Dressmaker's Child (a girl). The cause of the accident is complex, the blame shared between the girl (who seems to be disturbed, and has a habit of running at moving cars) and Cahal, who is distracted by his passengers (newlyweds who are necking in the backseat) and a soccer match on television that he is currently missing. Cahal doesn't stop because, he tells himself at the time, he isn't sure if he hit anyone, and, obviously, if he did, he will be in huge trouble, and also lose his fifty Euro fare (although to his credit he doesn't think about the fare overtly). The girl has rushed cars before and hit them with stones; perhaps the thud he heard was only a rock, and not the child's body. Yet, he doesn't stop to find out, and he is haunted by this decision for the rest of the story. Later, the girl's mother lets him know that she knows he hit the girl, but didn't turn him in. His guilt, and his multi-leveled obligation to the mother, constitute the aftermath. The story is logical, complete, and there are no extraneous pieces.

The Kardos story is written in a non-linear mode, and the focus is on explaining why the character failed to stop, although we don't know that this is the focus until the story is nearly over. Confusing? It should be. There is little aftermath, although the primary ramification, the death of the driver, is revealed in the first line.

Gradually we learn that the driver was a school bus driver, and that he hijacked a busload of children before he died. The hit-and-run isn't revealed until much later, after a prolonged section in which we learn that the bus driver was having an affair with his pregnant wife's sister. The sister had threatened to reveal their relationship to the wife; the husband, stressed and sleepless because of this threat, hits a dog while driving the kids home from school.

So here's the big question: why doesn't he stop? It's just a dog, and the dog ran in front of the bus. All he faces is embarrassment and inconvenience. This is not the same as striking a child, after all. Yet, he bolts. Okay, he's tired. He isn't thinking clearly. But then he compounds this stupidity by driving off with the kids instead of just dropping them at their regular stops. This makes no sense whatsoever! Kardos tries to cover this up by saying "Maybe Vinnie had gone a little crazy today," but that just doesn't cut it. There's also an intimation that he wanted to get in major trouble, even get thrown in jail, so that he could escape the untenable situation with his wife and mistress. But again, I'm not buying it. It takes a damn big rubber band to stretch that far.

So there you have it. Two stories answering the same questions about nearly identical events, with dramatically different results. I won't get into the thematic differences, and how Trevor takes his story to a spiritual and cultural level that Kardos's story never sniffs (or aspires to).

Mules

2006-05-18T15:14:00.000-05:00

"In 1919, there were 26.5 million mules and horses in this country. By 1945, less than a tenth of that number remained. They simply disappeared from the landscape."

That's how Lydia Peelle begins her note about her story, "Mule Killers," originally appearing in Epoch and anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006. The story is beautifully told, and what's most amazing is that it's Peelle's first published piece. Well, she's only 28.

The story begins:

My father was eighteen when the mule killers finally made it to his father's farm. He tells me that all across the state that year, big trucks loaded up with mules rumbled steadily to the slaughterhouses. They drove over the roads that mules themselves had cut, the gravel and macadam that mules themselves had laid. Once or twice a day, he says, you would hear a high-pitched bray come from one of the trucks, a rattling as it went by, then silence, and you would look up from your work for a moment to listen to that silence. The mules when they were trucked away were sleek and fat on oats, work-shod and in their prime. The best color is fat, my grandfather used to say, when asked. But that year, my father tells me, that one heartbreaking year, the best color was dead. Pride and Jake and Willy Boy, Champ and Pete were dead, Kate and Sue and Orphan Lad; Orphan Lad was dead.

That last sentence, with its melancholy rhythm and the surprising repetition of "Orphan Lad," sets a tone of heartache that does not relent throughout the story.

This is one dead animal story that transcends the cliche. It's quite a debut.

Klam Bake

2006-05-17T14:46:00.000-05:00

I'm way, way behind the curve on this, since the book was published in 2000, but I wanted to put in one more plug for Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat and other stories.

I wrote earlier that Klam wrote like a dark, male Lorrie Moore. Let me amend that to say that he writes like the evil love child of Lorrie Moore and Steve Almond. But that's not meant to imply that his stories are derivative. No, Klam has staked out his own territory. He is the king of the love-hate relationship.

Most of the stories in Sam the Cat, as well as "Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine," his recent story in The New Yorker, are about men oscillating between adoration of their partners and a desire to see them dead at the bottom of a river. This contrast can be almost schizophrenic, but it works to keep the reader off balance and surprised (and laughing). Klam executes the surprises at the sentence level, over and over, giving the stories a very organic feel.

The title story, "Sam the Cat" (generously made available, in its entirety, at Klam's website), stands apart from the other stories, however. It's the tale of a guy who sees a sexy girl from across the room and approaches her, only to realize, after working himself into a state of arousal, that the sexy girl is just a long-haired guy. Every guy has had a similar experience, and it's more than slightly disorienting and weird. What happens afterwards to Klam's narrator is the one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.

Glass Screens, Glass Slippers

2006-05-15T10:14:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker's short story this week is "Cinderella School," by Lara Vapnyar. This is the story of a young Russian woman, Genya, who has immigrated to New York with her husband. She has been looking for a job for a year, and she finally finds one, teaching English at the Cinderella School, a bizarre establishment that plans to add English classes to its offerings of witchcraft, laxative tea, and holistic medicine. So far as we are told, the holistic medicine consists entirely of the application of positive thinking to the problem of erectile disfunction.

It's an entertaining story and an easy read. As the title suggests, this story is based on fantasies, on the fairy tales we tell ourselves, ranging from the self-delusion of Genya's white lie when she modifies her college diploma to indicate that she is qualified to teach English, to her use of movies to teach English (in particular "Pretty Woman," Hollywood's version of Cinderella), to the hopeful and doomed fantasy of all immigrants: that their lives will be magically made better by relocation to a new land.

Also interesting are references to "Red" and "Blue," films by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the echoes of those films within the narrative. In "Red," the unbreachable separation between a young woman and an older judge is symbolized by a car window (a sheet of glass); in this story, Genya tells the proprietor of the Cinderella School, an older man to whom she feels some attraction, that she feels shut off from Manhattan by a glass screen. In "Blue," a woman whose husband and daughter are killed in an accident sells her estate, gives up everything she owns, and moves, only to find that she can't escape her grief, no matter where she goes... just as the immigrants in this story learn that even though they have moved to the United States, they cannot escape being who they are.

A New God

2006-05-11T21:43:00.000-05:00

The first story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 is "Old Boys, Old Girls," by Edward P. Jones. This story was also included in BASS 2005. Stories that win both honors are not as common as you might think; it's worth paying attention when this happens.

"Old Boys, Old Girls" is the story of Caesar Matthews, a two-time murderer who is sentenced to seven years in Lorton Prison. The sentence is for the second crime; in the first murder, Caesar was never identified as the killer. "It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing."

The story begins with this description of his capricious interaction with the court system. This pattern, of a man in a world dominated by institutions and chance-- enormous forces that he cannot understand or control--repeats again and again throughout the story. Caesar is not a victim, however; we are told immediately that "[t]he world had done things to Caesar... but he had done far more to himself."

Nine of the story's twenty-three pages describe Caesar's time in prison. The events of prison life are familiar; they are the stuff of movies and HBO series. Turf wars, homosexuality, homemade tattoos that go bad, prisoners who will kill (literally) for a cigarette, and so on. But the rich metaphorical texture goes farther. Religious imagery and references dominate prison life, the most obvious being the name of one of the most powerful prisoners: Tony Cathedral. Like Charles D'Ambrosio, Jones does not shy from using character and place names as large, visible signposts. This might be most obvious in this sentence:

In another time, Cathedral and Caesar would have had enough of everything—from muscle to influence—to demand that someone give up the killers, but the prison was filling up with younger men who did not care what those two had been once upon a time.

Reading "Cathedral and Caesar" as "church and state" is unavoidable, and apt. The intimation in that quote that the old order is collapsing is later echoed when Caesar visits Cathedral in his cell:

Cathedral looked over at him with a devastatingly serious gaze and said, “What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.”

Eventually, Caesar is released from prison and finds work as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant. He also takes a room in a squalid apartment building,

a building that, in the days when white people lived there, had had two apartments of eight rooms or so on each floor. Now the first-floor apartments were uninhabitable and had been padlocked for years. On the two other floors, each large apartment had been divided into five rented rooms, which went for twenty to thirty dollars a week, depending on the size and the view. Caesar’s was small, twenty dollars, and had half the space of his cell at Lorton. The word that came to him for the butchered, once luxurious apartments was “warren.”

Yet another example of a once-grand structure that has been destroyed, broken apart, "butchered."

Also living in the building is Yvonne Miller, the only woman Caesar ever loved. Another resident, Simon the money lender, tells Caesar

"Now, our sweet Yvonny, she ain't nothin but an old girl." Old girls were whores, young or old, who had been battered so much by the world that they had only the faintest wisp of life left; not many of them had hearts of gold.

Caesar is eventually found by his estranged brother (a corporate lawyer) and sister (who lives "in an area of well-to-do black people some called the Gold Coast"). He has not seen them in years. Caesar resists his brother's invitation to a family dinner, but is eventually persuaded to attend. The reunion seems to be going well; his nephew and niece sit in his lap, eager for his attention. The wine flows. As Caesar is leaving, his brother says:

Even if you go away not wanting to see us again, know that Daddy loves you. It is the one giant truth in the world. He’s a different man, Caesar. I think he loves you more than us because he never knew what happened to you. That may be why he never remarried.

Caesar feels that the evening has gone well until his sister misinterprets his affectionate, and innocent, gesture toward his young niece:

He said to his niece, “Good night, young lady,” and she said no, that she was not a lady but a little girl. Again, he reached unsuccessfully for her feet. When he turned back, his sister had a look of such horror and disgust that he felt he had been stabbed. He knew right away what she was thinking, that he was out to cop a feel on a child.

Once again, Caesar is betrayed by an institution: the institution of family.

When he returns to his apartment buildng, he finds Yvonne dead, apparently of alcohol poisoning or choked by aspirated vomit. In a tender and ritualistic scene, he cleans her body and her apartment, rending his own clothes for cleaning rags. He dresses her, brushes her hair, pins a cameo on her dress, and arranges her body atop the bed for whoever will find her the next day.

He leaves the apartment building, knowing only that "he was not a young man anymore" and "that he did not want to wash dishes and bus tables anymore." He wants only to find some honest way to pay for Yvonne's funeral. He has in his hand a quarter.

It was a rather old one, 1967, but shiny enough. Life had been kind to it. He went carefully down the steps in front of the building and stood on the sidewalk. The world was going about its business, and it came to him, as it might to a man who had been momentarily knocked senseless after a punch to the face, that he was of that world. To the left was Ninth Street and all the rest of N Street, Immaculate Conception Catholic Church at Eighth, the bank at the corner of Seventh. He flipped the coin. To his right was Tenth Street, and down Tenth were stores and the house where Abraham Lincoln had died and all the white people’s precious monuments. Up Tenth and a block to Eleventh and Q Streets was once a High’s store where, when Caesar was a boy, a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream cost twenty-five cents, and farther down Tenth was French Street, with a two-story house with his mother’s doilies and a foot-long porcelain black puppy just inside the front door. A puppy his mother had bought for his father in the third year of their marriage. A puppy that for thirty-five years had been patiently waiting each working day for Caesar’s father to return from work. The one giant truth . . . Just one minute more. He caught the quarter and slapped it on the back of his hand. He had already decided that George Washington’s profile would mean going toward Tenth Street, and that was what he did once he uncovered the coin.

He stops at the intersection of Tenth and N streets. One way lies "Lincoln's death house"; the other way leads to Caesar's father. He sees a little girl, putting playing cards in the spokes of her bike's wheel. She watches him. He flips the coin but is dissatisfied with the result and flips it again. The story ends:

Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl's heart paused. The man's heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell.

He is in a landscape dominated by a church, a bank, "white people's precious monuments," but it's also a landscape in which lies his father's house. And, as the little girl with her deck of cards looks on, he lets a coin toss decide his path.

It's a powerful story, and a fitting opener for this year's O. Henry.

At the mailbox

2006-05-10T23:04:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day at the mailbox. First, I found Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat and other stories, which I had ordered from Amazon, on my doorstep (UPS); then in the actual mailbox I found a surprise complimentary copy of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, one of the two top annual short story anthologies. Plenty of fodder for blogging for a while.

Because the O. Henry anthology and the Best American Short Stories anthology are released at different times, they can be slightly out of synch. For example, this O. Henry includes "Old Boys, Old Girls," by Edward P. Jones, which was in BASS 2005.

Other stories in the O. Henry:
"You Go When You Can No Longer Stay," Jackie Kay, Granta
"Mule Killers," Lydia Peelle, Epoch
"The Broad Estates of Death," Paula Fox, Harper's Magazine
"The Pelvis Series," Neela Vaswani, Epoch
"Conceived," David Lawrence Morse, One Story
"The Dressmaker's Child," William Trevor, The New Yorker
"Disquisition on Tears," Stephanie Reents, Epoch
"Sault Ste. Marie," David Means, Harper's Magazine
"Unction," Karen Brown, The Georgia Review
"'80s Lilies," Terese Svoboda, Indiana Review
"Passion," Alice Munro, The New Yorker
"The Center of the World," George Makana Clark, The Georgia Review
"Wolves," Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Prairie Schooner
"Girls I Know," Douglas Trevor, Epoch
"The Plague of Doves," Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker
"Famine," Xu Xi, Ploughshares
"Puffed Rice and Meatballs," Lara Vapnyar, Zoetrope All-Story
"Letters in the snow--for kind strangers and unborn children--for the ones lost and most beloved," Melanie Rae Thon, One Story
"Window," Deborah Eisenberg, Tin House

I can't wait to review them all.

Becoming Dad

2006-05-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the things I haven't read, all the brilliant young writers with whom I am unfamiliar. Even limiting myself to short story writers and their collections, it seems impossible to ever catch up. Well, throw another shrimp on the barbie. This week's New Yorker fiction, "Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine," by Matthew Klam, had me mesmerized from start to finish.

Klam writes like a dark, male, Lorrie Moore. And I don't think it's just the similarity to Moore's great story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (both stories involve hospitals and endangered children); Klam is funny, hysterically funny, in much the same off-handed, cynical, but ultimately affectionate way that Moore is funny.

Quickly summarized, this is the story of Julia and Kevin. Kevin is out of town at a journalism conference when Julia, seven months pregnant, accidentally breaks her own water while using her vibrator. Hey, Brad Pitt was on TV, what are you gonna do? The story alternates between Julia, who eventually goes to the hospital, and Kevin, who wanders around incommunicado, avoiding going home because, frankly, he's sick to death of Julia and this whole pregnancy thing. Ultimately, he is located in time to be at Julia's side in the delivery room.

This story is just more proof of the old maxim: Execution is Everything. The bones of the story, the basic plot line, is as commonplace as anything you'll find: a woman goes into labor, there are problems, will the baby be okay? It's another story with a built-in narrative arc, something I've dwelled on in the past. A built-in narrative arc provides an event that the reader can see coming early on, an event that is essential to the story's completion, and that will happen on a predictable timeline (usually). Or, as a teacher of mine might say, this story's clock is running from the get-go. We know almost immediately that the endpoint of this story will be the delivery of the baby. This drives us as readers; it gives us a sense of purpose. There's no better way to achieve profluence.

Klam also keeps the story moving with a series of reversals. Throughout the middle, and despite the looming delivery, he keeps us guessing about where the story is going. More on this later. For now, go read it.

That Triumphant Egg

2006-05-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I reread a classic: Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg," first published in 1920 and originally titled "The Triumph of the Egg." This story is probably Anderson's best known piece, outside of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, and there are things to be learned from it, especially if you yearn to write funny.

In "The Egg," the first-person narrator tells the story of his father, a farmhand who is quite content in life until, at the age of thirty-five, he takes a wife. As in many Anderson stories, marriage initiates the father's downfall. For the first time in his life, he experiences a "notion of trying to rise in the world," a notion which leads him to become first a chicken farmer and then a restauranteur, both with unhappy results.

The agent of his ultimate defeat is, ta da, an egg.

The first thing to notice about this story is the contrast between subject matter, which is ludicrous from start to finish, and diction. In much of his writing, Anderson was not above writing in a sort of ham-fisted countrified drawl, but in "The Egg" he is careful to write in his most dignified drawing-room voice:

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon--to go squashed and dead back to their maker.

So proper, so Victorian, right up until the moment of squashing.

The second small touch of craft that I notice in this story is the way Anderson achieves profluence by playing with the order of events. It's a simple but effective trick. For the first half of the story, the narrative is pulled along by the comic voice and by a general sense that a comic scene is coming, although we don't know quite what to expect. The main scene takes place late one night in the family's restaurant, when the father, who has resolved to boost the business by becoming more of an entertainer, tries to perform a couple of egg tricks for a disinterested patron. Eventually the egg breaks and the father is humiliated, and the story ends soon thereafter. What's interesting is the way the sequence begins:

Late one night I was awakened by a roar of anger coming from father's throat. Both mother and I sat upright in our beds. With trembling hands she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by her head. Downstairs the front door of our restaurant went shut with a bang and in a few minutes father tramped up the stairs. He held an egg in his hand and his hand trembled as though he were having a chill. There was a half insane light in his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I was sure he intended throwing the egg at either mother or me. Then he laid it gently on the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees beside mother's bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away by his grief, cried with him.

Now the hook is set for us to observe the actual scene (in a flashback) in which the father tries to impress his customer by first trying to stand an egg on its end and then trying to put the egg, its shell softened by vinegar, inside a glass bottle.

The final thing I'll note is the way Anderson handles the POV issues in the flashback. The story is told faithfully in the first-person pov of the son. The son was upstairs, asleep, when the critical scene unfolded. But rather than have the scene related by the father (who would have had little perspective on the event), Anderson prefaces the telling with this:

I have forgotten what mother said to him and how she induced him to tell her of what had happened downstairs. His explanation also has gone out of my mind. I remember only my own grief and fright and the shiny path over father's head glowing in the lamplight as he knelt by the bed.

As to what happened downstairs. For some unexplainable reason I know the story as well as though I had been a witness to my father's discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplainable things.

So, the narrator is saying, I don't know how I know all these things, but I do, so get over it. Hasn't every writer been in the middle of a first-person narrative and, suddenly running up against its limitations, wished for a free pass to omniscience? This part of the story serves as a reminder: you can do whatever you want, so long as you tip your hat to the rule you choose to ignore.

Let me tell you something

2006-05-01T09:48:00.000-05:00

"Once in a Lifetime," by Jhumpa Lahiri, is this week's fiction at The New Yorker. Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies is one of my favorite short story collections, and I was excited to see her name this morning. This story, however, fails to engage me in the way her other work has. Maybe it needs another reading. Maybe I need more coffee.

This story is interesting, however, because the point of view is something I'm going to label "first-person addressive," in which the first-person narrator speaks directly to "you," although "you" is not the reader but another character. The story begins:

I had seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life. Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents and their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. I was six years old. You were nine.

The feel of the story is similar to that of an epistolary (a story told in letters), a story form almost never seen in modern realistic fiction, probably because of the demise of formal correspondence.

The effect in this story is also faintly accusatory, however; reading it, I feel backed into a corner, as though charges are being read against me to which I cannot respond. I think that has a lot to do with why I can't connect with the narrative; but also, and at least as important, the story simply lacks profluence. The narrator recounts a period in her childhood in which another family stayed with her family while they were looking for a home. The "you" of the story is the son of the visiting family.

But nothing progresses. The families predictably grate against one another, but the stakes of the conflict are low. We are simply waiting for the visiting family to find its own home. The narrator has a crush on the boy to whom the story is addressed, but there's an age gap that snuffs any real sexual tension before it can develop. So the story plods along until near the end, when Lahiri reveals a hidden bit of information that does, in fact, raise the stakes... but only if the reader is still awake to enjoy it.

Strike That

2006-04-27T10:03:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I wrote that all the Antonya Nelson stories I've read are relationship stories. I was forgetting the first Nelson story I ever read, "Strike Anywhere," which appeared in Issue 9 of failbetter and was later collected in The Story Behind the Story, edited by Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett, and Some Fun, Nelson's latest collection. In The Story Behind the Story, the author of each story has added a note explaining the story's origin.

This story is pure comedy. Over at StoryGlossia, the April 25 post asks if "Strike Anywhere" really qualifies as a story. It lacks certain elements that we normally look for, such as a clear moment of crisis, a permanent change in the world of the protagonist, and so on. But to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, comedy has its own logic; it either works or it doesn't. And this story definitely works.

In The Story Behind the Story, Nelson explains that the story arose in part from a discussion with a student who loved the irony of O. Henry. Nelson said she derided the kind of irony seen in "The Gift of the Magi" as child's play. I'm going from memory, but I think she called it "shallow irony" as opposed to "deep irony." The student was unswayed, however, taking the position that such irony can give a story a satisfying and memorable shape, like a little box that you can hold in your hand and admire. So Nelson took this as a challenge to write her own ironic tale.

In "Strike Anywhere," a young boy, Ivan, accompanies his father, who has been uncharacteristically sober for three months, to buy a box of matches and lighter fluid for a family barbecue, planned to celebrate the advent of spring. The father, however, has planned his own celebration, and stops at a bar called The White Front. Ivan waits in the truck while the father goes inside. The narrative alternates between the father in the bar, who orders a "Jack and a Bud back" from a bartender named Frozene (a name that I truly envy), and Ivan, who sits in the truck playing with the box of matches.

The father starts talking to the hard-drinking young second wife of the local jeweler, a woman who comes to the bar every day with a twenty-dollar bill and doesn't leave until it's exhausted. When she goes to the bathroom, he sees that she is pregnant, and berates her for drinking while in "the family way." This is the substance of the bar thread. Various secondary characters drift through the scene: some migrant workers, a trio of teachers, a crazy guy with a menagerie of pets.

Outside, Ivan, having discovered a taste for matchheads, has been putting matches in his mouth until the coating dissolves and then using the denuded sticks to build a house on the dashboard. He has his own parade of supporting cast members: a gang of girls who are friends of his sister, a woman pushing a stroller, and finally a more menacing figure:

Beside The White Front, in the dark entryway of the defunct wedding dress shop, a shadowy shape suddenly began moving.... The moving shadow emerging from between the dress windows assumed a human form, pale face first and then animate body, shocking, like a broken down groom stepping out of the ruined wedding party....

Ivan watched wide-eyed as the man came forward, lurching, wavering, like a marionette manipulated by a child, one moment upright, the next heaping limp on the sidewalk, where a high school couple had to veer around his flung, booted, foot.

