New Yorker’s 20 Under 40: Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss

The New Yorker has published online brief Question and Answer sections with each writer in the 20 under 40 series. One of the questions is the inevitable query that always gets asked by someone in the audience at an author reading: What was the inspiration for your story?

Rivka Galchen, “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire”—Story Inspired by the Internet

In the Q&A session between Galchen and The New Yorker, Galchen, (who, in addition to her MFA from Columbia, has an M.D. in psychiatry) said that the inspiration for the story was two letters she received from prisoners. In the story, one of the letters is a philosophical inquiry about love, written by a smart fifteen-year-old; (He must have been pretty smart) the other is from a guy who has an idea for a movie about the Tunguska incident of 1908, (In Siberia, thousands of acres of trees were mysteriously laid flat by a huge fireball.)

The title of the story comes from the following testimony of an observer of the incident, which can be found on the Internet.

“At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara trading post. I suddenly saw that directly to the North, over Onkoul's Tunguska road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.”

The other inspiration for the story is the notion of the Kantian Sublime, described in the story by the narrator’s friend David as follows: “There’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”

The following definition of the Kantian sublime is from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“The Kantian Dynamically Sublime: In this case, a ‘might’ or power is observed in nature that is irresistible with respect to our bodily or sensible selves. Such an object is ‘fearful’ to be sure, but (because we remain disinterested) is not an object of fear. (Importantly, one of Kant’s examples here is religion: God is fearful but the righteous man is not afraid. This is the difference, he says, between a rational religion and mere superstition.) Again, the sublime is a two-layered experience. Kant writes that such objects ‘raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind…’ (sect.28). In particular, nature is called ‘sublime merely because it elevates the imagination to the exhibition of those cases wherein the mind can be made to feel [sich fühlbar machen] the sublimity, even above nature, that is proper to its vocation’ (sect.28, translation modified). In particular, the sublimity belongs to human freedom which is (by definition) unassailable to the forces of nature. Such a conception of freedom as being outside the order of nature, but demanding action upon that order, is the core of Kant’s moral theory. Thus we can begin to see the intimate connection between the sublime (especially here the dynamically sublime) and morality.”

So what is the story about? Coming up against those experiences in life that seem so vast or mysterious that we cannot fathom them, cannot understand them, cannot integrate them into our everyday experience. The specific incident in the story confronted by the pregnant narrator is her husband’s abrupt leaving, with the note “I can’t live here anymore” and her discovery of her husband’s blog: “I Can’t-Stand-My-Wife-Dot-Blogspot-Dot-Com-“.

The tone and style of the story is that of a clever writer’s reaction to this event—an attempt to deal with it, control it with satire, wit, cleverness, e.g. that her first novel is a love story between a bird and a whale, that the movie studio wants a cheaper love story between two land animals, that she thinks about the experience in terms of a word she has heard that makes her think of her childhood in Kentucky—“poleaxed.”

As David, who has come to borrow money, reads to her from her husband’s blog, she gets printouts of witness accounts she has found on “that horrible thing called the Web.” (One of the accounts is that one cited above which gives her the title to this story.)

But the “horrible thing called the Web” is the source of this story, which explores in a writerly way (as the narrator understands at the end of the story) “the sense that life is an enormous mystery, but with secret connections, you know, that knit us all together.”

This is an exploratory story that begins with certain concepts (Kantian Sublime, the mystery of Love) derived from specific experiences (the two letters), connected to a specific experience (the husband’s desertion of the pregnant narrator) that gives the experience universal significance from a writer’s perspective.

It is a rigged story, but then all stories are rigged to explore some mysterious human experience in a writerly way. The trick is not the let the reader see the rigging right away, but to suspect that it is there and to be encouraged to discover it. I liked the story. I thought it held together as a unified piece and did what short stories do well.


Jonathan Safran Foer, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly”—Inspired by Experiment

In the Q&A on this story, Foer responded to the inspiration question this way:
“I had read a few stories that experimented with voice in similar ways—shifting rapidly between perspectives, using pronouns rhythmically, condensing time into details—and was very much moved and inspired by them.”

