...the amazing and beautiful thing about the short story is the elasticity of the form. As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong. With every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.
Yet as many possible ways as there are to tell a story, one that I think doesn't usually work particularly well is a polemical story. Fiction excels at telling truths slant, at sneaking past the argumentative objections people form by appealing to the logic of their senses. And while there is plenty of sensory invocation in Deborah Eisenberg's "The Third Tower," I felt like at heart, there was a little too much head-on attack and not enough clever strategy for getting around the defenses of the reader.
Synopsis
Therese is in some kind of semi-dystopian future. She is sent to the big city because she has a "word stabilization reflex" that is far below normal. What this means seems to be something between just being artsy, poetic, and imaginative in the way she thinks about language and being on the spectrum of some neo-diverse condition.Essentially, when Therese hears a word, her reaction is an advanced kind of associative logic. She hears "tree" and thinks of a piano. She tries to explain what is going on in her head as "words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels."
The doctor prescribes medicines and reduced stimulation. She starts to get better. When the doctor says "tree," she thinks of "tree." She has a one-to-one correspondence between what someone says and what she thinks of. But it doesn't hold. Something in her is trying to get out. And then the story ends.
But in between, there is a rather too-on-point monologue from the doctor, ranting to himself about how foolish others doctors are who might celebrate her condition and how smart he is for fixing it. In a section titled "A Doctor Reflects," we break from Therese as the point-of-view character and get inside the doctor's head. He is happy to have helped improve her "almost hopeless ideation-capacity." This kind of "failure to recognize the confines of words" makes the brain unable to comprehend the world, he thinks. He scoffs at those who think of these "hyperassociative disorders" as "viable," such as one "pretentious colleague" who has written about the "visionaries of the banal." The best that can be hoped for is that these sorts of people might be put to work in advertising, or "the field of branding."
This section could have appeared in an Ayn Rand novel. Not the actual argument of it, but the approach, in which a character shares his naked philosophy at length in a way that allows the reader to assess it as a nearly full doctrine. The story was saying, rather bluntly, that either an imaginative view of language or a fuller neo-divergence is a valid way of looking at the world. Neither is exactly a revolutionary message. So I didn't see much to love in the story.
I thought maybe I was crazy, feeling a little like Therese that perhaps the way I was processing this thing was wrong. So I did something I don't usually do and read a bunch of other reviews. They were mostly about the larger book of short stories "Third Tower" was included in, which was Your Duck is My Duck. Although The New York Times review seemed to enjoy this story, Anthony Cummins said that it "didn't quite hit the mark. Steve Halvonik called it the "most ambitious" story in the collection, which is not generally a huge compliment. A number of reviewers compared "Tower" to "Merge," another story in the collection. Nobody really pointed out this story as one of the best of the collection overall. So maybe I wasn't nuts.
Generally, reviews for the collection as a whole were very positive. This might be a case where Doerr wanted to do justice to a memorable collection of short stories that came out recently, but the rules stipulate that BASS has to choose only stories published in magazines during a specific time. So this might have been the story he had to pick.
In any event, I don't get much enjoyment out of going on about why I don't like something, so I'm happy to pass over this one and move on to the next. I think most readers will be able to figure out what's going on thematically without much help from me, so if you're a college student reading this, I hope you're fine if I just end it here.
For Karen Carlson's take on this story (hers came out about a week after mine, but we generally agreed), click here.
It seemed to me there was too much backstory left to the reader to create, at least to bring it into alignment with what she describes in her Contrib note.
ReplyDeleteI liked the imagery of the words exploding. Something none of the reviews seemed to mention - I got the sense the doctor was just as brainwashed as Therese, just in a different way, at a higher level. But maybe that's my hyperassociativity. But if you're going to write half a story, don't blame me for writing the other half.