No easy way in: "The Hollow" by Greg Jackson

If you're visiting this blog, like I suspect a lot of my readers are, because you're a student who was assigned Best American Short Stories for a class, and you're stumped about how to write a paper on "The Hollow" by Greg Jackson, boy, are you in luck. This story might seem kind of impenetrable. You might be trying to make headway thinking about what this story could possibly be all about and why it's supposed to be so good and find yourself, like Jack trying to force his way into the hollow in the story, thinking that "there's no easy way in" to the heart of what the story's all about.

The good news is that you have a very easy-to-write paper sitting in front of you. You can do the ole' compare and contrast with the story's two central characters, Jack and Valente, a.k.a. Jonah, a.k.a. B.A., Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, the Whale, and Picasso. Lit professors love compare and contrast papers. Why? Who knows? They just do. 

Jack and Jonah knew each other passingly in college, but they get to know each other years later when both are a little sidetracked in life. Jack is living upstate in "Trevi," a town with pretensions to a sort of European sophistication, while Valente lives in Rock Basin, which sounds, on two levels, like it's the very bottom of the bottom. (A geographical basin is a depression, while "rock" suggests "rock bottom.") These two locations fit the two men, who since college have had different aspirations. Jack has aspired to be what you might call bourgeoise, while Jonah is a simple sort, unashamed of his naivete and his sincerity, focused on what he loves, which is art. 

Not surprisingly, since the two are so different on a fundamental level, they interpret nearly everything differently, beginning with their recollections of college. Jack found everyone, after a while, to be basically boring and normal, while Jonah "thought that their classmates had been deeply weird and had clung to the idea that they were dull and conventional to keep from sliding off the face of the earth." Jonah remembers that there had been a popular movement among the students to bring him back after he was expelled, but Jack doesn't remember anything of the sort. 

Jack finds their differences in interpretation unsettling. He understands there is likely to be some difference, but "it was vaguely unnerving to see that two people could live through the same experience and understand it so differently." Jonah doesn't find it unnerving at all. He's as pure a spirit as the popular imagination of van Gogh would have us believe. 

Two paths in life

Jack and Jonah represent two paths one can choose in life, paths that are often chosen in college. One leads to a stable career, family, the house in the suburbs Jack is so obsessed with. The other leads to less stability and financial success, with the compensation, supposedly, being that you might get more happiness in return. Jonah gave up football to pursue art. He did it with so much earnestness, Jack found it unseemly. (For the would-be bourgeoise living in a town with pretentions of old-world style, nothing is worse than earnestness.) He sees Jack's willingness to be seen as a fool as "some insuperable grossness in Valente’s character that would never, even with boundless fellowship and care, settle into sufficient self-awareness."  

Their differences are best seen in their attitudes toward two things: the hollow in Jack's house and the idea of freedom. 

1. The hollow

The hollow which gives the story its name is an architectural feature of Jack's home that doesn't make any sense. The home was built, like a lot of older homes, in different phases. It had been "fixed up and expanded over the years." Somewhere in one of those expansions or renovations, there had come to be a walled-off area in the home that Jack couldn't get into and which didn't seem to have a purpose. It's Jonah who discovers the hollow. Jack soon becomes obsessed with it. He begins to feel "a great restlessness growing inside him, something vast and formless." 

However, looking closely, we can see that Jack was already feeling this restlessness before the hollow became known to him. When talking to his future wife Sophie while they are temporarily broken up, he is unable to resist being mean to her. This cruelty "welled up in him like an irresistible pressure, building behind the prim dishonesty that obscured the raw, dark realities of the heart." Jack has learned to "play the game," as he scolds Jonah for not doing, but he also has a yearning to not play that game. The story takes place while he is recovering from getting fired from his high-paying job because he temporarily gave in to "the little devil in" him and said something he shouldn't have. This devil came out because Jack was temporarily unable to hold back what was hidden inside him. This person who knew how to dissimulate to get ahead also "At times...felt so clear about his rightness and other people’s dishonesty that he could scarcely breathe." Like the house, Jack has something deep and unfathomable hidden inside him. 

No wonder the hollow in the house holds such fascination for him. He has just given in to his own hollow, the hidden thing within him. No wonder he becomes obsessed with it and thinks of it almost as a holy place, like "Mecca or Jerusalem." 

Jonah, although he discovers the hollow, soon ceases to care about it. Hollows don't trouble Jonah, presumably because he is pure enough that he doesn't have any. Or maybe he does. Jack's hollow is the honest person inside him he hides in order to "play the game," but Jonah's hollow appears to be sadness. During a drug trip, he sees dancing figures, and goes through a drug-induced logical sequence: "Like they were on a different planet, dancing in outer space. Somewhere you could never get to, you know? And then I thought, No, I was wrong. It was our world, the dancing planet, and I was the one who couldn’t get there.” Jonah doesn't fear the space inside him. He fears the space out there, and he feels there is no place in it for him. Doctors tell him at one point that his main problem is a "lack of a sense of proportion," which seems to suggest that Jonah makes small spaces into big ones. 

