Three Differents and One Menace - #46

STORY:  “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” by Justin Scott

FROM:  MANHATTAN NOIR, ed. Lawrence Block (Akashic Books, 2006)

BASICALLY:  Bob has finally found the New York apartment of his dreams, complete with unparalleled view of the Empire State Building.  He’s ready to buy, but the owner’s playing hardball with an exorbitant price.  Bob’s friend the real estate broker is helping as much as possible--but the friend’s newfound obsession with exacting revenge on his supposedly evil ex-wife is starting to get creepy.  A suspenseful tale with a deadly climax and a surprising final twist.

This is a story that fairly cries out to be broken down, like so many Lego castles, into its component parts.  I’m kind of obsessed with structure you guys!  Not because it’s my favorite thing about literature though—quite the opposite.  The reason I’m always wanting to know how stories are put together is that my instinctual understanding of the mechanism is precisely nada.

Now, lovely prose, that I get.  I’m making no claims to an immortal style of my own, you understand, but I do think I have a good strong gut feeling about what works and what has quality and how words sound nice together.  Sometimes I can even coax these qualities into my own sentences!  But large-scale narrative structure—like plotting, pacing, and overall balance—doesn’t come naturally to me in the slightest.

That’s why a story like “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” is such a boon to a writer like me.  It’s entertaining and interesting, and yet simple and formulaic enough that I can study it to understand why writer Justin Scott chose to include the elements that he did and how he knew where to put them.

I feel like I’ve got to insert a caveat, here—I definitely don’t see learning to write to a formula as one of my writerly goals.  (Noooooo!  I am lofty and high-falutin’!)  It’s not that I think formula fiction has no value, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to start penning popular thrillers; that’s not what I read and it’s not where my passion lies.  However, I do want to learn how literary formulas function.  Why are they so pleasing to readers?  What effect do certain narrative choices have?  It’s that whole “you have to learn the rules before you can break them” thing—not that you have to do anything at all, or do it in the way that I do it.  I’m just groping along in the dark, here.

I’ve run across a couple of links lately that have given me a lot to mull over in terms of formula and structure.  First, it was this breakdown by Michael Moorcock, a respected science fiction writer who’s written many a non-formulaic novel in addition to his bald-faced moneymakers.  In it, he explains his approach to churning out a 60,000-word potboiler in a mere three days.  That discovery led me to this method by Lester Dent, successful pulp writer of yore, for writing a 6,000-word short story.  Let’s take a look at some of the ways “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” (or “TMBAINY,” as I shall henceforth call it) accords with their principles.  By the way, some serious spoilers ahead.

So, if you look at Lester Dent’s method, you’ll see he starts right in with some good specifics about what your unique formula-driven story will need:  

1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO

One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell. It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.

I wasn’t sure what Dent meant by “different” in this context, but it seems to make sense once I apply the concepts to “TMBAINY.”  The murderer, unhinged real estate broker Tommy King, uses in this instance a scalpel.  As murder weapons go, it’s not especially shocking and in no way over the top, but neither is it the kind of thing you hear about every day.  It’s, y’know, different.  And author Justin Scott amps up the interest level by having Tommy talk about his fascination beforehand:

“I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel. What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught— What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”

At the time, this is fairly casual.  Of course, once you know that Tommy does try to cut his ex-wife’s heart out, it’s a bit more grim.

I wouldn’t say that Tommy is seeking anything especially different in this story, but he’s not clearly a villain until most of the way through.  As Bob the protagonist’s friend and real estate broker, Tommy’s goal (revenge against his ex-wife) is meaningful because it remains hidden until the climax.

Next, Dent calls for “a different locale.”  (And check out his tricks to convince editors you’re familiar with any random faraway place.)  (I could spend forever musing about the ways such shenanigans have become both easier and harder in the Internet Age.  But I’ll spare you.)  This story takes place in New York.  New York!  Pretty-well-known slash not-so-different.  There must be a million and one other stories that take place in that city.  Yet I think Scott’s New York serves the same function that an exotic and thrilling locale would for Dent.  The main thing is that it’s absolutely integral to the story.  New York itself is intertwined with the protagonist’s goal—everyone everywhere wants to live in a nice place, but in a gargantuan city where real estate is scarce, apartment buying achieves epic importance.  The other main thing is the specificity, how place permeates this story in its smallest details.  The intractable owner, for example, insists that his apartment’s a great investment because

“Nothing will bring it down. It didn’t go when the Towers went down. I was watching on CNN thinking, Oh, God, the Empire State Building’s next, I’ll never get my price without the view. Then I realized the terrorists don’t know from shit about the Empire State Building. You gotta be a New Yorker to love the Empire State Building—sure enough, they went for the Pentagon.”

