No Free Road Snacks: "Mobilization" by Allegra Hyde (O.Henry Anthology)

Why does the first-person plural narrative voice so often give summaries of habitual actions rather than declarative sentences in the simple present tense? I'm not complaining; I'm really asking. I'm not the most widely read of commentators, but I can think of five stories I've written about on here that used the first person plural: "Serranos" by Francisco Gonzalez, which appeared earlier in this same O.Henry anthology as "Mobilization"; "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, which appeared in the 2022 Best American Short Stories; "The Whitest Girl" by Brenda Peynado, one of the few Pushcart stories I've looked at on here; "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor, which appeared in the 2022 BASS; and Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End, one of the few novels I've looked at in depth on this blog.

All of these stories, when using the "we" of the first-person plural voice, tend very often to avoid a simple depiction of past events, such as: "We went to Heini's Cheese Chalet as a group that day, and although we all meant to spread out as we went through tasting samples, we ended up clumping around one another at the same popular cheeses." If these stories were written in Spanish, they'd favor lots of past imperfect verbs and very few preterits. There's a heavy dose of depictions of things the "we" used to do regularly, rather than things we did once. Because nobody in the "we" is more important than anyone else, the narrative tends towards general descriptions of behavior, rather than specific anecdotes.

Here's an example from "The Whitest Girl":

We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz me el favor, how dare she?...Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.

And here's another example from "Serranos":

Although we had been ten years in the valley, and no longer thought of ourselves as foreigners, our precautions had long ago become a part of us. We avoided banks, police stations, doctors' offices. We had stopped attending Mass, since we'd heard the stories of worshippers seized at the steps of churches. And we visited Albertsons or Safeway only in groups of three at most. We couldn't risk losing too many adults; someone had to remain to watch over our daughters and sons.

If there was too much of this kind of generalizing, this-is-what-life-was-like kind of summary in a first-person or third-person singular POV, I think it might get boring quickly. But for some reason, with a first-person plural, it actually leads to a strong forward propulsion of the narrative.

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"Mobilization" Does This Even More Than Most

Most of the other we-narrator stories I've alluded to break from the general to the specific at some point, but Allegra Hyde's "Mobilization" sticks to imperfect-tense actions almost exclusively. It reminded me not so much of the stories I mentioned above, but Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," in that it's a poetic series of paintings of landscapes, both internal to the "we" and also external, that tell a loose story. Only the very end of the story seems to tell of a specific event that happens to the caravan of RVers, and even then, there is still a good deal of general listing of the kinds of actions taken to cope with the end of the party mixed in with the occasional specific, one-time historical action taken.

Many of the we-narratives I've mentioned make a shift in style at some critical junction. In And Then We Came to the End, there is a chapter told in the voice of the boss, Lynn, that stands out from the "we." In "Mbiu Dash," the "we" switches to "I" after the protagonist is rejected by the town. In "Mobilization," the shift isn't from "we/us" to some other pronoun, but from the past "imperfect" to the present indicative. This shift happens in the closing paragraphs.

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A Real Present Transposed on an Imagined Future

As anyone who's seen the movie Nomadland knows, the community described in "Mobilization" isn't made up. There really are communities of people in the United States living fully nomadic lifestyles in RVs, vans, and various cobbled-together vehicles. "Mobilization" has them traveling in packs together a bit more than Nomadland does, and that's to fit the idea behind this being a true mobilization. The title is, of course, a play on words, as the nomadic families described are both mobile, meaning on the move, but also something of a movement, giving it the military flavor of one of the word's meanings.

The attitude of the nomads is a unique blend of independent and communal. They look down on land dwellers who are tied to their normal lives and relish their freedom above all else, but they also share in a quasi-communist fashion. The mobilization, then, depicts two sides to America, two sides that have always been there. The first white settlers left to be able to practice religion as they saw fit without being told by someone else how to do it, but the initial colonies they founded were intensely, often oppressively, communal.

As anti-establishment as the nomads are, they are generally very pro-American, sporting "USA" signs among their bumper stickers and shooting off fireworks to "show our shared patriotism." This isn't the only contradiction in them. Their feeling of superiority is founded on their belief that they have solved a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too contradiction, being able to be "always at home, but always away," to "have an adventure yet keep your home close." They hope their ancestors' ashes rest in peace on their dashboard, even while they stay forever in motion.

The nomads, then, are a riven embodiment of the nation they are traveling about. Not unlike their country, they generally mean well, but they still cause harm as an unintended but unavoidable consequence of all that activity: "We tried not to litter, but we often couldn't help it. Leaflets, leftovers, stray bits of plastic wrap--they fluttered from our windows."

The nomads are presented as highly sexual, and their sexual appetite is linked to the nation's "fecundity," i.e., its fertility. They are representative of America in so many ways: their pioneering spirit; their don't-tread-on-me sense of individual freedom that nonetheless has room for community; their high levels of consumption, sucking up gas as well as a long list of foods they eat on the road in their "invincible ease." They hope this restless energy will keep them from harm, "death as distant as a possum in a mirror," much like our national zeitgeist has always felt the restless need to move forward. Even their very contradictions are American ones: they try not to read much, but they also cover their vehicles with text that "piles on top of itself."

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The Piper Has to Be Paid

The narrative pays a lot of homage to "us," and much of its poetry is a paean to the grandeur of the caravanners. They are the opposite of xenophobic, welcoming all without discrimination, happy to introduce their children to "every accent, every perspective."

Nonetheless, at some point, there ain't no free lunch, and this very American lifestyle, with all its goods and bads, can't go on. Gas suddenly disappears. The proximate cause isn't given. We read about a trade embargo and general chaos, but that seems to be a result of the gas shortage and not the cause. We can maybe assume that of the many reasons why we in the real world might one day face a serious gas shortage, the nomads in "Mobilization" were victims of several or all of them. It doesn't really matter. That level of consumption can't be maintained forever, and at some point, it's going to end, whatever governments may do in the meantime.

The caravanners conduct a desperate search for gas, sure it must be out there somewhere, but the search is in vain. The camaraderie of the road at last breaks down as the few people with custom-made electric vehicles run off, allegedly to get help, but they never return. The marooned campers try to carry on gamely, but eventually, they are hot and hungry and cut off, and things look bad.

As I've already noted, the end of the story switches to present tense. "Darkness comes quick..." "Algae blooms..." "It swallows us, grinds us." The finale is, I believe, an epoch-making event, perhaps marking the end of the Anthropocene era. "The bones" of the motorhomes are buried along with their owners. Mud and muck presses on top of them. They are pressed and squeezed. They're turning into fossil fuels, in effect. The restless nomads are still restless for more motion at the end of the story, and they will get it, but this time, they'll be powering the movement of others rather than using the remains of a past era to move themselves.

I do not plan to present a song that matches the theme of every story I blog about, but I have done it for two stories in a row now.

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It's obviously a commentary on American consumerism and American lifestyles in general, but is it anything else? 

