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STORY: "The Reaper" by Rachel Sherman
FROM: THE FIRST HURT (Open City Books, 2006)
BASICALLY: An ostracized teenage girl hopes her parents won't find out about the bizarrely sexual letters her soldier penpal crush keeps sending her.
For some reason, I feel tiptoe-y around this story. Like I don't want to hurt its feelings. Like perhaps my heart isn't actually made of pumice and carbolic acid! Maybe it's because a lot of the authors I've covered are dead, or they're so great/established that it feels like anything I have to say about them can't possibly be of any consequence, whereas Rachel Sherman's bio reveals her to be just a year older than me (yes also about a billion times more accomplished but don't worry it's not like I'd be jealous of an MFA from Columbia, I mean really) and her writing makes me think I could have a marvelous conversation with her should we run into one another at the drug store. But I have to say it truly: "The Reaper," while a pretty good story, is not a great one.
I do absolutely love Sherman's subject matter: Beth is such a teenage girl. She hides stuff from her parents, and has a ridiculously romantic fixation on a married soldier who writes her up to 3 letters a day from Iraq, and studiously ignores the warning signs of his inappropriate questions and transparent lies because she feels ignored and misunderstood in every other aspect of her life.
But I have trouble believing the individual bits of the story and I think it's because of a lack of development. All the necessary elements, maddeningly enough, seem to be present, but they feel unripened; it is conceivable that I would believe any individual detail of "The Reaper" if only Sherman had provided just a little bit more to go on.
Take the basic assumption, for example: Beth started writing to a soldier to receive extra credit in her high school psychology class. Okay, this is something that students do maybe do. But her soldier writes things like this: "I'll tell you mostly there is just a lot of sitting around here doing nothing. I play cards and THIS IS THE REAPER! WHEN I AM BORED I MASTURBATE AND THINK ABOUT YOU. BELOW IS A LIST OF QUESTIONS. YOU MUST ANSWER THEM ALL." And then he apologizes about the intruding personality, and then he asks crude questions, and then he apologizes again.
I would like to think that any high school program that involved minors having contact with strangers would have some sort of control to make sure that nobody gets, you know, abused. Now, Sherman could provide some details to show how Beth avoids the notice of authorities other than her parents (from her parents, she just hides the letters in a drawer under her bed and protects them from her mother's snooping with a note that says, "STAY AWAY YOU FUCKING DIRTY BITCH I DON'T GO THROUGH YOUR THINGS!!!!!", which I think is hilarious), or she could give me something else to latch onto to make it more plausible that the school just isn't paying attention. But instead of solidifying details, the only other glimpse we're given of this psychology class involves the teacher videotaping students walking across the classroom, and then showing the footage and describing to the whole class what the student's body language says about them. Does this happen? I guess maybe? But it strains credulity for me.
Again, it could be made believable. It's very close to believable. But it's not quite there.
I've got questions about the guy who's writing to Beth, too. An early, brief scene that appears to be a flashback shows Sergeant Daniel Burkhart in the psychology classroom, but it's not totally clear why—maybe like an ambassador for this letter-writing program? Someone whispers, "Creeper," which is the cruel nickname Beth's classmates have given her because of some unattractive birthmarks on her face, and "It is as if Sergeant Daniel heard him." Though this scene shows us that we're dealing with one man's fuckwittery rather than, say, actual demon possession, it's just barely sketched in. Whatever's happening seems deliberately obscured. We do understand that Burkhart chose "Reaper" as the persona for his mindgames because it's just enough but not too much like "Creeper," but anything else about the mentality that would make such a choice is left out completely. And if this is the reason, why is it only "as if" Burkhart heard the whisper?
Beth does manage to make one friend, a girl who "is older and boys like her." But the friend's only purpose, it seems, is to show that Beth's soldier friend is lying when he says he can't send her a picture of himself. (The friend, Sandra, is actually getting sexy photos from her own soldier, which kind of maybe a little bit supports the idea that the school has this program but otherwise doesn't give a crap… but it still seems really weird and hard to believe. And when Beth's parents inevitably find out, they don't gather up the damning letters and shove them under the nose of a school official; they destroy them in the garbage disposal.) The two girls sneak off and talk and smoke cigarettes together, but their interaction remains superficial. It's not clear why Sandra decides to take Beth under her wing, because Sandra is a totally flat character, and there's no major effect from their friendship, either. Certain possibilities suggest themselves, but they're so unfocused as to give me the feeling, if I try to connect them, that I'm the one writing the story that I think I'm supposed to be reading. It's not a case of multiple interpretations—instead, it's one of interpretations having to be made on incomplete evidence.
