Junot Diaz: "Miss Lora"

Scene from Threads

If you haven't read about Yunior before, you've just had a treat. This smart, sex-crazed, suffering man who narrates "Miss Lora" is one of the primary characters in Junot Díaz's first collection of short stories, Drown. He is also a member of the supporting cast in the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And finally, he appears prominently in Díaz's 2012 story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. Both "Miss Lora" and "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" appear in this latest book. In a New York Times book review, Leah Hager Cohen observes, "Junot Díaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it’s practically an act of aggression, at once alarming and enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy." This is fiction in which voice dominates, no doubt. The narration is alternately insightful and helpless, regretful and furious, crude and erudite, and Díaz can switch lightning-fast between these personality traits and somehow make you utterly believe in the solidity, the wholeness, the reality, of Yunior, the narrator.

But voice aside, this story breaks my heart.  Its depictions of loneliness and pain are paired with the characters' compromised efforts to find respite from their loneliness and pain. Yunior and Miss Lora both concern themselves with apocalyptic films because life has "messed [them] up good" and they project their internal destruction into external destruction. Yunior and Miss Lora have many similarities: both are immigrants from the Dominican Republic, both physically muscular, both traumatized by family life, both sleeping with their teachers. The way things repeat in the story (e.g. Miss Lora wears her red dress at one graduation, and then another) is similar to the greater picture of how history repeats itself (like-father-like-son machismo, or more sweepingly, one answerless death like another). And "blood always shows," as Yunior tells his ambitious girlfriend. Miss Lora has enormous eyes, and she sees the pain in young Yunior, and he finds her need for him compelling. Sometimes, our response to being exposed to trauma is to seek it out in representations, such as movies, or books, or photographs in which we are smiling and blinking and keeping on keeping on.

Charles Baxter: "Bravery"

Image from Adam McLean's Alchemy Website

In her introduction to Best American Short Stories 2013, Elizabeth Strout writes about the trust a reader must feel in order to be interested in a story.  Trust is earned, she implies, when a writer manages to sustain authority through voice, in the face of surprise plot twists, in the face of language’s instabilities, in times when characters are hard tried by fates their fictional lives have handed them.  For a writer like Charles Baxter, who so often writes about varieties of staged strangeness, and desire, and wonder, the reader's trust depends on how the “strange” is perceived by the characters. Are Baxter’s characters ever perceiving strangeness honestly?  And if not, do they have good reason for their dishonesties? 

In "Gryphon," first published in 1985, the young narrator desperately wishes to believe in Miss Ferenczi, a character who tosses off lines (and irresponsible logic) to children such as, "Do you think [...] that anyone is going to be hurt by a substitute fact?"  When I first read this (as a much younger person than I am now), like the young narrator, I was not sure of my answer to Miss Ferenczi’s question.  Yes, her “substitute fact”-finding leads the children to fear and to violence.  But I wanted to believe in her as a savior from a known tedium and conformity.  

I don’t see Miss Ferenczi as a savior any longer, maybe because I no longer trust “fact” itself, substitute or not.  I trust Baxter because he shows me what I do believe: that people’s perceptions are formed by deeply held fears and desires.  Baxter shows me individuals who fail at questioning that which informs them.  Reading "Bravery," published 27 years later, have I changed in that I find this show quite obvious, or has the author perhaps grown weary of misinterpretation? 

In “Bravery,” Baxter exposes “truth” such as “Every mother feels this way, every mother has felt this, it’s time to stand up” for what it is: informed by prejudice and the need for self-definition.  He reveals Susan’s blind spot right in the beginning of the story: she needs boys to be a certain way, to react a certain predictable way that defines them as male, so that she can find self-worth.  She believes she has secret wisdom in knowing that boys are “not all alike”—but part of what is revealed to the reader is that Susan doesn’t really believe this…she sustains this false belief so that she can be special, find the special one, the one who is almost perfect in his “variables”…but in the end, she actually believes that men should be all alike.  They should be men.  They should be brave, and manly, right up until someone gives them a black eye.  And let them have their black eye!  Her husband, Elijah, Susan confirms, “would want his badge. They all wanted that.”  

In the end, she will pretend to believe his story about rescuing a woman in danger, a story she suspects to be false, so that she can sustain a deeper falsehood that allows her self-definition.  Wow!  Baxter’s magic trick is to show us what lies behind “magic”: our belief in it is in us, in our desire to believe one thing and not another. 

