This collection is the last by the highly acclaimed Berriault, a writer's writer - I would never have heard of it without the offices of my first term mfa advisor, Jess Row, himself a dedicated, life-long practitioner of the black art. This one is a real find: I felt a guilty pleasure in reading writing so good and so relatively unknown.
Several things are noticeable about the collection as a whole. Berriault does not alter the basic parameters of her approach all that much from story to story. Almost all of the stories are told from a limited omniscient, close 3rd point of view, all but one in the past tense (there is an epistolary story, a series of diary entries).She has a curious way with narrative distance - for the most part, she fixes a distance between the narrator and protagonist even as she has access to the many, many ruminations of her main characters, but she will freely dip in and write directly as the character (as she does very powerfully at the climax of "Women in Their Beds").
I get a sense that for some characters, especially Angela Anson in the title story, the narrator is almost merged with the protagonist, while for many of the others, the narrator - and the reader - watch them as though in a fish bowl. If there is a pattern, here, it is that the latter characters are usually male, while the former are female. I'm not sure how she effects this, since the grosser parameters (as mentioned above) are not changing.
"Women in Their Beds"
The first story, rather than a plot based on events, has an arc that traces a growing realization on the part of Angela Anson, a young woman who has gotten temporary work (using falsified credentials) as a social worker in a ward for indigent women in a city hospital. As she watches the women in their strange, institutional, and temporary beds, beds they can never make their own, this realization builds and then emerges in the climax of the story, a beautiful and insightful soliloquy. Angela, making ready to lie in her own bed, comes to an understanding of women in the beds in general, and at this moment, the narrator drops away altogether and Angela addresses the women directly, almost as a prayer to and for those women. She speaks of the central importance of beds in the lives of women, how women come to make them their own, to center their lives around them either as young lovers, mothers (she calls out the troubled bed of Hamlet's mother in particular), and then, later aging matriarchs. And in this moment she reveals an affecting empathy for her would-be audience, these women who can longer lie in beds that are their own, and she reminds them that she herself knows that she may well be in their place one day. "Just remember the beds where you wished you weren't and the beds where you wished you were, and then name any spot on earth that's a bed for some woman at this very hour. A bed of stones and a bed of earth trampled by soldiers and and a bed of ashes, and where you're lying now, where you never wanted to imagine yourselves. If I'd wished for a bed or roses, and I did, I did, now I don't want it so much anymore".
There is another pattern I notice here: that in this story, as in several others, the character moves, almost in haste, from one episode to another, in between, troubled ruminations that create an effect of distance. What is being seen, shown, is disturbing but yet there is no strong felt sense of it. And then there is that moment of empathy and she seems to focus the force of all of the scattered images and thought-streams that have gone before into that powerful moment.
There were two structural devices that caught my eye in reading this piece: the first being the serial episodes with the women she talks to, the story focusing in on only one at a time, women whom Angela can connect either to her own self at an earlier time (a young woman who, like she once did, attempted suicide) or to others in her life (a fifty year old with pink champagne colored hair that recalls her own Aunt Ida whom she could never bring herself to love). The second framing device, much more quiet, acts as a complement that allows the story to avoid feeling too solidly framed around a procession of those episodes with the patients. It is the use of pages to doctors who are characters from fiction. These pages are woven in conspicuously but with a less regular rhythm. Her actor friends who are her co-workers page these fictional doctors to tease each other and call each other out cigarette breaks; but there is also an illumination in the names chosen, the sense that these names reflect how she is being seen in that moment: Paging Dr. Jekyl, then paging Dr. Zhivago, then doctors Caliguri, Mabuse, Freud, and Curie. I thought - quite nice: there is an author, the story has a design, but this musical interweaving of motifs and episodes doesn't make me forget it's a story as much as revel in it and still get drawn into its life.
"Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?"
Berriault is not ready to put the idea of bed down when she gets to this story.