Foer, who is married to Nicole Krauss (irrelevant bit of bio), studied under Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton (maybe a relevant bit of bio). And yes, this story is a self-conscious experiment with shifting voices, purposely repeating the “I” and the “You” until they become a “We.” By citing numerous specific characteristics of the “I” and the “You,” and then introducing a “He” (a child), Foer quite cleverly encapsulates the whole of a marriage—all those little things that separate the two into individual “I” and “You.”

The success of the experiment depends on the reader’s identification with the specific details. Some that I liked are: “I wouldn’t congratulate a woman until she explicitly said she was pregnant… I didn’t know where my voice was between my phone and yours…. You were never standing by the window at parties, but you were always by the window. … You were always copying keys and looking up words…. I was not going to dance at our wedding and you were not going to speak…. I hated my inability to visit a foreign city without fantasizing about real estate. … You couldn’t tolerate trace amounts of jelly in the peanut-butter jar. … You couldn’t tolerate people who couldn’t tolerate babies on planes. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people’s grammar.”

All this leads to the “WE” of the final three-paragraph section introduced by the title: “And here we are so quickly. I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty.” For all the otherness of the “I” and “You,” the narrator ends the story with a realization and an invitation: “Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, on the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this thread-bare sofa in this one-story, copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours become coming to our senses: ‘What would we even do with such a house?’”

Yeah, I know, it is an experiment with a style, but such experiments can lead to a discovery of the mysterious connections that holds us together, even as they seem to tear us apart. Ultimately, that two people can stay together through all the inevitable separateness is a miracle that Foer’s story explores quite nicely.


Nicole Krauss, “The Young Painters”: Inspired by Writing

Nicole Krauss, who was included in Granta’s Best American Novelists under 40 (Why is 40 the magic age?), says that this piece is an excerpt from a novel coming out in October, 2010. I n her Q&A with the New Yorker, Krauss responded to the “inspiration” question as follows:

“I went to a dinner party at a friend’s house. There was a painting on the wall, just like the one described in the story. It made a strong impression on me, and before I left I asked my friend who had painted it. He told me that his best friend and the friend’s sister had painted it together at the ages of nine and eleven, and that soon afterward their mother had put sleeping pills in their tea, driven them out to the forest, and set the car on fire with all of them in it. At that time, I already had a child of my own and was pregnant with another, and I became haunted by this story, those children, and what would have driven that mother to do what she did. The beautiful painting the children painted stayed with me. And the story of guilt—the crime of that mother, the guilt of a writer who uses that story in her own, and the fallen judge—became wrapped up together in my mind and my work.”

She also says the new novel, Great House, was influenced by Camus's The Fall. It has four voices, the one in this story by Nadia, confessing to a judge, but the judge (from the Camus novel) and Nadia are two sides of the same sense of guilt.

Although this is an excerpt from a novel, and thus does not interest me very much, I read it as if it were a short story and felt that it did have a sense of unity and an emotional/intellectual impact. Unlike some reviewers of this story, I do not object to the fact that it is about a writer. If a writer follows the old advice of creative writing classes, “Write about what you know,” then of course, what writers know best is writing. Why shouldn’t they write about writing? This does not necessarily mean that “The Young Painters” is a self-reflexive bit of metafiction like that John Barth played around with back in the 1960s. It simply means that this story explores a moral issue that everyone has experienced in one way or another, but that writers often experience more incisively—exploiting some real person in the world for selfish reasons.

The narrator of this story, who sees the painting described above and then writes a story about it, does not give into the old platitudes about the writer serving a higher calling, even though she does try to fall back on this at one point in the story. For the story to work, there has to be something at stake for the narrator more than just the academic issue of writers making use of real people for their art. In this case, the writer exploits two dead children, which is made more personally poignant by the fact that she does not have children. “And though when I was younger I believed I wanted to have a child, I was not surprised to find myself at thirty-five, and then forty without one.” It is underlined also by the fact that the dancer, in whose home the narrator sees the painting, is gay and has no children either.

When he tells the writer that after reading her story he took the painting down, he says he could not bear to look at it anymore. “After a while I understood what your story had made so clear to me.” The painter then taps her lightly on the cheek with two fingers and walks away. We are not told what the dancer understands about the painting, and since we do not have the story within the story or the painting, we cannot make a judgment about what that is. But we know it has something to do with children exploited, with children not there, with children somehow longed for.