Ivan recognizes the man as Kermit Boyer, one of the town drunks. Boyer sees Ivan and staggers across the street to the truck:

Kermit reached the truck's hood and melted onto it, sliding along the fender, grabbing onto the side mirror of the passenger door like a handle. His fingers were brown, crazy with scratches and scabs. His face was like a large rotten apple.

"Little boy," said Kermit Boyer, rapping with his free hand against the glass.

Ivan scooted to his father's side of the truck, beneath the steering wheel. His fingers trembled on the horn, ready to alert the people in the street, who would turn then and rescue him from his nightmare, this desperate drunken figure....

In the locked truck, in the oncoming dark, Ivan's fear paralyzed him, Kermit's appearance, its suddenness, its ugly publicness, a person crawling like an animal on the sidewalk, draped like dirty laundry on his father's vehicle. . .

"Little boy," Kermit Boyer repeated, his fingertips now inside the passenger window, chapped lips at the crack. A missing tooth, Ivan noticed, canine incisor like his own, whiskers, loose jowls, eyes loopy. "Little boy, don't do that," he said, his breath powerfully upon Ivan, a wave of sour ferment. "Don't eat the matches, boy," he said, "Good lord, son, that's poison!"

The stick in Ivan's mouth stopped. And then Kermit abruptly disappeared, dropped like a felled deer, unstrung puppet, onto the cooling pavement beside the truck.

That's how the story ends, with a warning against self-poisoning from an expert on the subject. There's no resolution of the conflict in the bar, or of the fight that awaits at home. Instead, Nelson has tied a bow around her ironic box and presented it for our admiration.

Some More Fun

2006-04-26T15:09:00.000-05:00

I'm still reading through Antonya Nelson's collection, Some Fun. Five of the seven stories (there's also a novella) are available online, including "Rear View" (see "Extra Credit for Marmots"), and "Strike Anywhere," which appeared at failbetter.com, source of many fine interviews in addition to online fiction. Also, three of the stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker: "Dick," "Only a Thing," (not online) and "Eminent Domain."

I was reading "Eminent Domain" earlier today (which, I must say, is a weak title for this story), trying to figure out what makes it tick, and it took me a minute to recognize it for what it is: a love story. Or, perhaps more accurately, a relationship story. No big surprise there, because all of Nelson's stories (the ones I've read, anyway) are relationship stories of some sort.

But more so than her other short fiction, which tends to dwell on infidelity, "Eminent Domain" fits a traditional love story model:

Boy sees girl

Boy meets girl

Boy buys girl dinner

Boy dates girl repeatedly; their relationship progresses

Boy and girl sleep together

Boy and girl break up

Boy and girl reunite briefly and then break up for good, or they live happily ever after

Now don't tell me you don't have anything to write about. Don't talk to me about plot. You can write stories based on that plot for the rest of your life, with or without variations. Just try to bring a little freshness to the table, if you can.

How does Nelson freshen the old tale up? Here's the "Boy sees girl" part (from the version in Some Fun, a little different from the online version):

What caught Paolo’s attention was the smile, teeth extravagantly white and large, orthodontically flawless. Expensive maintenance in the mouth of a homeless woman. Around the smile was a pale, animated face, around that a corona of wild purple hair. The owner of this gleeful mouth was drunk, her flame of a head swaying on the thin stick of her body, lit at nine in the morning on the front stoop of a condemned Baptist church. Its facade alone remained. The vast skirt of the steps fronted the building the way the smile did the woman's face: behind was a pile of rubble, scatter of boards and bricks and glass, a frightening exploded emptiness.

Not only does Nelson drop a corkscrewing twist on Boy Sees Girl, she also tackles one of the hoariest cliches in amateur fiction--the homeless character. Of course, this is no ordinary homeless woman, and that, of course, is the whole point.

Groundhog Day, Martin Amis Style

2006-04-25T09:45:00.000-05:00

My April 24th issue of The New Yorker finally arrived in the mail with Martin Amis's story, "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta." It's easy to imagine why this is not on-line, given the reaction of certain groups to those anti-Islamic editorial cartoons in the recent past.

In particular, the story describes the life of Atta on the morning of September 11, 2001, the day on which Atta piloted an airplane into the World Trade Center. Just the other day, someone asked Are We Ready? Are we ready for fiction (technically, the question pertained to movies) about 9/11?

Amis and The New Yorker have answered this question with a bold "Yes."

The next question is, What Form Will This 9/11 Fiction Take? Will it be insightful and even-handed? Should a story about Atta portray him as a reasonable human being, serving his religion with the ultimate sacrifice? Or should Atta be drawn as a hapless soldier, trapped into committing suicide by his sacred vows of loyalty and honor?

Well... no. No more than Hitler has been reimagined as a misunderstood and under-appreciated water-colorist who only wanted the best for his pastel people.

Instead, Amis indulges our baser instincts. Unable to exact any meaningful vengeance on the corporeal Atta, Amis treats the fictional Atta to a host of plagues. We are told that Atta hasn't had a bowel movement since May, and is as taut-bellied as a pregnant woman; that his intestinal blockage results in bile rising repeatedly to the back of his throat, causing him constant nausea; that he has headaches, multiple simultaneous headaches, like snakes fighting inside his skull; that shaving causes him the worst distress of all, because, beardless, he sees how unimaginably hideous his face is. He also cuts his nose and lip with the razor.

In addition to his physical discomfort, the fictional Atta is deprived of the spiritual comfort of religion. He is perpetrating this crime, Amis tells us, not because of a love for Islam, but purely for a love of death. He wants to escape the earth not because he believes that he will be rewarded with seventy virgins, but because it will end his physical pain, and also because it will cause, he believes, an unending cycle of death and war.

Does Atta get his wish? I'll leave the ending for you, if my title hasn't already given away too much.

William Trevor, Back in the Saddle

2006-04-24T09:36:00.000-05:00

This week at the New Yorker is "An Afternoon," by William Trevor, the prolific and widely honored Irish fictionist. I recently bought Trevor's collected short stories, a volume of over 1200 pages, and am working my way through it (along with half a dozen other collections). Mr. Trevor was born in 1928, started writing full-time in 1965, and apparently doesn't intend to stop before it's mandatory.

"An Afternoon" is the tense tale of a girl, Jasmin, who goes to a bus stop to meet a man she talked with on a chat line. "Jasmin" is a name she has given herself, her improvement over "Angie." Jasmin's mother is cheating on her husband, with whom she cheated on Jasmin's father. The mother is, perhaps, not the best role model.

Trevor has chosen an omniscient pov. The story begins:

Someone had left a comic paper on the seat near where he sat and he read the strips while he waited. All the way to the bus station he had hurried because he liked being early for things. He liked to take his time, to settle himself, and he did so now. He knew she’d come.

Jasmin knew he was going to be different, no way he couldn’t be; no way he’d be wearing a baseball cap backward over a No. 1 cut, or be gawky like Lukie Giggs, or make the clucking noise that Darren Finn made when he was trying to get a word out. She couldn’t have guessed, all she knew was he wouldn’t be like them. Could be he’d put you in mind of the Raw Deal drummer, whatever his name was, or of Al in "Doc Martin." But the boy at the bus station wasn’t like either. And he wasn’t a boy, not for a minute.

We're never sure of Jasmin's age, although she says sixteen and later seventeen, then fifteen; the man, who tells her his name is Clive, estimates she could be as young as twelve. Clive says he is twenty-nine, but Jasmin thinks he is older, mid-thirties. We see quickly that we are witnessing an all too-common 21st-century parental nightmare: the adolescent girl seduced on-line (in this case, on a telephone line) by a pedophile.

Omniscience is a tactic that creates some distance from the characters, but which also gives Trevor license to show a great deal through the thoughts of the characters. This can be criticized as taking the easy way out; it's much easier to look inside a character's head than to dramatize what he's thinking or planning. Looking back on this story, I'm not sure that we ever really need to see inside Clive's thoughts, because Trevor provides us with all the creepy detail we need to figure it out on our own (as if the age difference isn't enough). Clive constantly invokes Jasmin's name, tells her she's pretty, wins a necklace for her, and on and on, eventually persuading her to go with him to his home, but not before stopping to have a drink. However, the occasional forays into Clive's mind arguably raise the level of menace, and the effect of this story is pure tension. We peek through our fingers, straining to see what will happen next.

Body Parts

2006-04-20T22:29:00.000-05:00

This month's StoryGlossia brings us Benjamin Percy's short story "The Hand." This is the tale of a meek man whose life is changed when he finds a talismanic object--in this case a prosthetic hand--lying on the sidewalk. It's a familiar story form; if you don't think so, substitute "magic lantern" for "prosthetic hand" and "beach" for sidewalk. As in all such stories, the object is embued with magical properties (whether real or imagined) and changes the protagonist's life, perhaps for the better, perhaps not.

At just over 1500 words, the story is slight. It reads like a fairy tale, largely because of the genie-in-a-bottle premise, but also because of the wide-eyed, naive voice of the first-person narrator, notable for its simple syntax and its scarcity of contractions. The story begins:

I found it last week. At first I mistook it for a glove. But it was a hand – a prosthetic hand – just lying there on the sidewalk. When I bent over to get a better look at it, I heard a woman say, “Watch out. That man is going to be sick.”

“No,” I said, my voice coming out angrier than I intended. “I’m not going to be sick.”

A crowd gathers, and the narrator picks up the hand. "I had, after all, found it. If it belonged to anyone it belonged to me," he says. An "important-looking man in a business suit" appears and starts asking questions, but the narrator tucks the hand in his jacket and hurries away.

Up to this point in the story, the telling has been quite superficial. We have a childish narrator playing finders-keepers, relating his story (for the most part) in the language of a child, describing the other characters as stick figures. We might be listening to a grade-schooler's anecdote. But now Percy zooms the camera in and adds a touch of verisimilitude:

Someone had stepped on the hand, leaving behind the tan imprint of a waffle sole. And there was some chewing gum and a cigarette butt stuck to it. I splashed some soap in the sink and filled it with water and washed the hand along with a few cereal bowls glazed with old milk.

The imprint of the shoe sole, the cigarette butt, the chewing gum: these are gritty details that make us feel that we're in a real place, with a real person. And there's my favorite detail in that paragraph, the "cereal bowls glazed with old milk." More gritty detail, but also detail that underscores the childish nature of the narrator.

The narrator makes an unsuccessful effort to find the hand's owner (by going to the mall and looking for one-handed people; another childlike approach to a problem), but becomes more "attached" to the hand, carrying it with him everywhere. He buys a shirt with extra-long sleeves, and is surprised when his wife, with whom he has chilly relations, compliments him. This is the first indication of the hand's "powers."

And then the hand becomes assertive:

I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but yesterday I touched a woman. Specifically her rear end. I am not proud of this, and I don’t really know how to explain it except that I felt compelled to touch her, as if I didn’t have a choice. As if the hand wanted it to happen....
Here is the weird thing. Here is the thing I can’t get out of my head. She looked up, surprised, bewildered, and then smiled shyly, as if I had complimented her hairdo. This was an extraordinary moment for me. Normally women seem furious even when I look at them, whereas she seemed…empowered, somehow.

The story ends with the narrator in bed with his wife. Here Percy shifts from past tense to present tense, a little technique for heightening the tension. He puts the hand under his pillow (something a child might do with a lost tooth), and things turn a little creepy:

Sometime during the night I wake up to find the hand has crept from beneath its hiding place. It hovers above Emily, trembling, like some vulture riding an updraft. Then it descends.... At first she goes stiff, uncertain, but when the hand climbs up her waist, sliding up and down the dip of her hip, she kind of giggles and sighs and scoots her butt back until it touches me. The hand, encouraged, continues to explore her body, stroking her cheek, petting her hair. She breathes heavily. And though at first I don’t know whether to feel jealous or horrified or elated, I decide to feel good. I decide to let the hand take me where it wants to go.

This story evokes numerous associations for me, from a severed hand crawling across the floor in any number of bad horror movies to The Fourth Hand, by John Irving, in which the protagonist receives the first hand transplant (and in which the hand has a "mind of its own"). Percy's protagonist also reminds me of the timid narrator in Tobias Wolff's "Next Door," a story unforgettable for its use of Florida as a euphemism for part of the male anatomy. But more than anything, the flat characters, the fairy-tale quality of the narrative, and (of course) the manufactured hand itself remind me of a puppet show, with the prosthetic hand as the bewitched marionette that comes to life and entrances the puppeteer.

Yet, despite its familiarity, because of the carefully crafted voice and the well-chosen details that so ingeniously suit Percy's purpose, the story works. Percy's writing always evokes the juvenile; Mississippi Review published a story of his in which the narrator rants about his penis, as though it is some newly discovered outcropping on his bodily world. Perhaps with "The Hand" Percy has found a more tasteful body part upon which to dwell.

When Nothing Moves but Hope

2006-04-19T14:55:00.000-05:00

When I first read Tobias Wolff's collection, Back in the World, the story that most viscerally affected me was "Desert Breakdown, 1968," a long story about a young family driving across the California desert toward Los Angeles, where the husband plans to look for work.

I admire this story more each time I reread it. It begins:

Krystal was asleep when they crossed the Colorado. Mark had promised to stop for some pictures, but when the moment came he looked over at her and drove on. Krystal's face was puffy from the heat blowing into the car. Her hair, cut short for summer, hung damp against her forehead. Only a few strands lifted in the breeze. She had her hands folded over her belly and that made her look even more pregnant than she was.

After the thumping, alliterative rhythm of the first sentence, reminiscent of tires rolling over expansion joints on a highway, we meet Mark, the husband, already in the act of breaking a promise to his pregnant wife. In the back seat lies Hans, their toddling son.

To summarize very briefly, the car breaks down at a remote gas station, little more than a cinderblock building and pumps. Mark must walk and hitchhike to a nearby town to buy an alternator, leaving Krystal and Hans behind. He's picked up by a man and two women in a hearse who encourage him to abandon the family and join the film crew they work on, to live the good life. It's exactly what Mark, already despairing of the life that lies before him, doesn't need to hear.

The pov alternates between Mark and Krystal. Back at the gas station, pregnant Krystal is shown kindness by the proprietor, a hard-drinking, shotgun-toting woman named Hope. (Between Hope and the hearse that threatens to bear Mark away, Wolff isn't stingy with the signposts in this story.) Hope lives in the back of the cinderblock gas station building, and invites Krystal to nap in her bedroom, a red-saturated "love nest."

Mark accepts the offer to ride on with the occupants of the hearse, abandoning Krystal and Hans, but soon changes his mind and demands to be let out. He catches another ride back to the parts store before it closes, but he doesn't have enough money to buy the alternator, and the store is closing. He is reduced to calling home for help, the thing he has most desperately avoided. Indulging in one final fantasy, he plans to pretend to be a state trooper, calling to inform his parents of a crash that killed Mark (their son) and his family. But when his father answers the phone, Mark says only, " 'Dad, it's me--Mark.' "

Krystal has her own delusion, and it too is crushed when she wakes up from her nap and Mark has not yet returned:

I will say a poem, Krystal thought, and when I am finished he will be here. At first silently, because she had promised to speak only English now, then in a whisper, and at last plainly, Krystal recited a poem the nuns had made her learn at school long ago, the only poem she remembered. She repeated it twice, then opened her eyes. Mark was not there. As if she had really believed that he would be there, Krystal kicked the wall with her bare feet. The pain gave an edge of absolute clarity to what she'd been pretending not to know: that he had never really been there and was never going to be there in any way that mattered.

While Krystal has been sleeping, Hans has been entertained by the men on the bench, who have taught him to say "bitch," the word with which he greets Krystal when she emerges from the bedroom. She flies into a rage, cursing the men in German, attacking them with a piece of lumber. The story ends with an apocalyptic image:

She [Krystal] shaded her eyes and looked around her. The distant mountains cast long shadows into the desert. The desert was empty and still. Nothing moved but Hope, walking toward them with the gun over her shoulder. As she drew near, Krystal waved, and Hope raised her arms. A rabbit hung from each hand, swinging by its ears.

I like this story because it moves; it proceeds relentlessly forward with conflict after conflict to expose the naive fantasies of this young couple to the harsh reality of the world. I also like it because the simple, fast-paced syntax is so well suited to the setting and the characters. And I like it because, ultimately, despite the blatantly contrasted symbols of the hearse and the woman Hope, the story can't be satisfactorily reduced to an aphorism. It's a story that uses event (plot) to define the characters that people it, something that writers are constantly exhorted to do, but something which is very rarely achieved.

Things in Small Packages

2006-04-18T09:40:00.000-05:00

This week's New Yorker fiction ("The Last Days of Muhammad Atta") isn't online, so I'm turning to another terrorism-related story, "If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane...", by Laura Kasischke. This story appears in the Fall 2005 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Antonya Nelson (see "Extra Credit for Marmots").

"Stranger" is deviously crafted, and well worth reading. It begins:

Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane...

Just in case you didn't pick it up from the title, Kasischke makes doubly sure that we know what the story is about. No hemming and hawing, no coyness. This sentence does a lot. Phrased as it is, like the opening of a fable, or a parable, it implies a hypothetical question: What would you do, gentle reader, if someone asked you to carry a package on a plane? Like all of us, the woman, whose name turns out to be Kathy Bliss, has scoffed at such a question, not believing that anyone would ever be so stupid.

The first sentence also establishes an omniscient pov and a psychic distance ("there was a woman") that gives us a moment to consider the question objectively, from outside. The omniscience also prepares us, subtly, for the possibility that the woman may die during the narrative. (If the story's pov is close third, we won't think her death is possible, and the story will never reach maximum tension.) After this distant opening, Kasischke swiftly draws nearer and nearer the woman until we are inside her head:

When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed. She was wearing a black turtleneck and slim black pants. Black boots. Pearl studs in her ears. She was swinging the loose leg, the one that was tossed over the knee of the other—swinging it slowly and rhythmically, like a pendulum, as she tried to drink her latte in burning sips.

By the time the stranger approached her and asked her to carry the foreign object with her onto the plane, the woman had already owned that latte for at least twenty minutes, but it hadn’t cooled a single degree. It was as if there were a thermonuclear process at work inside her cup—the steamed milk and espresso somehow generating together their own heat—and the tip of her tongue had been stung numb from trying to drink it, and the plastic nipple of the cup’s white lid was smeared with her lipstick.

First we see how she is dressed, then we feel her bodily sensations in the swinging leg ("like a pendulum", a nice touch) and the burning coffee. Then the second paragraph moves neatly into her thoughts about the coffee.

The second paragraph (remember the thermonuclear process) also cleverly establishes the story's theme. The coffee cup is the first of three small objects in the story that carry a threat. The second object, as you might assume, is the foreign object. What's the third? Note the coffee cup's "plastic nipple." Does a coffee cup have a nipple? No. Why does she use that word? It's all about the power of association, a way to gently underscore the relationship of the three objects. Consider that nipple after you reach the end of the post.

Eventually, a man approaches Kathy and asks her to carry a package on board. The man looks like an Arab (he later gives her an Armenian name) but he sounds American. The package is small and gift-wrapped; the stranger tells her it contains a necklace for his mother's 70th birthday. He's supposed to be flying to Portland for the party, but his girlfriend just called and told him that she's pregnant; he has to go to her, as soon as possible. If Kathy will just carry the gift, his brother will pick it up at the other end. He offers to unwrap it so she can see the necklace. She declines, unwilling to destroy the beautiful wrapping.

Of course, we fear that the package contains its own thermonuclear process. But Kasischke handles the scene so deftly that we understand when Kathy agrees to take the package with her. She doesn't want to be paranoid; she wants to help this earnest young man, who needs to leave so he can buy his pregnant girlfriend an engagement ring, for God's sake.

After she agrees to take the package, and in fact boards the plane with it tucked into her carry-on, where can the story go? It's a crucial point; she has us on the edge of our seats. Will the plane blow up? Will Kathy deliver the package? It's the old yes/no/maybe/4th best thing problem. Both "yes" and "no" promise to be unsatisfying. What does Kasischke do? First, of course, having us where she wants us, she plays the tease by inserting some backstory about Kathy's childhood. She lived next to a prison, and her father died young. Other than heaping on more dark imagery, this information does little, if anything, except to heighten the drama by making us wait--a worthy purpose! But then Kasischke hits us with her second stick, the real stick: Kathy has a sick two-year-old (briefly mentioned earlier in the story). No sooner has she boarded the plane than she is handed a message: "Baby in hospital. Call home now. Husband."

The baby is the third iteration of the story's image system, another small, dangerous package. The narrative jumps to a week later, after the baby has survived its brushes with death and is back home with Kathy. We realize that the bomb did not bring down the plane; we also realize, apparently sooner than distracted Kathy, that she did not deliver the package to anyone in Portland.

After Kathy has pulled the package from her carry-on, the story ends:

She didn’t open it, but imagined herself opening it. Imagined herself as a passenger on that plane, unable to resist it. Holding it to her ear. Shaking it, maybe. Lifting the edge of the gold paper, tearing it away from the box. And then, the certain, brilliant cataclysm that would follow. The lurching of unsteady weight in the sky, and then the inertia, followed by tumbling. The numbing sensation of great speed and realization in your face. She’d been a fool to take it with her onto the plane. It could have killed them all.

Or, the simple gold braid of it.

Tasteful. Elegant. A thoughtful gift chosen by a devoted son for his beloved mother. And she imagined taking the necklace out of the box, holding it up to her own neck at the mirror, admiring the glint of it around her neck—this bit of love and brevity snatched from the throat of a stranger—wearing it with an evening gown, passing it down as an heirloom to her children:

Who was to say, she thought to herself as she began to peel the gold paper away, that something stolen, without malice or intent, is any less yours than something you’ve been given?

We thought we had dodged the thermonuclear device; instead, we are left to wonder forever: will it explode?

Extra Credit for Marmots

2006-04-14T17:51:00.000-05:00

A brief entry. Today I read "Rear View," a story by Antonya Nelson in the Fall 2003 issue of Ploughshares. Antonya Nelson can flat-out write, something I've only discovered recently (and she has the awards to prove it; just check out the cover of her latest collection, Some Fun). This story is an engaging, entertaining narrative, as is "Palisades" (Fall 1999), also on-line at Ploughshares.

Both are good reads, and that's all I really want to say; however, I can't mention "Rear View" without making a couple of quick comments. First, "Rear View" is very similar in structure to "A Walk in Winter" by Robert Boswell (see Are You Dead, Deer?); i.e., it's written backwards.

Antonya Nelson just happens to be married to Robert Boswell.

Second, and you might want to sit down for this, "Rear View" includes a scene where an animal is hit by a car and the driver reluctantly leaves said animal to die. Yes, the Dead Animal Trope raises its head from the asphalt once again. However, as the title of this entry implies, the animal in question is not a deer, or a dog, or a goat, or a horse; it's a marmot. So, Ms. Nelson, extra credit for originality.