Now, this is an excellent passage for several reasons, but most fundamentally it melds the story’s What to its Where.  Plot and setting are about as elementary as narrative components come—but when they’re well-united, as they are here, they add a powerful dimension to the storytelling.  (And I don’t see how the truth of this is limited to pulp or formulaic writing.)

Last of all, Dent says a menace has to hang like a cloud over the hero.  This mystified me at first, but then I looked at “TMBAINY” and realized that a certain feeling—yea, one might even say a menace—does hang over the whole story.  Bob, as protagonist, is intently focused on his own goal: he wants that apartment something fierce.  The importance of his desire is increased by the New York setting, an external impetus, and also by his growing sense that in his life, he’s always accepted second-best—the lesser apartment, the lesser wife, the lesser life.  And then even the guy selling the apartment suggests that maybe he’d be better off buying an apartment in Brooklyn.  Infuriating!  So Bob’s got forces within and forces without pushing him to do whatever it takes to get this apartment.  He’s even willing to spend time with Tommy King, sleazeball extraordinaire.

Bob and Tommy are presented as friends, but it seems fairly clear that it’s a friendship based on, to put it nicely, practicality.  Bob is unnerved by Tommy’s ex-wife fixation and this feeling only grows throughout the story as Tommy’s fixation seems to balloon out into a real desire to do harm.  Bob also finds himself seriously doubting Tommy’s loyalty—is he showing the apartment to someone else who’ll buy it out from under him?  The story’s focus is the acquisition of the apartment, but the thing with Tommy is like a gadfly that won’t let up.  As a reader, I felt a mounting anxiety about it—I didn’t know how Tommy’s violent impulses would end up affecting Bob’s goal, but I could sense that something was going to have to give.  Of course, this only works if the two separate strands end up crashing into one another.  If that had never happened, if it had turned out that Tommy King’s ex didn’t actually figure in the story at all, it would have been baffling.  In a short story, what’s there needs to get used.

That’s something Michael Moorcock says in his advice on writing sword-and-sorcery action to formula.  I haven’t talked much about Moorcock’s approach, mainly because it’s designed to apply to a short novel rather than a short story (and even Dent’s method is meant for a much longer story than “TMBAINY”).  But one bit from Moorcock stands out because it happens to be the main way in which “TMBAINY” fails.

Moorcock says,

You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other.

It’s the thing about cohering that matters.  In “TMBAINY,” the conflict comes to a head with Bob humiliating himself by borrowing money from his working-class parents, who have painstakingly saved it to retire on, but then it doesn’t even matter because the owner’s already sold to a woman who wants a “pied-a-terre for her boyfriend.”  The woman just happens to be Tommy King’s ex-wife.  She has no idea that Tommy’s even involved, she just loved the place at first sight—but he is literally lying in wait for her.  As she tours her new piece of real estate, he attacks and kills her.  Bob has guessed Tommy’s plan, but he hesitates just a moment too long—fully aware that her murder would mean that “the price of that apartment was going to plummet.”

She dies.  And Bob does get the apartment, which brings us to the problem with the story’s cohesion.  Bob finds that he can’t enjoy his wonderful new apartment because everywhere he looks, he sees this woman’s ghost.  Literally.

Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me…“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”

My big problem with this part of the ending is that it just doesn’t fit.  There’s been no indication that we’re in anything but the mundane world—now, suddenly, I’m supposed to accept a supernatural judgment?  Irascible apartment owners cohere with sleazy real estate brokers, and big-city apartment hunters cohere with ex-wives, and excellent views of the Empire State Building cohere with human motivation—but none of that coheres with the sudden appearance of a mournful, guilt-inducing ghost.

When I re-read “TMBAINY,” I realized that the author had actually mentioned ghosts numerous times before the ending.  The guy selling the apartment, for example, mentions that the only thing that brings down prices on apartments like his are hauntings.  And the word gets used metaphorically more than once.  So Scott clearly made an effort for the ghost thing to cohere.  But it fell flat; the departure was too great.  I think he would have had to include some early hint that supernatural events actually could occur in the universe of the story—lacking that, protagonist punished by his own guilt in the form of a ghost just feels like a cop-out.