Well, maybe not much more, but it's offering its commentary in a layered way that's kind of interesting. In fact, I found this story a lot more appealing than Hyde's "Democracy in America," which was also a pointed commentary on the American way of life. "Mobilization" at least takes the time to eulogize the dead way of life, doing what all good eulogies do by finding that even in the worst of the deceased, there is often much to admire and praise.

America's weird leave-me-alone-but-also-don't-touch-my-social-security and its I-hate-taxes-but-the-police-better-come-when-we-call split personalities are contradictory, but it's so breathtaking to behold the chutzpah of Americans being themselves, we don't always mind the contradiction. The observation of the hypnotic power of American kinetic energy calls to mind Whitman. And of course Kerouac, but that's too obvious to even bring up. "Mobilization" is a eulogy for a dying America, but it's also a hymn to what has been best in us: our adventure, our creativity, our fierce sense of individualism but also our compassion and community spirit that can thrive as long as nobody is making us do it.

He who goes down to Sheol does not come up: "The Dark" by Jess Walter

For much of "The Dark" by Jess Walter, the title seems totally inappropriate, because the mood of the story is anything but. Doug Coates' dad humor is on the higher end of the spectrum, and it's matched by the characters he interacts with. This isn't the overpowering humor of a comedian essentially playing themselves in a movie, where the dialogue is impossibly sharp compared to what an actual human could come up with on the spot. It's the kind of genial, self-effacing humor that knows it's not quite succeeding as soon as it comes up with a joke, but the realization of its own failure is part of what makes it funny. 

There's so much of this breezy humor--"banter," as Doug's son Aaron calls it, a word of uncertain origin but that might be related to a term meaning to hit a ball back and forth, highlighting the play involved in the practice--that one almost forgets it's a story about a guy trying to get over the death of his wife from some kind of terminal disease. The story feels light, both in terms of weight and also in color. So why is it called "The Dark"?

Life is ultimately a comedy. That's because there's a big joke being played on all of us, which is that we work hard to make the most we can out of this life and act like the choices we make are very serious and important, but ultimately, we die and do not come back and all the things we thought were so serious don't matter much in the long run. The only way to keep treating life as a tragedy or a drama is by believing that life goes on after death and our decisions will reverberate in eternity, but that wasn't a choice for Doug and his wife Ellie. Doug was an agnostic by temperament and by training as a scientist, while Ellie came about her lack of belief by way of rejecting the faith she was raised in. For both characters, as Ellie was dying, the belief in life after death wasn't a consolation either could reach for. 

That's why it was so disconcerting for Doug when Ellie called for a pastor to come speak with her in her dying days. Doug was worried that: 1) This meant he had never really known his wife, which made him feel more alone, and 2) She knew something about the afterlife that he didn't, and she would be able to obtain it and he wouldn't.

Cosmic and common fears

There are two levels of anxiety and fear going on the "The Dark." One is the big fear that all of us have about death, the fear we mostly spend our lives trying not to think about. The other is more about all the little, daily fears we have. What will dating be like after four decades? Will this person like me? Did I look like an idiot with the joke I tried to tell? Both are fears of the unknown, but the former, the fear of "the dark" of death, is the more fundamental one, while the fear of not knowing how things are going to work out in life is a more contingent concern. 

If I have an issue with much contemporary literature, it's that it ignores the more fundamental fear and only writes about the contingent ones. It will offer an endless stream of flawless detail, told in sparkling prose, about working through trauma or the struggles of the subaltern, but it never puts their fears within the larger context of what the fuck is this whole strange eventful history even about?  Personally, the trouble I have dealing with the smaller fears has a lot to do with how out of whack I feel knowing the bigger fear is always there at the back.

It's not, of course, that the battle to overcome trauma or the realities of the subaltern are unimportant. We should strive to make the world better for people and not worse. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest," says the Bible's most nearly nihilistic book, and I agree. Modernity, though, seems to have shortened it to just the part up to "do it with thy might," without the uncomfortable reason why. Reasoning that the brevity of life and the uncertainty of death is a cause to focus more on the precious life we do get, they take that focus so far that they ignore the big questions altogether. They might even call those questions irrelevant or childish. Rather than deal with the darkness, modernity chooses to keep the lights turned up as brightly as possible, to put the music on full blast and to keep itself focused on work not because of the shortness of life, but in order to forget about it.

"The Dark" doesn't shirk from the yawning maw of death, Sheol that is never satisfied. It does, however, lead us into it softly, cushioned all along the way with what the narrator calls "polite, gentle questioning." When the pastor shows up to talk to Ellie, Doug thinks it's a mistake. Oh, no, we don't go in for that, he says, but then he finds that Ellie has, to his dismay, asked the pastor to come. This leads Doug to twin fears. They are listed out of order, perhaps. First is that if he didn't really know her, then his "temporary detour from the existential horror of being alive and alone" was mistaken. The second is that perhaps Ellie knows something about the afterlife he doesn't, that she'll get in and he won't. 

The pastor who shows up unbidden forces Doug to ask hard questions about life that he's managed to avoid through his close relationship with Ellie. But the narrative holds off telling us what Ellie actually spoke with the pastor about until nearly the end. Almost the only thing we hear that the pastor said about life after death is that it's strange that we teach our children to be afraid of the dark. They wouldn't naturally have this fear, because, after all, they come from the darkness of the womb. It's home to them, so there's no reason they would ever develop a fear if we didn't teach it to them.

Pay no attention to the faulty biological basis of this argument and the fact that our fear of the dark is very much a natural part of our evolution. This is an emotional truth, not an empirical one. As Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" puts it, "You start out from nothing, you go back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!" 

It's not an answer that gives a map of where we go when we die. It's much less dogmatic and certain than that. The pastor doesn't say she knows what happens when we die; she says that there isn't any known reason to fear it. It's a tentative but also a compassionate and gentle answer to our most fundamental fear.

Comic and tragic mindsets

We can respond to the basic, comic losing battle of life with either a comic perspective or a tragic one. Tragic approaches include rejecting the darkness (Rage against the dying of the light) or accepting it, either as part of God's plan or as a necessary limit to life necessary to make life have meaning. Comic approaches also can either acknowledge the dark (optimistic nihilism like that Monty Python song) or try to avoid thinking about it (eat, drink, and be merry). 

The unique, humane excellence of "The Dark" is that it blends these views. It accepts that as humans, we can never stop trying to make sense out of death, to hope there is some way beyond it. Nonetheless, it also understands that the dark is too dense to peer into, and so really the only consolation we can obtain is the contingent, highly bracketed consolation of love and companionship. This love and companionship, though, has a necessary end. One has to accept the comic view to handle the trauma of the dark, to enjoy our human relationships as tiny lights that hold back the dark. But it's only in acknowledging the dark that these relationships take on their full meaning and value. Without the dark, it would be impossible to even feel sad for those we have lost.

