It's inevitable that in an anthology of twenty stories, there will be a few that don't seem as transcendent to me as they did to the judge. It would be a lot weirder if I loved every story in an anthology. This is the first one in BASS 2021 I didn't like.
It's not really fun for me to look deeply into the ones I don't like. I don't get any thrill out of dumping on a story. I'd rather just skip it, but since "Why didn't you like it?" is a fair question, let me give it a very brief answer.
This story gave too many details that weren't important to the story, needed pared down, and didn't have an emotional center for me. It felt like a story from a developing writer (albeit a talented one) who hasn't quite learned yet how to separate the chaff from the wheat. There's back story there, which is great, because it gives the characters depth, but a lot of that back story could have been left on the editing floor to produce a tighter final product with more drive. Karen Carlson called the story a "model of simplicity," but I felt like it had simplicity in its hands and gave it away. A family trying to escape a fire is about as straight-forward a journey as you can get. If having a character who wants something is key to a compelling plot, then having three people and a dog who just want to get away from a fire (or two people who want to escape and one who wants to stay) is a pretty direct way to get there. But the story opens with one page of setup, then five pages of backstory, then seven pages back in the present. We're halfway through before we really get to the point where someone wants something.
That backstory, when it happens, is full of details that don't need to be there. They don't come from the narrator in any kind of natural style; instead, it feels like there's a checklist of things the narrator wanted to tell us and she's running down it. Here's how the narrator introduces us to racist father-in-law Wes: "He was a big bull of a man, about five eleven. He was white and bald and wore glasses. He had a chipped front tooth and his son's blue eyes. He wore a Cowboys T-shirt and blue nylon shorts and black flip-flops. Eight years old."
Some of that's solid description (although, as Karen pointed out, I'm not sure the story is consistent about the color of Wes's son's eyes, although some cultures call blue and green the same thing, so maybe it's fine). But "about five eleven"? That's kind of the sort of thing writers try to avoid. Why? Partly, because it's cheating. It's telling us his height instead of showing us his height. But also, it's because we don't want to feel we're being given the answers so we can cram for some kind of test. "Big bull of a man" is fine, but not "about 260 pounds." (Although I don't know that I think of five eleven as a "big bull.")
There are a lot of these passages that feel like the narrator is shoehorning information in:
-"We stood in the front yard of the house, which was on Edgewood Lane."
-"Pulga's a little town maybe fifteen miles away from Paradise as the crow flies." (That's not in dialogue; it's the narrator talking directly to us, as though giving us directions. A better way to do this naturally might have been for the narrator to think something like: "Shit," I thought. "Pulga was only, what, ten miles away? Fifteen? Twenty? Mike always knew that kind of stuff, could plan trips to arrive on time down to the minute, but distances have a way of going all wobbly in my mind." Or whatever. Just not telling us the distance on a map.)
-"I'm Pomo and Mexican and grew up in the Evergreen Mobile Home Park with my parents, Lupita and Ben."
-"Mike was above me because my parents worked as janitors at Paradise's Best Western and Chico's Oxford Suites. But his pa, Wesley Noonan, was one of the best lawyers in town. Wes set up a three-man outfit--Noonan, Gump, & Penzer--up on Skyway, where he did estate planning for folks from Paradise to Chico. We was a big man, and not just physically." (Not even physically, I'd say.)
This kind of thing is at least begging for an explanation, a statement from the narrator like, "People tell me I tend to share too many details" or whatever. Instead, it feels like a developing writer. I realize Murray is an accomplished writer, but accomplished writers are capable of slipping just like anyone. That's what this story feels like.
Did she mean that?
There are also a few passages in the story that just made me raise an eyebrow and wonder if they'd been edited thoroughly.
-The narrator calls Wes's house his "ancestral manor." But it was built--as we are told twice--in the 1980s. Is "ancestral" ironic? In what way? "Stately manor" with echoes of "Stately Wayne Manor" might have done that, but "ancestral" brings in connotations that don't accomplish anything.
-Telling us twice when the house was built, both times like it was news to us.
-Did Mike have blue eyes or green? Also, Fernanda isn't right that she must have white in her to have had a child with green eyes. As this site--which is called "Gregarious Green Eye Facts" so you know it's infallible--says, people of any race can have green eyes.
-Did Wes really build a "salon" in his house? He doesn't seem the salon type.
I had something for this...
The story is called "Paradise," and it's set in a town of that name. We're about to find out how non-paradisal the place is, but the story really does nothing with the name or the symbolism inherent in it. Even with the kind of unnecessary summoning of Trump's name, which would have allowed for some kind of clever transposition of Trump into the role of Satan, we get nothing. Wes's safe could have played off the name, with Wes thinking he was saving in order to afford some kind of ultimate reward in the end. Instead we get a mention of "hellfire" in the end that contrasts with "Paradise," but that's about it.
Okay, enough. I wanted to give a sufficient answer for why I didn't like the story, but now I feel like I've gone too far. It's a miss for me. On the the next one.
I can't argue with your list of grievances (especially since I noted some of them myself). But I still thought it worked, possibly because it started with this seemingly trivial stuff then built to the racism and then the consequences of the arrogance of the old man. And possibly because the end was the part I remember. And possibly because I'm not a writer (though I remember being thoroughly scolded for pulling the sorts of things you point out when I was still thinking I could be a writer).
ReplyDeleteBut mostly, when I come across these stories that have been through three rounds of high-level scrutiny, and are written by someone with significant background but not a "name" that can be viewed as catnip for the marketing people, I think of the quote I read some time ago:
"Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’ – Joyce Cary"
Now, I have no idea who Joyce Cary is/was, but that always makes me stop and wonder: why DID she write it this way? Sometimes I don't have an answer (though one of the above 'possibly's' might fill the bill).