Here, a young man, homeless, appears before a city librarian with a poem by the South American poet Ruben Dario, a poem that challenges its readers to face whatever circumstances they are in with good cheer and appreciation for their own lives. The homeless man demands to know where the poet was lying when he woke up the morning he wrote the poem.He says to the libararian, “I'll bet you wake up in your own bed. That's what I'm saying. What's-his-name wouldn't've thought up that poem if he woke up where he was lying on sidewalk.”
The perishable constructions of identity pay such a central role in this story I'm tempted to say it would deserve pride of place in any anthology of so-called Buddhist fiction (and I wonder that it is not in such an anthology, actually).
There is a passage remarkably similar to Angela's soliloquy in “Women”. The librarian is nearing the end of his own carefully constructed existence and we have by now been shown the losses, major and minor, that have eaten away at that construction, not the least of which is the loss of his cognitive functions: There is a certainty in degradation. You can puzzle over lines your whole life and never be satisfied with the meanings you get. Until, slushing onward, you've got, at last, one meaning for sure, because now its time had come, bringing proof by the thousands wherever they were this night in their concrete burrows and dens.
The librarian is both repelled and haunted by the specter of this homeless man who insists on the librarian's being his confederate in determining who or what this bundle of sensations is. In the end, the homeless man is found dead in the library, and as a crowd massed around the body, for the librarian, Humans speaking were unbearable to hear and abominable to see, himself among the rest. Worse, was all that was written down instead, the never-ending outpouring, given print and given covers, given shelves up and down and everywhere in this warehouse of fathomless darkness.
Up until now, I as a reader, have felt the same distance from this material as the librarian himself has felt from his own world, and it may be in this managing of this distance that this story is most powerful. Nothing has hit me emotionally in the story, but it's all vivid and disturbing. And then, the final paragraph, where the librarian has scattered the scraps of paper from the homeless man's pockets onto his desktop and tries to examine them with shaking hands, tore at my heart with surprising force. It was for me the single most powerful moment in the collection.
The narrator now becomes the librarian and asks, had the fellow hoped to impress upon himself his likeness to other humans? A break-in of a different sort. A young man breaking into a home of his own.
"Soul and Money"
I begin to notice in this story a certain rhythm in Berriault's prose, a pattern of moving from general summary to specific episodes, and then, within those episodes, moving from summary scenes to specific scenes with dialogue, with a great deal of rumination interspersed.
I notice her facility for analepsis, as in this passage that in a sentence, describes the effect on his first son of the loss of his mother: "A Winter evening, Rachel and their little son crossing the icy street, a skidding car, and Rachel leaping to push the boy out of the way. Their son, growing up, wandered the world on his own, barefoot amonth the hordes of India and the hashish squatters of Morrocco, then, regaining himself or an altered self, he'd put himself through law school. A public defender, wearing decent shoes." It is powerful moment, for it shines a light that reveals a new depth and sorrow in the life of the protagonist, Walter.
Walter was from the hard left and wrote columns for Arise, a newspaper that, for the true believers, was "a prescription nobody went and got filled." When we meet him, he is an apostate, wondering if he hadn't gambled away his life on a bet that could never pay off, his much younger second wife has "at last and yet too soon" taken on a younger lover herself, and Walter, at loose ends, is on his way to Las Vegas, a place he's been to often.
I found myself at this point scribbling questions in the margin: I don't understand, for instance, whether in an episode between Walter and his brother whether I'm supposed to have felt a change in Walter. In the event, I did not, but it's structural placement in the story makes me feel it's a key part of the setup. What I wind up feeling is that he withstands this challenge, hidebound and untouched, but then his meeting with a fellow apostate at the casino, something like two defrocked priests meeting in a veritable brothel, does shock him into a different way of seeing.Walter has thought he could catch the demon money out in its own game and instead, believes he comes to see it as "God's circulatory system". It seems, in the end, he gets a glimpse of the futility of his project in the Casino and flees.
