On Childish Things - #30

You've gotta love the design of a McSweeney's book.

STORY: "The Aces Phone" by Jeanne DuPrau, illus. Rachell Sumpter

FROM: NOISY OUTLAWS, UNFRIENDLY BLOBS, AND SOME OTHER THINGS THAT AREN'T AS SCARY, MAYBE, DEPENDING ON HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT LOST LANDS, STRAY CELLPHONES, CREATURES FROM THE SKY, PARENTS WHO DISAPPEAR IN PERU, A MAN NAMED LARS FARF, AND ONE OTHER STORY WE COULDN'T QUITE FINISH, SO MAYBE YOU COULD HELP US OUT (McSweeney's, 2006) – eds. Ted Thompson with Eli Horowitz

BASICALLY: A young loner finds a cell phone in a park and discovers that it has a very strange number on speed dial--what comes through the phone isn't a voice, but a wallop of noise and overwhelming emotion. This sound/feeling is composed of individual strands that can be followed to their sources, good or bad. Soon he meets the phone's owner and learns the secret: that the phone's connected to all of the dogs in a 20-block radius of the park, and it's the job of the phone's owner to find the wounded, abused, and hurting dogs and make sure they get help.

When I was in second grade, we used to split up into groups for reading a story and then answering discussion questions. One time we read only part of a story and then were asked, based on what we knew, how the story was going to end. I seem to remember elephants. A baby and its mother? Maybe it was hippos. Anyway, I remember that my answer, while true, didn't exactly please my teacher:

I said that the story was going to end happily (with the baby finding its mom or whatever) because the stories we read always ended happily.

I admit, I still feel a little smug about that response all these years later. I had picked up on a simple cultural truth: that stories for children aren't out for blood. (My rampant cynicism at age seven is a little harder to explain.) Stories for kids aren't trying to undermine trust in the world. They don't try to invoke despair. (Notice I'm saying children here and not young adults—that's a different genre with its own conventions, and this McSweeney's collection is aimed at 4^th to 7^th-graders.) The danger present in most literature for children is highly stylized and eminently capable of being resolved, for the very good reason that we don't want our kiddos to live in abject fear of the world.

So I think it's kind of honest and unusual of Jeanne DuPrau (author of bestseller intermediate novels like THE CITY OF EMBER) to dispense with any sense of calamity in her story. At no point do we feel that the boy, Martin Alonzo, really has anything to worry about. He's intrigued by the sound/feeling that comes through the found cellphone and he has pretty much no trouble talking to the phone's owner, an older lady (prickly but not at all threatening) who he recognizes from the neighborhood. The story mostly consists of Martin learning how to use the phone and what it's for. It's a story about an idea—an idea that, as a sensitive and worried child, I feel sure I would have been interested in.

I, too, knew about animals suffering—unloved stray dogs, mangy neighborhood cats—and I too felt basically helpless about the situation. This story bridges that feeling of helplessness and makes it manageable. It's a fantasy, but one that attempts to resolve an emotion that might already be present in the reader, rather than one that it has raised in the reader. An adventure story, for example, might put the hero in a volcano about to erupt, just so it could have lots of fun explaining how he gets out.

But Martin's tale isn't about unrealistic physical danger. Instead, it deals with psychological transformation, an inward change that's shown through outward action. At the beginning, Martin suffers from a sense of not belonging. 

Martin himself was only passing through [the park] on his way home to get his skates. Skating was what he did after school. He didn't like hanging around at home, in the apartment that was way too small for his big family. It was crowded and noisy, with his four little sisters and brothers always yelling and crying, and crawling all over the place, and his mother always getting after them. He didn't like hanging out with the kids from school, either, because all they wanted to do was play video games at the arcade. Video games made Martin feel like he was trapped in a box. 

On the one hand, I want to mock Martin. Martin, you are so emo! Nobody understands you! …But on the other, it's a pretty authentic emotion. Martin, like many a reader, is trying to figure out his place in society. Just like helplessness against the world's problems, this concern—one of self-realization—must already be present in the reader to have much meaning when the story deals with it.

Ultimately, I'm afraid "The Aces Phone" does suffer a bit from its lack of tension. A little something to make the reader worry about Martin, and therefore feel more involved in the goings-on, would have taken the interest level up a notch. I really have no idea what a ten-year-old would think; I can only tell you how it strikes me as a reader and as a writer. But I do imagine that this is just the right kind of story for a certain kind of person. And I admire a piece of fiction for children that isn't just about embroiling a character in wacky hijinks. DuPrau's story demonstrates the power of a resonant, emotional idea (creatively explored) and she proves that literature for children doesn't have to be insipid or sentimental to be meaningful.