The story ends with the writer describing walking past a playground and hearing an agonized child’s cry ring out, a cry that tears into her as if “it were an appeal to me alone.” The cry stays with her, and sometimes she hears it when she writes or when she wakes up in the morning, until it wears away her reserve and she begins to distrust herself.

I know this is an excerpt from a novel, but it holds up quite nicely as a short story, ending with a sense of the woman being haunted by some mysterious guilt she feels, some abdication of her responsibility as a human being, some sense of something lost, or never gained. Krauss succeeds in making me empathize with the woman at the end and have some inchoate understanding of her guilt and need to confess to the judge. This still doesn’t mean I will read Krauss’s novel to “see what happens next” to the woman. I am quite content with this one unified experience.

New Yorker 's 20 Under 40--ZZ Packer and C.E. Morgan

“Dayward” by ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer’s rise to big-city buzz and media stardom began with the summer 2000 special Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker. Accompanying her story, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” was a full-page photo of Packer sitting on some rough city steps beside a cracked, graffiti wall. Dressed simply in black slacks and a white top, her hair in cornrows, she stares at the camera with a sullen, even angry, look. Given this projected persona, it is not surprising that reviewers of her first book of short stories, of which The New Yorker story is the title piece, called her a fresh voice of the outsider and the disenfranchised. However, ZZ Packer is no child of the ghetto who rose up shaking her fist in righteous anger at white economic oppression. Born in Louisville, Ky, her parents were a middle-class small business owner and a schoolteacher. She is a Yale graduate, who also attended the prestigious Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University as well as the influential Iowa Writers Workshop.

What Packer succeeded in doing in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was to create African American characters either who are not defined solely by their race or by their economic status, or whose assertion of race is a relatively harmless result of the uncertainty of well-meaning whites. For example, “Brownies,” whose narrator is a young African American girl at summer camp with her Brownie troop, begins as a typical race prejudice story with her friends vowing to kick the butts of a troop of little white girls who have come to camp with complexions like a blend of strawberry and vanilla ice cream, packing Disney character sleeping bags. The African American girls are tough-talkers who laugh that the white girls smell like wet Chihuahuas and who scornfully call everything dumb or distasteful “Caucasian.” The immediate cause of the conflict develops when one of the African American girls hears a white girl use the hated “N” word. Although the talk of retaliation is tough, it comes from the mouths of very young children, who are not quite sure what would be the appropriate revenge, except maybe putting daddy longlegs in the white girls’ sleeping bags and then beating them as flat as frying pans when they wake up.

By the time the black girls decide to corner the white kids in the bathroom, the narrator says that the revenge was no longer about one of them being called a derogatory name, for the word that started it all now seems to have turned into something deeper and unnamable. However, it should be noted here, that ZZ Packer does not suggest what this ominous unnamable thing is, except perhaps the inevitable tension that results from “difference.” When the little white girls are actually confronted, the black girls discover that they are mentally handicapped, evoking the derogatory name “retarded” and suggesting an easy sort of turning-the-tables discrimination. Furthermore, the black girls are told that the white children are echolalic, which means they say whatever they hear, like an echo.

The story thus ends as a sort of cautionary fable about prejudice and about how older generations pass down racial intolerance. Although the young African Americans are hard to resist with their little girl street-wise talk, they are really middle-class kids, posturing the way they have seen others do. Like the white girls, they are small children who say things they have heard others say. The story succeeds because it allows African American girls to make fun of white girls and talk tough about beating them up for using the “N” word, but since they are only small children at summer camp, it is all within a harmless, comic context. It pleases readers that the discrimination tables get an O. Henry turn and that the story ends with a simple moralistic message about prejudice.

I have spent considerable time talking about an early ZZ Packer story because I don’t have a lot to say about the piece entitled “Dayward” in the 20 Under 40 New Yorker 2010 special issue. Packer has been working for several years on a novel about Reconstruction and the African American Buffalo soldiers. I guess “Dayward” is an early chapter in this book and that Lazarus will “rise” up later on as one of those soldiers. I suspect there will be more about racial prejudice in this historical novel, for in this “chapter,” we have a classic chase scene right out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the runaways being sent up a tree instead of across the ice, the hounds on the scent (one twist on this scenario is that the two children are not runaways, but freed, being chased just out of meanness). The central scene, where Lazarus rams his fist down a dog’s throat to choke it to death, results in his being maimed, perhaps permanently. The piece ends with Lazarus and Mary Celeste’s arrival at their safe haven destination, where we await the next chapter of their reconstruction adventure.

