In my forty-four years of teaching and editing, I’ve read countless stories about abused women but never one like this. Without a single scene of abuse (and the sensationalism such scenes almost inevitably create), the story parses its soul-shattering effects. At one point, the narrator says, “It’s odd, even savage, how lies are sometimes tender while truth can surprise you, like a backhand across the cheek.” This story surprises us with just such a truth. Reader, brace yourself.
If I had read those words before the story in the original journal, I wouldn't have thought much of it. That's just the normal work of a journal promoting itself and its writers. But for Pushcart to have transplanted that introduction into its anthology struck me as a rather profound statement. It was saying two things:
- The reader is too stupid to get how brilliant this story is unless we add a note to explain how this is better than other stories the reader may have come across with similar subject matter.
- Pushcart's editors REALLY thought this story was something special, because they included the original journal's own hype for it.
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| It's more fun to just ride with a story on your own that have someone tell you how to read it. |
That's a lot for the story to live up to. It's the last story in the anthology, meaning the editors thought it was strong enough for the anchor leg. But beyond just its position, the story gets called out--the only story in an anthology full of presumably great stories--for how special it is. Brace yourself! This story will blow you away! There is literally no way we can oversell this!
In reality, it's a very solid story, but not something I found I needed physical support to sustain me after having read it. It's very good on its own terms, but I was denied those terms by how the story was presented.
As promised, it's about a woman who has recently escaped a physically abusive marriage. And true to the judge's words, a strong point of the story really is that it avoids putting the abuse on screen. It's told in second person--which is now the new first person, it's become so common--meaning the main character is just "you" throughout most of the story.
Perhaps the weakest part of the story is the explanation of how "you" actually end up in the place you are. You've wandered into a bar in Colorado, where you've apparently run in a great hurry. There, some cowboys find you and, because it's so obvious to them that you're running from an abusive relationship, invite you to an "equine program--where women caught in hazardous marriages learned to tug a rein resolutely, steering their lives away from vows they should have never spoken."
This means that "you" have somehow packed a bag in haste, run off with no plan, and somehow gotten lucky enough to walk into a bar where cowboys who run a halfway house with horses happen to hang out? This turns out to be especially lucky, because Billy, the old, Wilford Brimley-looking cowboy who runs the ranch, spends most of his life at the ranch in the mountains, we later find.
There's a lot of tenderness as Billy tries to figure out a way to draw your story from you. There's a bit of tension held to the end, because we're not quite sure these cowboys won't be rough themselves. And your backstory is weaved in deftly throughout with the present action so nothing gets bogged down in exposition. But it's still really weird that Billy runs this thing for women. He doesn't even have electricity, he says, so how does he advertise for his halfway house? Does he just go down to the True Grit saloon and look for women who look a little lost? He mentions having taught handicapped kids to ride horses, so maybe his business model is just a ranch for non-cowboys to learn to ride horses, but it's still a rather incredible stroke of lucky for unlucky you that you stumbled across him in the bar.
Or is it? At the end, you are drinking beers around the campfire with three cowboys you barely know, and you realize it's dangerous. The final line, "And one of the three cowboys starts humming, soft as a fiddle," sounds like a happy ending, an ending where you will be able to learn what life is like around men who don't knock you senseless. But it could also be read as a menacing final line. Your abuser was like that, too, quiet and non-threatening, until he lashed out suddenly. The hazard is that men who are abusive don't have a lot of really easy to read signs. Like with horses, it takes someone very experienced to know how to read small differences between danger and safety.
In any event, it was a nice story, but it's a much better story when it's able to develop quietly on its own rather than have chorus of trumpets announcing its arrival.
I'm going to take a few days, then come back with some thoughts on Pushcart as a whole.
The editor's note totally threw off my interpretation of the story. I thought it was a metafictional trope, and the "judge" was an invention of the author. It took me a few pages to realize there was nothing ironic about the story and the judge was a real person.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on reaching the end!
That's hilarious. And also very believable. When they put something like that in there, you assume there's a very good reason for it. Thinking it was part of some metafictional set-up was as good a reading as any at that point. I just really don't understand including it. Thanks for the comment.
DeleteFortunately, it appears to use no cliches: “It’s odd, even savage, how lies are sometimes tender while truth can surprise you, like a backhand across the cheek.” That is so hackneyed both as sentiment and as expression that it's not even banal: merely obnoxious.
ReplyDeleteYou know how a line can sometimes sound cheesy, but in a particular piece of art, it somehow works? I think that's true of the line you cited. I thought the same thing when I saw it in the foreword, but when I saw it in the story, I didn't hate it.
DeleteI couldn’t agree more that this story was ruined by the inclusion of that blurb. It’s especially ironic that a blurb by a man sabotages a story by a woman, about an abused woman constantly sabotaged by her husband. Kinda pisses me off.
ReplyDeleteI had two negative reactions. Like your reader Scott, I felt it was a setup for some kind of weirdness – a story about writing a story about writing a story, maybe, or a story about a story and the waves it creates. I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall, and when it didn’t I was disappointed, since I love weirdness.
Secondly, as you say, the setup was for something terrific, and while the story is fine (I have the same coincidence issues you do; I think the idea is to create tension – is she in a safe place, or are these guys gonna be bad – to put the reader in her shoes), it doesn’t knock my socks off. The rosemary chicken scene was quite nice, but the scene with the hose was the one I wished was repeated – showing how home was by how this new location is not, people aren’t getting angry at her for imagined slights, etc.
I’m at a loss as to why they would do this. Maybe it was a technical error? I can’t remember this ever being done before. Last year, there was an explanation in the Introduction about the submission of the first story, but that was the Introduction, which I suspect few people read, and thus was separate from the story. And the story was terrific.
Something went very wrong with this year’s Pushcart.
I hadn't considered that angle, but now that you bring it up, your first point is exactly right. It's like they couldn't just let the reader experience the story by the woman, because first, it needed a man to tell us that the story was worth reading.
Delete