Linked Just By This - #42

STORY:  “The Eggy Stone” by Tessa Hadley – Once again, when I selected this story, I had no idea it was available to read HERE for free! Yay!

FROM:  SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES (Picador, 2007)

BASICALLY:  At a week-long school trip to camp, two girls’ hands touch the same beach pebble--the Eggy Stone--at the same moment. Over the holiday, like best friends, they pass the stone between them by elaborate rituals--but how will they share when the trip comes to an end?

Here’s another gorgeous story you can go read for yourself.  Out loud, if you’re up for it.  Some of the lines seem to long to be spoken.

We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long gray line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of pebbles…Under our sandals the big pale pebbles rattled and shifted awkwardly.  The boys began throwing them in the sea; we felt between them for treasures, the creamy spirals from old shells, bits of washed-soft glass.

The prose is musical; it lilts from hard to soft and, when said aloud, makes the throat open and close through a revolving progression of vowels.  Word-shape is a part of musicality—but what’s here is more than merely pretty.  This passage lays the nature scene with specific sensory details and a certain breezy-but-invigorated tone.  It mimics the movement of water with its sibilants (SockS and SandalS acroSS a rim of criSped black Seaweed) and its repetition (sea-washed plastic…in the sea…washed-soft glass). Thanks to the mention of “the boys” followed up with “we,” as in we the girls, it also manages to indicate in a masterfully understated manner that the narrator is female.  It’s pretty impressive—information like this, while crucial, isn’t always easy to slip in without being really heavy-handed about it. 

Actually, I’d like to stagger off-course for just a moment on that topic.  In my own writing, I used to think a certain amount of androgyny in my narrators was kind of clever.  I was writing about humanity and human beings, after all, not simply one gender or the other; if I had hit upon a voice, a point of view that could be interpreted in either direction, so much the better.  However, after enjoying many heaping mounds of manuscript workshopping and critique-grouping, I’ve come to learn that a character whose sex could genuinely go either way actually happens to annoy the shit out of readers.  Really.  They don’t read it as groundbreaking or delightfully playful or an interesting commentary on their own internalized gender norms.  Nope.  It just bugs the ever-loving crap out of them. 

But hey.  That’s not to say that you should never, ever do it.  Absolute rules do not exist, no matter what you might hear.  But when we take risks in our writing, we should understand what it is we’re risking.

And one other thing.  You might still fall into this trap if you try to make the sex of your narrator clear through action and voice, but you never explicitly say what it is.  My teacher Jack Trujillo at UNM once told us that if you don’t tell your reader what sex your narrator or main character is, they’ll always assume it’s the same sex as you the writer.  While a narrator that seems at one moment male and another female will frustrate your readers, the narrator that’s left undefined is assumed—without comment or much conscious thought—to be the writer’s gender.  (If something later in the story contradicts what the reader had assumed, they will move on to the annoyance I mentioned above.)  I never noticed this tendency until it was pointed out to me.  In fact, when I actually caught myself flipping to the beginning of a story to see if the writer was a man or a woman so I could figure out what POV I was reading—I realized exactly how true this observation is.  So I pass it unto you, dear readers, with my compliments.  Do with it what you will.

But back to the story at hand.  “The Eggy Stone” strongly calls to mind Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” (a.k.a. story #31).  Besides being beautifully written, both deal with girls who become close friends for only the duration of camp, and both approach the relationship from the POV of the girl who has less social standing (“The Eggy Stone” in first person and Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” in close third).  But where Atwood’s story takes a long view and uses a remembered tragedy to link a past event to the emotional present, Hadley’s story is quieter, almost completely contained in the childhood moment it seeks to describe.

Through the course of the narrative, the Eggy Stone becomes imbued with a kind of power that links two girls who have little else in common.  It’s a bridge between two distant nations. Speaking different languages, they've got to invent their own form of communication:

We took turns holding the Eggy Stone, and the turns were decided by various ritualized competitions, including folded-paper fortune-tellers, knocking the heads off plantains, and a kind of wrestling we invented, kneeling opposite each other with the stone placed between us and swaying in each other's arms, trying to force our opponent to touch ground on one side or another. Before each competition there was a form of words: something like "Eggy Stone / On your own / All alone / Inaccessible light."

