Your Story Is a Place - #31

STORY: "Death by Landscape" by Margaret Atwood

FROM: WILDERNESS TIPS (Doubleday, 1991)

BASICALLY: Reflecting on her valuable collection of landscape paintings, displayed in a new apartment now that she's widowed, a woman remembers the fateful summer of her thirteenth year, when a friend mysteriously disappeared while the two of them were alone during a camp expedition.

This is a story with lots to teach, if only I could figure out what. Seriously, it's seamless—my description above of the story's plot doesn't even begin to do it justice. Atwood presents a childhood incident in such a way that she's able to evoke the entire course of a woman's life and the emotional reality the woman has never been able to deal with. I came away from "Death by Landscape" feeling as though I had read a Greek tragedy or watched a heartbreaking documentary, even though the story only portrays this woman—Lois—in youth and (briefly) in old age. Two stops along a whole lifetime, and yet it's enough. We feel as though we understand. While the story isn't crushingly sad, there's an emotional impact, a sense of years collapsed into a few paragraphs.

You might remember that in story #28, I was all like, Realism? Meh—whatevs. And yet here is a profoundly real-seeming story that totally enthralls me. I mean, that's not to take anything away from Bezmozgis—I was serious when I said "Tapka" is well-written, and absolutely the right kind of story for the right kind of audience—but I do think it's interesting that I had such different reactions to what is pretty much the same genre; these are both pieces of literary fiction that deal with a Significant Childhood Incident. Obviously, the writer whose techniques I'd like to emulate is the one whose work resonates for me when I read it. And Atwood…I can see that I need to read a lot more of her.

Just another indication, friends, that we should cast our nets widely. We never know what's going to strike a chord. I, for example, am not a reader of realistic fiction! Until I am.

So, what was so effective about Atwood's story for me?

Margaret Atwood seems to have a lot of tricks up her sleeve when it comes to making her small story seem huge. Like the author of story #29, she plays around with present tense and past tense—except that she actually does it well and not quite like you'd expect. Instead of just using present tense for Lois-as-an-old-woman and past tense for Lois-as-a-girl, Atwood complicates the relationship of these two versions of Lois by putting part of the childhood experience—maybe the most important part, the part that revolves around the disappearance of Lois' friend—in present tense. This connects it to the present tense used at the story's beginning and end to show old-woman-Lois, and (like I talked about with story #29) it moves the story's camera into a greater intimacy with the character.

Atwood also just writes really beautifully. A monumentally unhelpful observation, I know. Oh, I can hear you exclaiming, if you'd just told me I was supposed to write beautifully, I would've tried that. But how to quantify style? It's not that Atwood's writing is especially lush or poetic (though she is also a poet, and a good one); it's more that she writes fluidly. All those mechanics everyone harps on, from sentence variation to strong verbs, turn out to recede into the background when they're employed well. Atwood's sentences are so consistently well-constructed that you don't even really notice them. Instead, you keep tumbling forward into the story.

And I think that's a key to the power of "Death by Landscape." Because those beautiful sentences that flow so nicely and naturally aren't just telling the surface story of the events leading up to and away from the disappearance of Lois' friend; they're also telling another story about Lois and what the events mean to her. Not directly, though. If Atwood had come right out and said, "Lucy's disappearance bothered Lois for the rest of her life," no one would care. But look at this paragraph: 

However, there were things Lois knew that Lucy did not. Lucy scratched the tops off all her mosquito bites and had to be taken to the infirmary to be daubed with Ozonol. She took her T-shirt off while sailing, and although the counselor spotted her after a while and made her put it back on, she burnt spectacularly, bright red, with the X of her bathing-suit straps standing out in alarming white; she let Lois peel the sheets of whispery-thin burned skin off her shoulders. When they sang "Alouette" around the campfire, she did not know any of the French words. The difference was that Lucy did not care about the things she didn't know, whereas Lois did. 

Not only do we get a fantastic image of the kind of friendship that existed between these two girls (Lucy lets Lois peel the dead skin from her sunburn, ew), but check out that last sentence. In the context of the paragraph, it makes complete sense, and we understand exactly what we need to about the difference between these two personalities. But the wonderful trick here is that this sentence also means something significant about Lucy's eventual disappearance and how it will affect Lois. Although Atwood never explains directly, sentences like this one help us to understand the reason why Lois is haunted her whole life by this childhood event, beyond even what might be expected.