"The Dark" is full of ironies. All of Ellie's dating advice turns out wrong. Her lifelong grudge is pointless, but also, the person she held it against unintentionally hurts Doug just as she (probably) unintentionally hurt Ellie. With all this witty banter and all this irony, it's clear that "The Dark" is mostly encouraging a comedic response to the comic problem of death. But as they say, if everything is funny, then nothing is. Or maybe if nothing is sad, then nothing is funny. It's the sadness of death and the terror of the grave the underpins the humor. 

Of course, one could also say that if everything is tragic, then nothing is. Dealing with death without going utterly crazy relies on the ability to move between comic and tragic ways of looking at it. "The Dark" succeeds as much because of its light as because of its darkness.

                      This story really kept making me think of this song. 

The past is full of blame: "The Room-Service Waiter" by Tom Crewe

First, a terribly reductive summary of the story: 

Charles Bisset was a young man working at the Le Meurice Hotel in the 1920s when the by-then renowned artist Chaim Soutine hired him to pose for a painting. Charles wore his room-service waiter outfit while Soutine painted, and the artist eventually created the work below, which has the same name as this short story.

I did not know who Soutine was before this short story. A lot of his paintings are apparently like this.

The story takes place more than two decades after Soutine's death and about four decades after the panting was first made. There's an exhibition celebrating Soutine's work going on in Paris, and the curator dug up Charles and other of Soutine's models for interviews in order to add some interest for viewers. Charles realizes while thinking about his modeling sessions with the painter and everything else that's happened in his life that he hasn't made good use of his time. By the end of the story, he's had a microcatharsis that leads him to take a small step to live his life better, and he reaches out to his ex-wife. 

A critical moment leading to the catharsis

It's often unfair to summarize a story so much, but here, I don't think I'm actually doing a great deal of violence to it. Some stories like to hide their truths, but "The Room-Service Waiter" is happy to let you see what it is serving up, and it isn't any the worse for that. It's a classic "life not lived" story, much in the same way that Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Last Days of P" was. Far from being weak for putting its heart in the open for all to see the same way Charles' private moments are on display for the public at the exhibition, this is a strength. It's a good story and none the worse for having been told before. 

If its thematic heart is relatively simple, that doesn't mean that deciphering what led Charles to his mini-transformation is. In some ways, it looks as though it's the typical route from self-assured pride to the humility that precedes wisdom. Charles, thinking back on what he was like during his days at the hotel when he'd been Soutine's muse, recalls that he'd "taken pride" in the hotel. When Charles sees other paintings at the exhibition, he observes that they all look "smart and pleased with themselves," just as he had. If we look at Charles' whole life at this point, we can see it as a long, slow movement from the self-gratified waiter, happy with himself for convincing the prettiest girl at the hotel to marry him, to the now humbled older man crying while looking at the great painter's portrait of him, resolving to make better use of his life.

But what led to this change? For much of the exhibition, Charles is showing the same self-satisfied tendency that has defined his life up to that point. He eats it up when audiences gather to hear him talk about his time with Soutine. He's happy that everyone can still recognize him as the man from the photo in spite of all the time that's passed, vain about how he's kept his hair and his looks. He's a little bit mean to one of the other models from the hotel who is at the exhibition, a man called Alexandre who was the inspiration behind "The Bellboy," below.  

Charles pinches Alexandre's fat and criticizes him for having let himself go. He points out that, unlike himself, it's impossible to see the young man from the portrait in the old man. Alexandre doesn't defend himself or take offense. He's self-effacing, stating that he likes looking at the photo and being reminded of "when he had a neck." He says kind words to Charles, telling him that all the younger lads had admired Charles for his good looks. 

Charles never gets around to returning Alexandre's kindness. His last words we see to Alexandre are criticizing him again for getting fat. Alexandre replies with his most self-deprecating statement of all: "I have disappointed myself. It is hard to explain--" 

Soon after this, we see Charles crying openly in front of his painting, then telling the curator who found him that the exhibition has "utterly changed" his life, and then he goes home to write the letter to his ex-wife. The letter includes the words "I'm sorry," so we have to believe that at least some small amount of self-examination and metanoia has taken place. 

The narrative doesn't spell out for us how his inner transformation has taken place. It doesn't say, for example, that "Charles thought that Alexandre was right, and that he also had disappointed himself, and he should start immediately to make amends." We have to read into what Charles has said, done, and thought to guess at where the transformation has taken place. 

While Charles never stops acting condescendingly toward Alexandre, we have to assume, since Alexandre's words about disappointing himself immediately precede Charles's self-proclaimed change of life, that the words have sunk in on some level. Charles has recently remembered that Soutine used to tell himself "Bravo!" at the closing of each painting session, apparently congratulating himself for his work, and Charles has started imitating the behavior. This imitation is like that of a "valet to a famous man, repeating his master's little phrases in the dusty corners of his own life." That is, Charles may not be a great man of history like Soutine, but he can take some little snippet of Soutine's behavior and use it to improve his own life. Charles' repetition of "Bravo" is the final line of the story. Charles has also soaked up some influence from Alexandre in a similar, osmosis-type of way.  

Perhaps Charles isn't always aware of his own moments of change. He repeats phrases without realizing that repetition is altering the way he thinks. We can, I suppose, repent without always knowing we're repenting. In fact, those moments might be the more profound and lasting moments of change. It seems that this is what has happened with his interaction with Alexandre. Although he never stops mocking Alexandre, Charles nonetheless appears to have internalized something from his humble way of looking at the past and used it to make a change for the better. 

Quasi-ekphrasis

Normally, the terms "ekphrasis" and its adjectival form "ekphrastic" are used for works of literature that focus rather narrowly on a work of visual art. William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is probably the best-known example of ekphrastic literature to most non-literary folks. An ekphrastic poem will have a narrator in a museum, say, who looks at a painting, describes it in some way, and then offers a meditation on it. 

If a work of art is a key underlying element in a work of literature, that doesn't make that literature ekphrastic. For example, the novel Girl with the Pearl Earring isn't ekphrasis. It's literature inspired by art. 

"The Room-Service Waiter" might deserve to be called quasi-ekphrastic. It doesn't go to great lengths to describe (the word "ekphrasis" is related to the Greek word for "describe") the works that inspired the story, but it is an extended mediation on the meaning of one of those works. It provides one way of thinking about Soutine's portraits, which is sort of a good way to think about any portraits: they are time suspended, which offers us a chance to consider the way in which we might think the moment we are in will last forever, but it doesn't. All art is a memento mori, and all art calls us to consider how best to spend our time on Earth. Charles may not, as Monty Python's street critic often proclaimed, know much about art, but he seems to have gotten the gist of what his master was saying, even without much knowing how he was saying it.  

A closing digression

I found the opening lines of the story difficult to read. Rather than draw me in, I kept re-reading the lines to try to understand who "they" was and who "him" was. The second time through, it was easy to read, of course, but I believe the narrative does something kind of unusual in its opening lines. The first sentence reads: "They found him where he had always been, living quietly on the rue Fournier." The "they" here is Monsieru Dupont and, it seems, other, unnamed people in charge of the show who decided to try to find Charles. The "him" is Charles. The first paragraph continues that "the man sitting across from Charles was a curator..." So the first sentence is about how they found him, making me think it's going to be from the point of view of the "they" who went looking for him, but then sentences three switches to Charles' POV. Which meant I didn't trust myself to understand who the "He" leading sentence four was. I figured it out eventually, and other than those first lines, there's nothing difficult to understand about the story, which leads me to wonder why it does this POV switcharoo right off the bat. 