What I love about this is how it externalizes the very real kinds of tacit competition that can occur between girls (and also not-girls, I presume), even ones who are best friends at camp.  A rumination on the ways in which one jockeys for position even with the people one loves would not be nearly so effective as this glimpse into the competitive heart of these girls’ connection.

If you can get ahold of the Atwood story (HINT: try your local library!), I recommend reading it in conjunction with this one.  There’s no such thing as a scientific approach to the study of fiction (what would the control group be—a blank page?), but the subject matter of “The Eggy Stone” is so similar to that of “Death by Landscape” that their differences are truly instructive.  However, even if you’re not trying to dissect the hows and whys of short stories, Tessa Hadley’s writing is lovely and I can wholeheartedly recommend popping over to read this very short story.  Thanks Library Month—you’ve given me another introduction to yet another fabulous author!

P.S.  I couldn't decide which cute bonus pic with neighborhood kitty to include, so here's another:

And Now I Die - #41

STORY: “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” by Frank Norris - Take a gander for yourself here.

 

FROM: THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS (Ironweed Press, 1998) – Originally published in 1902. 

 

BASICALLY: Framed as a journalist’s publication of pages found by chance in the desert, an accomplished young writer’s hastily-scribbled diary of his final days traveling across the barren desert southwest as his group is first followed and then attacked by a band of Indians.
 

As a blogger, I am contractually obligated to whine about this sooner or later, so I might as well do it now. I’m having trouble staying up to date with my (admittedly rather untaxing) posting schedule here on the YoOHS blog. Here it’s already July, but ack I’m not even halfway to the finish line. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I very nearly got three entries posted last week (instead of just the minimal two), but then I stumbled on this curious little number from Frank Norris.  (...Since this entry took me forever and a half to write, however, AND I've been beset with a bunch of really boring technical difficulties, I'm even more behind.  Yeesh.)

 

That I picked it up at all, of course, is sheer chance. That’s one of the great glories of the public library—all the rampant serendipity, the accidental finds. At the risk of pestering you with the obvious, I’d like to point out: libraries—they are places! with stuff! to discover through actual physical contact! (Discovery can happen in a bookstore, too, but then you have to pay for it, and that throws a wrench into the proceedings.)

 

As you can see from the photo above, THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS is unassuming at best. But I liked the cover photo, and the description on the back seemed intriguing, considering I’d never heard of the man: “Frank Norris (1870-1902), in the course of his tragically brief career, distinguished himself as one of the most influential and innovative writers of his era, leaving an indelible imprint on American literature.”

 

So I checked it out and brought it home. Then, when I was trying to decide which piece to read, the book fell open to a story that begins, “The manuscript of the account that follows belongs to a harness-maker in Albuquerque, Juan Tejada by name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement this notice may bring him.” A charming opening line that touches on local history and promises some rich historical detail? Yes please.

 

But…there are issues. Okay, I know I just said that the opening line is charming, but the story starts out with this whole journalistic background thing which drones on for almost three pages. The journalist details how he got ahold of the manuscript, and the history of the writer, named Karslake, and why this particular account should be of interest to the reader, and what the manuscript looks like, and why Karslake had enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and… yeah. A tidal wave of piddly details.