The writing is functional—a combination of the literary and the ordinary, e.g.: “saying stuff that Lazarus had never before heard in his natural-born life.” “Lazarus had to prize her fingers from where she clawed at Minnie’s door.” “Lazarus might well have been wearing a loincloth instead of trousers.” In my opinion, either because of the shift in genre or the shift in subject matter, ZZ Packer’s writing here is a falling away from her earlier, more focused, work in the short story.



“Twins,” C.E. Morgan

Morgan has already made it clear in a brief interview that this is a section from a novel she is working on, which is concerned with, to use her term, “race relations.” I have not read Morgan’s work before, and I know little about her. She has a B.A. degree from Berea College in Kentucky, a tucked-away little town with which I am familiar. She also has an M.A. in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her first novel, All the Living, was published in 2009 to a few decent reviews.

Morgan’s prose is more studied than ZZ Packer’s, sometimes a little too studied. For example: this description of Cincinnati, another town with which I am familiar:

“A queen rising on seven hills over her Tiber, forming the circlet of a crown. A jagged cityscape of steel and brick and glass, with its own bright nightless burn and, beyond it, the fretful, historical amplitude of Kentucky, that netherworld. This was Cincinnati—the capital of pork, the first truly American city….”

Since “Twins” s a self-proclaimed section from a novel, and my interest is in the short story, I have little say about it. I reckon, since the focus is on twin boys—one black and one white, called by a group of girls, “the Oreo babies”--the story will use this as a metaphor of both union and conflict in the chapters to come. I may read Morgan’s first novel, but only because it takes place in Kentucky, my home state, on a tobacco farm. I probably won’t read the new novel. I probably won’t read ZZ Packer’s new novel either.

But then, what the hell! As many of you know, I only read novels when I just can’t help myself. I recently pulled a water-wrinkled paperback copy of Alistair Macleod’s novel No Great Mischief (1999) down from my shelf. I bought it several years ago at a little bookstore just off the Liffy in Dublin. After having a wee chat about Scotch vs. Irish whiskey with MacLeod in Toronto last month, I felt I owed it to him to read it. MacLeod said he had several bottles of top shelf Scotch in his home, expensive stuff that folks had given him at readings and such, but that he felt they were just too good for him to drink, so he drinks the bottom shelf stuff instead. I understood that. I have a bottle of Irish whiskey that a student friend gave me several years ago, which cost about $250.00. It rests in a polished oak box with brass hinges, unopened. Bushmills and Jameson are good enough for me.

On numerous special occasions over the past ten years, I have said I would open it and share it with family and friends—at my retirement, at my daughter’s wedding, on my 65th birthday, etc. But every time, something happens that prevents it. I have extracted promises that my ashes will be buried in the old family graveyard in Eastern Kentucky in that box. But I reckon I have to drink the whiskey first. I have some apprehensions, I suppose about seeing that box sitting up there on the shelf empty, waiting. God willing, however, there will be special occasions in the future to drain the bottle dry.

Forgive the little personal aside. It’s an old man’s privilege.

New Yorker's 20 Under 40: Philipp Meyer and Salvatore Scibona

It probably seems a hypocritical contradiction that, on the one hand, I proclaim that I am an enthusiastic supporter of the short story, whereas on the other hand, I often seem quite critical of many stories being published nowadays—particularly the stories in The Atlantic and The New Yorker’s special summer fiction issues.

My only explanation is that despite the fact that I wish more people would read short stories, I wish they had good stories to read. When I read a fiction that is short, I want it to be a short story, with all the virtues of that form in subtle view. I do not want it to be a careless, rambling chapter in a novel, or a meaningless anecdote, or a simplistic take on something “ripped from the headlines,” or a cliche cribbed from television.

