Wayyyyy back in 2017, when my book was just coming out, my adviser from back in grad school hooked me up with a review in the American Book Review, which focuses on small market books. In return, I said I would review a book for someone else. I was assigned "Outside is the Ocean" by Matthew Lansburgh. I waited and waited for it to show up. The author's publicist contacted me a few times. I wrote my former adviser, asking if she could explain what had happened. She assured me that was just the pace they worked at.
I felt terrible, because I'd gotten my review, but hadn't paid the love back. It was bad literary citizenship on my part, or at least it seemed that way to me, even though I'd read the book as soon as I was assigned it and had a review off within two weeks. Turns out, the magazine just changed editors and they lost my review. The new editor was nice enough to include my review in the most recent edition, although it being two years after the author's book came out, it's probably far too late to do him any good.
The moral to me is that serious fiction outside the few stars selected for fame is a tenuous business, kept going by golden-hearted volunteers who nonetheless are overworked, doing it as a second or third or fourth job, and the whole thing is likely to be error-prone. If something goes right, count yourself lucky. If it doesn't, count yourself lucky anyway that you have a life free enough of real troubles that you get to worry about what happens with your writing.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
A metaphor of motherhood: "Hellion" by Julia Elliott
Mothers don't come off very well in Julia Elliott's "Hellion." It's easy to miss, though, because in "Hellion," there's a story going on in which the mothers seem to play only a bit part in the larger drama. Like many moms in real life, they aren't even granted the decency of getting credit for their important role. But motherhood is at the heart of all the tension in the story.
There's plenty entertaining going on in the surface story to distract the reader from thinking about mothers. Butter, a country-dwelling tomboy in early 1980's South Carolina on the verge of puberty, tries to shepherd her city-boy distant cousin Alex during his temporary stay in the country. He's not exactly from the big city, coming from Aiken, but he's exotic enough for Butter. His dad works at the "nuke reactor" there, and they have a mall.
She can see, though, that he's too soft for the hellion boys she runs with, so she coaches him through surviving his interactions with them. In fact, she coaches him through pretty much everything there is to know about living in the country, from the calls of frogs to the best place to score Kit Kat bars and Dr. Pepper. She takes to her role as country life mentor with enthusiasm, promising Alex she will show him "a whole 'nother universe."
There are four threatening symbols lurking at the back of the story that eventually drive the conflict. Three are monsters: an alligator, a vampire, and the Swamp Ape. The fourth symbol is the nuclear reactor, which we'll come back to.
There is an alligator named Dragon that Butter has raised since it was a baby. It's now three feet long and becoming a menace. The alligator bites Butter's hand when she's feeding it; it savors "the taste of fish splashed with his adoptive mother's blood." Butter gets no gratitude from Dragon for having raised it and protected it against those who would harm it. (Interestingly, the first in the story who attempt to harm it are the neighborhood hellion boys, who feed it atomic fireballs, a sly nod to the threat of the nuclear reactor in Aiken, which to this day is one of the most contaminated places on Earth.)
The second monster is the vampire, which is the name Butter's father gives her mother. Mom works at the local hospital on the night shift, drawing blood, and she sleeps all day, forcing her dad with his bad back and drinking habit to tiptoe around the house to keep from waking her up. She pays the bills in the house, but she's also a monster, and father and daughter are both in on the joke.
Then there's the Swamp Ape. In an otherwise reality-based world, the presence of the swamp ape is the last magic of childhood that remains for Butter. The creature lives "just beyond the border between wet and dry ground," just as Butter lives right on the border of childhood and adulthood. The creature seems to be as real within the narrative as the flying squirrels and frogs and chuck-wills. She feeds it Slim Jims, and the creature comes and eats them. She sees and hears the creature.
What is the Swamp Ape? People do not agree. Some say it's a primitive man, some that he's a regular man gone feral. Others, in another echo of the dangers of science, think it's an escaped experiment from Clemson University. But it seems, in the narrative, to be the embodiment of sorrow, specifically Butter's sorrow: "And through this delicate symphony came the bellow of the Swamp Ape, mournful and longing, as though epochs of human misery had been mixed together into this one voice, ringing out from the deepest dark." As Butter notes to Alex while explaining the Swamp Ape, people can also be monsters--another possible jab at her mother, although in the context of some of her other fears, she might be referring to the general propensity of humanity to destroy itself.
Butter so fully identifies with the sadness of the Swamp Ape, she seems almost to have summoned it. "Out came a bellow so long and low, so misery-packed and wistful, that I longed to join in, to howl my own torments in the muggy dark." It's easy to see the Swamp Ape as her childhood coping mechanism, one that embodies her sadness for her, so that the sadness becomes external to her.
Like she does with the alligator, she also feeds the Swamp Ape. Butter, the child of a monster vampire mother, is now the mother to two monsters herself, a dragon and a Swamp Ape.
Alex and Butter form a friendship with hints of young and awkward romance, partly because Butter is, without knowing it, smart, and there is no outlet for her intelligence among the hellion boys in her town. They go on small adventures, but then Butter gives into a temptation she cannot resist, and it begins the end of their idyll. She smells hot tar, which to her signifies everything she's been dreaming of that has made her start saving up her money to escape her hometown. To Butter, tar represents "the smell of flat-roof exploration, new roads winding off into the green distance, amusement-park blacktop gone soft in July sun." She loves tar so much, she initiates a tar fight with Alex, and they experience a consummation of sorts as they smear each other with it.
Giving into temptation leads to them being stripped in front of each other by Alex's grandmother and scrubbed with an "angry" brush. They are made to feel ashamed of their (near) nakedness, and are thrown out of their Eden. This is followed by a fight between Butter's parents, during which the mother sees the bite on Butter's thumb from Dragon, and she forces the father to shoot the alligator while the neighborhood "hellions," now turned into a nearly literal chorus of demons, hoot their approval. (And now we get the triple entendre of the atomic fireball--both parts of the candy's name refer to something else in the story.)
Butter runs off into the woods. She thinks about how narrow the limits of her life are--ironic for a girl who has so much freedom that only hours ago she was driving a truck that did not belong to her without a license while smoking a cigarette. She imagines Alex has much wider opportunities. She will have to become a vampire taking blood (or worse) at the hospital like her mother. He, meanwhile, has big prospects he's talking about, and Butter thinks the worst:
When Butter started the tar fight because she couldn't resist it, tar was both a domestic dream (a rooftop) and also freedom (new roads winding off into the green). But giving into that temptation as a species--starting families and exploring the world--has led to the rot of the beautiful planet Butter has grown up on. Domesticity leads to women becoming monster mothers, and adventure leads to nuclear reactors.
And here we come back to the nuclear plant. Alex came to Butter's town full of Cold War fears. He is afraid his father is contaminating the house. He is afraid the nuclear radiation is the reason his brother was born prematurely (which is why he had to come to live with his grandma for a while in the first place, while his parents stayed in the ICU with the newborn). The reactor in Aiken, it so happens, was created after the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, in the hopes we could build a stronger bomb to stay ahead. Butter's idyllic home is not far from the monster creating the end of the world.
We are come to a familiar paradox as old as one of the oldest stories in Western civilization. Butter is growing up, and with that come adult longings. But those longings come with conditions, and chief among those conditions is that the moment one seizes those wishes, freedom is circumscribed. Truly loving someone means leaving Eden. It means pain and danger. It leads not just to the pangs of childbirth, but to being utterly ignored for having gone through those pains. It leads to shrill nagging like that Butter's mother shouts at her father.
But perhaps, it can also lead to wisdom. It did for Alex, at least. He is no longer a timid boy by the end. He comes to find Butter in the woods, and he, at least, refuses to blame Butter for getting whipped by his grandmother. "Not your fault. Got a will of my own and so do you." This is the opposite of Adam and Eve's "not my fault" attitude during their fall. It's awfully big man talk for someone who was playing Qbert days ago. His burgeoning adult feelings for Butter have matured him rapidly.
Their relationship looks like it will soon end; his brother is coming home from the hospital. Alex suggests they might be pen pals, but she rejects the idea. Their friendship/more than friendship has gone as far as it will go, at least for now. So the two sit together and listen to the Swamp Ape, who is now joined by "fairies," which is how the flying squirrels jumping for pawpaw fruits seem to her. She knows what they really are, but chooses to think of them, perhaps for one of the last times, as fairies. The magic of childhood is nearly at an end.
She has choices in front of her, although she may not, as she put it, have as much "room to move" as others. She can choose to turn her tar into a road to freedom, or she can turn it into a house to start a family, but any choice means not choosing other things. It seems that she is likely to choose a route that leads to motherhood, thankless as that may be. It's in her nature to mother things, much as she rejects that idea.
The final moment is just sweet. She is falling into whatever future lies ahead of her, but she is at a point where the attractiveness of that future is brighter than the possible downsides. Meanwhile, the magic of her past has not faded, meaning she has both future and past shining on her at once. Alex's brain seems to her "a different universe," one that might open up to her the opportunity to have some of the freedoms she might otherwise not have gotten.
Every year, BASS gives me a story or two that I'm amazed got published. Not because it's badly written--in this case, far from it--but because there's something in it that seems to break a rule or two. In this case, it has to do with dialect. There's no hard rule about its use nowadays, but if there is one, it seems to be this: "Go easy on it." And most of the story does. But the most heavily southern dialect-accented parts are right up front. The neighborhood hellion boys, who appear in the first scene, are especially full of a strong dialect. The first word of the story is "y'all." It settles down into a more modest use of dialect a few pages in, but I would have been afraid as a writer to put that much up front, where a busy editor might have thrown the whole thing out before discovering the rest of it. I give a lot of credit to the Georgia Review here for having the sense (and possibly the ability to know a true regional portrait from a false one) to see the gold that was here.
Further reading: Karen Carlson goes deep following the link between the tar, tar pits, and the pits of hell here.
There's plenty entertaining going on in the surface story to distract the reader from thinking about mothers. Butter, a country-dwelling tomboy in early 1980's South Carolina on the verge of puberty, tries to shepherd her city-boy distant cousin Alex during his temporary stay in the country. He's not exactly from the big city, coming from Aiken, but he's exotic enough for Butter. His dad works at the "nuke reactor" there, and they have a mall.
She can see, though, that he's too soft for the hellion boys she runs with, so she coaches him through surviving his interactions with them. In fact, she coaches him through pretty much everything there is to know about living in the country, from the calls of frogs to the best place to score Kit Kat bars and Dr. Pepper. She takes to her role as country life mentor with enthusiasm, promising Alex she will show him "a whole 'nother universe."
There are four threatening symbols lurking at the back of the story that eventually drive the conflict. Three are monsters: an alligator, a vampire, and the Swamp Ape. The fourth symbol is the nuclear reactor, which we'll come back to.
 |
| Why wouldn't every town want a nuclear reactor in it? |
There is an alligator named Dragon that Butter has raised since it was a baby. It's now three feet long and becoming a menace. The alligator bites Butter's hand when she's feeding it; it savors "the taste of fish splashed with his adoptive mother's blood." Butter gets no gratitude from Dragon for having raised it and protected it against those who would harm it. (Interestingly, the first in the story who attempt to harm it are the neighborhood hellion boys, who feed it atomic fireballs, a sly nod to the threat of the nuclear reactor in Aiken, which to this day is one of the most contaminated places on Earth.)