 

My assumption is that Norris meant this introduction to serve in place of backstory so that the story itself, in the form of hastily-written log entries, might focus on action and not get bogged down with the kind of background necessary to make a reader care about that action. Also, of course, a journalist’s fact-based introduction, even if fictional, lends an air of truth to the piece. Norris takes great pains to provide the kind of quotidian detail that grounds this in real life:

Though I did not know young Karslake, I knew his stuff—as everybody still does, when you come to that…the mere mention of his pen name, “Anson Qualtraugh,” recalls at once to thousands of the readers of a certain world-famous monthly magazine of New York articles and stories he wrote for it while he was alive; as, for instance, his admirable descriptive work called “Traces of the Aztexs on the Mogolon Mesa,” in the October number of 1890. Also, in the January issue of 1892 there are two specimens of his work, one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other Justin Blisset. Why he should have used the Blisset signature I do not know. It occurs only this once in all his writings. In this case it is signed to a very indifferent New Year's story. The Qualtraugh "stuff" of the same number is, so the editor writes to me, a much shortened transcript of a monograph on "Primitive Methods of Moki Irrigation," which are now in the archives of the Smithsonian. The admirable novel, "The Peculiar Treasure of Kings," is of course well known. Karslake wrote it in 1888-89, and the controversy that arose about the incident of the third chapter is still--sporadically and intermittently--continued.

None of this bears any direct relation to the rest of the story (or if it does, the connection is far too subtle for me to tease out). From a historical perspective, this mountain of details is kind of interesting. But as a reader—gah.

 

Once the action of the “manuscript” gets going, things ramp up a little. (Fun tidbit: the entire reported text of the manuscript is actually enclosed in quotation marks. It’s so quaint and fussy I could squeeze its widdow cheeks!) Karslake begins in an interested, but nonchalant, tone:

“They came in sight early this morning just after we had had breakfast and had broken camp. The four of us--'Bunt,' 'Idaho,' Estorijo and myself--were jogging on to the southward and had just come up out of the dry bed of some water-hole--the alkali was white as snow in the crevices--when Idaho pointed them out to us…We took them in through my field-glasses and Bunt made sure they were an outlying band of Hunt-in-the-Morning's Bucks…They seem to be well mounted.
     "We held a council of war from the saddle without halting, but there seemed very little to be done--but to go right along and wait for developments. At about eleven we found water--just a pocket in the bed of a dried stream--and stopped to water the ponies. I am writing this during the halt.
      "We have one hundred and sixteen rifle cartridges.

Karslake is sure, almost from the outset, that an attack is imminent. Yet the attack doesn’t come. This wavering certainty does create some tension—because of the introduction, the reader knows that an attack will come, so Karslake’s anticipation within his narrative combines with what we know will take place.

 

But it’s not enough. Certain stories to which we already know the ending still manage to hold our interest, even fill us with a delicious readerly anxiety as we hope against hope that there’s some loophole and things will not end as we know they must. (The only example jumping to my mind at the moment is a novel, WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys, which reimagines the history of JANE EYRE’s madwoman in the attic. The whole time I was reading, I kept wanting to believe that I had simply misunderstood some fundamental point and that it would all end happily…) In “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,” however, there’s no mounting sense of tragedy. 

Perhaps it’s a question of length? Or maybe Norris provides the wrong kinds of details about Karslake in that journalistic introduction—for all that the reader ultimately knows in the way of facts, we get very little sense of who the man actually was or why we should especially care about what happened to him. His tragic end is no more than a curiosity.

 

This piece does contain some good writing and historical detail that’ll probably make me recommend it to certain friends who have an enthusiasm for literature about the desert and the west. I especially like several bits about the landscape and the way the story ends in the middle of a sentence (as though the writer really were killed in the middle of the action). I also like a passage in which Karslake recounts his surprise that the death of one of his companions should feel so insignificant:

This is the first violent death I have ever seen…If I had been told of his death—the details of it, in a story or in the form of fiction—it is easily conceivable that it would have impressed me more with its importance than the actual scene has done. Possibly my mental vision is scaled to a larger field since Friday, and as the greater issues loom up one man more or less seems to be but a unit—more or less—in an eternal series.