A while back, I saw this quote by James Wood (author of HOW FICTION WORKS) on the Tin House Books blog and it seemed worth writing down: "I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level." As far as I can see, this applies equally to short fiction. "The Reaper" isn't problematic because it's inherently impossible to believe or because Beth isn't a fascinating character; instead, it doesn't quite manage to "teach us how to adapt to its conventions." The distinction is subtle, and can be a matter of just a few sentences, a few brushstrokes here and there, but it ultimately makes all the difference between a great story and a story that leaves us wanting.
Sherman has blended several interesting ingredients into an unsatisfying stew with "The Reaper." Is this typical for her, or did I just happen to read the weakest story in the collection? I think I'll have to return to her sometime this year and find out…
STORY: "Winky" by George Saunders
FROM: PASTORALIA (Riverhead, 2001)
BASICALLY: Neil Yaniky attends a self-help seminar to determine how to overcome the person who's the source of all his problems. Meanwhile, Winky, his nutso-religious, oblivious sister bumbles around the house, thinking about how much she loves him.
George Saunders is the most hilarious man who'll make you sob uncontrollably. There are several great parts to "Winky," though the story ultimately leaves me sad and deflated—deliberately, I think. Saunders likes to set up all the grief and vagaries of the world, but give his reader with no tools to deal with them. His mordant humor doesn't provide a way out so much as it makes clear that we are all equally pathetic. …Yay!
What makes this story interesting is the way that it sets up two competing loci for our contempt. Just on its own, Saunders' lampooning of a self-help seminar is pure gold. He starts the scene with a third-rate guru's literal pageant of cheap Types with paper labels (You longing for Inner Peace, almost thwarted by Whiny, Self-Absorbed, Blames Her Fat on Others, Insecure, Disappointed, Too High-Strung to Function, etc., until they're thrown in the Pokey for Those Who Would Keep Us from Inner Peace). Neil Yaniky, like the rest of the crowd, is mesmerized. Then the founder of the Seminars, Tom Rodgers, gives a rousing, ludicrous, spot-on speech about how everyone started out in a pure, unsullied state like oatmeal, happy and nourishing, but there's a problem: people are constantly wanting to come and crap in your nice warm oatmeal!
"Let me tell you something amazing: I was once exactly like you people. A certain someone, a certain guy who shall remain nameless, was doing quite a bit of crapping my oatmeal, and simply because he'd had some bad luck, simply because he was in some pain, simply, because, actually, he was in a wheelchair, this certain someone expected me to put my life on hold while he crapped in my oatmeal by demanding round-the-clock attention, this brother of mine, this Gene, and whoops, there goes that cat out of the bag, but does this maybe sound paradoxical? Wasn't he the one with the crap in his oatmeal, being in a wheelchair? Well, yes and no. Sure, he was hurting. No surprise there. Guy drops a motorcycle on a gravel road and bounces two hundred yards without a helmet, yes, he's going to be somewhat hurting. But how was that my fault?"
Then Rodgers goes on to explain how he dumped the problem of Gene on his sister Ellen, and so Rodgers is now free of Gene's oatmeal-crapping ways, though, "'as for Ellen, Ellen still has some issues, she'd take a big old dump in my oatmeal right now if I gave her half a chance, but guess what folks, I'm not giving her that half a chance, because I've installed a protective screen over my oatmeal.'" Saunders is a master at simply standing back and letting his characters show, through their own conflicting, hypocritical speech, exactly what kind of people they are.
Neil Yaniky has a personal session with Rodgers to determine the source of Neil's problems, and the source is easy to locate: it's Neil's sister, ugly and crazy and hyper-religious. She needs to move out of his house, and Neal leaves the session gathering his strength and repeating his mantra: Now Is the Time for Me to Win! Now Is the Time for Me to Win!
But Neil's sister is also a piece of work. As idiotic as the self-help session was, and as pathetic as Neil is for buying into it, we do sort of want his life to get better. And when we see Winky, we understand what he's up against. The story shifts into her point of view and her thoughts flit from topic to nonsensical topic, sometimes alighting on a funhouse version of Jesus, or a memory about her and "Neil-Neil's" childhood with their alcoholic father and miserable mother, or the time a vagrant outside Rexall Drug told her she was "too ugly to f—." She's not likable, but she's too pitiful to hate. It's clear that if Neil kicks her out, Winky will have absolutely nothing to hold onto in this world. The story closes on Neil's recognition that he can't give her the boot, but ironically, he's no better for it. There's no redemption.
