The pink balloon of dreams goes pop: "Howl Palace" by Leigh Newman

Every year, there's an entry in Best American Short Stories that breaks some cardinal rule of narrative, and in a lot of ways, these are some of the most interesting stories to read. "Howl Palace" by Leigh Newman breaks a couple of rules, all in the last few pages of the story. It introduces a ton of new information at the end about the main character's life, which forces a complete reevaluation of everything we thought we knew. Just at the moment we feel we should be building toward the big crescendo that wraps up the symphony, the whole melody changes. It changes in key, tempo, timbre, and what building the orchestra is playing in. 

The story I thought I was reading

Dutch is one of those I-did-it-my-way kind of gals, but now the end is near and she has to face the impossibility of continuing to do it her way. She's kind of a study in contradictions, because although she's an independent spirt, appropriate to her Alaskan surroundings, she also has a deep-seated desire to connect and to belong to others. Exhibit A of her desire to belong to others is her five marriages and one affair. The husbands, in order, are: Benny, Wallace, RT, Lon, and Skip. In between husbands two and three came Carl, the affair, and maybe the love of Dutch's life. Or if not the love of her life, then at least the "beautiful, bedeviling, heartbreak" of her life. 

Dutch has held onto her house her whole life, although she had to pay through the nose to buy some of her husbands out of it. Her first husband, Benny, the one who died, told her to hold onto the house, nicknamed "Howl Palace," no matter what, and she has. The house is part of her identity, and the house's identity stems from Dutch. Being forced to sell it is an affront to who she is. The conflict seems to be shaping up as something like: can she sell it and remain herself? How can anyone remain themselves in a world that's constantly forcing change upon us?

Much of the story is Dutch meditating on the way times have changed. She isn't entirely negative about the changes--she adores the Costco in Anchorage and the perfect avocados she can get there--but she also feels something has been lost. What she wants most is "everything the way it was before, years before." She can't get that, of course. Is there enough in the world and enough in Dutch to salvage something?

Dutch is an eternal optimist, if a reluctant one. Although her divorces have left her a little jaded, "the thing about having gotten divorced four times and widowed once is that people forget you also got married each time. You and your soft, secret pink balloon of dreams."

Carl was the one who told Dutch about her pink balloon of dreams, by which he meant her indefatigable hope and longing for real connection. Although Dutch feels the balloon has withered over the years, we wonder if there is enough in her to reinflate the balloon as she gets ready for the last act of her life.

Is a balloon in a story like Chekov's gun? Once introduced, does it have to go pop at some point?

The house's ominous name 

The house gets its name "Howl Palace" from the wolf room, the part of the house Dutch loves the most, but which her real estate agent refuses to include in the description of the house and which all her husbands except Benny hated. Even Carl wasn't a fan. We don't know exactly what the room is, except that when a young girl visited it, it made her want to howl. Howling, sounding your barbaric yawp, seems like a symbol of Dutch's independence, especially when one considers that she had to keep the room over the objections of everyone she lived with. 

Two sticks of dynamite in the last few pages

A lot goes wrong while Dutch is trying to get ready for the open house to sell her home, which she needs to do so she can cash in her last asset and avoid going to live in a nursing home. Unless she gives up at least some of her independence, she's going to have to give up nearly all of it.

The first thing that goes wrong is Carl shows up needing her to watch a high-spirited lab. She doesn't want to, but she realizes Carl is dying and about to go try for last-ditch medical treatment, so she relents. Dutch tries to enlist the help of her neighbors to catch the dog when it runs off, but neighbor Candace is a little drugged out. When Dutch finally gets back to her grill, where she intended to cook a ton of moose and caribou for open house visitors in order to give them a feel for the great Alaskan charm of the place, she realizes the dog has eaten all the meat and then thrown it up all over the lawn. 

Still, the story feels up to near the end as though Dutch is going to salvage something. Her balloon is going to find a way to fly again. And then we get to the end. 

Dutch insulted Carl by insinuating he wanted her money to help with medical bills. He tells her the dog is named "Pinkie," after Dutch's balloon, which leaves her "a little more in love with him than ever." Then the open house begins, and suddenly, the narrative fills in all kinds of back story on Dutch it has left out to that point. Generally, if there is something shocking or unexpected in a character's back story, the place to share it is up front. Anything else, and it feels like you've withheld from the reader just for the sake of shock. There are a number of these shocks coming.