Our Story Begins and Begins and Begins

2006-04-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

Tobias Wolff's "Our Story Begins" appears in Back in the World along with "Leviathan" (see "A Whale of Two Tales"). This story is unusual even for Wolff, because it is a frame within a frame: a story in a story in a story.

The outer story is about Charlie, a young busboy in a San Francisco seafood restaurant. Charlie is also an aspiring writer, although we don't learn this until the end of the story. Charlie is at work; it's a slow, foggy night. He eavesdrops on the waiters at the restaurant, but not much happens. After the restaurant closes, he walks toward home. He encounters a three-legged dog. He enters a coffeehouse where Jack Kerouac used to hang out.

Three people enter: Truman, George and Truman's wife, Audrey. These three proceed to act out a small drama that serves as the outermost of the two inner stories. George and Audrey sing together in a church choir; the choir has just returned from a trip. After some chat, George tells a story about a Filipino immigrant named Miguel. Miguel's story, the innermost of the three stories, is a tale of unrequited love; Miguel pursues a woman who has no interest in him. Today we would just say he's a stalker. She has him jailed and almost deported, but he doesn't give up. The woman moves away from San Francisco. One day Miguel calls George and asks for help. He has gone blind, his head is wrapped in bandages, but he still insists on going to find his beloved. He's getting on the bus, and he asks George to call ahead and arrange for the woman to meet him. He believes against all reason that the woman loves him and will be there to receive him, bandages and all. Love, ahem, is blind.

Truman expresses incredulity that Miguel could have been so "blind" to the situation before him. Then Wolff treats us to his own snippet of "Hills Like White Elephants" subtext:

"Truman, listen," Audrey said. But when Truman turned to look at her she took her hand away from his and looked across the table at George. George's eyes were closed. His fingers were folded together as if in prayer.

"George," Audrey said. "Please. I can't."

George opened his eyes.

"Tell him," Audrey said.

Truman looked back and forth between them. "Now just wait a minute," he said.

"I'm sorry," George said. "This is not easy for me."

Truman was staring at Audrey. "Hey," he said.

She pushed her empty glass back and forth. "We have to talk," she said.

Thusly, George and Audrey confess their affair to Truman as Charlie eavesdrops.

Charlie leaves the coffeehouse and continues toward home. We have returned to the outer-outer story. He thinks about the music he's heard all night; he thinks about Mark Twain; he thinks about his novel, returned by some heartless editor with a note saying, "Are you kidding?" He realizes that he was close to giving up on his dream of being a writer, but he also realizes that he has decided to keep going. The story ends:

He stood there and listened to the foghorn blowing out against the Bay. The sadness of that sound, the idea of himself stopping to hear it, the thickness of the fog all gave him pleasure....

Charlie turned and started up the hill, picking his way past lampposts that glistened with running beads of water, past sweating halls and dim windows. A Chinese woman appeared beside him. She held before her a lobster that was waving its pincers back and forth as if conducting music. The woman hurried past and vanished. The hill had begun to steepen under Charlie's feet. He stopped to catch his breath, and listened again to the foghorn. He knew that somewhere out there a boat was making its way home in spite of the solemn warning, and as he walked on Charlie imagined himself kneeling in the prow of that boat, lamp in hand, intent on the light shining just before him. All distraction gone. Too watchful to be afraid. Tongue wetting the lips and eyes wide open, ready to call out in this shifting fog where at any moment anything might be revealed.

This is Wolff's advice to the learning writer. Pay attention. Be watchful. Listen. Who knows when a Chinese woman will appear beside you, her lobster conducting music? Who knows, indeed, what may be revealed.

A Whale of Two Tales

2006-04-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

"Leviathan" and "Our Story Begins" appear in Tobias Wolff's collection, Back in the World (Vintage Contemporaries edition, 1996, originally printed in 1985). Each of these stories employs one of Wolff's favorite devices: the frame.

Simply defined, a frame is a story that contains another story, with the inner story usually told by a character in the outer story. With any luck, the inner story has some relevance to the outer story. In many frame stories, such as the old P.G. Wodehouse golf stories, the outer story is very thin, barely a wrapper around the inner story. Wolff's frame stories tend to be constructed with a meatier outer story, with the inner story presented as anecdote, or for illustration.

"Leviathan" is the story of Ted and Helen and Mitch and Bliss, four hedonists who have gathered to celebrate Helen's 30th birthday with an all-night cocaine session. They also smoke some marijuana and drink some wine. Wolff tells us almost everything we need to know about this group in the second paragraph. It's morning, and Bliss is smoking and cooking a "monster omelet."

"So how does it feel," Bliss said, "being thirty?" The ash fell off her cigarette into the eggs. She stared at the ash for a moment, then stirred it in.

Blech. Theme alert: She sees the ashes; she pretends they aren't there.

Mitch, 40, has already had a facelift and wants people to think he's 20-something; Ted is a fitness buff; they are all beautiful people, and they intend to stay that way. Bliss has a daughter who lives with Bliss's ex-husband; this daughter was recently hospitalized for tonsilitis, and Bliss feels bad because she never went to the hospital to visit. "I can't deal with hospitals," she says. The other three console her, because after all, the little girl is okay. "She's all right," they say again and again, a mantra. Ted and Mitch confess that they've done much worse things, although Mitch's "confession" turns out to be a condemnation of someone's else's behavior.

All this negative talk depresses them, so they decide to talk about the good things they've done. This is where the true inner story begins. Helen tells them about a day when she went on a whale-watching boat tour with a neighbor's retarded but grown son. She had known this man growing up and had taken him to the zoo on numerous occasions, but neither had been whale-watching before. After several hours of inactivity, an enormous whale appears, half again as long as the boat. The whale "plays with" the boat, brushing against it, rocking it violently. Even the crew is frightened, thinking the whale could kill them all; Helen becomes worried that the retarded boy will panic and jump overboard. She resolves to calm him.

"I just talked him down," Helen said. "You know, I put my arm around his shoulder and said, Hey, Tom, isn't this something! Look at that big old whale! Wow! Here he comes again, Tom, hold on! And then I'd laugh like crazy. I made like I was having the time of my life, and Tom fell for it. He calmed right down. Pretty soon after that the whale took off and we went back to shore. I don't know why I brought it up. It was just that even though I felt really afraid, I went ahead and acted as if I was flying high. I guess that's the thing I'm most proud of."

Next, it's Ted's turn to tell a story, but he has passed out:

"I think he's asleep," Mitch said. He moved closer to the sofa and looked at Ted. He nodded. "Dead to the world."

"Asleep," Helen said. "Oh, God."

Bliss hugged Helen from behind. "Mitch, come here," she said. "Love circle."

Helen pulled away. "No," she said.

"Why don't we wake him up?" Mitch suggested.

"Forget it," Helend told him. "Once Ted goes under he stays under. Nothing can bring him up. Watch." She went to the sofa, raised her hand, and slapped Ted across the face.

He groaned softly and turned over.

"See?" Helen said.

"What a slug," Bliss said.

"Don't you dare call him names," Helen told her. "Not in front of me, anyway. Ted is my husband. Forever and ever. I only did that to make a point."

Mitch said, "Helen, do you want to talk about this?"

"There's nothing to talk about," Helen answered. "I made my own bed."

So, everything is not perfect in La-La land after all. Perhaps Helen has realized that the whale is out there, waiting, no matter how convincingly she pretends otherwise.

The criticism of a story like this is that it seems too convenient that one of the characters just happens to have an anecdote that so neatly meshes with the outer story, even if she doesn't realize it. But I think that complaint is a little churlish. We all tell anecdotes, sometimes because they illuminate a more current situation; sometimes that's true even if we don't know what we're doing. Our minds know more than we do.

In the next post, I'll talk about "Our Story Begins," a story that I like to think of as Tobias Wolff's guidance to beginning writers.

Are you dead, deer?

2006-04-12T10:43:00.000-05:00

Recently, it seems that I can't look down the scope of my thirty-ought-six without seeing a short story about hunting. And all these stories were written before Dick Cheney realized he hadn't bagged his limit of lawyers, so I can't blame that recent news item as the impetus. Men (and some women) just like to write about hunting. There's an elemental life-and-death appeal to it.

The Pushcart Prize XXX (2006) contained at least two hunting stories: "Her First Elk," by Rick Bass, and another, the title of which escapes me, about a woman dying of cancer who goes on her first hunt with a man she met via a personal ad. By coincidence, I recently read "The Jewish Hunter," by Lorrie Moore, also about (in part) a woman on her first hunt. Yesterday I blogged about a variant, Robert Boswell's "A Walk in Winter," which includes a deer struck by a car (no, not technically a hunting story, but decidedly gamey). I recently blogged about Tobias Wolff's classic "Hunters in the Snow" (see "More Pancakes, Tub?"), and last night I read yet another, John McNally's "The New Year."

Like the Boswell story, "The New Year" is about a deer being hit by a car, but the ending alludes strongly to "Hunters in the Snow." A young man, Gary, is on his way home from a party, stoned out of his mind and recently informed that his girlfriend is pregnant. His mother left his father in the not-too-distant past, and his father is nearly comatose with grief, unable to work, unwilling to speak.

A twelve-point buck runs in front of Gary's car; the deer is killed, and Gary's car is totaled. He's five miles from home; as in every good hunting / deer bashing story, it's cold as hell, but he has no choice. He walks home. He tells his father what happened, and for the first time in a while his father perks up. He grabs an axe and hustles Gary into his truck and they take off for the crash site, where they find the car and the deer, "already dusted with snow." The father then proceeds to chop the buck's head off, his plan being to mount it, unpreserved, on a sheet of plywood and fedex it to his ex-wife and her new husband as a wedding present. The story ends:

They drive the rest of the way home in silence, the deer's head rolling around behind them, antlers clawing the truck's bed. Though the storm has ended and the sun is peeking over the tree line, the wind is still fierce, and Gary stares blankly at the snow whirling across the highway. His surge of adrenaline is on the wane now, the rush of exhilaration over. He's falling asleep, slipping into that precarious crack between consciousness and unconsciousness, but for a moment, before he drifts completely away, Gary pretends that he and his father have been in a fatal collision, and that although dead, they are still puttering along in the pickup, maneuvering it through swirling clouds instead of snow, and they are having the best time they've ever had together, father and son floating high above the rural roads and farms, two men no longer of this earth.

Now reread the ending of "Hunters in the Snow" and compare. While McNally takes us by the hand and spells out this image of two men bonding in a pickup, "no longer of this earth," Wolff creates the same image with a surreal scene, purely dramatized. It's good old showing versus telling, which is not to dismiss McNally's story, but to point out, once again, Tobias Wolff's mastery.

The Need to Know

2006-04-11T15:31:00.000-05:00

I've been reading an anthology titled The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work, edited by Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett. After each story is a two- or three-page note from the author discussing the story's genesis.

I'm enjoying it. The writers are all accomplished, yet, with one or two exceptions, they aren't household names. No Annie Proulxs, no Alice Munros, no T.C. Boyles. The only story included that I've read before is "Love and Hydrogen," by Jim Shepard, which was included in Best American Short Stories 2002. Some of the authorial notes are very enlightening.

Today I read Robert Boswell's "A Walk in Winter." It's about a traumatic event that shaped the life of the narrator when he was a young boy. Now, as a man, he has been called back to his boyhood home to identify his mother's remains, or what may be his mother's remains: a collection of bones stored in Tupperware containers that, when the narrator stacks them on the floor, are "as tall as a person." By examining the teeth, he determines that the bones are not his mother's after all. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't learn that until the 15th of the 21 pages.

What was the traumatic event? Was it the death of his mother? Not exactly. We don't find out until pages 19-20. Boswell makes us read the entire story to get our payoff.

I'm not complaining, although some readers decry this technique of delaying information. The narrator knows damn well what we want to know and refuses, spitefully, to tell us! Yes, it's sort of a trick, but the narrator in every story knows everything in advance and refuses to tell us. After all, he has finished writing the story before we read it; yet, when the narrator is speaking in first person, this willful delay feels a little more devious. I don't think it's a fatal flaw, though, and it can certainly create profluence. It gives the story somewhere to go. If the nature of the traumatic event is unveiled too soon, what do we do with the remaining twenty pages? Also, to be fair, the narrator in this story doesn't know everything about the traumatic event until shortly after he examines the bones in the Tupperware.

The effect of this technique, in this case, is that the story is told backwards, with the narrator drawing closer and closer to the Big Event. (Spoiler alert, in case you plan to read this.)

Here's the order of events as they are told:

First we learn that the narrator is in Chapman, South Dakota, where his mother disappeared into the winter woods when he was ten. The father acted suspiciously.

Next, to throw us off track and also to reap the benefits of the beloved Dead Animal Trope (see Beating a Dead Horse), there is an automobile accident involving a deer.

Next is a brief flashback to an incident in the narrator's adult life in which he had a panic attack and wrecked another car. We don't know what caused him to panic, but we hope he doesn't do it again.

Next we get a little backstory about the narrator's boyhood: his mother had bad teeth, the farm was poor, and the winter was very, very harsh. The family subsisted on whatever the father could shoot and drag home to eat, including a neighbor's dog. At this point we learn that the narrator is returning home to identify his mother's remains. Her frozen remains.

Next we meet Officer Patty, and learn that the narrator's father hasn't been seen in years, but now he's a suspect in his wife's murder. There's also a rumor that the narrator might know where his father is. The narrator says nothing.

Next is a section where the dead mother is compared to the deer (the payoff of the dead animal trope), although, to be absolutely honest, we don't know if the deer, which scampered away, is dead. But it might as well be.

A little more childhood flashback to characterize the father as a not-very-pleasant man who was capable of violence.

Next, the narrator examines the frozen remains and determines, because the teeth aren't bad enough, that they do not belong to his mother.

Next, he learns that the police have discovered another piece of evidence (the timing couldn't be better): a shotgun, near where the bones were found. The narrator has a light bulb moment: the bones, he realizes, were the bones of his father, who killed himself with his shotgun.

Finally, we get the big payoff, the Traumatic Event: flashback to a day when the father takes the ten-year-old narrator into the woods. He makes him sit on a stump and face away. The father loads his shotgun. The narrator, certain that his father is about to shoot him, possibly to spare him from starvation, wets himself. In a strange (and barely plausible) show of compassion, the father takes the boy back to the cabin so that the boy's underwear won't freeze. The father soon after disappears; the boy never sees him again and is raised by wolves. Er, concerned relatives.

The story ends with the grown narrator taking some comfort from the epiphany that his father had planned all along to die with him (something that had apparently never occurred to him in the intervening twenty-odd years).

So, all snide comments aside, the story works as an example of one way to handle the event that is almost too big to write about. It's also an example of saving the biggest, juiciest scene for last even though it lies first on the timeline.

Sofa, So Good

2006-04-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

"The Trojan Sofa," by Bernard Maclaverty, is this week's New Yorker fiction. It's a good old-fashioned voice-driven crime story about an eleven-year-old boy (the narrator) who helps his father run a burglary scam. The father, who justifies his thievery in the name of Irish bravery, sells and delivers furniture. When he identifies a target, the boy is sewn inside the sofa (hence the title); the next day, when the homeowners have left, he cuts his way out and admits his father and uncle, who proceed to steal whatever they can carry away. The story details one such episode.

It begins in media res, with the kid in the sofa:

It’s dark—pitch black—and everything’s shaking and bumping. I’m not scared—just have some what-if knots in my gut. What if they have a dog? That would be me—well and truly. Or a burglar alarm, with laser beams, like they have in the movies. And when you walk through the beam, which you can’t see, the alarm goes off in the nearest cop shop. But my Da would’ve asked all these questions when he was selling. My Da sells anything and everything, bric-a-brac, furniture, you name it. He sells all over the place—fairs, car-boot sales, a stall in the Markets—but quality stuff, or as much of it as he can get. He’s good, friendly, knows what he’s doing.

This kind of opening, where the nature of the action is unclear, is slightly risky, because it relies on the reader to be curious enough, and patient enough, to keep reading. And Maclaverty doesn't stop to explain--instead he cuts to a scene demonstrating the father's technique for finding out if the victim has a dog or a burglar alarm. Soon we have figured out what's going on, with no break in the action.

This story is pure entertainment, with almost no backstory, no layered meaning, no purple patches. Its strength lies in the narrator's description of his experience inside the sofa: how he deals with the need to urinate (a plastic bag), his fear of falling asleep and giving himself away by snoring, the food he takes along (ham and cheese because it's odorless), how he observes, from his hideaway, the home around him. Structurally, the story is one long scene (with several brief reflections that might qualify as backstory), followed by one brief section of aftermath that is part scene and part summary. Not the most complex story, but an easy and amusing read.

The Logic of Love

2006-04-08T14:40:00.000-05:00

Karl Iagnemma's On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction is a collection of eight stories about scientists in love (if "scientist" is defined broadly to include "mathematician"). In an interview at Identity Theory, Iagnemma says that the book as originally submitted to publishers only contained four science-related stories, but Dial Press, the eventual publisher, requested more science and Iagnemma delivered.

In addition to the title story (see Doing the Math, Revisited), in which a mathematician tries to understand love with Venn diagrams and formulae, the more well-known stories include "The Phrenologist's Dream," about a phrenologist who believes that he will recognize the perfect wife by the shape of her skull, and "Zilkowski's Theorem", about another mathematician who risks ruin by writing a doctoral thesis for the woman he loves.

Each of these stories includes some hard-core detail about the protagonist's area of expertise. "On the Nature" includes a drawing of a Venn diagram that illustrates the narrator's love for his girlfriend, as well as his actual formulae, complete with Greek symbols, that describe love. Do the formulae make sense? Heck if I know, but they look good. And Iagnemma has enough sense to avoid long-winded explanations. "Phrenologist," a piece of historical fiction, includes this passage:

In his vest pocket Jeremiah carried a leather-bound book; for each woman he examined, he penned three numbers: their amativeness, adhesiveness, and conjugality, rated from one to seven. At night in the hotel room, he wrung his gloves in the washbasin, then leafed through page after page of data, the figures as varied and perplexing as women themselves.

Nagle had shown that skull size was determined by race; Layfield had proven the relationship between combativeness and climate.... He was thrilled by phrenology's brash wisdom--for what was science's greatest purpose, if not to explain man to himself? As he read, he gingerly touched his own skull, propping the book open with his elbows. Surely, he reasoned, a woman's capacity for love couldn't be random.

Throughout the collection, Iagnemma gives us just enough detail to convince us that the narrator knows what he's talking about, without ever letting the science take control of the narrative.

The point of this technique is to establish the narrator's authority, to make the reader more willing to accept the story as "truth", to enhance verisimilitude. You see it used frequently, but often the author goes overboard. I've seen this happen in Glimmer Train stories more times than I care to remember. I call this kind of story, where the author seems too proud of his research, a "term paper" story. At some point you forget that you are reading fiction, with characters and human problems, and think instead that you have wandered into a textbook on geology, or marine biology, or whatever expertise has been heaped on the protagonist's shoulders.

But Iagnemma doesn't write term papers. He gets it right.

Who's Your Daddy?

2006-04-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

"Famous Fathers," a story by Pia Z. Ehrhardt that appeared in Narrative Magazine last year, is one of ten finalists for storySouth's 2006 Million Writers Award. This story already won the Narrative Prize, a $4,000 tip of the hat awarded annually for the best story by a new or emerging writer in Narrative Magazine.

In "Famous Fathers," Ehrhardt plays to her strength: the confusing and complicated relationships between fathers and daughters. Katie, a girl on the cusp of 18, seeks the attention and love of her father, the somewhat imperious mayor of Texadelphia. The story begins:

My father is the mayor of Texadelphia,
so he gets to work early and stays late in his
wood-paneled office with red leather couches.
A window looks out on a small green square with
a fountain and some park benches. On the tile
floor in front of his desk is the mayoral seal, and
everyone steps around it like it’s religious. I’d like
to remind them he’s just a man, but his office
impresses me too. When I’m in there it’s easy to
feel like a voter and not a daughter.

That confused relationship lies at the heart of the story. Is Katie a voter or a daughter, a girl or a woman? Exactly what does she want from her father? Her friends speak openly of using their nascent sexuality to get the attention of (and manipulate) their own fathers, and encourage Katie to do the same. Katie does eventually win her father's attention, but not without cost.

Ehrhardt's prose is focused, flawless and unobtrusive. She never overwrites, never resorts to trickery, never pushes for effect. She tells the story and stays out of the way. It's easy to forget, when we become overly attuned to the technical aspects of craft, that solid prose remains the fiction writer's first, best tool. But ultimately you have to pick the right words and put them in the right order.

This story is an easy pick for the Million Writers Award. I've already cast my vote.

What Was That Again?

2006-04-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

Some writers seem to be able to make a career out of telling the same story over and over. This week's New Yorker fiction is "In the Reign of Harad IV", by Steven Millhauser. Fans of Millhauser will enjoy this story, in the way that I enjoy Seinfeld reruns.

Millhauser earned a measure of fame for winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Here's part of what Wikipedia says about it:

A focus of the novel is Martin's imagination for grand, sweeping business ideas and his instinctive sense for orchestrating large systems. Through all this Martin has the persistent feeling that there must be something bigger waiting around the next corner. One of the novel's themes is the emptiness that may lie behind the ideal of the American Dream.

In this more current offering, the protagonist is a court miniaturist. He has an imagination for tiny, infinitesimal ideas and systems. He is refurnishing a miniature version of the royal castle, much to the delight of the King, yet he has the persistent feeling that there must be something smaller waiting around the next corner. He continues to create smaller miniatures, ones that may only be seen with a magnifying glass. Then, still unsatisfied, he creates an entire miniature kingdom that is wholly invisible, even with the glass. His assistants ask for a look, which he allows them; they praise his work effusively, although he knows that they can't see it. He doesn't care that they can't see the Emperor's new clothes (oh, wait, Millhauser didn't write that one), and bends back to his task.

One of the story's themes is the emptiness that may lie behind the ideal of the American dream. Yeah, we get it.

Good Grief

2006-04-02T08:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was talking with someone about the tendency of writers, when writing about emotional topics, to push too hard for sentiment. To explain too much, to put too many words in a character's mouth, to turn to the camera and emote. Sentiment should arise from the objective details of a story; interjections of feeling by the narrator or characters result, instead, in sentimentality.

"Grief," by Pamela Painter, is an excellent example of the right way to handle an emotional topic. It's also an excellent example of how to build suspense, and how to create and thwart expectations. This story, which appeared in Ploughshares in 2000, won Painter a Pushcart Prize.

