Normally, I try to ignore personal details about authors when reviewing their work. This is typically easy for me, since I'm so terrible at remembering names, I often really don't know anything about even an established writer. Once I'm done writing my review, I'll sometimes Google and take a peek at what's out there on the author, mostly out of curiosity. I also like to check just to be sure I didn't say something about a work that someone else already wrote.
For some reason, while reading "Lupinski" by Myron Taube, I decided to check up on the author before writing my review. I liked the story okay. Its use of significant detail, such as a well-timed meatloaf recipe, was particularly effective. I could teach a class on use of detail from this story. It's not technically innovative or anything, and the subject matter--an old man saying good-bye to his wife dying in the hospital--is the opposite of innovative. (I've seen stories get rejected just because they were about this very subject. It's been done. A lot.) But the story's craft--a word I normally hate, but will use here, because it struck me reading it that craft is really what held the story together--got me through it thinking it was alright. My guess--and this is what led me to look up the author--was that it had been written by some bright young MFA student making good use of the writing advice he'd been learning, but still struggling to find unique subject matter.
Instead, I found out that Myron Taube was a retired English professor who died in 2017, not long after writing this story. Moreover, his wife of many years died not long before him. This story wasn't a talented young writer searching for something to write about and landing on the well-worn subject of parting at the end of life; he was a guy who'd just been through the ordeal of saying goodbye to his wife and made it the last thing he left to the world.
Should that matter? Should I think more (or less) of a story because I know some small piece of the human background of the author who wrote it? In serious literary study, the answer is generally no. We are usually supposed to make our judgments based on the text. Extra-textual matters are interesting, but they're supposed to be left outside the discussion of the story itself.
But that's not always how it actually plays out. If I didn't know what made Eric Clapton write "Tears in Heaven," I'd think it was a fairly syrupy, sentimental song. But knowing it's what he himself wrote to try to cope with a terrible tragedy makes me think of the song differently. It really is a different matter when you are witnessing someone "perform" art in this manner, when they are using art publicly to survive some trauma, and we get to watch the performance.
"Lupinksi" starts out like one thing, changes to another, then shifts back to the original thing again, only worse. Life is running out for two people who lived full lives, who checked a lot of the boxes most of us would think you'd need to check to say you spent your time on Earth well. One is just fading away while the other is lost in a fog. There isn't much grace to snatch there, but what there is, the dying pair ineluctably find. It's true and raw and still not totally without hope. And it's far, far more powerful knowing it came from a guy who needed to share this rather than a guy who was just trying to find a touching subject for a story.
This kind of thing strikes me as the product of inculcated cynicism:"If I didn't know what made Eric Clapton write "Tears in Heaven," I'd think it was a fairly syrupy, sentimental song."
ReplyDeleteWe are trained in this advanced culture to be suspicious of sentimentality. To hate the true and love the odd. It's interesting that a story which turned out to be the product of something authentic was not recognized as such without a little research. Sentiment is fine, sentimentality is fine if done well. But to be cynical about it a priori is not the same thing as being a critical reader: cynicism is the counterfeit of critical thought because it relies primarily on tropes. I fear it's what poisons a lot of how we approach life.
Point taken, although sometimes the line between sentimental and mawkish on the one hand and sincere and unafraid on the other is razor thin. A lot of people like movies on the Hallmark Channel. Sentimental hogwash does exist, and I will at least try to make a story earn its sentiment. This one did, even without the back story. It was just better with the extra information.
DeleteThis discussion comes very close to proving Houston's point in her opening essay about irony. Sentiment isn't "literary". But it's the most universal experience we have.
DeleteCan you say more about the meat loaf - I agree, it works really well (I don't even like meat loaf but I want to make that recipe) but *why* does it work so well? Is it the placement (and what about that spot makes it the right place for a deep dive), some obscure relationship between meat loaf and his wife (hominess, comfort food)?
ReplyDeleteI've long been a fan of including context - including the author's motivation, background, and history - in my readings. After all, I can't separate out my experiences, as a reader, from the text, so why should I separate out the author's experiences.
I wonder if a grad student, without the experience of loss (and few grad students could possibly have long-term relationships like this; parental loss is the only thing that comes close, and that's a very different experience) could have written this story. I'm also interested in the Jewishness of it; when I started reading back in the 60s and 70s, there were lots of books with Jewish characters, often second-generation kids trying to distance themselves from what they saw as the limitations of their parents' cultures. Now, that's pretty much disappeared. I miss it. i wonder if contemporary teenagers know any Yiddish vocabulary at all. Then again, they probably know things that I was completely unaware of back then. i guess it's just a shift in emphasis.
Every part of a story ought to either be establishing setting, establishing character, or moving the plot. The meatloaf recipe does all three. It's a detail that grounds us in the reality of the moment, but it's an unexpected detail. Anyone could pick out something obvious, like photos of the old couple and their family or a house that's probably not that well kept at this point. But instead, we get just the objects in the home that will contribute to the thing he wants to make to help her get better. Which also tells us a lot about him. He seeks to connect through food, but we're being shown this fact rather than told. Finally, it also helps to move the plot, which has to do with the man not really being able to process what's happening. He's still stuck in his head with the recipes he's picked up over the years rather than realizing what's happening. Which is both a blessing (why shouldn't he be in a happier place in his head?) and a curse (the family has to keep telling him that his wife is dying). Meatloaf is an extremely tangible, specific, and unexpected symbol of all the couple has had and all they're about to lose.
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