Hey, Give Me a Hand with Story # 4!

Eleven posts?! Come on Lisa, I’ve been remodeling my house. I haven’t always had Internet access. I have three kids. I’m in grad school! I’m working on a zine! My house is on fire! My leg is broken! Children around the world are suffering! People are learning how to skydive and then putting those skills into action! Ten strangers are becoming ten friends! The power of friendship! Amazing! I am just swamped with all the things that are going on!

Must you always be so competent?! Must you always set goals and then follow through on them, not all at the last minute as I do, but in a measured and timely manner?!

Fine.

You have cast down the gauntlet, and I shall accept your challenge. I will read and critique one million stories in one year and write about them. My children will have you to thank for my parental absence. 

Wait, a mere one hundred, you say? Okay, that’s not so bad.

I wrote a review of Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” that I haven’t posted yet, because I thought it missed the point, a point I only realized after writing it. So I’ll rewrite that and post it soon. For now, here’s this.

STORY: “One Arm,” by Yasunari Kawabata.

FROM: House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (Kodansha, 1969)

BASICALLY: A man is allowed to take a girl’s arm home for a night. He does so, spends a romantic evening with it, and then decides to replace his own arm with it.

This is one seriously weird story. I like it. Included in a beautiful paperback-with-a-dust-jacket edition from Kodansha International, with a gorgeous gilt-saturated Klimt-painting cover, this story is sometimes considered a novella, though that’s something of a stretch.

The story begins with an exchange—a female friend offering to loan a man a part of her—her right arm—to take home and spend a night with and even keep if he likes. Perhaps this is a commentary on women loaning some other part of their anatomy while they themselves don’t go with it. Perhaps.

Or perhaps it’s about how romantic even one part of a person you love can be. Again, perhaps.

                   I laid the arm on the bed and sat down beside it. I stroked it gently.

‘How pretty. I like it.’ The arm would be speaking of the bed cover. Flowers were printed in three colors on an azure ground, somewhat lively for a man who lived alone. ‘So this is where we spend the night. I’ll be very quiet.’

In the American movie version of this story, if there ever is one, starring Dane Cook and Michelle Obama’s CGI-altered arm, the script will basically be one joke about hand jobs after another. In this one, there’s no sex, but it’s still kind of erotic in a funny, bizarre way, with descriptions about caressing an arm, that would seem sensual in any story in which the arm was still attached to a woman but that here seems sensual and freaked-out and strangely beautiful.

The arm seems to communicate with the man, sort of telepathically, and as the evening progresses, the man identifies with it more and more as it allows him to access long neglected memories and deeply buried emotions. He identifies with it so much he decides to make it a part of him. Before this can happen, the arm gets pricked by a stray hairpin and bleeds a little and cries out.

Although I think I understand how a woman feels when she gives herself to a man, there is still something unexplained about the act. What is it to her? Why should she wish to do it? Why take the initiative? I could never really accept the surrender, even knowing that the body of every woman was made for it. Even now, old as I am, it seems strange.

They talk as it rains outside. “You were so quiet, I thought you might be asleep.” …Arm. After a time, the man removes his right arm and replaces it with the woman’s.

He loses a part of herself, and the girl loses a part of herself. There is a more perfect union, but individuals are altered forever; pieces of them are gone for good.

In the morning, he rolls over and his old arm startles him when bumps into it in bed. In a panic, thinking of his male blood coursing through the female arm, thinking of the stray limb rolling around in his bed, he rips the woman’s arm from his shoulder, replaces it with his own, and feels it as an act of murder. The woman’s arm turns white and goes motionless and he lunges after it, hoping he hasn’t destroyed it, that it isn’t dead, that he hasn’t done the unthinkable.

This is magical realism, Japanese-style. This is Gogol’s “The Nose” approached seriously, almost erotically. This is perhaps a literary interpretation of that bizarre syndrome where people thing their own limbs aren’t their own. This is…well, it’s just beautiful. Unsettling and beautiful. The aspects of conquest and ownership and effacement that inevitably enter in some form and to some degree into even the best of relationships, laid bare, reduced to even less than to two people. (Perhaps that has something to do with the history male perspective of women as something less, too.) I can’t begin to say that I’ve got this thing completely figured out. I suspect that this author’s views on women could be a book all their own, as this collection’s title story, which I also read, has to do with a whorehouse where the women are all drugged into sleep and old men come by special invitation to be with them—again with the distance.

The writing is beautiful and poetic and imagistic, and page-turning. Kawabata, as translated here by Yukio Mishima, is a gorgeous read, and highly recommended, worth finding, worth buying, worth an arm or a leg.