Does his storytelling free us to see past our own desires?  Or is this just another kind of desire? 

P.S. Susan believes in her heart that she has been able to interpret the crazy woman’s message, even though the woman was speaking another language.  Know this: “Pozor” does not mean “beware” in Czech.  It means “pay attention.”

Samuel Beckett: Worstward Ho

In an essay published by Glimmer Train, my partner Silas quoted famous lines from Samuel Beckett's novel Worstward Ho.  You should read the essay, but in case you don't get a chance, here are some of Beckett's words:

Worstword Ho

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

[...]

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Said nohow on.

The year of 2013 is almost over, and once again I have practiced being a creative writer or in other words a magician.  It's hard work.  Rewards are fleeting but very sweet.

All magic is illusion, I'm certain, because all human experience is illusion of one type or another.  Perception is illusion, and so is thought.  We have the illusion of worse and the illusion of better.  I really like what one of my students expressed in a reflection on studying fiction in our workshop this fall.  Maddie DiStasio wrote: "I guess what I would tell someone about wanting to be a fiction writer is that they will need to get their hands dirty, they will need to fall flat a couple (or more like 40,000) times, and they will need to learn to embrace the inherent possibilities that spring from failure.  I'd tell them that this is precisely why writing is a liberating experience.  You will learn how to fail [...]."

Thank you, Maddie, and Breeyon, Chelsy, Jade, Amanda, Julia, Laura, Christine, Bre, Abby, Jenna, Dylan, Madison,and Nick.  Nohow on right into 2014.  

George Saunders: "The Barber's Unhappiness" and "I CAN SPEAK!"

On an Eight-Part Fantasy Romance, and a Letter to a Dissatisfied Customer:

George Saunders has published four books full of short stories, and I have read all of them like a cat at the water bowl.  I drink up the disfigured, misogynistic, abused, middle-aged man lusting after a younger woman.  I absorb the harried, foolish, sycophantic employee sympathizing with the furious customer and defending the company that exploits and employs him.  Saunders's stories poke at the hurting places, at the sadness of our little lives, and in these stories, we are all small, we are all victims of the system.

However, in addition to reminding me of pain and smallness (my own and others'), the stories also make me feel the largeness of the suffering individual.  The suffering individual is everywhere: in driving school, getting drunk at the wedding, coming every week to the Altar and Rosary Society, employed by KidLuv.  We are all there, and in this union we can sometimes rise above our limitations.  We can laugh, for one thing.  Laughter releases us for periods of time.  We can also learn to read the stories (perceive the forms) that trap us.  In "The Barber's Unhappiness" Saunders shows me that the form of a "fantasy" is perhaps an invisible trap.  In "I CAN SPEAK!" Saunders reveals the corporate language, or any jargon embraced by a power-hungry group, as another kind of trap.  If there is any hope at the end of the barber's story, it is that he is making an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of fantasy.  Ironically, in expressing himself in the form of a letter, Mr. Rick Sminks both puts on the mask of the LuvKid company and he also reveals himself as the unhappy baby that he is.

I'd like to point out two craft elements involved: both stories are based on innovative formal structures and a point of view that is very close, embarrassingly close, to the painfully small-minded protagonist.  The structures are innovative, but we can easily recognize them.  The barber's story is patterned almost like a fairy tale.  The letter, while ridiculous, is very much a letter.  In both stories, the protagonist is distanced from us by being so small-minded, but then Saunders gives each such specific language that his magnified small desires become our own.  We ogle, too.  We picture the pretty girl rubbing corncobs. We sit stiffly.  We wet our comb, flex our chest, dance around our nubs.  We sit at our own (cluttered!) desk.  If you have a story that wants to critique the world we live in (a magic trick a.k.a. satire), you might take your cue from Saunders's playful structure and his specificity.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" and "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"

Marc Chagall's Clock with Blue Wing

A Woman Named Jeremiah Spavey

THE FIRST ASSOCIATES to arrive that day shivered like usual at the air blowing from the store’s cavernous break room, the constantly chilly backroom where no one liked to be found, and where the managers sent children who climbed steel shelving units or got caught loitering where they sold soda by the check-out registers. Children were not valued customers. When children got put in the break room, everyone gave them the evil eye until the parents arrived, tired and lost, to retrieve them. The room had been empty since Monday. Managers’ tempers were rising and their eyes held in them the mean small looks of potbelly pigs deprived of their bread, even first thing in the morning, so when the woman wearing heavy boots emerged from the ice-cold room, asking about the best washing machine in the store, Jim, a newish associate, rubbed his eyes and wondered which of the tricky managers had hired her to throw him off. Or maybe it had been his direct supervisor Glenda. She had written up Jim once several weeks before for laughing at a customer’s joke over in Plumbing, something that involved an old couple and some leaky pipes.