In the end, whether we're dealing with a modern religion like the self-help movement, or an older religion like Christianity, Saunders shows that we are equally self-deceived and equally ill-equipped to find our way out of the irrational holes into which they thrust us. He makes this more profound—and more damning, and more depressing—by lampooning not just one mindset, but all the mindsets that intersect with it. Tom Rodgers, who has divested himself of responsibilities by pawning them off on others, has made a career of inspiring others to take control of their lives. The poor slobs who listen to him, like Neil Yaniky, are grasping at straws. And the hideous idiot sisters like Winky who depend on them, and smile at mirrors as they pass them to thank God for the trial of their suffering, have no understanding whatsoever.
STORY: "The Death of Jack Hamilton" by Stephen King
FROM: EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL: 14 DARK TALES
BASICALLY: John Dillinger, the 1930s gangster, runs out of luck when a member of his gang is shot through the lung and dies slowly, over a number of days, while the group continues to flee and hide out from the police.
First, the obvious: Stephen King does quite a lot of things right. "The Death of Jack Hamilton" is a great story that flies by at King's usual pace with escapes, shootouts, and car chases. Even after Jack Hamilton's been shot, his constant pain and deteriorating condition are evoked, but not dwelled on—the character of John Dillinger injects action and hopes and optimism (despite the story's title, even) into the whole thing. Meanwhile, the narrator, speaking from the perspective of history, assures us that Johnnie Dillinger's luck is up. This creates a tension between the story's action-heavy forward momentum and the sense of impending doom, or destiny, that's very appealing.
But King does some other things well, too. Maybe less obvious things, like managing a huge cast of characters. The story's told through the eyes of Homer Van Meter, a member of Dillinger's gang, and we're thrown the names of all kinds of associates and enemies and victims—Dock Barker, Melvin Purvis, Harry Pierpont, Mrs. Deelie Francis, and on and on—but never in some huge eye-glazing dump of exposition. The names are always attached to memorable characteristics. (Dock Barker's big penis, anyone? Harry Pierpont's original gang? Dr. Moran the crybaby?) King introduces the kind of notable details that make it easy for his reader keep all the people straight, and it works so nicely and subtly because Van Meter's voice, as narrator, is conversational and casual. Little by little, it reveals exactly what's necessary, just like a guy telling a good story.
King also nails the vocabulary and rhythms that bring the 1930s to life. Kind of. I think. I'm not convinced that the voice is completely authentic; it actually seems so seamless and perfect that I have the feeling it must be culled more from movies and the mythos surrounding Depression-era gangsters than from history. But it sounds extremely plausible, and most importantly, it's consistent.
Johnnie broke out the back window of the Ford with the butt of his pistol and started shooting back. I mashed the gas pedal again and got that Ford all the way up to fifty, which was a tearing rush in those days. There wasn't much traffic, but what there was I passed any way I could—on the left, on the right, in the ditch. Twice I felt the driver's-side wheels go up, but we never tipped. Nothing like a Ford when it came to a getaway. Once Johnnie wrote to Henry Ford himself. "When I'm in a Ford, I can make any car take my dust," he told Mr. Ford, and we surely dusted them that day.
And, of course, there's the requisite smattering of dames and krauts and slugs throughout, but King never lays it on too thickly. He treads that line between conjuring an era and parodying an era with apparent ease.
I'm a little curious about King's choice to depart from the historical record with his narrator. Homer Van Meter died a month after Dillinger in1934, but King has him muse at the beginning of this story about a book that "claims that my old pal died on November 20, 1963—two days before Kennedy—at the ripe old age of sixty, and it wasn't no federal bullet that took him off but a plain old heart attack." I suppose the advantage is that King can frame the story as being the reminiscence of an old associate who knows the true story of Dillinger, lending it a sort of credibility. And as far as a good yarn goes, it really doesn't matter what happened to Van Meter. King could have made up a different associate to tell the story, except that he mentions in a note afterwards that he was drawn to Van Meter precisely for one of the story's most incredible details (that just happens to be supposedly true)—that Van Meter learned how to rope flies with little lassos of thread when he was in Pendleton Reformatory as a youth. A truly weird detail is much better if it's attached to something real, I guess, whereas fictionalizing something so mundane as a date of death pretty much slips by unnoticed.