The second monster is the vampire, which is the name Butter's father gives her mother. Mom works at the local hospital on the night shift, drawing blood, and she sleeps all day, forcing her dad with his bad back and drinking habit to tiptoe around the house to keep from waking her up. She pays the bills in the house, but she's also a monster, and father and daughter are both in on the joke.
Then there's the Swamp Ape. In an otherwise reality-based world, the presence of the swamp ape is the last magic of childhood that remains for Butter. The creature lives "just beyond the border between wet and dry ground," just as Butter lives right on the border of childhood and adulthood. The creature seems to be as real within the narrative as the flying squirrels and frogs and chuck-wills. She feeds it Slim Jims, and the creature comes and eats them. She sees and hears the creature.
What is the Swamp Ape? People do not agree. Some say it's a primitive man, some that he's a regular man gone feral. Others, in another echo of the dangers of science, think it's an escaped experiment from Clemson University. But it seems, in the narrative, to be the embodiment of sorrow, specifically Butter's sorrow: "And through this delicate symphony came the bellow of the Swamp Ape, mournful and longing, as though epochs of human misery had been mixed together into this one voice, ringing out from the deepest dark." As Butter notes to Alex while explaining the Swamp Ape, people can also be monsters--another possible jab at her mother, although in the context of some of her other fears, she might be referring to the general propensity of humanity to destroy itself.
Butter so fully identifies with the sadness of the Swamp Ape, she seems almost to have summoned it. "Out came a bellow so long and low, so misery-packed and wistful, that I longed to join in, to howl my own torments in the muggy dark." It's easy to see the Swamp Ape as her childhood coping mechanism, one that embodies her sadness for her, so that the sadness becomes external to her.
Like she does with the alligator, she also feeds the Swamp Ape. Butter, the child of a monster vampire mother, is now the mother to two monsters herself, a dragon and a Swamp Ape.
Alex and Butter form a friendship with hints of young and awkward romance, partly because Butter is, without knowing it, smart, and there is no outlet for her intelligence among the hellion boys in her town. They go on small adventures, but then Butter gives into a temptation she cannot resist, and it begins the end of their idyll. She smells hot tar, which to her signifies everything she's been dreaming of that has made her start saving up her money to escape her hometown. To Butter, tar represents "the smell of flat-roof exploration, new roads winding off into the green distance, amusement-park blacktop gone soft in July sun." She loves tar so much, she initiates a tar fight with Alex, and they experience a consummation of sorts as they smear each other with it.
Giving into temptation leads to them being stripped in front of each other by Alex's grandmother and scrubbed with an "angry" brush. They are made to feel ashamed of their (near) nakedness, and are thrown out of their Eden. This is followed by a fight between Butter's parents, during which the mother sees the bite on Butter's thumb from Dragon, and she forces the father to shoot the alligator while the neighborhood "hellions," now turned into a nearly literal chorus of demons, hoot their approval. (And now we get the triple entendre of the atomic fireball--both parts of the candy's name refer to something else in the story.)
A complex but sweet denouement
Butter runs off into the woods. She thinks about how narrow the limits of her life are--ironic for a girl who has so much freedom that only hours ago she was driving a truck that did not belong to her without a license while smoking a cigarette. She imagines Alex has much wider opportunities. She will have to become a vampire taking blood (or worse) at the hospital like her mother. He, meanwhile, has big prospects he's talking about, and Butter thinks the worst:
"I saw myself, pale and moving in a dream through a hive of the sick and dying, a one-week vacation the only thing to look forward to. Alex had said he wanted to build rockets, and I pictured him zipping off into the twinkling black of space, leaving the likes of me to rot on our ruined planet. I imagined humans crammed cheek to jowl, mutated by nukes, resorting to cannibalism after they'd devoured every last animal alive. I saw plant life stamped out by solid blacktop, the globe turned to a ball of tar."
When Butter started the tar fight because she couldn't resist it, tar was both a domestic dream (a rooftop) and also freedom (new roads winding off into the green). But giving into that temptation as a species--starting families and exploring the world--has led to the rot of the beautiful planet Butter has grown up on. Domesticity leads to women becoming monster mothers, and adventure leads to nuclear reactors.
And here we come back to the nuclear plant. Alex came to Butter's town full of Cold War fears. He is afraid his father is contaminating the house. He is afraid the nuclear radiation is the reason his brother was born prematurely (which is why he had to come to live with his grandma for a while in the first place, while his parents stayed in the ICU with the newborn). The reactor in Aiken, it so happens, was created after the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, in the hopes we could build a stronger bomb to stay ahead. Butter's idyllic home is not far from the monster creating the end of the world.
We are come to a familiar paradox as old as one of the oldest stories in Western civilization. Butter is growing up, and with that come adult longings. But those longings come with conditions, and chief among those conditions is that the moment one seizes those wishes, freedom is circumscribed. Truly loving someone means leaving Eden. It means pain and danger. It leads not just to the pangs of childbirth, but to being utterly ignored for having gone through those pains. It leads to shrill nagging like that Butter's mother shouts at her father.
But perhaps, it can also lead to wisdom. It did for Alex, at least. He is no longer a timid boy by the end. He comes to find Butter in the woods, and he, at least, refuses to blame Butter for getting whipped by his grandmother. "Not your fault. Got a will of my own and so do you." This is the opposite of Adam and Eve's "not my fault" attitude during their fall. It's awfully big man talk for someone who was playing Qbert days ago. His burgeoning adult feelings for Butter have matured him rapidly.
Their relationship looks like it will soon end; his brother is coming home from the hospital. Alex suggests they might be pen pals, but she rejects the idea. Their friendship/more than friendship has gone as far as it will go, at least for now. So the two sit together and listen to the Swamp Ape, who is now joined by "fairies," which is how the flying squirrels jumping for pawpaw fruits seem to her. She knows what they really are, but chooses to think of them, perhaps for one of the last times, as fairies. The magic of childhood is nearly at an end.
She has choices in front of her, although she may not, as she put it, have as much "room to move" as others. She can choose to turn her tar into a road to freedom, or she can turn it into a house to start a family, but any choice means not choosing other things. It seems that she is likely to choose a route that leads to motherhood, thankless as that may be. It's in her nature to mother things, much as she rejects that idea.
The final moment is just sweet. She is falling into whatever future lies ahead of her, but she is at a point where the attractiveness of that future is brighter than the possible downsides. Meanwhile, the magic of her past has not faded, meaning she has both future and past shining on her at once. Alex's brain seems to her "a different universe," one that might open up to her the opportunity to have some of the freedoms she might otherwise not have gotten.
Notes on the writing
Every year, BASS gives me a story or two that I'm amazed got published. Not because it's badly written--in this case, far from it--but because there's something in it that seems to break a rule or two. In this case, it has to do with dialect. There's no hard rule about its use nowadays, but if there is one, it seems to be this: "Go easy on it." And most of the story does. But the most heavily southern dialect-accented parts are right up front. The neighborhood hellion boys, who appear in the first scene, are especially full of a strong dialect. The first word of the story is "y'all." It settles down into a more modest use of dialect a few pages in, but I would have been afraid as a writer to put that much up front, where a busy editor might have thrown the whole thing out before discovering the rest of it. I give a lot of credit to the Georgia Review here for having the sense (and possibly the ability to know a true regional portrait from a false one) to see the gold that was here.
Further reading: Karen Carlson goes deep following the link between the tar, tar pits, and the pits of hell here.
Monday, October 7, 2019
Word stabilization reflex far below average: "The Third Tower" by Deborah Eisenberg
In his introduction to the Best American Short Stories collection of 2019, Anthony Doerr succinctly testifies to the many possible forms a short story can take:
Yet as many possible ways as there are to tell a story, one that I think doesn't usually work particularly well is a polemical story. Fiction excels at telling truths slant, at sneaking past the argumentative objections people form by appealing to the logic of their senses. And while there is plenty of sensory invocation in Deborah Eisenberg's "The Third Tower," I felt like at heart, there was a little too much head-on attack and not enough clever strategy for getting around the defenses of the reader.
Essentially, when Therese hears a word, her reaction is an advanced kind of associative logic. She hears "tree" and thinks of a piano. She tries to explain what is going on in her head as "words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels."
The doctor prescribes medicines and reduced stimulation. She starts to get better. When the doctor says "tree," she thinks of "tree." She has a one-to-one correspondence between what someone says and what she thinks of. But it doesn't hold. Something in her is trying to get out. And then the story ends.
But in between, there is a rather too-on-point monologue from the doctor, ranting to himself about how foolish others doctors are who might celebrate her condition and how smart he is for fixing it. In a section titled "A Doctor Reflects," we break from Therese as the point-of-view character and get inside the doctor's head. He is happy to have helped improve her "almost hopeless ideation-capacity." This kind of "failure to recognize the confines of words" makes the brain unable to comprehend the world, he thinks. He scoffs at those who think of these "hyperassociative disorders" as "viable," such as one "pretentious colleague" who has written about the "visionaries of the banal." The best that can be hoped for is that these sorts of people might be put to work in advertising, or "the field of branding."
This section could have appeared in an Ayn Rand novel. Not the actual argument of it, but the approach, in which a character shares his naked philosophy at length in a way that allows the reader to assess it as a nearly full doctrine. The story was saying, rather bluntly, that either an imaginative view of language or a fuller neo-divergence is a valid way of looking at the world. Neither is exactly a revolutionary message. So I didn't see much to love in the story.
I thought maybe I was crazy, feeling a little like Therese that perhaps the way I was processing this thing was wrong. So I did something I don't usually do and read a bunch of other reviews. They were mostly about the larger book of short stories "Third Tower" was included in, which was Your Duck is My Duck. Although The New York Times review seemed to enjoy this story, Anthony Cummins said that it "didn't quite hit the mark. Steve Halvonik called it the "most ambitious" story in the collection, which is not generally a huge compliment. A number of reviewers compared "Tower" to "Merge," another story in the collection. Nobody really pointed out this story as one of the best of the collection overall. So maybe I wasn't nuts.
Generally, reviews for the collection as a whole were very positive. This might be a case where Doerr wanted to do justice to a memorable collection of short stories that came out recently, but the rules stipulate that BASS has to choose only stories published in magazines during a specific time. So this might have been the story he had to pick.
In any event, I don't get much enjoyment out of going on about why I don't like something, so I'm happy to pass over this one and move on to the next. I think most readers will be able to figure out what's going on thematically without much help from me, so if you're a college student reading this, I hope you're fine if I just end it here.
For Karen Carlson's take on this story (hers came out about a week after mine, but we generally agreed), click here.
...the amazing and beautiful thing about the short story is the elasticity of the form. As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong. With every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.