Other associates skittered from Appliances to Windows and Doors, waiting for the end of the Christmas season when they would return to their regular posts, longing for the quieter months, and the only occasional questions about how to install a water line for a refrigerator ice-maker, or about when you could solve an ant infestation with powdered charcoal or turmeric versus needing to bait with boric acid. Jim had joined just before the seasonal rush, so he did not have a strong preference for anything but getting home at night to tell his wife about his day, stories mostly about particular customers, such as the urban mother of two who had just moved to central Pennsylvania and needed someone to understand her, or the old man who came in once a week, wanting to talk about his dead wife. In a clean but threadbare shirt and wearing sturdy black workboots, this woman who had appeared as if from nowhere, exiting from the break room, seemed on closer inspection not to be an employee plant. Nor was she a petulant child, nor a person Jim had seen before. He would have noted her hair, a gray halo about her face like a windblown cloud, or her reddened eyes that suggested hours spent worrying over the state of the world, or reading the fine print of every written arrangement. She made Jim wish suddenly that he’d been a better son and taken his mother back to his house with his young wife rather than installing her in the home for elderly people. What he said out loud was a question: The best washing machine in the store?

Yes, she wanted to buy the best, and the best dryer, too, the ones that stacked and didn’t knock around like the devil in God’s pantry, could Jim lead her to them?

No, the managers would not stoop to planting this kind of person, but maybe Jim’s supervisor Glenda would do something like this, he thought. The store featured upward mobility in its training sessions held daily in front of a screen in a much warmer room, the training room, and Glenda, Jim’s customer service supervisor, had ambitions to become a manager. She had she ratted out associates for random acts of unworkmanlike behavior, such as keeping candy in service center drawers that were meant for pens, or being too casual with customers. Her steadfastness was why she now earned $10.42 an hour, more than two bucks over her starting point, and she had been with the store only four years. Jim did not want to be written up again, as his young wife loved that he had this job, and her pride was the stool where he rested his feet at night. He ushered the woman over to Glenda and then stood back to watch his supervisor’s eyebrows rise like arrows into her puffy brown bangs. The black-booted woman said again that she wanted to purchase the best washing machine in the store. Glenda shot a look at Jim that said: Is this some kind of joke?

Jim’s chin jerked. Both of them knew that in that old shirt and pants, in those old workboots straight from the farm, or the construction site, this woman did not fit a thousand-dollar washing machine. The boots and worn shirt indicated one problem, and there was also something uncooperative about her wispy white hair. Yes, the woman said, and she started flying toward Appliances, shuffling her legs like the wings of some heavy-bottomed insect. She hovered in front of the most expensive machines in the store and said, I want this one, to an associate named Robert. I have this unit, and it’s a good one. I’m buying it for my neighbor.

Robert, who had been at the store for even less time than Jim, a seasonal employee who might not even last until the end of the season, stroked his salt-and-pepper goatee.  He listened to the woman say that her neighbor’s washer and dryer had broken.  Her neighbor didn’t have anyone to take care of her. It’s what my dad would have done, the woman said. Your father? asked Robert, thinking that this woman's brain had been addled somehow by the years she'd spent alone on a farm somewhere, nothing but cows to warm her, and chickens for conversation. His name was Jeremiah, the woman said, and it’s my name too.

The beginning of something, to be continued…

Post by Jessica Gilchrist, guest blogger: Fifty Shades of Mary Gaitskill: "The Secretary" and "A Romantic Weekend"

Over the summer, I traveled to Saratoga Springs, NY for a two week long writers workshop with Howard Norman (who we lovingly dubbed Howie just two days into the workshop). Many of my favorite authors were there: Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, and even the dashing Rick Moody. One of the professors had to leave for the second week of the advanced fiction workshop, and we knew they were bringing in someone new. "Mary Gaitskill" was a name that echoed in the filing cabinet of my brain, tucked away in a folder somewhere either marked "Shit I Read in the New Yorker And Forgot" or "Stuff Silas Told Me to Read in Intermediate Fiction That I Didn't."