"Lives of Saints"
Brief precis: artist constructs an image of himself as a celibate, spiritual-seeker whose life work is a series of statues of saints. Inconveniently for this image, he does have a child whom he does not acknowledge. The story follows the child, humiliated by his father's denial of his existence, as he visits each of his father's saints in an attempt either to avenge himself on his father by revealing his art for the sham work that is is, or to commune with his father's life work. It seems a bit of both happens.
This one echos the first two stories in that bedding down, sleeping, becomes a central, repeated element in the story. The boy winds up sleeping near most of the statues, and it's when he wakes up that he's able to dismiss each in turn. There is something mysterious in the climax, after he's heard his father has died, he realizes that he, the living man, is something his father has left that actually has life, that is connected directly to real life and its billions of generations, as opposed to the dead, abstract representations that were his father's statues, artifacts removed from the eternal stream of real, living, cellular life. "Contrary to that old saw about art being long and life being short, it was the other way around. He lay facedown under the tree and bit off some grass near the roots, chewing to distract his smile, but it would not give in, and so he lay there the entire day, smiling into the earth."
This one is mysterious: I don't kid myself that this scribbled summary in any way captures all or even most of its meanings, and I'm feeling that, despite its comic tone, it will stick, I'll want to revisit and question it again.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
Words on Marcus's Introduction
In his introduction, editor Ben Marcus writes of the stories that grabbed us most in childhold. For him, these were the stories that made him want to lie awake and linger in their echoes, to allow the hidden, alchemical codes of language time and space and silence to do their work. That silence was important - Marcus writes that literature is a silence - as the best stories did most of their work in that silence that occurred after they were read or heard. Questions of what and why and how did not matter, what was most important was the mysterious effects of the telling itself. As he puts it, “The best stories were stun guns that held my attention completely, leaving me paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within.” It was the story itself that happened, not the events it described.
And the secret making of that effect is how Marcus redefines the notion of "plot". In selecting the stories for this anthology, Marcus was not interested in their plots, but rather, in what they were "plotting for", what was their "tactic of mattering", what were the hidden machinations that rooted the story deep in the reader's active imagination. The effect of these hidden machinations is to carve out new space in the geography of the reader's sensibilities, a geography that had been shaped up until the encounter with that story by habitual patterns of language. Marcus writes, “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.”
For Marcus, a plot is what is hidden, the “hide” of the story, and just as an animal's hide conceals the inner workings of its body, the story should not give up the secrets of these hidden machinations too easily. This “hide” is one way in which Marcus defines "style" and style, especially in the unique use of language, is what Marcus focused on in his selections. Stories – or the sequence of events they describe – are limited, but the possible use of language in re-imagining them is limitless.
It is in this limitless re-imaginings of their methods through new uses and formations of language that the authors are able to make stories that matter. And it seems that the idea that limitless re-imaginings are possible for all things, may be the most important message such stories carry.
Language is what carves, what is carved is our sensibilities formed from language, and that hidden machinery, that new use of language, the forms carved, is style. Marcus writes, “a stylist seeks to master that technology [the sentence], to not let it lead or dictate terms, but to control it and make it produce whatever effects the stylist desires..to rescue the sentence...is to do something strenuous and heroic...”
In compiling this anthology, Marcus asked for stories from the many different camps, “the realists, the metafictionists, … and the fabulist maximalists” and found that the very best writing in each didn't fit comfortably into any one camp, even made the act of rendering them into categories meaningless. Any of the fundamental components of story – plot, setting, character – no matter the approach used, was but “a piece of language slapped to life by a writer...These are acts of language rubbed over the air to make people appear...”
Thus, because concerned with language, Marcus sums up his concern as being with style, which he defines as a way to to name the artist at work with language, for “language is ...the way we communicate privately to ourselves, [it is] the true code of our inner lives, and to be a short story writer is to know this, to tap into and reveal those ways of personal address we reserve for the private, necessary messages we send ourselves.”
