Pop song meets high lit: "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you're probably aware that I have an affinity for an old-world view of theme. I like stories where I feel like it's possible to sum up not just what the subject matter of the story is, but what the story's attitude toward a subject is. This runs dangerously close at times to stating what the "moral" of the story is, although the idea that stories should even have a moral has been largely dismissed as didactic for over a century now. Still, it appeals to me. Maybe it's because reading literature took the place for me of religious reading of sacred texts when I realized I wasn't a believer anymore. I might be asking for literature to do something for me it wasn't meant to do, but part of me can't help myself. 

For example, in this year's Best American Short Stories anthology, it might be possible to distill the "lesson" of "The Little Widow from the Capital" as, "There is a difficult balance between community and individual." Now, I'll be the first to admit that's a pretty prosaic, even cliched, theme. The point of a theme isn't necessarily to sound brilliant on its own. If it did sound brilliant on its own, there'd be no need to write a story. This kind of theme can, however, serve as a rough roadmap to take one deeper into the interior of a story. Taking the struggle between individual and community as a suggested means for looking at the details of the story, the straightforward conflict of between characters can take on a more cosmic dimension to it. 

A story like "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette might not seem, at first sight, to appeal to my rabbinic side. It's a quick, wry, perhaps touching story, but there's nary a moral in sight.  I did, however, find it satisfying, if not really applicable to my life. Why? Because of its lyricism.

Two types of poetry 

Some introductory poetry books will roughly divide all poems into two types: narrative and lyrical. There are dozens or maybe hundreds of sub-types of poems within these two very broad categories, but the basic division can usually hold up, with a poem being more or less one or the other. Examples of narrative poems are "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or "The Iliad." As the name suggests, the primary function of these poems is to tell a story.

A lyrical poem, meanwhile, is all about feelings. There might be elements of story in a lyrical poem, but they're primarily there so the poet can work through her emotions. Examples include Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" or "Aubade" by Philip Larkin.  

It might seem like all short stories would necessarily be "narrative." That's what makes them stories. That's true, but there are some stories that are more at the narrative end of the spectrum than others. Some stories, while they do have a plot, are more about the mood or feeling than about what's happening.

The lyricism of Sugar Island

That's "Sugar Island." The entire logic of the story flows from the feeling the narrator is conveying rather than the importance of the events themselves. What is that feeling? Well, it's kind of a feeling that a lot of pop songs love to cover--and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It might sound like I'm calling the story frivolous by comparing it to pop music, but the best pop music manages to work on more than one level. It can be nice background sound on the loudspeakers at the city pool during the summer, but it can also make someone cry if it catches them alone in a car at night during a vulnerable moment. 

This is a "looking back at a romance" story. It's about Maggie and Joan. Maggie doesn't have her life together when she starts dating Joan, which is why so much of the relationship involves Joan "gift-giving" and Maggie "gift receiving." It's easy to write Maggie off as selfish, sullen, and self-involved, but because we're looking back at this story from a time long after she's mended her ways and can be better to the person she's now with, we know there's more to her character than this. 

A good story always is able to answer the question of "Why now?" If it's well crafted, it's evident why it begins and ends at the point in the main character's life that it does. For Maggie, this story is taking place during the middle-late period of a long rut in her life, when she was working as a phlebotomist, a job the narrator more than once points out is "easy to master." (I'm not sure I think all phlebotomists are created equal, and I'd be more than happy if the ones who stick me have been doing it for 50 years and are not interested in doing more.) She had crappy furniture and a job where she was easily replaceable, then along came Joan. Joan was a talented and accomplished artist who put her talent and attention to use on Maggie. 

Most of the action takes place on one day when the couple take a ferry to Sugar Island so Joan can buy Maggie an antique couch, a "camelback." Maggie thinks it's gross to consider how many people have sat on an old couch, and we start to get the idea that Maggie doesn't really appreciate all the love and gifts Joan is showering on her. Maggie has been wanting to break up with her almost since the beginning. When she rehearses her break-up speech, it's, "I don't care what you have to say about anything," and there's no hint she's just saying it so she can get Joan to really leave. 

Maggie is peevish and sullen the whole day, resenting Joan when she interacts with the owner of the couch, who is interested in Joan as an artist and generally cosmopolitan person. Maggie finally pretends to love the couch because it seems the easiest solution. When they are hauling it back to the ferry, she gives up carrying it and lets a man help, then regrets "giving up so easily," an early hint that she is getting tired with her own settling for less in life, her own willingness to easily go for what was "convenient," which was how she viewed sleeping with Joan at the beginning.  

Ultimately, Joan leaves her. In the process, the reader maybe gets a sense that Joan, in spite of being so giving, wasn't perfect, either. Joan left Maggie for someone else, leaving us to wonder whether Joan was also seeing someone when she first met Maggie. Maybe Joan's big production with the owner of the couch had something to do with her own need for validation and attention. Maybe she liked being in a relationship in which she gave everything because it made her feel like the better half. 

In spite of that, Maggie does not look back on the relationship with bitterness. Later on, when she's with someone "well adjusted" and Maggie is also apparently better adjusted herself, she is distressed to find her partner has sold the camelback, which she has held onto the whole time. She thinks back on her time with Joan with fondness. It didn't work out because they were both "in different places," as the saying goes, but Joan--whether she was part of Maggie deciding to strive for more or whether she just happened to be there when it happened--was there during an important transition for her.

Pop 

It's this sweet looking back at a former lover that gives it a pop song feel. There are any number of songs where the narrator is looking back on an old love with nothing but fond feelings, even while realizing they will never get together again. I'd guess most people who read that sentence jumped right to "Someone Like You" by Adele, but there are countless others. The song this story really makes me think of, though, might be "Daria" by Cake, because of the way Maggie is unable to receive all the love Joan is trying to give her and now realizes it later. 

I don't usually do a YouTube-like "leave your thoughts" in the comments, but I'm curious if any readers do find that there's a song this story reminds them of. 

Two miscellaneous thoughts

That's pretty much what I'll remember this story for, but there are two other things I noted about it on the way. One is how there seems to be a kind of easy assumption in it that Maggie is improving her life by getting a better job, one that requires more work. I'm wondering if a neo-Marxist reading might object to the story and find a reading in which Maggie was controlled by Joan because she had less money and so decided to get more money herself. 

Secondly, it's interesting to me that this story was told in third person. It felt like a first-person story, like the narrator looking back should have been Maggie herself. This decision had some plusses and minuses to it. It allowed the reader to trust Maggie's transition, because the once selfish girl wasn't now the one telling us she'd changed, leaving us to doubt her own assessment of her transition. However, it also might have lessened the emotional impact at the end to have Maggie's desperation to find the couch filtered through a second consciousness rather than coming to us directly. It probably would have worked either way, but I kept having to remind myself when thinking about how to blog on this story that it wasn't first person. 

Other readings: Karen surprises me by not loving this story as much as I thought she would.