Naturally, I can’t help but connect this to Norris’ own desire in writing this short story (and feel a little haunted by the fact that his own life would end so soon after writing this). It’s conceivable, even, that Norris wanted to make this thrilling scene of death by shootout in the desert into what Karslake experiences—just “a unit...in an eternal series.” (But if so, it would mean that it’s gone out of his way to make his story less interesting than it otherwise could be.) In the end, I’d say that “Memorandum of Sudden Death” is an example of a fine piece of writing that, because of its structure, doesn’t reach its true potential.

Speaking of Speaking - #40 – ALSO, LIBRARY MONTH CONTINUES!

STORY:  “I Kiss a Door” by Miranda July

FROM:  NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU (Scribner, 2007)

BASICALLY:  Looking back on the details of her interactions with a former friend, a woman realizes that the signs of the friend’s big secret were there all along.

So, I sort of want to hate Miranda July.  She’s one of those wunderkinder too bright to look at—writer, filmmaker, actor, etc. etc. etc., plus exceptionally pretty, plus my age, plus recipient of all kinds of awards and critical accolades and jury prizes and so yes, sometimes I just want to throw up my hands, toss down a vodka tonic, and crawl under a rock.  Oh sure, oh sure, I’ll drunkenly mutter to myself, it’s *easy* to be published in The Paris Review when you’re already perfect in every way.  And then I’ll belch and fall into fitful dreams of losing the Tuscaloosa County Pie Eating Contest to a members-only club of pygmy chimpanzees.

They’re called coping strategies, people.

Unfortunately for my planned slide into bitterness, alcoholism, and night terrors at the hands of these damned injustices, Miranda July is, by all appearances, actually a very nice person who has actually done a lot to earn all the praise that's been heaped upon her.  When I heard her talking on a podcast about her writing, I found her intelligent and likeable.  Click on her book link above or head over to her personal site and notice how casual and quirky and charming she manages to be.  So, I suppose that, instead of despising her and making up nasty rumors to insert into her Wikipedia page and feeling generally venomous and petty, I should just sit back and try to learn something useful from her.  Argh, maturity.  I haz it!

“I Kiss a Door” is short and on first glance, feels slight, almost underdeveloped.  It doesn’t branch out from its center.  By “center,” I mean in this case the mind of its narrator, a somewhat self-involved woman who is essentially relating her shock at a piece of gossip she just heard.  But on reflection, I think the story instead branches inward, becoming deeper and more layered precisely because it doesn’t move around much and have a bunch of plot pushing things forward.  The narrator’s thoughts and judgments about her friend Eleanor, by remaining enclosed in her own mind, become as much about herself as about that other person.  Eleanor’s particular relationship with her father, especially, but also her troubled views on creation and art and freedom, become a prism through which the narrator sees her own views on these things—though she can’t acknowledge it even to herself.  No, in her own mind, it’s just a Well I’ll be damned kind of moment as she grasps something about Eleanor she never before realized.

In terms of technique, it’s notable that a large percentage of this story takes place through dialogue.  Interestingly, July chooses, in this story as elsewhere, not to mark her dialogue with quotation marks.

I don’t know what it’s like for you, but when I read dialogue that doesn’t use quotes, it feels completely different in my mind.  Such a little thing, but it makes so much difference.  For me, the effect is what I’d call flattening, though if you ask me to explain that I’ll just stammer and try to change the subject.  Without quotation marks to set them off, the words feel pushed into the page—even though they’re structured much like normal dialogue, like the specific things that people actually said, they feel less certain.

I have my suspicions that to never, ever use quotation marks is something of an affectation, but I do think it’s an effective technique in this particular story.  We’re learning about the past (and by extension, the present) through the memories of the narrator, and the fact that all of the dialogue occurs in this flat and unmarked manner only seems to underscore that it’s not a completely reliable record of events.  Not that it’s an unreliable narrator in the strict literary sense of the term, but that any first person account is by its natured skewed.  Plus, all the dialogue in the story occurs between the narrator and another person—there aren’t any group conversations, or reports of others’ conversations.  Here’s how “I Kiss a Door” opens:

Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly, there is nothing I remember that doesn’t contain a clue. I remember a beautiful blue wool coat with flat silver buttons. It fit her perfectly, it even gripped her.