The story begins:

Harris was walking his usual route to work, up Beacon Street and past the State House, when half a block ahead he saw their stolen car stopped at a red light. It was their missing car, all right—a white ’94 Honda Accord, license plate 432 dog, easy to remember—and it was still pumping out pale blue exhaust, portent, Harris remembered thinking, of a large muffler bill and so much grief.

So much grief, over a muffler. Harris alerts a nearby policeman and before long has his car back. Along the way, we learn that the adrenalin Harris felt as he spoke to the policeman was "the first thing he’d felt in the year since his wife’s death." In the opening quoted above, the car is referred to twice as "their car," but there is no "their" there; there is only Harris, the grieving widower.

We do feel Harris's grief, in passages like this one:

The day after his wife died, he’d driven an hour west on I-90 until he came to a rest stop with an outside phone booth. He’d pulled the folding door shut against the outside world, and he’d called home over and over to hear her voice say, “Hello, please leave a message. We don’t want to miss anything.” Then he’d saved the tape and left a message of his own.

But this is grief expressed in action, not through internal discourse. We don't hear Harris's lamentations, we aren't subjected to an explanation of his feelings.

One evening after Harris has recovered his car, he gets a phone call from the car thief, a man referred to as Ponytail. “You got my TVs,” Ponytail says. It turns out that three televisions are in the trunk of Harris's car, televisions that Ponytails says he had repaired and needed to return to their owners, but which, we believe, are stolen goods. After a series of calls, Harris agrees to meet Ponytail and let him have the televisions.

At this point, in reading the story the first time, I sat back and pondered where the story might go. What expectations had Painter created? Clearly, the reader feels that Harris is stepping into a dangerous situation. And Harris has his own misgivings:

Ten minutes later Harris was driving to the appointed place, wondering if he really would go through with this maneuver. He didn’t feel prepared for anything since his wife died. He probably wouldn’t be meeting Ponytail if his wife were at home waiting for him, worrying. They would have talked it over, together come up with a plan. It saddened him that he didn’t know what she would have wanted him to do.

Here, in writing that "it saddened him," Painter may have indulged in a little telling. But by this point, she has (as they say) earned it.

What will Ponytail do when they meet again? Harris can't just hand Ponytail the televisions and drive away; although that might happen in real life, we know that the story demands something more. Our expectation, of course, as in any suspenseful story, is that something bad is going to happen.

As writers, though, we should expect something else, and that's what Painter delivers. I admit that I had envisioned a transfer of televisions from Harris's car to Ponytail's; but, of course, Ponytail has no car. That's why he stole Harris's. So Harris must drive him, and the televisions, back to Ponytail's house. Painter makes it plausible that Harris would do this by showing that Ponytail seems to be as wary of Harris as Harris is of Ponytail. She dampens the threat level. Then we get this exchange:

Once they were on the open road, Ponytail said, “Hear that rattle? Oil needs changing.”

Harris glanced down at the dash, which was reassuringly dark. “A light usually comes on if—”

“Them lights don’t know nothing.”

“So, you think it’s the oil?” Harris said.

“I was gonna do it.”

“Yes, well, thanks,” Harris said.

“You probably know about the muffler,” Ponytail said.

Not exactly what we expected, is it? Although Ponytail is indeed a thief--when they arrive at Ponytail's house, Harris sees stacks of microwaves and leaf blowers in his garage, still in their boxes--he is not just a thief. Harris also sees clothes flapping on a clothesline.

Harris backed up fast till he was flat against the car door with thoughts of taking off, TVs and all. Why on earth was he here? As if on cue, a woman came to the window and peered out through the screen. She was jiggling a kid about two on her hip. Absurdly, Harris found himself noticing that her blond ponytail was fatter than her husband’s.

“Hey,” Ponytail called out to her, his thumb jabbing the air in Harris’s direction. “He’s gonna help me put the stuff in the garage.” Another kid, not much older, butted his head under her arm. “Bring in the clothes when you finish,” she said without acknowledging Harris, then smartly wheeled the children away.

Harris helps Ponytail unload the televisions, and then

“Well—” Harris said. Because he didn’t know what else to say, he turned toward his car. It had probably been parked on and off in this same driveway for three whole weeks. The candy wrappers must have been from the kids. Beyond the fence, the shiny robe or dress was fluttering back and forth. It was actually a bathrobe, and Harris could see now that the hem was a little ragged and one of the elbows had a hole in it, but it was still of use. Without thinking, he walked past his car to the clothesline and reached up to undo the clothespins holding the robe in place. The robe was red; it was light and slippery as he folded it over his arm.

Ponytail touched his shoulder. “Hey, man, you don’t need to do that.”

The story doesn't proceed in quite so linear a fashion as my summary, but it doesn't stray from the main path for long. A friendly female neighbor has been cooking dinner for Harris and hinting that they go to a movie, but he isn't ready yet for dating. This, Harris's need to move on, is what the story is really about, but it's never allowed to slow down the surface story about the car thief. This story is a great example of using an external conflict (Harris v. Ponytail) to contrast, and illuminate, an internal conflict (Harris's reluctance to move on with his life).

Doing the Math, Revisited

2006-03-30T13:17:00.000-06:00

After yesterday's post about the first lines of Karl Iagnemma's story, "On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction," I went back and reread the whole thing. It had been a couple of years, and I had forgotten how good it is.

Structurally, the story is fascinating. Iagnemma weaves two primary story lines around a third minor thread. The first primary line is the narrator's story of his love for Alexandra, the promiscuous daughter of the narrator's ex-advisor. The second primary line concerns the history of Slaney, the town in which the story is set; in particular, it is the story of The Swede, who founded the town in 1906. The minor thread is about the narrator's ex-advisor, and his doomed love for an undergraduate. I've titled this "Doing the Math, Revisited" because the narrator is a mathematician who tries to understand love with formulae and Venn diagrams.

Usually, multi-threaded stories segregate the threads with clear section breaks. Iagnemma starts off that way: the first section (four pages) is almost entirely related to the first thread. The next section is, at first, about The Swede, but then he brings in the ex-advisor thread and returns to the narrator's thread. But then Iagnemma jumps back to The Swede for a paragraph, with no transition, no section break, and no explanation, then back to the narrator. This pattern repeats for a while, paragraph by paragraph, and then, at the end of the third section, we get a paragraph that cuts from The Swede's thread to the narrator's thread in mid-paragraph, again with no transition whatsoever. This intermingling of stories intensifies. For example, we have this paragraph:

They found ore in the hills around Slaney in 1926--not the glittery hematite they were seeing in Ishpeming, but a muddy blue sludge that assayed at sixty percent iron. Overnight, Slaney was reborn: the front glass of Dan Gunn's saloon was replaced and the floor replanked, Hugh Grogan's place on Thomas Street was scrubbed down and reopened. The Swede awoke from a month-long bender, his handwriting looser and less optimistic. Strange to see trains unloading again. Excitement even at the meat market; ore, they say, is everywhere. No chicken for nine months. My ex-adviser, one chilly April Sunday in the TechInfo office, explained that his ex-wife had taken out a restraining order, and if he called her one more time, he would be arrested. It took me two months to realize that chicken was the Swede's code word for intercourse.

What's that sentence about the ex-adviser doing in there? And that's the way it continues, more and more overlapping, until the final pages when all three threads are resolved. The amazing thing is that it works, and never, for me at least, becomes confusing.

The other amazing thing about this story's structure is that it is told almost entirely in summary; in 24 pages, the only certifiable scene is at the end, three pages long. I didn't bother to chart this one. That it works is testament to Iagnemma's skill. But it also underscores the difference between summary and abstraction. Scene is, by definition, concrete. Summary can be concrete or abstract. Some writers, reciting the old "show don't tell" rule, think that anything in a scene is showing and anything in summary is telling. Not true. Showing is accomplished with concrete details, perceptible to the senses, whether in summary or scene. Telling is committed when the writer falls back on abstraction.

I Read About Dead People

2006-03-30T11:09:00.000-06:00

It's not often that a story fills me with envy and leaves me with a warm glow, but "Naturally," by Daniel Handler, fills the bill. It appears in the current issue of Zoetrope All-Story. You may also know Handler as Lemony Snicket.

It begins:

It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. "We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans" is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park. Hank was. He heard that one, and "Let's tell them six and then they'll show up at six-thirty" and "America just needs to get the hell out of there and not look back." Hank lay on an obscure corner of the grass, eyes closed, not moving, getting cold even in the nice day, and he overheard "Maybe we shouldn't move in together at all" and "If taxi companies don't take requests the company will rent you a car probably" and "The guests can gather out on the porch and then come in when dinner's ready" and "Oh my fucking Christ! Don't look, honey, don't look! The man is dead, honey, that's a dead man, oh God somebody call the police."

As you may suspect, although it isn't crystal clear for a few more paragraphs, the dead man is Hank. He wanders around New York for a while, invisible to everyone except a cat named Mr. Mittens, worrying that he is screwing up the afterlife. But eventually he encounters a woman (Eddie) who can see him. They date. One day, while Eddie is sleeping, Hank finds a letter she wrote to her dead husband:

The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.

I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. What deft contrast in those two lines. The pathos is set up by the humor; it heightens the effect brilliantly.

It's a story about ghosts, real and metaphorical, which I suppose is what ghosts always are. A great read, simultaneously moving and laugh-out-loud funny.

The All Important Lead

2006-03-29T15:07:00.000-06:00

I stopped at the library today to pick up John McNally's collection Troublemakers (2000, Univ. of Iowa Press). There's an interview with McNally at Virginia Quarterly Review, which gave me the idea (and another one here at Emerging Writers Network); I haven't read his fiction before. While I was there, I also grabbed On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction (2003, The Dial Press), by Karl Iagnemma (EWN interview here), and Quick (2004, Univ. of Michigan Press), by T.M. McNally. I'd never heard of Quick, but it was tucked in snuggly against Troublemakers and it seemed a shame to break them up.

Oddly, the first story in each collection is about student life. Here are the leads from each.

From Iagnemma's "On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction":

When students here can't stand another minute, they get drunk and hurl themselves off the top floor of the Gehring building, the shortest building on campus. The windows were tamper-proofed in August, so the last student forced open the roof access door and screamed Fuck! and dove spread-eagled into the night sky.

From John McNally's "The Vomitorium":

Ralph ran a hand up and over his head, flattening his hair before some freak combination of wind and static electricity blew it straight up and into a real-life fright wig.

From T.M. McNally's "Muscle (And the Possibility of Grace)":

The need for strength is something we understand even then, during our first semester, when life is not yet a matter of avoiding death--the gray wash of despair; a fluke car accident on a long, coastal highway. For us the future is that in which we believe. We are the hopeful, however uninspired. We are Freshmen.

Everybody knows the lead is critical. It should be intrinsically interesting; ideally, it should begin to orient the reader in time, place and character; it should suggest dramatic potential, no matter how meager. The best leads also make a promise: if you keep reading, here is the kind of story you will get. If the promise is enticing, and if the story keeps the promise, that's a pretty good measure of success.

The Iagnemma story promises a story that is both dismal and comic, while providing a touch of setting: an urban university, probably, since the campus comprises numerous buildings, the shortest of which is tall enough to (apparently) encourage suicide attempts, a detail that suggests a greater than ordinary desperation. (Iagnemma works at MIT.) But note how the setting is sneaked in; the focus of these sentences is the image of the student diving "spread-eagled into the night sky." And listen to that odd note of mystery: If the students want to kill themselves, why do they jump from the shortest building? Finally, note how Iagnemma lets us know that we are dealing with a first-person narrator when he says "When students here...." This is a story most readers would continue with. This is a lead that does a lot of work, without ever feeling crowded.

The John McNally story also provides an intriguing image: Ralph and his fright wig. The story takes place on Halloween, fitting with the image, and the name Ralph promises a certain comic, if familiar, tone. This lead doesn't hold up against the Iagnemma lead, however; the threat implied by the image of the hair standing on end is undefined. We can't say that we have a feel for what the story is about. On the other hand, we have a character, this Ralph with his fright-wig hair, something that Iagnemma fails to provide (unless we count the diving student). This is enough to keep me reading.

Finally, we come to the T.M. McNally lead. What does this promise? A lecture? A long-winded narrator who likes to wax poetic about "the gray wash of despair"? We know that the story is about freshmen... and nothing else. No dramatic potential. No image to draw me into the story world. No characters. No setting. Just a narrator making a speech. If I keep reading, it will be from a sense of duty, and little else.

Aristotle said, "Well begun is half done." Never truer than in the short story.

Not That Kind of Angel, Either

2006-03-28T09:36:00.000-06:00

Continuing this week's angel theme is "Chasing Angela," by Terry DeHart, appearing in The Barcelona Review. However, the Angela in the title is certainly no angel, guardian or otherwise; the irony of this name choice reminds me of Arnold Friend, the name of the villain in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".

And, like the classic Oates story, DeHart's story is built on suspense. The story opens with Mother and Big Jimmy (Angela's parents) driving through the night to their daughter's aid. We don't know why Angela needs help, but we know we're not going to a bake sale:

Mother knitted while Big Jimmy drove, her skinny arms knotted hard as axe handles, her sharp needles clicking and going too deep, ham-fisted, into the shroud she was making.

Yes, she's knitting a shroud.

After driving all night and all the following day, they arrive:

They stopped in front of their daughter’s house, the Cadillac clicking and popping as it cooled. Big Jimmy pried himself out of the car and opened the passenger door for Mother. They went together up the short concrete walk. Big Jimmy rang the bell, a buzzer that sounded like a jolt of electricity let loose in the air. At first they waited without any sign of emotion, as if they were just stopping by for no reason at all, really. Just stopping by to say hello.

No one answered. They listened for footsteps, creaking floors, opening doors. Mother looked at Big Jimmy. That was all it took, only a flash of worry from her dark eyes, and Big Jimmy opened the screen door and pounded on the hollow-cored door behind it. They waited again, their faces impassive, their eyes stinging. They waited like cops who had just pulled a graveyard shift and then been called to a domestic dispute. They waited like cops and it was ironic because for many years, all their lives really, they had been on the other side of the law.

Mother tried the door herself, turning the knob to see if it was unlocked and then knocking with her sharp knuckles. Nothing happened. A dog barked from behind a fence. A Cessna chugged low across the sky. Mother moved away from the door and Big Jimmy put his right hand against it, arm straight out as if taking a measurement. He ran his other hand through his gray hair, as if to make himself presentable, and then he kicked the door off its hinges.

That's how to build suspense, and how to pay it off, with that great last sentence.

I won't play the spoiler on this one. Definitely worth the read.

Summary or Scene?

2006-03-27T15:31:00.000-06:00

A few more words about "A Better Angel," by Chris Adrian. I've run this story through my little structure analyzer, and here's the chart:

(Click on the chart for a better look.)

Note, once again, the predominance of scene (red bars) over summary (green bars). The interesting thing about this story is that even in the summary sections, Adrian has consistently integrated elements of scene; I could have justifiably tagged even more of the story as scene and less as summary. For example, here's a section I marked as summary:

Some nights as a resident, I would withdraw into the bathroom and leave the intern to flounder and drown, later claiming that I’d never got the frantic pages when in fact I had turned off my pager and was sitting on the toilet with my face in my hands or taking little hits of whatever I was really into that month. There was a bathroom near the elevator on my father’s floor of the hospital, a nice one-person arrangement with a lock on the door.

The angel was there in just a few moments—I never know what delays her, when she can travel at the speed of guilt and sometimes seems to be everywhere at once. She berated me while I hid my face, her voice making the little room seem very full, all the “What do you think you’re doing?”s and “You get back there”s seeming to bounce off the white walls in discrete packages of sound. I am not this sort of doctor, I said to my hands. I am not any sort of doctor and I don’t know what to do about what’s back there in that room. And she said that even if you are the sort of doctor who doesn’t know anything about medicine, and even if you passed your certifying exams only because you paid a certain Dr. Gupta to bypass the pathetic security measures taken against cheats and impostors by the American Board of Pediatrics, you can still recognize a patient at the extremes of abandonment and grief, and even you can do the smallest human thing to improve his lot.

Overall, this is summary, but it's concrete summary. The reader can see the narrator with his head in his hands, talking to the angel. This is summary, but it includes little abstraction.

The point is this: we lose readers when we become abstract. Some summary is necessary, but find ways to enliven it with concrete details and you'll keep readers interested longer.

Not that kind of angel

2006-03-27T10:30:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker fiction is "A Better Angel," by Chris Adrian. Adrian is the author of Gob's Grief, referred to everywhere as "a masterpiece of restrospective mythology." As of 2001, when the novel was published, he was also a medical student.

This story is about a drug-addicted young doctor (the narrator) who has his own personal angel. The angel first appears when the narrator is a boy, just before he is attacked by a swarm of yellow jackets, and then again in the hospital, where he is getting his first in a long line of fixes, a Benadryl IV.

But when we were alone, and she stood silently at the foot of my bed, looking strange not just on account of the wings but because she was dressed as a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. “I’m not that kind of angel,” she said.

So what kind of angel is she? One who constantly tells him he is destined for greatness and just as constantly berates him for his mistakes. Sounds a lot like a mother; the narrator's mother, coincidentally, is never mentioned in the story. The narrator's sisters are mentioned, however; I'm not sure if they're based on the Gorgons or the Harpies, but there definitely seem to be a few references to Greek myth thrown around.

My sisters were all much older and hated to have me underfoot, so they’d draw fake maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, then send me off on quests. I fell for this sort of thing for years.

The story is about one more such quest: their father is hospitalized, and the three daughters, all of whom are pregnant, insist that the narrator go take care of the father. He goes, takes his father home to die, shares his father's morphine, and so on.

Are we readers asked to accept the angel literally? Adrian gives us room to view the angel as the narrator's fantasy, or perhaps a drug-induced delusion.

I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, making up games, inventing friends to play with, since I really had none of my own....

[The angel] was sitting in a tree, gently tapping an orange that hung near her face, making it swing. My imaginary friends were not the kind you could see. I figured her for a smart-aleck picker’s daughter, since it was nearing the end of the season and the groves were full of Guatemalans. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress with a furry kitten face on the front—I remember that very clearly, and remember wondering later how, if she didn’t exist, I could have made that up.

Doesn't that sound like the tactic of a practiced liar? That introduction of a specific detail as evidence that "I couldn't have made it up!" The angel doesn't appear until the day he experiences the "beautiful thick sleep" of the Benadryl drip, and when the narrator does drugs as an adult physician hiding in the bathroom to escape his duties, the angel morphs from angry to mellow, as if it were the angel having a toot. Does that make sense unless the angel exists only in the narrator's imagination?

Doing the Math

2006-03-26T16:18:00.000-06:00

I've been seeing a television promo this weekend in which some detective looks at the camera and blurts out, "You do the math!" That phrase has definitely run its course; however, Donavan Hall, in his short story "A Survey of the Works of Ernesto Veto," at StoryGlossia this month, does an admirable job of marrying a little math with literature.

Written in essay format, the story recounts the life of Ernesto Veto, a fictional writer whose compositions were guided by transcendental numbers. (These are numbers with an infinite and unrepeating number of digits to the right of the decimal place, such as pi.) Veto uses these number sequences to dictate the number of letters in each succeeding word in his fiction:

For example, the first few digits of the number π are 3.14159. The opening of the novel π is "Say, I need a thick ridgepole..." Three letters in the first word. One letter for the second word. Four letters for the third word, and so on.

The story ends with a reference to Veto's suicide, caused, possibly, by his numerical obsessions.

The story is amusing and well done as a sort of faux document, but I'm worried that I'm missing something. This tale can't be complete unless it contains its own mathematical riddle. Surely Hall has based the paragraph lengths on the golden ratio. Or perhaps if all the letters in the story are converted to numbers, a Fibonacci sequence will appear, perhaps if read backwards, or divided by Hall's social security number... or something. It's devious, whatever it is, but I intend to find it.

Sour Grapes for Breakfast

2006-03-24T09:08:00.000-06:00

"I Hold You Harmless," a short story by August Tarrier, is the first place winner in the 2005 All-Story Short Fiction Contest. It's a story told from the pov of a female stalker. It's told almost 80% in summary. Here's the chart (green = summary, red = scene):

If you can't tell, I'm not very impressed. The narrator stalks and she obsesses. We stay in her head for the entire ride. She reads a field guide about birds and keeps some notes in a log. In the big 577-word scene, she enters the building where her ex-lover works and is at last face-to-face with him, but a bird flies into the room and prevents them from having any meaningful interaction. Then the stalker returns to stalking.

Even though I didn't enter the contest, it distresses me that the judge (I think it was Robert Olen Butler) couldn't find something better among the thousands of submissions. But I can taste the sour grapes on the back of my tongue. You be your own judge.

Analyzing Structure

2006-03-23T13:32:00.000-06:00

I'm becoming more and more intrigued by the ways short stories are structured. "Structure" can mean different things, but I'm talking about how a story is broken into integral units, primarily scenes and blocks of summary. How many scenes does a story contain? How long are they? Which scenes are longest, and which are shortest? What's the balance between scene and summary, and in what pattern are they presented?

I've been working on a computer program that analyzes stories along these lines. Now don't get too excited; the program doesn't parse a story and decide on its own what is scene and what is summary. The user has to tag the story sections, in code similar to html.

I'm going to write more about this later, but here's a teaser I can't resist posting. The chart above is a structural analysis of Lorrie Moore's story "Debarking," from The New Yorker. The red bars are scenes; the green bars are summary. Ms. Moore is a genius at dialogue, and her stories are very scene-oriented. Note the predominance of red bars. Note the predominance of short scenes, and how the longer sections are spread throughout the story.

More about this story, and this device, later.

... and then nothing happened.

2006-03-22T09:06:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker fiction isn't available on-line, so I thought I would turn to "Good Luck," a story by Kate Walbert which I received in the mail yesterday from One Story. (If you aren't familiar with it, One Story publishes one story per issue in a chapbook format. For $21 you receive 18 stories, about one every three weeks. According to the website, two stories from 2005 were chosen to appear in the 2006 issue of Best American Short Stories, and five others received notable mention. Pretty impressive.)

"Good Luck" is the kind of story that critics of literary fiction love to hate, a story that showcases the author's pathological plot phobia. In this story almost nothing happens: a husband and wife are on a small cruise ship in Patagonia. Before the story begins the wife has announced that she is divorcing the husband. The passengers on the ship take turns presenting lectures on various topics, and the wife decides to lecture on Florence Nightingale. She delivers the lecture, and the story ends with husband and wife staring at some glaciers.

In this story there is no tension. This story is neither plot-driven nor character-driven. If it is driven by anything, it is "information driven." The story ends with a husband and wife staring at an "unbudgeable" glacier, which represents their marriage, especially when the glacier sheds a chunk of ice, which represents their impending divorce. Thank god for the glacier; at least it does something.

