That's how it has often felt to me, which is why I usually avoid the use of the term "review" when discussing literary work on this blog. But maybe there is a kind of review where the conversation doesn't end with a bald statement of preference. If so, then it must be one in which the review is intimately linked to both analysis and criticism.
"The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota is a skilled work of short fiction that for some reason doesn't resonate with me much. Something about it calls to mind a debate that's been going on for at least three decades. Has American literary fiction become homogenized, producing what Robert Olen Butler called "polished, bloodless prose"? Or skilled works without much to say that nonetheless state their nothingness well? With literature, this debate is linked to the rise of graduate writing programs, but there is a similar debate surrounding the work on streaming services, which is often good but not great, determined by algorithms to churn out massive amounts of content just good enough to keep people paying their monthly subscription fee. Either way, it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with the work, except that maybe you feel like you've seen it before.
"Paper Artist" strikes me as a very competent short story that sounds a lot like other short stories I've read in the last twenty years, one that passes muster with the creeds and preferences of workshops, but one that also doesn't read to me like anything that came from the forge of a hot and desperate human consciousness. Maybe this is unfair, though. Not every story has to be Moby Dick. There is probably a feminist argument to be made that favoring "raw and bloody prose" reflects a masculine perspective, and that a close examination of the quiet parts of the world and the human mind in that world are worth serious consideration. In the case of "Paper Artist," the discussion is more complicated, because the story's main character, Muneo, is an artist whose work, his wife notes, "swept through the mind, brushed the soul, and couldn't quite penetrate the heart." So if the story does something similar, is this perhaps not a success of form meeting content?
To start a discussion of the story and whether its lack of "bloody" content is a success or a weakness, I'd like to start with an outline. This isn't quite what "formalist" theory means, but let's call it a watered-down kind of formalism, because I think looking at the story in this way can help us arrive at a more useful discussion of whether this story is good or just good enough.
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| Is "Paper Artist" an example of art that cynically connects the dots based on what has worked before, or does it deserve a more sympathetic reading? |
Outline
1. Confrontation between Muneo (father) and Mana (daughter)
This is the strongest part of the story. It begins directly at the point of conflict. Mana is marrying a foreigner, and one who isn't much to speak of. She's already pregnant. Muneo wants her to get an abortion, ditch the man, and get back to serious study on the cello. She decides to stay with the man and go to America. So the father issues his edict: as long as you stick to this decision, you can never come home.
We often talk about strong narratives presenting us with something a character wants, but they can also use a character's choice as a framework. Think of The Lion King, and how Simba chooses to run away out of shame when his father is killed. The rest of the narrative unfolds as we see how the decision plays out, at first seeming to succeed but then later showing its flaws. That's what's going to happen here. Scene one gives us the father's decision, and everything after that will come about from the challenges to that decision and whether he sticks to it or waivers. Muneo is described as a "master of control." He is seeking, through his decision, to exert total control over his daughter. Will it work?
2. Counterpoint
Masako has not really emerged as a character with her own thoughts in Act I, but she springs to life in Act II, and when she does, it's to challenge Muneo's control. This is unexpected, as the narrative makes clear that for most of their marriage, she has indulged his desires and gone along with his view of how their marriage should work. Her first words in the story, though, are, "You were too hard on her."
She won't push her opposition too ardently for most of the narrative. Life will continue on for them as it has, and when she finally decides to outright oppose his decision, she'll do it quietly, without him knowing. She does offer, however, the perfect counterweight to his "control." The end of Act II is Masako's question to him: "Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman's heart?" She is presenting him with something beyond his control and suggesting it might foil his plans. Now we have a decision and an opposing force to the decision, and the plot works out from there.
3. Exposition!!
We see Muneo paying homage to his parents, which leads to backstory about his father having been a surgeon. Muneo, like his daughter, opposed his father's will, becoming an artist instead of a doctor. We then move from seeing "most mornings" to one particular morning when Muneo and Masako are eating breakfast together. During this particular breakfast, Masako will break with tradition by speaking during what is supposed to be quiet reflection time. There is more backstory and then yet another flashback of how they had gone to make amends with Muneo's father by offering him a dragon lamp Muneo had made.