The story's full of such sentences. Not so many that they're annoying, of course—that would just distract from the storytelling. These sentences do double duty. Meaningful in the context of the narrative's forward movement, they're also directly applicable to the story's larger meaning. Atwood uses them as a tool to bring her readers to a realization about the kind of person Lois is. We come to understand why this woman—not just a woman, but this woman—would possess a collection of landscapes that "fills her with a wordless unease." And we understand not because we're told directly, but because everything is there, all at once, woven into the landscape of the story itself.

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.

No, Really, Grammar Is Exciting - #29

STORY: "The Fairy Helena" by Ruth Manning-Sanders

FROM: THE GLASS MAN AND THE GOLDEN BIRD: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales (Roy Publishers, Inc., 1968) – illus. Victor G. Ambrus

BASICALLY: A zany, if unfocused, folktale starring a guy who accidentally lets a demon out of jail, runs away because he's afraid he'll get in trouble, almost starves, gets rescued by the (kindly?) demon and given a life of ease. He enjoys the company of the demon's ten daughters, but discovers that each night they turn into birds and visit a fairy. In secret, he tags along, falls in love with the fairy, gets in trouble with her and almost killed, but is helped out again by the demon. He wins her in the end and of course yaddas yaddaly ever yadda.

There was a lad called John, who went to be a soldier. And one night they put him to stand guard outside a prison.

   So there is our John, standing in the moonlight with his gun over his shoulder, and the keys of the prison in his pocket. Not a sound did he hear until midnight; and then there came such a moaning and a groaning from inside the prison as made John's hair stand on end.

Did you see it? The strange thing that just happened in those two little opening paragraphs? We started out in a distant past tense—there was, who went, they put. We switched to present—there is. Then we flopped back to past, but not so distant—did he hear, there came, made.

It's dizzying. And the story just keeps on in that vein. 

"Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!" moaned a voice. 

"I can't do that!" shouts John.

Accidental tense-switching is an all-too-common affliction at early stages in the writing process. Maybe we haven't yet settled on the voice for a piece, the particular vista from which our POV character is taking it all in, and we slip back and forth between happening-in-the-now present tense and the-perspective-of-time past as we drum up the action. Once we figure out what's what, we go back and marshal our verbs into formation.

I don't think that's what's happening here. There is no apparent attempt at marshaling. Instead, the tense-switching runs headlong through the whole story, but for me, it irritates from the get-go. The story's trying to sound like an oral tale—there's casual diction ("by that time he had put a goodish bit of distance between him and the town") and idiomatic syntax ("'What's fretting me indeed!' cries John. 'It's yourself is doing that!'")—and so maybe the heedless flip-flopping between past and present tenses is meant in that vein. As if the tale's more authentic because it's not the sort of thing you see written down very often. Which is kind of true.

And so, even though I think the tense-switching in this story doesn't quite succeed, I find myself intrigued by it. When I look at what it does to the action in the tale, I can see that it actually controls time in a really weird way. That's because past tense and present tense aren't just opposites of one another. When you read, 

But every evening at supper time those girls would suddenly go from the table and run upstairs; and John didn't get another sight of them till next morning, 

you're looking backwards as though through a telescope. You're seeing all the action, but you're not next to it. There's a certain amount of distance. But with, 

So what does he do but tiptoe upstairs and put his eye to the keyhole of the girls' room, 

you're not only seeing events unfold in the now, you're actually right next to the events, your nose right up against the keyhole with John's. You don't have that telescoping distance, but you also can't see the bigger picture. See what I mean? Whether you use past tense or present tense isn't just about time; it's also about tightness and specificity of focus.

There has got to be a way to play with tense more smoothly than it's managed in "The Fairy Helena." After all, we're actually very accustomed to these movements back and forth—the majority of stories and novels are narrated in the past tense, while characters are always going around speaking in the present. And it's not that uncommon to see tense shifts used to articulate different sections of a piece—like maybe switching to present tense to indicate that we're in a dream. So it's just a tiny step more to imagine how one might try to shift tenses between sentences to show different realities for different characters, or to distinguish a supernatural being from a human, or to make someone seem magical and strange in a way that other characters are not.

