Reading the Short Story

Alice Munro’s “To Reach Japan” and the Winter 2012 issue of Narrative

2012-01-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

Alice Munro’s most recent story, “To Reach Japan,” has been published on the online journal Narrative. I have been receiving online stories from Narrative for a few years now. But I must confess that I do not always read the stories online. Although I have been using computers to research, organize, and write since the early days of CPM and Apple II (My first computer was a Kaypro a with a nine inch green screen and two floppy disc drives), I still cannot fully engage in reading stories on a computer screen or an Ipad/Kindle type tablet. Something about books, I reckon, that has been with me since I first picked up a copy of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I have had an e-reader for almost a year now, but have only read one book on it—a biography of J.D. Salinger.

I think e-readers are fine for “disposable books,” i.e. pop fictions, mainly novels, of course, that you read once for entertainment and then give away to a second-hand store; I also think they are great for textbooks and applaud Apple’s recent arrangement with text publishers to make inexpensive texts available for its Ipad;. The outrageous price publishers charge for texts and the absurd frequency with which they release “new editions” is scandalous; and forcing students to lug huge tomes around in backpacks because they have no lockers is unforgivable.

However, for my purposes--reading and studying short stories--I will cling to the solid feel of a book in my hand and carefully reading black ink on white paper. Thus, I was very happy recently to purchase and hold in my hand the handsome Winter 2012 issue of Narrative magazine—hefty but not overweight, with a slick firm cover and 360 pages filled with some twenty stories, a passel of poems, and a half dozen essays. I know the magazine is made up of PDF printouts of the stories, poems, and essays that have appeared on Narrative’s web site because I ordered a PDF version of Alice Munro’s story “To Reach Japan” ($4.00) when it first came out a few months ago; the pdf printout looks like a photocopy of the story as it appears in the magazine.

The very fact that the first thing I did when I downloaded the Alice Munro story was to make a hard copy, of course, says something about my addiction to pages and print. That I still went ahead and ordered the Winter issue of Narrative ($19.95) that contained the story, of course, testifies I am hopeless in my commitment to books.

I am not sure why Munro published “To Reach Japan” in the online magazine, Narrative. I know she has a first-refusal contract with The New Yorker, which means, I think, that she is required to send a story to them first and give them a chance to refuse it before she can send it to anyone else. Did The New Yorker (gasp!) turn down a story from Alice Munro? Or did they demur because they already had in hand another Munro story, “Leaving Maverley,” which appeared in the magazine at the end of November? Or was the story too long for them? I know that her quite long story “Too Much Happiness” appeared a few years ago in Harper’s. I also know that Narrative, like New Yorker and Harper’s (unlike most periodicals that publish short stories pay real money for stories they publish, and I certainly would not expect Alice Munro to give her stories away. After all, she is a professional writer, not an amateur. I thank my reader Jay for alerting me that another new Munro story is appearing in Granta in the issue that comes out next week. I have ordered the new issue and look forward to reading it. With the story that Bob Thacker has told me that Harpers has in hand, that makes a total of eight new stories for the new Munro book due out later this year.

. I have only a couple of complaints about the format of the new Narrative volume: Although it contains a story by a great short story writer, the cover of the issue is dominated by a huge close-up photo of Sherman Alexie in an open-mouthed laugh; his name and the title of his poem “In’din Curse” is in 48 point type. The picture of Alice Munro on the cover is about the size of a large postage stamp. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know; the picture of Alexie having a great laugh is more eye-catching than a picture of an octogenarian with white hair. But damn! Alexie’s little I-poem “In’din Curse” that hopes your bladder containing gallons will be crushed under the feet of a half-white dancer is just so trivial and juvenile! And another thing: Perhaps it is my age and eyesight, but the typeface of the stories in Narrative is pale and hard to read; moreover, the volume does not identify the title of each story on the page headings, something I also find annoying.

But never mind; it is the content of the “magazine” that counts most, of course. I didn’t like everything, but there was enough here to keep me engaged for several nights. I will make just a few brief comments about the pieces I liked best before talking in more detail about Alice Munro’s “To Read Japan.”

Amy Bloom’s “A Portion of Your Loveliness” is a clever, witty story by a writer who always makes me laugh and groan at the same time. This is a story about a woman whose young daughter’s favorite game is “Holocaust,” in which the little girl pretends she is an Anne Frank-like refugee hiding from, or captured by, the Nazis. It’s a humorous concept that Bloom takes very seriously; or else a serious concept that Bloom takes very humorously.

“Sitting In” by Will Boast, is an appealing story about a young boy who challenges an older man to play tuba in a small polka band. The older man is “possibly a Jew, exiled by the Holocaust,” and absolutely needs his role in the band to survive emotionally. It is an initiation for the boy into the adult world of loneliness and despair. I liked it.

Liz Moore’s “Our Neighbors the Bells” is told from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl who lives with her twenty-five-year-old mother and twin sister. The story is told in the present tense, but the narration is not that of an eight-year-old, although its short sentences and repetition might suggest a child’s voice. The son of the family across the street, Benny Bell, tells the mother he is in love with her, but her relationship with the family is an ambiguous one. An engaging story, it seems to me, about a child’s puzzled reaction to the mystery of adult reality.

I also like Mary Morris’s “Birds of Africa,” about a boy who breaks into homes of his neighbors to take a short nap on their beds and steal some inconsequential item. One of the items he takes is a book entitled Birds of Africa, with which he becomes fascinated.

Rick Bass’s essay about the trial and tribulations of taking out the carcass of an elk he has killed is typical Rick Bass, which, in my opinion, is always pretty damned good; and Jayne Anne Phillips’ review essay on E. L. Doctorow’s collection of new and selected stories, All the Time in the World is, as usual for Phillips (one of my favorite writers), smart and perceptive.

This is a handsome collection, well worth the $19.95 price tag.

I have written so often about Alice Munro on this blog that I don’t want to spend a great deal of time here on her story “To Reach Japan.” This story seems more like one of Munro’s earlier stories, not only because it focuses on a young woman (for Munro has of late been writing about women near her own age), but also because it follows a relatively linear plot line and does not seem to have the complex thematic structure that Munro’s later stories do.

The story focuses on a woman named Greta who is taking the train to Toronto with her young daughter Katy to housesit for a friend while her husband Peter works on a job in northern Canada. Peter and Greta differ in significant ways: He studied business while she was learning Paradise Lost. She avoids anything useful, while he does the opposite. While she has strong opinions about things, his opinions are even tempered. When he sees a movie or reads a book, for example, he never wants to talk about it and does not judge, saying that the people who put them together were probably doing as well as they could. Greta is more analytical and critical; she is a poet, who has had a few poems published.

In a bit of social background commentary, the omniscient narrator states that it is hard to explain the life of woman at the time the story takes place—a time when feminism did not exist. Any serious idea or ambition by a woman was seen “as some sort of crime against nature. Even reading a real book was behavior that was suspect, leading possibly to a child’s pneumonia, and making a political remark at a party might be said to be the cause of your husband’s failure to get a promotion.”

The background incident of the story occurs when Greta is invited to a party by the editor of the magazine where her poems were published. When she arrives, she knows no one there, is generally ignored, and becomes slightly drunk. She is rescued by a journalist named Harris Bennett, the son-in-law of the people who have given the part; he offers to take her home. He has adolescent children; his wife is in a hospital for “emotional problems.” On the way home, he says he was thinking of whether or not he would kiss Greta and decided he would not—which mortifies her at the time.

Greta cannot get Bennett out of her mind, thinks about him every day, nearly weeps with a “dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness,” although she chastises herself as an idiot for her romanticism. The offer to housesit in Toronto, where Harris lives, provides an opportunity to see him; so she finds his work address and writes the following note: “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—and hoping it will reach Japan.”

On the train trip to Toronto, Greta meets a couple of young actors named Greg and Laurie, who work with preschoolers. They are both beautiful and charming, playing with Katy and other children on the train. It is at this point that we get another personal insight into Greta and some more social background commentary about the time of the story. When Greta says that Greg is “remarkable,” Laurie says,”He doesn’t save himself up. You know? A lot of actors do. Actors in particular. Dead offstage.” Greta thinks that this is what she does--save herself up. “Careful with Katy, careful with Peter.” The narrator says that in the decade they had now entered—which seems probably to be the sixties—“Being there was to mean something it didn’t used to mean. Going with the flow. Give. People were giving, other people were not very giving. Barriers between the inside and outside of yourself were to be trampled down. Authenticity required it.”

When Laurie gets off the train (She had Greg have decided to separate), Greta and Greg have a drink together and end up having sex in his berth. When Greta returns to her own cabin, her daughter is not there; and she “went stupid” with the shock of it. However, after some panic, she pushes the door between the cars open and finds Katy sitting there. She tries to justify all this by saying that surely someone would have found Katy, but she is obviously shaken and feeling terribly guilty about the whole thing. After Greg leaves the train at the next stop, she scolds herself for allowing other things to crowd Katy out—the “idiotic preoccupation” with the man in Toronto, her fantasies of writing poetry—all this now seemed “traitorous” to Katy and her husband—“A sin. The inattention. Coldhearted foraging attention to something else than the child. A sin.”

However, when they get off the train at the Toronto station, a man walks up and takes hold of Greta and kisses her “in a determined and celebratory way.” It is, of course, Harris Bennett.

The story ends this way:

“First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling.

She was trying to hang on to Katy but at that moment the child pulled away, she got her hand free.

She didn’t try to escape, she just stood. Downcast, waiting for whatever had to come next.”

I wonder if this is a story Munro wrote several years ago and never got published—either because The New Yorker turned it down or because she was not satisfied with it. It has several familiar Munro features in it: a woman who wants to be a writer married to a man who is practical and business minded; a woman who has mixed feelings about the counterculture of the sixties—averse to it by her culture, but drawn to it by romantic notions stimulated by literature; a woman who often neglects her domestic and motherly duties with her romantic fantasies, but then feels guilty about this. A woman who commits the “sin” of inattention to her child while indulging in her own romantic fantasies. Munro has written about these things before, and anyone who has read Robert Thacker’s biography of Munro will surely recognize some of these characteristics of Munro herself when she was a young wife and experienced conflicts between her domestic duties and her ambition to write.

Engaging in romantic impulsive behavior perhaps because of the influence of literature is a common Munro theme, as is the influence of actors or acting on one’s view of the world. The cultural/social background of the emerging of the sexually permissive sixties is also a common Munro theme, especially in her early stores, as is the influence of emerging feminism on female behavior.

However, this story does not seem to me to be as complex either thematically or structurally as Munro’s later stories, which also makes me suspect that it is an early story that she has perhaps “rescued” to fill out her new book. I will check with Bob Thacker, who is the expert on all things relative to Munro’s

Popular Plotted vs. Literary Thematic Stories: Margaret Atwood vs. Alice Munro—Part II

2012-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

I appreciate the many kind comments I received on my post about Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress,” even those, of course, that did not agree with me. And I am pleased that they have been looking forward to this discussion of Alice Munro’s “Leaving Maverley.”

However, first I want to clarify my conviction that short stories often have to be read more than once. When I posted an essay on this issue on the very fine blog “Thresholds,” I received a mild roasting from Mike Smith, a regular to that blog. In my own post, I argued that short stories could not be skimmed, read quickly, or summarized. Mike begged to disagree, concluding, after a discussion of one of his own favorite writers, Stephen King, that if short stories were not immediately accessible at some level, they fail in their primary function, which is to “entertain” in what Poe described as one or two hours.

Although I do not think that the primary function of a short story is to “entertain,” that is, unless the word “entertain” is understood as something more complex than a Steven King shiver, but rather that the primary function of a short story is to provide a stimulating experience with what it mysteriously means to be a thinking, feeling human being in the world. However, the primary reason I think that short stories must be read more than once does not have to do with the opaqueness of their language, but rather with the way that many stories structure that stimulating human experience. I argued in the blog on “Stone Mattress” that Atwood’s story was a relatively simple plot-based surface level “entertainment” that revealed little about complex human reality.

Readersquest, one of my favorite readers of this blog because she likes playing the gadfly and because her own blog posts are interesting, earnest, and stimulating (but more about that a bit later) commented: “I guess at heart I'm still just a child who gets a huge dopamine rush, upon opening a book or a magazine, because I think the author is going to tell me a story. I may be a junkie for unliterary crack. I don't pretend to know what constitutes "social substance" or "artistic importance" in a short story--and I'm not sure that I'd want to read anything by a writer who was so self-important that they'd try to tell me something socially substantive or artistically important anyway!”

Although I have no patience with writers who try to pile “socially substantive” stuff on me, I have no objection to writers who dare to offer me something “artistically important,” that is, of course, unless their sense of “self-importance” is misplaced, like that of Julian Barnes, whose Man Booker prize-winner The Sense of an Ending is pretentious and light-weight (but more about that in a week or so). I don’t think Alice Munro presents herself as “self important,” the way Barnes did in his acceptance speech at the Man Booker Awards; however, I think she would be a lesser writer if she did not believe that what she writes is important. In my opinion, Munro’s “Leaving Maverley” has more “artistic importance” than Atwood’s “Stone Mattress” because it explores something complex about how human beings think and behave in the world and because it carefully structures that complexity in the only way stories can—with language. Readersquest says in her comment: “I look forward to reading Part II of this post, because I really don't enjoy the kind of stories that offer me only artifacts of "language-based thematic.” I hope she finds the following discussion an interesting description of the process by which I read “Leaving Maverley”:

As I began to read Alice Munro’s story “Leaving Maverley” for the fourth time, I was reminded how complex a process reading a story is when you have already read it once and know what “happens” in it as an account of events involving characters in the world.

If you already know what happens, why would you want to read it again? What do you “attend to” when you read it a second or third or fourth time? Well, for one thing, when you read a story the first time, you probably focus so much on “seeing” what happens that you might fail to focus on “hearing” the words of the story. In the opening paragraph of “Leaving Maverley,” you visualize the movie theatre and the owner Morgan Holly, but perhaps are not aware of the rhythm of the sentences. Take the opening sentence: “In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were.” There are many ways this information could have been communicated, e.g. “Every town used to have a movie theatre; Maverley had one with the common name the Capital.” However, something is lost with this revision, even though it seems to follow Strunk and White’s famous advice in Elements of Style, “Omit needless words.”

Munro’s sentence has a “once upon a time” (which, as Bruno Bettelheim has suggested, might better be translated as “one there was; once there will be”) familiarity to it that alerts us to a story about something in the past that may indeed have timeless significance. The phrase “this town” suggests the teller has some first-hand knowledge and is perhaps telling of the events as an effort to understand and articulate their significance. The ending phrase, “as such theatres often were,” suggests some broader contextual historical knowledge also. This rhythm is continued in subsequent paragraphs with short storytelling sentences such as “So the girl came. Her name was Leah” and “There was one problem.”

Although it could not have occurred to us on the first reading, a second reading may lead us to ask why Munro opens the story with the movie theater and its owner, since neither play a significant role in the remainder of the story. This seems to ignore Poe’s injunction: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” It also seems to ignore Chekhov’s advice: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.”

However, neither Poe nor Chekhov meant to suggest that every detail in the story must contribute to the “plot” or events of the story, for neither believed that plot was the most important element in a story; both were more concerned with thematic “design” or pattern. If we assume that “Leaving Maverley” is built around a spatial thematic pattern rather than a temporal action plot, then we might suspect that the theatre and its owner are related to significance rather than to events. Furthermore, since we have read the story through once and know that it has something to do with the “secret lives” of its characters, with the mysterious way that unions are created and promises broken, we might suspect that the following introductory details of the story have thematic significance:

*The owner of the theatre, Morgan Holly, does not like dealing with the public;

*Holly prefers to manage the story on the screen.

*The ticket-taker who gets pregnant must quit because “in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show”;

*Morgan Holly “disliked change and the idea of people having private lives.”

*The new girl’s name is Leah; we know Munro’s choice of name is not incidental because Holly asks her about it, and she tells him it is out of the Bible, and because the story ends with a reference to the name. (In Genesis 29, Jacob works for seven years for his chosen Rachel; but Rachel’s father gives him her older sister Leah instead, and he must work another seven years for the woman he wants).

*Leah is forbidden by her father either to look at the movie screen or to listen to the dialogue. Holly agrees, but deceives the father by telling him the theatre is soundproof;

These themes about staying away from the public, dealing with depicted stories rather than “real” people, disliking private lives, being isolated from what is going on, etc. are echoed later when the night policeman Ray Elliot and his wife Isabel are introduced. They have been isolated from the town by the scandal of her leaving her husband for Ray; he brings her news from the town and she, a teacher of English Language and Literature, tells him what she is reading.

The theme of “story” or telling about events rather than experiencing them or being involved in them is related to the theme of “acting” or “fictional reality” brought up when on their walks home, having little to talk about, Leah asks Ray, who sits in on the movies, what the audience had been laughing about. He tells her that he does not get involved in the movies, seeing them only in bits and pieces, so he seldom follows the plots. When Leah asks him what he means by “plots,” he tells her the movies tell “stories.” He does not tell her any specific story, but generically generalizes what the stories are about: “crooks and innocent people and that the crooks generally managed well enough at first by committing their crimes and hoodwinking people singing in night clubs or sometimes, God knows why, singing on mountaintops or in some other unlikely outdoor scenery, holding up the action.” Ray tells Leah that in the movies there are dressed-up actors with glycerin tears, jungle animals brought in from zoos, “people getting up from being murdered in various way the moment the camera was off them”—in other words, that the movies do not deal with reality but rather a similitude of reality, with pretending.

The next section of the story focuses on an event in which Leah is actually involved—running away with the minister’s son--but the event seems distant and unreal to the reader, like the movies played out of sight, because it is known to us only through Ray, who did not even know Leah was working for the minister and his wife. He is surprised that Leah had not mentioned it—“Even though, compared with the theatre, it hardly seemed like much of a foray into the world.” This is ironic, since Leah’s work at the theatre is hardly an encounter with the world, but rather an encounter with a pretend world and even that at a distance. Later Ray’s wife Isabel teases him, “wondering if it was on account of his descriptions of the wide world via the movies that the girl had got the idea.” Thus, the theme of acting as if one were in a story, being motivated to do things because that is how people in movies might do them, is suggested.

The next section of “Leaving Maverley” takes place a few years later when, after Isabel’s illness has necessitated hiring a nurse, Ray runs into Leah on the street with a two-year-old baby boy and a little girl. Although their conversation seems inconsequential, “there was a feeling that she didn’t quite want to part with Ray yet, and Ray did not want it, either, but it was hard to think of anything else to say.” Indeed, there is some tacit or immanent connection between Ray and Leah, it is not something that can be articulated, for, as is often the case, one cannot be sure if it is “real” or not.

When Isabel gets worse, Ray takes her to a hospital in the city. When she fails to wake up one morning and must be transferred to a section of the hospital for people who have no chance of improving but refuse to die, Ray goes back to Maverley and sells his house and leaves: “All those years in the town, all he knew about it, seemed to just slip away from him.” Thus, the title of the story. Although Ray leaves Maverley because Isabel has already left it, one could hardly say that they have any real connection to the town.

There is yet one more “story” or scandal about Leah that leads to her “leaving” Maverley. The United Church Minister wants his wife to divorce him on the grounds of adultery with Leah. The Minister tells his congregation that he did not believe all his own mouthings of the Gospels, that all his preachings about love and sex had been timid and conventional—a sham—and that he was now, thanks to Leah, a free man. Once again, we have the theme of the relationship between pretend behavior and actual behavior. One might say, without cynicism, that the two primary places in a town like Maverley in which “fictions” are presented are movie theatres and churches, even if many believe that the fiction presented in churches is a “higher fiction.” My favorite passage from the Bible is from Hebrews: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for.”

Ray gets work and an apartment in the city and for four years visits Isabel even though she has lapsed into a coma. One day Ray runs into Leah again—this time at the hospital where she does recreation for the cancer patients. Once again, there seems to be some tact connection between the two people; this time, Leah takes it a bit further by offering to come and cook for Ray once in a while. Although he demurs, saying his place is too small, Leah does not seem discouraged. It is at this point that Ray gets word his wife is “gone.” Ray thinks that they said “gone” as if she had got up and left.” Thus, the title theme of “leaving” is emphasized again. Ray feels, the “emptiness in place of her was astounding.” “She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever.” As he makes arrangements for what the hospital staff calls the “remains,” he thinks “what an excellent word—‘remains’. Like something left to dry out in sooty layers in a cupboard.” What Ray now feels is “a lack, something like a lack of air, or proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”

The story ends with Ray thinking of the girl he had been talking to, about how she had to be used to the loss of her children after her divorce. “An expert at losing she might be called—himself an novice by comparison. And now he could not remember her name. Had lost her name, though he’d known it well. Losing, lost. A joke on him, if you wanted one.” Then as he goes up his steps, he remembers her name, Leah. “A relief out of all proportion, to remember her.”

Rather than ponder, “What does this story mean?” I would consider, “What does this story make me feel and think about the mystery of what it means to be human?”

Knowing that stories most often place the most weight on their conclusions, I put myself in Ray’s place at the end and feel the emptiness of something that “was” and now is no more. It does not seem to make any sense; it is why people often feel disbelief at the death of someone they know, thinking, “How can that be? I just saw her yesterday.” I remember a couple of years ago when my dog died, I had been sitting with her, my hand on her chest, and suddenly felt the absence of the heart beat, and instantly she was transformed into “remains.” It is what Hamlet felt when he lifts the skull of Yorick and marvels at the absence of one he once knew as a fellow of infinite jest. I felt my mother’s loss before she died, for she had been on “life support,” (helluva of phrase, no?”) for several days, and I had already begun to look at her as “remains,” going into her hospital room and looking at the numbers on the machines rather than at what was once her. The “loss” or “absence” of her was, as Munro says, “astonishing.”

Leah’s “loss” is more distant from me, for I have not accompanied her throughout the story as I have Ray. However, I do recall my own divorce and the terrifying fear I felt when my ex-wife made threatening suggestions that she was going to move far away from me and take my two children with her. It was unthinkable that what once was “there” might no longer be “there.” It made me engage in a bitter court battle to make sure that I could be part of my children’s’ lives.

Of course, at the end of the story, it only “makes sense” that Ray and Leah will “get together.” And indeed, the fact that Ray suddenly, after a momentary loss of her name, recalls “Leah” and feels a “sense of relief out of all proportion, to remember her” suggests that these two people may now after their sense of “loss” may “find” each other.

But what does this conclusion have to do with all that has gone before? What basic mysteries about the human condition has Munro developed throughout the story to prepare for this crushing sense of loss that does not involve just one man and woman in the story, but possibly all readers of the story?

I see the opening description of the theatre and its owner Morgan Holly as a kind of “introit” to a story about the mystery of our relationship to the world around us--how we adopt or “try out” the roles that define our place in the world. Ray returns from the war with a vague idea that he had to do something “meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him.” But how do we know what is “meaningful”? How many of us live lives that we think have meaning? Ray falls in love with his literature teacher. Why? What makes one “fall in love?” It is important that Isabel is a literature teacher, for the story has something to do with people making decisions based on their experience with depictions or impressions of life. (How else do we make decisions?) And does one’s decisions have implications or consequences? If so, what in the larger “story’ of the world would necessitate such consequences? When Isabel becomes ill, she jokes that God is punishing her for her affair with Ray, saying God was wasting his time when she didn’t even believe in him. She later teases Ray that his descriptions of the world in the movies gave Leah the idea of running away with the preacher’s son.

What kind of “fictions” lead us to behave in the way that we do--the fictions of literature, movies, religion, the stories we make up about those who live secret lives around us? And how do we know that what we do is “right” or “wrong”—the “best” thing for us or the “worst”? Who is the hell is writing the script that governs our lives?

One of the curious things about short story writers is that those who write short stories think like writers of fiction. And writers of fiction do not think like people who do not write fiction, especially short fiction. Short story writers think about reality in terms of language. Short story writers explore the possibility that human experiences are mysteriously meaningful. Does this mean that short story writers inevitably give us a view of reality that is more governed by “fictions” than the kind of reality that nonwriters (or nonreaders) understand or experience?

Alice Munro is, in my opinion, a great short-story writer, and thus a quintessential writer of fiction. In “Leaving Maverley,” she does not just have an “entertaining” story to tell, like Margaret Atwood does in “Stone Mattress,” but rather has some deeply human mystery to explore about what makes humans act and think as they do.

After I finished writing the above comments, I followed up on readersquest comment that she has just posted an essay on her own blog about “Leaving Maverley.” She says that although she likes the Atwood story, ” I have yet to read a short story by Alice Munro that I’ve found enjoyable. My irritation with her stories seems all out of proportion. And I’ve never been able to put my finger on the precise reason for that irritation. It’s very frustrating to read worshipful paeans to Alice Munro’s stories with the feeling that I just can’t participate in the adulation – that maybe I’m just not quite smart enough to “get” what Munro is up to.”

Well if readersquest has never found a Munro story enjoyable, it is certainly not because she is “not smart enough.” I have enjoyed her own exploration of “Leaving Maverley” and recommend it to you heartedly. Although she and I agree on many aspects of the story, we do not come to the same conclusions. I wish I had had more students like readersquest when I was teaching. Click on readersquest in her comment on Part I of this posting and read what she has to say; perhaps we can revisit the different ways she and I read the story in a subsequent blog. In spite of her concluding remark in her comment, I make no claim that what I have said above is the “real” answer to “Leaving Maverley.” There is no “real” answer--just caring, committed readers trying their best to appreciate and understand what caring, committed writers create.

I intended to talk about Munro’s new story “To Reach Japan,” which appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Narrative, but have decided to hold that over until next week when I will discuss the story, as well as the issue of Narrative in which it appears.

Popular Plotted vs. Literary Thematic Stories: Margaret Atwood vs. Alice Munro—Part I

2012-01-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

One of the most troublesome problems I face in trying to come up with meaningful suggestions about reading short stories is the question of whether a story can be effectively read only once or whether it must be read more than once.

It is not as simple as it first appears, for the question seems to depend on the following issue:

Lets say, you pick up a copy of The New Yorker or Harpers from the bedside table at night and read a story. If the story seems immediately clear and “accessible” (to use an irritating word), it may be because it is a simple plot-based story. However, if you are puzzled or dissatisfied after only one reading, it may be because the story is structured according to themes that do not become connected until, having read the entire story, you begin again reading for meaning rather than for “what happens next.”

These issues raise the perennial problem of “accessible” vs. “literary,” suggesting the related problem of “dumbing down” vs. “elitism.” When the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced back in October, 2011, the chair of the judging panel, Stella Rimington, raised a little hell when she noted that the panel was looking for “enjoyable books” and said the judges thought the shortlist were all “readable books.”

(A side note here: I have just finished reading Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker and will post a blog on it’s “accessibility” next week.)

Among the various reactions Remington’s judgment aroused, the one that seemed to attract the most attention was the response by Jeanette Winterson in the Guardian, who reminded readers that an “entertaining read” was not necessarily “literature,” for which she said there is a simple test: “Does this writer’s capacity for language expand my capacity to think and feel?”

Winterson argues that the language of fiction is “not simply a means of telling a story; it is the whole creation of the story. If the language has no power—forget it.” However, the problem, said Winterson, is that powerful language can be daunting; for example,” reading Joyce is hard work and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a very slow read.”

Winterson insists that the controversy is not about “dumbing down,” but rather a misunderstanding about the purpose of literature. “We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.”

The old “accessibility” issue was raised again in November, 2011 by poet John Ashbery in his acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Noting that he was delighted to receive the award since to many people, “what I write makes no sense.” Ashbery mused, to knowing laughter from the audience, that many think his poetry apparently lacks “accessibility,” which he suggested seems to be a “relatively recent requirement” for literature. Ashbery said that when he first discovered modern poetry many years ago he was delighted by its “difficulty.” Noting that when as a student he was assigned Henry James’s Wings of a Dove, he exclaimed to himself, “Well, this is really difficult.” Ashbury laments that nowadays difficulty is “out” and accessibility is “in.” He further argues that reading literature is justifiably difficult because “when we read we are temporarily giving ourselves to something that may change us.”

I want to talk about this issue, focusing on two stories that appeared in the last few months in The New Yorker: Alice Munro’s “Leaving Maverley” in the Nov. 28, 2011 issue, and Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress” in the Dec. 19/26 issue.

I read Munro’s story when it first appeared in my online version of The New Yorker and then read it again when the hard copy of the magazine arrived. Googling around the blog world for others who read Alice Munro, I noted that most of those readers summarize the plot of the story and conclude that it does not add up to anything significant.

And I agree, on a first reading of the story, it seems relatively straightforward and inconsequential, not really very “story like.” However, that judgment may be based on a single reading of the story for plot and character, rather than a second or third readings for thematic complexity.

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe’s insisted that a short story differs from the novel by being organized spatially rather than temporally, the short story has often been misread by readers who read it for plot and character the way they read a novel rather than for language and theme, the way a short story primarily communicates.

A single reading of “Leaving Maverley” for plot and character reveals little of note. Basically, it is about a policeman in a small Ontario town whose wife Isabel has a disabling heart problem. The policeman becomes acquainted with a young woman who later runs off with the town minister’s son, with whom she has two children. When the young woman has an affair with the new minister in town, she loses her children in a divorce. The policeman’s wife falls into a coma that lasts four years. At the end of the story, he happens to run into the young woman again in the hospital just before his wife dies. That’s “what happens” in the story. It does not seem like a story, and it does not seem to mean anything.