There is a lot of flashbacking and backstory going on here, and one of the strongest criticisms I have to offer is that the story thereby loses momentum. In a workshop, you'll offer hear the criticism/suggestion that a short story feels like it really wants to be a novel, and while I usually think that's a dumb comment made by someone who doesn't want to offer anything thoughtful, this story is starting to feel like it really does want to be a novel. Except it isn't. It's a short story, so all of those flashbacks are getting crammed in uncomfortably without organic introductions, and they're piling up faster than the forward momentum is. Also, perhaps because of the attempt to create a generational family drama feel within a short story, there is a tendency for characters to essentialize and openly reveal what other characters are thinking rather than let it be evident from their actions. "It was his pride on the line now, and it stung him that he had been disregarded," Masako summarizes of her husband.
4. The revolt: Masako conceives of the secret visit
Masako sets up a visit with her daughter and granddaughter while Muneo is on a trip. There are some "Gee, different cultures are different" observations. Muneo has trouble concentrating because of his daughter, but he pushes through.
5. Mana's updates subside
Mana's marriage ends. More backstory about how Masako accommodates Muneo by not eating out, even when she wants to, but she's going to break that when her daughter and granddaughter visit.
6. Status quo is upset by the visit
We don't see the visit anymore than Muneo does, but we see its impact. Something is off afterwards, although he doesn't know what it is. Another flashback to when Masako's mother died. Flashback to giving gift of hanten. That's four gifts total in the story now: Paining from daughter to dad, necklace from Muneo to Masako, hanten from Masako to Muneo, and dragon lamp from Muneo to his father. How each gives and receives tells us a great deal about their characters, and I feel like much of the backstory could have been ditched and just left us with what these four gifts tell us. Flashbacks to couple in their twenties, to moving into Muneo's parents' house, to finding out what happened to dragon lamp.
7. Masako's cancer and further explanation of what she meant to Muneo
8. Daughter's death and finding of Mina
The final act begins with Muneo making his masterpiece, which tells us both that he has gone as far as his control can take him, and also, perhaps, that his art has finally brought him to a place of transcendence, and perhaps he will now realize something that will help him outside of his art. He believes that he has finally managed to put soul into his work.
All art is a balancing act between raw emotion and technique or craft. The goal is to channel energy in order to increase its power. Channel it too much, and it chokes everything off. Channel it too little, and it become dispersed slop creating a mess all over everything. If Muneo's art has leaned too far in one direction, it's been to channel too strictly, but now he seems to have learned to let the water of his art flow enough to create more spiritual power. He has given up some control and found that it has helped his art, not hurt it.
This artistic realization is linked to a key personal revelations for Muneo that come about at the end. There is the fact that his daughter died. There are facts about his daughter's life in America. There is the granddaughter who needs a home. Most of all, there is the fact of Masako's betrayal, that she went against his edict when she brought her daughter and granddaughter to Japan when Muneo was gone.
Newly enlightened Muneo doesn't react with rage. He thinks that the three ladies must have had "fun without him." This is perhaps the strongest possible relinquishing of control possible for Muneo, one that isn't just about him becoming a chiller version of himself so others can enjoy their own lives, but in fact suggests that his presence might not be needed at all. We leave the story thinking that maybe Muneo's late-in-life understanding of his relative unimportance may be the key he needs to being the unlikely guardian his granddaughter needs. Maybe he'll do better with his second chance than he did with the first one.
Okay, so with that out of the way...
I think that outline gives us a pretty good understanding of what the story is trying to do, how it succeeds and how it might struggle. I can't deny it's a good story, at least in the sense that it gives us a clear conflict with stakes and a character who is trying to navigate the conflict. It does all the things a good story should do. I think it's a little dense with flashback, but I'm not going to be too much of a stickler on that. Sometimes, the information in a character's past is too good not to let it interrupt the present. Digressions in an amiable speaker are an enjoyable indulgence, if you've got the time.
What doesn't quite go down as easy for me is the way all those flashbacks and all that backstory seems to be aimed at filling in motivation. Just like there is a tightrope to walk with too much form and not enough in art, there is also a balance in a narrative between too much motivation and too little. Laura Walter has written persuasively on the danger of providing a surplus of it:
And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.
If we knew nothing about Hamlet's past, we'd be at a loss to understand his motivations and why he's so damn moody. If we knew too much, we wouldn't be mesmerized by his struggles. Coleridge wrote of Hamlet that he is "a person of vast intellectual power, and his mind is a world unto itself." It's the inability to pin Hamlet down to a simple motivation that makes him Hamlet.