Sometimes, I've heard fans of Stephen King try to claim that he's overlooked by critics, that he's as good as any of the "classic" writers we study in school. But I don't see it. "The Death of Jack Hamilton" is a fun story, and very well told. But that's all it is. The surface story is the whole story—though this is not a value judgment. I repeat: people who read great literature are not somehow better than people who read entertaining literature. King is not trying to do what, say, Cynthia Ozick or Franz Kafka are trying to do—tell a multiplicity of stories at once, or involve the reader in untying a knot at the center of the story. I'm interested in learning from King what King does well: make the reader see and feel the unfolding of his vivid plots, make the prose fly by, and keep everything straight even as it becomes complicated.
For me, there's only one thing that feels like a clunky mistake in "The Death of Jack Hamilton": the ending. Van Meter sort of sums everything up and reflects that "God makes it all come right in the end, that's what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company" and "we're stuck with what we have, but that's all right; in God's eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way." Guhhhh. The sudden injection of a moral just about ruins the whole thing for me, though I can see that this technique is probably enormously appealing to a good portion of King's vast readership. One of the cherished conventions of literary fiction is that the story not get wrapped up in some tidy package, that the author not ever directly tell you what the story's supposed to be "about." Of course, that's probably why a lot of people hate literary fiction and why it will always possess a certain elitist stink. But I think an ending like this one ends up limiting the story; it doesn't leave anything whatsoever for the reader to do. No point, even, in reflection, because the reflection has been done for us. I like my reading, even when it's just for pleasure, not to be entirely passive. So I'll skip the tidy endings, but I'm still thrilled by the overall delivery.
STORY: "Dick" by Antonya Nelson
FROM: SOME FUN: STORIES AND A NOVELLA
BASICALLY: A woman moves her family from Los Angeles to the wilds of Colorado, but cannot escape the specter of her young son's troubled best friend--nor can she escape what she's really fleeing.
This story falls into a disdained, neglected, and nebulous category of writing I think of—not at all originally, mind you—as "New Yorker fiction." I pretty much never read [anything except the cartoons in] The New Yorker, due to the fact that I have always found it unutterably boring.
There, I said it. Go ahead, blame the internet. Everyone else does.
So either all this reading is turning me into an East Coast effete literary snob, or Antonya Nelson rises above the pack, because this story is quite good. It has a way of enveloping you in its voice and rhythms and creating a wholly believable psychology while not bogging down. And it was indeed originally published in The New Yorker, along with two other pieces in the collection, so maybe now that I am a Mature and Serious Reader of Serious Fiction, I should give the (famous, respected, well-paying, pinnacle-of-writerly-success-representing) magazine another chance.
I bought SOME FUN when Nelson visited the inimitable Bookworks in November 2010. I attended the reading from her new novel BOUND for a class assignment and had no idea who she was or how significant she is in the world of short fiction. I'm sure she was terribly impressed during the question-and-answer period with my inquiry—"I'm not very familiar with your work. Do you write mostly novels, or short stories, or…?" Nonetheless, she answered with complete grace and generosity about her love for the short form and the impossibility of making a living off of it. (And seriously, this woman has like, 7709870222 major awards—as attested to by the cover of this collection—and if she can't make a living at it, well…Geez. But I paid full price for SOME FUN because I am PART of the SOLUTION.)
Being literary fiction, the plot of this story is of secondary importance. I mean, there's a plot—sometimes, I wish authors of literary fiction would remember that there's still supposed to be a plot—but Nelson remembers and it is, actually, interesting in and of itself. After Ann Ponders has hauled her son Cole and her husband Richard off to Colorado to start a fresh new life in the silent, unimpeachable wilderness, Cole's weird best friend Dick, the son of a blue collar couple who raise Rottweilers, runs away. And Ann, who has left L.A. to escape (though she would never really admit it) her deteriorated relationships with her own Alzheimer's-ridden mother and eighteen-year-old daughter, finds herself having to confront this vestige of their former life—the frightening absence of an unhappy twelve-year-old boy whose family she dislikes.
What Nelson does so beautifully with this plot, I think, is to obscure what the story is really about as it's being read. I found myself becoming involved in the mystery of Dick's disappearance and whether he would show up out of the blue one day and whether he would turn out to be dead and how that would crush Cole. And so I was taken a little aback with the suddenness of the story's ending, which doesn't resolve any of this at all. This little boy, Dick, hangs over the whole story and becomes the focus of all kinds of emotions, but he only appears at the beginning and his story has no closure. However, while I was all focused on him, Nelson was quietly telling me this complicated story about Ann, through her own reasonable and believable and relatable voice. And when I go back and look, I see that the plot actually occupies only a small portion of the text. There are pages and pages of Ann thinking about her daughter, her mother, her husband, her son, her neighbors, herself.