This is a fun fairy tale with a bizarrely passive protagonist and a bafflingly helpful demon, but what I like best about it is how it's got me thinking and makes me want to try things. Inspiration comes from the oddest corners, sometimes.

Oh God, Not the Dog - #28

STORY: "Tapka" by David Bezmozgis

FROM: NATASHA AND OTHER STORIES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)

BASICALLY: The sins of childhood are mined in this account of what goes awry one day for two young children entrusted with a neighbor's beloved Lhasa-apso. More broadly, though, a story about the immigrant experience.

You may have noticed that I've written about a lot of stories with quirky or fantastical elements—devils and cheerleaders, robots, ghostly apparitions, and fairy tales of the afterlife. My tastes, I admit, do favor of the weird. Realism, on the other hand—well, it can leave me cold. It's not you, Realism, it's me! I get why people want to be smacked in the face with the relentless suffering of humanity, sure I do, but sometimes it just feels like a chore to read—like I'm enduring something just to get my character built.

"Tapka" is a good story. I'm probably not its audience. I found myself just wanting to get through it, but it's not the story's fault. It's just…these little kids, and they're Russian immigrants who're trying so hard, and this precious little dog, and he's the only thing this older immigrant couple has, and you just know the whole time that something awful's in store for him and you kind of want it to be over with already.

And it doesn't even turn out that bad, but we end on a note of sadness wrapped around a painful life lesson and while I admire how we got there, I didn't enjoy myself much.

But if you like this sort of thing—the people that may very well be real, the personal tragedies that could be happening next door—then Bezmozgis is right up your alley. He tackles the perspective of childhood with elegance and compassion, but the really interesting thing he does in "Tapka" is unite the state of childhood with the experience of being an immigrant. One context informs the other—they run so easily and obviously parallel, in fact, that I know Bezmozgis has to be making the connection look easier than it is.

In the crucial scene, we see six-year-old Mark with his seven-year-old cousin Jana, playing with the dog in the ravine where they take him for walks. They throw his toy again and again, each time having only to say "Tapka, get Clonchik," and the dog will fetch. But on this particular day, the children are also playing with their newfound tongue. Jana discovers that you can say "Shithead, get Clonchik" and the dog doesn't know the difference and keeps playing the game in happy obliviousness. But Mark is bothered and doesn't want to call the dog he loves "Shithead." 

I couldn't help thinking, "Poor Tapka," and looked around for some sign of recrimination. The day, however, persisted in unimpeachable brilliance…I was amazed at the absence of consequences.

Bezmozgis uses this conflict over a word in such an interesting way. He paints a convincing picture of a quarrel between two children, those little power plays and acts of one-upmanship they engage in. At the same time, he's keeping their strangeness in their surroundings front and center, as they struggle to express themselves rightly in English. And then he's marrying the bewildered state of an uncertain child with the equally bewildering experience of being in an unfamiliar country. When disaster strikes, the stakes feel extremely high because they are flailing, both as immigrants who can't speak the language and children who can't articulate what terrifies them.

And if it turns out to be a little bit (though not too) depressing, then Bezmozgis has most likely accomplished what he was aiming for: a story that feels true, an empathy that becomes real.

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.

“Undrinking Butlers & Unflirting Housemaids of Metal” - #26

STORY: "The Invisible Man" by G.K. Chesterton – Another short story you can find online easily. Maybe I should be reading more stories published this century?

FROM: THE ANNOTATED INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN, edited by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1998) – Story originally appeared in 1911.

BASICALLY: A far-fetched mystery in which a young man (named Angus) tries to help his romantic rival catch another romantic rival (this one EVIL) in the act of leaving threatening messages all over the place. Angus enlists the help of a reformed-criminal-turned-private-investigator (named Flambeau) who is being visited by the unimpressive-but-observant Father Brown. They do solve the mystery--too bad the first romantic rival still gets butchered. Oh well!

