The incredible shifting story: "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley

I don't have a terribly complicated process for reading and commenting on stories. I read them once for pleasure and personal edification, the same way anyone would. Then I read them again, this time highlighting and making notes on passages that seem to most clearly call out the major themes in the narrative. Usually, I've got the outline of how I want to analyze the story by about halfway through the second read, and from there it's just filling in the skeleton.

But Jamel Brinkley's "No More Than a Bubble" frustrated every approach I made to a thesis of what this story was about. I came up with no fewer than five possible thematic approaches to the work, each of which has its problems and possibilities. I'll sketch each of those five, but first, I'd like to outline the work a little bit. It would be dull to summarize the whole thing, especially since most people reading this analysis have likely just read it. But it deserves a quick review, with some attention to the structure.

Synopsis

Part One

"Bubble" can neatly be broken up into two parts, with the break coming almost exactly in the physical middle of the text. In part one, friends Claudius and Ben crash a party in Brooklyn hosted by Harvard grads, although they themselves are still college students, and of Columbia, not Harvard. They are on the prowl. They've been practicing hooking up with girls at college parties, and now they're ready for the real thing, with women they dream of as more exotic, worldly, and more in control of their bodies than the younger girls they've been trying their moves out with. They have a sexualized, exotic view of the women here. These are girls who know things: "If not Caribbean like Sibyl, then the girls were something else distinct and of the globe. These girls each had her own atmosphere. We were convinced they wore better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew, convinced they were mad geniuses of their own bodies."

They find Sibyl and Iris, and set their sites on them. They both originally decide to go for Sibyl, because she is thicker and "that's what black guys are supposed to like." But Claudius "calls" her and so Ben, the narrator, zeroes in on Iris. Both girls are babbling the whole evening about something they call "bubble," a mysterious "noun, verb, and adjective" which strikes Ben as "glistening wet" with potential meaning.

But neither boy manages to understand what bubble is. Desperate to impress the girls, Claudius suggests they play a game where everyone tells a "shameful" story about themselves. Claudius tells a bawdy story about how he once put on a show for an old lady who lived next door who was watching him through his bedroom window, even masturbating for her. Ben, unable to think of a story, blurts something out about his father, who has been much on his mind. Turns out Ben's dad is white. Italian, no less, of the old-school, chest hair protruding, kiss-ladies-on-the-hand, say romantic words in Italian type. Ben's father loved his mother, but not long after his mother saw Ben looking at his father's porno mags, replete with black women, she left.

Her leaving was preceeded by an arugment about the magazines. The father had a "boys will be boys" attitude, suggesting looking was natural, and that the boy would learn to think of black women as beautiful. The mother replied that "that's not what he's learning." She doesn't say what he is learning, and the reader is left to judge for himself.

I wish I could think of a metaphor for something tenuous and ephemeral to describe how hard it is to find a theme for this story without breaking it, but I just can't think of one. 

Part II--Bop

The girls lose interest, and the boys spend a few hours talking to each other. They see other men aggressively pawing at Iris and Sybil, but before they can intervene, Iris and Sybil extract themselves from the situation and leave. The boys see the girls riding their bikes past on the way out, and the girls crash and fall. The boys stop to help, hoping chivalry will win where charm had failed. Part II has an entirely different feel to it, a change that is overtly referenced by the narrator bringing up the bop records his father would play during the second half of a party. Where works had failed the boys, suddenly, they are saved by grace.

That grace includes an explanation of what "bubble" is. It's the Japanese concept of mono no aware, which for the purposes of this story might best be translated "an awareness of things." Iris, the "prophet of bubble" (interesting that Sibyl is not the prophet), defines it like this: "A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty."

The boys continue to walk the girls home chivalrously, but they are accosted by a dog. The boys fail to protect the girls from the possibly rabid thing, but the girls defend themselves just fine. Finally, they all make it back to the girls' apartment, where the boys finally get what they want. But it comes with a catch. The girls, who are not shy about enjoying one another's bodies, tell the boys to strip and look at one another. It's as if they're encouraging them to recognize sexual feelings for one another they never noticed: "There's always more to what you want than what you wanted," Iris tells them. The whole time, they're having sex, Ben is distracted by trying not to let it go full-scale orgy.

The Five themes

There are five different ideas that might be the central theme holding the story together. They are, in order of how they occurred to me while reading:

1) This is a story of a man who has learned that his collegiate sexual prowling is not a good way to treat women. Although as a boy, Ben sided with his father and thought that his mother was overreacting when she claimed the father's hyper-sexual attitudes to her and every other woman were disrespectful, he can now see that his mother was right. Objectifying women puts Ben on a level with the creeps he saw trying to push themselves on Iris, or with the rabid dog she kicks off of her. The end, in which Ben sees his friend as suddenly ugly and knows that is how Claudius sees him as well, is Ben realizing how he has been behaving and not being proud of it. Given the current cultural backdrop of me-too, this seems like a natural way to read the story.