As usual in a Munro work, the story covers a long period of time and focuses on several characters—the kind of time span ad character configuration that makes many reviewers call her stories “novelistic.” However, if we read “Leaving Maverley” as a short story rather than as a novel—that is, if we read it more than once—as a language-based thematic structure rather than for plot and character configuration—we may find that it is more complex than we first assume.

Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress” is about a woman named Verna in her sixties who, while on an Arctic cruise, recognizes someone on board as the seventeen-year-old boy who got her pregnant when she was fourteen and then dumped her. The back-story is that Verna has become so embittered against men that she has become something of a “merry widow,” who has gone through four husbands, usually older than herself and well-to-do. Although each died of “natural causes,” she assisted by encouraging bad eating habits, helping them overdose, taking advantage of Viagra’s danger to those with heart problems, etc. She seems never to have been in love and does not like sex, although she knows how to use it. The man, named Bob, who does not recognize her, tries to seduce her, while she plots to kill him—which she does, with a fossil stone she finds on a trip to shore, leaving his body there for the ravens. She conceals the fact that Bob is missing by frequently going into his cabin and messing up his towels and bed. When the cruise is over and Bob does not show up to pay his bill, it is assumed he fell overboard on the final night. Verna is safe and at peace.

I think you will agree that, based on plot summary, Atwood’s story seems more like a “story” than Munro’s, which seems more like the synopsis of a novel. And that’s because, of course, that “Stone Mattress” is a plot; it is even based on a “plot”—Verna’s plot to seek revenge on the man who “done her wrong.” What is the story about? Well, just that—its plot: revenge, poetic justice, selfish predator males, clever plotting females, etc.

And, of course, the primary clever plotting female here is Margaret Atwood. I have to admit I was hooked from the first sentence: “At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.” The language of the story is simple and transparent—the sentences serving the purpose of advancing the plot and making us empathize with Verna so that we feel a sense of satisfaction at the end, closing the magazine with a smile of appreciation for the cleverness of Verna’s plot and, of course, Atwood’s.

Although this is a popular plot story, not a literary thematic story, Atwood cannot resist a little social commentary and a little playing around with metaphor. In the fifties (we know it is the fifties because Atwood helpfully tells us that at the dance Bob Takes Verna to they dance to “Rock Around the Clock,” “Hearts Made of Stone,” and “The Great Pretender”—all titles that Atwood must have been pleased to come up with since they all echo Bob and the title of the story), when a girl got pregnant illegitimately, as Atwood reminds us, no “decent man” would ever want to marry her. Also in the fifties, as Atwood notes, there was no name for what happened to Verna—no “date rape” since “rape was what occurred when some maniac jumped on you out of a bush.” So, for the sake of the story and its social significance, we are to believe that Bob has turned Verna into a murderer and deserves whatever he gets.

Atwood gets in the “literary stuff” in a couple of ways: Her third husband was a “serial quotation freak” who especially likes to quote from the Romantic and Victorian poets, which allows Atwood to drop in relevant quotations now and again, ending the story by recalling her husband, after his Viagra sessions, annoyingly quoting “Calm of mind all passion spent.” Verna muses, “Those Victorians always couple sex with death” and wonders if the line is from Keats or Tennyson. It little matters that it is neither, but rather from Milton’s Sampson Agonistes, for what Atwood wants to suggest is that Verna’s act of revenge leaves her with “passion spent,” much as the sex act might.

The other little “literary” device Atwood playfully uses here is the ironic significance of Verna’s name and the title of the story. For each of her husbands she has provided a learned explanation for her name—from the Latin word for spring, with its promise of phallic renewal; from the 18^th century Scottish poet, James Thompson’s line about vernal breezes, and from Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” “a highly sexual ballet that ended with torture and human sacrifice.”

The title of the story comes from the word “stromatolite,” the world’s earliest fossil, which comes from the Greek word “stroma,” meaning mattress, coupled with the root word for “stone.” This is the kind of fossil that Verna finds on shore and uses to beat Bob’s brains out. And yes, there is, of course, a clever reference here to that old fossil Bob, to the memory of "bad boy Bob" preserved or fossilized in the mind of Verna, to the poetic justice of leaving Bob’s body on a “stone bed” (since Bob’s crime has turned Verna and her bed to stone) in the Arctic to become still another fossil once the ravens have picked him clean.

All very clever, all very easy, all a lot of fun, but meaning what? Nothing, of course, except the cheap thrill of identifying with Verna’s clever search for revenge. The little bit of social commentary and the little bit of literary allusion and metaphor are perhaps meant to make us think we are reading something with social substance and artistic importance, rather than a bit of pop fluff. I read the story twice, but discovered nothing that was not obvious from the first reading. I don’t plan to read it again, although I admit the first reading whiled away the time one night before sleep.

Alice Munro’s “Leaving Maverley” is another story, as it were. I will discuss it next week, along with her recent story in the winter issue of Narrative, entitled “To Reach Japan.”

Responses to Recent Comments and an Explanation of Recent Edits

2012-01-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

Before getting started on a new year of essays for this blog, I ask your indulgence while I tidy up some loose ends left hanging from the old year.

1. Editing of a Few Past Blogs: I have had to make some deletions from previous blogs on some stories by Alice Munro. In my introductory essay for the collection of essays on Munro I have recently edited for EBSCO publishers, I made use of a few paragraphs from my blog entries on “Corrie,” “Gravel,” “Axis,” and “Pride.” Because my work for EBSCO is termed “proprietary content” and EBSCO retains “exclusive perpetual rights to publish that content in print and electronic form,” there seems to be some sort of conflict with my using some of my blog material in the introductory essay. To avoid any problems, I have therefore deleted paragraphs from blog entries that I used in my essay. I apologize to my blog readers for this. Because editing these entries necessitated reposting them to my blog, I temporarily turned off the program that automatically sends new postings to readers by email to avoid cluttering up their mailboxes.

I also deleted the entire entry I posted last year on Alice Munro’s “Passion”—a paper that I presented to the International Short Story Conference in Toronto in 2010—because an expanded version of that essay will appear soon in a special issue of the literary journal Narrative, published by Ohio State University. Although Narrative has not asked me to make this deletion, I wanted to avoid any conflict.

I have researched legal advice on the copyright status of the essays I have published on by blog and determined that they are protected by US copyright law. I own the essays and plan to make use of some of them in future publications. If I wish to make future use of work I have done for EBSCO or for Narrative, I will seek their permission.

2. Responses to Recent Comments: I check my “Comments” file regularly and have decided to respond to some of the most recent ones here rather than in the “Comment” box because they raise issues that I think deserve more than a brief remark.

Thanks to Stephen, Don, and Dex for their comments on my end-of-the-year blog on “Best” lists, especially my reaction to John Stanzinski's piece in P&W. I agree with Stephen that short stories are not memorable for their creation of characters, but I am not sure I agree that that they are memorable for their plot synopses or (unless they are relatively simple “what if” stories) for a “concept.” When they are memorable for a metaphor, it seems to me to be because the metaphor reveals some complex reality that cannot be satisfactorily revealed any other way. I hope to examine this character vs. metaphor issue in more detail in a later blog.

And of course, I agree with Don that when folks come up with metaphors comparing short stories and novels, they inevitably base the comparison on size, with “big” always winning over “small.” I have previously discussed the difference between the kind of “complexity” in the short story and the novel, but it is a crucial issue that needs more exploration, and I will come back to it again and again.

And thanks to my friend Dex, who suggests that it might be a good thing if MFA programs stop using the short story as a convenient teaching tool. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree that when beginning writers who think “novelistically” are forced to write short stories the result is often less than illuminating, but on the other hand I can’t help feeling that when those beginners are taught to think in large structural terms they tend to become sloppy on the sentence level.

“Barebullmoose” was kind enough to respond to my blog on Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams”; thank you. As far as I know, when “Train Dreams” was released as a single volume, it was not expanded from the version that appeared in Best American Short Stories; I think rather that the publisher simply used large type and lots of space. “Barebullmoose” notes that a “Pet Peeve” is when he or she reads a story and later finds out that it is a chapter in a novel, concluding, “I also maintain that if a chapter of a novel can stand alone as a viable short story, then how good can that novel possibly be?” I have discussed this “stand-alone story” vs. chapter in a novel issue before, but once again, it is an important issue that I need to explore further. I would phrase “Barebullmoose’s” question differently: “If a story is a chapter in a novel, how good can the story be?”

In a response to my blog on E. T.A. Hoffmann’s “New Year’s Eve Adventure,” “readersquest” asks me if I know the origins of the “body-soul” dichotomy in Hoffmann. If there is a primal origin of the dichotomy, I would suggest it might be what Mircea Eliade describes as the primitive human distinction between the “sacred and the profane”—in which the profane is the world of everyday practical experience, while the sacred is the world of that human sense of there being some reality other than that on which we stub our toe. It has always been my opinion that the short story is more apt to deal with the “sacred,” whereas the novel is more apt to focus on the “profane.”

In a “Comment” on my Best American Short Stories: 2011 blog, “anonymous” asks me if I have read Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child. Yes, I have, but I am afraid I did not like them as much as “anonymous does.” Here is my conclusion to my review of that book: “Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child is a textbook example of what often results when an interesting and entertaining novelist writes short stories: pleasurable, but perfectly ordinary, plot-based stories with a concluding twist, featuring likeable but relatively simple characters whose problems the plots resolve rather neatly. Those who like novels will find these stories completely satisfying. Those who like short stories will like them, but they won’t be haunted by them, and they won’t feel the need to read them again. But perhaps that’s less the difference between novels and short stories than it is the difference between popular and literary fiction.” This issue of “popular” vs. “literary” fiction is one to which I will return in a blog later this month.

In a Comment on my blog on Alice Munro’s recent “Dear Life,” “Anonymous asks whether the piece is “fiction or nonfiction.” Well, if the question is, did the event Munro describes happen or not happen? Then I reckon it did happen. However, I suspect anonymous’ question is more complex than that. I don’t think the issue is whether Munro “made up” some of the details in the piece. The real question may be: What transforms an event into a story? And the answer is not simply dependent on “what really happened?” Once again, this is an issue that I hope to return to later.

Thanks to Aaron Riccio for his “Comment” on my blog on Entertainment vs. Literary stories back in October, especially my discussion of David Means’ story “El Morro.” Aaron, who did not care for the Means story, concludes, “What it boils down to, for me, is having something to grab onto, and authors like Means seem to go to an overly literary place, to the extent such that they obfuscate rather than reveal.” However, Aaron also notes that this may be his initial gut reaction to the story and that he will perhaps return to writers like Means later, noting that he wants “to understand how I could so totally hate their earlier work, but if I'm not making a connection, I'm simply not making a connection.” This gets to the problem of whether some stories need to be read more than once. I will come back to this issue in a blog later this month.

Thanks to “trodbarne” for a comment on my emphasis on “spirituality” in the short story. “trodbarne” says, “I feel there is an acute confusion around spiritual things these days--which I guess places them appropriately into the hands of story writers.” I agree and will come back to the issue of spirituality in the form again. And in response to “trodbarne’s” suggestion that I might think of some title for my book like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style: Although I occasionally reread my tattered little paperback of Strunk and White, I do not plan to emphasize the traditional elements of plot, voice, point of view, etc. Finally, I appreciate “trodbarne’s” request that I focus on contemporary writers rather than the “classics,” for indeed although I will talk about some of the masterpieces of the genre in the book and what makes them great, I do plan to focus primarily on recent writers.

Thanks to all the others who wrote comments congratulating me on the third anniversary of my blog and encouraging me on the new book. Thanks especially to Sandra Rouse, Alisa Cox, Loree Westron, Ann Graham, Joe Melia, and my lovely daughter-in-law Ean May for suggestions about the title of the book.

Well, now it is time to get down to work. I hope never to stop learning about the power of “story,” and I trust I will never tire of sharing what I learn with others. Thanks so much for your support. May 2012 be a most fulfilling year for you!

“A New Year's Eve Adventure” by E. T. A. Hoffmann

2011-12-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all my readers! I wish you all good fortune in the year ahead. I hope you continue reading my modest contributions, for I fully intend to continue writing them as long as body and mind allow. I thought I would end the year with a brief discussion of one of my favorite New Year’s Eve stories—a tale that reflects that romantic/modern convention so crucial to the development of the short story—the merging of so-called “reality” and the world of fantasy/art/imagination.

E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, "A New Year's Eve Adventure," first published in German in 1816 and translated into English in the late 19^th-century, is partially Hoffmann's own romantic fantasy, but it is also a satire on the convention of the lost reflection or shadow familiar in other German fantasies of the early 19^th century. It is typical of Hoffman in that its realm of reality seems to hover halfway between the real world and the world of fairytale; thus the split in the central character Erasmus Spikher, both between himself and his reflection, as well as between himself and the narrator, referred to as the Travelling Enthusiast, is reflective of the duality of the world as Hoffman sees it‑‑always half actual, half imaginative, always half comic half tragic.

The basic nature of such a split is announced in the editor's foreword to the story in which the Travelling Enthusiast is described as one who cannot separate the events of his inner life from those of the outside world. Suggesting that the reader is to enter a world where he cannot determine where inner world ends and outer world begins, the editor warns the reader that in this story he will be in a strange magical realm where figures of fantasy step right into his own life.

The story opens with a convention familiar in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (who was highly influenced by Hoffmann's fiction) of the Enthusiast's sense of inexplicable fear and madness, the source of which is the fact that every New Year's Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for him. He goes to a party given by the counselor of justice and there sees Julia, a beautiful woman from his former life of love and poetry, only to discover she is married to a spindle‑shanked little creature with eyes like a frog.

Retreating from the grand party to a beer cellar, the Enthusiast meets a tall, sad man who looks like a character from a Reubens painting and a short, dried‑up‑looking fellow who has a powerful antipathy to mirrors. This second stranger has two different faces‑‑one a pleasant young man's and the other that of a demonic old man. We discover that this little man is Erasmus Spikher who has lost his reflection and that the tall man is Peter Schlemihl, the man who lost his shadow, from Adalbert Chamisso's novel of that name published in 1814. When the narrator goes to a room that night, he looks into a mirror and sees from the background of his own reflection the image of Julia, which then changes into the image of the little man, Erasmus Spikher.

The duality of the narrator and Spikher is made clear when Spikher tells him that he has lost his reflection because he earlier gave it to Julia, or Giuletta, as he calls her. When the Enthusiast awakes the next morning after having strange dreams of Julia as a demonic figure out of the paintings of Brueghel, Callot, and Rembrandt, he thinks it all must be a dream until he finds a manuscript which is "The Story of the Lost Reflection"‑‑the story of Erasmus Spikher, which is now inserted into the text and becomes the greater part of "A New Year's Eve Adventure."

This insert story begins with Spikher travelling from the cold North to the beautiful warmth of Italy. Leaving his wife to fulfill this dream, he sets off for Florence where he meets Giuletta, who looks exactly as if she were a woman from Rembrandt walking about. He immediately falls in love with her, saying he has seen her in his dreams, that he has always been in love with her, that she is his life. It is at this point that Spikher also meets the strange figure of Doctor Dapertutto and, in a madness of jealousy, kills a young Italian suitor of Giuletta. When he realizes that he must now leave her to avoid prosecution, she begs him to leave her his reflection. Spikher travels back home to his wife and child and gradually forgets Giuletta, that is, until his son and wife discover that he has no reflection and reject him as a demon. Claiming that Giuletta must now have him body and soul, he calls up Dr. Dapertutto, who tries to make him poison his wife and child. When he refuses, Giuletta tries to convince him to sign over his wife and child to Dr. Dapertutto, but this too he refuses at the last moment.

Spikher's story ends with his wife telling him to go out into the world again to see if he can track down his reflection and get it away from the Devil. Spikher follows this advice, meets with Peter Schlemihl, and plans to travel with him. The story ends with a postscript by the Travelling Enthusiast, who once again takes over the narration to tell Hoffmann, that he is completely saturated with the manifestations of this New Year's Eve and that he now believes that Julia is a picture of a siren by Rembrandt or Callot.

This is of course a story within a story--sometimes published under the title "A New Year's Eve Adventure" and sometimes published only as Spikher's insert story and entitled "The Story of the Lost Reflection." It belongs within a romantic tradition in German 19^th century romanticism--a tradition of the novelle that begins with Goethe and develops in more detail with the works of Ludwig Tieck, Adalbert Chamisso, and Hoffman himself. American readers are most familiar with the tradition in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom make use of the familiar convention of the double figure based on the notion of the split in the self between the body and the soul.

"A New Year's Eve Adventure" also makes use of the convention, made most famous by Goethe, of the man who falls in love with a beautiful woman, sells his soul to the Devil, and is doomed to wander eternally in search of his lost self. In this story, Hoffman makes the convention a bit more complicated by using it and by making fun of it at the same time. Thus, we have a classic romantic story of the lost self, even as we have a story that burlesques the theme. This device of parodying a convention is one of the primary ways that the short story develops historically.

The fact that the story of the Travelling Enthusiast serves as a framework for the story of Erasmus Spikher suggests that Spikher functions as a double for the Travelling Enthusiast, even as within his story we meet a character out of the fiction of Hoffman's friend Adalbert von Chamisso. The fact that a fictional character like Peter Schlemihl enters into the frame story as if he were a real character is indicative of Hoffman's innovation of integrating the world of dream, fantasy, fairy tale and psychological projection into the world of "as if" reality.

The tone of the story is one of mock seriousness, for although it seems to take place in the real world and involve real people, the events are also described as if they were the events of the fairy tale. Throughout the story, there is a sense of mocking both the Travelling Enthusiast and Spikher, both for their obsession with Juila/Giuletta and for their taking themselves so seriously.

The story draws from the fairy tale convention of the reflection or shadow as that force that divides the ego into truth and dream. And indeed this split between what is physically actual and what is an imaginative projection is both the theme and the technique of Hoffmann's story, for the style of the story itself is calculated to keep the reader off balance, never being quite sure whether he is reading a fiction that follows the conventions of realism or one that follows the conventions of the fairy tale, never being sure whether he is in the world of physical reality or in the world of pure psychological projection.

The fact that Giuletta seems to be a character out of a painting by Rembrandt or Callot suggests further that the basis for the story we are reading is the realm of the artwork. Nothing comes from external reality here; everything comes from art itself. The stories of Hoffmann mark the beginning of the Romantic insistence that reality is of the imagination only. Moreover, Hoffmann's combination of psychological realism and fairytale conventions is a key factor in the development of the short story genre in America with the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.

As I have noted in a previous blog entry, the primary contemporary artist of this short story mixture of fantasy and reality innovated by Hoffmann is Steven Millhauser; both are artists of the short story as a form that affirms the “reality of artifice.”

Happy New Year to all readers and writers of the underestimated short story form.

End-of-the Year "Best" & "Notable" Books Lists: 2011

2011-12-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

If the annual end-of-the-year lists of “notable” or “best” “books of the year” in the various media are any indication of the health of the short story in 2011, then the paucity of short-story recommendations this December suggests that…well, what else is new?—the short story remains in the shadow of the bigger, and therefore obviously better, novel.

The only real short story winner in the “best” lists this year is Don DeLillo’s The Lady Esmeralda: Nine Stories. The first collection of a writer who has been, arguably, claimed to be American’s premier novelist, was bound to get some press. I have not yet read these stories written, perhaps to while away the time between DeLillo’s more important work over the past 32 years. I will. I will. Sometime in the next few weeks. But I am in no hurry, having found myself more than once unable to get through one of DeLillo’s “baggy monsters.”

A friend and colleague sent me a review of The Lady Esmeralda by Joe Gross, written for the Cox newspaper syndicate, which he opened by saying that to read this book “is to think it’s past time, or perhaps the exact right time, for the short story to make the comeback it richly deserves.” Well, God bless Joe Gross. I hope he is right, but will reserve judgment of course until I read the book myself.

Gross suggests that we might be moving toward a period of modern literature in which our culture has no time for anything but a “concentrated blast of meaning.” He cites Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction as being a work in which any chapter could be removed and published on its own. (As a matter of fact, most of the chapters were published as short stories on their own). I agree, and am encouraged that Egan’s book has not only won the big awards, but has also remained on the paperback bestseller lists for months. I liked Goon Squad and will try to find some time to write about its short story qualities after the first of the year.

Gross ends his review by saying DeLillo’s collection has made him ready for “shorter fiction to become common coin, for stories to be discussed with the same gravity as the novel.” I hope he is right.

In addition to The Angel Esmeralda, the New York Times lists only the following two short story collections in their list of 100 Notable Books of 2011:

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, Charles Baxter

Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories. Barry Hannah

The Washington Post lists no short story collections.

Kirkus lists only Steven Millhauser’s We Others.

The Library Journal lists only Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family.

David Ulin, of The Los Angeles Times, lists two short story collections:

Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, Edith Pearlman.

You Think That’s Bad: Stories, Jim Shepard

The most frequently listed works of fiction this year were, of course, novels:

Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

The one novel I was happy to see on several lists was Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which has, as I suggested in a previous blog, many short fiction characteristics.

In my opinion, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision and Steven Millhauser’s We Others are the best books of fiction of the year. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?

As a final note, a brief comment on an article by John Stazinski in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Poets and Writers: Stazinski, who teaches writing and literature at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, MA, and has published in several prime places, talks a bit about a fiction workshop conducted by Grub Street, an independent center for creative writing in Boston, that he thinks should be the wave of the future—a workshop that purports to teach fiction writing by workshopping novels rather than short stories—a task that many MFA programs steer away from because of the novel’s forbidding length.

Stazinzki says the Grub Street experiment raises some “uncomfortable questions” for MFA programs across the country, arguing that although the short story may be a “great pedagogical device for teaching certain aspects of fiction writing,” “no one dreams of writing the Great American Short Story Collection” and every MFA candidate knows that when publishers want fiction, they want a novel.

The difference between a novel and a short story, says Stazinski, is like the difference between a symphony and a country song. The difference between constructing a short story and a novel is like the difference between “building a rowboat and building a yacht.” He quotes approvingly William Giraldi’s essay in Rumpus, who says the novel is as different from a collection of stories “as a truck is from a tricycle.” Lord, how I hate these glib comparisons which consider only at the external size of the work and not the difference between their narrative ways of exploring what we so casually take to be “reality!”

Stazinzki concludes that the Grub Street folks at Boson may have found a whole new way for novelists to workshop. If this is true, if MFA programs begin teaching fiction writing by workshopping novels rather than short stories, there may indeed be important implications for the future of the short story. It is probably true that most of the writers devoting a great deal of time to the short story nowadays are MFA students, and it is often the case that their first books are collections of stories workshopped in MFA classes (books in which the writing was good enough for publishers to take a chance on if they promised that their second book would be a novel.) One of the basic differences between the novel and the short story is that the writing on the crucial sentence level is usually better in a short story than in the novel. What’s going to happen if MFA programs begin to focus more on the macrocosmic structure of the novel and ignore the microcosmic structure of the short story? More on this in the New Year.

I apologize for neglecting this blog in the past few weeks. I have been reading a great deal, but reading in the relaxed atmosphere of my family—in an easy chair in front of a fire rather than hunched over my computer in my cold study. I will return to my more regular posting in January—commenting on what I have been reading, replying to the comments I have received about my planned new book, and responding to the poll of readers about a possible name for that book.

Have a wonderful holiday, whatever you celebrate!

How-to-Read Books and New Book on Reading Short Stories

2011-11-16T11:32:00.000-08:00

Today, Wednesday, November 16, 2011, is the third anniversary of this blog—“Reading the Short Story.” In that three-year period I have posted over 160 brief essays on various aspects of short story theory and criticism, and on many different short story writers, short story collections, and individual short stories. I hope to continue posting essays at least once a week. But now that I have completed editing work on the new Critical Insights: Alice Munro book, I am itching to begin a new publishing project. Although I am no believer in such things, a few days ago, a newspaper horoscope provided the following Aquarian encouragement:

“You’re not sure you have the energy to dive into a project, but dive you will. You have a feeling that your adrenaline reserves will kick in when you need them most—and you’re right!” Can the stars be wrong?

So, here’s what I have in mind. I have always believed that although the short story is a “natural” form, it is at the same time a form of high “artifice.” That is, although it probably began with the basic human urge to relate something some strange that happened or to illustrate some significant idea, it has a long tradition of developing certain literary conventions that make reading a short story a different experience than reading a novel. In my opinion, the form is not popular because often the general reader, not knowing its conventions of artifice, tries unsuccessfully to read it the same way he or she reads a novel. Furthermore, I have always believed that academic readers—students and teachers alike—have undervalued and largely ignored the form because in their focus on what they consider to be the more complex and comprehensive novel, they do not understand or appreciate how short stories uniquely capture ambiguous human reality.

So what I would like to write is a book that is accessible to the popular reader, acceptable to the professional reader, and meets the approval of the short story writer--a bridge between general readers and academic readers. Based on my forty years of reading, teaching, and writing about the short story, the book would offer suggestions I have found helpful for reading the short story with pleasure and understanding--in short, a “how to” book for readers that would stimulate their interest in the short story—a daunting task. Virginia Woolf opened her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” (Common Reader, Second Series) cautioning that the only advice one person can give another about reading is “to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” She says she aims to put forth a few suggestions about reading, confident that her readers will not allow such suggestions to “fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.” However, “to enjoy freedom,” Woolf wisely adds in a final reminder, “we have of course to control ourselves.”

I hope the book I begin to write this week embodies just the right blend of freedom and control to encourage both general and professional readers to read the short story with appreciation and understanding. The first aspect of the book on which I seek the advice of my own readers is what to name it, since titles can either attract or affront. “How to Read a Short Story” seems a bit pretentious and somewhat condescending. “Reading the Short Story,” which is the title of this blog, makes an assumption that there is such a genre as “the” short story, rather than merely lots of stories that happen to be short. “Reading Short Stories” sounds too casual on the one hand or too much like a text anthology on the other. How Does a Short Story Mean?—after John Ciardi’s famous How Does a Poem Mean? sounds a bit too academic. And I sure don’t want to call it, How To Read a Short Story Like a Professor. I would like to create a book for the educated general reader as well as the student and professional reader, which can serve as “A Guide for People Who Love Short Stories and For Those Who Want to Write Them”—to echo Francine Prose subtitle for her Reading Like a Writer.

Over the next several months as I work on this book, I plan to post on this blog my progress and my problems; I sincerely solicit your advice at all stages of its composition. Initially, I ask you to choose on the sidebar poll what you think is the best name for the book.

As a first step in writing such a book, I did a fairly thorough search of other books that suggest “how to read.” Tom Lutz did a helpful survey of such books back in 2007; you can find it at:

http://www.salon.com/2007/03/08/reading_4/

Lutz points out that whereas the “how-to-read” genre has been around since Noah Porter published “Books and Reading, or What Books Shall I Read and How Should I Read Them?” in 1871, there is something odd, though, about the latest slough of anti-academic books offering to teach us “how to read, since they are primarily written by academics “But perhaps it is because most of these books are only masquerading as guides to reading. What each really offers is a series of explications of famous passages, much like, well, academic criticism.”

Below is my own list of “how to read” books, most of which you can find also in Lutz’s article. I would like to weave my way through this thicket, making use of the best of them and avoiding, of course, the worse. I am no famous author and thus cannot arouse interest by luxuriating in personal anecdotes and autobiography. I am no high-powered critic who writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times, or The Times Literary Supplement, who can wander with scholarly ease through a wide range of worldly reading. I would like to write a book that aspiring writers and aspiring teachers would find useful, but at the same time, I have no authority to write a “guide for writers” and no desire to put together a standard college textbook.

I do not plan to submit a formal proposal to publishers until I have the book outlined and at least one chapter completed I have no illusions about how difficult it will be to find a publisher who thinks a book on how to read short stories will sell well enough to justify its publication. After all, few publishers think the form generates enough interest to publish books of short stories, unless the author promises a novel. But I plan to write the book anyway. Wish me luck!

How-To-Read Books

Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book, 1940. This is a classic book on reading in general. Clifton Fadiman, writing in The New Yorker, said it was the only “self-improvement book” he has ever read that did not make him “want to go out and start improving things by assassinating the author.” That, of course is often the problem with “how-to” books: People are put off by someone daring to suggest that they need to be taught something they already know.

I. A. Richards. How to Read a Page, 1942. Subtitled “a course in efficient reading with an introduction to 100 great works,” the word “efficient” certainly does not suggest speed reading, skimming, or summarizing, but rather what is often discredited now as “close reading” by the great British literary critic and semanticist.

Harold Bloom. How to Read and Why, 2000. One of Bloom’s major arguments about contemporary criticism is that ideology, “particularly in its shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading.” Irony, says Bloom, “demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise…. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.”

Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 2003. Foster argues that the professor of literature has acquired over the years a “language of reading,” a “grammar of literature, a set of conventions, patterns, codes and rules” he or she uses when reading literature. He says that memory, symbol, pattern are the three items that separate the professional reader from the “rest of the crowd” and that what he hopes to do in the book is to “give readers a view of what goes on when professional students of literature do their thing, a broad introduction to the codes and patterns that inform our reading.” Foster is a little too chatty and informal for my tastes. I cringe when he says, “By now I’ve beaten you severely about the head and shoulders with the notion that literature grows out of other literature” or uses the word “natch” as short for naturally.

Caroline Gordon, How to Read a Novel, 1957. Gordon says that since the novel is “different from any other form of art, if we are to become good readers of fiction, we must learn to recognize and in our own minds define this essential difference.” Gordon says up front that her concern is with the “general reader” and that her book is an attempt to answer two questions: “What is a novel?” and “How Should It Be Read?” Gordon includes fairly conventional chapters on setting, point of view, etc.