Leave it to me to unknowingly seek out the one "metaphysical detective story" that contains robots. Of course, Chesterton's Edwardian robot is a vaguely imagined "clockwork invention for doing all the housework by machinery," and inspired, as annotator Martin Gardner notes, by "L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz except it was headless." These so-called robots turn out to be only minimally important to the story, merely the successful invention with which Angus' first romantic rival—a diminutive man named Isidore Smythe—recently gained his independent fortune. (I suppose they're a possible red herring, too—part of me, I must admit, hoped the Robot Butler Had Dunnit. But it was not to be.) Honestly, robots seem completely out of place and fairly ridiculous in this otherwise plain Edwardian setting. Of course, because I am me, they still kind of made me like the story more. (I mean, if nothing else, I appreciate that once upon a time Genre Conventions were not quite so rigidly defined and enforced as they are now.)

In his fascinating and helpful Introduction (which you can read here, yay Google Books), Martin Gardner explains that 

Father Brown stories obviously belong to the classical tradition of mysteries in which the reader is challenged to solve a puzzle. The story is a game between reader and writer. The author tries to play fair, yet at the same time surprise readers with a simple solution that they could have guessed but did not. Like so many Sherlockian plots, and those of Agatha Christie and other great masters of the puzzle genre, the plots of Father Brown tend to be enormously improbable. Indeed, improbable is an understatement. 

He then goes on to detail the ways in which current detective shows and movies (current as of 1985, anyway), with their car chases, bare-knuckles boxing, and bimbos, are just as fantastical in their own right. And he's got a point. What seems realistic to one generation is the cheesiest claptrap artifice to the next… isn't it kind of strange that it ever seemed realistic?

But that's the sleight-of-hand of entertainment in whatever medium—it succeeds based on a verisimilitude that is entirely manufactured. For the writer of fiction, that's both enormously freeing (since you can, in theory, make anyone believe anything) and burdensome (since it means there's no objective measure—the slightest irregularity can inadvertently puncture the fictional dream).

This quote by James Wood (spotted on the Tin House Books Blog) seems to apply here: 

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. 

Let that sink in. Genre, literary, whatever kind of fiction—and heck, nonfiction too—it all comes down to the degree to which the writer has managed a hunger in the reader for itself and its characters.

In "The Invisible Man," Chesterton's management is clunky at best. I'm baffled by Gardner's note that "This is perhaps the best known, most anthologized of all Father Brown stories." Father Brown doesn't even show up until twelve pages in. Before that, we get Angus (who, as I far as I know, is not a recurring or otherwise significant Chesterton character) peering in at a sweets-shop window, entering and proposing to a pretty shopgirl he barely knows, then her long tale of the two men (ugly! and loafers!) who already spontaneously asked her to marry them, and how they went away to seek their fortunes which they already had but she ;lajksdfa;ljwhocares… It really goes on for quite awhile.

Should I excuse this as some kind of generational thing? If I expect a mystery story to dash out of the starting gate like a hopped-up greyhound, it's got to be because of genre conventions, right? In 1911, maybe a guy was free to write his romance-slash-mystery with a little bit of AWESOMEROBOTS thrown in for color. Maybe he didn't have to plunge right into murder, but could take his time and weave a little story about some people inveigled in curious circumstances.

Except that Chesterton's own subplots, which dominate the first two-thirds of the story, don't appear to interest even him. After the first of Angus' romantic rivals is killed, and then the second is caught and shown to be the killer (how he got away with it—not who he is—is supposed to be the story's clever reveal, so that's not really a spoiler), Chesterton dispenses with the love story he spent pages and pages setting up with this unevocative sentence: 

John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely comfortable. 

---.  Uh, great.

So it's not that Chesterton was mixing different elements in some unorthodox way. It's more that he doesn't seem to have gone back once he reached the end to make sure that it still had something to do with his beginning. I cannot hunger for the reality level of "The Invisible Man" because it isn't sure, itself, of its level. Some wise editing could have made this a much stronger story. Gardner mentions several times that Chesterton wrote the Father Brown stories for money and that they do not represent his finest writing and I get that. It's probably even truer today that most people making a living off their writing can't afford to be too fussy about it when deadlines and cashmoney are involved. I'm also not immune to being charmed by the quaint weirdness of these stories, in spite of their flaws. So it is with everything we read as writers—we are always taking stock on what to steal, what to love, what to discard, and what to improve upon.