"Hate that fucking cat," murmured Ann; the image saving the animal was of it curled in the armpit of her sleeping son. She hated a few other things, such as the way she looked in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, especially when compared with her daughter, who looked beautiful in whatever she wore. What consolation did age provide? Ann wondered. Bragging rights for having arrived at forty-five or sixty or ninety-nine? You didn't come through intact, that much was clear. Moreover, the interesting things happened early, a piece of information Ann was consciously, uncharitably, withholding from her daughter.
This passage, actually, is a fine example of Nelson's ability to lay clues for her reader that don't make sense until later. The story ultimately comes to be about what Ann withholds, even/especially from those who love her. And so, unlike her character, Nelson has placed everything out where we can see it, but the melodic distraction of her own lovely writing and the interest created by this nagging worry about a missing child help to distract us from seeing what's in front of our own eyes.
Which is a trick, I think, that's worth learning.
STORY: "An Unwelcome Guest" by Garth Nix
FROM: TROLL'S-EYE VIEW: A BOOK OF VILLAINOUS TALES, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling – Oh, this book! It is so pretty! Sweet little leafy patterns on the pages and fancy shiny stuff done to the cover.
BASICALLY: A funny fairy-tale reimagining in which a perfectly respectable evil witch must outsmart the machinations of a loophole-exploiting freeloader named Rapunzel.
Well, it's been quite a week. Between Melissa making me think hard thoughts with her smart comments (she actually went and read one of the stories I talked about!!! I am changing the world, one extremely patient and supportive and literate friend at a time!!!) and Mike catching on to my nefarious plot to destroy his life, I really needed a breather. And "An Unwelcome Guest" was just the thing.
Let us ruminate for a moment upon the advantages of a great opening.
"There's a girl in the south tower," reported Jaundice, the witch's marmalade cat. "The same one as almost got in last year."
"Well, go and bite her or something," said the Witch. She was busy stirring a huge bronze cauldron. She had twelve coworkers coming for lunch and was mixing up a batch of jelly that had to be poured into an architectural mold and put in the ice cave before eleven.
Are you ruminating upon this wonderfulness? I certainly did not ruminate while I was reading—I was hooked. Look at the modest characterization that crops up right away (just look at it!). We've got an orange cat named "Jaundice," which is a nice counterpoint to the Witch who never receives a formal name. (This is a tricky thing, I think, in retellings… It often irritates me when an author takes it upon themselves to specify a name for an established fairy tale character. I'm all like, WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT? Unless they do it well, in which case I'm all, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?) By the way, "Jaundice" turns out to be even more tongue-in-cheek than it seems at first, because the cat's real name is Jenny—
"Don't call me Jenny!" spat the cat, her back arching in agitation. "My name is Jaundice! I am the evil servant of a wicked witch!"
The cat-name thing comes up again a little later when Jenny/Jaundice has to explain that the "Fangdeath" she's talking to on the phone is actually Decima's cat, Bluebell. Anyway, the feline companion trope is given new life and so is the witch trope—I love the idea that she's got colleagues and is on a tight schedule. (There's a hilarious moment soon after when the Witch stops stirring for a second and some frogs manage to escape the jelly with "a sudden series of pops.") The tropes themselves are still exploited—we don't have to have these concepts explained to us—but they're employed in such a way that we know this story's going to be funny.
Nix orchestrates his jokes brilliantly. He's got a cat name that's funny unto itself, so we don't look for the next joke ("Fangdeath") that relies on it as a setup. There's the jelly mold thing, which is again funny on its own, so we're not looking for the next punchline that takes advantage of it. He's basically making clever one-offs do double or triple duty in his story. And there are subtler jokes, too—like the fact that the Witch has twelve coworkers coming, meaning they'll have the right number for a traditional coven of thirteen, or Rapunzel's three "suitors" who show up later and get blinded by thorns (in a nod to the original story) and then revert to their natural mice-forms (three blind mice—get it?).
