tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post4996827529518058297..comments2024-03-09T00:19:36.011-08:00Comments on Reading the Short Story: T. C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood, “Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House,” and Ian McEwan’s “First Love, Last Rites”—Memory Piece vs. Meaningful StoryCharles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-80941086248841517602012-09-14T11:08:58.987-07:002012-09-14T11:08:58.987-07:00Eric, I am not really worried about getting into a...Eric, I am not really worried about getting into a big boiling cauldron of theoretical toil and trouble. Sounds like a Macbeth adventure.<br /><br />If you want to call Boyle's piece a short story rather than a memory piece, I have no problem with that. Maybe the distinction is just between what C.S. Lewis calls "good art" and "bad art" (See my next blog entry.) Maybe it is the difference between what my colleague Mary Rohrberger called a "simple narrative" and a complex short story. <br /><br />I like your discussion of the similarity between Boyle's story and Carver's, but I am more interested in what their differences mean.<br /><br />Thanks for taking the time to join this little conversation. <br /><br />And if it is the modern theorists who make no distinctions between "good art" and "bad art" that might want to boil me in the oil of theoretical toil and trouble, I have always rather suspected their concoctions to be more like weak tea.<br />Charles E. Mayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-44542833154524971572012-09-13T21:54:47.963-07:002012-09-13T21:54:47.963-07:00Birnam Wood has its faults, it seems overwritten, ...Birnam Wood has its faults, it seems overwritten, narratively forced at times, and graceless, but reading it out of the very genre of the short story is a bit drastic. <br /><br />Thematically it is very similar to Chef's House. Both stories suggest that despite favorable physical circumstances (the symbolic good weather) and material circumstances (a nice place to live in peace) people are unlikely to change who they are, even if it poisons their lives. The said poisoning being represented by their relationship with a beloved woman. <br /><br />In Birnam Wood the narrator's character is poisoning his life, and his narration of that poisoning is a somewhat graceless mix of remembered events, (mainly his angry, resentful, immature behavior) and his own present time reaction to them, characterized by increasing self dislike. This indeed ends in a predictable catastrophe in his relationship, but the story logic makes it nearly inevitable. <br /><br />At first reading I thought that Nora's saying she wasn't tired would have been a better place to end the story, and it would have been a complete story, at least to me, with a clear meaning and theme, leading to a clear and carefully crafted consequence. I don't believe Keith was having a Gatsby-like experience at that window in the actual ending. Boyle perhaps attempted to bring Keith to some kind of possible means of distancing himself from himself, as an immature, angry, and confused person, destroying his own chance at a loving relationship, and at the same time Boyle is himself looking back, and into, his life then from a present perspective. But it's a short story not a novella and that's the end of it.<br /><br />Chef's House is more poignant, intimate, wistful, and written with more grace and economy, but then Wes is not narrating, and alcoholism, in remission for a brief summer, is not something whose ugliness is apparent on a day to day basis, although there are indications that Wes has something of an ugly personality: his calling his benefactor's daughter Fat Linda, his children don't love him, his wife, even though she loves him, could not live with him. Of course we can believe that if the summer had gone on forever Wes would have stayed sober, but I don't think that is the idea. Wes says it himself "... I'm who I am."<br />Middle-aged Wes has lost the battle Keith is still fighting for himself. Chef's House has a softer, more regretful tone, partly made possible by its brevity, and enhanced by being narrated by the tender, loving, understanding Nora. And it can afford brevity because as Carver writes, "What do you want? he said. But that's all he said." There is nothing else to say, it's not even what might have been, the battle was lost before it began and we all knew it. It's story logic was every bit as predictable as Birnam Wood.<br /><br />At least it seems like that to me, and I just can't think Birnam Wood is not a meaningful story or thematically less significant than Chef's House.<br /><br />I don't think there is any question that it deploys mood, character, atmosphere, style, and so on, or that it is a fiction, whatever the autobiographical elements. Nor do I think that it will even occur to the readers of the New Yorker, or readers of some future anthology that it is not a short story. The distinction you are making between memory piece and short story, at least here, does not seem justified at all to me, and distinguishing Birnam Wood out of the genre will get you into a big boiling cauldron of theoretical toil and trouble.<br /><br />PS my name is Eric.Theorbyshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16626985721724069042noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-50920950258514886152012-09-04T10:38:26.513-07:002012-09-04T10:38:26.513-07:00P.s., just to compare the Carver and McEwan storie...P.s., just to compare the Carver and McEwan stories. I agree that "Chef's House" succeeds at evoking "a painful sense of loneliness." And it does this partly through its style and language. I'd just argue these elements are successful because they evoke a human situation we can all imagine, in the same way Carver made an imaginative effort to relate the event from his ex-partners' perspective.<br /><br />In contrast, to me McEwan is not as successful because you feel the young author self-consciously choosing an evocative metaphor (informed, one imagines, by his reading widely of other authors.) Jonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-17998875053432113422012-09-04T10:19:28.749-07:002012-09-04T10:19:28.749-07:00Well, first off, since I introduced the concept of...Well, first off, since I introduced the concept of "flesh and blood," characters, I have to say I meant something different than what is being discussed in this essay. And in terms of the specific issues raised here, I'd just say that Boyle's intent is just very different than Carver or McEwan's (and I'm not really a Boyle, or McEwan, fan). To me, Boyle produces something akin to pop music--his story is fun partly because it need not, and doesn't try, to resonate too widely. I don't see Boyle's characters as "flesh and blood" in that they're not fully realized. They're "types" who serve mainly to propel the story forward and serve as a conduit for Boyle's clever writing. The whole point seems to be to appreciate the author's energetic inventiveness (like the point of listening to pop music is to just carried away in the fun, creative energy.)<br />To clarify what I did mean by "flesh and blood," I'd like to mention a story by Lydia Davis, titled "They Take Turns Using a Word They Like." The story (in its entirety): "'It's <i>extraordinary</i>,' says one woman. 'It <i>is</i> extraordinary,' say the other."<br />This short story depends on our capacity as readers to empathize, and identify, with recognizable human behavior--in both the two women in the story and with the author/narrator. We recognize that that's how people bond. We appreciate that the author is wittily observing this interaction and conveying it to us as a "work of art" in a lean, pure form. There are no metaphors and deliberate efforts to signify, but the story does resonate because it's depicting something elementally human.<br />One could compare this to, say, the novel "Amsterdam," by that McEwan fellow. To me, everything in the book felt white-boarded out. Every character in the book was also unlikable and the overall story was dark and enervating, leaving the author's dry cleverness as the only meaningful theme one could take away.<br />Lydia Davis gets last word with her story "Away from Home": "It has been so long since she used a metaphor!"Jonnoreply@blogger.com