Like television producers looking for subjects with dramatic or comedic potential—cops, lawyers, doctors--writers look for subjects sure to generate a story. The relationship between husband and wife and parents and children are sure things. But no one is interested in happy families, except in sitcoms. Tolstoy was probably not the first to say it, but he is surely the most famous: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

These two stories by Philipp Meyer and Salvatore Scibona deal with family schisms, particularly with fathers who fail their children. Both seem straightforwardly realistic. But while Meyer exploits the conventional male midlife crisis situation, entering the anguished mind of the central character, Scibona stands back from his characters and manipulates them puppet like in a heartless little drama with no significance.

“What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone,” by Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer’s novel American Rust won the 2009 LA Times prize for First Fiction and was placed on “Top Ten,” ”Top 100,” “Best Of” lists by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, and Newsweek.

The story begins by referring to some mysterious event the central character Max calls “the Accident,” something about which he feels depressed and guilty. There does not seem to be any real reason to conceal the nature of the accident. It is not until half way through that we learn that Max’s Harly, age eighteen, has been arrested for possession of cocaine, that Max decided to play “tough love” and let him stay in jail for a second night, that a beating by another inmate or a policeman has left him in a coma, and that will take some time, possibly years, for him to recover.

The story focuses on the effect this event has on Max, the best Porsche mechanic in the entire Southwest, and owner of his own shop. The accident has put Max in a “heightened state,” a “fragile state,” “aware of his own heart wearing him down to extinction.” Max, mistreated by his wife, also senses that he has reached a point in his life when he needs to “begin his journey,” needs to “walk out, turn his back on all of it, leave Texas and never return…remake himself as his ancestors had done.”

And that’s pretty much the story—an oft-told tale of the midlife crisis of an American male. When Max tells his wife Lili that he does not want to stay here anymore, and she asks, “Do you want me to come,” he replies, “Yes, I want you to come with me.” The story ends with that familiar meditative moment when Max sits outside in the darkness, listening to the crickets, looking up at the stars, thinking about going to get his son. “He could see them both clearly, two figures on a remote highway at the saddle of some unnamed pass. They were carrying their burdens easily. They were already fading from sight.”

This seems like a chapter from a typical American novel, like the kind of thing Richard Ford used to write, about a man facing a crisis in his life and a rocky relationship with his wife, rethinking his situation, ready to strike off in a new direction, strip himself of all his baggage, strike out for a new territory, etc. etc. etc. etc. The success or failure of such a story depends on the relative transparency of the language that allows the reader to forget the language, visualize the action, identify with the character, and become interested in what befalls him. I liked this story, but I liked it for the reasons that I occasionally like novels, as a temporary escape from my own life into someone else’s. I read it twice, because I always read a piece of fiction parading as a short story twice. But will I ever feel the necessity to read it again? No need to. This is a competently told story, an easy read that requires no analysis or interpretation. With the exception of a tsk tsk for Max’s “tough love” decision, it stimulates little emotional response and no intellectual reaction. Someone could make a movie of it and lose nothing in the translation.


“The Kid” by Salvatore Scibona

Salvatore Scibona’s fiction has been published in the Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his novel The End was short listed for the National Book Award in 2008.

Scibona uses the technique of two alternating parallel actions in this story. The first action focuses on a five-year-old boy standing alone crying in the Hamburg-Fuhlsbuttel Airport. The boy talks to various attendants, but no one can figure out what language he is using—Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian. Scibona’s own language is somewhat formal, e.g. “no one could get him to divulge anything that sounded like a name…. some of the adults began to think their solicitousness only aggravated his distress.” Attendants ask his name but get no response. A Kazakh nurse senses that the boy knew they were asking his name “and in the nightmare of the present, his withholding the name was the only thing that tied him to the lip of the chasm into which he had slipped.”

The story then shifts to the second action—a narrative about Elroy Heflin, a solider assigned to an Office of Defense Cooperation attached to the U.S. Embassy in Riga, Latvia. He meets a young waitress named Evija and before his deployment ended, in a curious little shift in language tone, “he’d got her knocked up.” When he is transferred to Afghanistan, he sends her a third of his pay for the upkeep of the boy, who the girl names Janis, and visits one or twice. Evija then writes to tell him that she is moving to Spain and to come get the boy. Elroy flies with Janis to the Hamburg airport, where he stuffs the boy’s pocket full of money and leaves him in a bathroom stall, telling him he will return for him soon. This is all told in a flat, straightforward style with no exploration of motivation.