John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel, 2006. Sutherland complains about information overload, suggesting that there is so much out there that we cannot know what we should read. “How can we identify the 10 percent, or less, of fiction available that is not crap”? Sutherland spends a lot of time talking about modern market techniques and longing for the Victorian good old days. He is genial in a British scholar sort of way, but doesn’t really talk very cogently about what his title promises.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, 2005. Smiley says the most obvious hallmark of novels is length and that the form was invented to be long because “what early novelists wanted to communicate could not be communicated in a shorter or more direct form, and also because length itself is enjoyable.” The characters or the narrator’s voice or the author’s way of thinking becomes something the reader wants to continue to experience. “In a novel, length is always a promise, never a threat.” Smiley also says that the “most important essential characteristic of the novel that arises out of its structure, out of the combination of narrative ad length, is that it is inherently political.” By this, she means that since the reader knows it is highly implausible that a single human mind has no social context, inevitably the subject of any novel “comes to be the coexistence of the protagonist and his group.” Smiley includes chapters on the history of the novel, the psychology of the novel, a case history of her own novel Good Faith, and a brief synopsis and commentary of 100 novels. This is a big book—almost 600 pages—with lots of personal anecdotes.

Nancy C. Millett and Helen J. Throckmorton, How to Read a Short Story, 1969. This is a small textbook in which Millett and Throckmorton, two professors at Wichita State University discuss the basic elements of fiction—theme, character, plot, symbolism, and irony—including stories to illustrate them—Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” Chekhov’s “The Wager,” Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Portable Phonograph,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” For each “element” and each story, they point out what they call “clues” to discovering theme, character, plot, etc.

John Ciardi and Miller Williams, How Does a Poem Mean, 1975. This is a classic textbook anthology that includes a number of poems along with Ciardi’s commentary on them.

Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem, 1999. Hirsch makes generalizations about poetry, explicates specific poems, and quotes critiques and writers. He says an exemplary poem teaches you how to read it. However, he laments that so many people have become estranged from the devices and techniques of poetry and poetic thinking that reading poetry is an endangered activity, maybe, he says, because reading itself is endangered in our culture. The book includes a glossary and a list of suggested reading.

James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008. By fiction, Wood primarily means the novel. However, he redeems himself in my mind by pointing out that two of his favorite twentieth-century critics are the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes. Wood likes these critics because, being formalists, “they thought like writers: they attended to style, to words, to form, to metaphor and imagery.” However, Wood says, unlike Shklovsky and Barthes, he does not wish to present himself as a specialist writing for other specialists. Although he says he hopes to ask theoretical questions he wants to answer them practically.

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, 2006. Prose’s central point is that to be a good reader, one must be knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, those elements of writing that constitute the craft: words, sentences, character, dialogue, and details. Prose reminds us of something that students of literature often find it hard to accept—that subject matter is not all that important, that what the writer most often wants to do is write really great sentences. Over and over, Prose urges the reader to focus on words, rhythm, and pattern; it is thus not surprising that she more often cites short stories rather than novels to illustrate stylistic excellence and to explain formal strategies.

Steven Millhauser and The Reality of Artifice

2011-11-10T19:24:00.000-08:00

I had just finished reading Steven Millhauser’s new book, We Others: New and Selected Stories, when I received my copy of Best American Short Stories, 2011, which reprinted his story “Phantoms,” from McSweeneys. And then, son-of-a-gun, in came the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker with his story “Miracle Polish.” As was said of the ubiquitous Mr. Browne in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Millhauser has of late been “laid on like the gas.” That’s all right by me. Steven Millhauser is always a welcome guest in my mind.

We Others includes fourteen stories from Millhauser’s previous four collections (In the Penny Arcade, 1986; The Barnum Museum, 1990; The Knife Thrower, 1998; and Dangerous Laughter, 2008. It also includes seven “new” stories: “The Slap,” “The White Glove,” “Getting Closer,” The Invasion from Outer Space,” “People of the Book,” “The Next Thing,” and the novella-length title story “We Others.”

The Millhauser story chosen for the 2011 Best American Short Stories, “Phantoms,” is also a ghost story, in which Millhauser explores one his favorite “romantic” concepts—that there is another dimension of reality surrounding us, a dimension of spirits of those who have died. “Phantoms” is made up of various “case studies” in which these spirits appear to people, interspersed with various hypotheses or explanations of what they are. For example, one explanation is that the phantoms are “the unwanted or unacknowledged portions of ourselves, which we try to evade but continually encounter; they make us uneasy because we know them; they are ourselves.” Given Millhauser’s “romantic” view of reality, perhaps his favorite hypothesis is that we are all phantoms, that our bodies are artificial constructs of our brains and we are dream creations. “The world itself is a great seeming.”

Millhauser’s most recent story in the new issue of The New Yorker, “Miracle Polish,” is a “concept” stories that draws on nineteenth-century German romantic notions, which Millhauser has used before. For example, in his story “August Eschenburg,” he explores Heinrich von Kleist’s paradoxical notion that, from the perspective of art, the automaton is preferable to the human--a concept most fully developed in Kleist's dialogue, "On the Puppet Theatre," in which a famous dancer tells Kleist that puppets are better able to express grace and beauty in their motions than human beings because they have no choice but to obey mechanical principles; the more that the human element of the puppeteer can be removed, the more perfect the dance the puppets perform.

The purest form of grace exists, says the dancer, only in those who either have no consciousness or those who have infinite consciousness--either the puppet or God. When Kleist responds that this theory suggests that we must eat from the tree of knowledge once again and then fall back into a state of innocence, the dancer replies, "by all means...that is the last chapter in the history of the world." Critic Robert Langbaum has suggested that this is the central myth of romantic literature: the psychologized and secular version of the myth of the Fall, for the Fall to the romantics is indeed a fall into consciousness. For Kleist, says Langbaum, art becomes the back door to Eden, in that art delivers us from self-consciousness through ritual. And indeed it is ritual rather than self-consciousness that characterizes Kleist's fiction.

Nineteenth-century German Romantic, E.T.A. Hoffman’s “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” is a story within a story which is sometimes published only with the insert story and entitled "The Story of the Lost Reflection." Erasmus Spikher is a man who has lost his reflection; another character in the story, Peter Schlemihl, who lost his shadow, is from Adalbert Chamisso's novel of that name published in 1814. These stories belongs within a romantic tradition in German nineteenth-century Romanticism-- a tradition of the novelle that begins with Goethe and develops in more detail with the works of Ludwig Tieck, Adalbert Chamisso, and Hoffman himself.

American readers are most familiar with the tradition in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom make use of the familiar convention of the double figure which is based on the notion of the split in the self between the body and the soul. The stories of Hoffmann mark the beginning of the Romantic insistence that reality is of the imagination only. Moreover, Hoffmann's combination of psychological realism and fairytale conventions is a key factor in the development of the short story genre in America with the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Such a transition is part of that major shift in the nineteenth century that critic M. H. Abrams says characterizes the basic concepts and patterns of romantic philosophy and art, that is, as displaced and reconstituted theology or as a secularized form of devotional experience. The resulting basic tendency of the romantic revolution is to naturalize the supernatural and humanize the divine.

Millhauser’s “Miracle Polish” begins in traditional folklore fashion: A stranger comes to the door with something for sale called “Miracle Polish.” When the protagonist buys a bottle of the polish and shines his mirror with it, he seems to see himself differently: “There was a freshness to my body, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before… What I saw was a man who had something to look forward to, man who expected things of life.” This transformation becomes an obsession with him, and he polishes all the mirrors in his house and buys many more mirrors to polish and hang so that everywhere he turns he sees his transformed self. However, when he tries to involve the woman with whom he has a relationship in his mirror obsession, she accuses him of preferring the woman in the mirror to her actual physical self.

As in many other Millhauser stories, “Miracle Polish” is a metaphorical exploration of the Platonic notion that underlies all romanticism—the reality of artifice. The narrator’s sense of growing obsession is typical of the romantic short story that gave birth to the form in the early nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe has always been accused of being indifferent to living, flesh and blood subjects. W. H. Auden has said there is no place in any of his stories for "the human individual as he actually exists in space and time," that is, as a natural creature and an historical person. Richard Wilbur in his famous Library of Congress Lecture in 1959 concluded that Poe's aesthetic that "art should repudiate everything human and earthly," was insane. However, the repudiation of "reality" as being only everyday human experience is precisely what myth and folklore--the primal forerunners of the short story--are based on. Poe's aesthetic, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the short story, has always been based on this same assumption that the artistic objectification of desire is true reality.

Millhauser is motivated by the same obsessions that drove William Blake--to see a world in a grain of sand, to affirm that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Best American Short Stories 2011

2011-11-08T09:17:00.000-08:00

In her Introduction to The Best American Short Stories: 2011, Geraldine Brooks admits that when she read the 120 stories preselected and sent to her by series editor Heidi Pitlor, she was more than a little overwhelmed by her task of picking the top twenty, asking, “And who was I, anyway, to be making this call? I who had never written a short story.”

And readers who have followed this series faithfully for many years might well ask why the series has been picking writers who know little or nothing about short stories to be guest editor, for example, Richard Russo in 2010 and Alice Sebold in 2009.

It does not appear that such big-name novelists on the cover have done much to attract reviews for the series. I searched all the standard newspaper and periodical databases and could only find three or four, e.g. short notes in Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews, and a notice in the Chicago Tribune, primarily because the book features a story by Rebecca Makkai, a Chicago native (her fourth straight appearance in the series!). I reckon the book is selling fairly decently though; it was recently listed at about #1,000 on Amazon. That’s not bad, considering that Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is running at around #3,000 on the Amazon list.

I do not intend to offer extended comments on the twenty stories this year, but will simply indicate why I liked some of the stories and did not like others. One of the things I like best about this series (and the PEN/O. Henry Award series also) is that they often introduce me to writers I might have otherwise missed, since I simply cannot subscribe to all the journals that originally published their stories. Seven of the twenty stories in this year’s BASS originally appeared in The New Yorker and one appeared in Harper’s, both to which I do subscribe. However, without the BASS, I might have missed Megan Mayhew Bergman’s story “Housewifely Arts,” which appeared in One Story and Ehud Havazelet’s “Gurov in Manhattan,” which appeared in Triquarterly.

I was hooked by Bergman’s story when the narrator said she was driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach “so that I can hear my mother’s voice ring through the beak of a thirty-six-year old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me.” Bergman is a witty writer who makes me laugh, but who sneaks up on me with a serious story about the complexity of a woman’s relationship to her mother, joking her way to a final admission of a discovered truth about “what maniacs we are—sick with love, all of us.”

Havazelet’s “Gurov in Manhattan” is a perfect example of my conviction that short stories have to be read slowly and attentively or not at all. I started this story three times, determined to read it because it was based on my of my favorite stories of all times, Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog,” but it kept fading away from me. I am glad I did not give up, for it is a very delicate story about a man who has reached that age when he must painfully realize that he is not what he once thought he was. The central male character, Sokolov, is the one with the dog in this story, an old dog having a helluva time with his bowels. The Chekhov allusion is to the crucial moment in “Pet Dog” when, after seducing Anna, Gurov pauses to eat a slice of melon. It is a moment that Havazelet rightly points out that Chekov does so well---“a moment where nothing seems to happen but yet everything has changed.” Yes, indeed.

The 100 stories that Brooks did not pick from the 120 that Pitlor selected from approximately 4,000 she somehow managed to read are listed at the back of the book. So the twenty presumably “Best American Short Stories” we have in this year’s book have been “chosen” three times—once by the editor who originally published them, then by Pitlor, and finally by Brooks. Of course, the finally twenty reflect each editor’s notion of what “best” means.

Brooks admits up front that she looks “sideways at short stories, like a nervy horse at an unknown rider. I wasn’t quite sure how they worked.” Then she relates a little anecdote of being at a literary event at which a group of writers took turns telling jokes; the best jokester, she said, turned out to be Richard Bausch, a master of the short story—no coincidence Brooks suggests, since “The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common…in the joke and the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs.”

As a result if Brooks’ notion of the relationship between the joke and the short story—not a bad comparison actually, that is, for a certain kind of short story—results in this year’s volume focusing more than usual on, well, a certain kind of short story that Brooks likes: stories with clever, witty, funny writing, e.g. the stories by Bergman, Egan, Goodman, Horrocks, Lipsyte, Nuila, Saunders; and stories with snappy endings, like a punch line, e.g. Englander, Johnston, Row.

The result is that this is an entertaining, very accessible, readable collection, with only a few stories that are complexly and humanly challenging. You really don’t have to read these stories twice; they are funny, clever, witty, transparent, conceptual, satiric, etc. That’s all well and good and may be just the thing to get folks back to reading short stories. I hope so.

Writers in this collection whose work I know well include the following, some of which I enjoyed, some of which I found passing fair, some of which I thought ordinary, but passed the time of day.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Ceiling” failed to interest me much. Too much dependent on social change in Nigerian society, with a relatively weak “lost love” story stringing the social issues together.

Jennifer Egan’s “Out of Body” is a chapter from her best-selling A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I have read and enjoyed, but this is not my favorite story from that collection of stories parading as a novel. I liked it better in the book because it provided a context for these characters that the stand-alone story does not provide.

Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a fable/folkloric story about what is capable of in order to survive in brutal situations. Like the stories in Englander’s well-received collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges several years ago, this story is an effective combination of the rough-edged and the smoothed-out. I feel about this one the same way I did about Englander’s earlier tales: I liked them, but felt sheepishly as if I had allowed myself to be manipulated by a slick storyteller.

Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova” is another slick, smooth, “a-little-to-clever-for-my tastes” tale that seems to exist primarily as an opportunity for Goodman to just “fool around” a bit while not writing a novel.

I wrote about Claire Keegan’s story “Foster” when it appeared in The New Yorker. I like this story very much, not only because it makes me long to be back in Ireland, but because it captures so delicately and authentically the mystery of family secrets and childhood vulnerability.

I am a great fan of Steven Millhauser. I just recently read and reviewed his We Others: New and Selected Stories, and he has a new story in the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker. I will discuss the story in BASS, “Phantoms,” his new story, and some of the stories in WE Others in a separated blog entry next week.

As anyone who knows me at all knows, I am not a great fan of Joyce Carol Oates. I have written about why I am not a fan on this blog before. This story, “”ID,” inspired by her having to id her husband’s body, is too routinely “Joyce Carol Oates transforming every thing in her life into a story” for me. I read it when it came out in the New Yorker and have remarked on it in an earlier blog.

I like the stories of George Saunders and have read all of them, although the satiric short story is not my favorite type. In this story, “Escape from Spiderhead,” as usual, Saunders has an interesting intellectual/social concept in mind, and he certainly knows how to transform a concept into a story. He is always fun to read; I never miss an opportunity to read a new Saunders story.

I have only recently discovered the stories of Mark Souka and have commented him on this blog recently. In “The Hare’s Mask,” he creates a tight little story about a father’s childhood when he discovered violence and learned compassion. This is a classic, well-made story with a stinger in its tale—not a trick ending, but a discovery ending that creates a nice little surprise for the reader.

Similarly, Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Soldier of Fortune,” whose stories in his collection Corpus Christi I have read and liked, is a story with an ending that, while not totally unexpected, is satisfying because of the way Johnston paces the story so carefully to lead up to it.

The other stories in this year’s Best American Short Stories did not, for various reasons, capture my attention, compel me into thought, or otherwise make me want to read more of the same. I will probably soon forget Tom Bissell’s self-absorbed “A Bridge Under Water,” Caitlin Horrocks’s clever satire “The Sleep,” Sam Lipsyte’s boys-playing-games “The Dungeon Master,” Elizabeth McCracken’s “Property,” Ricardo Nuila’s “Dog Bites,” Richard Powers “To the Measures Fall,” and Jess Row’s “The Call of Blood.” As for Rebecca Makkai’s “Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart,” I think I will go back to the last three BASS collections and read her other stories before commenting on her work. To have four stories in a row in the series is, if not a record, at least worthy of note.

All in all, this year’s Best American Short Stories is a collection that I read with mostly “pop” pleasure. It introduced me to at least three writers that I intend to seek out and read again and it gave me an opportunity to return to several writers that I have enjoyed in the past. For the $10 to $15 price tag (depending on where you buy it), it is a real fiction-reading bargain. I always recommend it highly, even when I don’t agree with the choices of the guest editor.

Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" and the Importance of Genre

2011-11-01T13:04:00.001-07:00

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, published in a whopping 128-page hardcover (with lots of white space) by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux two months ago, originally appeared, according to the book’s copyright page “in a slightly different form” in the Paris Review in 2002. The story only took up about 50 pages in the O. Henry Prize Stories: 2003 (where I first read it). It was chosen by O. Henry jurors Jennifer Egan and David Gutterson as their “favorite” of the 20 stories in the volume (Juror Diane Johnson chose A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest” as her favorite.”)

The Library Journal review said that Johnson “has skillfully packed an epic tale into novella length” and Publishers’ Weekly praised Johnson’s “epic sensibilities rendered in miniature.” So, one might ask, what is a “miniature epic?” Aren’t those two terms contradictory? And why is Train Dreams a novella rather than a short story or a novel? Often these generic terms are a matter of marketing. For example, Jennifer Egan’s very successful book A Visit from the Goon Squad is marketed on its cover very prominently as a “novel.” However, I read it as a collection of short stories. Any time a writer puts together a collection of stories with some links--ala Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, e.g., a shared place or shared characters--publishers are eager to label it a novel and critics are eager to discuss it as a short story-cycle.

It will come as no surprise to those of you who have read my blog even occasionally over the past three years that I have little patience with attempts by the publishing industry to try to make the short story more appealing or the academic industry to make it more worthy of discussion by calling individual stories (like those of Alice Munro) “novelistic, or by calling a collection of stories a “composite novel.” As for what Henry James called the “blest nouvelle,” the kind of fictional narrative that lies in length somewhere in between the “world in a grain of sand” that is the short story and the “bulky monster” that is the novel, I think it is a closer relative to the short story than to the novel. I posted a blog on that form in January 2010, in which I tried to lay out the characteristics that distinguished it both from the short story and the novel.

Many readers and critic may very well argue that such generic terminology matters little or not at all, noting that “a rose by any other name” blah, blah, blah. Whereas publishers will probably say that terminology matters a great deal to how they market their books of fiction, I would argue that it matters a great deal in terms of what kind of experience readers are in for when they pick up a book called “short stories,” “a novella,” or “a novel.” On this point, I would quote again what I cited in my earlier blog on the novella: I agree with C. S. Lewis, who once said, “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used!” If one does not formulate some means of knowing this, then one can say nothing to the purpose about it, and indeed may run the risk of misunderstanding, or misjudging, it entirely.

Genre is, for me, an important issue because knowing the “kind” of story we read establishes a certain “horizon of expectations” that guides our reading. Certainly, a great writer will not merely follow the conventions of a genre, for then we would call him or her a “genre” writer, the way, for example, Stephen King is a genre writer. Certainly, a great writer will often defeat our expectations, thus extending our previous understanding of what kind of story we are reading. On the other hand, a great writer will seldom completely ignore the tradition from which he or she draws.

Many reviewers have already noted the importance of the genre issue when reading Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. For example, in his comments on why he chose the story as his favorite in the O. Henry volume, David Gutterson reminds us that the short story does indeed have a tradition, from Poe and Gogol to Borges and George Saunders; he places “Train Dreams in a line of descent that includes tall tales, supernatural yarns, and magical realism—a homage to Bret Harte. He says he admires Johnson’s “skilful blending of forms and traditions.” “Is it a short story?” Gutterson asks. “That’s difficult to say. Perhaps there’s no longer such a category.” Gutterson admires Johnson’s attention to detail in the story, but says its greater power lies in “its visitations, its haunted moments of sadness and yearning in which the world appears otherworldly and aggrieved even while infused with comedy.”

Jennifer Egan also calls attention to the “density of historical detail in the story,” but adds that the story’s “real power lies in its mystery, its reluctance to reveal itself. What is this about?” she says she kept asking herself as she read. David Ulin’s review in The Los Angeles Times also focuses on the key generic issue of the book, calling it a “stoic miniature,” a “portrait of containment, of compression and restraint.” Ulin says that although Johnson evokes the stuff of novels--“the slow passage of time from rural to commercial, the commodification of our collective soul,” he thinks Johnson has something more “elusive in mind, something more fundamental and intense.” What the books evokes, says Ulin, is “the fluid divide between spirit and substance, his sense that the metaphysical is always with us, even if we can’t decipher what it means.” And this, as I have suggested many times in this blog, is the sense of the spiritual that has always been the special realm of the short story and the novella.

Anthony Doerr’s review in The New York Times isolates the generic source of the story’s power most incisively. Doerr says he read the story almost ten years ago when it first appeared in The Paris Review and has read it several times sense. Like Jennifer Egan and others, he has said that the story seems to haunt one long after it is read. He attributes this haunting power to the story’s brevity, citing Poe’s famous statement that, second only to poetry, the form most advantageous for the manifestation of the highest genius was the “short prose narrative” that one could read in one sitting. Novels, Poe felt were objectionable because they necessitated taking breaks in the reading, with “worldly interests” intervening that “modify, annul or counteract” the impressions of the work. Doerr emphasizes that short stories and novellas “offer a chance to affect readers more deeply” than novels because the reader “can be held in thrall for the entirety of the experience,” giving them, in Poe’s words, “the immense force derivable from totality.”

James Wood’s reading of the story in The New Yorker is less incisive that those of Ulin and Doerr, but he also finds himself caught in two different realm of reality in “Train Dreams.” First there is what he calls a kind of “clean American simplicity in prose” reminiscent of Hemingway, but he complains that sometimes one longs to “bathe in impurities” of a more abundant style. In other words, he thinks “Train Dreams” is a bit too short, “as if the protagonist’s lack of inwardness were itself a literary virtue.” Doerr, on the other hand, while praising the story’s brevity, complains that occasionally “tufts of seemingly irrelevant material stick out here and there.” But Doerr suggests that the story’s “imperfections somehow make the experience better, more real, more absorbing.” James Wood is able to forgive the clipped style reflective of the protagonist’s unreflective view of the world by noting that his spiritual visions “seem fit compensation for the unreflective, bounded, wordless, and bookless solitude of his existence.”

So what makes Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” work and what makes recognizing its genre as a “blessed nouvelle” important for the reading experience? Just this blend of Poe-like spiritual visions and Chekhov-like precise detail and language. Just this combination of the realistic and the supernatural, the sacred and the profane. Just this seamless linking (and blurring of that line) of the stuff of everyday reality and the stuff of that mysterious world that always exists in our dreams. In short, just the permutation that the short story and its close generic relative, the novella, have always made their own. Go back and re-read Gogol and Turgenev, Poe and Borges. Reread what has been called the “nightmares at noonday” in the stories of Ernest Hemingway. Read Steven Millhauser and Alice Munro. Read Joy Williams, Edith Pearlman, William Trevor, and many more great short story writers. They will all remind you of the importance of the generic tradition of the “short prose narrative” and how Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” both confirms and expands that tradition.

Flannery O'Connor: Critical Insights

2011-10-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

As a result of her tenacious adherence to an unfamiliar narrative genre and an esoteric complex of theological themes, few twentieth-century fiction writers seem more in need of interpretation and analysis than Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor knew from the beginning of her career that both her method and her message would be bewildering to many readers. When editor John Selby, expecting a traditional novel, balked at the manuscript of Wise Blood, O’Connor, convinced that the quality of her fiction would derive precisely from the peculiarities to which he objected, cancelled her contract, declaring that she had no intention of writing a conventional novel.

Several years later, fully aware that she was often trying to communicate with many who did not share her religious beliefs, justified her shocking characters and their outrageous actions by insisting that to the hard of hearing, you had to shout and to the almost blind you had to drawn “large and startling figures.” She made no apologies that the subject of her fiction was always “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

O’Connor always liked short stories. The author she cites as the earliest influence on her desire to write was the first theorist and self-conscious practitioner of the form in America, Edgar Allan Poe. In a letter in 1955, she said that as a child she read a lot of slop, but following the “Slop Period,” was the Edgar Allan Poe period, which lasted for years. Later in her career, however, she recognized that her true precursor was Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1961, she told John Hawkes, “I think I would admit to writing what Hawthorne called ‘romances’…. Hawthorne interests me considerably. I feel more of a kinship with him than with any other American.” In her essays and talks, her many reviews, and her letters, O’Connor often affirmed her commitment to the short story and to the romance form out of which it developed and with which it has always been aligned.

She knew that the style and narrative technique demanded by the short story was quite different than that expected in the novel. She once said, “I believe that it takes a rather different type of disposition to write novels than to write short stories, granted that both require fundamentally fictional talents.” In a good short story, she argued, “certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the story itself, and when this happens, they become symbolic in their action.” In response to the question, “What is a Short Story?” she insisted that it is not a joke, an anecdote, a lyrical rhapsody in prose, a case history, or a reported incident, for it has an “extra dimension” that occurs when the writer puts us in the middle of some “human action and shows it as it is illuminated and outlined by mystery.” In every story, O’Connor insisted, there is some “minor revelation which, no matter how funny the story may be, gives us a hint of the unknown, of death.”

Flannery O’Connor knew that there are two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: one that involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenon, sensate, and logical relation--a realm that the novel has always taken for its own--and the other that involves an experience that challenge the acceptance of the real world as simply sensate and reasonable—an experience that has dominated the short story since its beginnings. The novel involves an active quest for reality, a search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story in general, and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories in particular, more often focus on a character who is confronted with the world of spirit, which then challenges his or her conceptual framework of reason and social experience.

As Flannery O’Connor knew well, the short story has always remained close to the folk tale, the ballad, the romance, and the mythic forms that constitute the very source of narrative. If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material world, then the short story creates a similitude of a different realm of reality, that reality of the sacred which Mircea Eliade says primitive man saw as true reality. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories attempt to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality. The short story form is, as Flannery O’Connor knew throughout her short life, closer to the nature of "reality" as we experience it in those moments when we are made aware of the inauthenticity of the everyday life, those moments when we sense the inadequacy of our ordinary categories of perception.

This volume is an effort to introduce O’Connor to a new generation of readers by including twelve previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction, and four original essays commissioned especially for this volume that make significant new contributions to the understanding and appreciation of her work.

In 2009, more than 10,000 people cast ballots for what they considered to be the best book of fiction among all the National Book Award winners in its history. Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories was the winner. Although such numbers do not speak louder than words, especially the words of Flannery O’Connor, they would surely make that wise and wonderful writer shake her head in wry amusement.

For further information about the volume, go to: http://salempress.com/Store/samples/critical_insights/oconnor.htm

Critical Insights: Flannery O'Connor: Table of Contents

”About This Volume,” Charles E. May

Career, Life, and Influence
On Flannery O'Connor and the Short Story/Romance Tradition, Charles E. May
Biography of Flannery O'Connor, Charles E. May
The Paris Review Perspective, Paul Elie for The Paris Review

Critical Contexts
Flannery O'Connor and the Art of the Story, Susan Srigley
The "Christ-Haunted" South: Contextualizing Flannery O'Connor, John Hayes
Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and the Writer's "True Country," Avis Hewitt
Flannery O'Connor: Critical Reception, Irwin H. Streight

Critical Readings

"Flannery O'Connor and the Art of the Holy," Arthur F. Kinney

"Flannery O'Connor's 'Spoiled Prophet'," T. W. Hendricks

"Flannery O'Connor's Misfit and the Mystery of Evil," John Desmond

"'Wingless Chickens': "Good Country People" and the Seduction of Nihilism," Henry T. Edmondson III

"'Through Our Laughter We Are Involved': Bergsonian Humor in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction," J. P. Steed

"Carnival in the `Temple': Flannery O'Connor's Dialogic Parable of Artistic Vocation," Denise T. Askin

"Flannery O'Connor's Empowered Women," Peter A. Smith

"The Domestic Dynamics of Flannery O'Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge," Bryant N. Wyatt

"'The Artificial Nigger' and the Redemptive Quality of Suffering," Richard Giannone

"Wise Blood: O'Connor's Romance of Alienation," Ronald Emerick

"From Manners to Mystery: Flannery O'Connor's Titles," Marie Lienard

"Called to the Beautiful: The Incarnational Art of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away," Christina Bieber

Chronology of Flannery O'Connor's Life
Works by Flannery O'Connor
Bibliography

David Means' "El Morro"--Literary Quest for the Sacred

2011-10-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

My thanks to Dex and Phillip for responding to my last post about entertainment stories vs. literary stories. Dex suggests that the literary story may be one of the last remnants of modernism. Lorrie Moore has, I think rightly, pointed out, that now “the commercial slick story has largely died out, the stories we are left with are almost always all serious art.” The fact that short stories do not sell well and thus that publishers are reluctant to take them on--unless they come with the promise of a novel--is due to the public shift to other media for narrative entertainment. And once the short story is no longer sought after for simple entertainment, it either dies out, or for better or worse, is relegated to the realms of art. Whether cause or effect, it seems clear, as John Updike has suggested, “Short fiction, like poetry since Kipling and Bridges, has gone from being a popular to a fine art, an art preserved in a kind of floating museum made up of many little superfluous magazines.”

I appreciate Phillip’s Virginia Woolf citation about reading Chekhov’s stories and feeling “at first” as if the solid ground had been dislodged from under us, leaving us dangling in mid air with unanswered questions. One of America’s finest short story writers, Joy Williams, says that short story writers love the dark and are always fumbling around in it. “The writer,” says Williams, doesn’t want to “disclose or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery…. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them.” And the greatest short story writer of the twentieth century, Alice Munro, says, “I write because I want to get a feeling of mystery or surprise. Not a mystery that finishes you off, but something that makes the character or reader wonder. I don’t really like interpretations. I don’t want to make definite explanations.” Amy Hempel agrees that she doesn’t like having anything spelled out, but insists, that mystery is not mere vagueness. “Mystery is controlled. It involves information meted out only as needed. I not only don’t want the explanation, I want the mystery.” John Edgar Wideman adds: “Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the vision of reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear swiftly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment.”