Shock number one: Dutch was an orphan. Her parents died at five.

Shock number two: Benny was very old when she married him. He was sixty-seven and she was nineteen.

Shock number three: Benny was romantically involved with his male hunting partner, but also genuinely loved Dutch, and this was mostly okay with Dutch, for whom marriage was "the ability to hold hands and not try to forgive the other person, not try to understand them, just hold hands."

Shock number four, and this is the big one: The wolf room is full of pelts from wolves Dutch killed by hunting with Benny out of of a plane. These were fly-by shootings, hunting for sport, like when the psychotic Marine is gunning down civilians from the helicopter in "Full Metal Jacket," and someone asks, "How do you shoot women and children?" and he answers, "Easy, you just don't lead 'em as much." 

That last one is honestly very hard to take. It's extremely difficult for me to return to thinking of Dutch as an empathetic character. I'm not a reader who thinks characters need to be "likeable," whatever that means, but I do need to be able to feel empathy for them. Another reason it's a good idea to get a character's shocking flaws out in the open early on is because the reader hasn't already connected with the character yet, which means there is no sense of betrayal when we find out their flaws. How can we feel betrayed by someone we don't know yet? If you give us the character's worst right away, we might be able to slowly connect to her anyway. Waiting until the end to drop this on us leaves us with that as nearly our only lasting memory. Furthermore, it feels like we were being lied to all along when we were led to believe the character was something other than what she was. I might deem this the "Khaleesi principle." 

The narrative does attempt to explain the motivation behind the wolf mass murder. She'd just had her fifth miscarriage with Benny, and they'd removed her uterus while she was under. Benny sensed it was what she needed in order to not lose the will to live. She cut her finger pulling the trigger, but something about it did, in fact, make her feel alive: "It was warm blood, at least. And I was alive. Despite any wish I might have had to be otherwise. Which was maybe what Benny was trying to show me." 

What is it about loud animal noises that we associate with a steadfast will to remain oneself? 

Does this work?

Is Dutch's fifth act revelation too great a betrayal? Or can the story claim, as Game of Thrones cannot, that it was really there all along?

Reading it a second time, I think the story can claim with some justice that it was tipping its hand from the start. Right off the bat, the second time through, I noticed how often the lure of wealth, often in the form of natural resources, showed up. Dutch lived along "Diamond" Lake. Her realtor's name was Silver. The house had a clamshell grotto which Dutch suspects had enough pearls in it that a future owner might be tempted to try to jackhammer them out of the concrete. Alaska is the home of pristine wilderness, of "shale-covered peak under a sky so blue you taste the color in your lungs," but it's also a place that has lured those greedy for gold or oil. One of the big changes Dutch notes is that in the old days, there were no contractors to help you build a house, because until the pipeline showed up, there was nothing to lure them to a place like Alaska. 

Dutch notes with some useless hand-wringing her sense of guilt at living in an oil state that is contributing to global warming, but that sense of guilt doesn't keep her from taking part in the globalizing capitalism that's behind the oil boom. She gladly gets avocados from Costco when one shows up in Anchorage. Perhaps Dutch's pink balloon is not that dissimilar, in a way, from America's Achilles' heel, which is its sense of unwarranted optimism about the future. She longs for connection, and believes, no matter how often she fails, that she will find it, much as Americans continue to dream the American dream of wealth but more often than not just cause destruction in their quest for it. 

The final, poignant symbol of this undying quest for connection is the neighbor boy. Dutch has asked him to try to "fish" for the missing dog by tossing a moose rib rolled in tranquilizers at him. But the boy has apparently misunderstood, and is literally "fishing" by casting the rib into Diamond Lake over and over. "So intent was he on his task" that he noticed little else as he "cast again. And cast again." The story ends with him calling for Pinkie the dog, literally calling out for the sense of the dream of connection that has eluded Dutch her whole life. 

I can accept that murdering hundreds of wolves is consistent with a character like Dutch, that the need to howl back at the existential questions she notes are dangerous for people living in the Arctic Circle is so strong in her it might manifest in some mistaken form, just as the boy is looking for his connection in the wrong places. This isn't a flawed story for its ending. It's just a lot to ask a reader to accept its naturalness when we weren't told about it at the beginning of our relationship with Dutch. 

For Karen Carlson's take on this story, go here.