Solid and mutable both: "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken

Once, as an undergraduate, I was at a party with my English professors and we were discussing what we were reading. At the time, I was trying to force myself to read Latin American literature of the 20th century in Spanish. I told my professor, who I'm sure was deeply stoned because he was almost always deeply stoned, that I was reading 100 Years of Solitude. He looked at me with a manic sort of excitement in his eyes and said, "Oh, it's a feast."

The metaphor of eating a book is at least as old as the book of Ezekiel, and I've never had a hard time understanding it. There are some books you enjoy so much, you want them inside you. You want to digest them and make them become part of who you are. The very best ones really are a feast, because the more you come back to them, the more diverse and rich treats wait for you to enjoy.

There aren't many books that really are a feast, that reward no many how many times you read them. It's a short list for me, but I think Elizabeth McCracken's short stories are starting to join it. 

I've loved  "It's Not You," included in the 2020 Best American Short Stories collection, and "Thunderstruck" is my second-favorite story in the ten years I've been reading BASS. I was excited just seeing her name in the table of contents. Reading her stories doesn't feel like work at all, although I'm exhausted right now and finding it hard to keep up with a BASS blog-through. 

Symphony

A lot of stories can give you a great theme, but this story weaves at least four themes into it, blending them and then letting them stand alone for a time the way a great symphony can. Indeed, much like in listening to Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, I find myself enjoying each new motif as it comes along so much, I'm disappointed when it's interrupted, only to find I like the new one better, until it's interrupted again by an even better one. The experience builds until all the themes are brought together.

In ""Souvenir Museum," there are at least four themes going on:

1. The struggle that coming of age brings between child and parent

2. The illusion of choice

3. The strangeness of time, how it moves both fast and slow and how many different ages all coexist at once

4. How memory and imagination try to bring together the different times existing all at once, usually in a confused way

First Movement, adagio: Mothers and Sons

When the action starts, Johanna's son Leo has already undergone an awakening of sorts. He got glasses. These produced a type of epiphany, an I-was-blind-but-now-I-see moment, quite literally. Johanna was the one who enabled this enlightenment. She'd picked out the glasses for him, because Leo hadn't cared what kind he got. When he puts them on the first time, his whole world changes. "Wow, he'd said, stepping out of the optician's, scanning the parking lot, the parking lot trees, the Starbucks and the Staples. Wow. Just like that, both he and the world looked different." By giving him the glasses, she has given him a whole new way of seeing the world. This is even more evident in the first scene of the book, when Johanna wakes Leo up to ask him (or tell him) about going to Denmark. He holds out his hand and Johanna knows he wants his glasses. He's making his first strides into a larger world, one in which he will eventually grow more independent, but he's still young enough that he needs his mother to enable that movement into independence, which she does. 

In that passage with the two "wows" in it, there is, barely noticeable, the first subtle shift of point-of-view, from mother to son. Most of the story is from Johanna's POV, but occasionally, very subtly, there are moments when Leo's takes over. One "wow" is Leo seeing, and the other is him being seen by his mother. This mirrors the process Johanna notes that is part of all parenting, how children go from only knowing things their parents placed in their heads, to having knowledge they have acquired indendently of them. Her way of seeing (POV) is gradually being replaced as the story goes on by Leo's way of seeing. (As a parent, I agree that this is one of the most unexpected and mind-blowing of milestones.) Leo moves from being only what Johanna can see to being someone with his own agency, his own POV. 

It's not a process without its difficulties. Although this growth into independence is, of course, the whole point of parenting, it means personal struggles along the way as the former sight-giver now has to give way while the child uses his newfound sight to see the world in new ways. Johanna notices anger at mothers from more than just Leo. She sees a teenager working at a historical site who glowers at her, and she understands that "he was mad at his mother, wherever she was, in whatever century, and therefore mad at all mothers." But she also begins to see the resentment of mothers everywhere, too. When she encounters an angry older woman at the same site, she muses that "The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody listens to them, their knowledge, their advice." 

(Lines like these, any one of which would be enough to make a normal story memorable, are on every page. It's one of the reasons a McCracken symphony is so enjoyable. It's just overflowing with virtuosity.) 

This generational struggle is the first of the four themes the story introduces. But others have already been hinted at. 

A Viking historical village. The one in the story doesn't seem to be a real place, but there are places just like it.

Second movement, allegro: The illusion of choice

Johanna presented the idea of a trip to Denmark to Leo like he had a choice, but of course he really didn't. She had already booked the trip. She did it because it was good form, because "you had to give a child the illusion of choice." Was she just thinking here about parenting, or was she thinking bigger? Was she thinking about how life circumscribes everyone's choices, and it's necessary to ignore this and pretend to all children, not just your own, that they have choice?  

There are other ways she limits Leo's choices without making it look like she is. She bought him the bunk bed she had wanted as a child. She picked out his glasses. (Because he hadn't cared, she says, but should she have encouraged him to care?) And she has one iron rule: he's not allowed to play with toy weapons. 

However, Leo easily finds a loophole around the prohibition on weapons. He makes them with Legos, because he is allowed to play with those. Come to think of it, Johanna finds that she's having trouble controlling him in a lot of ways. There's the fact that he now has "thoughts all the time that she hadn't put there." There's the way he is interested in the same boring history that her father was, the boring history that had continually ruined her own dreams of going to amusement parks as a child. 

So Johanna, perhaps, thinks that choice is an illusion, but is choice's evil twin, control over others, also an illusion? Maybe Leo has more choice than she thinks, but it's simply not the kinds of choices she would prefer. She's given Leo much more than the "illusion" of choice. 