Yet as many possible ways as there are to tell a story, one that I think doesn't usually work particularly well is a polemical story. Fiction excels at telling truths slant, at sneaking past the argumentative objections people form by appealing to the logic of their senses. And while there is plenty of sensory invocation in Deborah Eisenberg's "The Third Tower," I felt like at heart, there was a little too much head-on attack and not enough clever strategy for getting around the defenses of the reader.
Synopsis
Therese is in some kind of semi-dystopian future. She is sent to the big city because she has a "word stabilization reflex" that is far below normal. What this means seems to be something between just being artsy, poetic, and imaginative in the way she thinks about language and being on the spectrum of some neo-diverse condition.Essentially, when Therese hears a word, her reaction is an advanced kind of associative logic. She hears "tree" and thinks of a piano. She tries to explain what is going on in her head as "words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels."
The doctor prescribes medicines and reduced stimulation. She starts to get better. When the doctor says "tree," she thinks of "tree." She has a one-to-one correspondence between what someone says and what she thinks of. But it doesn't hold. Something in her is trying to get out. And then the story ends.
But in between, there is a rather too-on-point monologue from the doctor, ranting to himself about how foolish others doctors are who might celebrate her condition and how smart he is for fixing it. In a section titled "A Doctor Reflects," we break from Therese as the point-of-view character and get inside the doctor's head. He is happy to have helped improve her "almost hopeless ideation-capacity." This kind of "failure to recognize the confines of words" makes the brain unable to comprehend the world, he thinks. He scoffs at those who think of these "hyperassociative disorders" as "viable," such as one "pretentious colleague" who has written about the "visionaries of the banal." The best that can be hoped for is that these sorts of people might be put to work in advertising, or "the field of branding."
This section could have appeared in an Ayn Rand novel. Not the actual argument of it, but the approach, in which a character shares his naked philosophy at length in a way that allows the reader to assess it as a nearly full doctrine. The story was saying, rather bluntly, that either an imaginative view of language or a fuller neo-divergence is a valid way of looking at the world. Neither is exactly a revolutionary message. So I didn't see much to love in the story.
I thought maybe I was crazy, feeling a little like Therese that perhaps the way I was processing this thing was wrong. So I did something I don't usually do and read a bunch of other reviews. They were mostly about the larger book of short stories "Third Tower" was included in, which was Your Duck is My Duck. Although The New York Times review seemed to enjoy this story, Anthony Cummins said that it "didn't quite hit the mark. Steve Halvonik called it the "most ambitious" story in the collection, which is not generally a huge compliment. A number of reviewers compared "Tower" to "Merge," another story in the collection. Nobody really pointed out this story as one of the best of the collection overall. So maybe I wasn't nuts.
Generally, reviews for the collection as a whole were very positive. This might be a case where Doerr wanted to do justice to a memorable collection of short stories that came out recently, but the rules stipulate that BASS has to choose only stories published in magazines during a specific time. So this might have been the story he had to pick.
In any event, I don't get much enjoyment out of going on about why I don't like something, so I'm happy to pass over this one and move on to the next. I think most readers will be able to figure out what's going on thematically without much help from me, so if you're a college student reading this, I hope you're fine if I just end it here.
For Karen Carlson's take on this story (hers came out about a week after mine, but we generally agreed), click here.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
The incredible shifting story: "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley
I don't have a terribly complicated process for reading and commenting on stories. I read them once for pleasure and personal edification, the same way anyone would. Then I read them again, this time highlighting and making notes on passages that seem to most clearly call out the major themes in the narrative. Usually, I've got the outline of how I want to analyze the story by about halfway through the second read, and from there it's just filling in the skeleton.
But Jamel Brinkley's "No More Than a Bubble" frustrated every approach I made to a thesis of what this story was about. I came up with no fewer than five possible thematic approaches to the work, each of which has its problems and possibilities. I'll sketch each of those five, but first, I'd like to outline the work a little bit. It would be dull to summarize the whole thing, especially since most people reading this analysis have likely just read it. But it deserves a quick review, with some attention to the structure.
They find Sibyl and Iris, and set their sites on them. They both originally decide to go for Sibyl, because she is thicker and "that's what black guys are supposed to like." But Claudius "calls" her and so Ben, the narrator, zeroes in on Iris. Both girls are babbling the whole evening about something they call "bubble," a mysterious "noun, verb, and adjective" which strikes Ben as "glistening wet" with potential meaning.
But neither boy manages to understand what bubble is. Desperate to impress the girls, Claudius suggests they play a game where everyone tells a "shameful" story about themselves. Claudius tells a bawdy story about how he once put on a show for an old lady who lived next door who was watching him through his bedroom window, even masturbating for her. Ben, unable to think of a story, blurts something out about his father, who has been much on his mind. Turns out Ben's dad is white. Italian, no less, of the old-school, chest hair protruding, kiss-ladies-on-the-hand, say romantic words in Italian type. Ben's father loved his mother, but not long after his mother saw Ben looking at his father's porno mags, replete with black women, she left.
Her leaving was preceeded by an arugment about the magazines. The father had a "boys will be boys" attitude, suggesting looking was natural, and that the boy would learn to think of black women as beautiful. The mother replied that "that's not what he's learning." She doesn't say what he is learning, and the reader is left to judge for himself.
The girls lose interest, and the boys spend a few hours talking to each other. They see other men aggressively pawing at Iris and Sybil, but before they can intervene, Iris and Sybil extract themselves from the situation and leave. The boys see the girls riding their bikes past on the way out, and the girls crash and fall. The boys stop to help, hoping chivalry will win where charm had failed. Part II has an entirely different feel to it, a change that is overtly referenced by the narrator bringing up the bop records his father would play during the second half of a party. Where works had failed the boys, suddenly, they are saved by grace.
That grace includes an explanation of what "bubble" is. It's the Japanese concept of mono no aware, which for the purposes of this story might best be translated "an awareness of things." Iris, the "prophet of bubble" (interesting that Sibyl is not the prophet), defines it like this: "A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty."
The boys continue to walk the girls home chivalrously, but they are accosted by a dog. The boys fail to protect the girls from the possibly rabid thing, but the girls defend themselves just fine. Finally, they all make it back to the girls' apartment, where the boys finally get what they want. But it comes with a catch. The girls, who are not shy about enjoying one another's bodies, tell the boys to strip and look at one another. It's as if they're encouraging them to recognize sexual feelings for one another they never noticed: "There's always more to what you want than what you wanted," Iris tells them. The whole time, they're having sex, Ben is distracted by trying not to let it go full-scale orgy.
There are five different ideas that might be the central theme holding the story together. They are, in order of how they occurred to me while reading:
1) This is a story of a man who has learned that his collegiate sexual prowling is not a good way to treat women. Although as a boy, Ben sided with his father and thought that his mother was overreacting when she claimed the father's hyper-sexual attitudes to her and every other woman were disrespectful, he can now see that his mother was right. Objectifying women puts Ben on a level with the creeps he saw trying to push themselves on Iris, or with the rabid dog she kicks off of her. The end, in which Ben sees his friend as suddenly ugly and knows that is how Claudius sees him as well, is Ben realizing how he has been behaving and not being proud of it. Given the current cultural backdrop of me-too, this seems like a natural way to read the story.
2) It's partly #1, but really it's more about how complicated the line between natural courting and unnatural predatory prowling is. The girls aren't actually prey. They're drunk and high, but so are the boys, and the girls seem more used to that condition than the boys are. The girls handle themselves well when threatened, and if the boys finally got in their pants, it happened on their terms. They're enlightened (literally, if you believe Iris knows what she's talking about when it comes to Japanese philosophy), and if they choose to enjoy themselves sexually, who is to say they were wrong? This reading holds up for most of the story, but then you have to explain that ending where Ben sees "an acute ugliness...a face within his face" on Claudius, and knows Claudius has seen the same thing on him.
3) This is a story about Ben and Claudius discovering their identity. There were a couple of parts of the story where I felt like this was turning into something similar to the movie Superbad, which on one level is just a really funny, bawdy movie about teenagers trying to get laid, but on another is about those friends realizing how much they mean to each other. I don't believe their realization includes feelings for each other that are exactly romantic, but it does include deep feelings that resemble romantic love in their intensity. I started to suspect this was the case early on, when Ben describes his friend with a little more than platonic closeness: "he manipulated gestures and disguises, pushed the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his face and in the flare of his broad nostrils the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people chatter about." (That "some people" chatter about, indeed.)
The boys start off the story both interested in the same girl because that's what they think they're supposed to want. They don't even know what they want themselves or who they are. Ben's confused about his identity as a mixed-race child, and neither of them knows which voices in their heads are their own and which have been put there. The point of Iris and Sibyl making the boys get naked and look at each other is not so they will realize they were gay all along, but so they will realize what they mean to each other, will acknowledge that as they've been chasing the illusory fuck come down from heaven, they had something special with each other the whole time. Again, this reading is challenged by that ending.
4) This story really is about the bubble, like the title and Iris tell us. It's about learning to be present. Iris is not encouraging them to look at each other so they will acknowledge some latent homo-erotic feelings for each other, but because their bodies are part of what is unfolding that night, and they shouldn't overlook them.
Strangely, the narrator reads some feelings into his friend at this moment. He assumes that Claudius is "trying to remember everything there--the large bed, the flickering light, the heavy curtains--as the setting he might use for an entirely different story. He was remembering everything, it appeared, except the people in it, ignoring us and therefore omitting us. Maybe he was even omitting himself."
It's possible to see this story as a commentary on the life of a writer, and how it makes being truly present in any moment difficult, because the writer is always processing information in such a way as to turn it into a story. It may be that "Ben" is projecting onto Claudius. It's strangely suspicious that Ben thinks Claudius will tell his own story, omitting the people in the room, when Ben is the one actually telling the story. Is Ben assigning his own characteristics to Claudius? Has he omitted himself by putting these thoughts into his friend's head? Ben admits that he is unable to embrace the magic of the bubble: "I didn't really get to enjoy Iris's body, not really, because I was too concerned with keeping matters organized, under some semblance of control, fending off the orgiastic."
Read this way, Ben is "ugly" because of his inability to live in the moment, to be present with those around him.
5) It's about all of it. All of those themes run together. Ben's narrative cycle is a success in some of these more than others. He grows up in terms of how he looks at sex and the objectification of women's bodies. He partly comes to terms with his own identity, reconciling with his black mother after feeling, for the first time in his life, that something was amiss in his father's conceptions of love. But he never manages to find the magic of the bubble, maybe because he isn't ready to live free yet, maybe because that kind of freedom is not the lot in life of the writer.
The end seems to wedge both a narrative change for the good and a narrative change for the bad into the last page and a half, and it's ambivalent whether Ben's change was a net positive or negative.