Sea Oak - George Saunders
What is this story's “tactic of mattering”? This one seems to be a story about a bunch of losers, something that is well trodden territory. These characters have either poor jobs or no jobs at all; they live a second rate existence in a crime ridden neighborhood. They have a matriarch, the narrator's aunt, a woman who seems to selfless to be possible: no matter how bad the circumstances she reminds them to be grateful for all that life has given them, she never has an unkind word for anybody, and she has been so uncaring for her own needs she has never even had a date with a man in her long life. And then she dies. What comes next moves the story into the fantastical: the woman digs herself out of the grave and comes back to the house as a corpse, rapidly decomposing, but anxious to finally get some living – and sex – in before she has completely fallen apart. This story, embedded in the first, makes both of them work. Saunders uses the tropes of magic realism – the fixation with the physical details of the corpse and the grave – to get us past the limits of credulity. And there is a real urgency. I root for the aunt, I want her to succeed in getting her people succeeding, especially if in doing so she'll finally get to have a lover. But, even as she begins to succeed, she falls more rapidly apart.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower
Tower's first person narrator speaks in the language of classic mid century comic books, although he lives in medieval times as a Viking raider and is given to belief in mythology, superstition, and the deeds of heroes. Hear his voice: “A turncoat Norwegian monk named Haddad had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver.”
What grabbed me in this was the contrast between what the first person narrator had heard of and believed, of magic and the deeds of his warrior leaders, and what he saw firsthand. At first, as he
describes what he knows of the exploits of his leader and other warriors, it seems this story might be an amp-ed up, hyper-violent fantasy. But as the story progresses, he describes only what is happening in the moment, what he actually sees, and it becomes clear this is not a fantastical world at all, it is only the narration of someone who believes magic and myth, and he is beginning to lose that belief. As the raiders row on their mission to destroy Haddad, he notes the obvious contradiction of rowing out to sea to destroy an enemy who has the power to control the sea: “I couldn't help but think that this crossing would have been a fine opportunity (for Haddad) to call up a typhoon and hold a massacre.” By the end, the belief in the exploits and the magic have seemingly drained away, and he waits at night in horror, knowing that people very much like the man he was at one time may well be bearing down on his own settlement now as he and his wife and children lie in their beds.
Do Not Disturb - A.M. Homes
I did not like this one on the first pass – it is in fact, deeply unpleasant and unsettling – but there was no doubt that it gripped something in my imagination. On the second pass, I could admire this work and the author's mastery.
The very beginning is a nice piece of prolepsis that pulls me right into the narration: “My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end, she could be dead.” I'm telegraphed past the immediate scene into the wife's serious illness, and also know from this sentence that, by the end of the story, it will not yet have killed her.
Homes is able to stay in scenes, weaving in enough details that come out in dialogue or asides to fill in as much of the back story (and no more) as is needed to make the story work. It was a story I might have preferred to have not read, but I lay there in that shocked silence Marcus wrote of. (Still, I now know too much, and in much too vivid detail, about what happens when a woman has a hysterectomy.)
There is a great exchange that happens after the husband (who narrates the story) has heard the specialist explain the operation to the wife. It jogs a memory of a time when the two of them talked idly about what method each would use to kill themselves if they were forced to do it with their bare hands. He begins by remembering her method:
“...you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”
“What's your point?”
“No point – I just suddenly remembered it. Isn't Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”
“I doubt he's going to throw it across the room,” she says.
I've read about great stories that they cannot be paraphrased. The story is the paraphrase, it is already all essential. I was tempted to try to find an “about” for this story, or to draw a parallel to the wife's cancer and their hostile marriage, but I could not. I'm intrigued by a what Homes drops in at the end of the piece, a little snippet that undermines the narrator's credibility. He has told us repeatedly that his wife is full of malice and spite, feels that one of her own great failings was that she could not fix him, but he depicts himself as giving no reason for it. Yet in this last scene he is on the floor with a maid who is stroking his naked chest and giving him champagne to drink. As he tells the story, this is the maid trying to help him recover from physical paralysis brought on by his back spasms.