Where did you find that coat?

My father bought it for me.

Really? It’s so cool.

It just arrived this morning.

He picked it out? How did he know how to pick something so cool?

I don’t know.

Notice that, lacking quotation marks or dialogue tags to clarify things, July sticks to back-and-forth dialogue that’s both simple and brief.  No speeches, no ambiguous attributions.  Her narrative paragraphs are set off partly because they are longer—i.e., visually—and partly because of the cue words July uses to begin them.  The example above doesn’t make it obvious, but other non-dialogue paragraphs begin with things like “It seemed unfair that…” and “When Shy Panther played at…” and “By the time Thunderheart came out…”  It would be difficult to mistake these phrases for the narrator’s dialogue.  Quietly and carefully, July works hard to make sure that these shifts don’t annoy or confuse her readers.

And now.

I have absolutely no transition (Miranda July would have thought of a transition…), but hey everyone, it’s Library Month! My father suggests I call “Library Month ±” since, as I have explained, NO ONE has any idea how long it’ll actually last.  Feel free to think of it in mathematical terms!  Meanwhile, I’d like to point your mouse-clicks to some library-related coolness:

• The literary blog MobyLives recently drew my attention to what census figures can tell us about the personal and professional lives of librarians over the past century or so.  And good news, because the librarian profession is no longer in decline, having apparently found its cultural niche.
• Except maybe not.  The Daily Dish highlights the ongoing debate.  Fie!  Librarians are cool.
• In fact, take a look at some photographic evidence of their coolness in a series of gleeful posts over on writer/artist Laini Taylor’s blog.  She’s just returned from her first ALA annual conference and has posted tons of great on-the-town photos and book porn.  Enjoy!

Let’s Start a Gumshoe Revival - #39 – PLUS, LIBRARY MONTH BEGINS!

STORY: "Zigzags of Treachery" by Dashiell Hammett

FROM: DASHIELL HAMMETT: CRIME STORIES & OTHER WRITINGS (The Library of America, 2001)

BASICALLY: Classic detective fiction. The narrator, an unnamed Continental Op, uses a combination of diligence, smarts, and guts to get proof of a doctor's suicide before his sickly widow--falsely accused of murdering him--dies in police custody.

The other day, with the indoor summer air warm and unmoving, and the late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the high windows, and the few fragments of conversation muted by the walls of dusty books, I wandered the Fiction shelves of my local public library. I was searching for something, though I couldn't have said exactly what. Listlessly, I picked up this novel and that one, finding titles I've always meant to read sooner or later, but nothing struck my fancy. One book had always been fascinating when it wasn't in front of me, but exceedingly dull whenever, like now, I held it in my hands. Another reminded me of someone I'm doggedly not thinking about for the time being. What I really wanted was a book that would thwap me upside the soul in absolutely delicious irresistibility—something light, but still solid and meaningful. Something that would make me feel better about life, but without resorting to treacle. I've read a couple of really great novels recently, and I'm almost through another round of the Alice books, and I've actually started what promises to be another very good read, but something still was wanting.

Alas for me, I was unable to locate this mythical high-flown ineffable idea of a novel. Instead, what I kept finding were short story collections.

Winding my way through the rows, I piled volume after volume of stories into the crook of my arm, wondering what the hell I was going to do with them all. I do already have an entire groaning shelf-ful of books of short stories, you know. Plus, the blog is my best excuse yet for acquiring more books. But it seemed like such a pity—here were stories of all sorts, many of which I knew zilch about, let alone whether I wanted to go to the trouble of owning the books they were in. And that is how, then and there, YoOHS's celebration of Library Month was born!