One intriguing clue comes at the very beginning, which a reader likely won't catch until a second reading. Ben recalls that the party happened "just weeks before the Day of Atonement, in late September 1995." One could read this as supporting the first reading above, in which the young Ben learns the wickedness of his ways and repents. But why the Day of Atonement? Do most people recall things in relation to their closeness to Jewish High Holy Days if those people are not themselves Jewish? It turns out that a vague Jewishness was one of the exotic characteristics of Iris Ben found so fascinating. So why does his recollection of this story make him describe it as though he, too, had some personal connection to Judaism? She offered more than just Jewishness to him, but was all he was able to take her a sense of guilt, such that the most lasting change she has wrought for him is a lingering sense of the need to confess?
Brinkley was in last year's BASS, and I loved how that story, too, was so full of mysteries, I'm still chewing on it a year later. His themes deeply challenge ideas of masculinity, but never in a way that denies it, cheapens it, or wishes to take any of what is best in it. At this point, I'm beyond being a close reader of his. I'm a fan.
But Jamel Brinkley's "No More Than a Bubble" frustrated every approach I made to a thesis of what this story was about. I came up with no fewer than five possible thematic approaches to the work, each of which has its problems and possibilities. I'll sketch each of those five, but first, I'd like to outline the work a little bit. It would be dull to summarize the whole thing, especially since most people reading this analysis have likely just read it. But it deserves a quick review, with some attention to the structure.
Synopsis
Part One
"Bubble" can neatly be broken up into two parts, with the break coming almost exactly in the physical middle of the text. In part one, friends Claudius and Ben crash a party in Brooklyn hosted by Harvard grads, although they themselves are still college students, and of Columbia, not Harvard. They are on the prowl. They've been practicing hooking up with girls at college parties, and now they're ready for the real thing, with women they dream of as more exotic, worldly, and more in control of their bodies than the younger girls they've been trying their moves out with. They have a sexualized, exotic view of the women here. These are girls who know things: "If not Caribbean like Sibyl, then the girls were something else distinct and of the globe. These girls each had her own atmosphere. We were convinced they wore better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew, convinced they were mad geniuses of their own bodies."They find Sibyl and Iris, and set their sites on them. They both originally decide to go for Sibyl, because she is thicker and "that's what black guys are supposed to like." But Claudius "calls" her and so Ben, the narrator, zeroes in on Iris. Both girls are babbling the whole evening about something they call "bubble," a mysterious "noun, verb, and adjective" which strikes Ben as "glistening wet" with potential meaning.
But neither boy manages to understand what bubble is. Desperate to impress the girls, Claudius suggests they play a game where everyone tells a "shameful" story about themselves. Claudius tells a bawdy story about how he once put on a show for an old lady who lived next door who was watching him through his bedroom window, even masturbating for her. Ben, unable to think of a story, blurts something out about his father, who has been much on his mind. Turns out Ben's dad is white. Italian, no less, of the old-school, chest hair protruding, kiss-ladies-on-the-hand, say romantic words in Italian type. Ben's father loved his mother, but not long after his mother saw Ben looking at his father's porno mags, replete with black women, she left.
Her leaving was preceeded by an arugment about the magazines. The father had a "boys will be boys" attitude, suggesting looking was natural, and that the boy would learn to think of black women as beautiful. The mother replied that "that's not what he's learning." She doesn't say what he is learning, and the reader is left to judge for himself.
 |
| I wish I could think of a metaphor for something tenuous and ephemeral to describe how hard it is to find a theme for this story without breaking it, but I just can't think of one. |
Part II--Bop
The girls lose interest, and the boys spend a few hours talking to each other. They see other men aggressively pawing at Iris and Sybil, but before they can intervene, Iris and Sybil extract themselves from the situation and leave. The boys see the girls riding their bikes past on the way out, and the girls crash and fall. The boys stop to help, hoping chivalry will win where charm had failed. Part II has an entirely different feel to it, a change that is overtly referenced by the narrator bringing up the bop records his father would play during the second half of a party. Where works had failed the boys, suddenly, they are saved by grace.
That grace includes an explanation of what "bubble" is. It's the Japanese concept of mono no aware, which for the purposes of this story might best be translated "an awareness of things." Iris, the "prophet of bubble" (interesting that Sibyl is not the prophet), defines it like this: "A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty."
The boys continue to walk the girls home chivalrously, but they are accosted by a dog. The boys fail to protect the girls from the possibly rabid thing, but the girls defend themselves just fine. Finally, they all make it back to the girls' apartment, where the boys finally get what they want. But it comes with a catch. The girls, who are not shy about enjoying one another's bodies, tell the boys to strip and look at one another. It's as if they're encouraging them to recognize sexual feelings for one another they never noticed: "There's always more to what you want than what you wanted," Iris tells them. The whole time, they're having sex, Ben is distracted by trying not to let it go full-scale orgy.
The Five themes
There are five different ideas that might be the central theme holding the story together. They are, in order of how they occurred to me while reading:
1) This is a story of a man who has learned that his collegiate sexual prowling is not a good way to treat women. Although as a boy, Ben sided with his father and thought that his mother was overreacting when she claimed the father's hyper-sexual attitudes to her and every other woman were disrespectful, he can now see that his mother was right. Objectifying women puts Ben on a level with the creeps he saw trying to push themselves on Iris, or with the rabid dog she kicks off of her. The end, in which Ben sees his friend as suddenly ugly and knows that is how Claudius sees him as well, is Ben realizing how he has been behaving and not being proud of it. Given the current cultural backdrop of me-too, this seems like a natural way to read the story.
2) It's partly #1, but really it's more about how complicated the line between natural courting and unnatural predatory prowling is. The girls aren't actually prey. They're drunk and high, but so are the boys, and the girls seem more used to that condition than the boys are. The girls handle themselves well when threatened, and if the boys finally got in their pants, it happened on their terms. They're enlightened (literally, if you believe Iris knows what she's talking about when it comes to Japanese philosophy), and if they choose to enjoy themselves sexually, who is to say they were wrong? This reading holds up for most of the story, but then you have to explain that ending where Ben sees "an acute ugliness...a face within his face" on Claudius, and knows Claudius has seen the same thing on him.
3) This is a story about Ben and Claudius discovering their identity. There were a couple of parts of the story where I felt like this was turning into something similar to the movie Superbad, which on one level is just a really funny, bawdy movie about teenagers trying to get laid, but on another is about those friends realizing how much they mean to each other. I don't believe their realization includes feelings for each other that are exactly romantic, but it does include deep feelings that resemble romantic love in their intensity. I started to suspect this was the case early on, when Ben describes his friend with a little more than platonic closeness: "he manipulated gestures and disguises, pushed the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his face and in the flare of his broad nostrils the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people chatter about." (That "some people" chatter about, indeed.)
The boys start off the story both interested in the same girl because that's what they think they're supposed to want. They don't even know what they want themselves or who they are. Ben's confused about his identity as a mixed-race child, and neither of them knows which voices in their heads are their own and which have been put there. The point of Iris and Sibyl making the boys get naked and look at each other is not so they will realize they were gay all along, but so they will realize what they mean to each other, will acknowledge that as they've been chasing the illusory fuck come down from heaven, they had something special with each other the whole time. Again, this reading is challenged by that ending.
4) This story really is about the bubble, like the title and Iris tell us. It's about learning to be present. Iris is not encouraging them to look at each other so they will acknowledge some latent homo-erotic feelings for each other, but because their bodies are part of what is unfolding that night, and they shouldn't overlook them.
Strangely, the narrator reads some feelings into his friend at this moment. He assumes that Claudius is "trying to remember everything there--the large bed, the flickering light, the heavy curtains--as the setting he might use for an entirely different story. He was remembering everything, it appeared, except the people in it, ignoring us and therefore omitting us. Maybe he was even omitting himself."
It's possible to see this story as a commentary on the life of a writer, and how it makes being truly present in any moment difficult, because the writer is always processing information in such a way as to turn it into a story. It may be that "Ben" is projecting onto Claudius. It's strangely suspicious that Ben thinks Claudius will tell his own story, omitting the people in the room, when Ben is the one actually telling the story. Is Ben assigning his own characteristics to Claudius? Has he omitted himself by putting these thoughts into his friend's head? Ben admits that he is unable to embrace the magic of the bubble: "I didn't really get to enjoy Iris's body, not really, because I was too concerned with keeping matters organized, under some semblance of control, fending off the orgiastic."
Read this way, Ben is "ugly" because of his inability to live in the moment, to be present with those around him.
5) It's about all of it. All of those themes run together. Ben's narrative cycle is a success in some of these more than others. He grows up in terms of how he looks at sex and the objectification of women's bodies. He partly comes to terms with his own identity, reconciling with his black mother after feeling, for the first time in his life, that something was amiss in his father's conceptions of love. But he never manages to find the magic of the bubble, maybe because he isn't ready to live free yet, maybe because that kind of freedom is not the lot in life of the writer.
The end seems to wedge both a narrative change for the good and a narrative change for the bad into the last page and a half, and it's ambivalent whether Ben's change was a net positive or negative.
One intriguing clue comes at the very beginning, which a reader likely won't catch until a second reading. Ben recalls that the party happened "just weeks before the Day of Atonement, in late September 1995." One could read this as supporting the first reading above, in which the young Ben learns the wickedness of his ways and repents. But why the Day of Atonement? Do most people recall things in relation to their closeness to Jewish High Holy Days if those people are not themselves Jewish? It turns out that a vague Jewishness was one of the exotic characteristics of Iris Ben found so fascinating. So why does his recollection of this story make him describe it as though he, too, had some personal connection to Judaism? She offered more than just Jewishness to him, but was all he was able to take her a sense of guilt, such that the most lasting change she has wrought for him is a lingering sense of the need to confess?
Brinkley was in last year's BASS, and I loved how that story, too, was so full of mysteries, I'm still chewing on it a year later. His themes deeply challenge ideas of masculinity, but never in a way that denies it, cheapens it, or wishes to take any of what is best in it. At this point, I'm beyond being a close reader of his. I'm a fan.
Friday, October 4, 2019
It works on so many levels! Well, okay, three. It works on three levels. And now my title to this blog post is even longer than the title of Wendell Berry's short story "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How it Ceased to Be Told"
It's easy to forget while reading Wendell Berry's "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How it Ceased to Be Told" that it is, just as the title advertises, a story about a story. That's because so much of the story's biomass is not the meta-fiction about the fiction, but the story itself. It's just a plain, old good story, told not in a literary fiction voice, but in the natural, beguiling, and folksy tones of an oral story teller. It's not unlike the feeling of reading Mark Twain's "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" or the shorter fiction of Norman Maclean. It's an easy-to-enjoy yarn in the American folk tradition. So that's one level on which the story works. It's the most obvious level at which it's working, and, I'd wager, the one most readers will walk away with, in spite of the wishes of the narrator.
But there are two other levels on which "Interruption" is working. One is as a history of the education of a storyteller. Billy Gibbs is the spinner of tales who learns his craft, and a big part of his education as a storyteller has to do with how he was raised. He was forced to work a lot, being the son of tenant farmers, but he was also given occasional leave to follow his own inclinations. He learned, as a result, to value his ability to go unseen, because when he was unseen, he would not be put to work. This penchant for going unseen is what enables him to oversee his first great story.