But is there enough for me to say that it's not the wife who's the creep, it's him? The story does not suffer from this, is not in any way vague or muddled – it is, in fact, sharp and clear, I forget there is a story or a writer. The effect for me was that a series of questions came alive after the read, and I was haunted by both the hostility and malice in their marriage, by their strange inability to let each other go, and by even stranger, more remote echoes of love and tenderness humming in the background.
The Caretaker - Anthony Doerr
This one reaches to forty five pages, more a novella than a short story. I'm taken by the way the author changes pace and focus - in the beginning five pages, the protaganist's country has been shattered by a civil war, he has lost his mother and his own livelihood (selling stolen goods), and was wandered through Liberia witnessing shockingly violent scenes. In the remaining forty five pages, he is in Oregon, having worked on a freightor for his passage there. One thing that is of interest - Doerr writes convincingly about the protagonist's life in Liberia, but by bringing him into Oregon for larger part of the piece, is able to also bring this character into a setting the author will presumably know more.
Doerr's images are strong, surreal and it seems the story is organized around them: the violent scenes of the civil war; the whales beached, then sawed open for the medical examination of their organs; the protagonist's taking of their hearts for burial on his employer's land; the images of the employer's resort home falling apart as the protagonist charged with its upkeep lies in his own emotional paralysis; and the garden he grows over the buried hearts of the whales. Doerr also uses echoing: the man, in self-exile from Liberia, is effectively exiled in Oregon by his employer and comes back to almost literally haunt his employer's land; in Liberia he has lost his mother to an unknown fate, while in Oregon it is his employer's deaf teenage daughter, a girl with whom he forms a kinship, that goes missing. The girl has known some horrors, also, and I can guess that it was abuse, but Doerr remains silent on this.
Where the mythological sense rises most strongly is in Doerr's descriptions of the natural world. After the man has lived as a vagrant in the elements for weeks and then months, he connects with the girl and he wants to tell her what this has taught him: "He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day's light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight - every second of every day has its own magic". Wow, makes me want to take up the vagrant life in some remote forest myself. (Does the above sentence have a dangling modifier? I'm not sure whether "every second of every day has its own magic" is the promise of twilight, or whether it is meant to modify the entire sentence...)
Doerr calls attention to his images and their intended workings in this story, particularly that of the buried whales' hearts and how the garden grows above them. He even has his protagonist speak directly on how things that die give rise to something else. In that sense, unlike Marcus's introductions, he does reveal how his story works. But it does work for me through the empathy - perhaps romanticized - with his character, the scope of the story (stretching over two continents), and the vivid, surreal quality of his protagonist's experiences.
Words on Marcus's Introduction
In his introduction, editor Ben Marcus writes of the stories that grabbed us most in childhold. For him, these were the stories that made him want to lie awake and linger in their echoes, to allow the hidden, alchemical codes of language time and space and silence to do their work. That silence was important - Marcus writes that literature is a silence - as the best stories did most of their work in that silence that occurred after they were read or heard. Questions of what and why and how did not matter, what was most important was the mysterious effects of the telling itself. As he puts it, “The best stories were stun guns that held my attention completely, leaving me paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within.” It was the story itself that happened, not the events it described.
And the secret making of that effect is how Marcus redefines the notion of "plot". In selecting the stories for this anthology, Marcus was not interested in their plots, but rather, in what they were "plotting for", what was their "tactic of mattering", what were the hidden machinations that rooted the story deep in the reader's active imagination. The effect of these hidden machinations is to carve out new space in the geography of the reader's sensibilities, a geography that had been shaped up until the encounter with that story by habitual patterns of language. Marcus writes, “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.”
For Marcus, a plot is what is hidden, the “hide” of the story, and just as an animal's hide conceals the inner workings of its body, the story should not give up the secrets of these hidden machinations too easily. This “hide” is one way in which Marcus defines "style" and style, especially in the unique use of language, is what Marcus focused on in his selections. Stories – or the sequence of events they describe – are limited, but the possible use of language in re-imagining them is limitless.