Luckily, that’s not quite where the story ends.  The true ending has a much better twist, and I think I’ll leave it unspoiled for you.

Even for this major flaw, though, “TMBAINY” is a really fun little story.  To me, that’s the big power of formulaic approaches—even when other elements aren’t as strong as they could be, the formula points to the pieces that make a reader want to keep reading.  Most people, I believe, would vastly prefer an exciting and interesting tale with some slightly wooden characters and a few weird plot turns to a beautifully-composed, carefully-rendered story in which nothing seems to happen.  And to me, it’s not an either-or proposition—the very best fiction serves up pleasure right alongside art.

Poetry Its Own Logic - #27

STORY: "Leopard Arms" by Leni Zumas

FROM: FAREWELL NAVIGATOR (Open City Books, 2008)

BASICALLY: A dreamy and unsettling account, as told by a gargoyle, of the occupants of the Leopard Arms apartments in Brooklyn. To save a neglected child with tonsillitis, he'll have to break the rules he learned in gargoyle school.

"Leopard Arms" isn't like any of the other stories so far twiddled apart here on YoOHS. Much stranger and harder to categorize than, say, "The Last Rabbit", its experimental elements mean we're dealing with a new species of short fiction. It's far more of an actual story than Lydia Davis' experimental "The Family", but it's not even trying to do what "Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian" was going for—and so I find myself less sure than normal what to make of it.

I either liked "Leopard Arms" or I didn't. One of those two things. The jury's still out. Could go either way. But since it's trying something that feels fresh and weird, I lean toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.

I liked how it's episodic—a simpler structure that doesn't require such a tight control on continuity between scenes. To open, for example, the gargoyle narrator introduces the "new family" that "is taking the place of the woman who choked on a peanut." Then, following a section break, the gargoyle gives his backstory and outlook—

The word you know me by is from gargouille, the French for throat. A throat can sing a tune, swallow milk, be sliced wide open. Down throats go slender needles aimed at human hearts. 

Another section break, and now for a moment we see the new family, the young daughter "pacing along each new wall to listen," but then the camera swings outside to show a passing bus full of tourists and swoops back in to show the reactions of building residents like Mrs. Megrim and "the watcher."

So Zumas builds up her story stroke by stroke. It's how a lot of TV shows work—a whole tangle of subplots get advanced at once by moving an inch on one, then switching to another. And of course they all interact. Part of the appeal of a show or a story with a large cast is our involvement and interest in their individual lives. When they inevitably conflict, fall in love, form friendships, and make enemies of one other, we have a sense of complexity because we are intimately familiar with all the separate points of view. (I love shows like The Good Wife or True Blood or Boardwalk Empire for this, but look for it in your favorite ensemble dramas. You'll probably start seeing it everywhere.)

While I think Zumas creates a narrator that's just perfect for giving voice to this episodic structure—a gargoyle is the ultimate watcher of all and sundry—something's missing. She either doesn't try to or isn't successful at binding all her strands together. The threads that follow the collector and the watcher and the flautist, while stuffed full of lovely poetic non sequiturs, don't do much that I found satisfying. They're connected, but the connections don't bear fruit. The scenes are well-larded with striking imagery, yes—the shame collector's senile grandmother phoning him, the watcher's bittersweet longing for a shark—but in the end, are used only as elaborate set pieces. I felt like the peripheral episodes on which the story spent so much time didn't signify much to the main story about a neglected little girl finding a mother-substitute in her curmudgeonly neighbor.

So I don't like that. Except that I can appreciate how this story eschews narrative structure for its own kind of poetic logic. Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of poetry for school, lately, and so I feel sympathetic or attuned to the lushness of strange words arranged just to be fascinating…Even though the scenes didn't satisfy me in terms of story, there's still something about their eccentricity, their sense of being assembled of odds and ends, that, surprisingly, ties them together enough to make them feel like more than they individually are.

Compressed Malevolence - #21

STORY: "Sredni Vashtar" by Saki (H.H. Munro) – You can Google this one.

FROM: INCREDIBLE TALES (Dell, 1966)

BASICALLY: A sickly orphan boy is denied every possible pleasure by the sanctimonious relative with whom he's been sent to live. But he has a secret: a polecat-ferret in a wooden hutch, hidden at the back of an old forgotten toolshed. In his misery, he worships the beast and plies it with gifts like a god. And of his deity he asks only one small favor...