But just perfecting the art of going unseen and the voyeuristic insight it gives him isn't enough to make him a good storyteller. Because his parents raised him to both be responsible and to know the joys of occasionally shirking work, he is continually of two minds. "But along with the wish to avoid work, his mental development brought him also to the wish to be useful to his parents and to work well, especially if an adult dignity attached to the work. And so he was a two-minded boy."
Without the willingness to shirk what the adult world sees as adult responsibilities, no fiction writer will ever produce anything, because it requires a certain brazen selfishness to take the time to oneself it requires to write. But pure selfishness doesn't make for a good writer, either, because the best stories come from those who care, on some level, about the people who are reading or hearing the story. There is a symbiosis, as Billy finds out, between teller and listener, and "if Billy told his story well, and he did tell it very well, that may have owed a good deal to the excellence of his audience."
The push-pull between selfish desire to follow one's own interests and social responsibility is not the only split in Billy's nature. He also is split between the desire to do what is right and what satisfies his curiosity.
Billy first "successful story" comes to him when he happens to be in the right place at the right time to catch a prominent local politician en flagrante delicto in the woods with a woman who is not his wife. Billy wants to go see what they are up to, but hesitates, because he is a "mannerly boy, accustomed to granting respect, not invariably sincere, to grownups." Because of this psychological split, "his feet were itching to creep up close" to see, but "the same itch made him cautious."
All writers are voyeurs. We notice when others think we aren't, and we use our powers of surveillance and observation to steal bits of the lives of others and bottle them for our own selfish purposes. But anyone who doesn't balance this out somewhat with a sense of what is actually a decent invasion of privacy and what is not is likely not human enough to tell stories other humans love.
By the end, Billy is a fully realized story teller. His curiosity and selfishness give him the material to develop his material, but it is his "pure generosity" that allows him to give that story away and his control over it once he's told it.
But that's not all this story of a story is about. It's also a lament for and love letter to a place, in this case, to a rural Kentucky that doesn't exist anymore. And it is here where a first-person voice suddenly enters the narrative, a first-person voice that is likely very identifiable with the author himself, a voice that realizes how Billy's saucy tale will seem to outsiders.
To the people who originally heard the story, the people within it were real people. "The ones who told it and the ones who heard it knew the abandoned field and the brushy fencerow at the lower end of Birds Branch. They knew the Blue Hole and the big briar patch. They knew Billy Gibbs, and the boy he had been and was...The tellers and hearers of the story understood in an ever-renewing instant the entire signification of their vision of the august Forrest La Vere conjugating the commonplace old verb upon an extracted back seat in a weedfield. Thus, for the men, the story was a way of knowing what they knew, and a way of teaching the boys."
Because of the resonance the story would have had to Billy's original audience it would have had to no one else, the story "belonged richly and completely to Port William." But the Port William of the story is gone from the world now. World War II came, and the town was never the same after the boys came home, went to college, and went off into the world. All of the natural rhythms of the city vanished.
If the story were to be told now, it would be by some Port William ex-pat gone off to the big city himself, where the story would mean something else to its audience. "It would be heard then as little more than a joke on the subject of what we have learned to call 'sex.'" The new narrator imagines the teller at a cocktail party, where the story would be "understood as an exhibit of the behavior of rural Kentuckians, laughable in all their ways, from which the teller had earned much credit by escaping."
This is the final, most emphatic layer of the story that unfolds. Billy's development as a storyteller was intimately tied up in his relationship to the world around him, including the people of a particular place and time. The author Wendell Berry, through the voice of "Andy," his late-come first-person-narrator, seems to be telling us that he developed in the same way.
For fellow BASS blogger Karen Carlson's take on the story, go here.
Portrait of the artist as a young shirker
But there are two other levels on which "Interruption" is working. One is as a history of the education of a storyteller. Billy Gibbs is the spinner of tales who learns his craft, and a big part of his education as a storyteller has to do with how he was raised. He was forced to work a lot, being the son of tenant farmers, but he was also given occasional leave to follow his own inclinations. He learned, as a result, to value his ability to go unseen, because when he was unseen, he would not be put to work. This penchant for going unseen is what enables him to oversee his first great story.
But just perfecting the art of going unseen and the voyeuristic insight it gives him isn't enough to make him a good storyteller. Because his parents raised him to both be responsible and to know the joys of occasionally shirking work, he is continually of two minds. "But along with the wish to avoid work, his mental development brought him also to the wish to be useful to his parents and to work well, especially if an adult dignity attached to the work. And so he was a two-minded boy."
Without the willingness to shirk what the adult world sees as adult responsibilities, no fiction writer will ever produce anything, because it requires a certain brazen selfishness to take the time to oneself it requires to write. But pure selfishness doesn't make for a good writer, either, because the best stories come from those who care, on some level, about the people who are reading or hearing the story. There is a symbiosis, as Billy finds out, between teller and listener, and "if Billy told his story well, and he did tell it very well, that may have owed a good deal to the excellence of his audience."
The push-pull between selfish desire to follow one's own interests and social responsibility is not the only split in Billy's nature. He also is split between the desire to do what is right and what satisfies his curiosity.
Billy first "successful story" comes to him when he happens to be in the right place at the right time to catch a prominent local politician en flagrante delicto in the woods with a woman who is not his wife. Billy wants to go see what they are up to, but hesitates, because he is a "mannerly boy, accustomed to granting respect, not invariably sincere, to grownups." Because of this psychological split, "his feet were itching to creep up close" to see, but "the same itch made him cautious."
All writers are voyeurs. We notice when others think we aren't, and we use our powers of surveillance and observation to steal bits of the lives of others and bottle them for our own selfish purposes. But anyone who doesn't balance this out somewhat with a sense of what is actually a decent invasion of privacy and what is not is likely not human enough to tell stories other humans love.
By the end, Billy is a fully realized story teller. His curiosity and selfishness give him the material to develop his material, but it is his "pure generosity" that allows him to give that story away and his control over it once he's told it.
Threnody for a place
But that's not all this story of a story is about. It's also a lament for and love letter to a place, in this case, to a rural Kentucky that doesn't exist anymore. And it is here where a first-person voice suddenly enters the narrative, a first-person voice that is likely very identifiable with the author himself, a voice that realizes how Billy's saucy tale will seem to outsiders.
To the people who originally heard the story, the people within it were real people. "The ones who told it and the ones who heard it knew the abandoned field and the brushy fencerow at the lower end of Birds Branch. They knew the Blue Hole and the big briar patch. They knew Billy Gibbs, and the boy he had been and was...The tellers and hearers of the story understood in an ever-renewing instant the entire signification of their vision of the august Forrest La Vere conjugating the commonplace old verb upon an extracted back seat in a weedfield. Thus, for the men, the story was a way of knowing what they knew, and a way of teaching the boys."
Because of the resonance the story would have had to Billy's original audience it would have had to no one else, the story "belonged richly and completely to Port William." But the Port William of the story is gone from the world now. World War II came, and the town was never the same after the boys came home, went to college, and went off into the world. All of the natural rhythms of the city vanished.
If the story were to be told now, it would be by some Port William ex-pat gone off to the big city himself, where the story would mean something else to its audience. "It would be heard then as little more than a joke on the subject of what we have learned to call 'sex.'" The new narrator imagines the teller at a cocktail party, where the story would be "understood as an exhibit of the behavior of rural Kentuckians, laughable in all their ways, from which the teller had earned much credit by escaping."
This is the final, most emphatic layer of the story that unfolds. Billy's development as a storyteller was intimately tied up in his relationship to the world around him, including the people of a particular place and time. The author Wendell Berry, through the voice of "Andy," his late-come first-person-narrator, seems to be telling us that he developed in the same way.
For fellow BASS blogger Karen Carlson's take on the story, go here.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
What's more natural than... "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott
As I dove into reading Kathleen Alcott's "Natural Light," I was a little like the story's first-person narrator who goes to an art museum in New York looking for one thing and finding another. "That day I had come into the museum for a show of paintings, landscapes of Maine refashioned with a particular pink glow the painter must have felt when he saw what inspired him." She's looking for a sentimental kind of art, one that shows "nature," but nature with the artist's feelings changing nature's organic complexion into what the artist feels it should look like. It's nature pruned by the imagination.
On the way to that set of paintings, however, she passes through a retrospective of photographs. The narrator is somewhat dismissive of it, saying it's one of those shows that "cater to nostalgia for a certain era in New York." Funny, because she was on her way to view nostalgic art, but she is accusing the art she stumbles across of nostalgia.
How was my situation like the narrator's? I, too, have my predilections with stories. I prefer Danielle Evans elevating a Confederate flag bikini to high art over a story that actually has high art shows in it. I like a narrative voice that feels like it just came out that way in one take (even if it took a hundred drafts to get it that way) rather than a voice that sounds so polished I know it took months of painful editing. But just like Alcott's narrator found herself forced to deal with unexpected art and how it changed her perceptions of the world, so I am looking on at art I wouldn't normally choose to encounter and trying to learn from it.
Granted, my situation isn't the gut punch Alcott's narrator faces. The exhibit is a collection of gritty photos featuring realistic depictions of past New York drug culture (I can't tell if it's from the 60s, 70s, or 80s, but I'd guess 60s based on what I think the timelines here are). The photos feature "bare mattresses on the floor, enormous telephones off the hook, the bodies always thin but never healthy. Eyes shadowed in lilac, men in nylon nighties pour liquor from brown paper bags into their mouths. A woman with a black eye laughs, her splayed thigh printed with menstrual blood. These photographs are in color, the light strictly natural." (Emphasis mine. Roll credits!)
She was looking for sentimental lighting in her art, but she got natural light instead. Having gone in looking for the truth she wanted, she is going to get raw truth instead. Is she ready for it? Well, kind of. By nature, she is open to truth spoken in the world's own terms. In arguments with her much older now-ex-husband, she would speak "quietly and practically about the empirical world." And as much as she was not really looking forward to the photo exhibit, she resolved to give it an honest look: "Whatever my feelings about the work, I never want to be one of those people rushing through a museum, intent on immunity."
There's an irony slipped in right before the big reveal of the story. She is looking around at younger women and wondering what lesson she might have for them now that she is in her early thirties. The best she can come up with is that life doesn't really prepare you for what it throws at you. It doesn't give you the chance, as in school, to "show what you learned," because it's always changing the lesson. "Your real self was mostly revealed in negotiation with the unforeseen element."
The irony is that she is thinking about how much life is about being prepared for things you can't possibly prepare yourself for seconds before something profound happens to her she wasn't prepared for. So in a sense she was prepared...to be unprepared.
Her mother is in one of the photos. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, the narrative tries to avoid revealing this as a shock, because shock is viewed as an element of genre fiction. The reader is warned in the opening sentence of the story that the mother is in a photograph the narrator finds shocking, so it doesn't seem as abrupt when the narrator places the revelation back in its natural sequence.