The most common characteristic the literary short story shares with the lyric poem, Herbert Gold argues, is that they both tend to “control and formalize experience.” However, this very characteristic, according to British writer James Lasdun, is one of the reasons many readers don’t care for the short story. Lasdun suggests that short stories do not sell well because the genre demands an interest in form more than the novel does, and “people do not seem so interested in form these days.” The literary short story’s emphasis on language and form rather than on content is, of course, one of the primary characteristics of what we loosely call “modernism,” which, as that great short story writer Donald Barthelme reminds us, begins with Flaubert, who changed the emphasis from the what to the how—a shift that is not merely formalism and not at all superficial, insists Barthelme, but rather an “attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one at that.” As Flaubert himself so emphatically proclaimed, “I don’t give a damn about the story, the plot. When I am writing, my idea is to render a colour, a tonality.” And no less emphatically, Truman Capote once said he wished always to maintain a stylistic and emotional upper hand over his short story material. “Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation.”

That the short story is a modernist genre embodying Flaubert’s ideal is a prevalent authorial conviction. Harold Brodkey recites the familiar modernistic mantra about the short story this way: “The music of language carries more of the real meaning [in the short story] than the literal meaning of words does. A shift in the mind, in the mood, and you lose control of that music.” American author Charles D’Ambrosio agrees, chiming in that, “It’s the musical nature of sentences, where you actually hear the sound in a meaningful way, and those sounds have meaning and nuances as important as any of the content.” “ I love that aspect of the short story, says D’Ambrosio; it’s almost like reading a poem.” Short story writer Amy Hempel says that when she starts a story, she often knows the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, without knowing what the words are. “I’ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and over again,” she says, “and then this tune will be translated into a sentence. I trust that. There’s something visceral about the musical quality of a sentence.”

Hempel’s fellow short story writer, Deborah Eisenberg agrees, noting, in classic Flaubert fashion, that in her stories, “Sometimes there’s a kind of tonality that I want, almost as if I were writing a piece of music.” And David Means--that brilliant short story writer who after four collections, still fends off his publisher’s demand for a novel—says about his experience writing the short story: “You listen to a song and get a bit of narrative along with beat and tone and sound and images, then the song fades out, or hits that final beat, and you’re left with something that’s tangible and also deeply mysterious.” This deeply mysterious, yet tangible something—what Donald Barthelme calls “rigorous truth”—is related to the formal nature of the short story, which communicates by pattern rather than by explanation or by mimesis.

David Means’ most recent story, “El Morro,” which appeared in The New Yorker on August 29, 20011, may be puzzling to many readers because it communicates, as most literary short stories do, more by thematic pattern than it does by character and plot. Consequently, if readers respond to the characters as if they were ordinary real people in the everyday world and to the action as if it merely pointed to actual events in that everyday world, then they may ask, as one blogger expressed it, “What the f**k is this story about?”

The first thing one notices in the story is the repetition of references to the sacred-- beginning with Lenny, the central character, talking about a goddess who lived in a lake, back when it was freshwater.” He says the natives make “pilgrimages” to what is now a muddy hole, dip leaves in the brine (for it has turned to salt water) and “lick them the way you lick a lollipop.” (Lenny will come back to this story of the salt lake later.) The girl, who is unnamed, determines four main things that form the “litany” of Lenny’s thinking.” 1. drugs, 2. native culture, 3. birds, 4. her story. He talks of the Zuni Pueblo tribe, altering history to make them “worshippers” of deep pits, navels. He talks about a “holy” seer named Don Juan, not the fake one who helped Carlos Castaneda, but a true “visionary.”

One of Lenny’s key obsessions is hawks and falcons, which can spot a prey ten miles up and dive for it. “You’d be hard pressed to know which side of the story to look at, because it all meets up right there when the bird hits the prey and the prey, which wasn’t anything, man, becomes something, for a second, at least, and then suddenly it’s nothing but a half-dead carcass being lifted into the sky.”

He has told her about his brother who was killed in the early days of the Iraq war by a wayward U.S. Air Force Missile. “At least for a split second, he knew what was going to hit him, man. You always know what’s going to hit you. Maybe for only a sliver of a second. But you still know. Every second, there’s a missile ready to strike you in the head.” This notion of a sudden assault by an invisible force reoccurs later in the story, becoming a repeated thematic pattern.

Lenny prefers the story he invents to the events lying out there to be reported. He makes up a story for the girl from the few details she had given him back in California. One of the stories she tells is about her friend Kimberly who, one day near the stables in Griffith Park, told her a story of being somewhere in Utah when a “dervish” appears and tells her a story. It is a fable about a guy walking in the desert who comes upon a horse and a dog talking. The dog says he does not want to hear about running free and eating wild grass, but is waiting to be told about hunting a rabbit and tearing meat from a bone. The horse says he is sick of blood and gore and wants to hear about wild clover. The man interrupts and says “Meat and grass. What’s the difference? The function of each is to give you life. Without that function, you’re just bones.” Both animals turn on the man, kills him, and then go back to their argument.

One of the best-known sources for this kind of Sufi teaching story is Indries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes. One has to probe beneath the surface to discover their meaning. After the young woman tells dervish stories in Griffith park, Means shifts the perspective to a group of Japanese tourists on a string of horses above the taking pictures of vistas of Hollywood, “and two homeless girls, pale and gaunt, huddled on a sheet of cardboard.” The image is a telling juxtaposition between the surface and the secret reality of Hollywood. The gap between the surface reality and what lies beneath it is another repeated theme in the story that Means will return to later.

Lenny constantly “riffs” on the girl’s story as they drive north from Tucson. “You spent a summer sleeping on the sidewalk or in cut-rate hotels with other kids who’d embraced a mute acquiescence in a common dream of freedom, a possible salvation in the form of a good time, hanging on an edge of chance that might at any moment give way to complete, abject reality, and it did, man, it did.” Lenny riffs more on the common dream of freedom giving way to freeways and faceless drivers and one more piece of roadside trash sauntering by the roadside, which is all she had left when he found her. “Everything else was gone, pushed away, because you’d come to realize, no, scratch that, you’d learned through trial and error that your only recourse was to forget your past.” The tension between forgetting the past and trying to leave a mark on it is another theme that the story will return to.

When they pass the biggest copper mine in North America with the monstrous trucks and bucket loaders, Lenny shifts back to the theme of fear of an invisible force waiting to destroy one. Each man has his own “unique fear” when he creeps up one of the roads, putting on earmuffs and praying to God he will not be able to hear, for if someone hits a “sensitive vein or digs too eagerly, the ground gives way and the road crumbles. Lenny compares the mine to a similar mine in South America, which is on “holy land” guaranteed to give payback in the form of some catastrophic event, most likely in a hundred-year-rainfall-slash flood-slash mudslide.

They encounter a girl with a stop sign and walkie-talkie, who has a scar on her face that is too deep to cover with makeup, which she got on her honeymoon in Tijuana where her husband showed her his true nature for the first time—another example of the theme of something hidden beneath the surface.

Lenny says he likes the new lady, saying she probably has Zuni blood, or at least something Indian, “a stoic ability to put her woes aside and center in on the moment at hand, to withstand the elements for the sake of some larger vision.” Then he begins to invent a story about her—that she has a little brother with cancer, another brother who works at the copper mine—that he did not think he would work there, but one day his father and brothers put in the application papers in for him to work at the mine. Lenny continues his story, “And this guy—let’s settle on the name Bobby—couldn’t say no. Bobby felt himself caught in the long history of his family. Past generations had opened up an obligation” So he said, what the hell, and worked there until he was too tired to think of reinventing his life.

By the time they cross into New Mexico, the first girl is sitting in the back seat trying to avoid listening to Lenny, and the second girl is in the front, listening attentively. Lenny talks with “delusional precision,” saying he guarantees she is going to meet his hawk, Jag, who has intense focus, who flies out of sight but always keeps Lenny in his vision, and, when he is ready, can dive out of the sky and land gently on his arm; he says he is flying above them now, out of sight, following them.

The second girl and Lenny now become like two souls united by a mutual need formed back during the two hours they had spent navigating the hairpin mountain turns. She tells him how to manage skids, telling him the “myth” is you turn into a skid but in the mountains you have to turn against it as hard as you can, that she has seen trucks turn into a skid and head over the ledge and become a wad of tinfoil. When Lenny tells the first girl to stay in the car while he and the new girl have some time alone, she blocks their voices by remembering the road straightening out like a “magic carpet” when they left the twisty mountain roads.

When they pass through a reservation, Lenny returns to the myth that opened the story, about how the people walk a hundred miles to pay their respects to Old Lady Salt who ran away from Black Rock Lake, taking most of the potable water with her. People come here once a year and place their prayer sticks in what’s left of the lake and draw up granules of salt and take bags of it home.

The second girl starts talking about her younger brother who is gorgeous and is going to be a star in Hollywood. He was driving a truck one day and the road just rolled away from him, and he said he had a “vision.” She shows Lenny a picture of brother who has remorse but also hope in his eyes. Lenny says he looks like Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, and James Dean, but then says he is going to tell her what will happen to him. “He’s going to fall like the rest of them and end up holding a spoon over a flame.” Lenny says they will find his body up in the hills or, if he is not lucky, in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, for one does not want to die in front of a tourist from Wisconsin. “No one wants to shatter the congenial blandness they bring, the greenhorn belief in hopes and dreams that settles like the smog and makes it exhilaratingly hard to breathe. And let me tell you, there is nothing better in this world than struggling to breathe. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

When they reach the El Morro national monument, the first girl wakes and leaves the car and hears Lenny talking to the second girl about the men who came here. “They stumbled here astonished at the immensity of the stone formation…They stumbled here in wonderment. How could something like this rise out of so much flatness? It’s the work of the Devil, some said. The work of God, others said. He says they all felt compelled to make a mark on this thing, pointing to the petroglyphs. They all had to leave some indication that they had existed, leave their mark. Now they cannot. He said the last time he was here he marked his name with a pen and ended up in jail. He faces the monument with his arms out: “In a firm, hard voice, he spoke directly to the monument of his country’s urgent need for redemption.” He rhapsodizes about birds flying in formation, tribes moving from one “sacred site” to the next, cookhouses in Washington cranking out pure “sacramental salts.” Then he starts telling the first girl’s story again, about how she never dreamed of this place while on the streets of L.A., saying this is a fitting place to end this thing they have had.

The last part of the story shifts to Ranger Russell, a Zuni, who sees them on a video screen--the man like other white boys who came to vandalize the park who have no respect for the reality of the world. “An element of desecration was caught by these four cameras.” Once or twice a year a few nuns in habits, two monks from Vietnam, Fellow-Zuni. He watches the little drama play out and then goes to the girl who has been left, who is driving a piece of flagstone into the rock. “He saw in the delicacy of her action and in the lift of her toes a balletic movement, and he knew something about her that he wasn’t sure how to articulate…. When she turned, he saw the face of a girl who had lost almost everything, including her ability to speak. She kept the mute silence of a soothsayer. He saw that right away. It wasn’t the willed silence of the guilty….. Most in the white world didn’t understand medicine people, he thought, seeing her…. In truth a medicine man never picked his vocation. It was a fate that was bestowed, forcing one to forsake certain pleasures in the world—he thought—in order to become someone who knew a little too much about reality.”

In the last section, Ranger Russell is at home that night, telling his wife about all this. He has a vision of the grandeur and hope of the place, which he cannot see so well while in the midst of it. He thinks he will leave the mark the girl made a secret. When the archeologists come from Santa Fe, he will try to persuade them it had been there for years. “It’s just a scratch, he’d say. A few years of wind and rain will blow it away with all the others.” He thinks it will go against his good judgment and the strictures of his job and the park itself to lie for her, but he feels he must do it, “and with that he fell asleep, carrying with him the monument, his tribal land, and the rest of the world.”

In order to read literary short stories with some meaningful pleasure, one must move in close to the story to identify the repetition of meaningful details and then move back away from the story to try to determine what thematic patterns these repeated details create. The overall pattern of the story is a journey to a sacred place, in which one character plays the role of a seer or medicine man, who creates stories about the precarious life that human beings lead, afraid that at any moment, some invisible force can make the seemingly solid ground fall away or some force from the seemingly harmless sky strike from above. What the seer does in the story is rescue wanderers or waifs and tell them stories that provide them with a context for their lost state—very much what modern analysts do for their patients. The sacred place to which the seekers journey is a promontory, or “el morro,” where wanderers have always tried to leave their mark, if, for no other reason than to signify, “I existed. I was here.” The irony, of course, in making a mark on a solid place, is that the mark signifies the universal human desire to transcend mere place—to assert that true reality does not lie in the stones on which we stub our toes, but rather in some hope for a dreamlike, projective reality that lies beyond mere stuff. All the references to sacred places, drugs, appearance/reality, carving signs of the self, searching for meaning, telling stories, Zuni medicine men, marking/erasing the past create a pattern of the universal human quest for transcendence and significance.

Literary short stories, with their emphasis on form and pattern, are often like Sufi stories, because they present mythic, defamiliarized invariants of universal human action, not temporal, familiar variants of social interaction. Such an attitude has dominated short fiction since Hoffmann, Tieck, and Novalis; it can be seen in Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, as well as in such modern descendants as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and others. Human beings need to hear stories the same way they need to experience religion, says Canadian writer Hugh Hood. "Story is very close to liturgy, which is why one's children like to have the story repeated exactly as they heard it the night before. The scribe ought not to deviate from the prescribed form. That is because the myths at the core of story are always going on...Myth exists to give us this reassurance of the persistence of some of the fundamental forms of human action."

Stories, like liturgy or Sufi tales, do not teach by concept, says Indries Shah, but rather by some more intuitive method of communication, by rhythm, or as the structuralists would say, by a deep structure that lies beneath the conscious level of concept. We must go back to an early stage to prepare ourselves for story, says Shah, a stage in which we regard the story as "a consistent and productive parallel or allegory of certain states of mind. Its symbols are the characters in the story. The way in which they move conveys to the mind the way in which the human mind can work." Such teaching stories depend on an ancient and irreplaceable method of "arranging and transmitting a knowledge which cannot be put in any other way." Carol Cassola, an Italian writer, describes the mental disposition of the modern in a way that is similar to the kind of mental disposition which Shah attributes to the serious writer: "He doesn't observe reality, he contemplates it. He is passively receptive in front of it. He is, if you wish, a mystic: someone who awaits the revelation of truth from the silent language of things. What drives him to write is not psychological curiosity or social interest but a metaphysical need."

Story, like liturgy, like mantra, insists on a rigid formalized rhythm repeated in structures that remain the same regardless of the content until they become coordinated with the rhythm of the unconscious life itself, with the deeper rhythms of human reality as it is sensed to be. In this the reader "becomes" the narrative; that is, during the process of reading, the story establishes a rhythm that corresponds to and structures a rhythm within the thinking or responding processes of the individual. Randal Jarrell claims that our stories show that we take pleasure in "repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found unbearable.” Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that fairy stories, one of the primary progenitors of the short story, are such ritualized defenses or outlets for childhood anxiety. Bettleheim argues that the child is subject to fears of loneliness, isolation, and mortal anxiety--existential anxieties that fairy tales take seriously and deal with by objectifying in a highly formal structure, much the way that Sufi healing stories do. The entire line of development of the short story--from fairy tale to Poe, from Chekhov to Raymond Carver--has focused on such basic human anxieties and has dealt with them by the creation of a highly formalized, unified, and ritualized aesthetic object.

However, as much as “El Morro” explores the basic human desire for transcendence, leaving a mark, and ritualistic, story-telling protections against those invisible forces that threaten annihilation, the story also seems to undermine the means by which modern human beings seek to fulfill these desires. If Lenny is a seer, he also seems a self-serving meth-head who exploits the loneliness of others. And if the two young women are seekers after salvation, they also seem misguided victims. Perhaps the only character in the story who seems redeemed by this role is the Ranger, who protects the monument from desecration, for he is the only one in the story who seems to value the “old way.” If primitive peoples seem noble in their affirmation of the sacred, then modern peoples seem merely seeking an easy drug-induced escape. Maybe this is inevitable. Every generation seems to seek its own means of spiritual affirmation, but these seekers always become either dangerous extremists or helpless escapists. “El Morro” is, I suggest, a serious literary exploration both of the human need for meaning and transcendence and the human despair of finding a means for fulfilling those needs.

Entertainment Stories vs. Literary Stories

2011-10-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

David Means, “El Morro”

For the last few weeks, I have been meaning to get back to David Means’ story “El Morro,” which appeared in the August 29, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. David Means is one of my favorite short story writers, and I have written about his work several times before on this blog. Means is one of those I admire because of his determination to continue to write short stories in spite of the fact that his publishers no doubt have beseeched him to write something they consider more serious and more saleable, that is, a novel.

In an online Paris Review Daily interview last year (June 22, 2010), Means was asked if he was ever tempted to write a novel. He said that he was “tempted,” for all that “wide-open space would be enticing” after having written four short story collections. But, he hastened to say, “What’s not enticing to me is the idea of simply going big for the sake of giving into the possibility of going big.” Means says he likes novels and reads them, but that “stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they’re highly charged.” Means says that although novels can mean “comprehensive,” they can also mean “bloat.”

Means insists he is not at all interested in “simply reporting what’s here right now, or cranking out an entertainment device that’s going to touch the widest number of people.” He says he is interested in “digging and excavating” as deep as he can into “small eternal moments,” concluding that moving from stories to novels for him “would be partly a matter of not giving into the temptation to abuse the form.”

Means ends his statement this way: (If you love the short story, you gotta love the guy.)

When I'm down—and even Alice Munro admits that at times she feels guilty for not writing a novel—I just start a defensive mantra: Blake never wrote novels. Whitman never wrote novels. Carver's work is still around. Franz Wright hasn't written a novel. And it's not fear of bad reviews, or not making something that isn't coherent or good that holds me back, but rather a fear of wasting time—and in doing so not being able to tell the stories that want to be told. If a story wants to be told and you don't tell it, you'd better stand back because something's going to explode.

I greatly admire writers like Means and Munro who are not interested in “cranking out an entertainment device that’s going to touch the widest number of people.” However, I do understand those readers who like “entertainment devices.” It’s just that I don’t live in the same reading world that they do. During my forty years in the classroom, I encountered many students who resented stories that were not entertaining, that were hard to read, that were depressing. I tried with all my energy to get them to make the extra effort that great stories often required. Sometimes I think I succeeded; sometimes I reckon I did not.

After reading David Means’ “El Morro,” a couple of times, I decided to check the blogosphere to see what others thought about it. And here is what I found:

Trevor on the blog Mooksie and the Gripes started quite a stream of comments when he remarked that he had read the story on his way to work, but got lost in it. He said he would return to it to see if he liked it but concluded, “At this point, I don’t think I’ll end up liking this one, but I need to understand it better before I decide.”

Then the comments started to roll in.

Aaron said: “Oh good lord, I’m almost afraid to read the comments for this one: given how little I got out of this story, if anybody finds something of value here, I’m going to be disappointed in myself.”

After a detailed and very sensitive reading of the story, Betsy is dissatisfied because she feels as if David Means has used and abandoned the girl in the story in the same way the character Lenny has.

Jerry is much more succinct and to the point; he says: “I thought this was junk. But even TNY prints a bad one now and then. I keep waiting for something from T. C. Boyle.. it’s been too long.”

Betsy comes to the defense with another bit of reasoned analysis, telling Jerry, “I don’t actually agree with you about it being junk. Means took way too much care with it.”

Then Trevor comes back saying, “I don’t get much from it after a couple of readings. And while I’m with Betsy that it isn’t “junk,” and really like her reasoning in her dispute, I can’t quite accept that Means’ care in creating the story has any bearing on whether or not it is junk.”

In another blog named “Fail Better,” Aaron Riccio seems to sum up many of the readers of “El Morro.” He says: “Let’s play a game I like to call, “What the f**k is this story about?” After summarizing the story, he concludes, “There’s the illusion of a story, in that people say things, but talk, as they say, is cheap, and this is a cheap story that shirks the responsibility of making us care in the slightest. I’ll say it again: “What the f.**ck is this story about?”

My most recent encounter with this kind of debate between writers like David Means and writers like T. C. Boyle, (which Jerry, who thinks “El Morro” is junk, wants to see on the pages of the New Yorker) is a post I wrote for the blog Thresholds. In that essay, I argued that good short stories required a close and careful reading. The essay elicited a strongly worded response from Mike Smith, a regular contributor to Thresholds that opened with this remark:

There was something in Professor May’s article for Thresholds that I couldn’t let go of, something that, it seemed to me, was based on an assumption that needed questioning, or at least needed to be put into a broader context. That something was his statement that ‘short stories cannot be skimmed, read quickly or summarized’. It’s the sort of remark that makes my hackles rise, regardless of who makes it, because I know that short stories can be skimmed and read quickly, and that they are frequently summarized. They are read in buses, trains, and waiting rooms, between appointments and in snatches while the boss is away. They are recalled to friends in shaky patches and fragmented recollections. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most short stories are actually written to be approached in this manner.

Smith’s example of a writer who writes short stories one can read quickly is Stephen King, an example that elicited a huzzah of approval from several responders to the blog. Jerri, for example, did not find Alice Munro stories appealing because “for some reason I have never been able to establish a personal connection with either her characters or their emotions.”

So there we have it: In one camp are those who like the stories of T. C. Boyle and Stephen King. In the other camp are those that like the stories of David Means and Alice Munro. Is there any possibility of mediation between these two camps? Are they meant to always live in two separate worlds? Is this difference of opinion a reflection of the old low brow/high brow distinction? Is it another aspect of the so-called culture wars between right and left wing politics? If so, since the only interest it holds for me on this blog involves the issue of how one reads short stories, it is not something about which very many will get their knickers in a twist. I don’t think anyone has gotten very upset about the short story since Shirley Jackson had people furious to find out where they actually stoned someone to death for winning the lottery.

The most recent response to this debate on Thresholds is from my friend Alysa Cox, who argues that the dichotomy suggested by this disagreement is a false one, for she reads both Alice Munro stories and Stephen King stories while waiting for the bus quite easily, thank you very much. But is this because Alysa is an academic who has learned how to read Alice Munro?

This is an issue that interests me, for it seems to me that one reads stories of the Means/Munro type quite differently than one reads stories of the Boyle/King type. In my teaching experience, students who had no difficulty reading Boyle and King struggled greatly with Munro and Means. And pace Alysa Cox, I don’t think that Munro and Means write stories specifically for academic readers. I just think that Munro and Means try to explore more complex issues in a more complex narrative way than writers like Boyle and King.

Next week, I will post my own discussion of David Means’ “El Morro.” But somehow, I don’t think I will convince the Boyle/King folks that it is a story worth the effort.

Alice Munro’s “Dear Life.”

2011-10-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

I am currently editing a new book of criticism on the work of Alice Munro. The book includes fifteen original articles, especially commissioned for the collection, by noted scholars and critics from Canada, the U.S., England, and Ireland. My own task, in addition to soliciting, compiling, and editing the essays, was to write a brief biographical sketch of Munro and a critical essay expressing my own approach to her work. I will talk more about the book as it gets nearer publication, but today I wanted to respond to a piece of “personal history” Munro published recently in The New Yorker, entitled “Dear Life: A Childhood Visitation” (September 19, 2011).

My initial interest in the piece was to determine if Munro had included any “new” information about her life that I should add to my biographical sketch. I have read rather carefully the updated paperback edition of Robert Thacker’s wonderful full-length (600 pages plus) biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005/2011) (Thacker has contributed a most helpful analysis of Munro criticism to the book I am editing). I have also read all the interviews and occasional pieces in which Munro has talked about her life, as well as her daughter Sheila’s book Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro (2001). I have also, of course, read Munro’s The View from Castle Rock (2006), which is subtitled “Stories,” but which includes several “personal history” or “memoir” pieces. She does not always make clear distinctions between them.

And that’s what I would like to think a bit about in this post—the relationship between pieces that Munro calls “stories” and the pieces she calls “personal history,” focusing particularly on her recent piece “Dear Life.”

In the “Foreword” to The View from Castle Rock, Munro says, “About ten or twelve years ago I began to take more than a random interest in the history of one side of my family whose name was Laidlaw.” After doing research and reading in the history of her Scottish family, Munro says she put the material together over the years, “and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories.”

Not stories, mind you, but “something like stories.” Munro also says that during these years she was writing a “special set of stories,” which she did not include in the books of short stories she was publishing because she felt they did not belong. “They were not memoirs but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person.” Munro explains that in other first-person stories she had drawn on personal material, but then “I did anything I wanted to do with this material. Because the chief thing I was doing was making a story.”

However, she says that in this “special set of stories” (included in the second half of Castle Rock), she was doing something more like what a memoir does—“exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality.” Munro says that so many of these characters moved so far beyond their beginnings in real life that she could not remember who they were to start with. She concludes, “You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.”

“Dear Life” does not reveal anything about Alice Munro’s childhood beyond what she and Robert Thacker have already disclosed. However, it does offer some insight into how Munro sees the relationship between “memoir” and fiction. Although “Dear Life” seems to fit into the category of memoir—“exploring a life” in a factual way, with the self at the center—given Munro’s irresistible compulsion to write stories, this “personal history” often merges into the thematically rhetorical stuff of fiction.

I love the rhythm of Munro’s sentences. Note this opening: “I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me.” She could have said, more directly: “When I was young I lived at the end of a road that seemed long to me.” But the lilt would have been lost, don’t you think? And she could have opened the memoir in many ways, but she chose to open it with her memory of the two bridges that separated her home from the “real town.” And with these bridges, we are made aware of her early sense of separation from the activity of town life.

We are also introduced in the first paragraph to the individuality of this little girl, for one of the bridges is a wooden walkway which sometimes had a plank missing “so you could look right down into the bright, hurrying water. I liked that, but somebody always came and replaced the plank eventually.” I am glad that the little girl likes the gap made by the missing plank, for it does not frighten her as it might some children; it fascinates her.

If you have read Munro’s fiction, you will recognize the source of some of her stories in this piece of “personal history,” the most familiar being the whippings by her father for “talking back” converted to fiction in “Royal Beating” in The Beggar Maid. At certain points in “Dear Life,” Munro reminds us that what we are reading here is not fiction. For example, when she describes the house of a man named Royal Grain, which was like a “dwarf’s house in a story,” she suggests that although he could be the stimulus for a story here he is not, for she says the man “does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

I like this little aside, for in it Munro indicates at least one way that remembered real life might mutate into a story. It is as if she finds it hard to resist the writer’s urge to spin off from the “dwarf house” and the “troll’s name” and start a story. The distinction she makes here between something that is “only life” and something that might be much more significant is a helpful one, it seems to me, for it suggests that real life is “only life” because it does not mean anything, a story is more than real life because what makes it a story is some meaningful significance the author discovers in it.

Munro refers to the difference between real life and fiction again later when she describes the misfortunes her family faced--her father’s loss of his business and her mother’s Parkinson’s disease—commenting, “You would think this is all too much…. It wouldn’t do in fiction.” It is as though that Munro, and probably all writers, finds it difficult to think about life without thinking about the possibilities for fiction. It is as though writers like Munro experience almost a constant compulsion to convert everything into story, to see the world always in words and sentences and meaningful sequences.

In “Dear Life,” Munro finally gives into the compulsion to convert events in the world into meaningful fiction when she recounts a story her mother told her about “a crazy old woman named Mrs. Netterfield.” The first story the mother tells focuses on a day when the grocer forgot to put butter into the old woman’s order. When the delivery boy is opening the back of the truck, the old woman notices the butter is missing and goes after the boy with a hatchet, which made him drive away without closing the back door. Munro says that some things about the story puzzle her, though she did not think about them at the time, for example how the old woman knew the butter was missing and why she happened to have a hatchet with her. However, when Munro thinks about the story as a writer, she considers the issue of plausibility that governs fiction, but may have nothing to do with real life.

It is with the second story about old Mrs. Netterfield (which takes up roughly a third of “Dear Life”) that Munro begins to transmute “only life” into a story. She begins it in her writerly voice recalling, not the experience (for she was too young to remember), but her mother’s telling of it. “It was a beautiful day in the fall. I had been set out to sleep in my baby carriage on the little patch of new lawn.” The mother is in the house washing baby clothes by hand. Since there is no window in the front, she has to cross the room to look out a window to check on baby Alice, a view which let her see the driveway. At this point, Munro the writer steps in with her inevitable questions: “Why did my mother decide to leave her washing and wringing out in order to look at the driveway?” After considering possible reasons, including watching for hr husband to come home with groceries for something she was making for supper (and an aside about how his family did not approve of her fancy cooking, or her fancy dress for that matter), Munro returns to what her mother saw—old Mrs. Netterfield coming down the lane. Then, thinking like a writer, she considers the possibilities—i.e., not what she knows, but what she thinks may be the case: “My mother must have seen Mrs. Netterfield at least a few times before she noticed her walking down our lane. Maybe they had never spoken. It’s possible though, that they had. My mother might have made a point of it, even if my father had told her that it was not necessary. It might even lead to trouble, was what he probably would have said.”

