Notes on "Stories of Happy People" by Lars Gustafsson

There is a crucial epigram at the beginning, Gustafsson quotes Fritz Cramer: "Fundamentally complex living systems can be defined as systems which can delay the breakdown catastrophe for some time by organizing themselves in a more complex way for as long as possible." For me, on this first pass, the could be a motto for what Gustafsson's characters seem to be doing with their emotional lives.
Having read this collection of stories in the context of this MFA program, I find that it raises important questions for me. One of the things I've gotten more and more concerned with in my own writing is the authority of the writer. How does the author gain the reader's trust, how does the author assure the reader that this particular trip is worth taking?

If I had written a piece similar to one in this book and handed it to almost any critique group I've ever been a part of, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the readers would've been strongly critical of the writing. “What are the stakes?” would've been the first question. “What is the trouble?” closely related to the first one. “What actually happens in this story?”  (From O'Connor I know that this last is a false criticism.)  I don't bring this up because I want to deflect the responsibility for my own skepticism to an imaginary critique group, but because I do think critique groups in general are somewhat hostile to fiction that doesn't have some of these elements. In the Gustafsson collection, those elements are notably missing – most of the meaningful action seems to have taken place “off”, before the story began.

The first thing reading "Stories of Happy People" brings up for me is the question of how an author gets the reader to believe in the writing enough to keep reading. What is it in these pieces, for instance, that works, despite the apparent absence of some of the elements that I might think typically define a story?

The second question for me involves the approach. All of these stories seem to be philosophical essays illustrated by static characters moving through sometimes interesting, often odd, and sometimes uneventful periods in their lives. I get only a vague sense of the characters, who they are, where they come from, and what motivates them. The overall effect for me is that the focus is on what the author is working out with his thinking, and away from the characters and their actions which appear for me to be off in the background.

The author intentionally intrudes with his own philosophical musings, although on occasion there will be what can seem to be planted dialogue that does the author's musing for him. (I think of Uncle Sven intoning, “As a boy, you find the world ridiculous; you want to do something entirely different. As an old man, you discover that you have done the usual things.”)

Yet, for the most part, I do remain interested. I'd have my head handed to me on a platter if I tried it myself in my own writing, but Gustafsson often (not always, in my opinion) makes this work.  Part of what makes this work, of course, is that the musings are so interesting in and of themselves. I loved this : “Industrialism was viewed as...a rockslide which nothing could prevent any longer; its products had long since ceased to fascinate them … and were viewed as toys, designed essentially to keep the slum dwellers in a good mood.”  And the notion of the preoccupation with the body as being “in the most fragile of all the continents of hope". His metaphors are striking and often delightfully odd.

Back to process: at first, it seemed to me that Gustafsson writes “from where he thinks”, not, as Robert Olen Butler would advise, “from where you dream”. A lot of this writing seems to be occurring up in the cognitive levels. I've been pontificating to my friends (like a very pale belt in Karate describing how to do the moves) that the magic of the fictive process is in the power of the sub-cognitive mind, that this internal magma somehow gives us access to a kind of tran-spersonal cultural sensibility, transmutes our own cognitive level musings and worries into more powerful and beautiful symbolic representations of them.


But, on the second pass at some of these stories, I do begin to feel their dreamlike qualities as well.The four trains, or the apparently dead girl re-emerging with an entire lived life, and other stories are intriguing. I think of the story, “The Girl in the Blue Cap”, and his description of sleeplessness: “The sleepless hour...possessed all the shadowless, labyrinthine clarity of total, absolute sleeplessness, like a desert city in Mexico or a high plateau in the Alps where an unmerciful light never ceases to shine.”Superb.

I think at times his musings can seem a tad muddled – I'm not sure this is the author, or whether he's intentionally portraying characters who are themselves caught up in whirlpools of thought they don't quite understand. The question for me is now how well does this work. The stories are imperfect – what stories are not?  (I love that one of his characters latches onto imperfection as being an essential part of any great work of art.) I don't think his handling of the presentation of his ideas is always successful, although I'm not able to point to an author right now who works in this space and does it better. Any comments, leads on other writers?

Still, I might try my hand at a story like one of these. One of the very first I ever did with my critique group was a rambling story within a story that talked about the nature of story itself. It was not a good story (and far worse than these efforts) but I'd like to give something like that another go.