She appeared in a loose-fitting, dirty-gray pink cotton shirt, making her thin body look even smaller with the thick fabric holding her frail shoulders together. Gaitskill walked with her shoulders back. Though we were packed into the auditorium, touching thigh to thigh and using our free Skidmore College folders to fan ourselves under the domed fluorescent lights overhead, when she passed we shivered into each other. She had skin like bleached canvas stretched tight over her sharp cheekbones and giving way to two constantly pursed lips. Her eyes, almost as white as her straightened hair brushing the top of the loose t-shirt cowering around her neck, scanned us, leaving our spines shuddering from the ice in them. I thought I had a seen a ghost.

No many how many times I took her picture, it wouldn't quite come into focus. She floated down to the podium, and she settled, her body hunkering down among the desktop computer, her fingers pinching the stack of white papers she had brought with her. She glanced out as us as though she had asked a question, and we stared back at her with gaping faces as an answer.

Mary Gaitskill is creepy. She's creepy for taking the Fifty Shades of Gray style story of a secretary bending over a the wooden desk of her boss, letting him strike her until she is aroused by his own violent ejaculation. She takes what we read shitty fanfiction about, and she gives us a girl who is lying in bed with the covers pulled up, unable to summon the strength in her body to get dinner. Gaitskill exposes something about our own twisted bodies, our own twisted ways of reaching inside of others and taking something precious. In "The Secretary," maybe it's the sense that we can somehow do better for ourselves but not saying a word when someone metaphorically spanks us into submissions. Maybe in "A Romantic Weekend," we've had people who have gagged and tied us in stifling relationships. Gaitskill shakes out our dirty laundry onto the clothesline for the neighborhood to see, and when we try to slip back into our over-sized clothes, the air makes them as cold as I felt just watching her walk by.

Unpacking these stories is supposed to be emotional. I want to know what struck you. What was difficult to read about? How did you react? Gaitskill is brilliant, present, and detailed. Tell me what drew you in. More importantly, tell me what made you uncomfortable.

Also, here's a video of Peg Boyers and Mary Gaitskill reading at the program I went to over the summer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmY49CkOsUs. It's long. Don't watch the whole thing. Fun fact: The man introducing Peg Boyers is Howie. Gaitskill starts to read at 39:30. She laughs in the video. It's strange.

Richard Ford: "Rock Springs" and "Great Falls"

Richard Ford Wins 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence

I've read "Rock Springs" a hundred times, and now when I start reading it, I just can't wait to reach the ending.

In fact, this time through, I went straight to the last line: "Would you think he was anybody like you?"

But before talking about why, I need to mention Alice Munro, who just won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.  This wonderful short story author says that she when she reads stories, she dips in and out, entering one way, leaving another, entering again.  Originally, she explained this idea in an often-quoted essay: "A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."

When Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Richard Ford was quoted as saying, "I’m absolutely ecstatic that Alice won; nobody should win if she doesn’t."

Back to Munro's ideas on reading.  In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly, she expanded on her idea of the short story as a house: "I thought about the way that I read, which, as I said in that essay is going into the story anywhere. I can tell in a couple of sentences how I feel about a story. Then, I go on reading, and I read frontwards, backwards, all over. It is just like being enclosed in the story and seeing things outside the story in a different way—through the windows of that house. And it's not at all like following a path to see what happens. Quite often, I know what happens as soon as I start reading it. Maybe not the twists the plot will take, but the real story."

Wherever you first started reading "Rock Springs," what happened?  Did you feel anything?  Did you notice that someone was going on a journey?  Did you notice that the first person point of view forced you to identify with a narrator who is, I'll wager, nothing like you?  By the end, did you, in Munro's words, see "how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows"?  And did "you, the visitor, the reader,"  become "altered as well by being in this enclosed space"?

There is something that can't be understood about the real story until you get to the change in point of view at the end.  When Earl addresses us, the reader, I hear the real challenge: Can we identify and empathize with others' pain?  How much can we understand about ourselves by reading fiction?  How much can we be altered by writing, reading, and thinking about stories?

Typically, magicians don't ask us to empathize, not really.  They want us to marvel, to be amazed.  Ford reminds me that literary art is an old, deep magic that goes so much further than what most of us can manage, almost like what might resurrect us from the dead.  And by dead I mean stunned, stuck, immobile, pitiless, merciless.  Not to go all Aslan on you, but I think that experiencing a new point of view can bring us back to life.