The mother runs out and grabs baby Alice out of the carriage and carries her into the house, locking the door behind her. “But there was a problem, wasn’t there, with the kitchen door? As far as I know, it never had a proper lock. There was just a custom, at night, of pushing one of the kitchen chairs against that door, and tilting it with the chair back under the doorknob, in such a way that anybody pushing it to get in would have made a dreadful clatter.”

Then, writer that she is, Munro asks further questions about motivation, inner thoughts, background information that she does not know from “only life,” but must invent if she were to write a story: “Did my mother think of any weapon, once she got the doorknob wedged in place? Had she ever picked up a gun, or loaded one, in her life? Did it cross her mind that the old woman might just be paying a neighborly visit? I don’t think so. There would have been a difference in the walk, a determination I the approach of the woman coming down the lane. It’s possible that my mother prayed, but she did not mention it.”

The mother sees the old woman investigate the blanket in the carriage and fling it to the ground; she hides in the dumbwaiter, listening to the old woman walking around the house and stopping at every downstairs window. Then Munro as writer writer poses another question. After noting that the old woman did not have to stretch to see inside because she was not very tall, Munro asks: “How did my mother know this? It was not as if she were running around with me in her arms, hiding behind one piece of furniture after another, peering out, distraught with terror, to see the staring eyes and maybe a wild grin.” Munro says her mother stayed by the dumbwaiter because, “What else could she do?” She thinks her mother would not have gone into the cellar because it would have been more horrible to be trapped down there in the dark, and she could not have gone upstairs because she would have had to cross the room “where the beatings would take place in the future, but which was not so bad after the stairs were closed in.”

Munro says the earlier versions of her mother’s story of old Mrs. Netterfield end here with the old woman peering in the windows, but that in later versions the old woman gets impatient and goes away. What the mother calls “the visitation of old Mrs. Netterfield” actually seems to end for Munro when she asks her mother at some point what became of the old woman. Her mother’s stark reply: “They took her away. She wasn’t left to die alone.”

But it is not the end of the story for Munro the writer. She tells about when she was married and living in Vancouver, but still getting the weekly paper from home, she sees the name Netterfield as that of the maiden name of a woman living in Portland, Oregon who has written a simple and sentimental poem about living in Munro’s home town. Munro realizes from reading the poem and the letter that she had lived in the same house Munro lived in. Munro, the writer, considers this: “Is it possible that my mother never knew this, never knew that our house was where the Netterfield family had lived and that the old woman was looking in the windows of what had been her own house?” Munro then considers some of the “perhaps” that can convert a mere event into a story, thinking that the woman who wrote the poem was old Mrs. Netterfield’s daughter who “perhaps” came to take her away. “Perhaps that daughter, grown and distant, was who she was looking for in the baby carriage. Just after my mother had grabbled me up, as she said, for dear life.” And this, of course, where Munro the writer discovers just the right multi-layered title for her little memoir.

Munro ends this “childhood visitation” by describing an event in her mother’s life that she later converted into a fiction: “When my mother was dying, she got out of the hospital somehow,a t night, and wandered around town until someone who didn’t know her at all spotted her and took her in. If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.”

But, of course, those who know Munro’s fiction will know that this last event did become fiction; it concludes the story “The Peace of Utrecht” in Dance of the Happy Shades. When the narrator of the story hears of her mother getting out of bed and putting on her gown and slippers and go out into the January snow to make her flight from the hospital, she thinks this: “The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed. It was a picture I was much inclined to resist. Yet I had no doubt this was true, all this was true and exactly as it happened. It was what she would do; all her life as long as I had known her led up to that flight.”

“The Peace of Utrecht” is an important story in Munro’s fiction. As Robert Thacker points out in his biography, it is the first of her stories to deal with the facts and memory of her mother. The story appeared a year after her mother’s death; Munro says it is her “first really painful autobiographical story…the first time I wrote a story that tore me up.” It is a story she says she did not want to write, but she told an interviewer it was the first story she says she absolutely had to write. Thacker says the story “represents Munro’s imaginative homecoming to Wingham after her years away in Vancouver, home to the personal material that would subsequently become her hallmark.”

Edith Pearlman's BINOCULAR VISION

2011-09-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

Edith Pearlman is a classic example of how short story writers, even very fine short story writers, can get ignored by reviewers and the reading public. How can this happen? Well, it can happen when, like Pearlman, the writer writes short stories and never novels. Only a few writers who make this decision manage to get widely read: Raymond Carver, because, with the help of a savvy editor, he created a stylized, attenuated world of blue-collar misfits that caught the attention of reviewers. Alice Munro, because she is such an intelligent observer of the inner lives of women and creates a complex, densely populated world that reviewers can justify as “novelistic.

It can happen when a writer is ignored by the relatively wide circulation magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, and is published instead only by low circulation journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Idaho Review, and Ontario Review. And it can happen when those stories are collected in books that only university and small presses seem interested in. When Pearlman’s second book, Love Among the Greats came out in 2003, Mary Ann Gwinn, reviewer for McClatchy—Tribune News Service, wrote: “I’m not a big short-story fan. They seem to end before they ever really get rolling—when it comes to the so-called ‘fictional dream,’ I like mine long, leisurely, and novelistic. It’s a pleasure to announce a short-story collection that has trounced that bias.” Good on ya!, Miss Gwinn. Would that more reviewers were similarly converted! If there is any “sacred text” out there to make more people appreciate the short story, it is Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision.

So let me tempt you to buy a copy of that book with some of my favorite lines from Pearlman’s stories. While you’re at it, buy another copy for someone who loves good writing. Two copies from Amazon will cost you $25.78 and thus give you free shipping.

“Inbound”

Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lilly came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

Sophie had imagined that, in such an event, she would turn cool, a lizard under a leaf.

She felt her cheek tingle, as if it had been licked by the sad, dry tongue of a cat.

“The Noncombatant”

She lifted her wet head; she biked urgently toward the storm, as if it, at least, loved her.

“Chance”

But my forehead felt as if a flame had been brought very near, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that my hair was on fire.

“Tess”

The counsel locks his car and moves swiftly through the garage. Within its gloom his fair hair looks like dust.”

hen I unscrewed the end of the heart tube from the aqua clothespin and I slipped it under the blanket so the blood would pool quiet and invisible like a monthly until there would be no more left.

“Fidelity”

“Oh, Greg, sometimes I have to escape from his intensity, I get scorched, you are so cool, darling, like a winding-sheet.”

“If Love Were All”

She suspected that, like many fat men, he danced well.

The young woman sat at a piano, head bowed as if awaiting execution.

“Purim Night”

He liked to hang around the office because Roland, without making a big thing of it, let fall so many bits of knowledge, farted them out like a horse.

“Rules”

After a few minutes Signet set the youngster down and returned to her work, her scar glistening like the trail of a tear.

They left. Donna walked into the kitchen. It would be a pleasure to stew tomatoes until they burst through their skins.

“Home Schooling”

He taught us to beat egg whites until they were as stiff as bandage gauze.

Unravished Bride

They were bound to the code of their youth—self denial and honor and fidelity—an inconvenient code that would keep them, she realized with a pang, forever chaste, and forever in love.

Edna O'Brien's SAINTS AND SINNERS is my favorite for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

2011-09-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

My favorite book of the six shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award is Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners. If I were a judge in the contest, this is the one I would vote for as the “best” overall collection, the one I think most deserving of a prize commemorating the name of Frank O’Connor.

However, it would be naive, maybe even arrogant, to suggest that I know best which is the “best” book of short stories in the group. Obviously, as indicated by my remarks on Valerie Trueblood’s Marry or Burn, and the comments posted by one of her admirers, suggesting my own review is a “biased pan,” so-called critical judgments as to which is the “best” among a group of books of fiction may be tainted by “personal” preference. I would like to think my only “bias” is for good short stories, but maybe not.

Moreover, one often makes a judgment on what is “best” by eliminating from the list of contestants all those that one did not like so well, therefore arriving at a winner by a process of winnowing. As my remarks on each of the six books probably suggest, I would rank them in the following order, beginning with my “personal best.” If you want to know why I ranked them this way, I refer you to the six previous blog posts in which I discuss them.

1. Edna O’Brien, Saints and Sinners

2. Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

3. Suzanne Rivecca, Death is Not an Option

4. Alexander MacLeod, Light Lifting

5. Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family

6. Valerie Trueblood, Marry or Burn

But let’s be honest. Other considerations come into play when making a so-called critical judgment on what is “best.” Although I liked Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, I would be reluctant to give her the prize a second time. Both Suzanne Rivecca and Alexander MacLeod’s collections are uneven, it seems to me; although some stories are very strong, others seem self-indulgent and hurried. Besides, Li, Rivecca, and MacLeod are young enough to still have time to prove themselves “worthy,” as it were. Colm Tóibín and Valerie Trueblood may be good novelists, but they are not, it seems to me, good short story writers.

By choosing Edna O’Brien, I may well be influenced by other, more extraneous considerations.

*She may be the “hometown favorite,” as it were; no one from Ireland has won this very Irish prize. And Colm Tóibín has already won important prizes for his novels.

*Because of her age, she may well be the sentimental favorite; she is 81, still elegantly working, and she has not won many prizes.

*Because she was treated so shabbily by Irish priests and critics as a “bad girl” when her first books came out, she may very well be due for some recompense; the priests do not have the control over the morals of the country as they once did.

It is fortunate that aside from these “personal” considerations, in my opinion, her book is overall the “best” book in the six shortlisted entries in the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

I wish Edna O’Brien much luck in the competition. I look forward to the announcement this Sunday of the winner of The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Valerie Trueblood, MARRY OR BURN: Shortlisted for 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

2011-09-12T21:14:00.001-07:00

I have held Valerie Trueblood’s collection, Marry or Burn, until last because it is my least favorite of the six books shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. In February, 2011, I received an email from a publicist asking me if I would like to review Marry or Burn on this blog. Always willing to read new short story writers, I agreed and soon received a copy of the collection, Trueblood’s first collection of short stories (Her novel Seven Loves was published in 2006). I read all twelve stories, but did not think they were well done, so I wrote the publicist, expressing my regrets, saying that since I could not write a good review, I chose not to write one at all. When you are getting paid by a newspaper to write a review, you have promised to give your honest opinion, for better or worse, and over the years I have written what I thought were stinging reviews of many collections of short stories that I thought were weak, even though I have been called the world’s most passionate cheerleader for the short story. But when I have the freedom to follow my mother’s advice—“If you can’t saying something nice about somebody, don’t say anything at all”--I usually do.

So when I learned that Marry or Burn was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, I was not just surprised; I was shocked. How could that be? Could I have been so wrong about Trueblood’s stories? Is there a back-story about the collection’s shortlist of which I am unaware? Am I being a fair judge, making a judgment on the stories based on my years of experience reading short stories, or is it just that Trueblood writes the kind of story that I personally do not like? Now that I have promised to comment on all six of the collections shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, I have no choice but to try to examine these questions, even if it means saying something not “nice” about Valerie Trueblood’s short stories.

First, let me summarize my reading experience with these stories. This past week, I picked up the book and slowly read all twelve stories over again. With the exception of a couple of memorable and dramatic events—a woman shooting her abusive husband, and a woman attacking a bear with an axe—I could not remember any of these stories, although I only read them six months ago. Why is that, I wondered?

I did a search of various newspaper and magazine databases to see what other readers might have said about the stories and could find no reviews in any of the hard copy prepublication or newspaper sources, except one notice in the Seattle Times, which is Trueblood’s home turf. However, perhaps Ms. Trueblood’s publicist did have some success when he sent the book out to on-line reviewers, for several bloggers commented on the book and/or interviewed Trueblood. Most of these were vague and general, indicating merely that the blogger enjoyed the stories, because the characters were “alive, intense, and real, or because the writing was “light and deft,” making the world of the characters “fully real to our imagination.”

Perhaps Pauline Masurel in the online Short Review isolates what it is about Trueblood’s stories that I do not like, for she seemed to like them for exactly the same reason I did not. Masurel says the stories “display the sort of expansiveness that you’d expect to find in a novel rather than a short story having a wide cast of characters and a lengthy timeline.” I realize this is the same sort of comment that is often made about the stories of Alice Munro, who is my very favorite short story writer. However, reading the stories of Valerie Trueblood this second time, even though I purposely slowed down and tried to focus on them fairly, I found them too diffuse, with too many characters, too much time covered--in short, much too much like the seeming expansiveness found in novels without the sly, tight thematic patterning and psychological insight I find in the masterful stories of Alice Munro.

Too often in a Trueblood story, I got lost a few pages in and had to go back to the beginning to identify characters, visualize locale, and try to grasp the dramatic situation. I know I often have to do this in an Alice Munro story also, but the effort pays off by making me more aware of the emotional, psychological, thematic core of her stories. With Trueblood’s stories, I just found myself getting lost again when another set of characters at another space/time locale was introduced. Trueblood’s stories just go on and on without any sense of purpose or significance. Characters are introduced, their problems explored, and their actions and thoughts recorded, but the stories do not cohere in any meaningful thematic way. That may be fine in the leisurely world of the novel, but it just won’t do in the brief compact compass of the short story.

Trueblood’s prose is often too loose and wordy, without any significant reason. For example: “Her mother went into the hospital. She went by ambulance to the county hospital, the same one where they had taken Sharla’s little girl, and there she too died.” Why not, “Her mother was taken to the county hospital where, like Sharla’s little girl, she died.” And often, Trueblood takes time to pose general questions in quite ordinary ways: “What is love? What is it? How can it be what it seems to be, nothing? A vacancy, an invisibility, a configuration of the mind.” And too often the dialogue has no significance-- just people talking without that talk bearing any real weight or revealing anything important about the characters.

As I have been writing this, I have gone back through the collection and find to my amazement that although I have now read it twice, the last time in the past week, and I still cannot remember any of the stories. And damn it, I am not that old. The stories are just that diffuse.

I confess that Valerie Trueblood’s stories have suffered from the fact that I have also been reading Edith Pearlman’s magnificent collection of stories, Binocular Vision, this week. Pearlman’s stories are so brilliant, so well written, so remarkable in their precision and perception that Marry or Burn just pales in comparison. When she was writing the introduction to Pearlman’s book, fellow writer Ann Patchett says she sat down and read Binocular Vision with a pen in her hand, intending to underline some of the best sentences so she could quote them along the way, but quickly saw that she was underlining the entire book. I read Valerie Trueblood’s book this second time also with a pen in hand, hoping to accent sentences that I admired as I did so often while reading Pearlman’s book. I fear the pages remain clean.

Although I have tried very hard to understand, I cannot guess why Marry or Burn was shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Perhaps you may think that I personally just didn’t like Trueblood’s stories, but having read thousands of short stories in my life, I feel confident that when I do not like short stories I read, it is usually because they are not very good short stories.

The winner of the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award will be announced in Cork in a few days. The folks at the Munster Literature Center will probably never ask me to be a judge in the contest, but because one of the pleasures of such contests is trying to out-judge the judges, I may be so bold as to pick my own winner.

Yiyun Li, GOLD BOY, EMERALD GIRL: Shortlisted for 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

2011-09-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

The two most prominent sources of reader/reviewer fascination with the stories of Yiyun Li are: that a writer for whom English is a second language can write so “elegantly” in her adopted language and that Li provides “insights” into a culture with which Western readers may not be familiar. Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Prayers, won the first Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Guardian First Book Award in 2006, only ten years after she came to the University of Iowa from Beijing to study immunology. She has told an interviewer that she did not know Iowa City was a writer’s town; during her second year, someone told her that everyone is Iowa City was writing a novel, “And that started my dream. I thought I wanted to write a novel, too,” although she had never written anything in China. She began taking several undergraduate writing classes and then enrolled in both the nonfiction and the fiction program at Iowa, graduating with two MFA’s at once. Readers find such authorial backstories remarkable and irresistible.

Li has been named by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. In 2010, she won one of the so-called “genius” MacArthur Foundation Awards, worth half a million dollars over a five-year period. Her novel The Vagrant was shortlisted for the big-money IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2009, which was won by Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. But the fact that she won the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award in 2005, beating out David Means’ wonderful collection The Secret Goldfish, may make judges decide this year to award it to another, even though most reviewers think that Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is a better collection of stories than A Thousand Years of Prayers. I have not read Li’s first collection, but after reading her recent collection, I ordered it and plan to read it soon. Her success reaffirms my suspicion that good storytellers are born, not taught

As might be expected, the long, novella-type story, “Kindness” that opens Gold Boy, Emerald Girl has attracted the most praise from reviewers. It is often just assumed that if a story is long, it is more complex than one that is short. However, although “Kindness” is an affecting first-person account of a woman named Moyan who rebuffs the affection of her mathematics students and lives alone, which is not surprising since she has rejected overtures of love and friendship from others all her life—her professor who introduced her to Dickens, Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, and her Lieutenant while a teenage recruit in the People’s Liberation Army. Although Moyan’s refusal to make contact with anyone has made her an exemplum of what Frank O’Connor has said is characteristic of the short story as a form—loneliness—“Kindness,” in its drawn-out exploration of the sources of Moyan’s isolation over a period of years, is much more characteristic of the novel form than the short story.

If “Kindness” is to be taken as typical of Li’s novelistic technique, the eight remaining stories in the collection, in my opinion, are ample evidence that Li is a stronger short story writer than she is a novelist. Frank O’Connor’s “lonely voice” is predominant in all of Li’s short stories—which may due as much to the fact that the great Irish short story writer William Trevor is her favorite author as it is to the influences of a repressive modern Chinese culture.

In “A Man Like Him,” a retired art teacher becomes incensed when he reads about a young woman who is suing her father for taking a mistress and abandoning his family. He frequents social web sites, pretending he is a younger, more desirable man, buys fashion magazines with pictures of young women, and lives with his ninety-year-old mother, who adopted him as a child. He ponders the expression, “a man like him,” feeling lost and alone, and stalks the beaten-down father who abandoned his family to show his sympathy--telling him, “We are the kind of men who would not kick our feet or flail our arms if someone came to strangle us to death.” He tells the father his own story of being accused of perversion for simply looking with fascinated interest at a young girl in one of his classes. The father tells him that his daughter has said that if she is unsuccessful in getting him put in prison, she will come with rat poison, adding, “I am waiting every day for her to fulfill her promise, and I count it as my good fortune to have little suspense left in my life.” The retired teacher leaves the man with an expression that his aged mother often uses and which he has adopted for his own, “I have nothing to say about this world.”

“I have nothing to say about this world” might be the mantra of most of the lonely characters in Li’s stories. For example, in “Prison,” a successful Chinese couple living in America lose their sixteen-year-old daughter in a traffic accident and find their world shattered. When the husband suggests they go to China and find a surrogate mother so that they might have another child, the wife chooses an uneducated young woman whose only child has been stolen by a kidnapper several years before, and stays with her during the pregnancy with twins, fretting over imagined dangers to the unborn children. When the two women are approached by a young beggar boy on the street, the pregnant woman insists that the boy is her missing child, causing such a scene that the boy’s guardian must take him away. When the two women get home, the girl demands that the woman give her half the money promised so that she can buy the boy back from the beggar man. When the woman asks the girl to sit down so they can talk about it, she threatens to run away and sell the twins. The story ends with a standoff as the woman thinks, “This was the price they paid for being mothers…that the love of one’s own child made everyone else in the world a potential enemy.” She knows that the relationship of trust she and the girl has developed during the pregnancy is crushed and that they will remain each other’s prisoners.

“House Fire” starts out to be what seems like a light comedy about six women friends, from their mid-fifties to early seventies, who establish a detective business to investigate men who cheat on their wives. The title comes from a popular joke that circulates as a text message throughout the city: “An old man in love is like an old house on fire, which burns easily and burns down fast.” The women are so successful that a television station does a story about them, which ironically makes them lose business because potential clients think their “cover has been blown.” When they interview a potential male client, they become especially interested because the man thinks that his wife is having an affair with his own father who lives with them. During the course of the interview, the women recall their own past fears, disappointments, and betrayals. It is the lightest story in the collection, but even then it manages to probe beneath the surface of the mere plot to reveal the backstory of the characters’ loneliness.

The shortest story in the collection, “Souvenir,” (about six pages) may be the only one to verge on the manipulative. It is a single scene in which still another lonely, elderly man, approaches a young woman in a pharmacy with the oft-used line, “You remind me of my wife when she was your age.” The girl tries to avoid him, but when she awkwardly buys a pack of condoms, while being laughed at by other women in the story, she drops them and the old man puts his foot on them, scolding her for what he thinks is her immoral behavior. What he does not know is that the girl is planning to give herself to the boy she loved, a boy who has been beaten so badly by the authorities that his parents tell her he will never become a husband. However, “she is the kind of girl who did not believe their words. She believed that her love would save and change him.” The story ends with these lines: “Someday, when she became an old woman, she would show the pink pack to her children, a souvenir of her hopeful youth.”

The title story, which concludes the collection, is about a thirty-eight year old woman and a forty-four year old man for whom the man’s mother (the girl’s former teacher) is trying to arrange a match, unaware that her son is gay. The title refers to pictures of the man with his parents as he was growing up. “They would have been called ‘gold boy’ and ‘emerald girl’ at their wedding, enviable for their matching good looks.” The young woman agrees to marry her old professor’s son, but only because both love his mother. The story, and Li’s book, ends this way: “They were half orphans, and beyond that there was the love for his mother that they could share with no one else, he was a son who had once left but had now returned, she who had not left and would never leave. They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.”

I like Yiyun Li’s stories, not because she provides me with information about Chinese culture, but because she is a fine writer who has mastered my favorite literary form. She is obviously a born storyteller who has learned a new language with which she feels completely comfortable and confident. Moreover, by studying the stories of William Trevor, she has learned the secrets of the short story form from a consummate master.

A couple of weeks ago, Eileen Battersby (who was a judge of the Frank O’Connor Award when Jhumpa Lahiri won in 2008) wrote a piece for The Irish Times about the six shortlisted authors in this year’s competition, concluding, “Lightning may well strike twice. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl stands out on this shortlist. Should it win, it will be a victory for everyone: the author, the short-story form, the judges, the award, literary prizes in general and oh yes, let us not forget, the real winners, us, the readers.”

The winner of the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award will be announced on September 18. In a few days, I will comment on the sixth and final book on the shortlist, Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood. Then I may well venture my own opinion as to who might be the winner of the Award.

Colm Tóibín’s THE EMPTY FAMILY: 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award Shortlist

2011-09-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín

It is not often that I like an author’s novels better than his or her short stories. Usually, the writing is better in short stories than in novels, not only because it is difficult to sustain careful, precise, evocative writing over the long haul, but also because of the short’s story’s dependence on thematic significance communicated by careful poetic patterning of language.

I liked Colm Tóibín’s The Master, as a stylistic tour de force and loved Brooklyn because its universal theme, communicated by such carefully written language, suggested the technique of a short story than that of a novel (See my earlier blog entry on Brooklyn, January 20, 2010). However, I did not like Tóibín’s first collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, and I am no big fan of his recent collection, Empty Family, in spite of its being short listed for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

Of the six collections on that list, Tóibín’s book has received the most attention by reviewers, albeit, not so much by American reviewers, who, with the exception of positive reviews in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, pretty much ignored it. However, reviewers in Canada, Australia, England, and Ireland were mostly unanimous in their praise for the collection, which I thought lackluster, ordinary, and even sometimes carelessly written, as if Tóibín had so little respect for the short story form he used it only for “occasional” writing. In my opinion, he has not given it the care and careful attention that he did in The Master and Brooklyn.

In the opening story of The Empty Family, “The Silence,” Tóibín returns to his mentor of The Master, Henry James, taking an anecdote from James’s Notebooks to put together a fictional recreation of Lady Gregory’s account of her short-lived but heated affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. As a result of the affair, Gregory wrote a group of sonnets, which Blunt, at her request, published under his name. In my opinion, a competently done, but hardly Jamesian, literary jeu d' esprit, in which Tóibín attempts to write the story that James did not get around to writing.

The title story, “The Empty Family,” begins with a signature thematic sentence for this collection of stories, as well as a classic Irish theme ever since George Moore’s 1903 The Untilled Field: “I have come back here.” The story is a sort of meditation addressed to a former lover by a man who, while living in California, drives out to the ocean every Saturday so he can stand there and “miss home.” He returns to County Wexford where “home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road.” In a central passage that echoes Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the narrator looks out over the sea and focuses on a single wave to discover that although the wave comes toward us as if to save us, it does nothing, withdrawing in a “shrugging irony, as if to suggest this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing but a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy.” A bit too facile and self-indulgently ruminative, it seems to me.

“One Minus One,” also addressed to a former lover, is mainly a meditation about a man’s return to Ireland to attend the dying of his mother. For everyone who has made this melancholy journey back home for the deathwatch and funeral service of a mother or father, this will seem a familiar experience, which Tóibín handles in a quite ordinary personal essayistic way.

“Two Women” is about Frances, a movie set designer, living in California, who returns to Dublin to work on a film. She recalls her broken relationship years before with her dead lover, an Irish actor. The woman is a brittle, crusty old lady, scornful of her home country and just about everyone with whom she comes in contact, although we are not sure if this attitude has anything to do with that old lover affair. When she meets the widow of her ex-lover in a most convenient, unlikely encounter, they have a sit-down, heart-to-heart that seems inconsequential. Although the woman is “careful to use detail sparingly but make it stand for a lot,” I am not so sure that Tóibín does the same in this story.

“The New Spain” is about Carme Giralt, who, exiled as a communist under Franco, returns to Barcelona to claim an inheritance from her grandmother—an inheritance that has excluded her parents. In its focus on family conflicts, the story is much like the loose pieces in Tóibín’s earlier collection, Mothers and Sons.

“The Colour of Shadows” is about a Dublin businessman who goes to Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s homeplace) to care for his aunt, suffering from dementia. She becomes paranoid that he has been seeing his mother, who has been cut off from the family for deserting the narrator (who is gay) when he was a boy--something his family cannot accept.

“The Pearl Fishers” is about a man who writes thrillers having dinner with a married couple of friends. The wife, who is writing a book about being sexually abused as a young woman by a priest, does not know that her husband and the narrator were lovers in high school. He is on the verge of telling her about his past love with her husband, but is prevented by the disclosure of her own secret. In her New York Times Review, Francine Prose names “Pearl Fishers” the best story in the collection, suggesting that, “multiple ironies, some obvious and others quite subtle, are allowed to shimmer lightly in the atmosphere surrounding the former friends. Resonating throughout the story, the contrasts between action and intention, expectation and outcome alter our perception of the characters: of who they were as teenagers and how they became the adults on whom we are eavesdropping.” As much as I respect Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer, I cannot agree that this story has that much Jamesian stylistic subtlety.

“Pearl Fishers” introduces the reader to something previously missing from Tóibín’s fiction, explicit descriptions of male sexual encounters. The narrator recalls sex with the husband, remembering “I had fed his sweet, thick, pungent, lemony sperm into my mouth with my fingers as if it were jam, desperately trying to make sure that none was wasted.” The sexual descriptions, describing painful anal intercourse, continue in “Barcelona, 1975,” which is about a young Irish man who leaves Dublin at age 20 for Barcelona (as did Tóibín) and takes a lover The emphasis in these sexual scenes is merely on the physical event, not the significance of the event. The prose is routine and ordinary, for example: “I don’t know when I first let my new friend fuck me. I had been fucked for a few seconds the year before, but it was so painful I had made the guy take his dick out forthwith and keep it out. Another guy, summer before I left Ireland, had tried more successfully, but it was better when I fucked him. So when my new friend asked me if I liked fucking or being fucked, I said I like fucking. He said he did too, and in fact he hated being fucked and couldn’t do it.” That, it seems to me, is just tedious, purposeless, writing, regardless of what act it describes.

When asked by one interviewer if he was trying to shock readers with the sex scenes, Tóibín replies, ”with a gale of giggles,” “Yes, that’s thrown in for mischief.” But then more defensively, he adds, “It’s actually an important part of me, and it’s an important part of the world and here it is, and I’m not ashamed of it and I’m certainly not going to hide it, and it’s going in my next book and if you can’t deal with that I can’t…I’m certainly not going to do anything about it such as not put stories into the book or not write things that occur to me. You just have to go wherever things take you. I’m not sure you can take everyone with you, but you should be prepared to try.”

Although one can certainly agree that Tóibín has the right to describe that which is important to him, that which, to some extent defines him as a person, at the same time, a reader has a right to question whether these flatly described explicit sex scenes are anything more meaningful than examples of the author’s right to disclose. Hermione Lee of the Guardian says, “Every so often he allows himself some lavish, graphic sexual writing, as though challenging us to read these descriptions any differently from his scenes of longing for lost family homes or missed landscapes.”

The reviewer in The Toronto Star, Alex Good, suggests the sex passages give one the feeling that “Tóibín is determined to overcompensate for James’s reticence” about male sex. Good argues, “It’s not being prudish to feel that descriptions of analingus or remarks on the taste and consistency of spunk are out of place in stories that otherwise eschew physicality for the inner life. Tóibín’s characters get defined by their sexual urges and behavior, which is a trap that James took some pains to avoid.”

Reviewers are more accepting of the sex scenes in the longest story in the collection, “The Street,” about a young Muslim immigrant, Malik, who has come to Barcelona and must work out the cost of his passage by selling phone cards. Reviewers call it a “daring story,” a “dangerous, dramatic story.” Because it deals with issues of immigration, marginalization Muslim strictures about moral behavior, and because Malik is a young man struggling with his sexuality, reviewers seem ready to ignore the sexuality in favor of the multicultural social issues. However, I think an Australian reviewer best understands the success of this story, suggesting that “The Street” is one of the best stories because “ultimately Tobin is a novelist rather than a short-story writer; his preference for stories of sweeping emotion sits better in extended narratives that allow for character growth and development rather than the sculpted precision shorter narratives demand.”

