Short-a-Day: Tessa Hadley's "Clever Girl"

Originally published in The New Yorker, June 6, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 7.

"I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all of the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light." A minute ago, the "sulky stepdaughter" Stella had been attempting to solve her physics homework, and Norbert had been attempting to help her. Though Nor doesn't particularly like Stella (he truly loves her "mum"), he recognizes, in the cool logic of the accountant, that the sooner she grows up, the more of her mother he'll have to himself. (This seems silly, considering that the mother's currently in the hospital, waiting out the high-blood-pressured final week of her pregnancy.) But that's not what this story's about: it's about building to this titular moment, the moment at which the girl, fed-up at being blamed for things she did not do, tired of this minor tyranny, decides to apply herself after all: to grow up.

And yet, I'll admit that there are long stretches in any Hadley story in which I'm not entirely sure what's going on, and I'm often too bored to attempt to suss it out. Here's the final paragraph:

At first this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then, after a while, it ate itself and I couldn't turn the mind-light off, couldn't stop thinking through everything, couldn't sleep. I saw Nor--and my mother and my school--as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher's book. When eventualy sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees. I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once.

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Short-a-Day: Kate Walbert's "M&M World"

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 30, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 30.

"The city erupts, oozes, overflows; everyone is outdoors, walking quickly or standing on the corner checking phones, dialling phones, speaking on phones." And there you have the rhyme and rhythm of Walbert's story -- quick, over-full sentences. Now, where's the reason? Showing the hustle and bustle of New York City isn't anything new, and gawking at the storefronts and people-seas, even from the perspective of Ginny's excitable children (Olivia and Maggie), isn't all that interesting.

The stylistic gist is that Ginny is swept away by the rapid-fire speed of the world, and Walbert spells it out literally, too: "But she is constantly out of time, losing track, forgetting. Sunday's Monday evening, then Wednesday disappears altogether. M&M World looms in the distance, the electronic billboard--'m&m's world'--as bright as a beacon." But Walbert's so insistent in her tone that she misses the opportunity to be a little inconsistent, that is, to show us the difference between Ginny's present pace and that of her calmer (and ironically actually at sea) past, when she traveled on a whale-watching trip through Patagonia. Instead, she winds up being inconsistent with the current character, to the extent that it's hard to define Ginny's actual priorities, particularly as the flashbacks attempt to turn this into a tale still haunted by the girls' father (who is absently noted as never more than "the girls' father").

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Short-a-Day: Ron Rash's "The Trusty"

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 83.

The only problem with Rash's story is that it's a bit too reliable: from the moment we learn that Sinkler -- a "trusty" who is allowed to roam free in return for his hauling water (from wells at the neighboring farms) to the chained members of his hard-labor prison gang -- was arrested for scamming people, you can't help but look for the genre's all-too-familiar double-cross. It's awfully convenient, one thinks, that at the particular farm Sinkler winds up cadging water from, there's a young woman being oppressed by her older husband; moments later, this turns to suspicion: OK, why is this young woman being allowed to spend so much time with the sly young con man? When she's the one to suggest an escape plan for the two of them, the one who has played cold, then hot; dumb, then smart; soft, then strong, it's pretty clear where we're going. But they do say that half the fun's the journey.

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Short-a-Day: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "Medea"

Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal satisfaction rating (out of 100): 45.

[Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers]

"This is an awful story and it began with me taking a taxi," reads the first line, admitting from the get-go that it's taking a casual approach with terrible things. Had she chosen a title with less import than that of the standin for all scorned women, this story might have soared; instead, her Icarus is flat and grounded. There are no stakes, so the piece comes across as a lecture to the complainers of the world, like our narrator, who has chosen a "gentle proleterian" cabbie as her driver, ostensibly in the hopes that he will silently allow her to vent. Instead, he reminds her that "what I'd complained about was nothing, nothing at all compared with some of the things that happen. There was worse, much worse."