This story is wound tight as a watch spring. It's very short—under 1800 words—but it packs a wallop of suspense and a satisfying ending into its few pages. A search of them thar internets reveals that it's been adapted into operas and films and whatnot, and I have to wonder if its power to seize the imagination of others has to do as much with its spareness and restraint as with the merits of its own plot.

What I mean is that ten-year-old Conradin and his cousin Mrs. De Ropp are set up very clearly and immediately in opposition, but the details of their relationship are only sketched in. 

Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin's cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things—such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago. 

Saki's opening is part JANE EYRE and part Tom & Jerry; we are able to understand this clash so well and so immediately because it hits on a number of relatable archetypal conflicts—young vs. old, weak vs. strong, orderly vs. imaginative, restriction vs. liberty, etc. The story as written is missing nothing, yet it could be easily elaborated upon in other versions.

Once Saki has his protagonist in place, opposed by a mortal enemy, he sets up the stakes that will bring things to a head. Conradin has two secret pets, "a ragged-plumaged Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet," and the ferret. The former is merely something he loves, but the latter becomes something much more. 

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion…Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman's religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. 

Check out the formality of Saki's language. There's often the sense, in writing circles, that you can be the kind of writer who assembles elaborate and elevated sentences, or you can be the kind who goes for the punch in the gut. But Saki demonstrates that you can be both.

Once Saki has shown how important the animals are to the love- and pleasure-starved Conradin, chiefly through summary and telling, his next step is to have Mrs. De Ropp do the most horrible thing she can—that is, to take them away. First, she sells the hen. 

With her short-sighted eyes she peered at Conradin, waiting for an outbreak of rage and sorrow, which she was ready to rebuke with a flow of excellent precepts and reasoning. But Conradin said nothing: there was nothing to be said. Something perhaps in his white set face gave her a momentary qualm, for at tea that afternoon there was toast on the table, a delicacy which she usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him; also because the making of it "gave trouble," a deadly offence in the middle-class feminine eye. 

If Saki had skipped the bit about the hen, which, after all, isn't vital to the plot, he would have lost this marvelous opportunity for building suspense. Just like Mrs. De Ropp, we would expect Conradin to have a reaction to the loss of something we've been told he loves so dearly. The fact that he doesn't hints that something much bigger is coming, a foreshadowing sharpened by the "momentary qualm."

Something else happens in this scene: there's a turn in the story. Up till this point, Conradin has been merely a victim, suffering under the thumb of Mrs. De Ropp. But at this (emotionally) brutal act, something changes. And Saki creates this turn in two important ways.

1. He specifically doesn't TELL us that it's taken place. Saki's not at all averse to telling, as the story's first half demonstrates, but here, he's curiously silent. That, in itself, speaks volumes.
   
2. For the first time in the story, Saki includes dialogue:
   
   "I thought you liked toast," she exclaimed, with an injured air, observing that he did not touch it.
   
   "Sometimes," said Conradin.
   
   I absolutely love the subtlety of this. It had never occurred to me before that dialogue could serve this purpose. But in the compressed space of this story, those two little lines break the narrative flow. For the first time, we hear the voice of the protagonist—and there's a LOT he's not saying. The lines become a hinge between the two parts of the story, representing structurally the change that has occurred in Conradin.
   

As Saki unfolds his climax (Mrs. De Ropp realizes something remains in the toolshed and goes in after it) and the aftermath (which you can read for yourself—seriously, just Google the story—but suffice it to say that it's deliciously grisly in an understated way), he evokes a sort of supernatural menace through equally subtle means. For example, Conradin's guardian is described as "Mrs. De Ropp" only once more after their conversation. After that, she becomes merely "the Woman" (a seed planted in the above quote about religion), shedding her human identity and becoming an object that can be destroyed.

In the story's second half, Saki also begins repeating the ferret's exotic name. In fact, "Sredni Vashtar" comes up five times in a page and a half; its increase is like an incantation, mirroring the story's heightening tension. Mrs. De Ropp loses her name as the ferret god comes into his own.

"Sredni Vashtar" is an entertaining story of suspense founded on fairly straightforward principles: archetypal conflict, stakes, setback, climax, aftermath. But its ability to thrill, to evoke a sense of wonder, comes from subtler techniques. The ending is made possible by the way the text—its structure and its content—unifies the uncanny with the mundane. Saki is a fine example of enjoyable storytelling compressed to its fundamentals.