In that opening sentence, the narrator promises that she "won't tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph." Nonetheless, we get an awful lot of hints in the rest of the story about what's in the photo, and nearly everything around her mother that's in the shot is revealed. The narrator says that this revelation about who were mother was after she is dead "broke an explicit promise, the only one we keep with the deceased, which is that there will be no more contact, no new information." The narrator shares so much about the photo, she barely keeps her own promise not to tell us what her mother was doing, "or rather, what was being done to her."
I wrote out a long list of all the passages that give hints or descriptions of what's going on around the mother, but I've decided not to put it all in this analysis. Probably the best description comes from the photographer herself, whom the narrator meets near the end. The photographer describes not what is in the photograph, but what the opposite of the photograph would be: "a woman taking the thing she wanted, a man doing something for her." That, plus the fact that the narrator talks about the photo to her father by using a euphemism, leads us to assume it's something sexual, perhaps something vaguely violent, and definitely done because of the mother's former drug addiction.
The photo is the change in the status quo, but what was going on in her life before that moment? Well, she is a writing instructor at a college. Her mother died a while ago, but she still gets spam emails forwarded from her mother's email accounts. Her father, like her mother, struggled with addiction before starting a family, and his language is full of AA cliches. (The narrator no sooner wonders whether her father's penchant for cliche has invaded her own thinking, because she is not able to realize when she has "left a window open" into her psyche, than she drops the cliche "dime a dozen," one of the many wry self-recursive passages in the story.)
She got married at twenty-two to a forty-year-old man. The narrator feels that he was sometimes kind, but controlling. Here, she uses a lot of imagery of nature being pruned, the same kind of thing she was looking for when she wanted to see pink landscape paintings. She says her husband "tended me as one might a garden (another cliche?), offering certain benefits and taking others away." She views herself as an espalier, a tree or shrub trained to grow flat against a wall, only in this case, the wall was her husband's rigid beliefs.
In particular, those beliefs centered around the narrator's admitted thoughts about suicide. She had been having thoughts of suicide for a long time, but never told anyone. These thoughts would come unbidden. She had never tried suicide, but the fact that she even thought about it was something the husband could not abide, because it seemed an affront to the happy life he thought he was living. The narrator and the ex now barely speak.
I think the theme of this story is something like this: It's tempting to want to make things into what you think they should be, but people will probably be happier if they are allowed to be their natural selves. The narrator, it turns out, still has "an obsessive thought pattern concerning various ways I might bring about my own death" even after divorce, but without her ex there to assign meaning to it, the thoughts have less menace. The narrator drops four of these thoughts abruptly into the narrative at various points, and they have gradually less of a threatening feel each time they appear. The last time they appear, as the final lines of the story, it's not clear the narrator is even talking about how she might want to kill herself. It might be how she wants to take a nap.
Why is she thinking about a nap? Because she went to see the photographer who took the pictures of her mother. She goes, hoping to learn something about the circumstances that led to the photos, hoping that it might have been something taken against her mother's will. Instead, she finds that her mother attended the opening gala featuring her. Her father knew of them, too, or at least knew about the time in her life when they were taken.
When the narrator visits the photographer, the old woman is eccentric but also oddly nurturing. She nurtures in a different way from those in the narrator's life who have tried to train how she grows. There is another revelation: the mother was the owner of the "days of the week" underwear that the photographer made into maybe her most famous picture. Then the photographer asks the narrator if she can shoot her, too.
After thinking it over, the narrator agrees, but only if the photographer agrees to do it while the narrator is sleeping. Why sleeping? Is it because it's close to death? If so, then the concluding lines of the story really are ambiguous, signifying both the narrator thinking of another death fantasy and also of where she might be sleeping: "A field, I thought. A yellow caned chair. A room up some stairs that was empty."
The photographer's willingness to allow her subjects "natural light," that is, her penchant for finding the innate qualities dormant within her subjects and bringing them out on their own rather than picking and choosing which traits to make bloom and which to prune, has played a role in both mother and daughter eventually finding their way in the world.
There are two key passages that trace the narrator's journey toward developing a psychological trait that will help her survive. Early on, she is wearing a ring from her now defunct marriage. Her reason is that "its persistence on my finger was a way of matching inside to out." This is how many artists, especially in the Romantic tradition, treat the world. They often see nature as a reflection of their own internal mental or emotional state, and they read their own minds into nature. That is what the narrator's Maine landscape artist does. The narrator, trained to prune her own self by her former husband, is reading truth into nature (her own body) rather than letting nature speak for itself.
When shooting the narrator's mother, though, the photographer recalls how the mother's "face and body reacted separately. It was like the body would tell the face what was happening, and the face would say, Are you sure?" In other words, the mother, at this point, was taking in information and learning. She was still in her "wild phase," but the wild phase was not without profit for her, because wild also means "natural," and by living her life organically, she was able to find her own answers her own way.
There is a passage in which the narrator describes teaching writing at the college. It's enjoyable for its keen insight, so I probably won't get far with most readers if I say it was gratuitous, but that's how it felt to me. I'm not sure what purpose it served to the narrative. From this interview, I can see that Alcott is interested in examining women treating other women badly, but I'm not sure if that was a theme central to this story, so I feel like it could have been cut from an already longish short story. One thing I liked about the scene was the double mise-en-abyme that introduces it. She takes a photo of a photo, and then in the next sentence, she is talking about being a writing instructor, which I take to also be something of a mise-en-abyme in a short story.
Karen's Take: For Karen Carlson's take on this story, see her post here.
On the way to that set of paintings, however, she passes through a retrospective of photographs. The narrator is somewhat dismissive of it, saying it's one of those shows that "cater to nostalgia for a certain era in New York." Funny, because she was on her way to view nostalgic art, but she is accusing the art she stumbles across of nostalgia.
How was my situation like the narrator's? I, too, have my predilections with stories. I prefer Danielle Evans elevating a Confederate flag bikini to high art over a story that actually has high art shows in it. I like a narrative voice that feels like it just came out that way in one take (even if it took a hundred drafts to get it that way) rather than a voice that sounds so polished I know it took months of painful editing. But just like Alcott's narrator found herself forced to deal with unexpected art and how it changed her perceptions of the world, so I am looking on at art I wouldn't normally choose to encounter and trying to learn from it.
Granted, my situation isn't the gut punch Alcott's narrator faces. The exhibit is a collection of gritty photos featuring realistic depictions of past New York drug culture (I can't tell if it's from the 60s, 70s, or 80s, but I'd guess 60s based on what I think the timelines here are). The photos feature "bare mattresses on the floor, enormous telephones off the hook, the bodies always thin but never healthy. Eyes shadowed in lilac, men in nylon nighties pour liquor from brown paper bags into their mouths. A woman with a black eye laughs, her splayed thigh printed with menstrual blood. These photographs are in color, the light strictly natural." (Emphasis mine. Roll credits!)
 |
| Unlike the beer the title of this story makes me think of, this story is on the high-brow side |
She was looking for sentimental lighting in her art, but she got natural light instead. Having gone in looking for the truth she wanted, she is going to get raw truth instead. Is she ready for it? Well, kind of. By nature, she is open to truth spoken in the world's own terms. In arguments with her much older now-ex-husband, she would speak "quietly and practically about the empirical world." And as much as she was not really looking forward to the photo exhibit, she resolved to give it an honest look: "Whatever my feelings about the work, I never want to be one of those people rushing through a museum, intent on immunity."
There's an irony slipped in right before the big reveal of the story. She is looking around at younger women and wondering what lesson she might have for them now that she is in her early thirties. The best she can come up with is that life doesn't really prepare you for what it throws at you. It doesn't give you the chance, as in school, to "show what you learned," because it's always changing the lesson. "Your real self was mostly revealed in negotiation with the unforeseen element."
The irony is that she is thinking about how much life is about being prepared for things you can't possibly prepare yourself for seconds before something profound happens to her she wasn't prepared for. So in a sense she was prepared...to be unprepared.
The big reveal
Her mother is in one of the photos. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, the narrative tries to avoid revealing this as a shock, because shock is viewed as an element of genre fiction. The reader is warned in the opening sentence of the story that the mother is in a photograph the narrator finds shocking, so it doesn't seem as abrupt when the narrator places the revelation back in its natural sequence.
In that opening sentence, the narrator promises that she "won't tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph." Nonetheless, we get an awful lot of hints in the rest of the story about what's in the photo, and nearly everything around her mother that's in the shot is revealed. The narrator says that this revelation about who were mother was after she is dead "broke an explicit promise, the only one we keep with the deceased, which is that there will be no more contact, no new information." The narrator shares so much about the photo, she barely keeps her own promise not to tell us what her mother was doing, "or rather, what was being done to her."
I wrote out a long list of all the passages that give hints or descriptions of what's going on around the mother, but I've decided not to put it all in this analysis. Probably the best description comes from the photographer herself, whom the narrator meets near the end. The photographer describes not what is in the photograph, but what the opposite of the photograph would be: "a woman taking the thing she wanted, a man doing something for her." That, plus the fact that the narrator talks about the photo to her father by using a euphemism, leads us to assume it's something sexual, perhaps something vaguely violent, and definitely done because of the mother's former drug addiction.
So that's what gets the action going, but what else is happening in the narrator's life?
The photo is the change in the status quo, but what was going on in her life before that moment? Well, she is a writing instructor at a college. Her mother died a while ago, but she still gets spam emails forwarded from her mother's email accounts. Her father, like her mother, struggled with addiction before starting a family, and his language is full of AA cliches. (The narrator no sooner wonders whether her father's penchant for cliche has invaded her own thinking, because she is not able to realize when she has "left a window open" into her psyche, than she drops the cliche "dime a dozen," one of the many wry self-recursive passages in the story.)
She got married at twenty-two to a forty-year-old man. The narrator feels that he was sometimes kind, but controlling. Here, she uses a lot of imagery of nature being pruned, the same kind of thing she was looking for when she wanted to see pink landscape paintings. She says her husband "tended me as one might a garden (another cliche?), offering certain benefits and taking others away." She views herself as an espalier, a tree or shrub trained to grow flat against a wall, only in this case, the wall was her husband's rigid beliefs.
 |
| I had to look up what an espalier is. I hate yard work, and we are thinking of selling our house because I am so bad at doing it. |
In particular, those beliefs centered around the narrator's admitted thoughts about suicide. She had been having thoughts of suicide for a long time, but never told anyone. These thoughts would come unbidden. She had never tried suicide, but the fact that she even thought about it was something the husband could not abide, because it seemed an affront to the happy life he thought he was living. The narrator and the ex now barely speak.
Pruning and letting it go natural
I think the theme of this story is something like this: It's tempting to want to make things into what you think they should be, but people will probably be happier if they are allowed to be their natural selves. The narrator, it turns out, still has "an obsessive thought pattern concerning various ways I might bring about my own death" even after divorce, but without her ex there to assign meaning to it, the thoughts have less menace. The narrator drops four of these thoughts abruptly into the narrative at various points, and they have gradually less of a threatening feel each time they appear. The last time they appear, as the final lines of the story, it's not clear the narrator is even talking about how she might want to kill herself. It might be how she wants to take a nap.