2. Freedom

Jack sees freedom as something mysterious that others feel a longing for, but he doesn't. When Sophie breaks up with him, he decides he should "give her space" (that is, give her a hollow of sorts), and that "either (people) came back to you, ... or they disappeared into their own confusion and misery. With people he didn’t like, he thought of it as giving them enough rope." 

Freedom to Jack is nothing but rope someone can hang themselves with. He quotes Sophie's own words to her, "If it's freedom it has to feel like freedom," when he is talking to her during their time apart. He says it laconically, like he's saying the words he knows he should say. Freedom is almost an alien concept to him, a word he can use correctly in a sentence without actually feeling its meaning.

For Jonah, though, freedom is nearly the central tenet of his life. He recalls having wanted, at one point in his life, to climb to the top of the water tower in Basin Rock (the top of the bottom) and paint something crude on it. He thinks that if he were to climb up there now, he'd "just paint big letters that say ‘You are free.’”

The notable--perhaps even ham-fisted--thing about Jonah's recollection of going to the top of the water tower is that he did it with someone he called "Rope Man." The same rope Jack saw as being useful only for hanging oneself is, for Jonah, a rope that can be used to ascend the heights.

Both Jack and Jonah are mistaken

Of course, Rope Man, we learn, is now dead, and when Jonah decides to live out his fantasy of climbing to the top of the water tower, he falls and hurts himself badly. Jack can never get into the hollow to see what's there, and Jonah's freedom just leaves him broken and living with his mom, hoping to save enough money to go study art in France. 

This leaves Jack, in particular, hoping for some third option. He recalls a time when he went to a church for a concert with Sophie. There was an open space in the church, but he recalls not finding it uncanny like the hollow. Instead, it was "an intimate, tall, solid space." While listening to the music, Jack heard the sound of trucks outside. He found this mix of the church music with the trucks affecting, with the truck noises "accentuating perhaps the simultaneous existence of the disparate realities that hold our fragile world together in its brittle shell. The music tiptoed along the knife edge of its key, its tones, giving the illusion of freedom when there were always far more missteps than safe harbors and nimble plunges into grace." Again, Jack rejects freedom, even when he feels its call the clearest. Freedom is too uncertain. 

Jack momentarily found a place where freedom and safety could almost coexist, the artist and the lawyer, the sacred and the secular. He longs to get back to it. Because he was with Sophie when it happened, he asks her about it, but she can't remember anything about the trucks. 

"Sophie's choice"

Both Jack and Jonah pay a suspicious amount of attention to the name Jack had given to his decision to go live in a farmhouse in Trevi in the first place. "Sophie's choice" had been Jack's name for it. Jonah, trying to remember what the movie (and also book, Jack reminds him) had been about, can't understand what Jack's move had to do with the holocaust. Jonah is onto something, but not quite able to figure it out.

The meaning in the story of "Sophie's choice" is that the original Sophie's choice is actually a catch-22. It's a choice between two bad choices. 

The fact I knew this was a video to look for tells you I've made more of the Jack choice in life than the Jonah choice, I think. 

If one really has to choose between being an artist and being a boujie dull sandwich, the choice of Sophie, the character in "The Hollow," is to be a bad mix of both. She's empty like Jack, but also flighty like Jonah. "Some fire was missing in her, she’d be the first to admit. She bit off more than she could chew, spent months diving deeply into projects, then found herself paralyzed, unable to write a word." She runs away from Jack because for once, she felt something strong ("it had surfaced inside her with a force she could scarcely describe") but by the end of the story, they are married with a child, shopping for antiques (the most boojie and style-aspirational activity imaginable). 

When Jack tries to explain to her about the hollow in the house, she only asks, “Isn’t that . . . normal?” She's learned to just let the unsettled mystery inside her lie still and gather dust. If the choice between two life paths one might consider in college, the one being middle class normalcy and the other being artsy freedom, leads to sadness and emptiness either way, Sophie's choice, her middle ground, seems to be...resignation. Sophie's choice is a real shit choice, in other words. 

It seems to be the choice Jack has made by the end, though. He can't even remember, when he runs into Jonah, the previous jokes they'd made about Sophie's choice, or the whole deal with the hollow. He's buried it, and the hollow inside him is now safely locked away, with no easy way in. He and Jonah both realize for a moment that their separate choices are both equally meaningless. Jack has buried it, while Jonah can do nothing but laugh at the sadness that's left for him. 

Other readings:

Karen Carlson interestingly thinks of Sophie as a hollow herself in her reading, although she was kind of tough on herself.