But waitaminute, a disclaimer first: I actually have no idea how long Library Month will last. Might be two weeks, might be six. Let this fill you with a proper sense of carefree adventure rather than, say, annoyance. The duration depends on what I find to read and how long I want to keep going without breaking back into the books I already own and pretty much that means it's anyone's guess. I'm a Ouija-style reader—I can try and plan out my reading all I want, but it's fruitless; wherever the spirit/psychotic break takes me next is where I am compelled to go. I don't control this stuff, people. Truthfully, I don't know how others manage those impressive TBR piles and organized reading goals. But anyway, I couldn't very well name this the Library Event To Last An Arbitrary and Unpredictable Period of Time, could I?

So, I hereby dedicate a month-ish to singing the praises of public libraries in general and my library in particular and we'll get to more of that with the Next! Episode! Of! Year Of One Hundred Stories!

And oh yeah, did you want to actually hear about story #39?

Okay then. I happily oblige. This story's so much fun—though, with a name like "Zigzags of Treachery," I think it's contractually required to be cool. Over the years, I've read a decent number of novels and stories containing Raymond Chandler's version of the hard-boiled detective, but Dashiell Hammett (whose name is rather harder to spell than you'd think) is very different. With Chandler, everything is steeped in nostalgia and gin and passion and sorrow. Cynicism wars with romantic illusion in a baroque world of decay. It's heady and poetic stuff. While I wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions from reading just one story, Hammett clearly goes in another direction. His unnamed narrator is dispassionate, clinical, logical. The crime is a puzzle to be solved, a knot to unravel. Emotional reactions are consciously rejected. In that sense, maybe there's more of a kinship with that Victorian favorite, Sherlock Holmes.

But one of the things I really liked about "Zigzags of Treachery" is how Hammett uses his first-person narrator. In Sherlock Holmes, mysteries are solved supposedly through the application of logic, but really through inscrutable, almost otherworldly calculations that take place in a the mind of a singular genius, and are revealed to the audience only as they become understood by the narrator, Dr. Watson. Hammett's story, on the other hand, lets us see directly into the mind of the detective. The emphasis is not on genius, but on method: "[S]uch results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck." We see the Continental Op narrator spend hours waiting for a suspect to leave her apartment, and we see him choose a suit that's just shabby enough but not too shabby to blend in to a particular set of people, and we even get the benefit of his own guesses about the case's outcome—though, as he says, "I don't gamble too much on my guesses." Even though there are still plenty of unrealistic/impossible elements in "Zigzags," as there are in pretty much every mystery I've ever read, the narrator's voice helps carry the whole thing off as plausible.

I could talk about a lot of other aspects of this story, but, yikes—this entry might go on forever. An analysis of the ticking clock aspect, in particular, could reveal some juicy writerly secrets. I will say that Hammett's use of a time limit is good though imperfect (even if I love how he ties it into characterization)—but I really want to make the argument that you, my fellow aspiring writer-friends, should read stories like this one even if you're not remotely into detective fiction. They are useful as all get-out, and here's why: a detective story is something that can be understood right off the bat. Its purpose is always clear because its purpose is always the same—to create a sense of mystery that pulls the reader along until the secrets are revealed at the very last minute. As such, it's a wonderful tool for thinking about how to use particular techniques.

"Zigzags of Treachery" is a veritable textbook of ideas for distracting a reader's attention, inserting a ticking clock, upping the stakes for the protagonist, including details that lend a powerful sense of realism, and grounding a piece of fiction in a particular place. And it's got its flaws—particularly, the long-ass ludicrously detailed criminal confession that takes place near the end, but also the artificiality of the ticking clock and most especially the whirlwind trampling of the basic civil rights of every single suspect the narrator comes into contact with. But that's fine. Like many works of this genre, "Zigzags" is an entertaining story that's still simple and imperfect enough to break down into its component parts and learn from.

Of course, you could also just read it for the fun of it.

The Cudgel of Funny Ha-ha - #38

STORY: "Promisekeepers" by Brian Evenson

FROM: THE WAVERING KNIFE (FC2, 2004)

BASICALLY: None of the promisekeeping literature they've had Xeroxed specifically prohibits beer, so a bunch of religious good ol' boys meet in a bar at happy hour and get just plastered enough to unburden themselves manfully to one another. And then a little more plastered, and a little more. Certain secrets emerge. A story that starts out with laughter, moves quickly toward mockery, and then plunges suddenly into a tasteless (if still darkly humorous) ending.