Why is she thinking about a nap? Because she went to see the photographer who took the pictures of her mother. She goes, hoping to learn something about the circumstances that led to the photos, hoping that it might have been something taken against her mother's will. Instead, she finds that her mother attended the opening gala featuring her. Her father knew of them, too, or at least knew about the time in her life when they were taken.
When the narrator visits the photographer, the old woman is eccentric but also oddly nurturing. She nurtures in a different way from those in the narrator's life who have tried to train how she grows. There is another revelation: the mother was the owner of the "days of the week" underwear that the photographer made into maybe her most famous picture. Then the photographer asks the narrator if she can shoot her, too.
After thinking it over, the narrator agrees, but only if the photographer agrees to do it while the narrator is sleeping. Why sleeping? Is it because it's close to death? If so, then the concluding lines of the story really are ambiguous, signifying both the narrator thinking of another death fantasy and also of where she might be sleeping: "A field, I thought. A yellow caned chair. A room up some stairs that was empty."
The photographer's willingness to allow her subjects "natural light," that is, her penchant for finding the innate qualities dormant within her subjects and bringing them out on their own rather than picking and choosing which traits to make bloom and which to prune, has played a role in both mother and daughter eventually finding their way in the world.
The narrator's attitude that helps her survive
There are two key passages that trace the narrator's journey toward developing a psychological trait that will help her survive. Early on, she is wearing a ring from her now defunct marriage. Her reason is that "its persistence on my finger was a way of matching inside to out." This is how many artists, especially in the Romantic tradition, treat the world. They often see nature as a reflection of their own internal mental or emotional state, and they read their own minds into nature. That is what the narrator's Maine landscape artist does. The narrator, trained to prune her own self by her former husband, is reading truth into nature (her own body) rather than letting nature speak for itself.
When shooting the narrator's mother, though, the photographer recalls how the mother's "face and body reacted separately. It was like the body would tell the face what was happening, and the face would say, Are you sure?" In other words, the mother, at this point, was taking in information and learning. She was still in her "wild phase," but the wild phase was not without profit for her, because wild also means "natural," and by living her life organically, she was able to find her own answers her own way.
A tiny, tiny quibble
There is a passage in which the narrator describes teaching writing at the college. It's enjoyable for its keen insight, so I probably won't get far with most readers if I say it was gratuitous, but that's how it felt to me. I'm not sure what purpose it served to the narrative. From this interview, I can see that Alcott is interested in examining women treating other women badly, but I'm not sure if that was a theme central to this story, so I feel like it could have been cut from an already longish short story. One thing I liked about the scene was the double mise-en-abyme that introduces it. She takes a photo of a photo, and then in the next sentence, she is talking about being a writing instructor, which I take to also be something of a mise-en-abyme in a short story.
Karen's Take: For Karen Carlson's take on this story, see her post here.
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Brave New World meets Catcher in the Rye meets 1984 meets....okay, it's got a lot of elements that resemble other stories, okay?: "The Era" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Best American Short Stories 2019 starts off with a selection that happens to be included in what might be the most hyped short story collection since Jhumpa Lahiri. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black managed to make the NYT Bestseller List as a short story collection, which is, in many ways, harder to do than topping that list with a novel. The collection lives up to the hype, although I have to say that "The Era" wasn't one of my favorites in it. Still, I don't think Adjei-Brenyah is capable of writing a bad story if he tried.
There are moments the tight narrative drive of "The Era" starts to unravel for me, because the science fictional aspects of it are a little diffuse and told in a less than exacting style. But those centrifugal forces are more than offset by the centripetal ones stemming from the story's core about a young man trying to find his way in a strange world, dealing with alienation and love. That's a perennial story human beings live out over and over, and the greatest hope in the semi-dystopia of "The Era" is that Ben, the 15-year-old protagonist, is still living this story in spite of all that has changed.
As I've said, the loosest parts of this story are its science fictional aspects. Normally, when we learn about a futuristic society in sci-fi, there are a few salient features of that society that make it different from today the narrative focuses on, and we examine the effects that imagined change in society has on humanity. For example, Brave New World examines a world in which a technocratic group of oligarchs plans every aspect of human existence. But "The Era" has no one single characteristic of its future world that really forms the most important "delta" from today.
One important difference in the future of "The Era" is that the majority of parents use some CRISPR-like technology to pick traits for their children, with the richest parents getting the better packages.
Another difference is that society values a sort of anti-emotionalism. They link the existence of emotion and the corollary fudging of truth to the two great wars that came before "The Turn." Being emotional isn't "proud," and pridefulness, along with truthfulness and intelligence, is viewed as the summum bonum for a citizen to pursue.
Furthermore, society in "The Era" uses a different kind of language, one stripped of much of its color and variety. When something exhibits characteristics between two words, people merely stick those two words together with a backslash. Ben sees a girl wistfully write in her diary that she might have been "pretty/beautiful," for example. Alternatively, people can add "plus" between two related words: "I wanted her to keel over plus die." Then there are all the rough descriptive versions of words that exist: "brain-healer" for "psychiatrist," "clear-borns" for those born without the use of genetic technology to improve their traits, "HowItWas" for "History class," and the wonderful "shoelooker" to describe those who drift through the world without a purpose, subject to the bullying of all those fortune and technology have favored.
Finally, there is the presence of a drug to make everyone happy. This drug, called simply "Good," is given out to school children in the mornings. Ben's inability to feel better from Good and his pursuit of more of it is one of the major plot drivers in the story.
So we've got major changes from technology, which makes this like hundreds of other sci-fi stories. We've got a philosophical change toward emotion, which is similar to The Giver or the planet Vulcan from Star Trek. We've got a whole new relationship to language, one that evokes Orwell on every page, and we've got drugs to pacify a population that might not be entirely happy otherwise, which is reminiscent of the soma given out in Brave New World. That's a lot of changes to society, meaning it's hard to locate the control element we're testing for in this experiment.
Somehow, the story doesn't totally unravel under all this excess of variables. Instead of being a story where one key characteristic in society is changed and we follow the ramifications of that change, we're watching a whole different kind of experiment here. Society has changed on so many levels in the future of "The Era" that things we now think of as the natural way for society to behave and think have lost their resonance. They've been lost to such a great extent, in fact, that history classes of the future can't even accurately reconstruct the thinking of a human from the time of the reader here in our present. In the middle of this society of the future that has almost so completely wiped 21st century assumptions off its intellectual map hardly anyone can even understand what those assumptions were, a boy sets off on a journey so grounded in basic human desire it could have been understood two thousand years ago. That's the experiment. Take an old story and put it in the new wineskin of a human society that's almost not even human anymore.
It's clear "The Era" is making some kind of assessments about what is constant in the human condition, what might stay no matter how much everything else changes, but what is that? Our narrator, Ben, is easier for readers of the present to understand because, being a "clear-born," he's living a life similar to what we would be living if we suddenly time-traveled into this world. He's a key link to our world, because his genes are our genes. Choosing Ben as a narrator instead of one of the "optimized" or even "sub-optimized" (people whose parents elected gene therapy but for whom the therapy somehow failed) characters means we are looking at the world the way an outsider would, not seeing it from inside.
But Ben isn't totally an outsider. Picking him as the point-of-view character works wonderfully well. Instead of the point-of-view character being, as often happens in sci-fi, an insider with a Disney-princess-like secret wish for something more that leads him to end up making friends with the outcasts, Ben is an outsider who wants in. And he is in, to some extent. His parents are well off. They live in a nice house. They only chose not to optimize him because of the failure they had optimizing his older sister, whose entire optimization ended up focusing on only one trait: ambition. His parents now say they regret having him, and his teachers use him as an example of what someone who isn't smart is like, but none of this has shaken Ben's desire to belong in this world. He enjoyed the occasional affection his terrible sister gave him when he was younger and trying to live up to her expectations. Twice in the opening four pages, Ben describes himself as "proud," thereby identifying himself with the prevailing ethos. Ben wants to belong to a society that will never see him as anything other than stupid, and this desire to belong gives the narrative most of its emotional authenticity.
Part of wanting to belong means Ben also looks down on "shoelookers" and other outsiders. Pride for Ben is mostly experienced in a negative sense, a sense of not belonging to some group of "others" society has left behind. He is proud to live in the present and not the past. He is proud that even though he isn't optimized, at least he isn't sub-optimized. He isn't a shoelooker.
This ability to look down on those who willingly or unwillingly keep themselves outside of the mainstream of the "New Federation" helps explain one of the questions I struggled to answer: if this society is willing to force its philosophy on others, and it apparently is, judging by what little we learn of how it won the "Big Quick" War, then why does it allow outsiders to continue living? Why does it allow some to refuse to use gene therapy for their children, to elect to try to live in the past when people still made life choices based on emotion and not telling the truth, choices like becoming a comedian?
The reason they are allowed to exist is that they play a critical social role. They give the mediocre classes of mainstream society someone to look down on. The powers that run the future think the threat from a few marginalized romantics pining for a time they don't even really understand is more than offset by the balancing social force they provide merely by giving most people someone they can despise and be grateful not to be. As long as most people can say they aren't shoelookers, they will keep some level of pride and want to identify with the majority of society, even if most of society barely thinks of them as belonging themselves. The lowest rung create, as they do today, a safety valve that helps keep most of society playing the game rather than fighting against it.
But does pride in a negative sense truly satisfy? Ben ends up accepting an invitation from Leslie McStowe to go to her house to celebrate his birthday. He eats cake. They sing the wrong words to "Happy Birthday." Ben continues to think the McStowes are weird, and he is irritated they don't have any Good to give him. But he is drawn to Leslie, who is kind although Ben does not understand kindness, and pretty in spite of not being optimized. For Ben to be happy, he's going to need more than just negative pride. He is going to have to discover that he's better off belonging with pride to a group, even a marginalized one, than he is taking false pride in merely not belonging to the lowest rung on the social ladder.
That's what makes the ending of "The Era" so brilliant. The story isn't what I, or probably most readers, were expecting. The McStowes aren't a simple bunch of 24th-century hippies offering a better alternative. They're hucksters, and Father McStowe has enlisted his daughter to help him invite Ben to their house in the hopes of selling him one of their "The Era" packages. These packages offer unhappy people the opportunity to live in the halcyon days of the past, or at least the past as the McStowes imagine it to be. What is provided varies depending on price. The McStowes are selling the chance to make the New Federation great again by making it more like the Old Federation, and they are marketing it to those on the fringes of the powerful classes.
This leaves us with a lot of questions for how Ben ends up. In the final scene, he is cast out by his friends at school, who think he has become a shoelooker himself. He rejects the nurse's offer of Good, and the final line is Ben repeating a joke he heard Leslie's father tell at the birthday party. Ben seems to be choosing to identify with the outsiders. Given the revelation that they were selling the past rather than trying to rescue the best of it for their own happiness, has Ben thrown his lot in with the wrong side? Or is there even a good side to throw his lot in with, since he's got a choice between false prophets of the past on the one hand and the cruelty of "honesty" on the other?