However, having said all that, if you can force yourself to read past the first thousand words, the story is well written enough and crammed with enough interesting tidbits to be enjoyable. Perhaps this is the reader's equivalent of the runner's high: after the first ten miles of suffering you become euphoric. But oh, those first ten miles.

One thing I'll say for Walbert: you can't say she doesn't give fair warning. Here's the first paragraph:

And wasn't it Browning who said, "All's right with the world; God's in his heaven--" etcetera etcetera?

Hoo boy, there's a grabber. Who can read that and not know that the story promises 27 pages of pedantry?

To be fair, the first person narrator recognizes his pedantry, although he insists that he is not boring. In his attempts to prove this assertion, he resorts to trivia and anecdote. He gives us lines from Browning, a recounting of his (the narrator's) hellish days as a prisoner of some Japanese fishermen during WWII, penguins, the story of how he met his wife after she'd been hit by a bus, T.S. Eliot, Clydesdales, Louise Trumbull, etcetera, etcetera. Yet in the end the narrator is very boring. He is the quintessentially lifeless protagonist who suffers and suffers but never takes action in any revealing or meaningful way, with a single exception: when he sees his future wife run down by the bus, he pretends to be her uncle so that he can accompany her to the hospital. And later he proposes marriage. But his wife (after making him wait overnight for her handwritten acceptance) spends their honeymoon sleeping on the couch and he never responds to this rejection. And now, in the foreground of the story, she is rejecting him again, and he does nothing to stop her, although it is clear that he wants her to stay.

I had imagined standing before a crowd, or at least ten interested persons, with simply a few notes and my heart. I would tell the story of Browning. I would tell the story of his love for Elizabeth, a tale so well-known it is too rarely recounted. I would look directly at Evelyn. I would tell them all of our meeting. I would refrain from mentioning the rats, or Good Luck, or the smoke that sometimes blinded the pilot, the greasy smoke of Tokyo. I would think of something new for her; something wholly beautiful, with white teeth and fresh eyes and a walk that could easily shift to a trot, a full-scale gallop. An athlete, I'd give her; a hero of the mind. The dazzle would be so brilliant, so blinding, so nurse-like and efficient: a clean slate, a tabula rasa. A world without history, I'd give her. A world without end.

But, of course, he does none of that, because that might constitute plot and completely wreck the obligatory unhappy ending.

Fargo, Revisited

2006-03-13T13:38:00.000-06:00

What is it about Fargo that inspires crime stories? Maybe it only seems that way. Perhaps there are only two, the Coen brothers' movie (Fargo, 1996) and this week's New Yorker story, "Gleason," by Louise Erdrich.

If you're like me, you might need your memory of the movie refreshed. In the film, a man hires a couple of low-lifes to kidnap his wife so that he can swindle his father-in-law out of a sizeable ransom. His wife is supposed to be released unharmed after the ransom is paid. Things go wrong. A woodchipper famously comes into play.

"Gleason," however, is completely different. Yes, there is a man who arranges to have his wife kidnapped so that he can run a little scam, after which his wife is to be released unharmed. Things go wrong. But there are absolutely no woodchippers in this story. And although the wife's father is a wealthy businessman, he is not ripped off. Not directly.

Anyway, the similarities are amusing but probably not important. "Gleason" is the story of a married man, John Stregg, who falls in love with a younger woman (Jade) and gets her pregnant. The story begins with a nice, direct dose of menace, that time-honored attention getter:

John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand.

Gleason has come to blackmail Stregg, but his motives are pure; he wants the money for his sister. He asks for $100,000, an amount which Stregg feels is "wretched." Stregg, a banker, suggests $600,000; he wants desperately to do right by Jade. He tells Gleason that he would leave his wife for Jade except that his wife (Carmen) owns a controlling interest in the bank; leaving his wife would cost him his job, and then he wouldn't be able to support Jade and the baby. However, he then comes up with the kidnapping scheme (he'd probably seen the movie, come to think of it). Gleason is to kidnap Carmen and Stregg will pay the ransom out of his retirement account. Gleason will return Carmen unharmed, Jade will be taken care of, and no one will be the wiser.

So what goes wrong? At first, nothing. The caper goes smoothly, except that Carmen is more disturbed by the kidnapping than Stregg anticipated. Erdrich conveniently ignores the little complications that would arise in real life, such as Why aren't the police more inquisitive about Stregg's willingness to leave $600,000 in cash by a billboard without asking for help from police? Or how does Stregg's mistress pay cash for a new house without raising suspicions?

Eventually, Carmen remembers that she has seen her kidnapper (Gleason) before, in a local high school play. Warned, Gleason joins the army to get out of the area. Jade, who has no other family, blames Stregg for this turn of events and threatens to turn him in for the kidnapping. In an attempt to placate her, Stregg leaves Carmen and moves in with Jade, but Jade grows even more distant.

Eventually, Stregg confesses everything to Carmen, who calls the police. He is sent to prison.

In the years afterward, Stregg was sometimes asked by the friends he made behind bars what had caused him to confess what he’d done, and then take all the blame. Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said he had guessed that it would never end; he’d seen that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But, after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment when he’d first opened the door to Gleason, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the glowing porch light, in the snow, with that dull gun and that sad face, he hadn’t flinched.

From his perspective, Stregg is behind bars precisely because he always faced up to his responsibilities. He didn't flinch when Gleason showed up with a gun; he didn't flinch when it became necessary to have his wife kidnapped, nor when it became necessary to leave her, nor when it became necessary to return and confess his crime. He did the right thing, time after time, and prison is his reward.

The most interesting scene in this story might be when Stregg goes to visit his wife's father, who is "'in his nineties and in a nursing home, but perfectly lucid.'" After an uneventful visit in which they chat briefly about Stregg's wife but Stregg's thoughts drift to Jade, it is time for Stregg to leave:

When he left the old man, Stregg usually patted his arm or made some other vague gesture of apology. This time, still thinking of his visit with Jade, he bent dreamily over Carmen’s father. He kissed the dry forehead, stroked back the old man’s hair, and thoughtlessly smiled. The old man jerked away suddenly and eyed Stregg like a mad hawk.

“You bastard!” he cried.

From this absent-minded kiss on the head, Stregg has revealed his secret. Erdrich doesn't waste a word explaining this scene (it ends with that line), and she doesn't need to. We know it's time to warm up the woodchipper for poor old Mr. Stregg.

It's also interesting to take a look at how Erdrich describes the kidnapping itself. She describes the scene in which Gleason comes to the door with a gun, forces Stregg to tie up his wife, ties up Stregg, and then leaves with the wife. Then Stregg thinks about how he will drop the money, how Gleason will release Carmen in some remote area and she will have to walk home, what the police will think, and so forth. The scene ends, and the next section begins, like this:

The amount wasn’t excessive. It would use up most of their retirement account, but Carmen still had the bank. It would all blow over.

A blizzard came up and Carmen got lost and might have frozen to death had a farmer not pulled her from a ditch.

Erdrich completely skips the period in which Carmen is held hostage, opting instead for the neat little segue between "It would all blow over" and "A blizzard came up...." We get some details later about the time Carmen spent with Gleason, but not much. It's a bold jump-cut, and a good one. What would the story gain if Erdrich had shown us Carmen in Gleason's clutches, bound and gagged in a dark room? Yet how many of us would have had the sense to just leave it out altogether?

It Takes Two Sticks

2006-03-09T08:44:00.000-06:00

Something that's good to remember when developing a short story idea is that if you're lost in the woods, it takes two sticks to make a fire. You can't rub one stick against itself.

Okay, if you have a Zippo or a dry matchbook from your favorite bar maybe one stick will do. Or you could break one stick in half, if it's long enough. So maybe it's not a great analogy. The point is, a short story usually needs more than one thing going on in order to be surprising and hold our interest. This week's New Yorker story, "The Trench," may be the rule-proving exception, but "The Trench" has that built-in arc to carry us forward. If you don't have such an arc, you need something else.

Let's say you want to write a story about a farm wife who recently lost her 18-year-old son to encephalitis. She's struggling to deal with both the emotional burden and the practical burden of doing the farm work that the boy used to do. Dealing with the loss of a child is a common theme; the farm gives the story a setting, but alone it doesn't add much in the way of dramatic interest. What would you do? Have the woman reflect ad nauseum on her son? Spend pages showing how raising crops is like raising children? Inject a long heartfelt scene between the woman and husband, brimming with a lot of indirect "Hills Like White Elephants" dialogue, in which they discuss everything but the dead son, but the reader is supposed to know that they are really talking about the dead son? Aren't you bored already, just thinking about writing another one of those stories?

You could write that kind of story; there have been many such stories written, most still taking up room in a file cabinet somewhere. For me, reading such a story is like taking that single stick and jabbing it in my good eye.

Or you could take Tim Gautreaux's approach in "Returnings" (from his collection Same Place, Same Things) and find a second stick. The setup is as outlined above, and the farm wife is in the fields, trying to start a balky tractor.

Wiping her hands, she heard at the periphery of her attention the steady chop of a helicopter in the distance, a common sound in this part of the parish because of an air-training facility across the line in Mississippi. She mounted the tractor, pulled out the choke, and, with a finger in the starter ring, paused to look toward a helicopter that was passing closer than usual. A gunship, armed and camouflaged, skirted the edge of her field. It hovered a moment, approached with a whopping roar, and finally settled down in a circular dust storm seventy yards from her.

Now why didn't you think of that? Just land a helicopter in your story. The chopper is being flown by a Vietnamese trainee (the story is set in the early '60s); he is lost, and he has to find his way back to base in an hour or face being sent back to Vietnam and fighting in the infantry.

The woman gets in the helicopter and they take off over the parish. She eventually helps him get directions back to the base, and he returns her to the farm and the balky tractor. Her husband comes out in his truck, having missed the entire helicopter adventure. He helps her start the tractor, and the conversation turns, very briefly, to the dead son.

He [the husband] thought a bit. "One morning I tried and tried to start this thing. I ran down a battery before Joe--he was about nine then--came out to the shed and turned on the gas for me. He said, 'Daddy, what you ever do without me?' "

She walked over and stood next to him, the skin on her arms prickling. The empty quiet of the field was oppressive, and she pulled the starter ring. The tractor chuckled alive, but as soon as it did, he reached over and pushed the kill switch, the quiet settling on them like a memory. "We've got to get away for a while," he said, his voice so shaky it scared her. "Leave the tractor here. Let's get cleaned up and drive into town." He glanced up into the sky. "Let's drive two towns over and get a fancy meal. You need it. You never get off this place."

A nice ironic touch.

There are other elements that tie the helicopter ride to the main theme, mainly that the pilot is about the same age as the son. His life is indirectly in danger (he believes that if he doesn't make it back on time, he'll die with a rifle on his back), and she has a chance to protect him, something she was unable to do for her own son. But it's the helicopter ride that makes the story work, not because of any belabored metaphor, but just because it's surprising and interesting. It's the second stick, and Gautreaux uses it to build a pretty good flame.

More Pancakes, Tub?

2006-03-07T16:43:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite short stories is Tobias Wolff's "Hunters in the Snow." This story begins as a realistic tale of three friends out for a day of deer hunting. It begins with a nice dollop of menace:

Tub had been waiting for an hour in the falling snow. He paced the sidewalk to keep warm and stuck his head out over the curb whenever he saw lights approaching. One driver stopped for him but before Tub could wave the man on he saw the rifle on Tub's back and hit the gas. The tires spun on the ice. The fall of snow thickened. Tub stood below the overhang of a building. Across the road the clouds whitened just above the rooftops, and the street lights went out. He shifted the rifle strap to his other shoulder. The whiteness seeped up the sky.

A truck slid around the corner, horn blaring, rear end sashaying. Tub moved to the sidewalk and held up his hand. The truck jumped the curb and kept coming, half on the street and half on the sidewalk. It wasn't slowing down at all. Tub stood for a moment, still holding up his hand, then jumped back. His rifle slipped off his shoulder and clattered on the ice, a sandwich fell out of his pocket. He ran for the steps of the building. Another sandwich and a package of cookies tumbled onto the new snow. He made the steps and looked back.

Tub is the fat friend; Kenny and Frank abuse him mercilessly about his weight, and about the diet he is supposedly on.

"You ought to see yourself," [Kenny] said. "He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn't he? Doesn't he, Frank?"

The man beside him smiled and looked off.

"You almost ran me down," Tub said. "You could've killed me."

"Come on, Tub," said the man beside the driver. "Be mellow. Kenny was just messing around."

Yes, Kenny was just messing around.

They hunt; it's cold. They stop for lunch, and Kenny says

"You ask me how I want to die today," Kenny said. "I'll tell you burn me at the stake."

Kenny also reveals that Frank is having a tryst with a babysitter. They see no deer, but finally they notice some deer sign, and tracks disappearing into some posted property. They drive to the farmhouse of the man who owns the property; Kenny goes inside and gets his permission to hunt the deer. An old dog barks at them and then retreats.

They follow the deer but eventually lose the tracks. They head back, frustrated. Frank and Kenny exchange words and things get weird.

"Drop dead," Frank said [to Kenny], and turned away.

Kenny and Tub followed him back across the fields. When they were coming up to the barn Kenny stopped and pointed. "I hate that post," he said. He raised his rifle and fired. It sounded like a dry branch cracking. The post splintered along its right side, up toward the top. "There," Kenny said. "It's dead."

"Knock it off," Frank said, walking ahead.

Kenny looked at Tub. He smiled. "I hate that tree," he said, and fired again. Tub hurried to catch up with Frank. He started to speak but just then the dog ran out of the barn and barked at them. "Easy, boy," Frank said.

"I hate that dog." Kenny was behind them.

"That's enough," Frank said. "You put that gun down."

Kenny fired. The bullet went in between the dog's eyes. He sank right down into the snow, his legs splayed out on each side, his yellow eyes open and staring. Except for the blood he looked like a small bearskin rug. The blood ran down the dog's muzzle into the snow.

They all looked at the dog lying there.

"What did he ever do to you?" Tub asked. "He was just barking."

Kenny turned to Tub. "I hate you."

Tub shot from the waist. Kenny jerked backward against the fence and buckled to his knees. He folded his hands across his stomach. "Look," he said. His hands were covered with blood. In the dusk his blood was more blue than red. It seemed to below to the shadows. It didn't seem out of place. Kenny eased himself onto his back. He sighed several times, deeply. "You shot me," he said.

This tone shift is reminiscent of another Tobias Wolff classic, "Bullet in the Brain," in which Anders, the protagonist, is shot in the head halfway through the story. Until this point in "Hunters in the Snow," the men have been taunting one another, joking in the "good-natured" but cruel way that men joke. But now Kenny is lying in the snow, gutshot.

How do Tub and Frank react? After determining that the bullet missed Kenny's appendix, they return to the farmhouse to call an ambulance, only to find that it will take too long. While Frank is on the phone, the farmer tells Tub that he had asked Kenny to shoot the dog, which was infirm and needed to be put down.

Tub and Frank get directions to the hospital and try to load Kenny into the back of the pickup.

[Frank] rolled Kenny onto the boards. Kenny screamed and kicked his legs in the air. When he quieted down Frank and Tub lifted the boards and carried him down the drive. Tub had the back end, and with the snow blowing in his face he had trouble with his footing. Also he was tired and the man inside had forgotten to turn the porch light on. Just past the house Tub slipped and threw out his hands to catch himself. The boards fell and Kenny tumbled out and rolled to the bottom of the drive, yelling all the way. He came to rest against the right front wheel of the truck."

"You fat moron," Frank said. "You aren't good for diddly."

Tub grabbed Frank by the collar and back him hard up against the fence. Frank tried to pull his hands away but Tub shook him and snapped his head back and forth and finally Frank gave up.

"What do you know about fat," Tub said. "What do you know about glands." As he spoke he kept shaking Frank. "What do you know about me."

"All right," Frank said.

"No more," Tub said.

"All right."

As the story continues, Tub and Frank become more interested in patching up their differences and less concerned with Kenny, to an extent that becomes surreal. On the way to the hospital, Tub and Frank decide to stop for coffee to warm up. They leave Kenny in the back of the truck. Inside, Frank confesses that he is having an affair. Tub asks him who with.

Frank paused. He looked into his empty cup. "Roxanne Brewer."

"Cliff Brewer's kid? The babysitter?"

"You can't just put people into categories like that, Tub. That's why the whole system is wrong. And that's why this country is going to hell in a rowboat."

"But she can't be more than--"Tub shook his head.

"Fifteen. She'll be sixteen in May." Frank smiled. "May fourth, three twenty-seven p.m. Hell, Tub, a hundred years ago she'd have been an old maid by that age. Juliet was only thirteen."

"Juliet? Juliet Miller? Jesus, Frank, she doesn't even have breasts. She doesn't even wear a top to her bathing suit. She's still collecting frogs."

When they come out of the bar,

Kenny had tried to get out of the truck but he hadn't made it. He was jackknifed over the tailgate, his head hanging above the bumper. They lifted him back into the bed, and covered him again. He was sweating and his teeth chattered. "It hurts, Frank."

"It wouldn't hurt so much if you just stayed put. Now we're going to the hospital. Go that? Say it--I'm going to the hospital."

"I'm going to the hospital."

They drive for a while and decide to stop at a roadhouse, again leaving Kenny in the back of the truck. Now it is Tub's turn to confess a secret: he admits that he eats secretly, gorging himself on candy at every opportunity. The "glandular problem" he used as an excuse was entirely fabricated.

Frank responds by buying Tub four orders of pancakes and waiting while he eats every bite and then licks the plates clean. They return to the truck and set out again. Tub tells Frank that the farmer had asked Kenny to shoot the dog.

"You're kidding!" Frank leaded forward considering. "That Kenny. What a card." He laughed and so did Tub. Tub smiled out the back window. Kenny lay with his arms folded over his stomach, moving his lips at the stars. Right overhead was the Big Dipper, and behind, hanging between Kenny's toes in the direction of the hospital, was the North Star, Pole Star, Help to Sailors. As the truck twisted through the gentle hills the star went back and forth between Kenny's boots, staying always in his sight. "I'm going to the hospital," Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back.

In the last two lines, Wolff's omniscient narrator reveals himself in all his godliness.

Make what you will of the "coldness" of the men, of the casual cruelty initially shown Tub by Kenny and Frank, and how, after the pivotal shooting scene, Tub and Frank open their hearts to one another while Kenny lies in the back of the truck, almost, but never quite, dying.

I can't think of another Tobias Wolff story that ends on such a surreal note. We can easily imagine this threesome driving the backroads of this farmland for all eternity, Tub and Frank stopping now and then for more pancakes, Kenny writhing in his truckbed purgatory. For once, Wolff abandons realism, and the result is unforgettable.

Life is a Trench, My Friends

2006-03-06T08:45:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker story, "The Trench," by Erri DeLuca, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, stands in crisp contrast to last week's entry, "The Bone Game," by Charles D'Ambrosio. "The Trench" is as simple as D'Ambrosio's story was complex. It is the first-person tale of a man digging a tunnel. That's it. There is no backstory; there is no parallel thread. Not a single character is given a name, other than the narrator's nickname (Italy).

This story works because it has what I have referred to in past blog entries as a "Built-in Narrative Arc." Contrary to what one commenter claimed, this is not the same as plot, although in a story that has such an arc, the plot will grow around it like a vine. A Built-in Narrative Arc is a primary story element that suggests a certain timeline, the end of which is known as soon as the element is introduced. This foreknowledge can be integral to the element, e.g., pregnancy (see "The Best Year of My Life," by Paul Theroux). Ignoring abortion and miscarriage, we know that pregnancy in humans lasts about nine months, and it suggests a certain sequence of events. The reader knows, in this general sense, where the story is going, and reads to reach that target.

A built-in arc can also be established by the introduction of a clearly defined, concrete, objective goal, such as in this story, "The Trench." The narrator's objective is to dig a tunnel, or trench, from a house in Paris to the sewer pipe that runs beneath the street, so that the house's plumbing can be connected.

Will he reach the pipe? The boss has refused to take time to reinforce the trench walls. Will they collapse on the narrator? Will he go mad from digging, alone in the darkness, day after day? We read on to find out.

It's easy to read this allegorically, or as a metaphor for Life: a struggle in isolation, within the narrow tunnel of our own lives... a struggle in which we ignore the constancy of death in order to pursue our meager hopes (in this narrator's case, he is hoping for the smell of raw sewage, and when he finally smells it, it is like the "perfume of victory" to him).

Having said all that, it's probably good that this story is very short: 2,243 words. A suitable length. Even though the story is compelling, I'm not sure how much longer I would have lasted underground.

The Fiction Machine

2006-03-03T16:39:00.000-06:00

I read a couple of stories today by Tim Gautreaux, a Louisiana writer whose "Welding with Children" appeared in the Best American Short Stories 1998 anthology.

Gautreaux writes about Louisiana with a fine ear and eye, as well as a sense of humor that never escapes his control. But these two stories that I read today, "The Piano Tuner" and "Same Place, Same Things," remind me of something called The Fiction Machine. I first heard of this from Justin Cronin; I don't know if the term originated with him.

The Fiction Machine is a game, of sorts, for generating new story ideas. Something to play with when you're dry. It works like this. On one set of index cards, write two- or three-word descriptions of potential characters, e.g., The First Baseman, The Minister's Daughter, The Taxi Driver. On another set of index cards, write a brief predicate. Something concrete, something visual, nothing too complicated. One of Cronin's favorites is "let down her hair." Other examples might be "called the dog" or "turned to the sports page" or "tried to remember the name of his first wife" or even something more static, like "was excited" or "was confused." Then shuffle your cards and draw a card randomly from each stack and use the result as your first sentence. With any luck you might get "The first baseman tried to remember the name of his first wife" or "The minister's daughter turned to the sports page." Or maybe "The taxi driver let down his hair."

The Gautreaux stories open as follows:

"The phone rang Monday morning while the piano tuner was shaving, and he nicked himself." --"The Piano Tuner

"The pump repairman was cautious." --"Same Place, Same Things"

Obviously, once you have your Fiction Machine sentence, you may embellish it. "The piano tuner nicked himself shaving" becomes Gautreaux's great first sentence above. This is a great first sentence. First, it starts with the old-but-never-tiresome trick of starting with a phone call. This always works, in the same way that the arrival of a mysterious letter or package always works: we readers are like Pavlovian dogs, responding with eager anticipation. Who is it? What's in the package? The sentence then introduces the protagonist, always a good idea, and as "the piano tuner," an interesting occupation, made more interesting because we see him not in the act of tuning a piano, but in another, more mundane act: shaving (it's the combination that works). Finally, he nicks himself. This is another little trick that works time and again: inflict some minor injury on the protagonist in the first paragraph to win the reader's sympathy.