The rest of the story shifts back and forth between Janis at the airport and Elroy flying back to the U.S. When Janis is questioned by kindly Germans at the airport, Scibona allows us into the mind of the child who thinks his Papa will come back for him soon—the only sentiment expressed in the story. When the story shifts back to Elroy, he lands in London, throws the boy’s small bag into a dumpste, and catches another plane, but not before Scibona indulges in a little anecdote from the past when Elroy escaped being blown up by a mine and a little irrelevant history about how the London airport became named Heathrow. While the Germans at the airport find two hundred and sixty-three U.S. dollars in Janis’s pocket and take him to a big city so beautiful he wonders whether he is in heaven,

Elroy flies over the Arctic, lands at Boston ‘s Logan Airport, takes another flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, picks up a rental car (For some reason, we are told that he had booked a subcompact online, but that Avis had overbooked his model and he was given a Mustang convertible), and drives North to an army base where he meets his stepfather, who asks, “And where is young Janis?”

Elroy’s only explanation for the central event of the story is: “It didn’t work out, you know?” The stepfather, Sergeant Slocum, asks what the reader might well ask: “What do I know exactly?” The two men then have a little argument over the fact that Sergeant Slocum has eaten Elroy’s baloney. The story ends with an epilogue two years later when Elroy, now a Sergeant Major, is on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan. He receives an email from Evija, who has come back to Riga and says she misses Janis very much. “I have no right to ask you to come here and bring Janis. But this is where we belonged before. All three. I cannot stop from wishing that we could have another chance.” Well, hell's bells! Now what?

If this is a chapter in a novel, it is not clear to me where it will go after this. I am not sure how much more interest can be generated in these two completely superficial people and the child who is the victim of their superficiality. Since Scibona provides us with no motivation for the action of anyone in the story, we have no way to judge the action except to pronounce it meaningless. And if it is meaningless, then what’s the point of the story? Or if it is a chapter in a novel, where is it going next? And do we really care? The only possible theme in the story is perhaps suggested in the little background anecdote when Elroy escapes being blown up by a mine: “Like God was saying, ‘I want you to live, little shit.’” Why? Maybe the whole damned thing is a parable of America's military screwing over the rest of the world and then turning its back on what it has wrought, surviving, even prospering, by its very indifference. I don’t know, and after thinking about it for quite a while, don’t really care.

Transparent language and meaningless detail may be sufficient for a chapter in a novel but not a short story. As Faulkner once said, in the novel, you can put in a lot more trash and get away with it. But in a short story, there has to be more control, more attention to language’s plurasignificant potential, more focus on a complex human reality, more mystery, more poetry, and less of everything else.

"The Five Wounds" by Kirsten Valdez Quade

Congratulations to Kirstin Valdez Quade, who has placed a story, “The Five Wounds,” in the July 27 issue of The New Yorker. According to the contributors’ notes, Quade has just finished an MFA program at the University of Oregon and will begin work in the Fall at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

You have to admit, Quade has achieved two dream victories in the New Writers’ Triple Crown. What’s next? A bidding war for her first book, followed by a triple digit contract with a major publisher? I am sure all my readers join me in wishing her great good fortune in her career as an “emerging” writer.

“The Five Wounds” (which refers to the five wounds of the crucified Christ—on hands and feet and in the side) has generated a bit of discussion among bloggers, some of whom have suggested that it is the New Yorker’s token nod to new writers. I don’t know. Maybe so, maybe not. The fact that the New Yorker is willing to publish a new writer (As far as I can tell, Quade has only published one other story, in the summer 2008 issue of The Colorado Review.) should be encouraging to all struggling writers. For, to the best of my knowledge, the New Yorker pays more for a single short story than anybody else. And you do want to make some money at this, don’t you?

I recently picked up an old book at a library book sale entitled Indirections: For Those Who Want to Write, by Sidney Cox, published in 1947. Cox, a Dartmouth professor asserts: “Do not call yourself a writer, until you can include and shape enough to make a publisher and a public pay.” I wondered if the owner of the book ever reached his or her own desire to be a writer and made a publisher and a public pay. The book was only lightly read—no annotations, no underlining, no signature.

