What a Pack of Lies - #19

STORY: "My First Love Affair" by Sholom Aleichem

FROM: MY FIRST LOVE AFFAIR AND OTHER STORIES (Dover, 2002) Trans. Curt Leviant

BASICALLY: An impoverished young tutor has a pupil so lazy that he must write love letters on the pupil's behalf to the pupil's fiancé. In the process, a heartfelt romance blossoms, but as the wedding day draws near, how will the poor tutor confess that he is the one the fiancé truly loves?

1. He Tantalizes and Taunts with Titles

In my copy, "My First Love Affair" spans pages 129-146. What I'm saying is, it's not that long. But Aleichem divides the story into eleven numbered sections, each with its own subheading. They have sly titles like "My Boss' Tall Tales Rock Me to Sleep" and "Material for an Epistolary Romance." (Today's divided story write-up is inspired by this format, you see.) It's an interesting choice—for one thing, I think it mirrors, a little bit, the idea that the story unfolds for the protagonist letter by letter as he writes to his pupil's fiancé and reads her responses. But letter-writing doesn't actually come into play until the story's sixth section. Section 1 discusses how the "power of pull" (knowing the right people) helped the tutor obtain his post, Section 2 covers the "tall tales" of his boss, Section 3 includes a meditation on types of liars and tells us which one his boss is, Section 4 is self-explanatory—"The Boy Eats Like an Army While his Tutor Starves," and Section 5 has the pupil blackmail his tutor into playing checkers and "Sixty-Six" instead of conducting lessons. As short as it is, this story has an episodic feel that allows the reader to be entertained by each separate foible that's satirized.

2. Some of What's Worth Knowing

Sholom Aleichem was the pseudonym of Shalom Rabinovitz (1859–1916), an important writer of Yiddish plays, stories, and novels, whose works inspired FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. (You know the wry voice of Tevye that dominates FOTR? That's straight out of Aleichem.) He is totally so much fun, you guys. "My First Love Affair" lampoons while it humanizes and wraps suspense around a punch line. What Aleichem handles most masterfully is voice—his stories, though written and literary, read like oral tales. This quality reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen, many of whose stories (like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid") are so powerful and timeless that they frequently get lumped in with tales that possess a true oral heritage (e.g., "Little Red Riding Hood"). Aleichem reads nothing like Andersen, but he has a great gift for channeling a humorous, self-deprecating personality that seems archetypally Jewish.

3. How to Build a Joke

Writing teachers love to harp on about avoiding the pitfall of a bad ending. They are not wrong! If an entire story is built on weird occurrence after weird occurrence, ending it with "And then he woke up!" (or something equally abrupt) will make the reader feel cheated and angry, as though the writer has been too lazy to wrap up his own conundrums. Similarly, a punch line at the end, while good for a momentary laugh, tends to have an overall deflating effect. A punch line suggests that the story wasn't important in its own right, but served only to set up the laugh at the end. And "My First Love Affair" builds gloriously, but to an ending that is basically just a joke. It's a funny joke—I did, actually and truly, laugh out loud when I realized what was going on—but still just a joke. And yet, it works. Here, the story is not deflated, it doesn't feel like a cheat, and I'm fascinated by how Aleichem pulls this off.

It goes back, in part, to those five introductory sections I mentioned above. By the time we reach the question of the letters in Section 6, the tutor is a fully-realized character. His fixation on his own experiences leading up to the main conflict—how he got the job, the state of his poverty, the way that everyone in this well-off household continuously spouts lies—keeps the reader's focus firmly grounded in his point of view, wondering how events will affect him. This focus continues as the tutor begins ghost-writing his pupil's love letters and intensifies as the tutor begins to worry about the approaching nuptials. If Aleichem had begun with Section 6, when the tutor first begins writing to the fiancé, the reader wouldn't have understood what was at stake for the tutor and become invested in his emotional journey into love.

4. I Don't See What You Did There

In other entries on this blog (see here and here, for example), I've referred to the way an author seems to distract us from what she's doing in order to pull off something else. It is hard to see how the distraction is done and, precisely for this reason, so gratifying when it's done well. When reviewers refer to an author's "sleight of hand," this is probably part of what they mean. Aleichem's sleight of hand has him creating a suspenseful situation in which the audience wants to know, along with the narrator, how the tutor's love will come to light. Two entire sections—"9. The Wedding Preparations—My Foolish Dreams" and "10. The Guests are Welcomed"—are devoted to increasing this suspense. Wrapped in a cloud of suspense in one direction, the reader is far less likely to see a joke coming from the other.

There's another reason the joke works, too. Throughout the story, the narrator gripes about the ease with which everyone, his pupil and his boss and his boss's wife, all tell lies: "[My pupil] looked so innocent that I suddenly felt like spitting into his face and shouting: 'God Almighty. What Liars you people are. One lie after another. One lie greater than the next!'" He just barely comments, however, on his own speedy slide into dishonesty. When the punch line hits at the story's end, it completes the cycle of lies and takes it to its most absurd level. This is the really brilliant thing, the technique to note. Instead of undermining the story, the final punch line unifies it. 