Don't scorn the Fiction Machine just because you think it's a trick or leads to formulaic stories. It can be a great way to get launched, and besides, it only gives you the first sentence.

I leave you with a line from "The Piano Tuner," part of a description of a messy kitchen, that was not produced by the Fiction Machine:

"The cabinets looked as though someone had thrown the pots into them from across the room."

So there you go. Combine one from column A with one from column B, mix in a line like that, and you've got a story.

Saint Flannery Says...

2006-03-01T21:08:00.000-06:00

Recently I reread, for the nth time, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor, or Saint Flannery, as she is known to some. I've been browsing through Mystery and Manners, a posthumous collection of her essays. In addition to an opening essay on peacocks (which she bred), she makes a few remarks on writing fiction. These may be well known, but they are worth quoting again and again, until we see them tattooed on our foreheads in the morning mirror, above our shaving creamed cheeks and our bleary eyes:

A story is a complete dramatic action--and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience.

The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted and touched.... The fiction writer has to realize that he can't create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought.

A good short story should not have less meaning than a novel, nor should its action be less complete.... All the action has to be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of motivation, and there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, though not necessarily in that order.

Meaning is what keeps the short story from being short.

When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.

The average reader is pleased to observe anybody's wooden leg being stolen. But without ceasing to appeal to him and without making any statements of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning.... Now of course this is never stated. The fiction write states as little as possible [ed.: about meaning]. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

The fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses through abstractions.

Fiction is so very much an incarnational art.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Read it again and again. Concreteness. Perception. No ideas but in things. That's what fiction is all about, the rendering of a real world from which meaning arises, not a statement of opinion, painted on a signboard and toted on stage by a weary protagonist in a tattered purple robe. Things that can be tasted and smelled and fondled and heard in the dead of night and seen. Yes, even Saint Flannery will allow the occasional thought. Just don't overdo it.

The Bone Game, cont. -- Menace

2006-02-27T14:53:00.000-06:00

Steven McDermott, whose StoryGlossia is an excellent blog, likes to talk about the role of menace in the short story; i.e., how it is used to create and sustain tension.

The opening of Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Bone Game" provides a great example. Kype and D'Angelo are lost, cruising through downtown Seattle:

[D'Angelo] looked out the Cadillac’s tinted window and saw, through a haze of watery green, a few Chinese men in loose slacks, old coolie stock, it seemed to him, struggling up the steep hill, stooped over as if shouldering the weight of a maul. “Look at those Chinks,” he said. “I bet they laid some track in their day.” Kype finally found the street he wanted and steered the car north through Pioneer Square. An Indian sat on the curb with his head in his hands, tying back two slick wings of crow-black hair with a faded blue bandanna. A pair of broken-heeled cowboy boots lay in the gutter while he aired his bare feet. D’Angelo rolled down his window, waved a gun in the air, took a bead, and dry-fired. The hammer struck three times against empty chambers, but in his mind D’Angelo had dropped the Indian, right there on the sidewalk. He raised the barrel to his lips and blew away an imaginary wisp of smoke.

“What if that had been loaded?” Kype said.

D’Angelo grinned, and fired the gun at Kype’s face. “It isn’t, is it?”

Is that menacing enough? Quite a start, I'd say. (On a different subject, seeing men through a "haze of watery green" foreshadows one of the recurring themes of the story: Kype as fish-man.)

Also, check out McDermott's blog about Her Real Name, a D'Ambrosio story with certain parallels to "The Bone Game". In this entry, McDermott focuses on the character McKillop, who McDermott labels "off the grid." In some ways McKillop performs a function similar to that of D'Angelo. Each is so out of control that the protagonist is relieved, in a sense, from having to sustain the narrative by himself. Each also provides a great foil for the protagonist to push against (although McKillop is ultimately helpful, unlike D'Angelo).

As a final note, how many times have you seen stories about spreading some dead guy's (or gal's) ashes? Billions. And yet D'Ambrosio makes it fresh in the hands of these characters. Quite a feat in itself.

D'Ambrosio Redux -- The Bone Game

2006-02-27T09:08:00.000-06:00

By coincidence, this week's New Yorker fiction is a new Charles D'Ambrosio story, "The Bone Game".

All I can say is wow. This one's going to take a while to digest.

On the surface, it's the story of Kype, a young man who has inherited his grandfather's fortune and taken it upon himself to dispose of the old man's ashes in northern Washington State. When the story opens, Kype has already picked up a hitchhiker, D'Angelo, a reckless Brooklynite who "always had that dream, to hitchhike out West." But no summary can do D'Angelo justice; he is a dark angel and a jester,

wearing a red Western shirt with pearlish plastic snaps and a turquoise bolo tie... he was chubby and short and he still wore the baggy pin-striped slacks and red high-top sneakers he’d left Brooklyn in, six months earlier. To Kype he looked like one of those midget clowns that rode Shetland ponies at rodeo intermissions.

Soon they pick up Nell Ides, an Indian girl with, let's say, loose morals, who lives with her great-grandmother on a boat "embosked" in blackberry brambles and swarming with bees. Eventually Kype, D'Angelo and Nell wind up by a river cooking salmon over a campfire. This turns into a wild, mystical scene that I won't try to summarize. You just have to read it.

Ambrosia for Thought

2006-02-23T08:50:00.000-06:00

I've been reading "Blessing," a story by Charles D'Ambrosio in the Winter 2005 issue of Zoetrope All-Story. D'Ambrosio writes densely textured stories, overlaid with images and odd descriptions and seemingly out-of-place elements that create a swirl of associations and beg to be analyzed. I don't know that D'Ambrosio constructs these elaborate patterns in a conscious manner; most writers deny such control when asked. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop us, as readers, from drawing our own conclusions about what the story is about.

I'm going to pull some sentences and facts from "Blessing" without doing an overview of the story.

The first sentence refers to Mount Vernon, the second to Washington.

The protagonist and his wife have a neighbor named Mr. George.

The family's new house sits at the intersection of "Two flat strips of blacktop [stretching] away from it in all directions, falling off toward infinity"; also referred to as a crossroads.

"Perhaps we'd lived as nomads in New York for too many years, and maybe the twin luxuries of space and ownership made us dizzy...."

"That it wouldn't be taken away seemed a miracle."

"... a few high clouds scudded overhead..."

"I could hear Mr. George pounding away, the racket echoing above the river like rifle shots..."

The couple is visited by the wife's brother Jimmy, fresh out of the army; he's looking for money. With him are his Filipino wife Naga and infant son Joey. Also visiting is the wife's dad, who asks if Naga is short for Nagasaki.

"'We had to get out of New York,' I said. 'New York was depressing.'"

"I tried to chase my mood down, rummaging through thoughts and memories of New York, of the life we'd lived there, of the work we'd done and what we'd abandoned, of the people we'd left behind. I found nothing, nothing worth saving, and finally told myself it was atmospheric, negative ions from the squall."

Granted, these references are lifted out of context and from various parts of the story.

Nowhere in the story does D'Ambrosio refer to 9/11, terrorists, or anything directly related to 9/11. Does he need to? Can any American read a sentence containing both "New York" and "twin" and not immediately flash to the image of the Twin Towers imploding?

The surface story is about a couple who has moved from New York to Mount Vernon, Washington and bought an old house, too large for their needs, half renovated and half falling apart. As noted above, the wife's family comes to visit for a weekend, in part to celebrate the brother's birthday, but primarily for the family to "bless" the new house. The father is a crusty, hard-drinking, bitter old man. The mother is locked away in an asylum somewhere. Over the weekend, the wife's family copes with itself as best it can, with limited success, the narrator feeling that he remains on the outside looking in. Beneath the surface, the story is about America's struggle to face a post-9/11 world. The story ends with a wish. Not to be confused with a hope.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

My Father's Tears - John Updike

2006-02-20T14:51:00.000-06:00

The New Yorker has graced us this week with "My Father's Tears," a new John Updike story.

After reading this story once, my first reaction is to note how different this story is from most of the stories we see, in which the scaffolds of craft are fairly apparent. This story is (and I've been blistered for using this word before, but here goes) a tapestry of detail, as are many of Updike's stories, and it is the richness of detail and the quality of prose that carries the story along. In telling the narrator's life story, more or less, it reads like a memoir.

I intend to come back to this. All I'll note for now is the story's frame. It begins:

Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once.

Such a disarmingly conversational tone. This friendly rib-nudging can become tiresome, but of course Updike doesn't over do it; he uses it only to invite the reader in.

The one time the narrator saw his father cry was when the narrator said goodbye before returning to college.

The frame is closed at the end of the story, when the narrator has been called home from a European vacation to find that his father has died. The narrator finds that he can't cry for his father.

She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, “Cry.” Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.

I'm not sure why that would be the case, but Updike has tidily returned to the opening. A small bit of craft, after all.

The Obligatory Downer

2006-02-19T10:38:00.000-06:00

Last night I read "Treasure," a story by Susan Perabo in the Winter 2005 edition of the Missouri Review. This is the story of a girl, Katie, who almost witnesses the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that went down on 9/11 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. She "almost" witnesses it because she was supposed to be on the field with her marching band, over which the doomed airplane passed as it fell; but she was inside dealing with an equipment malfunction (no, a split reed, not that other thing). Anyway, she spends much of the rest of the story pretending that she did, in fact, witness the crash.

This story line is twined around a fairly generic, yet engaging, story of unrequited teenage love. Katie worships the boy next door (Dean), her best friend when they were younger, but now a little too cool for her. Katie babysits Dean's younger brother in order to be as near the older boy as possible. In the story's big scene, the younger boy (Toby, who is 10) disappears while Katie naps. Dean and Katie go in pursuit; Katie correctly intuits that he is hunting in a wooded area where "treasure" is rumored to be. The "treasure" is supposed to be jewelry from the plane crash: rings, watches, etc., that the search parties missed. Of course, the idea is ludicrous. Toby and his friends find a bobby pin, and are happy to have it.

The story moves well, is written in flawless prose, has adequate measures of humor and pathos and honesty. But then, in the big scene, where Katy is finally alone with her beloved Dean, in the woods, in the dark, everything falls apart. Dean kisses Katie, but he has been drinking; he's rough, the taste of beer in his mouth makes her gag, etc. Her illusions are destroyed.

There's really no reason for this to happen. I may be an old romantic, but this ruined the story for me. It is a classic example of The Obligatory Downer, the writer's refusal to permit a happy, or at least not depressing, ending because, I say, the author fears being ridiculed as a romantic. She must stick to "reality", which means that no one ever gets what they want; our dreams are never fulfilled, etc. Sure, that's usually true, but so what? Not to be too harsh, because Perabo is a fine writer, but this, to me, signals a timidity, a reluctance to write boldly, and also a certain finger-wagging attitude toward one's characters, not rising to the level of scorn, but certainly to parental disappointment. You should know better, the writer says, than to get your hopes up; now give me your hand for slapping.

But the real problem with this turn of events, from a craft perspective, is that it was so predictable. Perabo established the question: Will Katie get Dean? As with any such question at the heart of a story, there are four answers: Yes, No, Maybe, and Something Else. Yes and No almost ALWAYS result in boring, predictable resolutions; the reader always anticipates those two choices. They may root for one or the other, but what they really want is to be happily surprised, or left in an ambiguous state (the Maybe of the four answers). You can argue that the answer is here is both Yes and No; she gets him but finds out she doesn't want him after all. Sometimes that works--see my discussion of John Cheever's "Swimmers"; and maybe it works here for many readers. But it left me feeling slightly annoyed. Ultimately, the answer to 'Will Katie get Dean?' is still No.

That fourth thing, that Something Else, make a story great. I can't define what the Something Else should have been here, of course, but I wish Susan Perabo had.

Carrying Ashes to Newcastle

2006-02-08T13:00:00.000-06:00

A writer friend asked what I thought of "Ashes", a story by Cristina Henríquez (posted July 4, 2005 at The New Yorker).

This is the story of Mireya, a young Panamanian woman. The story begins with news of her mother's death. Although she refuses to cry in front of the surviving family members, Mireya is distraught over her loss. During the course of the story Mireya also loses her job and her boyfriend and squabbles with her brother over who will assume the care of their father, always a womanizing drunk and now apparently senile. The story ends after the mother's funeral and Mireya's appropriation of her mother's ashes with Mireya sitting with the urn, gazing out to sea.

There's much exploration of familial relationships: how, despite our protestations, children have a favorite parent and parents have a favorite child; how a daughter can love her father and seek his attention and approval even though he has been a distant, never present drunk for her whole life; how a woman can be unhappy with her husband for decades, but never leave him.

There are also many opportunities for melodrama. In addition to the phone call about the death, the funeral, the getting fired from the Casa de la Carne, and the gazing out to sea, there is a knock-down-drag-out fight in the street between Mireya and her (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend.

Yet, the story succeeds, I think. As Charles Baxter says in his book Burning Down the House, melodrama is one of those things that everyone despises but no one can define. But what I mean by melodrama (to risk a definition) is the staging of canned, predictable, and often unearned emotion. Every story worth reading has fodder for melodrama, because good stories all have emotional content, and the more the merrier (or moroser, as the case may be). Emotional moments mishandled wind up being melodramatic. It can be so tricky that most writers, including very good ones, choose to dodge the bullet by leaving the most emotional scenes off-camera, or quickly summarized and dismissed. They write instead about aftermath, and backstory, and repercussions. We all do that.

So how does Henríquez handle this? With humor, for one thing. The story begins with a phone call (a time-honored device in itself):

[I]t’s my older brother, Jano, telling me I might want to sit down because he has upsetting news.

“Tell me,” I say.

“Do you have a chair?”

“Just tell me.”

What I have is a hollow feeling in my stomach the size of a coconut.

“Mamá’s gone,” he says.

“What?” My heart seizes.

“Señora López found her today.”

“Found her? Where was Papi?”

“Are you sitting down?” he asks again.

“Stop asking me that. Why can’t you just answer my questions?”

“It’s a little bit complicated, O.K.?”

Here we have the protective brother, indulging in his own melodrama by reciting the traditional lines ("Are you sitting down?"), and Mireya, refusing to play along. She is saying "Don't be such a drama queen!" Much as Tobias Wolff does when he has a character critique his own trite behavior, Henríquez has Mireya rebuff her brother's attempt at sentimentality.

Later, when Mireya confronts her boyfriend, who she has caught with another woman in broad daylight, she releases her pent-up emotion by attacking him bodily. After she has thoroughly pummeled him, and also after it is clear that they are finished as a couple, she flings a final dagger:

“My mother was the only one in my family who liked you,” I finally say. It’s a petty impulse—wanting to hurt him because he hurt me—but I don’t care.

He looks like I just slapped him. “Your mother?”

I grab my bag from the ground and start walking away.

I hear his shoes shuffle behind me for a second and then stop.

“What about you?” he yells. “Didn’t you like me?”

It’s such a heartbreaker. Because here’s the answer: “Yes, I did. Who knows why, but I did.” But right then I can’t do it. I just walk away.

This line, "Didn't you like me?" is quite comic on its own, but also heartbreaking, as Mireya says. But the craft is seen in the next line, when she acknowledges what the melodramatic response would be, and then walks away without saying it. Henríquez eats her cake, yet still has it, right there in the little pasteboard box with the plastic window.

And so the emotion is modulated throughout, without dodging the big scenes. It's actually quite impressive.

The final scene, of Mireya looking out at the water, urn at her side, echoes an earlier flashback in which Mireya, as a girl, slipped on some beach rocks and hit her head, leading to a tender moment with her mother (in turn defused when her mother pinches her). I do think this final shot is melodramatic, but by then, it's well earned. And after all the deflected melodrama earlier in the story, it's almost a relief to finally sit and have a good cry.*

There is one thing in this story that clanks for me, and that is the father's "big line" at the funeral:

“How are you?” I ask. I feel none of the anger I usually do around him.

“I tried to save her,” he whispers, leaning sideways.

“I know, Papi,” I say.

“Human beings can’t save each other from anything, though.”

After being portrayed as addled throughout the story, barely aware of his surroundings, Papi comes up with "Human beings can't save each other from anything, though." Sorry, Cristina, you have turned Papi into your puppet with this line. The "I tried to save her" I could buy, maybe, but that's it.

Incidentally, the title of this post means nothing. Go figure.
*(Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Details, Details

2006-02-06T15:26:00.000-06:00

I've been reading Where You Dream From, by Robert Olen Butler (edited by Janet Burroway). This is, in essence, a "how-to-write" book, but it's a cut above the ordinary. Among other things, Butler obsesses about the use of concrete detail, avoiding abstraction and summary. He stresses the need to write from a dream state, in which you see a story in detail and write what you see, not what you think. This is one of my favorite topics, and something in which I believe strongly: concrete, specific detail.

I ran across a great example of this today in a story by Ron Currie, Jr., who is on the verge of becoming a very well known short story writer. My prediction: he will be in The New Yorker within two years. The story I refer to is "Three Stories From My Father's Life Which Have Nothing To Do With Me", published in In Posse.

The fourth paragraph of the story (the second, not counting the frame) reads:

The sun rose, and soon my father began to sweat under the rough rumpled cotton of his fatigues. Sitting in the bow of the PBR, he scribbled a letter to his mother with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook, the pages of which were smeared and crinkled from getting wet and drying out and getting wet again and drying out again. The index finger on his right hand bore a deep gash where the blade of his pocketknife had closed on it the day before, and he winced from time to time as he wrote. He was thinking about the motorcycle he would buy when he got back to America. He was thinking about the Pacific Coast Highway, and Big Sur.

The description of the water-warped pages, the cut on his finger, his wince as he wrote in his notebook. Is any of that strictly necessary? No, but God, it's good. The narrator's seeing his father in that boat; more than that, he's in the boat with him, and so are we.

A less talented writer might have written "The pages in the notebook were wrinkled. He'd cut his finger, and it hurt when he wrote." It sounds concrete, but it isn't. A page can be wrinkled in many ways; but when paper gets wet and dries, it takes on a particular feel and shape that we all recognize. "Cut" is not the same as "the blade of his pocketknife had closed on [his index finger]." "Hurt" is an abstraction; instead, we see the man wince.
That's what it's all about.

Now here's the great difficulty. It's not enough to describe something in detail, even if you see it vividly in your mind. As Chekhov said, don't waste words describing the commonplace; spend your effort instead on details that create the particular, something that identifies the specific place, person or thing you are describing. Raise it from the generic.

Far easier said than done.

Fables

2006-02-06T10:22:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker posting brings us another story by a favored author, Haruki Murakami. Entitled "A Shinagawa Monkey," this is written in classic fable form.

According to answers.com (with further attribution to the Columbia University Press), a fable is a:

brief allegorical narrative, in verse or prose, illustrating a moral thesis or satirizing human beings. The characters of a fable are usually animals who talk and act like people while retaining their animal traits....

I might add that a fable is not meant to be taken literally, even as fantasy, and that the language is intentionally pedantic, as if the author were addressing a child, explaining the obvious with wide-eyed sincerity.

This story relates the tale of a woman who has begun to forget her own name. She doesn't forget anything else, and she only forgets her name when asked for it unexpectedly. However, the problem prompts her to buy a bracelet with her name engraved so that she can know who she is when asked; she also seeks counseling in a neighborhood clinic.

Through the counselor's somewhat mystical powers, it is eventually discovered that the woman's name (represented by a college nametag) has been stolen by... ta da... a talking monkey (the eponymous Shinagawa Monkey).

The monkey's captors intend to kill it, but the monkey negotiates its release in exchange for the return of the woman's name and a promise to go into the jungle and steal no more. (Animals who strike bargains is also a standard element of fable, of course.) Also, the monkey must reveal to the woman what was taken from her when she lost her name: to wit, the knowledge that her family never loved her, and that she does not love her husband. The moral is, oh, let's say: Your pain is part of who you are. If you ignore your heartache, you will lose yourself. It doesn't matter. The problem with the fable form is that it invites this type of summary; but as Flannery O'Connor and others have said, if a story can be reduced to one sentence, why write the whole story?

On a technical note, I thought Murakami's handling of dialogue was interesting.

When Mizuki opened the door to her dorm room, Yuko Matsunaka was standing there, dressed in a tight turtleneck sweater and jeans. “Do you have a minute to talk to me?” Yuko asked. “Sure,” Mizuki said, surprised. “I’m not doing anything special right now.” Although she knew Yuko, Mizuki had never had a private conversation with her, and it had never occurred to her that Yuko might ask her advice about anything personal. Mizuki motioned for her to sit down while she made some tea with the hot water in her thermos.

“Mizuki, have you ever felt jealous?” Yuko said all of a sudden.

Mizuki was surprised by the question, but she gave it some serious thought.

“No, I guess I never have,” she replied.

“Not even once?”

Note how in the first paragraph, both girls speak, with no paragraph break. That breaks the rules of dialogue formatting! But Murakami does this to transition into the more important part of the dialogue, in which he breaks in a very conventional manner, even adding a break before "'No, I guess I never have,' she replied." Not strictly necessary, but it adds emphasis.

Later, after the monkey has restored the woman's painful memories, we get this passage of banal back-and-forth:

“Did what I told you hurt you?”

“It did,” Mizuki said. “It hurt a lot.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you.”

“It’s all right. Deep down, I knew it already. It’s something I had to confront someday.”

“I’m relieved to hear that,” the monkey said.

“Goodbye,” Mizuki said. “I don’t imagine we’ll meet again.”

“Take care,” the monkey said. “And thank you for saving my poor life.”

See what I mean about writing for children? But it's a fable, and so this is arguably appropriate.

Also, there's an interesting transition, mid-story, from an anecdote being related to the counselor directly into a flashback of the story being related. This latter device is seen all the time in film, but not so much in short stories (Mizuki is the protagonist):

“Anyway, this happened in October. Before dinner one night, I was in my room, doing my homework, when a junior named Yuko Matsunaka came to see me.... ”

When Mizuki opened the door to her dorm room, Yuko Matsunaka was standing there, dressed in a tight turtleneck sweater and jeans.

The narrative literally jumps from a recounting of an anecdote into the anecdote itself. This is indicated visually by an extra space (jump-cut) and an oversized cap at the beginning of the second paragraph; otherwise it would be jarring, to say the least. It seems odd to extract meaning from typography, but there it is. No less defensible than italics, I guess, which have their place as well.

The Deposition

2006-01-30T13:48:00.000-06:00

When I went to the New Yorker's web site this morning, I found a treat: a new short story by Tobias Wolff, titled "The Deposition."

I've read this story twice, but I'm not sure what I think of it just yet. It seems to be a fairly straightforward story about a lawyer who is conducting a difficult deposition. He believes that the witness is holding back, telling less than he knows about a medical malpractice claim in which the lawyer represents the plaintiff.