I have read “Five Wounds” three times now—the minimum, it seems to me, to give a short story that aspires to literature the kind of attention it deserves. My first reading simply follows the linear flow of the story, driven by my wish to know what happens next. My second reading is to determine the themes or motifs of the story—identified by looking for details that are almost obsessively repeated, looking for those points when the author cannot resist poking the reader, discovering whatever contexts I need to know about the story. After the third reading, I stand back from the story and try to see its shape in space. My reading model here is Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

“The Five Wounds” is a fairly conventional story, driven by a combination of something old and something new. The something old is the theme of guilt, redemption, penance. The something new is situating this theme within a cultural context that may be novel to many readers. The story takes place during Holy Week in New Mexico and focuses on a religious fraternity or brotherhood named Hermanos Penitentes, which the Catholic Encyclopedia identifies as a brotherhood of flagellants located in New Mexico and Colorado in the late nineteenth century, who, during Holy Week, name one brother to be bound to a cross. If the ritual, which is now forbidden, is still practiced, the Encyclopedia reports it is done so in secret.

I don’t know if Quade has any first hand knowledge of the brotherhood or whether she read about it and it caught her imagination as a means by which to explore the theme of penance. By choosing Amadeo Padilla as her Jesus, Quade picks someone who, if he has not committed all the deadly sins, has done enough to make him interesting. Quade also introduces, for the sake of creating a template against which Amadeo must be measured, a hermanos Jesus from the past, Manuel Garcia, who begged the brothers to use real nails, and obviously does not think Amadeo is worthy. Into this mix, Quade introduces Amadeo’s teenage daughter, Angel, who is unmarried and pregnant and who has come to stay with him. The plot development is clear enough. Whereas Amadeo thinks at first that Angel is a distraction from his role as Jesus, he inevitably comes to realize that, of course, his desertion of her when she was a child has made her the reason for his penance. When Amadeo tells her that he is carrying the cross this year, that he is Jesus, Angel says sarcastically, “And I’m the Virgin Mary.” That must have been a hard line for Quade to resist.

The complex thematic center of the story is announced when Angel, only mildly curious about Passion Week, says, “So, it’s like a play,” and Amadeo replies, “It’s not a play—it’s real. More real…” The ellipsis is Quade’s way of reminding us that whereas Amadeo does not have the language to explain the mystery of transubstantiation, her story is going to try to explore that mystery. When Amadeo takes Angel to see a wooden Christ on the cross, she asks him, “So you really want to know what it feels like?” Again, he cannot say, but he needs to know if he can ask for the nails, if he can do a performance so convincing, “he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. He looks at the statue. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.”

On Good Friday, the hermanos tie him to the cross, and start off “acting,” but then punch and slug him, and he is surprised that it is “actually happening.” By the second mile, he tries to “get into the part,” but is “just not feeling it.” He asks them to whip him, but Manuel Garcia, the old man, laughs at him. Then Amadeo realizes that Garcia’s mockery is a “gift,” and that Angel isn’t a distraction, but “the point. Everything Jesus did He did for his children.” He realizes that she is the one he wants with him today.

When the hermanos swing the cross upright, he asks for the nails, and the mayor Hermano, or elder brother/chief officer, sterilizes them and they pound them into his palms. It’s a powerful scene, not only because it is “actually” happening to Amadeo, but also because it is symbolically happening—a reenactment of the passion of Christ that at the moment becomes real to Amadeo. However, he realizes that he is not the son, but the father—that Angel is the suffering Christ who says to her father, “why hast thou forsaken me?”

The final image is of Angel holding out her hands toward Amadeo. He knows that she and her child will feel the pain of what it means to be human and that he is helpless to change it. He twists in agony on the cross and the people applaud as an expression of the fear and hope that the passion of Christ inspires in them. What Amadeo cannot explain and Quade’s story explores is the sin of all human beings—that we are mere flesh as a result of the Fall and must suffer pain and death. The paradox of Christ’s sacrifice that saves us all from death lies in the necessity of the Passion that makes possible the Resurrection. Christ serves as the Scapegoat, the one who becomes body and therefore must suffer the wounds and death that body is heir to, so that body can then rise from the dead, the ultimate promise of the Christian religion, the core of Christian faith: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for.” Hebrews 11:1.

Again, congratulations, Ms. Quade. Good luck on your future as a writer. I hope you make the publishers and the public pay.