Aleichem makes it look easy, but that's just more sleight of hand.

Dormouse Dreaming - #18

STORY: "How's Life Treating You, Viskovitz?" by Alessandro Boffa

FROM: YOU'RE AN ANIMAL, VISKOVITZ! (Vintage 2003), Trans. John Casey with Maria Sanminiatelli, Illus. Roz Chast

BASICALLY: Viskovitz takes innumerable forms. As a dormouse, he wakes painfully from his delicious hibernatory dreams to forage for acorns. He steals a nap to relish a few extra moments of dream world pleasure with his imaginary mistress, but his real world and his dream world end up colliding in the most surprising manner possible.

Oh, I do wish I had written this. "How's Life Treating You, Viskovitz?" fuses a Platonic cave of shadows with a world-weary dormouse narrator with multiplicitous dreamworld realities with wise and hilarious commentary. Viskovitz awakens as a dormouse and longs only to sleep again, grumbling in a manner both elevated and ridiculous. In his self-directed dreams, he has invented for himself a perfect dormouse companion named Ljuba (meaning "love"), but she's starting to get a bit querulous, complaining that Viskovitz treats her like a doll and doesn't let her fulfill her own desires.

Meanwhile, Viskovitz muses on the nature of reality with a distinctly dormouse philosophy. He notes that he had chosen his ugly, "depressing" mate Jana "Because only a life made up of boredom and frustration leads to fulfilling and magnificent dreams. And those are the moments that count. If the hereafter—that is, wakefulness—is hell, then life—that is, dreaming—will be paradise. Not the other way around."

Got that? Because when Ljuba suddenly enters Viskovitz's real life and reveals the role she's had in his dreams all this time, the whole philosophy is upended. But it's okay; Viskovitz gets his blissfully happy ending.

This is a story that turns on a bit of a trick rather than a plot (and part of the trick is that you think it's one trick, but it turns out to be another). I love fiction that works this way, though probably it's not for everyone. Still, there's one particular technique Boffa employs that I'd like to point out as potentially useful. Part of the charm, and much of the humor of this very short story stems from the way the author inhabits his character's point of view. On the one hand, the story is a fable, and like the animals of Aesop, Viskovitz seems very human. But Boffa interjects a number of great details particular to dormouse sensibility:

• "As my metabolism got into gear I was tortured by pains in my joints, by dehydration, by the distress of every single cell. It was the agony of reawakening, of a torment that would last another four months until the next hibernation. At a time like this there's only hunger that gives you the strength to get to your feet—the knowledge that if you don't fatten up, you won't be able to get back to sleep."
  
• "My den was the former nest of a woodpecker hollowed out of a sessiliflore oak." As far as I can tell, this is not only scientifically correct, but also is so perfect that an old dormouse would know the type of tree he lives in, just like a human would know a ranch-style from a Colonial.
  
• "The problem with Ljuba was that she never wanted to do with me those things that boy and girl dormice do in dreams—that is, sleep."
  
• And my very, very favorite line of all… "I greeted her with a zi-zi, our dormouse love-call. Then, coming down from a banana tree, I approached, gorgeous and indolent as a rodent god."
  

I would like that last one on a t-shirt. And a bumper sticker.  And tattooed as a tramp stamp.  Anyway, it greatly enriches Boffa's tale that he folds facts about real dormice into his narrative voice and uses them to advance the story. Even when our characters are, for whatever reason, left unrounded, it might be worthwhile to flesh them out with a little bit of perspective. Ask yourself, In what ways does this particular character view the world that are wholly different from how any other character would view it?  The answer might add a bit of texture... And I don't think I'm alone when I say that of anything, we want our stories to be interesting.

Between Two Places - #10

STORY: "Two Kingdoms" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

FROM: THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO TRIED TO KILL HER NEIGHBOR'S BABY: SCARY FAIRY TALES by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Penguin, 2009) – Here's the review I read a year ago that made me buy the book. Good stuff!

BASICALLY: A sick woman's dreamy experience of transmigration. Lina travels from the hospital with her new "husband" Vasya to an oddly tranquil land, a kind of holding zone where all her needs are met, but she cannot contact her young son or her mother. A foreign kingdom awaits her on the other side of a sparkling river.

Have you ever gotten to take a fiction workshop? That's where you write a short story, and then the whole group reads it (or sometimes listens to you read it) and then they give you feedback. Your characters are flat, I don't understand the part where the hero starts rollerblading, maybe three scenes of ground-up fire ants being snorted is excessive—that sort of thing. There's simply nothing like hearing a roomful of honest-ish advice about your art to open your eyes to your own failings. I actually love workshopping, but here's the crucial thing to know: only some of the enormous value of the process comes from what's actually said by other workshop members.

That's because, while feedback can range willy-nilly from the quite genuinely insightful to the batshit-crazy-did-you-even-READ-it? bad, most falls somewhere in the unexceptional middle. You've got your people who maybe want to say something useful, but don't know what they're doing, and the kids who are just learning the power of Disdaining Others as a route to self-love, and a whole lot of people who remember little rule-nuggets (whether from teachers, magazine articles, blog posts, writing books, or This One Writer Friend Who Really Deserves to Be a Lot More Famous But It's All About Who You Know Anyway) and then apply them, like a yardstick, to everything they meet. (…I'm not knocking the rules, by the way, just their one-size-fits-all application.)