A Lowlife Shuffle - #25

STORY: "Two Men" by Denis Johnson

FROM: JESUS' SON (Picador, 1992)

ALSO FROM: THE NEW YORKER FICTION PODCAST – Scroll down to "Salvatore Scibona reads Denis Johnson"

BASICALLY: A cowardly man careens from place to place through the night with his friends. The "first man" is a drunk who won't get out of their car. The "second man" burned the narrator on a drug deal awhile back. Unsympathetic people doing the incomprehensible - made electric by Johnson's prose and structure.

As any faithful reader of my blog (Hi Mom!) will no doubt remember, it's taken me a while to become someone who can honestly say they like The New Yorker. And yet my former position as scoffer and dismisser is looking more and more untenable, because here is this dark, beautiful short story by Denis Johnson that was published there in 1988. Since I was still in my denim-skirts-LipSmackers-pewter-dragons phase at that point, I don't think I can somehow imagine that The New Yorker has only begun to accommodate my tastes in the last few years... no, I must accept the fact that they publish some iconic fiction that I was, at a certain point, too green and short-attention-spanned to appreciate, and that I have carried that prejudice with me for far too long.

Not that I'll be giving up my robot stories and fairy tales any time soon. Variety, people! Have we learned nothing here?

Yet another reason to love The New Yorker is their Fiction Podcast. Authors pick a story published by someone else in the magazine, and then they read it and discuss it with the Fiction Editor. Simple concept, profoundly interesting results.

Hearing a story can change it. Can open it up in a new way. The same words are processed by the same language mechanism in the brain, yet are altered just by entering through a separate portal. I have to admit that when I first read "Two Men," it didn't strike me as anything special. I completely love Johnson's story from the same book called "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" (it haunted me so strongly I had to pick it up and read it again the very next day, just to cope), but "Two Men" kind of slid right by. Yet to hear author Salvatore Scibona read it was a completely different experience. The voice of this unstable man at the story's center comes alive in Scibona's voice, and I am there, in that night, trying to make sense of a series of unconnected events that are somehow unspeakably connected in the mind of the narrator. I've listened three times, now, and I have to say that my appreciation of "Two Men" gets deeper every time. (And the discussion that takes place after the story is not to be missed.)

There's something so impossible about trying to write from a truly unhinged point of view. Someone sane enough to get by in the regular world and not get locked up (much), but still totally crazy, capable of an awfulness and disconnection not normal. Johnson's narrator is neither quirky nor wholly, relentlessly bad. Instead, he just seems like a really fucked-up guy. The kind of guy everyone's run into at a party, or known through friends, or dated. This guy is out there, living his miserable life; I can completely believe that.

The narrative of this guy is full of telling sentences whose impact seem to escape him. At the beginning, for example, he tells us 

I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year.

Later, when the three friends are trying to dump the drunk guy off at his house, but a woman inside won't open the door, this: 

All of her was invisible except the shadow of her hand on the curtain's border. "If you don't take him off our street I'm calling the police." I was so flooded with yearning I thought it would drown me. Her voice broke off and floated down.

It's as though this person has some kind of deep understanding, an insight into his own condition and into beauty and into suffering—and yet his whole night, and not just the night, but his whole existence, is an utter waste. Pointless errands, meaningless diversions, unconcern for others, a profound resistance to facing the reality of the wife and young son waiting at home for him, needing him—Johnson juxtaposes the narrator's flashes of insight about his cowardly life against the bullheaded reality of his own feckless actions.

In doing so, he changes his readers' relationship to him. This individual, worthy of disdain at best, becomes someone with whom we have shared an experience—albeit one that disturbs us. It's a little confusing, when examined, which is exactly the point; in the right circumstances, with the right series of wrong choices, any of us could almost be this guy. Even if we're not him, we're implicated in what he does. It's a fantastic psychological trick that Johnson pulls off, to bring us so close to someone so fundamentally repellant.