For me the central issue of Tóibín’s stories is whether they are tightly written, precisely structured short stories, or merely occasional authorial pastimes and recollections to while away the time in between what her perhaps thinks is the more important work of writing novels. Tóibín’s short fiction certainly embodies some of the obsessions of the Irish short story—the theme of exile and return, the notion of the lonely voice--but I am not sure that Tóibín takes the form as seriously as he does his novels.

Heather Ingman, who has written a book on the Irish short story, says in The Irish Times, “For the reader prepared to read slowly and savour the silences between the words, there are rich rewards in this collection.” In my opinion, although Tóibín's novels encourage us to read slowly, his short stories do not.

Francine Prose opens her review in The New York Times by asking: Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia, and regret?… In its search for the surprising yet inevitable chain of events that will illuminate a character’s---and the reader’s—life, a short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.” I agree. I just do not get a glimpse of the genie in the stories of Colm Tóibín.

I will discuss the fifth book in the 2011 Frank O’Connor Award shortlist, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, by Yiyun Li (who won the inaugral Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005 for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) in a few days.

Suzanne Rivecca's DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION: 2011 Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist

2011-08-27T13:36:00.001-07:00

As soon as I started reading the opening title story of Suzanne Rivecca’s Death is Not an Option, I wrinkled my nose in clichéd old man fashion and laid the book aside. It was the same way I felt when I made the mistake of rereading Catcher in the Rye a few years ago. When I was a teenager, Holden Caulfield’s smart-ass behavior and language was exactly what I aspired to. Now that I am an old guy, I have so firmly put away childish things I have a hard time finding them; hell, I have a hard time finding my car keys.

But since I have promised to read all six of the shortlisted books for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize and comment on them, I picked it back up and forged ahead in this first-person rant of a Catholic high school senior, Emma, who has been accepted at Brandeis, but is not telling anyone, because her smartness and smart-aleckness has always made her an outcast. She scorns everyone and everything, describing one teacher as an “overgrown and demented Chucky doll,” one classmate as a “sadistic psycho bitch,” and practically everyone as “Mental Giants.

She refers to the uterus as an “impregnable fortress” and “chuckled happily at her ironic wordplay.” And she confesses, but only to the reader, “I have an absurd and disgusting fixation with my own crotch…a secretion-obsessed fetish.” When she tries to use a tampon for the first time, she feels like she is “trying to perform surgery with a Tinkertoy.” At the end of the story, during a touchy-feeling round-robin during which everyone is to tell what they will miss most about Sacred Heart high school, the sadistic psycho bitch talks about how much she will miss Emma, and then, I’ll be damned, the smart, tough, sassy, pain-in-the-ass Emma begins to cry, thinking about what lies in store for her, admitting that she does not know who she is unless she is fighting, that she cannot survive except in a hostile environment. And yes, that is supposed to redeem Emma from her Holden-like sense of the futility and hypocrisy of the whole lousy world, if you really want to know.

This smart-talking female figure, now age 21 and named Katrina, has matured somewhat by the second story, “Yours Will Do Nicely.” “Big words were my province,” she says, and often speaks in a tone of deadpan mock-gravity. After a one-night pickup with a guy who writes her an appreciative letter, she opens up to him in a long, frank and seemingly honest response that she fantasizes will change his life. She imagines him “marveling at how smart and insightful I was, my clever turns of phrase, the forthrightness of my disclosures.” Later when she does not hear from him, she cringes at what she has written, seeing her revelations as “self-important, performative, my metaphors strained, the crude obviousness of my need and self-ennobling loneliness.”

But as I read this second story about an outwardly brittle but inwardly vulnerable young woman with a snarky mouth, I realized two things: First, although I did not like this character, I did like Rivecca’s prose. It is the hard-earned, polished nature of her writing that kept me going. It was this sentence at the end of “Yours Will Do Nicely” that got me:

“And even though I knew these things weren’t the exact truth, they were a variation of it, and they felt true as I wrote them down. And they still felt like the truth—as if on some deeper, irreproachable level, those incidents hatched me like a newborn chick and I’d crawled from the wreckage of them with a bright new face. They had to have happened, because if they hadn’t, how could I explain the unhappy accident of myself.”

Language, carefully chosen and arranged in practically perfect sentences redeems other stories in the book that, on the surface, seem typically “ripped from the headlines” fodder for made-for-TV Opra movies. The longest story, the two part “Very Special Victims,” is about a young woman molested by her uncle as a child; “Look, Ma, I’m Breathing is about a young woman being stalked by an erstwhile landlord. But in neither of these two stories is the emphasis on social issues, but rather on the complex involvement of the central character in what seems to be a made-for-TV case of sociopathic behavior, “ripped from the headlines.” And what makes this involvement so complex and engaging for the reader is the careful structuring of Rivecca’s prose.

I am tempted simply to complete this discussion by quoting sentences from these two stories, for it is not plot, but prose that makes them so impressive. Both are told in the third person, so it is the voice of Suzanne Rivecca that we get, not the smart-alecky tones of a young female character. And it is a very fine voice indeed. For example, when the young girl tells about being abused by her uncle, we get this sentence:

“In the weeks after she told, something in her overturned, like lifting a rock and finding the ground underneath spongy with grubs, and she stayed up for hours bending God’s ear, fetisihizing prayer, clinging to His coattails and wrapping her arms around the pillars of his legs, stroking Him like a rabbit’s foot rubbed to a bald knuckle.”

The story is complicated by the girl’s feeling that she is not completely innocent in the abuse, but this is not a simple made-for-TV-movie presentation of female guilt about leading men on. This following sentence very profoundly tries to capture it:

“Kath thought telling would stop everything. Not just the uncle’s nocturnal groping, but her own weak love for the role she played with him, the novelty persona of cosseted scamp: how she had craved and courted the attention of the uncle before his hugging and cuddling and teasing snowballed into strange, fast-breathing caresses, that she could not return, that blanked her out of the scenario completely even though she was the centerpiece of it, there but not there, like the eye of a hurricane.”

She tells three men about the abuse. The first stops sleeping with her right away. The second asks a lot of questions, treating her “like the burial site of an ancient civilization; he dug for clues with a sweaty-palmed reverence and did not stop until he held it triumphantly aloft, that sordid tidbit like a saber tooth.” The third tells her it is not her fault and wants her to go to the policeThe story ends with a meeting with the uncle who wants to apologize, reassuring her that none of it was her fault; however, much to his puzzlement, she tells him she would feel better if it did have something to do with her. The ending of the story seems rigged to me, but once again, Rivecca’s prose redeems. She imagines herself lying on the pavement with police looming over her:

How grateful she would be as she waited for them to deliver their most merciful line, that rote benediction bestowed on every single person in trouble: the insane and the reasonable, homeless and naked, innocent ad guilty, uncle and nieces. You have the right to remain silent.

In “Look Ma, I’m Breathing,” the young woman, Isabel, is an associate professor of English looking for an apartment. After being turned down for a house she loves, the man renting a small house, begins writing her letters, at first romantic and then abusive, until she gets a court hearing to issue an injunction against him contacting her. The story line is simple enough, but the prose that describes the character as a child is striking and hard to resist: “She was an ideal vessel: dedicated, saturnine of aspect, with a mournful face and an eerie, shell-shocked poise… She was an eccentric, lonely child, given to soulful gazing and cryptic pronouncements.” Isabel has written a memoir in which she confesses that as a child she lied about seeing the Virgin; as a result, she is almost denied her request for the injunction. And like the women in these stories, the man, who has presented himself as obnoxious, is chastened and reveals his vulnerable self. The story ends with Isabel blocked in trying to write her second book, putting her editor off with promises and excuses. She replays the trial over and over in her mind in this well sculpted concluding sentence:

“How she opened her mouth and things came out, elegant and lucid things, and she was like the nightingale in the fairy tale placed in front of the king, watching respect and recognition dawn on the judge’s face—this doll-like girl, she speaks so well!--…and surrounded by the blank walls of her new apartment, she held the scotch in one hand and knew it was useless, knew that nothing would ever come out of her more purely or clearly than things like this: these distilled episodes, these illuminated lamentations, sculpted in all the right places, these testimonies of harm.”

In his book, How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, Stanley Fish begins with an anecdote by Annie Dillard from her book The Writing Life, about a colleague being asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, ‘do you like sentences’?” Fish quotes Dillard on the importance of carefully structured sentences: “When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.” Fish says that in a letter once, Gustave Flaubert described himself as being in a semi-diseased state, “itching with sentences.”

Suzanne Rivecca’s writing has already received a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and currently a Resident of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I hope she remains in that Flaubert semi-diseased state, “itching with sentences.” I wish her luck in her competition for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.

In a few days, I will talk a bit about the fourth book on the Frank O’Connor Award shortlist, Colm Toibin’s collection of stories, The Empty Family.

Edna O'Brien's SAINTS AND SINNERS: Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist

2011-08-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

Unlike most recent reviews of Edna O’Brien’s new collection Saints and Sinners, the following discussion does not mention how old she is, how prolific she is, or what a scandal she caused in her younger days.

Although best known for her Country Girls Trilogy and other novels, Edna O'Brien is the author of six previous short story collections: The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman (1974), Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978), Returning (1982), A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories (1985), and Lantern Slides, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in 1990. Her most recent collection, Saints and Sinners, is shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize, to be awarded in Cork on September 18.

An early story by O'Brien, "Irish Revel," from her first collection The Love Object (1968), and "Lantern Slides," from the book of the same name published in 1990, both of which are anthology favorites, are good examples of her typical themes and her stylistic range.

"Irish Revel" centers on Mary, a seventeen-year-old village girl who has been invited to her first party in town. However, when she arrives in her best clothes, she discovers she has actually been invited to be a serving maid. Her head filled with romantic fantasies about sophisticated city, she is surprised that so many people there are coarse and vulgar. When the men get drunk and start quarrels and one clumsily makes advances to her, Mary loses all illusions about town life. Slipping out of the hotel before dawn, she goes home, but she has not given up her romantic hope for a handsome young man. The story ends with lines that echo the famous lyrical ending of Joyce's "The Dead": "Frost was general all over Ireland...frost on the stony fields, and on all the slime and ugliness of the world."

"Lantern Slides” is also a tribute to "The Dead," for it recounts a contemporary Dublin party in which a number of characters tell their own stories of love and disappointment. Just as in Joyce's story, the focus here is on the ghostly nature of the past in which all have experienced the loss of romantic fantasies. However, the power of desire has such a hold on the characters that chivalric romance seems an attainable, yet not quite reachable, grail-like goal. When the estranged husband of one of the women arrives, everyone hopes it is the wandering Odysseus returned home in search of his Penelope. "You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it--a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds...It was like a spell...It was as if life were just beginning."

The reviewers’ favorite story in O’Brien’s new collection, Saints and Sinners, is “Shovel Kings,” for it is the longest (and thus, according to reviewers, the most novelistic) and gives them an opportunity to generalize about the historical/social issues of all those Irish men who had to leave Ireland to do manual labor in England. The story is told by a narrator who encounters the central character, a man named Rafferty, who came with his father to England to work when he was only fifteen. Later, when his father leaves, the boy makes it on his own with other Irish men like himself. In fact, Rafferty comes to be a representative of all those Irish men who emigrated to England to find work; the story ends with a “litany” of all the so-called Irish “shovel kings” who have now have gone to dust. It is an affecting story about a man “on whom a permanent frost had settled,” an exiled man who does not belong in England but no longer belongs in Ireland either, a man whose heart has been “immeasurably broken.”

My own favorites are three shorter stories that echo some of O’Brien’s earlier work, focusing on women—both young and older—who dare to dream or else have had their dreams dashed: “Sinners,” “Green Georgette,” and “Send My Roots Rain.” Such stories as “My Two Mothers” and “Old Wounds,” focusing on mother/daughter tension and family conflicts, are also reminiscent of O’Brien at her stylistic and culturally sensitive best. I do not care so much, however, for “Black Flower” (about an IRA man released from prison), “Plunder” (a fable about cultural clash and rape), or “Manhattan Medley” (a sort of stream of consciousness mental letter recounting a New York affair).

Although there is some reference to cultural change in Ireland in the three stories I like best, the references are only background—not the focus of the stories. In “Send my Roots Rain” (the line is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins), an aging librarian known in the small town as the “Spinster,” takes the bus to Dublin for a rendezvous with a famous Irish poet. The poet is not identified, but may be modeled after Seamus Heaney (He is called “our Laureate” by the porter in the hotel), or Brendan Kennelly, who taught at Trinity and is a popular Dublin poet, or he may be a composite of both. He is certainly not, as one reviewer says, “unmistakably Patrick Kavanagh,” for Kavanagh died in 1967, and this story takes place in the twenty-first century.

Although the name of hotel where the arranged rendezvous is to take place is not mentioned, it is obviously the Shelbourne, which the porter calls “the most distinguished address in Dublin.” The porter says he was been working in the hotel for thirty-three odd years, “barring the two years when the establishment was closed for the massive revamp,” which we know took place between 2005 and 2007. None of this really matters; I just wanted my readers to know that regardless of my objections to focusing unduly on information and background in short stories, I am not unaware of such things. And on a personal note, one of my happiest days in Dublin took place three years ago when I shepherded a group of California students to Dublin to study Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, I took my daughter (who was part of the class) to afternoon tea in the Shelbourne.

Many reviewers are fond of pointing out O’Brien’s negative attitude toward the so-called “Celtic Tiger” image of Ireland and the damage that has been done to the Irish economy by the economic errors of that period; and indeed, in “Send My Roots Rain,” the disruptions which that economic rise and fall have wrought in Ireland are mentioned as the librarian Miss Gilhooley thinks about what she and the poet will talk about when he arrives: “the changes that had occurred in their country, changes that were not for the better, bulldozers everywhere and the craze for money. Money, money, money. The rich going to lunch in their helicopters chopping the air and shredding the white mist….” But the story is not about social change; it is about the mystery of poetry, the inexplicable nature of love, and the “mysterious certitude of marriage,” which Miss Gilhooley has never managed to reach—all of which she thinks about while waiting for the poet to arrive. Having been in love many times, but always failing to make it to marriage, she has “turned to poets as she would to God.” Hopkins is her favorite, and she often repeats the line, “O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain.”

She remembers her loves and waits for the poet. But of course he never arrives. The porter makes excuses for him, saying that the poet often comes to the hotel bar, that he would have every intention of meeting her, getting dressed and probably came as close as the corner by the statue of Wolfe Tone, but then “balking it.” When she asks why the poet would baulk it, the porter says, “shyness, the shyest man I ever came across. I’ll bet you he’s walking the street now, or maybe on a bench by the canal, reproaching himself for himself for his blasted boorishness…his defection.” The porter shows her to the door and watches her go down the street. “She held herself well, but there was a hurt look to her back.”

On the bus ride home, she presses her face to the window and says the name of the man she had so loved, “a name that had not passed her lips in almost twenty years, and all of a sudden she was crying.” She thinks of the poet, a lonely, clumsy man walking the streets of Dublin, staring into the greenish water of the canal. “She knew then, and with a cold conviction, the love, the desolation, that goes into the making of a poem.” It’s a nice, tight little story that reaffirms Frank O’Connor’s famous notion of how loneliness is a characteristic of the short story.

“The Sinners” also focuses on an aging woman, this time a widow named Delia who runs a B&B. In her loneliness, she has “lost that most heartfelt rapport that she once had with God.” When a handsome English couple rent a room with their adolescent daughter, she envies them their youth and family closeness. However, in the evening, she hears the daughter’s going to her parents’ room on tiptoe. She listens and “her whole body stiffens in revulsion… something appalling was transpiring in there, whispers and tittering and giggles… she pictured them, their hands, their mouths, their limbs, all seeking one another out.” She imagines in vivid detail the naked girl, the man fondling both her and his wife, “and before long she knew that it would reach the vileness of an orgy.” She thinks that the girl could not be a daughter, that they have picked up a young girl, perhaps a hitchhiker or someone they solicited in an advertisement in their local paper, the wife agreeing to it all as being the surest way she could hold on to a husband.

Taking a sleeping pill, she has “a glut of dreams.” In one she is with a group of women about to be photographed by two men. They are ordered to undress, but she refuses. In another she is alone in a church in which the priest sings lustily as if in a beer garden, and a little altar boy drinks wine from the chalice. At breakfast “she took her revenge.” She tells the guests that she is only charging them for one room since only one room was fully occupied. Realizing that she has heard them, they insist on paying for two rooms, but she throws the money back at them. When the car drives away, she cries “from the pit of her being.” She thinks it was not because of them and the “unsavourines of the night,” but rather it has to do with herself. “Her heart had walled up a long time ago, she had forgotten the little things, the little pleasures, the give-and-take that is life. She had even forgotten her own sins.” The “little pleasures” have nothing to do with what the family do in the woman’s rented bedroom, but what she overhears reminds her of the secret lives of others and the loneliness of her arid existence.

“Green Georgette” is told from the point of view of a young girl who has been invited with her mother to a Sunday evening tea with the Coughlans, an upper-class family new to the town. The girl is very aware of the social differences between her family when she sees a piano being moved into their home, but it is her romantic, poetic side that is emphasized in the story, not social difference; when the piano is put down, it emits “a little sound of its own, a ghostly broken tune.”

Drew Coughlan, the woman of the house, is “the cynosure of all…like a queen.” All the women in the town are intrigued by her finery, her proud carriage, and her glacial smile. However, as seems fitting for her poetic perception, in church, the girl turns around to look at the woman, to take note of her little habits, and how often she swallows. “She blinks with such languor.”

The title comes from the crepe-like fabric dress that Mrs. Coughlan wears on the day of the visit. As the mother and the woman talk, the girl’s response is typically romantic and poetic: “It was like a room in a story, what with the fire, the fire screen, the fenders and the fire irons gleaming, and the picture above the black marble mantelpiece of a knight on horseback breaching a storm.” The conversation between the two women primarily suggests two secrets: that the mother wishes to ingratiate herself with Ms. Coughlan, and that Ms. Coughlan’s relationship with her husband is bland and unexciting.

The tea is disrupted suddenly when Ms. Coughlan asks her sister, who lives with them, to look at her rash and check her lips for swelling. Although the mother does not think there is any thing wrong, she tries to be accommodating by suggesting they call the doctor. But, Ms. Coughlan insists that they drive to the doctor’s office instead, which makes the mother think there was “something fishy, decidedly fishy” about it all, especially since she knows the doctor has a reputation as something of a lady’s man who has kissed the nurses on the hospital grounds.

The girl’s romantic imagination once again takes over, as she imagines Mrs. Coughlan lying on the doctor’s couch, and “how both, as in a drama, had a sudden urge to kiss each other, but did not dare to.” When Mrs. Coughlan and her sister return, the girl thinks she looks different, “as if something thrilling had happened to her.” As the mother and daughter leave, Drew says she is glad they came, “but it was like telling us we were dull and lusterless...” Walking home, the mother is scornful about the “grand Mrs. Coughlan,” but the girl has an “insatiable longing for tinned peaches.” She concludes by saying that mixed with her longing is a mounting rage. “Our lives seemed so drab, so uneventful. I prayed for drastic thing to occur—for the bullocks to rise up and mutiny, then gore one another, for my father to die in his sleep, for our school to catch fire, and for Mr. Coughlan to take a pistol and shoot his wife, before shooting himself.” Like the woman in “Sinning,” the young girl laments the lack of romantic engagement in her life—a sense of loss that in Edna O’Brien’s stories often manifests itself in brute and perverse imagining.

Edna O’Brien’s stories are not terribly complex, but they perceptively investigate the secret desires of their characters and the mysteries that lie behind the seemingly controlled surfaces of life. They are not as challenging as the stories of her Canadian colleague Alice Munro (who has always been a great O’Brien admirer), but they are delicately written and sensitively explored.

I’ll end on a final personal note. I have met Edna O’Brien briefly twice—once when I was in Dublin and attended a reading she gave at Trinity College; she was kind enough to have a brief chat with me and sign a copy of her most recent novel that I had just purchased for my wife. Three years ago, I was in Cork for an International Short Story Conference, at which she was a featured reader. I was very sick at the time, coughing so much that I had to leave the auditorium and listen to her finish the story from the public address system in the hallway. As one of the featured speakers, I was invited to sit at Ms. O’Brien’s table for the banquet dinner that night, but because I was coughing so much, I knew I would be a disruption and had to decline. Instead I went back to my hotel, the Imperial, where Michael Collins spent his last night, and spent my night coughing-- miserable that I had missed the opportunity for what I imagined would have been a delightful evening, drinking wine and making sophisticated chat with the grand Edna O’Brien. For a romantic like me, it was a crushing blow.

I send my very best wishes to Ms. O’Brien in her competition for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. In a few days, I will discuss the third book on the shortlist: Suzanne Rivecca’s Death is Not an Option.”

Alexander MacLeod's LIGHT LIFTING: Short Listed for 2011 Frank O'Connor Award

2011-08-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes all it takes is to make the shortlist of a literary contest, especially when you are not expecting it. Alexander MacLeod (age 40) lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia with his wife and three young children, teaching English at St. Mary’s University. His father is the wonderful writer, Alistair MacLeod, now retired, one of the best, least appreciated, short- story writers devoted to the form. But the father’s brilliance does not seem relevant to the son’s highly praised short story collection Light Lifting. In fact, MacLeod told an interviewer last year that although he and his father talked about lots of things when he was growing up, they never talked about stories and literature.

Alexander MacLeod has been writing stories for the past seventeen years, never really having time while getting his degrees and raising a family to create a book out of them. It seems it took his friend, Dan Wells, publisher of a small Ontario press, Biblioasis, to work with him to get Light Lifting together. MacLeod has said it was a shoestring operation, with he and Wells promoting the book by “driving around in a Volkswagen, selling books out of the trunk.” Then in early October, 2010, he got word that his book was long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Bingo! The rush of agents, publishers, reviewers, reporters all began, much to his surprise and bemusement. Then, lo and behold! the book made the shortlist of the top five for the Giller. This is not small stuff. The Giller, renamed the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is the largest annual literary prize in Canada, awarding $50,000 to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $5,000 to each of the finalists. It has been won by Alice Munro (twice), Mordecai Richler, Austin Clarke, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, and the shortlists include just about every major Canadian writer.

Here is the 2010 Giller citation for Light Lifting:

“Rarely does fiction inhabit the body – the moving, athletic body – as fully as in Alexander MacLeod’s debut story collection. Whether describing what it is to run track, to swim against a current, to build cars or to haul bricks, MacLeod brings into vivid concrete language the physical experiences that mark us as profoundly as any thought. His stories are a careful marriage of the lyric and the narrative: each unfolds around a resonant, ineffable moment, replete with history and emotion, a Gordian knot comprised of all the strands that lead up to and away from it. Sensitive and subtle, MacLeod is a writer through whose deliberately partial and quotidian pieces shimmers life’s unspoken complexity.”

MacLeod did not win the Giller; Joanna Skibsrud did for her novel The Sentimentalists. But his success with his debut book of stories is not over yet. He has also made the shortlist for the lucrative Frank O’Connor Prize, to be awarded in Cork in September 2011. Again, no small thing. The prize is worth 35,000 Euros, which, currently equates to 50,510 American dollars or 49,512 Canadian dollars. Yiyun Li, who is nominated this year, won it once before, as have Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, and Ron Rash.

So, what is it about this collection of seven stories that has put it on the short list of two of the best-paying literary awards in the world? It has not been widely reviewed in the U.S., and not paid much attention to in Canada until it made the Giller longlist/shortlist. The reviewers largely attribute the book’s appeal to its focus on ordinary working class people. Of course, the popularity of such writers as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolfe, and Richard Ford back in the sixties was also attributed to their focus on the so-called “blue collar.” But there is nothing minimalistically hyperrealistic (whatever that means) about MacLeod’s stories. In fact, they go on at great lengths about the details of work and the obsession of workers to do the job right. From a young drugstore delivery boy who overcomes his revulsion to save the life of a threatening old man to a young track star obsessed with shaving two seconds off his run, the stories seems to focus more on the surface of experience than on the depths.

However, Macleod believes that his stories are not just about the attention and dedication to the physical action necessary to succeed at what one does. At his first reading, when asked what makes physical action significant and meaningful, he said, “that somebody cares about it.” For MacLeod, the specific physical action of his stories has “general meaning.”

I will discuss only one story in the collection—“Miracle Mile,” although two others-“Light Lifting,” and “Adult Beginner I”—also seem illustrative of what constitutes the appeal of this collection and perhaps account for why it has been shortlisted for two major literary prizes. “Wonder About Parents” and “Good Kids” are family stories and not particularly compelling; “The Number Three,” about a man who tries to deal with guilt for the death of his wife and son in an auto accident, seems somewhat “rigged” and conventional. “The Loop” is a rather ordinary coming-of age-story about a young boy who delivers drugstore meds to the down and out elderly, often injured by a lifetime of work.

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe, short stories have often focused on obsession, because a psychological obsession most often leads to an aesthetic obsession with the unity of the story. Moreover, short stories often focus on characters, as one Hemingway story suggests, who inhabit “Another Country,” living outside the ordinary controls of everyday society, made to earn their identity rather than deriving it from social definitions. As the narrator of “Miracle Mile” says, “It was like we belonged to our own little country and we had this secret language that almost nobody else understood.” Well aware of the need for obsessive focus, he adds, “If you ever wanted to see what it was like on the other side, you would need to change your entire life and get rid of almost everything else.”

Short story collections that focus on a culture previously unexplored—a country, a region, a profession, a cult, a subculture—often grab the attention of reviewers and judges. It is the “new,” the “unknown,” the “mysterious that makes readers say, “wow, that’s really something, I’ve never heard of that before.” For a profession, like running, (MacLeod, who was a runner himself and seems to know what he is talking about), the reader is apt to be fascinated by what makes runners do what they do with such rabid devotion.

“It’s hard to tell anybody what it’s really like,” the narrator says, but tries by describing guys who are willing to spend two years of training to shave s single second off their personal best, tells about popping anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, recounts with some pride getting more cortisone injections in the feet in five months than you are supposed to have in your whole life, marvels at long distance female runners who are anorexic, iron deficient, and have not had a regular period in years, but who can run a hundred ad twenty miles in a week, who can slow down their hearts so far you have to wait between the beats.

All this is engrossing, “wow” information that contributes to the appeal of MacLeod’s stories. But mere information does not a story make, so MacLeod adds an insert action story about when he and his friend, whose nickname is “Burner” were in high school and used to race trains in the underground tunnel from Detroit to Windsor, Canada—foolish, “I’m invincible” type behavior that makes readers shake their heads in disbelief and hold their breath in anticipation as Burner gets out of the tunnel ahead of the train: “He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage.”

To give the story some historical context, MacLeod situates his story his story on that day in 1997 when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, which the narrator and his friend see played over and over again on television. He takes his title from the famous 1954 race when Roger Bannister beat John Landy as both broke the four-minute “miracle mile,” in Vancouver. What the two incidents share is what the narrator calls “pure craziness”; as one announcer of the Tyson fight said, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” MacLeod provides some detailed description of the bite and the race, but he does not have to rely on memory for these, since both events are available for viewing over and over again on YouTube.

In addition to the racing information about obsession and two historical events of head-shaking craziness, the story must, of course have a plot—the story of the race. And who can resist a race story—horse races, swim races, running races—for of all athletic events, a race seems the most audience-involving, as we try to “pick a winner” and watch in real time people or animals simply moving their bodies competitively through space-- but doing so at a speed that can only fill us with wonder.

The narrator describes the race as only a participant can describe it, and, as usual in races, the winner wins because of an ability somehow to exceed what ordinary human beings can do—like Roger Bannister in that final sprint around Landy. But the story also requires that the narrator elevate a mere race, which is the essence of action and suspense, into something more generally significant. The narrator ruminates:

“I know that when you give yourself over completely to just one thing, you can lose perspective on the rest of the world…. We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there’s no way to separate our faith from our desperation… We can only value what we yearn for and it really does not mater what others think… We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire.”

But stories cannot just be descriptions of interesting details, accounts of historical contexts, or even suspenseful, action-packed plots or thematic essays. They also have to have meaningful endings. And since MacLeod’s stories are less plot-based stories than explorations of physical actions, his endings sometimes seem generated by the convention of the necessity of a short story ending rather than by the necessity of the story at hand. “Miracle Mile” ends with a “crazy” example of the basic madness of what underlies the obsessed competitor. There’s something ultimately out of control about the absolute control required to be a winner. So when a group of four or five children, ages 7 to 9, speed by the narrator and Burner as they are jogging to cool off, the kids jeer, “I’m faster than you are…. you can’t catch me.” Burner “loses it” and charges after the children, who, of course have no idea that they are jeering at a professional runner. The story ends with Burner catching up with one female child riding her My Little Pony bike away as fast as she can, a strange, high-pitched wheezing sound coming from her. “But there was nothing she could do. Burner had already closed the gap and his hand was already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair. It all disintegrated after that. He must have been a foot taller than the oldest one.”

Finally, and never to be forgotten, there is style. Since MacLeod’s focus is on physical activity, it would not do for him to call attention to the writing itself; and indeed, the style here is relatively transparent. Even when the story is told in first person, the emphasis is less on the personality of the teller than it is on the action being described. This quotation from which the book takes its title is typical. The narrator is describing carrying brick on a job site:

"Anyone who’s ever done this kind of work can tell you that the bending over is the worst pat of it. Bending over and getting up, and then bending over and getting up again—it’s like you’re folding and unfolding your body all day. You get creaky. And just that little bit of weight—just the weight that’s in a couple bricks—that’s enough to grind you down. Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times. But it’s the light lifting that does the real damage.”