Here's another story we can blame on Christa and her Metafilter thread of awesomeness. I had never heard of Brian Evenson before, but I can't wait to read more of him. "Promisekeepers" is the kind of story you can imagine playing well at a reading—the characters are earnest and ridiculous, there are lots of lines fairly seething with irony, and the ending marches up and smacks you across the face with one part menace and two parts over-the-top stereotype. Any audience would fairly be falling off their chairs with all the hilarity.

Evenson makes an interesting choice, though. The humor of "Promisekeepers" keeps chugging along, right up to the very end—but then it cuts out suddenly, like the sound in a movie, leaving the reader wrestling with the unfunny import of the final lines. For me, it was like I was still kind of laughing, but then as I finished the story, I thought, That wasn't really funny at all, was it? And I'm probably a bad person for laughing at it.

It's disconcerting, a resolution like that. I call it an interesting choice because it sort of makes the reader complicit in what the story's criticizing—I mean, here I was, following along and being entertained and snickering at these screwed-up people, so suppressed and uneducated, and then the way it ends suddenly reveals how deep their dysfunction actually runs and how darkly it will explode in everyone's faces. Evenson's use of humor, in effect, turns on the reader and judges him.

I can't help but compare "Promisekeepers" with story #25, Denis Johnson's "Two Men." Both contain a first-person narrator who moves in and out of participating in the story, and both are centered around groups of uncertain and desperate-to-compensate men who careen through the night and commit acts that cannot be undone.

But while Johnson eschews outright humor and attempts to make us understand and identify with his protagonist, even if we can't excuse what he does, Evenson invites us to laugh at these hicks. At first the humor is relatively gentle--the character names Verl and Laverl, the admission that "it takes a few beers before honesty kicks in." And I really laughed at the line, 

It does not say in the promises we have to pray aloud, and like hell are we going to in a bar, but I move my lips so that if any of the others open their eyes they will see me praying in my heart. 

But things take a slightly darker turn when the narrator explains that the group took on Ray Junior in order to fulfill the obligation to meet with "a racial man or some sort of heathen once a month." Still, though, the bigotry's played for laughs--Ray Junior's credentials turn out to be that he's "one-sixth Italian (and thus dark-complected)" and "Episcopalian instead of Southern Baptist. He is going to hell, but we believe in promise number six so for now he is our brother."

And then that finish, about which I'm being very cagey so as not to give anything away. In a way, Evenson's ending isn't really any different from Johnson's. It's just that Johnson cuts his story off with the horrible (and deadly serious) suggestion of the violence that's about to take place, while Evenson follows the laughs right up until "the police arrive." As a reader, I suppose I'm ultimately more impressed by earnest, melancholy Johnson, but I'm certainly not immune to Evenson and the way that he mixes grimness into his humor (or is that humor into his grimness?). Evenson's story can be enjoyed and appreciated right off the bat, without multiple reads or deep intellectual analysis, and though maybe this is sounding like something of a backhanded compliment, I'm trying to say that it's no mere lighthearted piece of fluff, though it quite cleverly draws you in as if it were.

What It’s Like Is What It Is - #37

STORY: "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" by Tao Lin

FROM: BED (Melville House Publishing, 2007)

BASICALLY: A self-conscious 23-year-old tries desperately to take on the appearance of a normal, functional life. Though he can barely talk to a teenage girl who works at the library with him, she seems oblivious to his awkwardness. When she invites him to toilet paper some guy's house with her and her friends, he goes along, but the experience only seems to fill him with more doubt.