It is in this limitless re-imaginings of their methods through new uses and formations of language that the authors are able to make stories that matter. And it seems that the idea that limitless re-imaginings are possible for all things, may be the most important message such stories carry.
Language is what carves, what is carved is our sensibilities formed from language, and that hidden machinery, that new use of language, the forms carved, is style. Marcus writes, “a stylist seeks to master that technology [the sentence], to not let it lead or dictate terms, but to control it and make it produce whatever effects the stylist desires..to rescue the sentence...is to do something strenuous and heroic...”
In compiling this anthology, Marcus asked for stories from the many different camps, “the realists, the metafictionists, … and the fabulist maximalists” and found that the very best writing in each didn't fit comfortably into any one camp, even made the act of rendering them into categories meaningless. Any of the fundamental components of story – plot, setting, character – no matter the approach used, was but “a piece of language slapped to life by a writer...These are acts of language rubbed over the air to make people appear...”
Thus, because concerned with language, Marcus sums up his concern as being with style, which he defines as a way to to name the artist at work with language, for “language is ...the way we communicate privately to ourselves, [it is] the true code of our inner lives, and to be a short story writer is to know this, to tap into and reveal those ways of personal address we reserve for the private, necessary messages we send ourselves.”
Sea Oak - George Saunders
What is this story's “tactic of mattering”? This one seems to be a story about a bunch of losers, something that is well trodden territory. These characters have either poor jobs or no jobs at all; they live a second rate existence in a crime ridden neighborhood. They have a matriarch, the narrator's aunt, a woman who seems to selfless to be possible: no matter how bad the circumstances she reminds them to be grateful for all that life has given them, she never has an unkind word for anybody, and she has been so uncaring for her own needs she has never even had a date with a man in her long life. And then she dies. What comes next moves the story into the fantastical: the woman digs herself out of the grave and comes back to the house as a corpse, rapidly decomposing, but anxious to finally get some living – and sex – in before she has completely fallen apart. This story, embedded in the first, makes both of them work. Saunders uses the tropes of magic realism – the fixation with the physical details of the corpse and the grave – to get us past the limits of credulity. And there is a real urgency. I root for the aunt, I want her to succeed in getting her people succeeding, especially if in doing so she'll finally get to have a lover. But, even as she begins to succeed, she falls more rapidly apart.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower
Tower's first person narrator speaks in the language of classic mid century comic books, although he lives in medieval times as a Viking raider and is given to belief in mythology, superstition, and the deeds of heroes. Hear his voice: “A turncoat Norwegian monk named Haddad had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver.”
What grabbed me in this was the contrast between what the first person narrator had heard of and believed, of magic and the deeds of his warrior leaders, and what he saw firsthand. At first, as he
describes what he knows of the exploits of his leader and other warriors, it seems this story might be an amp-ed up, hyper-violent fantasy. But as the story progresses, he describes only what is happening in the moment, what he actually sees, and it becomes clear this is not a fantastical world at all, it is only the narration of someone who believes magic and myth, and he is beginning to lose that belief. As the raiders row on their mission to destroy Haddad, he notes the obvious contradiction of rowing out to sea to destroy an enemy who has the power to control the sea: “I couldn't help but think that this crossing would have been a fine opportunity (for Haddad) to call up a typhoon and hold a massacre.” By the end, the belief in the exploits and the magic have seemingly drained away, and he waits at night in horror, knowing that people very much like the man he was at one time may well be bearing down on his own settlement now as he and his wife and children lie in their beds.
Do Not Disturb - A.M. Homes
I did not like this one on the first pass – it is in fact, deeply unpleasant and unsettling – but there was no doubt that it gripped something in my imagination. On the second pass, I could admire this work and the author's mastery.
The very beginning is a nice piece of prolepsis that pulls me right into the narration: “My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end, she could be dead.” I'm telegraphed past the immediate scene into the wife's serious illness, and also know from this sentence that, by the end of the story, it will not yet have killed her.