Typical of MacLeod’s ruminative style is the following passage from “Adult Beginning I,” in which a third person narrator describes how a young woman feels when learning to swim:

"That’s when it happened. An understanding, a new realization came into her head and triggered a transformation that was almost total. Maybe this was how all learning worked in the end. The right kind of concentration deployed in the right way at the right time. If you paid attention and sorted carefully, put things in the right place at the right time, it was possible to think yourself away from yourself, away from the things you could not do."

To his credit, in an interview last year, MacLeod said:

“I’m a fan of the short story. I don’t see it as a warm-up for the great novel-writing career. People say that you have to escape the limitations of the short story to move on to the broader canvas of the novel, but there are possibilities in short stories that are not there in the novel. I wanted these stories to have a lot of tension, which is harder to sustain in a novel.”

I congratulate Alexander MacLeod on making the shortlist of the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize and wish him luck. I will discuss Edna O’Brien’s nominated collection, Saints and Sinners in a few days.

Guy de Maupassant and the Psychological Mystery Story

2011-08-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

In the decade between 1880 and 1890 Guy de Maupassant published over three hundred short stories in a variety of modes, including the supernatural legend, the surprise-ending tale, and the realistic story. Although he is best-known for such surprise-ending tales as La Parue (1884; "The Necklace," 1909) and most-respected for such affecting realistic stories such as Boule de Suif (1880; "Ball of Fat," 1909), Maupassant also contributed to the sophistication of the horror story by pushing it even further than Edgar Allan Poe into the modern mode of psychological obsession and madness.

The predominant mode of Maupassant’s psychological stories is not the manifestation of the ghostly supernatural in the traditional sense; rather the stories focus on some mysterious dimension of reality that exists beyond what the human senses can perceive. But even as this realm of reality is justified rationally, the reader is never quite sure whether the realm truly exists "out there" in the world of the story or whether it is a product of the obsessive mind of the narrator. The style of several of these tales is similar to some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, particularly the stories of the perverse which combine narrative story line with the narrator's quasi-philosophic considerations of madness, murder, and the mysterious realm beyond the pale of ordinary understanding.

The most explicit story to focus on this realm, parts of which are used later in the more famous La Horla, is "Letter from a Madman." As told by the narrator to a doctor, the story unfolds a theory that the human mind receives only sparse and uncertain information about the external world because the limitations of the five senses restrict what humans can perceive. The narrator argues, for example, that if we had additional senses we could perceive a reality that is closed to our present senses. From this assumption he tries to infer, rather than directly perceive, the mysterious impenetrable world that lies around us. As a result he feels in the presence of non-corporeal beings, although he does not actually have the sense organ that would make it possible for him to "see" them. While sitting in front of a mirror he cannot see himself, for the invisible thing stands between him and the mirror and blocks his reflection. Since that time he has spent hours before his mirror, going mad waiting for "It" to return, knowing that he will wait until death.

The story "He" is similar to "Letter from a Madman" in its focus on some unseen but felt presence; however, it differs thematically in that it emphasizes the appearances of the apparition as a result of the narrator's loneliness, and it differs stylistically in that it features a more developed narrative with less discursive meditation. "He" is very similar to Poe stories which focus on the fear of fear itself and which emphasize the power of hallucination. The narrator acknowledges that he suffers from a disease of fear, an incomprehensible terror that causes him to fear the very madness or confusion of mind that constitutes the fear itself. He describes entering his room after a walk and seeing a man sitting in his chair before the fire. When he reaches out to touch him, there is nothing there. Although convinced that the figure was obviously an hallucination, he cannot shake the fear that it will appear again. Even though he knows that it does not exist except in his own apprehension, he cannot escape that apprehension. In both of these stories, it is the narrators' own intense self-consciousness which constitute their insanity; they push what they consider to be reasonable assumptions to such ultimate conclusions that the inevitable result is madness--that is, the perception of a state of being that exists outside of the normal everyday limits of human experience, perception, and thought.

In "Am I Insane?" and "The Madman," Maupassant's focus is on how an obsession becomes so powerful that it is translated into murderous action. In "Am I Insane?" the simpler of the two, the narrator loves a certain woman to madness. However, he also hates her passionately, for he knows that she is impure and without a soul; he intensely desires both to possess her and to kill her. When she tires of him, he becomes insanely jealous, determines that her horse (which she rides enraptured) is his rival, and executes it with a bullet to the brain before also killing his mistress. The madness here is similar to the meaningful madness in many Poe stories; there is some basis for the narrator's jealous obsession, both figuratively in the powerful male symbolism of the horse and literally in the narcissism and autoeroticism that the woman’s daily rides suggest.

In "A Madman," Maupassant carries to even further extremes the theme of madness resulting from carrying a line of reasoning to ultimate conclusions. The story consists of diary entries of a dead judge who always seemed to know the secret hearts of criminals. Over and over again in the diary he questions what pleasure there must be in killing. He justifies his obsession in long discursive passages in which he wonders why it is a crime to kill when killing is indeed the law of nature; inevitably he puts his theories into action. Equating his desire to kill with the power of sexual passion, he describes in graphic detail reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade his murder of a young boy by strangulation and his killing of a fisherman by splitting his head open with a spade. Even after he sentences the fisherman's nephew to death for the murder that he committed, he describes watching the boy's head being chopped off and wishing he could have bathed in his blood. Although the ostensible theme of the story is that many such madmen exist secretly in society, the more predominate motif is the notion philosophically examined by Nietzsche and fictionally explored by Dostoevsky that killing is the nearest thing to creation.

However, of all the Maupassant tales that focus on madness, hallucination, obsession, and the mystery of a dimension beyond the senses, the most sustained and deservedly the most famous is "The Horla." Although many critics point to the autobiographical elements in this story (for during its writing Maupassant was possessed by the increasing madness caused by syphilis), still others suggest that the work stands on its own merits as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own madness as well as his understanding of the process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.

The story begins with many of the same themes that Maupassant had earlier developed in "Letter from a Madman," even at times using much of the same language as that story. The narrator begins considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to perceive all that is out there in the world, and the theory that if there were other senses, one could discover many more things about the world around human life. The second predominant Maupassant theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a presentiment of something yet to come. This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and the conviction that there is something following him; yet when he turns around there is nothing there.

This sense of something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual creatures who exist in this invisible dimension. This conviction is then developed into an idea that when the mind is asleep an alien being takes control of the body and makes it obey. All of these ideas then lead easily into the concept of mesmerism or hypnotism; for under hypnosis it seems as if an alien being has control of our actions which, when we awake, we have no awareness of. Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he also feels he is in complete possession of all his faculties, and he becomes even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his own mind does not direct him to do. Thus he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who have always existed and who have haunted mankind even though they cannot be seen.

The final event to convince him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of the creatures, is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil in which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures who feed on them during sleep. He remembers a Brazilian ship that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped ship to possess him. Now he knows that the reign of man on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla which man has always feared--forces called spirits, genii, fairies, hobgoblins, witches, devils, and imps--will enslave man.

Finally, in a scene that was used earlier in "A Letter from a Madman," he "sees" the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like man, be prematurely destroyed. His final thought is since the Horla is not dead he shall have to kill himself; the story ends with that decision.

What makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to account for his madness as being something external to himself. This universalizes the story, for human beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible presence named gods, devils, spirits, etc. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which is the very basis of hallucination.

Because of his ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the complex mind of man, Maupassant is an important figure in marking the transition between the nineteenth-century tale of the supernatural and the twentieth-century short story of psychological obsession. Maupassant is one of those writers whose contribution to literature is often overshadowed by the tragic facts of his life and whose real experimentation is often ignored in favor of his more popular innovations. Too often it is his promiscuity and profligate Parisian life style that receives the most attention from the casual reader. As if to provide evidence for the payment Maupassant had to make for such a lifestyle, these readers then point to the supposed madness-inspired story La Horla--a fit ending for one who not only wrote about prostitutes but paid for their dangerous favors as well with his life. In the last few years of his life, due to syphilis, his eyesight weakened, his memory failed, his thinking became erratic, and he suffered from delusions. After undergoing several unsuccessful treatments for his disease and even attempting suicide, Maupassant was incarcerated in a sanatorium in Passy, where he died on July 6, 1893.

However, Maupassant's real place as a writer belongs with such innovators of the short-story form as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry. Too often, whereas such writers as Turgenev and Chekhov are admired for their so-called lyricism and realistic vignettes, writers such as Bierce and O. Henry are scorned for their so-called cheap narrative tricks. Maupassant falls somewhere in between. On the one hand, he indeed mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number of characters in a luminous situation. The Soviet short-story writer Isaac Babel has perhaps paid the ultimate tribute to Maupassant in his story “Guy de Maupassant” by noting how Maupassant knew the power of a period placed in just the right place.

Maupassant had as much to do with the development of the short-story genre in the late nineteenth century Chekhov did in somewhat different ways. However, because such stories as "The Necklace" seem so deceptively simple and trivial, his experiment with the form has often been ignored. Not until the short story itself receives the recognition it deserves as a respectable literary genre will Guy de Maupassant receive the recognition he deserves for his contribution to the perfection of the form.

Thanks to Caroline for asking for my opinion of Maupassant--a query I obviously cannot resist.

The Short Story Genius of Ambrose Bierce

2011-08-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

The Library of America has just announced a new author in their series of editions of great writers: Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs. The book includes Bierce’s greatest collection, In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), as well as Can Such Things Be? The Devil’s Dictionary, and Bits of Autobiography, and Selected Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi, who has edited several other books on Bierce, it is due out in bookstores on September 1, 2011.

I have always been a great admirer of Bierce’s stories, for in face of the increasing demand for realistic novels in the late nineteenth century, he remained faithful to the short story as a form. In my opinion, Bierce, like Poe, is a brilliant short-story writer who has been snubbed by many academic literary critics who scorn the short story as being artificial and trivial. Thus, it should not surprise you that my favorite definition from Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is:

Novel--A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes -- some of which have a large sale.

My favorite Bierce stories, included in this new collection, are:

The Man and the Snake
The Eyes of the Panther
The Death of Halpin Frayser
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
The Mocking-Bird

Critics who have accused Ambrose Bierce of artificiality and lack of depth usually make such claims based on expectations derived from the realistic novel. By insisting on a faithful adherence to the external world, advocates of realism allow content, often ragged and random, to dictate form. As a result, the novel, which can expand to better create an illusion of everyday reality, is the favored form of the realists, while the short story, which requires more artifice and patterning, assumes a secondary role. Those writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century who were committed to the short story instead of the novel were well aware of this fact. When Ambrose Bierce entered into the argument raging between the romantics and the realists, he attacked the William Dean Howells school of realistic fiction by arguing that to them, "nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man's most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions.”

Bierce says that the capable writer does not give probability a moment's attention, except to make the fiction seem probable or true in the reading process. Nothing is as improbable as what is true, says Bierce; the unexpected does occur, "but that is not saying enough; it is also the unlikely--one might almost say the impossible.” Bierce's characters, like those of Flannery O'Connor's, have an inner coherence rather than a coherence to their social framework. As O'Connor says, "Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected.”

Bierce's most obsessive concern in the short story is not simple macabre horror, but rather the central paradox that underlies the most basic human desire and fear--the desire for a sense of unity and significance and the fear that the realization of such a desire means death. In terms of story telling, Bierce knew that the desire manifested itself as the compulsion to present life as if it were a fictional construct, that is, as if it had significance and meaning, beauty and order.

Bierce's characteristic short story dynamic is to distance his characters from the ordinary world of everyday reality--by presenting them in a static formal posture or picture, by putting them in a dream-like autistic state, by putting them on a formal stage. When this formal picture or frozen sense of reality is broken, the result is often the shock of entering another country, another realm of reality; the result is disillusion, despair, or death.

The simplest and most straightforward example of this technique of presenting a frozen reality and then ironically undercutting it is "Killed Resaca," in which Lieutenant Herman Brayle, the archetypal good soldier, sits his horse like an equestrian statue even in a storm of bullets. In a foolishly heroic and fatal gesture, he rides into battle, "a picture" described as "intensely dramatic, but in no degree theatrical." However, when the narrator returns a letter to the Lieutenant's lady friend, a letter that romantically states she could bear to hear of her lover's death but not of his cowardice, the heroic picture or statue of the Lieutenant is undermined when she, disgusted at the blood on the letter, flings it into the fire.

Bierce’s story “Chickamauga" is a particularly rich example of this theme of unreality being presented as reality until the spell is broken and the illusion of heroic order shattered. The story focuses on the two basic worlds: child and adult, fantasy and reality, innocence and experience. This is a story in which nobody listens. We say to child, "do you hear me?" We say to adults in war, "Why don't you listen?" When he reaches home, it is as if he has gone a long way to stay where he was; the plantation "seemed to turn as if on a pivot." The story ends with son's loss of mother, just as the war has to do with mothers' loss of sons. "The child was a deaf mute" completes the pattern of the adult observer. The story is another example of Bierce presenting stories in which language is inadequate and in which heroic pictures are startled into terrible life and in which illusory reality is startled into the reality of our deepest fears.

Of course, Bierce's most famous narrative play with the frozen moment of time and the power of imaginative reality is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The story explicitly and sardonically exploits the idea of the reader (and the protagonist) being pulled up short as Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only genuine "natural end" possible--death. However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it can be forestalled--through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of fiction making which the reader initially takes to be actuality.

The story is made up of three sections that correspond to three fictional elements--static scene, exposition, and action. But all of these elements are self-consciously ironic in presentation and thus undermine themselves. The first part of the story, the only part in which the realistic convention suggests that something is "actually happening," seems quite dead and static, almost a still picture, highly formalized and stiff. At the end of Part I, the teller tips the reader off to the play with time that the story, because it is discourse rather than mere event, must inevitably make: "As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside." The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious characteristic of fiction --the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or timeless he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told one after another. It is this purely rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse that justifies or motivates the final fantastic section of the story.

The second play with the convention of time in the story is the insertion at the end of Part I--purely and perversely by the demand of discourse rather than by the demand of existential event--of a bit of exposition that tells the reader who the protagonist is and what he is doing in such a predicament. The reader sits patiently through this background formality while the protagonist plummets into Part III of the story--which itself is of course a depiction of that which does not happen at all except in the flash (which can only be recounted in words) that takes place in the protagonist's mind. It is thus only because of discourse that Farquhar's invention of his escape from hanging, drowning, and death by guns and cannons makes the reader believe that the escape is taking place in reality. At the conclusion, when the protagonist reaches the end of the fall, the verb tense of the story abruptly shifts from present to the ultimate past tense: "Peyton Farquhar was dead." At this point, the reader is forced to double back to look at the tone and details of the story which created this forestalling of the end--a forestalling which is indeed the story itself, for without it there would have been no story. Postponing the end until the ultimate and inescapable end of death is the subject of Bierce's self-conscious and self-reflexive discourse.

Thus rather than being a cheap trick dependent on a shocking ending, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.

If you have not read Bierce, I recommend his stories to you as brilliant examples of the short story as a genre.

PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: 2011--Part II

2011-07-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

I suspect that my pleasure reading the following three stories from the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is “summer reading self indulgence. They are what some reviewers like to call “accessible,” that is, they do not make great demands on the mind, but rather have a visceral appeal. All three engaged me immediately, and hooked me completely. All three had elements of danger, but the danger is purely physical. I don’t have any real desire to read them multiple times or to subject them to a careful analysis. The following is simply an account of what engaged me about the stories and a discussion of the issues they raised for me about reading the short story.

Mark Slouka, “Crossing.”

In his comment on the origins of this story, Slouka says that the event on which it is based happened fifteen years ago when, in what he calls “an act of near-biblical stupidity,” he was fording a river with his five-year-old son on his back and found himself in serious trouble: “There are few things more excruciating than realizing you’ve put your child’s life in danger.”

The story begins as a straightforward account of a man who takes his son to a remote area where he remembers similar experiences with his own father. He carries their packs across a shallow but fast-moving river and then goes back and carries his son across. They spend one night exploring the area, but the next day when he recrosses the river, he knows that because of some melt runoff the current is a bit stronger than the day before. When he takes the boy back across, he loses his footing and, although he does not fall, he is moved downstream four or five feet to a point that makes it seem impossible to move forward or backward. The story ends with the man in the middle of the river, telling his son that they are o.k. and just to “hang on.”

Slouka says that over the years he thought about the event often and knew he wanted to write about it, but that he could not find “the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note—often dissonant, almost always unexpected—that brings a story to life.’ Slouka adds, “Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert.” So he let it be until he came across an anecdote that he has the man recall when he thinks with remorse and shame that he cannot get out of this dilemma—about a medieval priest who takes the torch from the executioner and goes down a line of victims tied to stakes and kisses each one tenderly on the cheek before lighting the fire under them. Slouka says this anecdote made him realize that he had to leave the man there in the stream, ‘tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.”

Of course the question the reader wants an answer to at the end of the story is: “Did the man get himself and his son across?” Slouka says that in real life he, of course, did get across with his son, who is now big enough to carry him across the river. But in the story, the man and boy do not get across, for they are still there in the middle of the river where the story leaves them. Slouka says: “Fiction, I remind myself, is an act of trespass on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn’t play. Both are equally true: We made it. And we’re still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.”

To convert this simple, albeit terrifying event, into a piece of fiction, Slouka inserts several minor suggestions that the narrator, recently separated or divorced, is in an in-between place in his life, e.g. “he hadn’t been happy in a while,” “he hadn’t wanted her back, hadn’t wanted much of anything really” “when he looked at her she shook her head and looked away and at that moment he thought, maybe—maybe he could make this right, “Sometimes it wasn’t so easy to know how to go, how to keep things alive.”

When the narrator is in the middle of the river with his son on his back, he thinks “My God, all his other fuckups were just preparations for this.” “He couldn’t move. He was barely holding on. There was no way.” And as he feels the ‘hot, shameful fire of remorse and the unending pity,” he recalls the anecdote about the medieval priest who takes the torch from the executioner and goes down the line of condemned witches or heretics and kisses each one on the cheek before setting the torch to the tinder under their feet.

Why and how this anecdote transformed an event into a story for Slouka is up to the reader. The anecdote is a reference to the so-called “kiss of death,” originating in that act of betrayal when Judas kisses Jesus on the cheek, therefore identifying him for the soldiers. Perhaps the event became a story for Slouka when he knew that the man and his son would neither escape nor would they die, but would remain there, suspended between past and present, between safety and death, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of going on. Who knows what went on in the mind of Judas when he betrayed Jesus with a kiss? Is the priest’s kiss in the anecdote an admission of betrayal or a kiss asking forgiveness of the condemned?

Slouka’s placing the man in a position wherein he cannot go on, but must go on recalls the final lines of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable:

You must go on.
I can't go on.
You must go on.
I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.
You must go on.
I can't go on.
I'll go on.

I do not know if Slouka had this passage in mind when he knew he had to leave his narrator and his son in the middle of that river. However, it is the one thing in the story that elevates it from simple visceral danger to an image of the universal human condition.

Lynn Freed, “Sunshine”

Lynn Freed says little about this story, except that it has been with her for a long time. A. M. Holmes, who picked it as her favorite in the collection, has much to say. Holmes suggests that one is initially deceived by the apparent simplicity in the story: “Something exceptionally artful in the way the author manages the balance between what is said and what is left unsaid. Enormously complex information and emotion is invisibly conveyed; this works because what is being said carries the fullness and weight of collective archetypal imagery, classical themes of mythological root, literary references, albeit barely spoken, ad psychological theories—all adding up to the very essence of one’s moral life and responsibility.”

The story begins with the discovery of a feral female child in the bush, who is turned over to a man named Julian de Jong, the wealthy master of an estate. It seems clear that this is not the first time that a native girl or “wild child” has been brought to de Jong. Indeed, the women Grace and Beauty, who he orders to clean the child up, have once been such foundlings. For four weeks, the two women try to “tame” or “civilize” the young girl, and each night de Jong talks quietly to her. The title comes from the fact that at one point, Grace begins to sing the song “You Are My Sunshine,” which somehow charms the girl, allowing her to be coaxed into putting on clothes. Although Grace thinks the girl still retains more of the baboon than the human, de Jong orders that she be brought to him.

De Jong waits for the girl, as he has done with the others before her, naked in a pool of water. His rape of the girl is recounted in some detail, but afterwards when de Jong dunks her head under the water to make her stop moaning, she breaks away and begins to bite him, sinking her teeth into his neck and hanging on like a wild dog until he dies and she rips away the flesh, swallows it, and escapes out an open window. The girl never returns, and eventually the story becomes a village legend of a baboon girl who kills a demon. The villagers even begin to doubt the existence of the demon himself, thinking that surely someone would have reported him to the authorities, that one of the girls would have told her story to the newspapers.

Holmes calls attention to what she terms the Freed’s “deft summoning of the complexity of slave/master relationships, the struggle of women for legitimacy, beyond man’s object or possession, and question of economic power and domination…are part of what gives this story its resonance.” Holmes ends her discussion by saying that in the story she celebrates “the dark art” and applauds the “gruesome, the transgressive, the thing that does not let us escape from the side of ourselves that we would rather not see.”

My reaction to the impact of the story is similar to Holmes’ reaction. It is a horrifying tale of exploitation in which every one is guilty. However, I am not so sure that it has a feminist message. The wild child could just have easily been a boy as a girl. The story fascinates me because it reminds me that we are all animals and only a thin, temporary veneer of civilization keeps us in line. Conrad told the same story in “Heart of Darkness” with a great deal more complexity. Still, the story kept me riveted until the bloody end, becoming, as all stories do, a timeless legend.

Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without”

According to his faculty profile for the Department of English at University of Iowa, “Matthew Neill Null was born and raised in West Virginia, where his family has lived for generations. He received a B.A. in English (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Washington & Lee University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a carpenter, a road crewman, and a grant writer. His fiction has appeared in The Oxford American, Gray's Sporting Journal, and Shenandoah. He's finishing a novel...and slowly, slowly, accruing a collection of stories.”

Manuel Munoz, who chose this story as his favorite in the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, says:

The central character’s “attempt to pass on a cheap piece of goods to the poor farmer McBride is as straightforward a plot as anyone could ask, and the surprise comes in the story's largely silent battle of pride and comeuppance, two men thinking of the single way to emerge the better in the bargain. The real pleasure—and certainly not the only one—is in the sentences, as complex, deliberately assured, and lethal as Flannery O'Connor's. What an authentic, confident story this is, soaked through with deceit and menace and the distinctly abrupt strain of American violence. Add in a startling ending—an unforgiving embrace of the nature of time and history, if not the devouring jaws of myth—and you've got a work ready to prove that short stories and short-story writers are the most sprawling and unruly of all mythmakers.”

I have to admit that part of the appeal this story has for me is its setting in a rural area of West Virginia, which is very similar to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky where I was born and raised. Null is a young man in his twenties who says he wrote the story as a self-conscious challenge to himself to try to write a “drummer tale” that would be more than a cliché, admitting that he knows that many great writers—Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Bernard Malamud—have written very fine travelling salesman stories, which are actually versions of the so-called “biter bit” stories, in which a con man gets conned.

However, I have my doubts when Null begins to talk about what he calls his central theme—“the crisis of people who love the land, but are faced with the prospect of selling or destroying some aspect of it to translate the landscape into dollars.” He says this is West Virginia’ story of the land having been sold and sold again for timber to coal mining. “Despite our common myths and party rhetoric, extractive industry has failed to improve the lot of West Virginians. For me “Something You Can’t live Without” is a middle chapter in a long, fraught history.”

I did not like Null’s story because of its so-called social message about the rape of Appalachia any more than I liked Lynn Freed’s story “Sunshine” because of its so-called social message about the exploitation of women. I think Null’s story is a straightforward, well-told tale about a travelling salesman who begins his career with a dead man’s sucker list and finally meets up with a sucker who gets the better of him. The salesman, Cartwright, on his buckboard wagon, riding up a holler to try to con honest Sherman McBride into buying a new plow, creates an irresistible image for me. And the language Null puts in the mouths of his characters sounds familiar to my ears. “Whoever cut this grade, Cartwright aid to the horses, must have followed a snake up the hollow.” (Although one of my folks would have said “holler.’) Still talking to his horses, Cartwright says, “It’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” I have never heard anyone say this, but it’s funnier than any of the “hotter than” lines I have ever heard. When he tells McBride that he has something that will triple a man’s harvest yield with half the effort, adding “you can’t beat that with a stick,” I am ready for a sales pitch of the one tool he says a man cannot afford to be without.

When Cartwright makes the sale, but McBride does not have enough money to buy the plow, we know we are in for another con. One of McBride’s sons takes Cartwright deep into a cave to show him a fossil of a petrified bear that the Smithsonian Institute is willing to pay big money for. However, when Cartwright tries to chip the fossil head out of the cave wall, it shatters. Things go from bad to worse when they discover Cartwright’s sucker list which characterizes McBride as “among the country’s daft, drunken, gullible, and insane.”

The story ends abruptly when McBride shoots Cartwright with a shotgun, and they cover the body with pine boughs. The history of the body is summarized quickly as bears and foxes tear it apart and scatter it and rodents chew off the drummer’s belt and boots. Five years later a hunter finds his belt buckle. Twenty years later a bear hunter pries off Cartwright’s gold tooth, and an old woman gives his rib cage a Christian burial after a dog drags it into her yard. The McBrides use the Miracle plow, but their yield is no better than it was before. When they tell the next drummer this, he hightails it out of there.

I like how the story sets up a comic “biter-bit” story that becomes legend with the body of the drummer being salvaged for whatever it might be worth. I thought the story was funny and familiar and well told. I just do not see it had a social message about the raped Appalachian land. And I do not think it has the complex human significance that Eudora Welty creates in “Death of a Travelling Salesman” or Flannery O’Connor creates in “Good Country People.”

Null says "Something You Can't Live Without" is his attempt to write a drummer story that would "outdo the established demigods of fiction." As much as I enjoyed his story, in my opinion, not many can equal the mastery of Welty and O'Connor. However, I look forward to reading more stories by Matthew Neill Null in the future. I trust they will not lean too heavily on social messages about downtrodden Appalachia.

PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: 2011--Part I

2011-07-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

Laura Furman says that every year she is asked what trends are revealed in short stories published during the year, noting that the question does not have anything to do with aesthetics or literary technique but with subject matter: “What do this year’s stories show about our world.” Furman responds that although in the past many writers, such as Dickens, Melville, Dos Pasos, and Margaret Atwood have a social vision, “for many writers, an explicit social agenda and social commentary—even contemporary life itself—are of limited interest. The relevance of a good writer transcends time and place.” As her examples of writers with social vision suggest, novelists are more apt to have a “social agenda” than short story writers.

In her brief essay on her favorite story, A. M. Holmes says, “The short story has always seemed to me the perfect medium, the manageable masterpiece… What makes a successful story is very different from what makes a successful novel—characters that are not sustainable for the duration of a novel, styles of telling, tones, narrative constructions that are perfect for a story but crumble or bore the reader is carried on for too long.” Holmes says she noticed something about the twenty stories chosen by Laura Furman for this year’s collection; “many expressed an outsider’s point of view… I was struck by this sense of ‘otherness’.” Of course, this aspect of the short story was emphasized by Frank O’Connor in his valuable little book, The Lonely Voice, many years ago.

In his comment on his favorite story, Manuel Munoz, who says he reads both the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American Short Stories every year, recalls 2004, when the National Book Award nominations chose five little-known women writers for their short list—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Christine Schutt, Joan Siber, Lily Tuck, and Kate Walbert—best known for their short stories—all of which stirred up a critical snobbery that Munoz rightfully resented. The New York Times stuck its nose in the air, complaining that the five shortlisted authors shared a “short story aesthetic” and that none of the selected books had a “big and sprawling scope.” Munoz thought, “What the hell is wrong with such an aesthetic?…. And since when are stories not “big.” He says he still seethes about that article six years later.

Well, good on Holmes and Munoz, I say. Sometimes I feel that the only ones who remain champions of the short story are writers themselves.

Of the twenty stories that Furman picked this year, the choices of the guest judges were as follows:

A. M. Holmes chose Lyn Freed’s “Sunshine”; Manuel Munoz chose Matthew Neill Null’s “Something You Can’t Live Without”; and Christine Schutt chose Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You.”

I have chosen nine as my favorites--four that I have read previously and have commented on in this blog:

Jim Shepard, “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You”
David Means, “The Junction”
Lori Ostlund, “Bed Death”
Brian Evenson, “Windeye”

The five stories new to me that I liked best are:

Kenneth Calhoun, “Nightblooming”
Lilly Tuck, “Ice”
Mark Slouka, “Crossing”
Lynn Freed, “Sunshine”
Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without”

For me, all five of these stories illustrate Laura Furman’s judgment: “The relevance of a good writer transcends time and place.” They also represent my continued conviction that it is style, not “stuff” that make for a good short story, although I must admit I responded positively to the subject matter of these four stories.

After reading through all the stories in the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, I found these stories to be the ones that I wanted to return to and read again. Rather than try to analyze the five stories in detail, I will simply talk a bit below about why I liked them.

Kenneth Calhoun’s “Nightblooming” is about a young man in his early twenties who joins a group of elderly men in a small jazz group. I admit I like it partly because I love traditional jazz and partly because it focuses on old guys, because I enjoy reading about men near my own age who continue to find meaning and pleasure in life doing what they like to do. Just because I am seventy does not mean I am ready to lapse into lassitude. I don’t think “Nightblooming” requires a young man appreciating the old guys to give them cache, but it is kind of nice to think that a young guy can see the significance in what these musicians do. “We’re just a speck in the grand whirling scheme, but at least we’re making noise.”