Or has she? Leo, young as he is, realizes, when they visit Legoland and hate it, that she can be "grim about expensive fun." That is, Leo realizes they're going to have to stick around for a while, since they paid for it, even though they both hate it. He can find some freedom for himself, but it will always be limited. He can scrounge more than just an illusion of choice. He can frustrate his mother's control. But only up to a point. 

I'm with Leo and Johanna on this one. I hate this place and I've never even been there.

Third movement, largo and presto all at once: The strangeness of time, how it moves both fast and slow and how many different ages all coexist at once

Time is constantly getting mixed up in this story. Leo likes the same boring things Johanna's father did, which reminds her of her past. Those boring things generally have to do with history, meaning her father was always looking for battlefields and museums, relics of times gone by that still exist here in the world of the present. 

Johanna and Leo eventually end up in a Viking historical village, one in which the buildings and clothing and even speech are meant to be somewhat faithful to times long gone.  It leaves Johanna feeling more than a little mixed up about what time she is even in. "She still didn't know what millennium they were supposed to be in," we are told at one point, and soon after, she asks herself "how many timeframes" she was in. Because she has gone to Denmark partly to give the watch her departed father wanted her to give to a former long-term boyfriend/common-law spouse, she has been thinking of many times all at once--"college, midtwenties, the Iron Age, the turn of the last century." 

This confounding blending of eras is made more difficult for her by Leo's early coming of age, because now she is experiencing time through his point-of-view, too. No wonder she wonders often whether she should give the watch to Leo. No wonder she wishes at one point that he might become a 'horologist," or expert in the art of watches, a wish we discover that he will one day fulfill for her. What is a watch but a tool that tries to organize and make sense of the mess of time? 

Even though Leo will one day become a horologist, though, this still does not mean that time doesn't become all jumbled for Johanna. The watch itself proves to be a trick on her, as what she took to be a very elegant and refined timepiece turned out to be a dirty little joke between her father and her former boyfriend. It has a wind-up pornographic scene hidden within it. The effort to control time and make sense of it is, at the end, just a dirty little joke on all of us, a joke that's just a little over our heads. 

Fourth movement, no tempo indicated: The brain tries to make sense of it all

There are overlapping perennial oddities of human experience joining forces to disorient Johanna and, to some extent, Leo, although Leo, as a younger human just beginning to attempt to make sense of it all, might be less beaten down by it all and therefore less inclined to self-doubt. Both Leo and Johanna, though, do find something that enables them to have at least tentative, if not final, relief from all the weirdness of human perception that comes from our experience of time, both on an epochal scale and a daily one. 

The symbol of this tentative resolution is the Lego. For Leo, Legos were always his door to foiling the control of his mother, to making his "illusionary" choice real. Legos are a toy you can make into anything, just as many of us are taught to believe that we can do with our own lives. When his mother forbade weapons, he found a way around her control through Legos. That's why he would rake through bins of the things beneath his bed "as a kind of rosary, to remind himself that the world, like Lego, was solid and mutable both."

Solid and mutable both. That's what Leo and Johanna find all the themes they've been playing with--control, choice, time--are. We try to make time less mutable through things like watches and by purchasing souvenirs--a word that comes from one of the French words for "to remember." Johanna thinks of souvenirs in this way, as a "memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened." 

When Leo and Johanna visit Denmark, there are several stops that could have been the final and defining climax of the action. It could have been at Legoland, the one place Leo very much wanted to go when he was told/asked about going to Denmark. It could have been at the "Souvenir Museum," the stop that gave its name to the story. Instead, it was at the rather dull Viking village. Why?

Because Johanna learns by that point that the whole world is a souvenir museum. She already knows all too well that we are surrounded at all times on all sides by an open-air museum, because her father and now her son have developed the habit of looking for the past alive in the present everywhere. And the world leaves its memories with us, whether we plan them or no, so we are left with nothing but souvenirs in this museum. 

At Legoland, Leo was disappointed in everything, but his largest disappointment was the gift shop. "He'd been imagining something he couldn't imagine, some immense box that would allow him to build--what. A suit of Lego. A turreted city big enough to live in. Denmark itself." He'd gone hoping for a souvenir, something that would remind him of the way life was both "durable and mutable," but found that the ability to make memories is more part of the "mutable" side of that pair. He'd tried to make Legos something simply durable and found that when he did, he could no more control what imagination achieved than his mother could. 

Virtuosity

I've compared this story to a symphony, and it is. Part of what makes it such an enjoyable symphony is the virtuosity. I don't know if there's a writer who matches McCracken for both the quantity and quality of wit that pours out on every page. There's no way to do justice to it, because the story is just dripping with it. No comedian outstrips her observational powers, and I found myself laughing at one line after another, even if it wasn't really funny as much as it was unexpectedly true. Here are some of the best ones, in no particular order:

1. "In our private Legolands we are the only human people."

2. "When our children love what we love, it is a blessing, but oh, when they hate what we hate!"

3. "To become interested in a boring subject was a feat of strength."

4. "The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody listens to them, their knowledge, their advice."

5. "The blondness itself seemed evil to Leo. A blond child who screeches and steps on your foot is compelled by its blondness; a blond mother who hits you with her stroller--here comes another one, rushing after her child, attempting to climb into the lap of the life-size Lego statue of Hans Christian Anderson--does it out of pure towheadedness."

I haven't come close to scratching the surface of the depths of this story. There is some nice parallelism between imagery of alligators near the beginning and the end I didn't get around to. I didn't consider the layers of the name "Leo," her bold lion/cowardly lion of a son. It's a story you could read a dozen times and keep finding new insights from, and a story that could inspire dozens of essays without beginning to run out of new things to say about it. It's a feast.