One could try to argue that the McStowes aren't wrong to sell nights in "The Era" in their homes if the time people spend there actually makes them happier. Hippies today selling art in Santa Fe to unhappy but wealthy tourists spending the weekend there aren't dishonest. They're just choosing to make a living by making certain choices that lead to their own happiness, then offering a piece of that happiness to someone who has sacrificed happiness for money.
Furthermore, Leslie seems, in spite of having been used as a pawn by her father to bring Ben to her house, to be a genuinely good person ("good" in our 21st century sense of saying things that aren't true in order to make others happy), and she is by Ben's side at the end trying to help him even after he left the birthday party in a rush.
I can imagine a future in which Ben does use his parents' money to pay for time in "The Era" with Leslie's family. He marries her, perhaps (the official match-making algorithms have already suggested it), and assumes a role in her family's business. But maybe one day, he'll argue with his father-in-law and try to change the family business to more of a broad political alternative to modernity. He'll argue it should be more than just a tent-making operation for the family, that it can be a movement instead of just a small-time business.
In any case, by the end of "The Era," Ben has realized that his former life is not tenable. He has been shaken of his pride, which, as any Bible student will tell you, is probably a good turn. He has salvaged something like a genuine human emotion. He may not have much hope, but he probably has more hope by the end than he did when he started.
FURTHER READING: Karen Carlson did a nice job of drawing ideas from philosophy and cognitive therapy into her reading of this story here.
There are moments the tight narrative drive of "The Era" starts to unravel for me, because the science fictional aspects of it are a little diffuse and told in a less than exacting style. But those centrifugal forces are more than offset by the centripetal ones stemming from the story's core about a young man trying to find his way in a strange world, dealing with alienation and love. That's a perennial story human beings live out over and over, and the greatest hope in the semi-dystopia of "The Era" is that Ben, the 15-year-old protagonist, is still living this story in spite of all that has changed.
What's different about the future?
As I've said, the loosest parts of this story are its science fictional aspects. Normally, when we learn about a futuristic society in sci-fi, there are a few salient features of that society that make it different from today the narrative focuses on, and we examine the effects that imagined change in society has on humanity. For example, Brave New World examines a world in which a technocratic group of oligarchs plans every aspect of human existence. But "The Era" has no one single characteristic of its future world that really forms the most important "delta" from today.
 |
| Normally, the rule in sci-fi is to keep it simple, stupid, when you're trying to show how the future is different from the present. |
One important difference in the future of "The Era" is that the majority of parents use some CRISPR-like technology to pick traits for their children, with the richest parents getting the better packages.
Another difference is that society values a sort of anti-emotionalism. They link the existence of emotion and the corollary fudging of truth to the two great wars that came before "The Turn." Being emotional isn't "proud," and pridefulness, along with truthfulness and intelligence, is viewed as the summum bonum for a citizen to pursue.
Furthermore, society in "The Era" uses a different kind of language, one stripped of much of its color and variety. When something exhibits characteristics between two words, people merely stick those two words together with a backslash. Ben sees a girl wistfully write in her diary that she might have been "pretty/beautiful," for example. Alternatively, people can add "plus" between two related words: "I wanted her to keel over plus die." Then there are all the rough descriptive versions of words that exist: "brain-healer" for "psychiatrist," "clear-borns" for those born without the use of genetic technology to improve their traits, "HowItWas" for "History class," and the wonderful "shoelooker" to describe those who drift through the world without a purpose, subject to the bullying of all those fortune and technology have favored.
Finally, there is the presence of a drug to make everyone happy. This drug, called simply "Good," is given out to school children in the mornings. Ben's inability to feel better from Good and his pursuit of more of it is one of the major plot drivers in the story.
So we've got major changes from technology, which makes this like hundreds of other sci-fi stories. We've got a philosophical change toward emotion, which is similar to The Giver or the planet Vulcan from Star Trek. We've got a whole new relationship to language, one that evokes Orwell on every page, and we've got drugs to pacify a population that might not be entirely happy otherwise, which is reminiscent of the soma given out in Brave New World. That's a lot of changes to society, meaning it's hard to locate the control element we're testing for in this experiment.
But maybe that's okay
Somehow, the story doesn't totally unravel under all this excess of variables. Instead of being a story where one key characteristic in society is changed and we follow the ramifications of that change, we're watching a whole different kind of experiment here. Society has changed on so many levels in the future of "The Era" that things we now think of as the natural way for society to behave and think have lost their resonance. They've been lost to such a great extent, in fact, that history classes of the future can't even accurately reconstruct the thinking of a human from the time of the reader here in our present. In the middle of this society of the future that has almost so completely wiped 21st century assumptions off its intellectual map hardly anyone can even understand what those assumptions were, a boy sets off on a journey so grounded in basic human desire it could have been understood two thousand years ago. That's the experiment. Take an old story and put it in the new wineskin of a human society that's almost not even human anymore.
So what happens?
It's clear "The Era" is making some kind of assessments about what is constant in the human condition, what might stay no matter how much everything else changes, but what is that? Our narrator, Ben, is easier for readers of the present to understand because, being a "clear-born," he's living a life similar to what we would be living if we suddenly time-traveled into this world. He's a key link to our world, because his genes are our genes. Choosing Ben as a narrator instead of one of the "optimized" or even "sub-optimized" (people whose parents elected gene therapy but for whom the therapy somehow failed) characters means we are looking at the world the way an outsider would, not seeing it from inside.
But Ben isn't totally an outsider. Picking him as the point-of-view character works wonderfully well. Instead of the point-of-view character being, as often happens in sci-fi, an insider with a Disney-princess-like secret wish for something more that leads him to end up making friends with the outcasts, Ben is an outsider who wants in. And he is in, to some extent. His parents are well off. They live in a nice house. They only chose not to optimize him because of the failure they had optimizing his older sister, whose entire optimization ended up focusing on only one trait: ambition. His parents now say they regret having him, and his teachers use him as an example of what someone who isn't smart is like, but none of this has shaken Ben's desire to belong in this world. He enjoyed the occasional affection his terrible sister gave him when he was younger and trying to live up to her expectations. Twice in the opening four pages, Ben describes himself as "proud," thereby identifying himself with the prevailing ethos. Ben wants to belong to a society that will never see him as anything other than stupid, and this desire to belong gives the narrative most of its emotional authenticity.
Part of wanting to belong means Ben also looks down on "shoelookers" and other outsiders. Pride for Ben is mostly experienced in a negative sense, a sense of not belonging to some group of "others" society has left behind. He is proud to live in the present and not the past. He is proud that even though he isn't optimized, at least he isn't sub-optimized. He isn't a shoelooker.
This ability to look down on those who willingly or unwillingly keep themselves outside of the mainstream of the "New Federation" helps explain one of the questions I struggled to answer: if this society is willing to force its philosophy on others, and it apparently is, judging by what little we learn of how it won the "Big Quick" War, then why does it allow outsiders to continue living? Why does it allow some to refuse to use gene therapy for their children, to elect to try to live in the past when people still made life choices based on emotion and not telling the truth, choices like becoming a comedian?
The reason they are allowed to exist is that they play a critical social role. They give the mediocre classes of mainstream society someone to look down on. The powers that run the future think the threat from a few marginalized romantics pining for a time they don't even really understand is more than offset by the balancing social force they provide merely by giving most people someone they can despise and be grateful not to be. As long as most people can say they aren't shoelookers, they will keep some level of pride and want to identify with the majority of society, even if most of society barely thinks of them as belonging themselves. The lowest rung create, as they do today, a safety valve that helps keep most of society playing the game rather than fighting against it.
But does pride in a negative sense truly satisfy? Ben ends up accepting an invitation from Leslie McStowe to go to her house to celebrate his birthday. He eats cake. They sing the wrong words to "Happy Birthday." Ben continues to think the McStowes are weird, and he is irritated they don't have any Good to give him. But he is drawn to Leslie, who is kind although Ben does not understand kindness, and pretty in spite of not being optimized. For Ben to be happy, he's going to need more than just negative pride. He is going to have to discover that he's better off belonging with pride to a group, even a marginalized one, than he is taking false pride in merely not belonging to the lowest rung on the social ladder.
Because it's 2019, everything can be tied to Trump somehow
There's something of a sly reflection of contemporary politics here. Much has been made of how Trump galvanized a disaffected group of voters who thought society had changed too much for their taste and passed them by. Many of those voters felt contempt from the educated, wealthy, neo-liberal East Coast elites running the country, and rather than trying to gain acceptance from that cabal, they rose up to overtake them. At least, that's one narrative of what happened.That's what makes the ending of "The Era" so brilliant. The story isn't what I, or probably most readers, were expecting. The McStowes aren't a simple bunch of 24th-century hippies offering a better alternative. They're hucksters, and Father McStowe has enlisted his daughter to help him invite Ben to their house in the hopes of selling him one of their "The Era" packages. These packages offer unhappy people the opportunity to live in the halcyon days of the past, or at least the past as the McStowes imagine it to be. What is provided varies depending on price. The McStowes are selling the chance to make the New Federation great again by making it more like the Old Federation, and they are marketing it to those on the fringes of the powerful classes.
This leaves us with a lot of questions for how Ben ends up. In the final scene, he is cast out by his friends at school, who think he has become a shoelooker himself. He rejects the nurse's offer of Good, and the final line is Ben repeating a joke he heard Leslie's father tell at the birthday party. Ben seems to be choosing to identify with the outsiders. Given the revelation that they were selling the past rather than trying to rescue the best of it for their own happiness, has Ben thrown his lot in with the wrong side? Or is there even a good side to throw his lot in with, since he's got a choice between false prophets of the past on the one hand and the cruelty of "honesty" on the other?
One could try to argue that the McStowes aren't wrong to sell nights in "The Era" in their homes if the time people spend there actually makes them happier. Hippies today selling art in Santa Fe to unhappy but wealthy tourists spending the weekend there aren't dishonest. They're just choosing to make a living by making certain choices that lead to their own happiness, then offering a piece of that happiness to someone who has sacrificed happiness for money.
Furthermore, Leslie seems, in spite of having been used as a pawn by her father to bring Ben to her house, to be a genuinely good person ("good" in our 21st century sense of saying things that aren't true in order to make others happy), and she is by Ben's side at the end trying to help him even after he left the birthday party in a rush.
I can imagine a future in which Ben does use his parents' money to pay for time in "The Era" with Leslie's family. He marries her, perhaps (the official match-making algorithms have already suggested it), and assumes a role in her family's business. But maybe one day, he'll argue with his father-in-law and try to change the family business to more of a broad political alternative to modernity. He'll argue it should be more than just a tent-making operation for the family, that it can be a movement instead of just a small-time business.
In any case, by the end of "The Era," Ben has realized that his former life is not tenable. He has been shaken of his pride, which, as any Bible student will tell you, is probably a good turn. He has salvaged something like a genuine human emotion. He may not have much hope, but he probably has more hope by the end than he did when he started.
FURTHER READING: Karen Carlson did a nice job of drawing ideas from philosophy and cognitive therapy into her reading of this story here.
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