The parties take a break from the deposition and the lawyer goes for a walk. The setting reminds him of the town where he grew up, and of a girl whose house he had frequented in high school "to glory in her boldness for a mad hour before her mother got home from work." He begins to wax poetic about the days of his youth, and stops:

But what crap!—wallowing in nostalgia for a place he’d come to despise, and dreamed of escaping.

In this case, Wolff is not having the character apologize for a burst of sentimentality; rather, he is drawing attention to the distortion and coloration of memory.

The lawyer continues his walk through a dilapidated business district, becoming more and more disheartened about the state of decay in the town and in the country. He sees two women as he walks, an old woman in a coat and a "bespectacled" woman at a Chinese restaurant. He pays them no mind.

But then a girl gets off a bus, far enough ahead that she doesn't notice him, but close enough that he can observe her in detail. She is long limbed and limber; he takes in the curve of her neck, her hair, her walk, a spot on her calf that may be either a mole or a speck of mud. His observations are so detailed you can feel his nostrils dilating. Suddenly he catches up to her, surprises her. She sees him, and is frightened by something in his face. She runs.

He continued on his way, deliberately keeping himself to a dignified pace, even stopping for a moment to put on his suit jacket—shoot the cuffs, shrug into the shoulders, give a tug at the lapels. He did not allow himself to look back. As the tightness in his throat eased, he found himself hungry for air, almost panting, and realized that he had hardly taken a breath while walking behind the girl. How frightened she had been! What was that all about, anyway? He put this question to himself with a bravado that he did not feel. He knew; he knew what had been in his face.

He continues walking until a police car pulls alongside. The girl and an older woman are in the car, and the lawyer is accused of stalking the girl.

Of course, he has done nothing criminal. The policeman questions him, and he calmly tells the truth, leaving out, of course, how fascinated he had been by the girl. The policeman lets him go, but the older woman shocks him with a fierce slap to the face and calls him a liar. And he knows that she is right. Just as he is right about the witness in the deposition.

The Protagonist as Self-Editor

2006-01-29T19:16:00.000-06:00

Rereading The Night in Question, I found my attention drawn to several instances in which Wolff's narrators became self-conscious about how they felt or expressed themselves. More like a writer than a real person.

In "Casualty," the protagonist tries to tell his girlfriend about his war experiences:

He wanted to be truthful with her. What a surprise, then, to have it all come out sounding like a lie. He couldn't get it right, couldn't put across what he had felt. He used the wrong words, words that somehow rang false, in sentimental cadences. The details sounded artful. His voice was halting and grave, self-aware, phony.

In "The Chain," the protagonist is recounting the story of an attack on his daughter by a dog:

'The whole thing took maybe sixty seconds,' Gold said. 'Maybe less. But it went on forever.' He'd told the story many times now, and always mentioned this. He knew it was trite to marvel at the way time could stretch and stall, but he was unable not to.

In "Smorgasbord," the young narrator describes the reaction of an older woman to his tales of sexual exploit:

... the more I told her the more wolfishly she smiled and the more her eyes laughed at me.

Laughing eyes--now there's a cliche my English master would have eaten me alive for. 'How exactly did these eyes laugh?' he would have asked, looking up from my paper while my classmates snorted around me. 'Did they titter, or did they merely chortle? Did they give a great guffaw? Did they, perhaps, scream with laughter?'

I am here to tell you that eyes can scream with laughter.

None of these little apologies are all that significant; they don't derail the stories at all. They reveal Wolff struggling with the problem of writing characters who are trite or sentimental. He disavows responsibility by having the characters apologize for their behavior, even though real people might never consider their own triteness. It is undeniably a form of authorial intrusion, but one which we, as kindhearted readers, must forgive and forget. Yes, I know that's trite. I can't help myself.

Oh What Fools We Mortals Be

2006-01-26T12:34:00.000-06:00

The opening story in The Night in Question is "Mortals," the story of a young newspaperman (the narrator) who loses his job after running an unverified, and premature, obituary of a man named Mr. Givens. Someone phoned in the obit and the narrator typed it up without question--in violation of the newspaper's policies but in accordance with standard practice.

It is Mr. Givens' wife who raises the ruckus that results in the narrator's termination; Mr. Givens seems all too willing to forgive and forget. Although the narrator doesn't catch on until fairly late in the story, the reader may intuit early on that Mr. Givens himself has called in his obituary, in an attempt to see how others might judge his life. He works for the IRS; you might say he has filed an early return.

The story is airily amusing, more anecdotal than many of Wolff's works; it's easy to imagine Wolff as the young protagonist and the story as autobiographical. But Wolff employs one noteworthy device, at the very end, that reminds me of many of his other, more serious pieces. After the narrator has wrung a confession from Mr. Givens with threats of violence, he is returning to the restaurant where the two of them ate lunch.

Just ahead of me a mime was following a young swell in a three-piece suit, catching to the life his leading-man's assurance, the supercilious tilt of his chin. A girl laughed raucously. The swell looked back and the mime froze. He was still holding his pose as I came by. I slipped him a quarter, hoping he'd let me pass.

What does this coda have to do with anything? Why is this extra bit tagged on? Obviously, to make a point: we all play the fool; the best we can hope for is a little kindness from those who catch us in the act. The device is the use of multiple stories within one story to achieve extra context or perhaps contrast. This tiny scene is a separate story, but one that sheds light neatly on the narrator's interpretation of the main thread; far better than a paragraph of heavy handed reflection.

Wolff loves the story within the story (usually seen in the form of frames). In one story which I intend to blog on later ("Our Story Begins"), Wolff uses a frame within a frame (a story in a story in a story).

Tobias Wolff: "Bullet in the Brain"

2006-01-25T13:34:00.000-06:00

Continuing with Mr. Wolff, and his collection, The Night in Question, we come to "Bullet in the Brain," a well known story about a book critic named Anders.

In direct contrast to "Powder," this story begins with a character who is difficult to like:

Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers, anyway, Anders--a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

Anders belittles everything. He hates everything. Even when a pair of bank robbers steps forth, brandishing guns, Anders can't corral his contempt.

"Keep your big mouth shut!" the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. "One of you tellers hits the alarm, you're all dead meat. Got it?"

The tellers nodded.

"Oh, bravo," Anders said. "Dead meat."

Anders is so annoying that you start wishing that the robbers would kill him just to shut him up. And eventually, one of them does. I've always wondered what real book critic Wolff had in mind when he wrote this. It must have been fun.

Of course, if the story ended with this imaginary revenge, it wouldn't be much of a story.

Instead, Wolff takes a cliched idea--that when you die, your life passes before your eyes--and uses it to turn the story on its head. As the bullet passes through Anders' brain, we are told, first, what he doesn't see: scenes from his life that show that he wasn't always such an ass, that he once was likeable and kind and worthy, as were we all.

Not only do you come to feel empathy for Anders, you begin to feel guilty as hell for wishing him dead.

The ending, a description of the single scene that Anders does relive in his dying moments, is possibly my favorite short story ending of all time. I won't set forth the whole thing, just the last line, which I hope I never forget (and which makes no sense out of context, so go read the story):

They is, they is, they is.

Tobias Wolff: "Powder"

2006-01-25T10:13:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I received a copy of The Night in Question, a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff. I've read this before, but decided I should own a copy, since Mr. Wolff is (blush) my favorite writer of short fiction. I admire, among other things, his ability to keep short fiction short. In this collection, "Powder," at four pages, and "Bullet in the Brain," at six, are among the best short-shorts I've ever read.

"Powder" is a straightforward story about an adolescent boy (the pov character) and his father on a ski trip. The parents are separated or divorced; the father has promised to have the boy back to his mother in time for Christmas Eve dinner. But the father tarries, deciding to get in a few more runs, and by the time they set off, the mountain road they must take is closed and guarded by a state trooper. Eventually the trooper leaves his post and the father decides to risk the snow-covered road.

In this story, everything seems to point to disaster. The narrator (an older version of the boy) consistently conveys a sense of worry, at first only that he will be late for Christmas Eve dinner (which has added importance because the father wants to win back the favor of his wife and is screwing this up), but later we fret about their physical well-being. The father sternly warns the boy against such foolhardy behavior. Disaster looms. Yet the boy, who is so tightly wired that he numbers his clothes hangers, is finally able to relax, to trust his father, to accept his fate and enjoy the journey. "If you haven't driven fresh powder," he says at the end, "you haven't driven."

As with many Wolff stories, signposts of "craft" are not so readily extracted from this piece. There are no tricks. Wolff follows a traditional path: he creates an empathetic protagonist (two, really); he gives the characters a clear goal; a problem arises from a character trait; the protagonists suffer a setback; they overcome the setback and the primary protagonist grows, or at least learns something. And all in four pages! What Wolff doesn't do is burden the story with flashbacks or a single word of backstory beyond what is required. He gets to the point quickly without ever making the reader feel rushed. There's even time left at the end for a little protagonistic reflection.

This story is really about the father, and that's the key. The story begins:

Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He'd had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonius Monk.

What a dad! Not only does he take his son skiing, he fights for the privilege, and this after sneaking the kid into a jazz club. Who wouldn't want this guy for a father? But we also recognize that he is a risk-taker, and we are concerned. The rest of the story echoes this first paragraph. It's all right there.

The Sun Never Sets... Huh?

2006-01-17T11:15:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker delivers a more challenging selection: "Sundowners," by Monica Ali. As noted in the link, Ali is a British novelist, shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, and the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents.

On its surface, this is simply the repulsive story of a writer (Stanton), sequestered in Portugal to finish a novel, and his conquest (?) of his poor, filthy neighbors, the Potts. Yes, repulsive; this story has dripping snot, a dead cow swarming with maggots, a vomit-flavored kiss, a sow who eats her litter, dogs pissing on the floor, and on and on, mostly provided by the Potts family, a flea-infested, self-mutilating, filthy, filthy, filthy bunch.

At first Stanton avoids involvement with the Potts family, but eventually he is drawn to them, fascinated with their lowness; first he befriends the young son; then he has sex with the mother (repeatedly) and then with the deaf teenage daughter. At the end, when Stanton has scorned his two lovers and finished his book, he visits the family, only to find that the mother and daughter have apparently spilled the beans. The father asks him, "What kind of man are you?... What kind of man are you?" Stanton goes back to his house, drunk and feeling as though his back is broken, but not so dispirited that he can't think

about how beautiful the place was and how much he would miss it. The rain had stopped in the night, and the sun played in the treetops, scattering diamonds here and there. It teased purples and scarlets from the plowed-up field and burnished the far-off hills a fine shade of nostalgia.

Huh? Nostalgia, after this catalogue of squalor? What's going on here?

The clues are in the title ("Sundowners") and the names and nationalities of the characters. This is a cynical look at the British Empire, upon which the sun was never supposed to set but for which the sun has indeed gone down. Stanton is the more-or-less proper British gentry, moneyed, on extended holiday to finish his "work" of writing a novel. The identity of the Potts family is suggested here:

“You’re English,” the boy said. Stanton had not noticed him there.

“Hello, compatriot,” he said.

The boy grew unsure. He beheaded flowers with his stick.

“We’re both English,” Stanton clarified.

The boy (Jay) doesn't acknowledge his nationality; rather, Stanton thrusts it upon him. He has colonized the boy, as he is soon to colonize his mother and sister. John Jay, of course, was an American, crucial in negotiating an end to the Revolutionary War as well as Jay's Treaty in 1794.

The mother's name is Chrissie (her arms are scarred and bleeding; can you say Stigmata? How about Crusades?); the deaf daughter's name is Ruby (she has a stud in her always exposed navel). Rubies are traditionally associated with India, and adorn the crown jewels. The father (whose given name is Michael), says, "Everyone calls me China." China? Well, that's a common name for a man; can't read anything into that.

The bar where much of the narrative takes place is peopled with German and Dutch characters, as well as the native Portuguese; the bartender's name is Vasco (the "da Gama" is understood); they discuss, among other things, the war in Iraq, a "terrible business," Vasco says, but it

"... has to be done. Everyone is saying to me, ‘Oh, they make the empire, these Americans.’ And I tell them, ‘Shut up, what do you know?’ Of course they make the empire. United States of America will not be threatened. We had a big empire, too.” Vasco turned purple and began to wheeze. It dawned on Stanton that he was laughing. “Five hundred years ago.”

I'm no authority on British history; those who are might laugh at this reading. But I believe that there's something here, because without some layered meaning, this story has no reason for existing.

Beating a Dead Goat

2006-01-14T17:31:00.000-06:00

I recently disparaged (lightly) the use of the dead animal trope in "Three Days," a short story by Samantha Hunt. Then I realized that I had earlier praised Alice Munro's "Runaway" without even noting her use of the device, although it is as blatant as any other. The difference is this: Munro integrates the dead goat into the story seamlessly, whereas most writers, including Hunt, tack on the dead animal however they can. Another way to say this is that "Runaway" is a single-threaded narrative, and uses the dead goat within that thread, whereas "Three Days" is essentially multi-threaded: there is the top-level story (Thanksgiving weekend) and there is the story of the mother pulling the plug on the father.

Also, of course, the only dead human in "Runaway" is the husband of the neighbor, but there's no parallel between him and the goat. But the lingering impression of the story is the implied threat, perhaps of death, against the young wife.

The Millions (A Blog About Books): A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2005

2006-01-12T16:44:00.000-06:00

Found this great summary of all the 2005 New Yorker stories (with some kind links back to SSC): The Millions (A Blog About Books): A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2005

The Mysterious Skunk Ape

2006-01-10T13:16:00.000-06:00

Tony Earley's "The Cryptozoologist," in the 01/09/06 issue of The New Yorker, is a funny, warm story set in the mountains of North Carolina, one of my favorite places on Earth.

This is primarily the story of Fieldin, an art professor turned unsuccessful artist, and Rose, his wife, former student, and junior by 25 years. Much of the story is presented as backstory about their relationship. A story that relies heavily on backstory requires a turbocharged sense of mystery up front to fuel the reader's interest, to keep him or her slogging along through the character histories. Earley knows this, and hits us with not one but two things to worry about in the first two paragraphs: first, Wayne Lee Cowan, an abortion clinic bomber, has disappeared into the local hills. The FBI is in pursuit; will they catch him? Will he strike again, kidnap Rose, commit some other dastardly crime? As Rose, already waiting by Fieldin's deathbed, stands on the back porch and contemplates these questions,

a figure separated itself from the shadow of one of the trees and strode quickly through the orchard toward the mountain. The figure was large and broad-shouldered, long-armed and stooped. It had some kind of silver stripe running the length of its back. Until it turned to look over its shoulder at her, Rose didn’t fully appreciate that the figure not only wasn’t Wayne Lee Cowan but wasn’t even human.

Wow. What the heck is that thang?

It's a Skunk Ape, apparently an Appalachian version of Bigfoot. Does it really exist? Will there be another encounter? After Fieldin dies in the third paragraph, will Rose hook up with the friendly FBI agent? Let me just say this, and I say it with gratitude: no skunk ape dies during this story. The dead animal trope is, for once, avoided. Although... if the animal is not real (and we don't know that for sure) does Earley get full credit for his restraint?

Beating a Dead Horse

2006-01-10T12:23:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker features "Three Days," by Samantha Hunt. This story depends on one of my "favorite" tropes: the death of an animal used to parallel (and shed light upon, of course) the death of a human. Open any copy of Glimmer Train and you can barely swing a dead cat without hitting a story that uses this trick. I'm a little surprised to find it in The New Yorker, but that just goes to show how sturdy the old swayback is.

In "Three Days," a young woman, Beatrice, returns to the family farm for Thanksgiving with her mother and stoner brother. The father, who Beatrice loved, is dead. He had lung cancer, and the mother confesses that she had his plug pulled (or conspired with the doctor to practice a little euthanasia; that's unclear).

After dinner, Beatrice and her brother, high on wine and marijuana, decide to ride the family horse, named Humbletonian, to Wal-Mart. The father loved the horse, of course (Oh, Wilbur); he used to sit in the hayloft, smoking away his existential angst and singing "Breathless" to the critter. (Yes, "Breathless"; the father died of lung cancer, the horse later drowns; what else would he sing?)

At Wal-Mart, the kids (both adults) tie the horse to a shopping cart corral (ha) and go inside. When they return, the horse is gone. They find the horse on a frozen pond behind the store. When they call the horse, it walks toward them but breaks through the ice and, naturally, drowns while they look on, helpless.

Just in case the parallel isn't clear enough, earlier in the story Beatrice reflects on her mother's decision to "kill" the father:

“I wouldn’t have killed him,” Beatrice says out loud and waits until she hears a question from the far side of her brain, from her mother. “What would you have done? Just let him suffer? Let him go on breathing that bubbly wet breath that sounded like a damn water fountain?”

Ah, the bubbly wet breath.

There are other elements to this story, in particular an amusing bit about the mother's job reinterpeting myth and history in order to create advertising campaigns and amusement park characters. And none of the above makes this story a sucky story, not especially. It's just that if you've seen one dead horse, you've pretty much seen them all. An animal in a short story about a dead family member is like the new guy on an episode of Star Trek: doomed, doomed, doomed.

The Need to Know -- Alice Munro's "Runaway"

2005-12-15T16:25:00.000-06:00

"Runaway," the title story in one of Alice Munro's short story collections (and originally published in The New Yorker), illustrates one of her favorite tricks: teasing the reader by withholding information that is known to the narrator.

This is a standard technique for creating profluence, even though you will see objections to its use. The narrative refers to an important event without disclosing the nature of the event, or refers to a death without disclosing the nature of the death or the identity of the victim, and so on. The reader wants to know what happened, or who died, and so on, and reads to find out. The objection is that it's an authorial trick, introduced specifically for the purpose of keeping the reader engaged, rather than a mystery that arises naturally from the story. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is just annoying.

In "Runaway," a young wife (Carla) listens from her barn as a car passes on the road. She's afraid it might be Sylvia:

If it was somebody coming to see them, the car would be slowing down by now. But still Carla hoped. Let it not be her.

So, naturally, we ask, "Why? Why not her?" But Alice refuses to tell us until later. Much later.

And even when she does reveal the answer, the revelation is teased out. We learn that the young wife's husband (Clark) plans to blackmail Sylvia:

Shortly afterward, Clark said, “We could’ve made him pay.”

Carla knew at once what he was talking about, but she took it as a joke.

“Too late now,” she said. “You can’t pay once you’re dead.”

“He can’t. She could.”

“She’s gone to Greece.”

“She’s not going to stay in Greece.”

“She didn’t know,” Carla said more soberly. “She didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I didn’t say she did.”

“She doesn’t have a clue about it.”

“We could fix that.”

Carla said, “No. No.”

Clark went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

“We could say we’re going to sue. People get money for stuff like that all the time.”

“How could you do that? You can’t sue a dead person.”

“Threaten to go to the papers. Big-time poet. The papers would eat it up. All we have to do is threaten and she’d cave in. How much are we going to ask for?”

“You’re just fantasizing,” Carla said. “You’re joking.”

“No. Actually, I’m not.”

And we're screaming, what the heck is it?

Finally, we learn that it is a sexual advance supposedly made by Sylvia's husband toward Carla.

But Alice isn't finished with us yet. She goes for the hat trick. Carla's pet goat has been missing from the beginning of the story. In the middle of a late night confrontation between Clark and Sylvia, the goat reappears, ghost-like, from the fog. The next day, Clark tells Carla all about his conversation with Sylvia, but never mentions the goat. Neither does the narrator mention the goat. We are left to shout, What About the Goat???

Not until the story's conclusion is this question answered, and in a chilling manner.

The bottom line: you might object to this technique; it might make you feel manipulated. But the story is impossible to put down.

"Twenty Grand" : Perhaps Not So Grand

2005-12-12T14:15:00.000-06:00

"Twenty Grand," by Rebecca Curtis, is this week's offering from The New Yorker. Ms. Curtis, a professor at the University of Kansas, has constructed a fair, but not great, story about a family with financial troubles. The mother of this family carries a coin, an old Armenian coin which belonged to her mother, and which she spends at a toll booth because she cannot find a quarter. She has to get through the toll booth to go see her husband at the Air National Guard base where he works, so that she can get $15 from him to buy groceries. Irony of ironies, it turns out the old coin was worth, ahem, twenty grand.

Although fairly entertaining, this story is riddled with flaws.

It begins:

On December 13, 1979, when my mother was thirty years old, she lost an old Armenian coin. That winter was cold, and she had been sleeping with my sister and me on a foldout couch in the living room to save on heat. We lived on a cleared ledge, a natural shelf, on a mountain high above a lake.

There is a disorienting shift in psychic distance here that could have easily been avoided. The first sentence is fine: remote, although first person. In the next sentence, however, we plunge into the family's living room, onto their sofa, into their shared bed. And in the next sentence, we are yanked back outside, high above a lake. This sequence is confusing because the first reference to the ledge leads us to think that the ledge is in the living room. How much simpler and clearer to simply reverse the order of those sentences.

Next, to get my pet peeve out of the way, this story lacks an inherent narrative arc. We are told right away that the mother lost the old coin, but there is nothing to suggest where the story goes from there... and in fact, that event is more of an ending than a beginning. The only profluence generated by the loss of the coin is to make us ask "So?" And it is a rare reader (more rare than an Armenian coin) who will happily pursue that question.

Worse than that are the logical holes that follow, and the implausible behavior of the characters. It turns out the husband knew of the coin's value before it was lost, but didn't tell his wife because he was afraid she'd sell it and spend the proceeds. No. That's ridiculous. Were he so paranoid, he would have wrested it from her and sold it himself.

Next, once he learns that the coin has been lost, they return to the tollbooth and offer to repurchase it from the tolltaker. However, the tolltaker refuses, saying that she recognized the coin and its value, and it now belongs to her. Excuse me? This takes place in New England; how many tolltakers in this region happen to be numismatists familiar with Armenian currency? Ridiculous.

While the parents are arguing with the tolltaker, a scene that can't take more than five minutes, their children (including the narrator) are "rescued" from their car, just a few yards away, by a well meaning but easily duped older couple and spirited away to the police department. Again, ridiculous. Not to mention the disregard of POV that allows the narrator to observe the conversation between her parents and the tolltaker while she and her sister are nowhere nearby.

And so it goes. Perhaps there's something more profound here than meets the eye; perhaps the narrator is unreliable. But I don't think so.

According to Boyle

2005-12-12T09:35:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a lot of T.C. Boyle lately, prompted by his 12/05/05 publication of "La Conchita" in The New Yorker. I picked up a collection over the weekend that contains many of his older pieces that I've never seen, including "Drowning," published in 1971.