Where review, criticism, and analysis collide: "The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota (O.Henry Anthology)

Although this blog will mix in plenty of review, I generally prefer criticism and analysis. Maybe these last two feel more like "real" literary work to me. Whenever I'm on one of those message boards where people discuss the meaning of song lyrics, I get irritated when the discussion veers from what lyrics mean to someone talking about how much they like or dislike them. Whether one likes something feels hopelessly subjective, more subjective even than an attempt to parse lyrics or explain imagery in a story or poem. Liking or disliking is what people resort to when they're too dumb or lazy to do the real work of understanding. "Real" literary work should illuminate, not just be a dead end about whether something happens to resonate. If you tell me how an egg's chemistry changes while it heats up, you've taught me something. If you tell me you don't like your eggs scrambled, the conversation ends there, because there's nothing I can really say about whether your preferences are right or wrong. 

That's how it has often felt to me, which is why I usually avoid the use of the term "review" when discussing literary work on this blog. But maybe there is a kind of review where the conversation doesn't end with a bald statement of preference. If so, then it must be one in which the review is intimately linked to both analysis and criticism. 

"The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota is a skilled work of short fiction that for some reason doesn't resonate with me much. Something about it calls to mind a debate that's been going on for at least three decades. Has American literary fiction become homogenized, producing what Robert Olen Butler called "polished, bloodless prose"? Or skilled works without much to say that nonetheless state their nothingness well? With literature, this debate is linked to the rise of graduate writing programs, but there is a similar debate surrounding the work on streaming services, which is often good but not great, determined by algorithms to churn out massive amounts of content just good enough to keep people paying their monthly subscription fee. Either way, it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with the work, except that maybe you feel like you've seen it before. 

"Paper Artist" strikes me as a very competent short story that sounds a lot like other short stories I've read in the last twenty years, one that passes muster with the creeds and preferences of workshops, but one that also doesn't read to me like anything that came from the forge of a hot and desperate human consciousness. Maybe this is unfair, though. Not every story has to be Moby Dick. There is probably a feminist argument to be made that favoring "raw and bloody prose" reflects a masculine perspective, and that a close examination of the quiet parts of the world and the human mind in that world are worth serious consideration. In the case of "Paper Artist," the discussion is more complicated, because the story's main character, Muneo, is an artist whose work, his wife notes, "swept through the mind, brushed the soul, and couldn't quite penetrate the heart." So if the story does something similar, is this perhaps not a success of form meeting content? 

To start a discussion of the story and whether its lack of "bloody" content is a success or a weakness, I'd like to start with an outline. This isn't quite what "formalist" theory means, but let's call it a watered-down kind of formalism, because I think looking at the story in this way can help us arrive at a more useful discussion of whether this story is good or just good enough. 

Is "Paper Artist" an example of art that cynically connects the dots based on what has worked before, or does it deserve a more sympathetic reading?

Outline

1.  Confrontation between Muneo (father) and Mana (daughter)

This is the strongest part of the story. It begins directly at the point of conflict. Mana is marrying a foreigner, and one who isn't much to speak of. She's already pregnant. Muneo wants her to get an abortion, ditch the man, and get back to serious study on the cello. She decides to stay with the man and go to America. So the father issues his edict: as long as you stick to this decision, you can never come home. 

We often talk about strong narratives presenting us with something a character wants, but they can also use a character's choice as a framework. Think of The Lion King, and how Simba chooses to run away out of shame when his father is killed. The rest of the narrative unfolds as we see how the decision plays out, at first seeming to succeed but then later showing its flaws. That's what's going to happen here. Scene one gives us the father's decision, and everything after that will come about from the challenges to that decision and whether he sticks to it or waivers. Muneo is described as a "master of control." He is seeking, through his decision, to exert total control over his daughter. Will it work? 

2. Counterpoint

Masako has not really emerged as a character with her own thoughts in Act I, but she springs to life in Act II, and when she does, it's to challenge Muneo's control. This is unexpected, as the narrative makes clear that for most of their marriage, she has indulged his desires and gone along with his view of how their marriage should work. Her first words in the story, though, are, "You were too hard on her." 

She won't push her opposition too ardently for most of the narrative. Life will continue on for them as it has, and when she finally decides to outright oppose his decision, she'll do it quietly, without him knowing. She does offer, however, the perfect counterweight to his "control." The end of Act II is Masako's question to him: "Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman's heart?" She is presenting him with something beyond his control and suggesting it might foil his plans. Now we have a decision and an opposing force to the decision, and the plot works out from there.

3. Exposition!!

We see Muneo paying homage to his parents, which leads to backstory about his father having been a surgeon. Muneo, like his daughter, opposed his father's will, becoming an artist instead of a doctor. We then move from seeing "most mornings" to one particular morning when Muneo and Masako are eating breakfast together. During this particular breakfast, Masako will break with tradition by speaking during what is supposed to be quiet reflection time. There is more backstory and then yet another flashback of how they had gone to make amends with Muneo's father by offering him a dragon lamp Muneo had made. 

There is a lot of flashbacking and backstory going on here, and one of the strongest criticisms I have to offer is that the story thereby loses momentum. In a workshop, you'll offer hear the criticism/suggestion that a short story feels like it really wants to be a novel, and while I usually think that's a dumb comment made by someone who doesn't want to offer anything thoughtful, this story is starting to feel like it really does want to be a novel. Except it isn't. It's a short story, so all of those flashbacks are getting crammed in uncomfortably without organic introductions, and they're piling up faster than the forward momentum is. Also, perhaps because of the attempt to create a generational family drama feel within a short story, there is a tendency for characters to essentialize and openly reveal what other characters are thinking rather than let it be evident from their actions. "It was his pride on the line now, and it stung him that he had been disregarded," Masako summarizes of her husband. 

4. The revolt: Masako conceives of the secret visit

Masako sets up a visit with her daughter and granddaughter while Muneo is on a trip. There are some "Gee, different cultures are different" observations. Muneo has trouble concentrating because of his daughter, but he pushes through. 

5. Mana's updates subside

Mana's marriage ends. More backstory about how Masako accommodates Muneo by not eating out, even when she wants to, but she's going to break that when her daughter and granddaughter visit.

6. Status quo is upset by the visit

We don't see the visit anymore than Muneo does, but we see its impact. Something is off afterwards, although he doesn't know what it is. Another flashback to when Masako's mother died. Flashback to giving gift of hanten. That's four gifts total in the story now: Paining from daughter to dad, necklace from Muneo to Masako, hanten from Masako to Muneo, and dragon lamp from Muneo to his father. How each gives and receives tells us a great deal about their characters, and I feel like much of the backstory could have been ditched and just left us with what these four gifts tell us. Flashbacks to couple in their twenties, to moving into Muneo's parents' house, to finding out what happened to dragon lamp. 