2) It's partly #1, but really it's more about how complicated the line between natural courting and unnatural predatory prowling is. The girls aren't actually prey. They're drunk and high, but so are the boys, and the girls seem more used to that condition than the boys are. The girls handle themselves well when threatened, and if the boys finally got in their pants, it happened on their terms. They're enlightened (literally, if you believe Iris knows what she's talking about when it comes to Japanese philosophy), and if they choose to enjoy themselves sexually, who is to say they were wrong? This reading holds up for most of the story, but then you have to explain that ending where Ben sees "an acute ugliness...a face within his face" on Claudius, and knows Claudius has seen the same thing on him.

3) This is a story about Ben and Claudius discovering their identity. There were a couple of parts of the story where I felt like this was turning into something similar to the movie Superbad, which on one level is just a really funny, bawdy movie about teenagers trying to get laid, but on another is about those friends realizing how much they mean to each other. I don't believe their realization includes feelings for each other that are exactly romantic, but it does include deep feelings that resemble romantic love in their intensity. I started to suspect this was the case early on, when Ben describes his friend with a little more than platonic closeness: "he manipulated gestures and disguises, pushed the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his face and in the flare of his broad nostrils the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people chatter about." (That "some people" chatter about, indeed.)

The boys start off the story both interested in the same girl because that's what they think they're supposed to want. They don't even know what they want themselves or who they are. Ben's confused about his identity as a mixed-race child, and neither of them knows which voices in their heads are their own and which have been put there. The point of Iris and Sibyl making the boys get naked and look at each other is not so they will realize they were gay all along, but so they will realize what they mean to each other, will acknowledge that as they've been chasing the illusory fuck come down from heaven, they had something special with each other the whole time. Again, this reading is challenged by that ending.

4) This story really is about the bubble, like the title and Iris tell us. It's about learning to be present. Iris is not encouraging them to look at each other so they will acknowledge some latent homo-erotic feelings for each other, but because their bodies are part of what is unfolding that night, and they shouldn't overlook them.

Strangely, the narrator reads some feelings into his friend at this moment. He assumes that Claudius is "trying to remember everything there--the large bed, the flickering light, the heavy curtains--as the setting he might use for an entirely different story. He was remembering everything, it appeared, except the people in it, ignoring us and therefore omitting us. Maybe he was even omitting himself."

It's possible to see this story as a commentary on the life of a writer, and how it makes being truly present in any moment difficult, because the writer is always processing information in such a way as to turn it into a story. It may be that "Ben" is projecting onto Claudius. It's strangely suspicious that Ben thinks Claudius will tell his own story, omitting the people in the room, when Ben is the one actually telling the story. Is Ben assigning his own characteristics to Claudius? Has he omitted himself by putting these thoughts into his friend's head? Ben admits that he is unable to embrace the magic of the bubble: "I didn't really get to enjoy Iris's body, not really, because I was too concerned with keeping matters organized, under some semblance of control, fending off the orgiastic."

Read this way, Ben is "ugly" because of his inability to live in the moment, to be present with those around him.

5) It's about all of it. All of those themes run together. Ben's narrative cycle is a success in some of these more than others. He grows up in terms of how he looks at sex and the objectification of women's bodies. He partly comes to terms with his own identity, reconciling with his black mother after feeling, for the first time in his life, that something was amiss in his father's conceptions of love. But he never manages to find the magic of the bubble, maybe because he isn't ready to live free yet, maybe because that kind of freedom is not the lot in life of the writer.

The end seems to wedge both a narrative change for the good and a narrative change for the bad into the last page and a half, and it's ambivalent whether Ben's change was a net positive or negative.

One intriguing clue comes at the very beginning, which a reader likely won't catch until a second reading. Ben recalls that the party happened "just weeks before the Day of Atonement, in late September 1995." One could read this as supporting the first reading above, in which the young Ben learns the wickedness of his ways and repents. But why the Day of Atonement? Do most people recall things in relation to their closeness to Jewish High Holy Days if those people are not themselves Jewish? It turns out that a vague Jewishness was one of the exotic characteristics of Iris Ben found so fascinating. So why does his recollection of this story make him describe it as though he, too, had some personal connection to Judaism? She offered more than just Jewishness to him, but was all he was able to take her a sense of guilt, such that the most lasting change she has wrought for him is a lingering sense of the need to confess?


Brinkley was in last year's BASS, and I loved how that story, too, was so full of mysteries, I'm still chewing on it a year later. His themes deeply challenge ideas of masculinity, but never in a way that denies it, cheapens it, or wishes to take any of what is best in it. At this point, I'm beyond being a close reader of his. I'm a fan.