The re-boot as literature: "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Anthony Marra

Normally, when someone writes a story that is obviously "after," or in direct homage to, a well-known work of literature, it's to fulfill a school assignment. "Write 'The Gift of the Magi' from the perspective of one of the shop owners who sells the couple the chain fob or the set of combs." Or, "Little House on the Prairie, but in space." Something like that. If not a school assignment, I might expect to see something like this in fulfillment of a writing prompt, the kind of thing meant to get you going. I wouldn't expect too many serious writers to try to turn it into top-notch literature. There are exceptions. Ahab's Wife comes to mind. But generally, this is a writing exercise, not a serious story.

So I was surprised to see Anthony Marra's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in this year's Pushcart Anthology. I saw that it was originally published in McSweeney's, known for their sense of humor, for doing things their own way, and for generally being a whole lot cooler than the rest of the literary world. I figured this must have been in response to a contest or themed episode, and I was right. They did a "49 Cover Stories" theme for one edition, and this was one of them.

It's a very short story, and not bad for what the job was, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. It's basically the Tell-Tale Heart, only in today's world and with a new motive. In Poe's story, the murderer cannot really give us his reason for killing the old man. He "thinks it was his eye." The eye creeps out the murderer, so much that he is willing to kill to be rid of it. Of course, no sooner does he free his sense of sight from being attacked by his imagination through murder than his sense of hearing is attacked. The great thing about Poe's story is we don't quite understand what motivated the killer. A hatred of the uncanny, perhaps, or maybe an extreme form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In Marra's story, the killer is motivated, it seems, by his hatred of his roommate's social media obsession. His roommate Richard is an okay guy, only he's totally absorbed in himself and in posting about himself to the various social media sites he's on through his phone. What really sets the killer off is when he sees Richard snapping and then deleting hundreds of selfies over a week. The selfies were meant for Richard's Tinder dating app, but they never make it there. The murderer, who is watching the endless iterations of selfies through the crack in the partially open bathroom door, starts holding a knife while he watches, although he assures the judge (the second person audience of the story) that it wasn't in order to kill Richard.

It's open to interpretation what pushes the killer over the edge. Either it's the fact that Richard is so self-absorbed he never notices the killer watching him, although the killer opens the door more and more every time, or it's because Richard has subtly turned the camera on the killer the whole time. The only thing more pathetic than being obsessed with your Tinder selfie is being obsessed with the guy who's obsessed with his Tinder selfie. Richard makes the killer see his own pathological anti-social behavior when the killer thought he was observing someone else's.

It's fine. It's fine. I could have done without the intentional usage of diction from Poe's story. ("Still--still!--he didn't see me.") In the end, the killer hears Richard's cellphone from beneath the floor boards. That would have been enough, but for some reason, the story insists on forcing a metaphor that equates the phone to Richard's heart: "The vibration pulsed from the wood grain through my shoe soles so that I was not standing on a floor but on the very frequency of Richard's heart." The story works fine as an homage to Poe without making the phone into a heart. It could have just been a phone on vibrate driving him crazy. Maybe the rules of the themed episode required it. In any event, the story was good for what it was, but I think it'd have been better if it had gone for more of a Clueless-Emma level of fidelity to the original. I found some things to like in it, but the level of fidelity it had was a little too on-point for me to love it.