7. Masako's cancer and further explanation of what she meant to Muneo

8. Daughter's death and finding of Mina

The final act begins with Muneo making his masterpiece, which tells us both that he has gone as far as his control can take him, and also, perhaps, that his art has finally brought him to a place of transcendence, and perhaps he will now realize something that will help him outside of his art. He believes that he has finally managed to put soul into his work.

All art is a balancing act between raw emotion and technique or craft. The goal is to channel energy in order to increase its power. Channel it too much, and it chokes everything off. Channel it too little, and it become dispersed slop creating a mess all over everything. If Muneo's art has leaned too far in one direction, it's been to channel too strictly, but now he seems to have learned to let the water of his art flow enough to create more spiritual power. He has given up some control and found that it has helped his art, not hurt it.

This artistic realization is linked to a key personal revelations for Muneo that come about at the end. There is the fact that his daughter died. There are facts about his daughter's life in America. There is the granddaughter who needs a home. Most of all, there is the fact of Masako's betrayal, that she went against his edict when she brought her daughter and granddaughter to Japan when Muneo was gone. 

Newly enlightened Muneo doesn't react with rage. He thinks that the three ladies must have had "fun without him." This is perhaps the strongest possible relinquishing of control possible for Muneo, one that isn't just about him becoming a chiller version of himself so others can enjoy their own lives, but in fact suggests that his presence might not be needed at all. We leave the story thinking that maybe Muneo's late-in-life understanding of his relative unimportance may be the key he needs to being the unlikely guardian his granddaughter needs. Maybe he'll do better with his second chance than he did with the first one. 

Okay, so with that out of the way...

I think that outline gives us a pretty good understanding of what the story is trying to do, how it succeeds and how it might struggle. I can't deny it's a good story, at least in the sense that it gives us a clear conflict with stakes and a character who is trying to navigate the conflict. It does all the things a good story should do. I think it's a little dense with flashback, but I'm not going to be too much of a stickler on that. Sometimes, the information in a character's past is too good not to let it interrupt the present. Digressions in an amiable speaker are an enjoyable indulgence, if you've got the time. 

What doesn't quite go down as easy for me is the way all those flashbacks and all that backstory seems to be aimed at filling in motivation. Just like there is a tightrope to walk with too much form and not enough in art, there is also a balance in a narrative between too much motivation and too little. Laura Walter has written persuasively on the danger of providing a surplus of it:

And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.

If we knew nothing about Hamlet's past, we'd be at a loss to understand his motivations and why he's so damn moody. If we knew too much, we wouldn't be mesmerized by his struggles. Coleridge wrote of Hamlet that he is "a person of vast intellectual power, and his mind is a world unto itself." It's the inability to pin Hamlet down to a simple motivation that makes him Hamlet. 

Nonetheless, however unfathomable the human mind might be, most human actions do have at least some level of motivation, however fractured it might be. We tend to want some explanation of why our characters do what we do. I don't really object to the attempts to use backstory and flashback in "Paper Artist" to provide some of the motivation that fuels the conflict. What rubs me the wrong way is the too-intimate link between vocation and character of Muneo. His fastidiousness is unbroken between his profession and his personal life, and it manifests itself in the same way. His job becomes the biggest symbol of who he is, so much that it's the title of the story. Freud isn't reduced to teleology here; it's reduced to a middle school aptitude test. 

This is where I feel like this story, as excellent as it is, might be a little too familiar, and it could be seen as following something of a formula. Choosing the profession of a character as the title of a story has been done a lot, especially in the last thirty years. The "algorithm" here is to do some research on the profession, then extrapolate from profession to person. The short stories of Andrea Barrett, which I've had more than one go at, do this to a nauseating degree. You take a scientist who studies something,  and then you make their whole interior life mirror that thing. The story writes itself.

In reality, there is almost always some tension between vocation and character, some gap between a person's core qualities and the demands their profession puts upon them. Stories that make an artist as fastidious in their personal lives and they are about their work seem to me like horoscopes that say everyone born in 1972 share basic traits. Are all artists fastidious at home and at work? Would you write this about, say, all the workers in a steel factory? I worked in the same job for about twenty years, and while my abilities and personality fit it in many ways, I still found that I often chafed at it. You wouldn't be able to understand me from my profession. Moreover, I was different from everyone else I worked with, even though we all had the same job. 

A woman I worked with told me last year that she assumed I was a neat freak who liked everything in its place based on how fussy I could be about writing reports. If you've ever seen my house or my car, though, you'd see how wrong she was. I'm one person at work and another at home. Or I was when I still had a job. 

So writing a story called "The Dude with this Profession," including a bunch of lyrical descriptions of the work they do, and then tying that work into the character's choices in life and love seems too easy and too essentializing. By naming the story "The Paper Artist" and then making Muneo a near-complete embodiment of a fussy artist in every aspect of his life, the story ignores how much people's professional personalities can surprise us. 

Review, critique, and analysis revisited

Review is generally a commentary on the quality of an artistic work. Analysis is related to exegesis. It's an examination of how the work is put together, what its aims are and how it accomplishes those aims, as well as what its assumptions are and where those assumptions might be challenged. Criticism is something of a hybrid of the two, and it then takes those two and relates them to other issues in the world.  

When I think a work is excellent, I tend to skip past the review and dive right into the analysis, because the quality is assumed. You only dissect a work that's really worth thinking deeply about. When a work feels off to me, I don't end up wanting to think about what it's trying to do as much, because I haven't been charmed into caring. A work like "The Paper Artist," though, forces me to blend together all three disciplines, because I almost am charmed by it. It turns review into a more philosophical effort, pushing it out of preference and into the realm of aesthetics. I can't really answer questions about whether it's working without first answering questions about how it's trying to work. To me, this is a story with underlying good bones built around a decision and its consequences. That framework ends up taking on too much weight from a story bigger than the building code of  a short story will allow, and it also suffers from tipping too much in the direction of a "Freud reduced to teleology" direction. That tipping is especially noticeable because of the tie between profession and character that has become so prevalent in stories of the past thirty years. I won't give you the same list Gemini just gave me of novels, short stories, and movies where the title is the profession of the main character, but it's a long list. 

I realize nothing can ever really be new in art, and I wouldn't reject a story just because it's got a title that follows what other stories have used. If I did that, I'd have to reject all my own work. But you've got to earn your place, make me accept that this addition to the list deserves to be there. This story feels to me like a 6/10 Netflix original. It competently puts a character through development, but at the end, I don't feel like that development really touches the soul. It's a complicated way of having a trad father come across the rather pedestrian observation that maybe he shouldn't be such a dick. 