So, anyway, all this is a long-winded way to say that I sometimes like to amuse myself by imagining what fiction workshop types might say about any given published short story. I think this one's a good candidate because its otherworldliness makes it appear simplistic. Throughout, symbols seem at first obvious, but then a little confused. Culled mainly from my own pessimistic worldview, with perhaps a sprinkle of Amazon reviews thrown in, here's a handy workshop-style breakdown of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "Two Kingdoms":

HYPOTHETICAL COMMENT	IS IT DESERVED?
I like how your story was kind of like a fairy tale about how someone died.	There's certainly a simplicity to the prose, and a dreamlike procession of events, so calling this fairy-tale-like is reasonable. Of course, it's not structured like a fairy tale—we begin with the protagonist Lina on a plane, and then we move backwards and find out how she got there from the hospital, and then forwards until the story ends with Lina progressing to the beautiful but remote kingdom on the other side of the river. So that's kind of interesting, right? To lend the feeling of a fairy tale, you don't have to match the style in every regard—a modern version needn't start with the equivalent of Once upon a time and move in a straightforward path.
The reveal that Lina is dead didn't surprise me at all.	This was my first impression, too, until I went back and re-read the opening. It turns out that I am not incredibly clever for realizing right away that Lina's airplane trip is some sort of transitional journey between life and afterlife; the author clearly wants this to be understood. Assuming the translation is faithful, the title alone—"Two Kingdoms"—suggests the connection, and also the very first line: "In the beginning they flew through a celestial paradise, through a glorious blue landscape and over thick curly clouds." If Petrushevskaya isn't trying to surprise us, she must have another purpose. Not that most people in a workshop would ever go back and read a story for a second time. Heavens no. If you find someone who does, be nice to them. Seriously. People who pay attention are invaluable.
Some of the imagery didn't seem to fit, or it's too obvious. Like when you said, "But later, later [Vasya] would take them away, her and her son, and her honorable mom, too, to an earthly paradise far far away, somewhere on the shores of a warm sea, amid marble columns, where they had—was it little elves?—flying about. In short, she'd live like Thumbelina from the fairy tale." So first you beat us over the head with the fairy tale aspect, but then what does Thumbelina have to do with it?	What are cherubim if not little fat flying elves? I take this as sly reference to the way in which our conceptions of the afterlife tend to rely on fairy tale tropes. Lina accepts what is happening to her, but she filters it entirely through the lens of her earthly life. That's why she thinks of Vasya as her "new husband," though "no one noticed him," and when she realizes on the plane that nothing hurts, she figures that "they must have given her some painkillers." It's also why she reaches for what to call the beings of "an earthly paradise" that just happens to be nothing like Earth. As for Andersen's fairy tale, Wikipedia mentions some interesting potential connections, like Maria Tatar's analysis that Thumbelina seeks transfiguration and redemption through the lens of Christian suffering, resurrection, and salvation. Similar themes, very different treatments. But Petrushevskaya creates a connection outside of the world of the story that both ties it to the real world and adds depth. Some folks in fiction workshops have a hard time telling the difference between the random noise of an unhoned draft and the difficult but deliberate details of a textured story. (I mean, it's actually really hard to tell, sometimes. If we already know a story is good—because it's published, because it's covered with about a million laudatory quotes, whatever—it's not that hard to find some justification. It's quite another to see the shimmery bits in a pile of classmates' Xeroxes.)
Is Vasya supposed to be an angel? How is it that he works in a bookstore he inherited from his aunt? If Lina's supposed to be dead, how come she worries about dying in the hospital and thinks, "This way I'll live" and then she can bring her son to her? If these are symbols, I'm not clear on what they're supposed to mean.	As readers, we want to understand what's going on. We want the writer, if not to make everything plain, then at least to provide all the necessary clues for us to figure it out. Even if we're readers of literary fiction, all highbrow, we still want to GET IT when it comes to a story. But of course, the stories that stay with us, the great literatures, are the ones that hold back just enough, the ones that make us think and wonder. Petrushevskaya doesn't provide us with easy answers, but it's not the scattered mish-mash of student writing—there's simply no one-to-one correspondence between symbols and the thing symbolized. Everything is suggestive rather than definite, but there's also nothing missing. You can come up with a hypothesis about the meanings of Vasya and the airplane and the hospital and everything else by using only what you find in the story itself. It's only poorly-executed symbolism that requires the reader to help make it up. And then someone else can come up with a differing hypothesis, and maybe there's something to back it up, as well. But the story bears up. And that's why I'm doing this blog. To figure this stuff out. Not that "Two Kingdoms" is the awesomest bestest story I've ever read, but it's good. It bears up well under poking. And it's got something to show us about creating a story with the universality and lightness of a fairy tale, but that reflects our modern preoccupations in an almost childlike language.