One of the old men says, “It’s a crazy thing to say you’re going to stick with something until you die. You pick two or three things you feel that way about and life organizes itself for you.” The style of the story is casual first person, and the narrator’s account of being hit on by a good looking eighty-year old woman is a hoot, and not at all condescending.

And the story has a theme that underlies its surface casualness. Kenneth Calhoun says that as a drummer throughout high school and college, he was especially interested in patterns and beats and that he got it in his head that everything that seemed random “could in fact be the articulation of a grand, overarching rhythm, but that the count hadn’t yet been revealed because we hadn’t reached the end of the measure.” He says that while writing “Nightblooming,” he begin to think “this could be a comforting religious sort of idea, not just a whimsical speculation.”

In my opinion, it is indeed a religious speculation that seems most appropriate for the short story, a form that creates meaning by means of a pattern that only becomes manifest when the story reaches its conclusion. The narrator in the story says his father only said one religious thing to him—that people like beats because they tell you what’s going to happen next. The narrator says he has thought about that a lot: “I think he was talking about patterns, about loops. And it’s true that once you hear a measure or two of the beat, you know what’s going to happen next and what to do when it happens. And the part that makes me think everything still has a chance—always has a chance—to work out is that you never know when the beat has completed a full cycle. This means that everything in life that seems so random could actually be part of a beat. We just don’t know yet. The full measure hasn’t been played.” I like the way the story embodies this theme, which applies to the short story as a form and life as an adventure.

Lily Tuck’s story “Ice” also embodies a universal theme. Once again, it is about older people. Yeah, yeah, I know. This time it is a married couple, in their sixties--still handsome, vital, active—on a cruise to Antarctica. In her commentary on the story, Tuck, who is seventy-two, says she and her husband did take a cruise to Antarctica, and that being a pessimist, she imagined the worse: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, her husband falling overboard. Nothing bad happened during the cruise, but she was struck by how stark and desolate Antarctica is—how insignificant and intrusive human beings are in such a landscape of ice. “I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.”

The perspective in the story is that of the wife, Maud, although the story is told in third-person. There is no indication that her marriage to Peter is in any particular trouble—it’s just that they have been married for forty years. He is a lawyer; she is a speech therapist who still works part time. They are a “handsome couple.” Maud feels anxious about the trip and about Peter. At the very beginning of the trip, just when they lose sight of land, she loses sight of him on board and begins to panic. When she finally finds him, “her relief is so intense she nearly shouts as she hurries over to him.” Maud feels Peter is hiding something or is depressed—which makes her feel all the more separated from him and all the more clingy. They know each other so well it is almost as if they can read each other’s minds.

The theme of the story is introduced by Maud’s recurring dream or nightmare about numbers. The numbers always start out small and manageable, but soon they multiplied and became so large they became so “unmanageable in incomprehensible that Maud was swept away into a kind of terrible abyss, a kind of black hole of numbers.” It has been years since she has thought about the dram, but Antarctica, “the vastness, the ice, the inhospitable landscape” reminds her of it. When she tells Peter about the dream, he says that many others from Aristotle to Pascal have had such dreams—that it suggests the “terror of the infinite.” Peter, who Maud says is the smartest man she knows, says the Greeks did not include infinity in their mathematics, for their word for “infinity” was also their word for “mess.”

I do not know if Lily tuck has read Frank O’Connor’s famous little book about the short, The Lonely Voice, but Peter’s response (and the theme of the story) is an echo of the following passage from that book:

“There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness. Indeed, it might be truer to say that while we often read a familiar novel again for companionship, we approach the short story in a very different mood. It is more akin to the mood of Pascal’s saying: Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” (The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.)

“Ice” is about Maud’s fear of being alone—a universal fear not unique to her. When Peter seems to be flirting with a somewhat younger woman on board, she accuses him and they have a confrontation about it. She recalls twenty years before when Peter had an affair, and the argument had turned violent with them throwing things at each other and his storming off for three days: “What Maud remembers vividly is her panic. During the time Peter was gone she could hardly breathe, let alone eat, and she could not sleep.”

At the end of the story, during the night Maud wakes up and finds Peter gone from their stateroom, and once again she panics, running throughout the ship looking for him. As she hears the pilot shouting out numbers, coordinates, compass points while the ship tries to navigate past a huge iceberg larger than the ship itself, Maud stands motionless, not daring to breathe. When she gets back to her room, Peter is there, saying he had merely been on deck watching the icebergs. “All that uninhabitable space. So pure, so absolute,” he says. When she goes to bed, Peter switches off the light and says, “Sweet dreams, darling.” But as Pascal says, and as we all feel at times, perhaps often at 2:00 in the morning, our dreams are not always sweet, but may be haunted by the silence that surrounds us.

I will comment on Mark Slouka’s “Crossing,” Lynn Freed’s, “Sunshine,” and
Matthew Neill Null’s “Something You Can’t Live Without” in my post next week.

If you have read the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and have a favorite story of your own, please let me know in the “Comment” section.

Jim Shepard and Andrea Barrett: Information vs. Storytelling

2011-07-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

I had just finished reading Jim Shepard’s new collection of stories, You Think That’s Bad when I received an email from Julia Terentyeva of FiveBooks at TheBrowser - Writing Worth Reading about an interview with Shepard, in which he lists his five favorite collections of short stories and talks about the art and history of the form. You might want to read it at
http://thebrowser.com/interviews/jim-shepard-on-short-stories

When Shepard was asked why short stories were not doing better than they are in our Twitter/Facebook era, here is what he said:

“It’s hard to understand why short stories don’t catch on given that they seemed to be suited to our frenetic modern lifestyle. I wonder whether that’s partially because readers feel that if they’re going to invest their imagination, they really want it to pay off in terms of time. They think: If I’m going to get invested in a world, I don’t want that world to go away so quickly. They want a trilogy or an 800-page novel or something.

Part of it also might be the mostly unfounded suspicion that short stories are like homework, that they’re closer to poetry than a novel. When you tell readers to read a poem, I think their impulse is often to think: Am I going to understand this? Nobody feels like picking up something for pleasure that will make them feel stupid. So maybe there is a little wariness about short stories, a little worry that they’ll be oblique and unsatisfying open-ended. But those are just theories. I don’t think anyone has an answer for why short stories aren’t doing better.”

Shepard may have found a way to make short stories more interesting to readers by appealing to the public preference for nonfiction. He has published four short story collections: Batting Against Castro, Love and Hydrogen, Like You’d Understand Anyway (shortlisted for the National Book Award)¸ and You Think That’s Bad. His stories have attracted some attention from reviewers because most of them are derived from Shepard’s reading in a wide range of subjects. A Shepard Acknowledgements page usually runs to two or three pages, with his introductory admission that most of his stories would not have existed “or would have existed in a much diminished form without critically important contributions” from…(and then he provides a long list of books.) I have read many of the reviews of Shepard’s collections, which are almost uniformly positive, but I have a suspicion that reviewers have responded so well to his stories because they are “different,” because they are so meticulously researched that the reviewer has a “handle” on the stories, i.e.—a great deal of factual information to talk about without actually talking about the stories as stories.

Although Jim Shepard gets the impetus and context for a story from his reading in nonfiction, he doesn’t get his story until he finds some personal involvement in the facts or when he invents some particular human engagement in the historical context he researches. Shepard says the title story of his collection Love and Hydrogen, which was picked for the 2002 Best American Short Stories, began when he was browsing with his four-year-old son in the children’s section of his local bookstore. When he ran across a children’s book about the Hindenburg airship, he was struck by the immensity and the hubris of the thing. He continued his research into zeppelins, looking for someway to elevate a story about them beyond a child’s fascination with big things that blow up, when, just after creating his two main characters, he wrote these two sentences: “Meinert and Gnuss are in love. This complicates just about everything.” Thus, only when he invented a love story between two men who were working on the Hindenburg on that fateful day it exploded did he have a story.

Similarly, his fascination with the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror bore no fictional fruit until he ran across a book entitled The Remarkable Saga of the Sanson Family, Who Served as Executioners of France for Seven Generation. The result was the story “Sans Farine,” chosen for the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, in which, buttressed by gobs of ghoulish information about the invention and uses of the guillotine, he invents a story about how one man and his wife try to cope with his inherited profession of executioner during the Reign of Terror.

Shepard says that like most of his fiction, the two stories in You Think That’s Bad chosen for the 2010 Best American Short Stories (“The Netherlands Lives With Water”) (and the 2011 Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories (“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You”) began from his browsing in bizarre subjects and finding his “imagination caught by a particular moment that resonates” with him emotionally. In the former, he was struck by the notion that a skier might cross a given area with no effect, while another might cross the same terrain and cause an avalanche. In the latter, what got his imagination going was the staggering engineering feats the Dutch developed to protect themselves from the implacable sea, even as global warming made their most ingenious efforts inadequate.

However, the avalanche story is really about one man’s guilt for inadvertently starting an avalanche that killed his brother. The Netherlands story is less particularized; although the conjugal conflicts of a couple of scientist/engineers are at the particularized center of the story, it is really a generalized account of the Netherland’s efforts to stave off the risking sea caused by global warning.
In answer to the FiveBooks interviewer’s question about whether “historical short stories” provide readers the pleasure of both fiction and nonfiction, Shepard replied:

They do feed the hunger that readers have for nonfiction in fiction. When I first started reading literary fiction, I was struck by how much I was learning – not only about the human heart, which is traditionally what literature is supposed to be about, but also about how the world worked and the way the world was. So when I read Ernest Hemingway’s [short story] “Big Two-Hearted River,” I felt I was learning not only about Nick Adams’s interior but also about fly fishing.”

Although Hemingway always creates such particularized experiences that he does indeed make me want to go fly fishing, I think the fishing information in “River” is only as good as for what Hemingway uses it—a means by which Nick tries to deal with the implications of his war experience. Indeed, when one gets intrigued by mere “information” in a story, one runs the risk of neglecting the complex human experience the language of the story attempts to create.

In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” (English translation in Illuminations, 1968), Walter Benjamin says, “information” threatens storytelling in the modern world. The difference between the forms of storytelling and forms of information, argues Benjamin, is that whereas storytelling always had a validity that required no external verification, information must be accessible to immediate verification. Storytelling differs from information in that storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the experience in some distilled way, but rather imbues the story with the life of the storyteller. Aspects of the storyteller cling to the story; this is the reason why many storytellers begin with the circumstances by which they have gained access to the story they are about to tell.

This distinction between storytelling and information points to one of the primary differences between the "truth" of story and the truth of other forms of explanation characteristic of discursive writing. Whereas, in such forms of discourse as history, sociology, psychology, etc, the aim of the work is to abstract from concrete experience so that a distilled discursive meaning remains, in story, the truth is somehow communicated by a recounting of the concrete experience itself in such a way that the truth is revealed by the details of the story, not by abstract explanation.

The first true storyteller, says Benjamin, is the teller of fairy tales, for the fairy tale provides good counsel. According to Benjamin, whereas realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus on the relatively limited areas of human experience that indeed can be encompassed by information, characters in fairy tales or stories encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience which cannot be explained by rational means, but which can only be embodied in myth. The wisest thing the fairy tale teaches is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits. What the fairy tale, and therefore the tale, does is to tell us how to deal with all that which we cannot understand.

In my opinion, another writer who does a more convincing job of integrating historical context into a complex human story is Shepard’s colleague at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Andrea Barrett. Barrett understands some basic similarities between science, history, and storytelling. She knows that all three construct narratives—whether they are called scientific theories, historical accounts, or fiction--to reveal connections, relationships, the interdependence of all things; all are human efforts to understand, or perhaps construct, what makes life meaningful.

Barrett once told an interviewer that after doing graduate work, first in zoology in the late seventies and then in history in the early eighties, she began to see a way to weave science and history together with her love of fiction. The resulting elegant tapestry was her collection Ship Fever and Other Stories, a surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1996.

Although the stories in Ship Fever focus on characters caught up in pursuits in the natural sciences, Barrett’s real emphasis is on the vulnerable human element behind the scientific impulse. Many of the stories are historical fictions in the classic sense: They involve real people from the past, often very famous scientists such as Gregor Mendel and Carl Linnaeus, and they present the past as it impinges upon and informs the present. All of Barrett's stories use scientific fact and historical events to throw light on basic human impulses and conflicts.

“The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," which was selected for The Best American Short Stories in 1995, is typical of Barrett's short fiction. Told by the wife of a mediocre twentieth century science professor, who greatly admires the geneticist Gregor Mendel, it includes the historical account of how Mendel allowed himself to be misdirected from his valuable studies of the hybridization of the edible pea to a dead-end study of the hawkweed by the botanist Carl Nageli until he finally gave up in despair. "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds" also contains the more personal story of how the narrator's grandfather accidentally killed a man who he thought was trying to abuse her as a child. These stories from the past are paralleled by stories in the present in which the narrator finds herself leading a meaningless life at middle age and in which her husband, having achieved nothing of scientific value himself, spends his retirement continually retelling the Mendel stories his wife told him.

Barrett also explores connections between science, history, and storytelling in the six stories in her second collection Servants of the Map. Like the scientists and historians in her work, Barrett says she is highly obsessive; all of her stories and novels are the result of painstaking research and scrupulous writing and rewriting. However, for all her attention to detail and focus on fact and the mysteries of science, the real mystery in her stories is the mystery of human motivation, particularly the drive to “see” and to “know.”

The title story is a carefully constructed novella about Max Vigne, a nineteenth-century surveyor who is part of an exploration party to the Himalayas. In a series of letters to his wife Clara back in England, Vigne discovers writing’s power to construct reality by going beyond mapping and recording to a higher level of perception, thereby creating a map not only of the physical world but of the human mind. The story was selected for The Best American Short Stories: 2001 and Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards.

Although I have to admit that I was fascinated by Jim Shepard’s account of how a Japanese special-effects expert created the film creature Godzilla (“Gojira, King of the Monsters”) and how an American infantryman coped with the hardships of an attack on the Japanese in New Guinea (“Happy with Crocodiles”). I was even riveted by the horrors of fifteenth-century inhuman pedophiliac monster Gilles de Rais who killed so many children. However, the absorption I felt when reading these stories was due largely to the specificity of the interesting information. Although Shepard writes well, it was still the “stuff,” not the “style” that appealed to me. The particular human experience he explores in his stories too often seems to me mainly an excuse for the array of the interesting information, whereas in Andrea Barrett’s stories, the informative background is secondary to the human conflict at the heart of her stories.

Haunted by Hemingway

2011-07-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

A half century ago on July 2, 1961, the day Ernest Hemingway’s body was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Idaho, I had just finished my first year at college and was attending summer school. I fancied myself a writer, publishing short stories in the college paper and literary magazine. I was walking across campus when in the newspaper rack I saw the headline that Ernest Hemingway had shot himself. I was reading his stories and novels during that summer, dreaming of living on the Left Bank in Paris and going to the bullfights in Madrid.

I did not get to Spain or Paris until much later. A few years ago, I was in Madrid. My wife, who loves all animals, told me not to go to the bullfight. But my youngest daughter who was with me, had read Hemingway recently, and said she wanted to see it. So we did, and it was brutal and cruel and not at all beautiful. I re-read Death in the Afternoon and understood that it could be beautiful only if one watched the pure pattern and form of it, elevating it above mere flesh and blood.

A few weeks ago, I walked the streets of the Left Bank in Paris and sat with my eldest daughter at the sidewalk café where Hemingway once sat. When I got home, I reread A Movable Feast and smiled at Hemingway’s efforts to write at the small round tables of the cafes.

Last week, my wife and I saw the new Woody Allen Movie Midnight in Paris, and laughed a lot, with the few others in the audience who knew the Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald in-jokes. Corey Stoll, who played Hemingway, spoke the lines Woody Allen could not resist giving him, as if Hemingway actually talked like the clipped, stylized voice of his fiction. Allen had Stoll play Hemingway well over the top, which, it seems, is the only way one can play Hemingway.

I got my new copy of the New Yorker yesterday, and there was a story by Julian Barnes entitled “Homage to Hemingway, which revolves around Hemingway’s story “Homage to Switzerland.” I couldn’t remember that story and could not find it in my library because I had given my Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway to that youngest daughter, who is now working on her Ph.D. in English (going into the family business, as it were). I looked for it online and was happy to find a Manchester Guardian podcast of British writers reading and commenting on their favorite short story (like the New Yorker podcast in America).

And sure enough, there was Julian Barnes reading “Homage to Switzerland.” It’s a relatively simple story in which Hemingway sets up three different versions of the same man waiting for a train. “Homage to Hemingway” sets up three different situations of the same man conducting a creative writing seminar on three different occasions. At one point, the teacher talks about “the myth of the writer and how it was not just the reader who became trapped in the myth but sometimes the writer as well.” He adds, that people thought Hemingway was “obsessed with male courage, with machismo and cojones. They didn’t see that often his real subject was failure and weakness.”

The Los Angeles Times ran an article on the anniversary of Hemingway’s death and a more personal article by reviewer David Ulin appeared the next day. Many critics and writers feel they have to apologize for liking Hemingway. Ulin’s article in the Sunday July 3 LA Times is headed, “Learning not to dislike Hemingway,” noting how questions about his legacy still linger, particularly his now discredited and politically incorrect stereotypes of masculinity. Although it has been getting some publicity, I am not tempted to read Marty Beckerman’s The Heming Way; the sub-title--“How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!”—puts me off, although I have no desire to apologize as many now feel they have to for reading Hemingway. I have always been more drawn to Hemingway’s magical style than his macho image and have always admired his short stories more than his novels.

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an article from the New York Times by A. E. Hotchner, friend of Hemingway and author of Papa Hemingway. He recounts those last years when Hemingway was haunted by a conviction that the FBI was tapping his phones and following him—paranoid fears that lead to shock treatments. As Hotchner points out, however, “Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file,” revealing that J. Edgar Hoover “had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones.”

Several years ago when I put together a textbook collection of short stories for use in the university classroom entitled Fiction’s Many Worlds, I chose a Hemingway story for the introduction—“Hills Like White Elephants”—trying to lead students gently into the close reading of a finely structured and complexly human short story.

Here is a brief excerpt from that Introduction:

One of the most powerful conventions of short fiction is the convention of selection of details. Every story is made up of two kinds of details--those realistically motivated details that exist merely to give the illusion of hard, concrete reality, and those that are mentioned because the teller has a rhetorical purpose for mentioning them, such as Kipling's repeated mention of the suspenders. Edgar Allan Poe suggested in the earliest discussion of the short story in American literature that the writer should not use a single word that was not carefully chosen to contribute to the overall purpose or effect that he had in writing the story. Anton Chekhov, the great Russian author, once advised a young writer that if he described a gun hanging on a wall on the first page of a story, then that gun should be fired before the end.

Using the terms of the Russian Formalists, we can think of details in a story merely to give us a sense of actuality as being relatively "loose" and even dispensable, or at least changeable. Details in the story because they are relevant to its meaning or overall rhetorical effect we can think of as being relatively "bound" to the story, that is, intrinsic and not easily detachable or changeable. Trying to determine which details in a story are "loose" and which are "bound" is one of the most important skills for reading stories effectively. One basic way we can determine which details are bound and which are loose is by applying the principle of redundancy or repetition: If a certain detail or kind of detail is mentioned more than once or twice in a story, we might suspect that it is relevant in some way.

Let's first look at the time frame of "Hills Like White Elephants." The couple are on the way to Madrid, Spain. They have stopped at a junction and are awaiting an express connection from Barcelona, which, we are told, will arrive in forty minutes and stop there for only two minutes. Thus, we have a situation explicitly cut off from the ordinary flow of time; the couple are enclosed between the time they got off one train and the time they will get on another. On the first reading of this story, the fact that the train will arrive from Barcelona in forty minutes may seem merely a "loose" realistic detail. However, at the end of the story the time is mentioned again when the waitress comes out and says that the train will arrive in five minutes.

This means that the events of the story we have just read from beginning to end take place in a time span of thirty-five minutes. However, we know that it only took about ten to fifteen minutes to read the story. How do we account for this discrepancy? After all, if the author had not wanted us to be concerned with the time element, he didn't have to mention the time frame both at the beginning and end of the story. Moreover, if he had not wanted us to see the disparity between the time of the events of the story and the time of the reading of the story, then he could have made the time span of the events more closely match the time span of the reading; Either he could have made the train arriving in fifteen minutes instead of forty minutes or he could have made the story longer.

The fact that there is a fifteen to twenty minute discrepancy between the announced span of the events and the time of the reading should lead us to ask what happened to those extra twenty minutes. The only answer is that they must be in the blank spaces in between the lines of the story, that is, points in the story when the characters are not saying anything.

Our realization that there are more blank spaces in the time span of the story than spoken dialogue should make us more aware of the basic problem that we began with--that is, that the story is about something that is never explicitly mentioned, but only hinted at and referred to, if at all, by the neutral pronoun "it." These two elements--the reference to "it" and the many blank spaces or silences inherent in the story--seem to be related. What we must examine now is why the couple do not speak of their problem explicitly and why there are so many silences or blank spaces in the story.

Perhaps a look at how the story exists spatially may provide further understanding. The author makes the spatial reality of the story as explicit as he does the temporal reality. The first paragraph locates the couple at a station situated between two lines of rails. One line of rails is going the way the couple have come, whereas the other is going in the direction they are heading; they are at a junction. If we make the assumption that this spatial location is a "bound motif" or idea, since it is made so emphatic, then we might suspect that the spatial location is meant to communicate the psychological location of the couple as well as their physical one. The spatial situation of the rails suggest where they have been (much as the labels on their luggage suggests all the hotels where they have stayed), as well as where they are going, which, of course, is precisely what is at issue here. She wishes to go one way; he wishes to go another.

But there is a further indication of their physical location that also may be meaningful; they are in a valley. On this side there are hills that are long and white and the country is brown and dry with no trees. Later on in the story when the girl gets up and walks to the end of the station she looks toward the "other side" of the valley, were there are fields of grain and trees along the banks of the river. This is the scenery she looks at when she says "And we could have all this. . . . And we could have everything and everyday we make it more impossible."

Several years ago, I wrote an entry for the “Bad Hemingway" contest. I did not win. Forgive me for offering it to you now. I mean no disrespect to Hemingway, whose conscientious work I have always admired.

Going to the Devil in the City of the Angels

The Avenue of the Americas was made wet by el nino, the incontinent brat from the sea who brought the heavy rains and made the lives of the beautiful Angelenos a misery. Their small sporty cars flooded in the streets and their flat-roofed houses slid down the steep hills toward Hollywood. The man with the hat and the healthy girl sat at a table in Harry's Bar and American Grill and waited for a taxi that would take them away from the misery the rain made. It was warm and dry in Harry's, and the beer was cool, but they were not happy. They were not beautiful and could no longer look at each other.

"The streets of the city are clogged with the fetid feces of a child," she said.

"I wouldn't know," he said. "I quit my stupid thesis on the man called Papa, for he began to sound hollow to my ears."

"I cannot see your ears," she said; "you wear your hat low, for where once there was hair, there is nada. It is your shame."

"I never said you were to blame," he said. "I can not stay in this city. It is the end of something."

"Yes," she said. "I know. We will go to another country."

"How will we know it is time?" the man said."

The bartender said he would tell us when the taxi passes the Schubert," she said.

"Your body does not need the sherbet," he said, and I do not understand why there would be taxes on it."

"I grow weary trying to talk the good talk to you," she shouted. "Will you please, please, please, please, please, please, please take off that hat."

The man took off the hat and laid it on the table. "I never said you had to take off fat. But the little man called Richard Simmons did say if you danced to the oldies, it would be perfectly simple."

"He would say that; he is without cajones, that one." The woman looked around the bar at the slim beautiful people and the men with much hair. "If I do it, will the earth move for us again?" she said.

"That is another reason we must leave," he said. "One never knows when the earth will move here."

"No, I mean, will we destroy each other in bed as we used to?"

"You destroy me too much now as it is. You need only to get some fat out," he said. She was indeed a very healthy girl. "It's perfectly simple," he said.

"Then I will do it," she said. "I will dance to the oldies and lose the fat. We will go to another country. We will find a place without so much water. You will write the thesis on the man called Papa, and he will not sound flat to your ears. We will again have the good destruction in bed, and the earth will move for us. We will talk the good talk as we did before, and you will like it."

She kept talking the good talk and she did not stop. He put the hat back on and pulled it over his ears. The rain from el nino continued to fall in the city of the Angels. He watched her lips move soundlessly and prayed that the taxi would come soon.

Alice Munro's "Gravel": New Yorker, June 27, 2011

2011-06-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

I have completed my fifth reading of Alice Munro’s new short story, “Gravel,” in the June 27, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. I liked it on the first reading, although I was a little unsure about the central event of the sister’s drowning. I liked it even better on the second reading, when I could separate the “actual” from the “imaginary” in the experience of the narrator. I liked it still more on the third reading, when I understood more about the nature of the narrator’s involvement in the central event. But now that I have read it a fourth time—with highlighter in hand, followed up with a fifth reading making penciled annotations—I like it inordinately for its seemingly simple, but actually complex, literary pattern and thematic significance.

Although you can probably read the story at the following site, http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/06/27/110627fi_fiction_munro?currentPage=all
I will provide a brief summary:

The first part of the story recounts the narrator’s memory of her mother’s starting to dress like an actress and then telling her husband that the child with which she is pregnant belongs to Neal, an actor she has met. The mother’s motivation for leaving her insurance-salesman husband seems related to her desire to have a “freer,” more Bohemian, life than she has had in her conventional home.

The central incident occurs after heavy rains have filled up the gravel pit and Caro tells the narrator to run back to the trailer to tell Neal and her mother that Blitzee has fallen in the water and she has jumped in to save the dog. The narrator runs to the trailer, but sits down outside before going in. When she does go in and the mother tries to get Neal to go to the gravel pit, he fails to do so. In the third part of the story, Neal does not attend Caro’s funeral. The mother gives birth to a child named she names Brent.

In the final section of the story, the narrator learns that Neal is living near where she teaches, and her partner, Ruthann, convinces her she should go see him to help “rout her demons.” She discovers that Neal lives in a semi-respectable dump and buys his clothes from the Salvation Army—all of which he says suits his principles. He tells her how it happened—that he was stoned at the time and is not a swimmer and thus would have drowned also if he had tried to save Caro. She asks him what he thinks Caro had in mind on that day, as she has asked two others before. Her counselor has told her that perhaps Caro wanted attention to how bad she was feeling; Ruthann has said it was to make her mother go back to the father; Neal says it doesn’t matter, that maybe she thought she could paddle better or that she did not know how heavy winter clothes could be, or that there was no one close by to help her.

The story ends with Neal advising the narrator not to waste her time, not to try to get in on the guilt for not hurrying up and telling that day. He then says:

“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” He then says goodbye.

In the last paragraph, the narrator says:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

In the following discussion, I have isolated what I think are the most important motifs of the story, which, taken together, suggest its universal, underlying themes:

One of the first things I look for when reading a story is the motivation for its telling, especially if the story is told first person by a character in the story. Why does the teller feel the need to tell the story? At the very beginning, the narrator tells us, “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.” The problem is that we usually remember the past in isolated moments—events that happen, but we have difficulty remembering what causally connects them, what relationship one event has to another. As Neal tells the narrator at the end, “I think you might want to know how it happened.” We may remember what happened, but not how it happened, what caused it. One tells a story in order to try to understand the links, the motivation, the causes.

This need to know, to be sure of the connection of events in the misty, disconnected past, is related to the theme repeated throughout the story of solidity and security versus instability and uncertainty.

The gravel pit embodies this split between what is solid and what is uncertain: “The pit was shallow enough to lead you to think that there might have been some other intention for it—foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further.”

After the mother leaves her husband, she was “so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street—the husband—with the life she’d had before” exchanging the solidly established house for the transient trailer. The father is an insurance salesman, who sells people security against the future; Neal, on the other hand, with his concern about the atomic bomb, thinks there may be no future. “His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.” Neal accepts uncertainty, while Caro desires stability. When Neal asks Caro, what if we all disappear and Blitzee has to fend for herself, Caro says, “I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.” The narrator and the mother build a snowman and call it Neal; snowmen do not last long and soon disappear.

The narrator feel caught between stability and instability, between things that exist solidly in the world and things that are so instable they just disappear. “Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.” Indeed, after Caro drowns, Neal does in fact disappear.

When the narrator and her mother make the snowman, Neal gets out of the car mad and yells that he could have run over her. Using a significant verb, the narrator thinks: “That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.” After Caro’s death, Neal writes a letter saying, “that since he did not intend to act as a father it would be better for him to bow out at the start.”

During the central drowning event, when the narrator goes to the trailer and just sits down rather than knocking on the door, she says, ”I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.” Munro creates this ambiguous insecurity about the nature of reality so deftly I need to quote the entire passage:

I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
That the dog had fallen into the water.

The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.

Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

Why?

I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

What I really did was make my way up the little incline toward the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes."

When the narrator is an adult, she goes to see a therapist to help her determine the links or causal connections between the events. All possible explanations from the three people she asks: therapist, companion, Neal—are hypotheses only, phrased as “must have,” “might have,” “maybe.”

When the narrator goes to meet Neal, he is still the voice of one who accepts life as it comes and refuses to feel responsibility about the past. His view about why Caro did what she did is that it does not matter: “Maybe she thought she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”

Then Neal gives the narrator advice from his perspective: “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”

The story ends with her understanding Neal’s advice, but not her ability to follow it:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”