But maybe the way this story has made me think so much about why I find it to be competent mediocrity undercuts my argument. Because I really had to think about why I felt that way, and when art makes you think that hard, it can't be throwaway. I wouldn't spend two seconds thinking about why I feel like Happy Gilmore 2 is trash. A story that confronts me with questions about why I feel a resistance to it must be, on some level, more than a mere mediocrity. 

Commemorating a sad day with a critical contribution to world culture

This morning, we had to put our beloved dog Manley down. He was well over sixteen, although we don't know his exact age, and after surpassing our expectations over and over for how long he would make it, it was finally time. I held him in my lap as he went, a devotion he honored by peeing all over me as he expired. I wouldn't have it any other way.

After I got home, I found myself thinking of the song "I Miss You" (보고 싶다) by Kim Bum Soo. It's from the Korean drama Stairway to Heaven (천국의 계단), which happens to be the first one I ever saw. Koreans use the expression "Korean Wave" (한류) to describe the insane rise in global popularity of Korean pop culture that started happening early this century and has only gotten bigger since. Their dramas were a big part of that wave, and this was one of the first mega successes. Kim Bum Soo's song was a big reason why.

I've had this song in my head for over twenty years, but I've never really been able to figure out the lyrics. The hardest thing about translating Korean is that the language often just doesn't state what the subject of the verb is. To use one example, without any context, the sentence "가"(which, believe it or not, is an entire sentence in one syllable), can mean: I go, he goes, she goes, we go. they go, (or "are/is going) for all of those). It can also be the imperative, "Go."

There are some really good translators out there in the world doing good work for free with Korean songs on YouTube. I figured I'd find a decent version of this song with no trouble, but all I saw was one trash translation after another. With a song this special and, without much exaggeration, of this much historical importance, having a bunch of crap English versions out there in the world just won't do. So I've worked with my most trusted Korean translation partner to produce this version below. Please feel free to refer to this if you ever feel sad and want to cry along to a song for a while.

Also, please give your dogs some love today. What kind of god loves us enough to give us something as perfect as a dog, but hates us enough to make them live such a short time?

This is a link to Kim Bum Soo singing the song in concert, along with a pretty good translation, far better than the terrible ones that are out there. I only quibble in a few places with my version, below.

 아무리 기다려도 난 못가

바보처럼 울고 있는 너의 곁에 

상처만 주는 나를 왜 모르고 

기다리니 떠나가란 말야

 

No matter how long you wait, I can't 

Be your side, where you're crying like a fool.

Why don't you know that I only hurt you?

You're waiting there, but I'm telling you to leave.

 

보고 싶다 보고 싶다 

이런 내가 미워질만큼 

울고 싶다 네게 무릎 꿇고 

모두 없던 일이 될 수 있다면

 

I miss you, I miss you 

So much I hate myself

I want to cry, come kneel in front of you

And make it like nothing ever happened.

미칠듯 사랑했던 기억이 

추억들이 너를 찾고 있지만

더 이상 사랑이란 변명에 

너를 가둘 수 없어

 

The memory of loving you like crazy,

The reminiscences are seeking you,

But I can't use love as an excuse

To keep you locked up anymore

 

이러면 안되지만 죽을만큼 보고 싶다

 

I shouldn't be like this, but I miss you so much I could die.

 

(Then the last three stanzas repeat, before it ends with the following line.)

 

죽을 만큼 잊고 싶다

I want to forget you so much I could die.

I guess I'm being fair to this mediocre Covid story: "The Honor of Your Presence" by Dave Eggers (O.Henry anthology)

It's taken me a while to post on the next entry in the 2024 Best Short Stories collection, mostly because I wasn't sure I was being fair to it. It's got a couple of triggers that tend to set me off. It's long--like either a really long short story or a kind of short novella. It's by a big name that even I recognize, although I don't make any effort to know who the big figures in fiction are. So in order to justify its length that it took up first in One Story and then in this anthology, it ought to be good, or else I'm going to assume it's there because of the pedigree of the author and not the strength of the story. I was pretty sure it was a kind of mediocre story about human connections with Covid-19 as a backdrop, but I wanted to sit on it a while to make sure it wasn't my own biases. After taking a little extra time to think it over, I'm pretty sure this is what it seemed to me. I don't like making these posts primarily reviews instead of focusing on analysis, but sometimes, a story just doesn't grab me as being worth the trouble of analysis, and then I kind of need to revert to a review to explain why. 

I don't usually spend time reading what other people have said about a story, but I really wanted to see if someone else could convince me I was wrong, and since the story was published as its own book (which should tell you something about how long it is for a short story), there are a lot of comments about it in Goodreads. I indulged a few. I think Dann LaGratta pretty much hit the nail on the head: "The synopsis promises a 'meditation on why humans congregate and celebrate,' but the vibe just feels very much like it was written during the Covid shutdown and just kind of thrown out there." LaGratta is now my favorite Goodreads commentator. He even abuses the word "just" like I tend to. 

That's the story in a nutshell. If this were a story by a writing student you were talking about in a workshop, you'd say it was pretty good, but as a long story that took a spot in one of the top journals and then also took a spot in one of the best anthologies, it better justify itself, and it doesn't. It's about Helen, who organizes events but doesn't like to go to them, and her wacky uncle Peter, a bon vivant who sometimes pretends to be more British than he is and who loves gatherings. He pushes her to put herself out there and she eventually meets someone who helps her remember that human connections can be good. 

Peter delivers the story's core line, commenting on the development humans are going through during the pandemic: "We're experimenting. We're emerging, and no one cares, and everyone understands." It's a kind of sweet line, and it does encapsulate one truth of the pandemic--although a truth that definitely ought to be balanced against other, darker ones. It's a truth that takes a long damn time to arrive at, though, and the characters aren't quite wacky and enjoyable enough that I was glad to be on the ride for so long. 

Look, Eggers is apparently a great guy who's done wonderful things to support writers, so this isn't about hate. But I wish journals and anthologies wouldn't give away the precious few spots they have available for what amounts to lifetime achievement awards. I'm sure One Story had a hundred better stories with more urgent truths to tell that it rejected because the writer was a nobody. 

Anyhow, since there's not much to dig into here, and not much of a layer below the one that appears to most readers, I'll move on to the next story. 

Therapy as art and art as therapy: "The Last Grownup" by Allegra Goodman (O.Henry Anthology)

For reasons I only sort of understand, the show Rick and Morty is very polarizing and sometimes written off as puerile, sexist, or misogynistic. One episode in particular seems to divide not only people who hate the show from those who love it, but even fans from other fans. It's the Pickle Rick episode. If you've never seen the show, it's about an older man named Rick who is so intelligent he is almost godlike in his ability to control the world. Rick travels the multiverse with his grandson Morty looking for adventure. Morty is a normal fourteen-year-old kid who struggles to understand his grandpa, while Rick struggles to maintain his sanity when he knows only too well how meaningless life in the multiverse is, where there are infinite versions of himself and everyone else. Rick uses alcohol to try to dull the pain, and he tries not to love those closest to him, because he thinks that will only increase the pain of life in the multiverse. 