Tao Lin is apparently some kind of hipster literary darling. (It's good work if you can get it. I imagine.) After reading "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues," I can see the appeal. It's not exactly tightly-plotted, and the ending doesn't so much resolve as cut off, leaving the last lines hovering there in the darkness, but he orchestrates a towering moodiness and links it inextricably to a particular time of life. Youth is foremost, with all its attendant miseries, anxieties, and personal failures as it flowers painfully into adulthood. Sometimes Lin reminds me of Douglas Coupland back before everything Douglas Coupland wrote began to disappoint me.

The fact that Coupland, who really can be great, had such a hard time sustaining the Voice of Disaffected Youth makes me curious to know whether Lin can write in only this one voice, or whether he's got any range, because I think it's got to be very hard to be able to Speak For a Generation and still come up with other meaningful works that don't try to Be That Same Thing. I'm using a lot of Capitalized Phrases right now, but what I'm trying to point out is the way some authors' writing can be become kinds of writing, types of writing, and probably in a future entry I'll have to figure out whether Tao Lin succumbs to that or is able to break free of it. Even if he does succumb, of course, it doesn't negate the fact that, in "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" at least, he does something pretty cool.

What kept occurring to me as I was reading was that it would be so easy for a story like this to be completely boring. The protagonist, Greg, is weak. He's frequently passive, always self-incriminating, and his story opens on and returns to long passages of expository summation.

That kind of gnawing offness that Greg always felt, that constant knowledge that he was doomed in small but myriad ways, intensified in the presence of people, became immediate and insufferable, like a rat in the stomach. So after his parents sold the house and retired to California, Greg moved alone into an apartment behind a rundown 24-hour supermarket. 

It goes on in that vein for quite a while—for three and a half pages, in fact, everything we learn about Greg comes through the narrator's explanations and not through any action on his part.

As anyone who's ever taken a workshop class knows, this is Not How It's Done. Start with action! Into the pot boiling! The last thing in the world you want to do is give your character's whole history right up front—that shit's gotta work its way in through dialogue and flashback and other Artfully Applied Techniques! …And usually, that's great advice. But, in spite of All the Clever Things I Know, I enjoyed Lin's approach. He has a way of mucking around in the dullest, most quotidian details of experience and finding the warped little gems.

I suspect that Lin's ability to tell a story this way relates to what author/teacher John Dufresne says in THE LIE THAT TELLS A TRUTH: "The only reason to ever describe a tree is to show how it is different from any other tree." Well, Lin describes boredom, listlessness, uncertainty, and shyness in terms that are anything but customary. After Greg moves out on his own at the beginning of the story, 

His meals became larger and less often, like a crocodile's. He'd eat an entire package of bacon or a box of frosty muffins, sleep for 20 hours, and then masturbate, languishingly, to all his crushes from middle and high school. 

I love how this has the ring of universal truth, but is so specific to the nature of this character. Lin could have told us that Greg was lonely and angst-ridden and thought a lot about his past, but it wouldn't have had the power of these details. Equally, he could have given us a scene of Greg being bored, of doing nothing—but who wants to see boredom dramatized? We all know what boredom is. This story unfolds the unique crevasses of Greg's particular ennui, but it also keeps blazing forward.

Lin's also great with the similes—the word crocodile was my first hint of the kind of voice we're dealing with. In fact, Lin frequently uses similes to buffer his exposition. Greg "became nocturnal and strange," he tells us outright, but continues, "taking on all the impatience and bipolarity of a young child , without any of the charm or smooth complexion." As Greg struggles to fit more easily into society, he reads self-help books and tries to start calling people by their names because 

It would be interpreted as friendly. And though his voice still sounded small and weepy to him, like gerbils let into a swamp, Greg felt good to be saying people's names. To be making some kind of progress.

For some readers, I suppose the constant similes could get grating. If I read more Lin and find that this is always his technique, that he always describes people in the same way and uses similes to couch his explanations, then I'll be less impressed. But for this story, about a suburban guy trying to find some meaning and some forward momentum in his unremarkable life, I think Tao Lin's technique works beautifully to find the beating heart at the center of one person's nothingness.