Nonetheless, however unfathomable the human mind might be, most human actions do have at least some level of motivation, however fractured it might be. We tend to want some explanation of why our characters do what we do. I don't really object to the attempts to use backstory and flashback in "Paper Artist" to provide some of the motivation that fuels the conflict. What rubs me the wrong way is the too-intimate link between vocation and character of Muneo. His fastidiousness is unbroken between his profession and his personal life, and it manifests itself in the same way. His job becomes the biggest symbol of who he is, so much that it's the title of the story. Freud isn't reduced to teleology here; it's reduced to a middle school aptitude test.
This is where I feel like this story, as excellent as it is, might be a little too familiar, and it could be seen as following something of a formula. Choosing the profession of a character as the title of a story has been done a lot, especially in the last thirty years. The "algorithm" here is to do some research on the profession, then extrapolate from profession to person. The short stories of Andrea Barrett, which I've had more than one go at, do this to a nauseating degree. You take a scientist who studies something, and then you make their whole interior life mirror that thing. The story writes itself.
In reality, there is almost always some tension between vocation and character, some gap between a person's core qualities and the demands their profession puts upon them. Stories that make an artist as fastidious in their personal lives and they are about their work seem to me like horoscopes that say everyone born in 1972 share basic traits. Are all artists fastidious at home and at work? Would you write this about, say, all the workers in a steel factory? I worked in the same job for about twenty years, and while my abilities and personality fit it in many ways, I still found that I often chafed at it. You wouldn't be able to understand me from my profession. Moreover, I was different from everyone else I worked with, even though we all had the same job.
A woman I worked with told me last year that she assumed I was a neat freak who liked everything in its place based on how fussy I could be about writing reports. If you've ever seen my house or my car, though, you'd see how wrong she was. I'm one person at work and another at home. Or I was when I still had a job.
So writing a story called "The Dude with this Profession," including a bunch of lyrical descriptions of the work they do, and then tying that work into the character's choices in life and love seems too easy and too essentializing. By naming the story "The Paper Artist" and then making Muneo a near-complete embodiment of a fussy artist in every aspect of his life, the story ignores how much people's professional personalities can surprise us.
Review, critique, and analysis revisited
Review is generally a commentary on the quality of an artistic work. Analysis is related to exegesis. It's an examination of how the work is put together, what its aims are and how it accomplishes those aims, as well as what its assumptions are and where those assumptions might be challenged. Criticism is something of a hybrid of the two, and it then takes those two and relates them to other issues in the world.
When I think a work is excellent, I tend to skip past the review and dive right into the analysis, because the quality is assumed. You only dissect a work that's really worth thinking deeply about. When a work feels off to me, I don't end up wanting to think about what it's trying to do as much, because I haven't been charmed into caring. A work like "The Paper Artist," though, forces me to blend together all three disciplines, because I almost am charmed by it. It turns review into a more philosophical effort, pushing it out of preference and into the realm of aesthetics. I can't really answer questions about whether it's working without first answering questions about how it's trying to work. To me, this is a story with underlying good bones built around a decision and its consequences. That framework ends up taking on too much weight from a story bigger than the building code of a short story will allow, and it also suffers from tipping too much in the direction of a "Freud reduced to teleology" direction. That tipping is especially noticeable because of the tie between profession and character that has become so prevalent in stories of the past thirty years. I won't give you the same list Gemini just gave me of novels, short stories, and movies where the title is the profession of the main character, but it's a long list.
I realize nothing can ever really be new in art, and I wouldn't reject a story just because it's got a title that follows what other stories have used. If I did that, I'd have to reject all my own work. But you've got to earn your place, make me accept that this addition to the list deserves to be there. This story feels to me like a 6/10 Netflix original. It competently puts a character through development, but at the end, I don't feel like that development really touches the soul. It's a complicated way of having a trad father come across the rather pedestrian observation that maybe he shouldn't be such a dick.
But maybe the way this story has made me think so much about why I find it to be competent mediocrity undercuts my argument. Because I really had to think about why I felt that way, and when art makes you think that hard, it can't be throwaway. I wouldn't spend two seconds thinking about why I feel like Happy Gilmore 2 is trash. A story that confronts me with questions about why I feel a resistance to it must be, on some level, more than a mere mediocrity.