In the Pickle Rick episode, Rick turns himself into a pickle. He says he does it to challenge himself, but in fact, he actually does it in order to avoid going to family therapy with his daughter and kids. Through a series of unlikely events, Rick ends up actually challenging himself much more than he meant to, but, because he's Rick, he survives. At the end of his adventures, he finds himself in the therapy session he meant to avoid with Dr. Wong, voiced by Susan Sarandon. 

In the meeting, Rick blurts out his disdain for therapy, and Dr. Wong responds with a monologue of her own. Rather than it them all out, I'll just paste the .jpeg of it that someone helpfully put on Reddit:

Dr. Wong's rejoinder (which Rick later will comment on, hypocritically, with the dismissal of "what a monologist!") should make it clear that the show isn't dismissing therapy. It gives both characters strong lines, and it's possible to side with either Rick's masters-of-their-own-destiny-don't-need-therapy beliefs or with Dr. Wong's sensible and non-threatened rebuttal. By giving Dr. Wong the last word, though, the weight does tip slightly toward her. (Also, Rick will voluntarily go to therapy in later episodes, and he will do so in a way that takes therapy at least somewhat seriously.) But given all Rick knows, even if we side with Dr. Wong, it's hard to escape the feeling that there is something to his approach to life. 

What the hell any of this has to do with "The Last Grownup"

When I analyze a story, I feel pretty free to use however much theory, close reading, criticism, and personal reaction make sense to me with each story, and in whatever combination. In the last year, I've been bringing in more and more theory, probably because I've been reading more about it. When I read "The Last Grownup," though, my reaction had everything to do with a series of thoughts about therapy and the meaning of life I've been playing with for years. 

The story is about a woman who is kind of controlling, in both good and bad ways. For most people, their good characteristics are intimately and inseparably linked to their weak ones. Assertive people don't get taken advantage of, but they sometimes offend others. Caring people make sure others are okay, but are sometimes too nosy. Creative people find novel solutions to problems, but they also often are a mess and they resist doing things that don't really require a creative approach. And so on. 

Debra in "The Last Grownup" is, depending on whether you're her justifying her attitudes or her ex-husband complaining about them, either a very responsible planner or a neurotic control freak. 

Admittedly, Debra tended toward the worst-case scenario. It made Richard crazy, because she was always, as he said, fast-forwarding. But she had foresight. She prepared. She planned meals and vacations, scheduled lessons, pre-registered for summer camp. Slow down, Richard would beg her. Cut back, get help! Of course, he never considered helping. When they fought he said, But you insist on doing everything.

This was true. No one had ever told Debra to stay home and do everything; that came from her. Nothing compelled her but her conscience and her common sense. 

I know some people like Debra. We all probably do. The Debras of the world are often underappreciated and derided, even by those who benefit from their borderline obsessive preparedness. At the outset, Debra's marriage has already been over for some time, but the official paperwork has just been filed and the divorce is now official. Her kids are on their first weekend visit with Dad since the official end, and she's lost in her house without them. The story will be about her figuring out what the good and bad parts of her personality are, where preparedness ends and obsessive, fast-forwarding, control freak begins. It will be her doing what therapy calls "the work." Therapy, in fact, makes at least one direct appearance in the story, as we listen in on part of one of Debra's meetings with her therapist. There is also an indirect appearance of therapy when Debra's sister, during what may be considered the muted climax, instructs Debra on a technique for expressing her anger. 

My feelings about therapy and the unexpected sexual politics of it

I've never been crazy about therapy. This is partly because people close to me in my life went to therapy, along with a psychiatrist who prescribed medicines, for a very long time without it seeming to do much good. It's also got something to do, though, with how in modernity therapy seems to have creeped into territory that was once occupied by religion or philosophy. For example, the whole world seems to treat suicide like it's primarily a question of mental health, but it's not. Therapy takes it for granted that suicide is bad. If I were the cynical type, I'd say that's in part because you can't bill dead people. Like any belief that takes something as an a priori principle, it's kind of boring to listen to its proponents try to explain why you should accept the belief in the same way. Therapy isn't discovery of fundamental truths, but it's often presented as having the same gravitas, like once you've started therapy, it's like you've gone on a quest for the meaning of life. You haven't. You're just on a quest to learn how to stop annoying people. 

After decades of trying to work to become intelligent, or even, in my more daring moments, to become an intellectual, I realize I'm no Rick Sanchez. I know full well that it's impossible to measure intelligence accurately, but let's pretend you could. In the types of intelligence that matter to being able to judge meaning-of-life questions, the math/science/language/reasoning types of intelligence, I'm maybe a 7 or an 8 out of ten. In effort, I'm a 9 or a 10 out of ten, so I make up for my quasi-mediocrity a bit, but all that work has done is make me realize how futile the work is without also being a ten of ten in natural ability. So maybe I don't have Rick Sanchez-level authority when I say I feel like life in this here multiverse presents us with a prima facie case that there is a lack of inherent order and meaning that's at the very least a bit disorienting, but I do think that I have cause to say that therapists might be side-stepping the real issues, and that they aren't the people with the most relevant things to say about the big questions in life.

I'm not quite a nihilist. Life may not have any inherent meaning, but it's kind of like living in a video game like Minecraft. There's no set order to how you "win" the game, but there are some rules in the sense that "if you do this, X will happen," and there are ways to play the game that are fun and ways to play that aren't fun. I try to play in ways that are fun. It so happens that those ways include not ruining the game for others, so I don't believe that all ethical decisions are equal. Even this borderline nihilism, of course, might raise an instinctive disdain among some intellectuals who feel they've graduated from it, that existential despair is a juvenile state of mind indicative of poseurs in the college coffee house, wearing berets and beating bongos and misquoting Sartre. They're like A.J. from The Sopranos, mispronouncing the name Nietzsche (which I admit I have to look up how to spell every time). I understand the resistance to poseur-y nihilism, but that doesn't mean that the class of people who think they're better than it have really made their case for something else. That includes therapists.

This near-nihilism of mine might not seem to have any reference to sexual politics, but it could, I suppose, be subject to a critique that it falls in the same vein of sexist dismissal of a feminist aesthetic that Nathaniel Hawthorne did when he dismissed popular female novelists of his time as a "damned mob of scribbling women." He meant, in part, that his work was serious but that the women to whom America was "wholly given over" to were not. Hawthorne's characters lived in a dark and brooding universe still haunted by the ghosts of Calvinism or the Book of Ecclesiastes, and there is a sense of the vanity of all things under the sun, whereas the novels he derided were about the business of living life and life lived well, without any need to justify it, and they put away the sense of vanity and fully turned their attention to the secular business of living in all its small and wonderful detail. 

This divide between "serious" fiction and frivolous has never gone away, and there has always been a bit of a sexual dimension to it, with serious white men writing ponderous stories about old men living alone in a cabin that appear in the New Yorker and women writing very talented prose about a seamstress that appear in Harper's. That's perhaps why early seasons of Rick and Morty, where Rick very much is into his "therapy is stupid" philosophy, earn the reputation for misogyny. 