With Boyle, you don't get cheated out of a story. Nearly all of his short fiction pieces can be used as illustrations of the power of the built-in narrative arc: a story element, established early in the text, that promises a certain duration, a tangible event that the reader can look forward to, and that serves to keep the reader reading, which is, after all, what it's all about.

"Drowning" is an interesting study in this regard. It's a strange, nihilistic little story, described by someone as "cruel". A beautiful and vain girl is sunbathing in an isolated spot on the beach. She strips. A swimmer swims out into the surf. A socially disfigured and very fat young man stumbles upon the naked girl and rapes her. Two fishermen chase him away... and then they rape her. The swimmer drowns. The fat man gets away.

Sounds horrible. And it is: not horribly written, but horrible to behold, something Gardner might have labeled "immoral fiction" because of its embrace of desolation and meaninglessness. I doubt that Mr. Boyle is especially proud of this story today, even though he has written many stories (including Chicxulub, written about previously) that reflect on the hopelessness of our situation.

But from a craft perspective, how in the world could Boyle create a narrative arc from these disjointed and dismal events?

He cheats. Yet, it works, and here's what he does. He begins the story with this sentence:

"In this story, someone will drown."

He doesn't reveal who or why, except to suggest that it will be random. Voila, narrative arc. We read to see who drowns, and how.

Some readers want to see metaphors the way occultists want to see ghosts, and for those people I suppose that the literal drowning of the swimmer is a metaphor for the repeated rape of the girl. Sure, why not. So you're left wondering, who drowned?

The Meaning of Devastation: Chicxulub and T.C. Boyle

2005-12-08T10:15:00.000-06:00

Here's why T.Coraghessan Boyle deserves your admiration, nay, your love: because he confronts topics and scenes that scare other writers goofy, and turns them into beautiful little things. He teaches us how to stare into the abyss of melodrama and not be afraid.

"Chicxulub," published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, is a great example. In this first-person story, the narrator and his wife get a call late at night telling them that their teenage daughter has been in an accident. She was hit by a car, is in surgery, condition unknown. After a frantic rush to the hospital, interminable waiting, stress-induced behavior, etc., they find that the girl is dead.*

As they say, this is every parent's nightmare. If your goal is to write a story that adequately captures this nightmare, that describes how the parents feel, how would you approach it?

Most writers would never try, because moments of extreme emotion are, in reality, all pretty much the same. Weeping, screaming, denial, bargaining, guilt. And some writers who do try something like this wind up with a scene full of obligatory ohmygods. Which might be realistic and gutwrenching, but doesn't really make for good or interesting fiction. So most writers try to deal instead with the aftermath, where the central event is long over, or happens to a minor character, or is wrapped in a frame, or all of the above. (Even Boyle does this sometimes.)

But in this story Mr. Boyle does not resort to aftermath, and other than some stress-induced rudeness as the parents try to find out their daughter's condition, there is no off-the-shelf emoting.

Instead, I imagine ol' T.C. asking himself: what it would feel like? And the simple, everyday answer is this: it would be devastating. But whereas you or I might write, "It was devastating" or "They were devastated", Boyle takes a somewhat more effective approach: he interleaves the story of the girl and her parents with a narrative about asteroids that have struck the earth, including the eponymous Chicxulub, a six-mile wide rock that created a crater 120 miles wide and wiped out 75% of all life on earth. He explains that once in every 300,000 years an asteroid strike will be of a sufficient magnitude to cast the planet into darkness for a year, during which no plants will grow, no crops will be harvested. That, you see, is devastation. And that is how you will feel if your daughter is killed.

*But they also find that the dead girl is not their daughter, but a younger friend to whom their daughter had loaned her driver's license.

Alice Munro Gets Jiggy in "Wenlock Edge"

2005-11-28T11:15:00.000-06:00

This week's New Yorker has a story from Alice Munro, "Wenlock Edge," that I won't be surprised to see in next year's BASS. Not that I like the story that much (I'm not a huge Munro fan), but she almost always gets one selected for BASS, and this one's funky enough to get more than the usual attention.

I've only read it once, and it deserves a more careful read. On the surface, it's the story of a college girl, something of a bookworm, who is forced to room with a young woman (Nina) who, at the age of twenty-two, has already lived a fairly riotous life. She has had three children (one died, the other two live with their grandmother) and is kept by a wealthy old man. She wears a kimono, and only audits college classes, playing the part of a student while the old man's matronly spy keeps an eye on her.

In the story's central scene, the narrator agrees to fill in for an ailing Nina and have dinner alone with Nina's elderly benefactor. When the narrator arrives for dinner, she is required to strip naked, which she does to prove that she is not "just a bookworm". Then she eats dinner with the old man (who is fully clothed) and later reads to him the A.E. Housman poem, "Wenlock Edge," in which the narrator muses about the impermanent but recurring nature of life and its troubles (to reduce the poem to a bland abstraction).

Ultimately, Nina runs away with the narrator's older male cousin for a week before apparently returning to the sugar daddy. At the end, the narrator reveals that she anonymously informed the old man of Nina's whereabouts.

I'll come back to this after another reading. But from a craft perspective, my first impression is that this is a useful example of counterpointing: using two characters who are opposites (at least on the surface) to highlight the characterization of one or both. Also, in contrast to some other stories I've discussed recently, there is no built-in narrative arc. It takes quite a while and quite a bit of patience to determine where Munro is headed, how long the story will last, and what is the purpose in reading it. This is typical of Munro, and probably why I don't tend to enjoy her work. However, I enjoyed this story, even if I had to force myself to read past the first thousand words.

Aleksandar Hemon's "Love and Obstacles"

2005-11-21T13:18:00.000-06:00

"Love and Obstacles," in this week's New Yorker, is another story with a built-in narrative arc: a boy is sent on a mission to a distant city to buy a freezer for his family. When the freezer is acquired, the story is complete, except for the requisite denouement. Once we know his mission, we read on to see it achieved. Profluence is created by this simple task.

The freezer is obtained with minimal problems. It is not the freezer that is important; the boy is not confronted with seemingly insurmountable problems in buying the freezer; he need not prove his mettle or overcome great odds, except that he has to tell a white lie to explain a slight shortage in payment. The story lies in the boy's journey, his confrontations (or interactions) with a drunk, someone who is either a pimp or a policeman, a tourist couple, and Franc, the "cantankerous" clerk at the Hotel Evropa. The boy is seeking love, to be euphemistic, but he seeks in vain. The universal tale of unrequited teen lust.

The themes are familiar, but comfortable as old shoes. How many meaningful themes are there, anyway?

Hemon begins the story by presenting us with a vulnerable character in a threatening situation. The protagonist is seventeen; he is on a train to a strange city; he is carrying a large amount of cash (enough to buy a freezer); and he shares the train with two criminals who discuss their past lives in prison. They harass him, but just enough to make him (and the reader) uneasy and, well, threatened. But eventually they leave him alone and disappear from the story. What purpose do they serve? Oh, one asks an unanswered riddle which is echoed later in the story, but the echo is obligatory, inserted to check off the square that says nothing can appear in a story only once. Their real purpose is simply to win our sympathy for the protagonist, to make us fear for him. He need not outsmart the criminals or beat them into submission or anything else comic-bookish. They have served their purpose, and now they can go.

Novel Pacing - Richard Ford

2005-11-17T10:21:00.000-06:00

I recently read Richard Ford's short story collection, "Rock Springs," and am now embarking on The Sportswriter, his novel that precedes Independence Day, for which he won the Pulitzer.

Moving from short stories to a novel, I'm struck by the (necessary) change in pacing. I don't know if I'll ever be able to write a novel, because the pacing is so fundamentally different from the pacing of a short story.

Taking a look at the first chapter in Ford's novel:

It's 21 pages of fairly dense text; I'm estimating 8,000-10,000 words. Longer than a long short story. This edition (Vintage, paperback, 1995) is 375 pages long. In this chapter, the first-person narrator (Frank Bascombe) introduces himself, giving us bits and pieces of his life story, telling us that he had a son who died at the age of nine and that Bascombe and his wife are divorced, although they have two other children. In the course of the chapter, Bascombe and his wife meet, pre-dawn, at their son's grave and chat, as is their custom on the anniversary of the boy's death. That's really all that happens in the primary thread. They meet and chat. Which is fine, for a novel, I don't intend to be critical. But how does he get nearly 10,000 words out of this?

He simply tells the fairly unexciting story of his life: his parents were unexceptional but acceptable people; his father died when Frank was 14, and Frank was sent to a military school, which he didn't mind; he met X (his ex-wife) and married her and they had children. He wrote a book of short stories (oh my god, he wrote a book about a writer) and then an unpublished novel and then became a sportswriter. We get varying levels of detail about each stage of his life, mingled with the scene at the cemetery and some gentle rambling about the current state of his life.

It's just details, good, telling details, backstory that makes Frank Bascombe seem real, concrete, authoritative about his own existence. Although he wouldn't describe himself that way; he refers to his own tendency to be dreamy, not in the sense of physically attractive, but of being distracted, lost in fantasy.

It's thick.

Haruki Murakami's "The Year of Spaghetti"

2005-11-17T08:23:00.000-06:00

"The Year of Spaghetti," by Haruki Murakami, appears in the 11/21/05 issue of The New Yorker. It is a puzzling little story; puzzling because one wonders why The New Yorker would publish it, other than the name recognition of the author.

I'm going to try to find something redeeming in this piece. The story begins with the first-person narrator telling us that in 1971 he cooked a lot of spaghetti, daily it seems, in a pot "big enough to bathe a German shepherd in." The narrator lives in a tiny apartment, alone and lonely: "Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life."

The narrator eats spaghetti every day, imagining at each meal that someone is coming to visit: different people, ranging from an old girlfriend, to the narrator himself from a different era, to William Holden. No one actually visits.

Murakami next explains the deep meaning of the cooking of spaghetti: "I cooked and cooked, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.

"I’d gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German shepherd, toss them into the roiling water, and sprinkle them with salt."

So, you see, it isn't just spaghetti he's obsessing over; it's past regrets, mistakes, the detritus of an unhappy life.

The first actual plot point occurs when, one day, the phone rings. After several paragraphs of listening to the phone ring, the narrator answers. The caller is a girl looking for her ex-boyfriend, a friend of the narrator.

The narrator refuses to tell the girl where to find the boy. They argue briefly. The narrator says he's too busy cooking spaghetti to help her. Ah, but he's not cooking spaghetti, not really, so he pretends too, pantomiming the act. Eventually, the girl gives up and the narrator lies down on the floor.

The narrator reflects on his unwillingness to help the girl. Maybe it was wrong, but he didn't want to get involved.

And finally, the heartstopping final paragraph:

"Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?"

Sorry, I can't find anything redeeming in this. It's like a parody of modern fiction. Or really bad college fiction. Or both. Someone suggested that it's intended to be funny, and maybe so, but I don't think it's fair for a writer to publish something laughably bad and then say, "Oh, I meant for it to be bad. Isn't that funny?" Harumph.

The Swimmer

2005-11-09T14:26:00.000-06:00

I just read John Cheever's "The Swimmer," a classic short story that I had somehow never gotten around to reading. It's the tale, often referenced, of a man (Neddy) who swims across his suburban New York county, one swimming pool at a time, in an attempt to get home.

The story begins in a festive spirit, with Neddy viewing his swim as an adventure worthy of Lewis & Clark. Neddy always plunges into pools, Cheever tells us, never using a ladder, and this is how he begins his journey, with hardly a moment's hesitation. At each pool along the way, he pauses to talk with the owners and have a drink. Everyone is happy to see him. Life is good. We are, perhaps, a little concerned about his constant drinking, and the effect it might have on his ability to swim. And there is some tinge of mystery about his four daughters, whom he expects to find at home when he arrives. But we happily tag along.

Only as Neddy nears his home do we learn that everything is not as it seems. He has a talent for suppressing the unpleasant, and it turns out that he has lost his home, his money, and possibly his daughters. He is, in the end, as delusional as one might expect such a swimmer to be.

I love the structure of this story because, as with "The Best Year of My Life" or "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face," the cross-county swim gives us a clearcut destination, a well defined arc that we will readily trace, knowing (roughly) where we are headed and how long it will take us to get there. (In TBYOML, the arc was the course of a pregnancy; in TSOHCF, it was a baseball game.) Of course, it's also important that the outcome of the arc be uncertain: will he make it all the way? The answer turns out to be yes and no; he physically arrives at his home, but only to find it abandoned, empty, dilapidated. It is not the home he remembered.

I wonder how Cheever developed this story. Did he begin with the fanciful idea of swimming across the neighborhood, one pool at a time, and then figure out why a man would do this, and what the outcome would be?

There are almost always three obvious answers to a dramatic question: yes, no, and maybe. And then there's the fourth best thing, which avoids or restates the question, but is (we hope) satisfying nonetheless. To simply have Neddy arrive at home and see his daughters and reflect on his great swim would have been pointless. To have him fail to get home would have been cheating the reader; after all his jumping in and out of pools, we are waiting to see him get home, and we sense that the payoff will come when he gets there. The answer is yes; the answer is no; it is, perhaps, the fourth best thing.

Writing v. Invention

2005-11-08T10:57:00.000-06:00

Every writer of fiction faces a bifurcated challenge: there is obviously the writing, i.e., the construction of sentences and paragraphs, the choice of words, spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc., but more importantly, and less talked about, is the challenge of invention, the imagining of a story that is worth reading. The writer must succeed on both levels in order to produce quality fiction.

I have a bookcase full of books on writing fiction, and they are all about the writing. They drone on and on about techniques for getting the imagined story on paper. But I don't think I own a single text that addresses the process of imagining the story in the first place.

How does one imagine a story? And what makes a story well imagined or poorly imagined?

I don't have an answer for this, but I often feel, when reading superior fiction, that the story has been, for lack of a better phrase, "deeply imagined." The writer seems to see and hear the scenes portrayed with such clarity that it becomes difficult to believe that they only existed in his mind. The deeply imagined story provides us with unfamiliar details, details not borrowed from a television show or common knowledge, details that lift the people and situations described from the generic to the specific, to a new and shimmering specific unlike any we have seen or read about before.

In great writing, this freshness appears at every level. At the level of descriptive detail, but also in the acts of the characters (and thus the plot or story line), in the dialogue, in the phrasing and word choices. It is, once again, the antithesis of the commonplace.

How does the writer achieve this state of fictional grace? Imagine everything obvious, everything easy, everything familiar, write it if necessary, and then throw it all away. Then the real work begins.

Theroux - The Best Year of My Life

2005-11-07T13:04:00.000-06:00

I just read Paul Theroux's story, "The Best Year of My Life," in The New Yorker. Some off the cuff observations:

This is another example of a story that achieves basic profluence by incorporating a plot element with a built-in arc: in this case, pregnancy. A young college student receives a telephone call from a girl in which she informs him that she is pregnant. They are not in love, but the boy runs away with the girl to help her hide her condition from her parents, first to New York and then to Puerto Rico. Eventually they return to Boston, where the girl gives birth to a boy at a home for unwed mothers, and the baby is given up for adoption.

The pregnancy is introduced in the lead, and the story ends shortly after the baby is born. The nine-month arc of the pregnancy provides a structure for the story that is easy to follow and naturally compelling. We read, if for no other reason, to see how it turns out. Will the baby be born? What will happen to it, and to the young couple? The answers to these questions is not at all surprising or novel... and they don't need to be. So much bad fiction attempts to rely on a surprise, or overly dramatic, ending. There is no need if the narrative has carried the reader along in a satisfying way. And yet, having a reason to read, having a sense of our destination, is critical. Few things are more annoying for a reader than to pause a few pages into a story and wonder, "Where is this going?" Most readers don't have much patience. If the writer doesn't provide at least a pretty strong clue, the story won't work.

So the basic structure of the story, and the central problem, is established early on. Thereafter, the story is told on a traditional arc of escalating problems, culminating in the arrival of a letter from the girl's mother. They are busted, and must return to face the consequences. The story concludes with the narrator's reflection and realization that this year, that seemed so terrible as it occurred, was, as the title says, the best year of his life. That it had prepared him for anything that might happen to him in the future. That it gave him a frame of reference against which to judge the petty misdeeds and mistakes of the rest of his life. So it ends with an old-fashioned epiphany.

Besides the profluence, what makes the story succeed? The characterization of the narrator. (We barely see the girl or any of the other characters; this is all about the boy.) He never complains. He never dodges responsibility. He never indulges in false sentiment, never pretends to love the girl, never beats himself up over his mistake. He just deals with the problem as best he can. He is also bright, giving ample evidence of being well read and multi-lingual. Yet, he is not above manual labor, working as a field hand harvesting asparagus to pay for a room for himself and the girl.

Consider this story in light of the previous post regarding sentimentality. There are certainly elements here which carry predefined emotional content. Pregnancy out of wedlock. Giving a child up for adoption. Yet, the story never approaches sentimentality. For one thing, the narrator does not dwell on his own emotional reaction to these things. We know how he feels, because we empathize with him. We don't need to have our noses rubbed in it. The girl is allowed to weep over her lost child, but we see this only as it is observed by the narrator, and he treats her with kindness, holding her at night (fully clothed) as she cries.

So it isn't that potentially sentimental elements can't be included in a story. If that were true it would be almost impossible to write anything. But the writer must, as always, avoid belaboring the obvious. Dead puppies are like nuclear warheads, and must be handled with great restraint and a gentle touch.

Sentimentality and Originality

2005-11-07T10:58:00.000-06:00

I've been pondering what makes writing sentimental; i.e., where does the pursuit of sentiment (emotion) slip across the line and become maudlin, cloying, and sappy? At what point do readers go from wiping their eyes to rolling them?

The key component of sentimental writing is the use of stock, emotionally laden elements. Justin Cronin calls such an element a "dead puppy": an iconic symbol that can be counted on to get an automatic reaction without working for it. Dead puppies are sad; it matters not what has gone before in the story, or what follows. One would have to work pretty hard to write a story about dead puppies that elicited some other response, and which did not sink to the level of dead baby jokes. (Remember them? How do you unload a truckload of dead babies? With a pitchfork.) I cringe to think about the dead puppies in my own writing. Not to mention dead babies. Yeesh.

We normally think of sentimental writing as sad, or treacly sweet (awww-inspiring). But it's really anything that relies on such overused, predefined imagery. And it really is a hallmark of bad amateur writing. Any editor will recognize the plethora of miscarriages, abortions, dead [puppies, mothers, children, boyfriends, etc.], cancer victims, wife-beaters, self-mutilators, and sexual deviants in bad amateur fiction submitted for publication. The authors of these pieces think they are writing "serious" fiction because the subject matter is "serious", i.e., somber. (I know this to be true because I have wallowed in this mudhole, both as writer and editor, at length.)

Serious fiction need not be somber, but it must be fresh, composed of elements not seen before, or at least capable of carrying original meaning, meaning created by the story. And by "meaning," what I really am talking about is emotion. True sentiment, dug out of the dirt of originality, letter by letter, word by word, detail by stinking detail.

Tom Drury's "Path Lights"

2005-10-21T10:07:00.000-05:00

Path Lights is a short story by Tom Drury published in The New Yorker (Oct. 17, 2005). Drury is a master at achieving profluence in quiet stories, never resorting to high drama, and this one is a good example of how he does it.

Although his stories are low-key (some might say nothing much ever happens), Drury successfully creates and sustains tension by introducing change, or the threat of change, to the lives of his characters.

"Path Lights" begins: "One day, a bottle almost hits us. It's a brown quart bottle that falls out of the sky. We are in the arroyo, the dogs and me, walking." When I read this, I flinch involuntarily. I ready myself for a fight, or some other confrontation. This threat, this falling bottle, sets up expectations, but as in many Drury stories, the expectations do not come to fruition. Instead, the mild-mannered narrator, realizing that the bottle must have come from the bridge above, accepts that the thrower of the bottle probably had no idea that anyone was walking below, and meant him no harm. He knows that he might have done the same thing.

Later, we meet the narrator's wife, in bed with a headache. We worry about her (sense the threat), and the narrator wins our approval with gentle ministrations. We expect that her illness will lead to something worse; but she recovers promptly.

Later yet, one of the dogs escapes its leash and disappears. Yet another threat. But the narrator locates and corrals the dog atop a neighbor's house without incident.

In addition to these minor threats, the story's profluence is built on the oldest technique in the book: mystery. In fact, the story can be seen as a lighthearted poke at the mystery genre, as the narrator envisions himself as clever sleuth, setting out to determine the identity of the bottle thrower. And the simple mystery works: who threw the bottle, and why?

In addition, the narrator earns money by providing the voice work for audio mystery novels, reinforcing the mystery theme. Finally, the narrator's wife works for a mysterious agency involved with sending a probe to Mars, a top-secret mission that she is not allowed to speak about.

So, the mysteries, large and small, are layered ingeniously to always keep the reader wondering about something.

On a side note, Drury uses a recurring image in this story of things in flight or on the verge of flight. The bottle flying from the bridge; the probe flying to Mars (named Phaethon, after the character in Greek mythology, a mortal who drove the sun god's chariot and was killed by Zeus for his recklessness); the beagle climbing atop the neighbor's house. Does this image pattern have any deep meaning?

Profluence

2005-10-21T09:48:00.000-05:00

Profluence: flow, the tendency to move forward, a steady progression. I've never really seen this word used except in the context of writing fiction. In particular, John Gardner writes of it in his book, The Art of Fiction. Any story, to be satisfying, must be profluent.

Profluence is a necessary part of any narrative, fiction or non-fiction, because all narrative (as opposed to essay and most non-fiction) contains an embedded timeline; whether or not it proceeds chronologically, a narrative describes a series of related events related, and these events move through time.

Another way of saying this is that time elapses during a story, and this happens both at the micro level and the macro level. The best stories, whether genre or literary, drag the reader along not just from event to event, but from sentence to sentence and from phrase to phrase.

How this happens at the macro level is easy to see: this thing happens and then that thing happens. It's a plot summary. At the micro level it's slightly trickier, but it all depends on the verbs.

For example.

"The dog was in the habit of eating his daily meal in the late afternoon." : Describes a habitual action. No time elapses in this sentence.

"The dog was eating his bowl of kibble." : not habitual, but still, no time elapses. This sentence reduces the act of eating to a static event, a moment frozen in time.

"The dog ate his food." : slightly better. This could have the same meaning as the previous example, but it could mean that the dog ate the entire bowl, implying that some time has elapsed, although the duration is indefinite.

"The dog approached his bowl, sniffed the unfamiliar kibble, and grudgingly took a piece into his mouth." : this is real-time. The act described takes about as long as the time it takes to read the sentence (or at least the reader can imagine the scene with enough specificity to know how long it takes).

Good writing carefully modulates the flow of time in this way, moving back and forth from real-time to more static description, but never letting things bog down for long.