Homes is able to stay in scenes, weaving in enough details that come out in dialogue or asides to fill in as much of the back story (and no more) as is needed to make the story work. It was a story I might have preferred to have not read, but I lay there in that shocked silence Marcus wrote of. (Still, I now know too much, and in much too vivid detail, about what happens when a woman has a hysterectomy.)
There is a great exchange that happens after the husband (who narrates the story) has heard the specialist explain the operation to the wife. It jogs a memory of a time when the two of them talked idly about what method each would use to kill themselves if they were forced to do it with their bare hands. He begins by remembering her method:
“...you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”
“What's your point?”
“No point – I just suddenly remembered it. Isn't Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”
“I doubt he's going to throw it across the room,” she says.
I've read about great stories that they cannot be paraphrased. The story is the paraphrase, it is already all essential. I was tempted to try to find an “about” for this story, or to draw a parallel to the wife's cancer and their hostile marriage, but I could not. I'm intrigued by a what Homes drops in at the end of the piece, a little snippet that undermines the narrator's credibility. He has told us repeatedly that his wife is full of malice and spite, feels that one of her own great failings was that she could not fix him, but he depicts himself as giving no reason for it. Yet in this last scene he is on the floor with a maid who is stroking his naked chest and giving him champagne to drink. As he tells the story, this is the maid trying to help him recover from physical paralysis brought on by his back spasms.
But is there enough for me to say that it's not the wife who's the creep, it's him? The story does not suffer from this, is not in any way vague or muddled – it is, in fact, sharp and clear, I forget there is a story or a writer. The effect for me was that a series of questions came alive after the read, and I was haunted by both the hostility and malice in their marriage, by their strange inability to let each other go, and by even stranger, more remote echoes of love and tenderness humming in the background.
The Caretaker - Anthony Doerr
This one reaches to forty five pages, more a novella than a short story. I'm taken by the way the author changes pace and focus - in the beginning five pages, the protaganist's country has been shattered by a civil war, he has lost his mother and his own livelihood (selling stolen goods), and was wandered through Liberia witnessing shockingly violent scenes. In the remaining forty five pages, he is in Oregon, having worked on a freightor for his passage there. One thing that is of interest - Doerr writes convincingly about the protagonist's life in Liberia, but by bringing him into Oregon for larger part of the piece, is able to also bring this character into a setting the author will presumably know more.
Doerr's images are strong, surreal and it seems the story is organized around them: the violent scenes of the civil war; the whales beached, then sawed open for the medical examination of their organs; the protagonist's taking of their hearts for burial on his employer's land; the images of the employer's resort home falling apart as the protagonist charged with its upkeep lies in his own emotional paralysis; and the garden he grows over the buried hearts of the whales. Doerr also uses echoing: the man, in self-exile from Liberia, is effectively exiled in Oregon by his employer and comes back to almost literally haunt his employer's land; in Liberia he has lost his mother to an unknown fate, while in Oregon it is his employer's deaf teenage daughter, a girl with whom he forms a kinship, that goes missing. The girl has known some horrors, also, and I can guess that it was abuse, but Doerr remains silent on this.
Where the mythological sense rises most strongly is in Doerr's descriptions of the natural world. After the man has lived as a vagrant in the elements for weeks and then months, he connects with the girl and he wants to tell her what this has taught him: "He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day's light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight - every second of every day has its own magic". Wow, makes me want to take up the vagrant life in some remote forest myself. (Does the above sentence have a dangling modifier? I'm not sure whether "every second of every day has its own magic" is the promise of twilight, or whether it is meant to modify the entire sentence...)
Doerr calls attention to his images and their intended workings in this story, particularly that of the buried whales' hearts and how the garden grows above them. He even has his protagonist speak directly on how things that die give rise to something else. In that sense, unlike Marcus's introductions, he does reveal how his story works. But it does work for me through the empathy - perhaps romanticized - with his character, the scope of the story (stretching over two continents), and the vivid, surreal quality of his protagonist's experiences.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)