I wasn't totally thrilled by the story's resolution, which involves some sort of not-very-explained shadowy being that's apparently been inhabiting the body of Rapunzel and making her act this way. It just didn't feel necessary to explain the story's events. But the whole thing carried on so well throughout that it didn't really matter. Nix brings in all kinds of fun bits—like Rapunzel's helplessly handwringing parents, some household "dust-fey" on their cockroach steeds, a cornucopia oozing with a wealth of ice cream and lemonade—and keeps the momentum going. It's so entertaining that I almost wish all the stories in this book were Nix's. (But only ALMOST. I'm really looking forward to checking out Neil Gaiman's poetic take on Sleeping Beauty and my beloved Kelly Link's dark Cinderella.)
STORY: "Continuidad de los parques" / "Continuity of Parks" by Julio Cortázar
FROM: INVESTIGACIÓN DE GRAMÁTICA, 2ª ed., by Patricia Vining Lunn & Janet A. DeCesaris (Heinle Cengage Learning, 2007) – yes, this is a Spanish grammar textbook, but I actually think it's really amazingly cool that, among other approaches, it uses fiction to convey an understanding of grammatical concepts / BLOW-UP AND OTHER STORIES by Julio Cortázar, trans. Paul Blackburn (Pantheon, 1967)
BASICALLY: A man is reading a novel in the green velvet chair of his mountain cabin. The characters in the novel are two lovers who must kill the woman's husband--who is found in his mountain cabin by the killer, reading a novel in a green velvet chair.
Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar is known for his bag of tricks—his ability to invoke duality and parallelism, his stories-within-stories, his erasure of time as a barrier. In "Continuidad de los parques" (translated into English as "Continuity of Parks"), he not only does all of this, but he accomplishes it in about 500 words.
Lucky me, I got to read this story in Spanish for school, and then analyze what Cortázar does grammatically. And if you think I'm being sarcastic, you have severely underestimated my level of nerdliness—I think it's one of the more thrilling things I've gotten to do in college. I was already a big admirer of Cortázar, but now I can see something that was previously invisible to me.
What you have to understand is that, unlike English, Spanish has two past tenses. (Trust me, it is one of the many royal pains in the patootie related to Spanish verbs for the native English-speaker.) I won't bore you with the details, but very basically, the imperfect deals with events without a clear beginning or end, or things that occurred habitually, while the preterit deals with actions with a clear beginning/end, things that occurred in a single discrete time. So, you would use the imperfect past tense to say "I went to the store every day," but you'd use the preterit to say "I went to the store today." Both happened in the past, but they express different perspectives on the time involved.
In "Continuidad de los parques," Cortázar does something absolutely brilliant with these two past tenses. He starts out telling the story with the normal mix between the two, setting the scene with imperfect and mentioning some of the particular actions of the protagonist with preterit, exactly as you would expect for "reality." When he shifts into talking about the characters in the novel that the protagonist is reading, he uses the imperfect. This is appropriate because, in a novel, characters are always doing what they are doing at any given point. There is no beginning or end to what happens on, say, page 37; it is endlessly occurring. (For class, we also read a scholarly paper that points out how Spanish-speaking children will use the imperfect when they're talking about what happened in their games of pretend. Neat, yes?)
And THEN. Subtly and exquisitely, after the story's only paragraph break, a change: the world of the novel begins to intersect the "real" world of the reader/protagonist, and the fictional characters begin to act with verbs expressed in the preterit.
You can totally get the coolness and circularity and chill-on-your-neck feeling of this story when reading it in English, but you can't get this beautiful thing that Cortázar does with the verbs.
It reminds me of a kerfuffle that went on last year, when Philip Pullman (author of many great books, including THE GOLDEN COMPASS, one of my all-time favs) dissed the Booker Prize committee for its love of present-tense novels. Although I definitely don't share Pullman's disgust with the "wretched fad" of writing in the present tense, I was very much struck by his commentary on verb tense:
I can't see the appeal at all. To my mind it drastically narrows the options available to the writer. When a language has a range of tenses such as the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, each of which makes other kinds of statement possible, why on earth not use them?
This, to me, is a lovely (if archly-worded) reminder to everyone who wants to manipulate the written word: we each have a set of tools available to us. Cortázar clearly understood how to make his work for him. As the example of "Continuidad de los parques" shows us, these tools go beyond just language itself; they are actually wrapped intimately into the fabric of the particular language we are using. That doesn't mean you have to go out and learn another (though, if you've got the opportunity, why not?), but I do think you should know your own inside out. Get a little grammar, check out etymology, subscribe to the A Word A Day newsletter, whatever. All the richness and depth we can add to our understanding of words, of verbs, of forms and structures and connotations—it all becomes part of what we have the capacity to create.