There is also a political dimension to the divide: Hawthorne's preference for eternal meaning-of-life-type issues over life-in-front-of-your-face ones could be seen as devaluing the struggle to improve life on Earth for the masses, because what's the point of short life in this valley of tears, anyway? As Siggy in What About Bob?  put it when pushed to learn to dive off a dock, "With all the horror in the world, what does it matter?" 

Those general philosophical preferences applied to the story

Knowing full well that my inclination for the eternal over the secular and for theoretical concepts over paying attention to the practicalities of life run the risk of being either frivolous or sexist or politically retrograde, those are still my inclinations, and I take them with me to a story like "The Last Grownup." 

My instincts are to find that although I can recognize the quality of the craftsmanship and that the story is, in the terminology of the New Critics, a "well-wrought urn," it also doesn't resonate with me the way "The Castle of Rose Tellin" did a few stories back. (And if there's an argument that my predilections aren't totally sexist, maybe it's that I loved Kate DiCamillo's story, and that I recognize that to the extent there really is a distinction to be made between transcendental fiction and secular, women can write the former as well as men.) 

"The Last Grownup" lets us watch as Debra "puts in the work." Part of the work includes the early phases of "feeling her feelings," as the kids say, but because Debra is Debra, the self-pity and inaction of the opening pages doesn't last. She gets almost excited about working with her ex-husband and his current girlfriend in the process of teaming up to get the whole family onboard about Richard and Heather getting married and having a baby. Yes, it means some pain for her as she watches her husband move on, apparently doing well in his own process of working on himself, as he's lost weight and quit smoking. But it also gives her something practical to do, which she loves. She finds herself, as she often does, fast-forwarding, wishing that Richard and Heather could just hurry up and get this whole transition over with so they could be a few years down the road and already adjusted to the change. "Debra wished it had all happened already, so she didn't have to watch."

Although the narrator assures us that Debra is "good at therapy," meaning that she listens to her therapist, knows the language of therapy, and can recognize the places in her life where therapeutic concepts apply, it's also true that she's guilty of everything Richard says she is. In the first conversation we see Richard and Debra have after the divorce is final, Debra is jumping ahead to Richard proposing to Heather, when he's really just talking about himself making smell steps of improvement. Debra then spends much of the narrative writing the story of what will happen before it's happened. 

The conflict of the story develops when Debra, Richard, and Heather hatch a plan to tell the kids about the baby and their marriage. During their meeting to formulate the plan, Debra is a little pushy--not too much, but enough that Richard and Heather could plausibly say that the plan was Debra's, even though Heather seemed to instantly recognize the wisdom of it. They seem to all be on board, and Debra, happy to have a role to play, writes up a "family proposal," which is kind of like one of those well-meaning corporate values statements that companies immediately ignore when it becomes difficult. Before she can drop the document on the family, though, Richard and Heather depart from the plan and tell the kids everything all at once, instead of telling them first about the marriage and later about the child, as the adults had agreed to at their meeting. 

Mini-lit court

I could have made this post very different. It could all have been one of my literary court entries, and we could have examined whether Heather and Richard were in the wrong for deviating from the plan. Debra's sister Becca sure thinks they were. She thinks Debra ought to be angry about it, and she even gives Debra a little drill to do to work out her anger. She has Debra plant her feet, breathe in and tighten her whole body, including making fists. Then she is supposed to let it go. Which made me wonder: was this a drill where she was supposed to get in touch with her anger rather than justify it away, or to let her anger go? Because Becca seemed to be advocating the former, while her drill was more about the latter. 

In any case, if I were to have done a literary court back-and-forth argument, one strong case against Debra would have been her attitude at the end of her meeting with Richard and Heather, where she feels superior to them, the "last grownup on Earth," in contrast to their foolish optimism launching them into a difficult future. A full litigation of the case would probably have revealed that it wasn't clear whether Richard and Heather were in the wrong, and that, by extension, the failure of Richard and Heather's marriage wasn't entirely the fault of either party. 

The big theme

Debra's revelation seems to be that she needs to let things go more. She tells Max, the dog, that "sometimes you have to rest," and she recognizes that the things she's lost will eventually turn up, probably when she's stopped looking for them. It's a very complete ending, and yet I find myself wondering why I don't feel much. Maybe I'm just a sexist bro and that's why I like Rick and Morty. Maybe I'll never much love a story that doesn't have a white whale in it somewhere, along with a hapless villain-hero trying to kill it. 

As much as I say I value big, cosmic themes, most of the problems that occupy my mind in real life are practical ones. Right now, I've been spending most of the past four months trying to find a job to replace the one I gave up--for reasons I can't believe are wrong--and feeling more and more anxious as the time I'm looking lengthens. I curse myself for not having learned more practical skills in life, like how to do household repairs or knowing more about finance or having chosen HVAC repair trade school instead of an M.A. in English. 

I try to divorce real-life stuff from "what's life all about, anyway" questions, and to put more weight on the second, but there's an inevitable link between the two, because of a lot of the angst that's there is tied to real-world issues. I partly see the universe as potentially hostile because I doubt my own ability to take care of myself and my family in it. This fear would be lessened if I spent less time thinking deeply about short stories and more time learning to run a CNC lathe. Not worrying about what could go wrong and preparing to avoid it is a better way to actually keep the bad thing from happening, I get it.  And yet, I can never fully make myself commit enough to playing the game that I'm willing to quit spending time asking what the point of the game is, anyway, or how the game is put together or what kind of madman created it and put sentient beings inside of it. 

A good deal of story analysis can be done without emotion. One can read closely for meaning and apply theory to it. AI can probably do a (mostly shitty, for now) job of coming up with a thoughtful reading, even while it doesn't "think" about the meaning of the stories at all. But literature really has no point if it doesn't eventually cross a threshold from "meaning" to "meaning something to me." And when it comes to "meaning something to me," I find it hard to feel much about a story that's a "therapy" story, where the revelation has something to do with a small change that will bring a small improvement in one's happiness, provided one is willing to be content being a slightly less annoying parent to one's children and not ask inconvenient questions like why did I bring children into a universe in the first place when this universe is a place where it is possible that those children may be kidnapped and raped and tortured? 

I'm being unnecessarily difficult, I know. I have made personal changes before as a result of revelations from fiction, whether in a book or on the screen or on the stage. Those changes have usually, although not always, made my life easier or better. So I'm not saying every story should be Moby Dick. If it were, I'd probably eventually get sick of it and want some stories about the everyday relationship issues of a butcher in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am saying that there are stories about doing the work, and there are stories about why one should bother to do the work, and I feel myself more drawn to the latter. When I do arrive at those moments in my life where I feel convinced I should do the work--and those are probably the majority of moments in my life--I'm grateful for art that is focused on how to do it. But I will probably draw what benefit I can from the story and then throw it to the side ungratefully. In that sense, a story like 'The Last Grownup" is to me the way people like Debra often feel--full of forethought and wisdom and totally underappreciated.