Petrushevskaya develops this character well, relying mainly on dialogue to show us a woman who puts her foot in her mouth with such regularity that she may as well be running a marathon on her tongue. Unable to remain quiet, she responds to the driver's warning that there are worse things out there by launching a lengthy monologue: "Oh don't tell me! A friend told me about a woman she'd gone to school with...." Instead of showing how much she understands of true suffering, she proves the opposite; she's lived such a sheltered life that the sight of an exhibitionist's "riches" inspire "horror" in her. And when the driver begins to relate his own, true horrors, our narrator stubbornly insists on cheering him up, as if to prove herself right by proving that the driver's complaints are no more serious than her own. When he tells her that he has not slept in a month, she replies "'The best medicine is valerian drops,' I told him, not knowing anything."

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Short-a-Day: Stephen King's "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"

Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 96.

Given that he's known best for his heavily plotted horror novels, and not for his characters, it's a pleasant surprise to see Stephen King writing in the vein of, say, T. C. Boyle, with this clear, crisp, and entertaining short that enjoys to play with its participants as much as with its language. Then again, perhaps it's not a surprise to find King in such a playful mood, considering that he wrote this story as the penalty for losing a sports bet with his son (who provided the title of the tale). Whatever the case, be it ripped directly from actual headlines or just dreamed up from them, King offers us two views of a horrendous car crash.

It opens first with Brenda: "BRENDA HITS PICK-4 FOR $2,700 AND RESISTS HER FIRST IMPULSE" blares the section header, which doubles as its first line. It's a winning opener, and quickly establishes her as the sort of desperately poor, single woman with multiple kids for whom $2,700 is a massive jackpot. This applies, too, to her best friend (only friend, emphasizes King) Jasmine, from high school, with whom she decides to head out on a Thelma & Louise-like "road trip" -- escapism at its finest, as if by speeding away (ostensibly to hit up their parents for cash) they can avoid their problems:

[T]hey are chanting ["road trip"] while the three kids bawl in Brenda’s Sanford apartment and at least one (maybe two) is bawling in Jasmine’s North Berwick apartment. These are the fat women nobody wants to see when they’re on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there’s nobody better in sight.

Meanwhile, every other section follows Phil and Pauline, quickly introduced as "SO THESE TWO OLD POETS WHO WERE ONCE LOVERS IN PARIS HAVE A PICNIC NEAR THE BATHROOMS." They're well-off writers, on their way to give a poetry reading, and they can take the time to relax in the relative quiet of a roadside rest area, and have a custard-pie and red-tea picnic, the sort who flip a coin to decide which one gets to read the Times's Arts Section first and who make the poignant observations about Herman Wouk still being alive . . . even as the Brenda/Jasmine sections tarnish such shallow poignancy. Who the fuck cares about Herman Wouk, after all? That's the way in which King chooses to close his story:
 

Pauline is also a poet, and as such feels capable of answering the man in the language God speaks. “What the fuck does it look like?” she says.

This is as great a use of the split narrative as you're going to get, with priorities shifting mid-sentence and veering across the lanes of what had, up until then, been a rather tidy story. If we were in the laid-back Phil and Pauline camp before, we're now plunged into their own realizations: "The windshield disintegrates; glass pebbles sparkle for a moment in the sun and she thinks—blasphemously—beautiful." That word, blasphemous, is a perfect choice, and though only moments before she'd gladly skip the horrors of the Times's front pages for the trivial comforts of the Arts, she's now mutely horrified by the sight of bystanders showing up to take pictures: "The woman raises her own cell phone and takes a picture with it. Pauline Enslin observes this without much surprise. She supposes the woman will show it to friends later."

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Short-a-Day: Mory Morris's "The Cross Word"

Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): -1 (i.e., offensive).

Not to sound like a snob, but once you start doing the upper-tier crosswords of The New York Times or the syndicated ones from CrossSynergy, or simply the ones edited by top-notch constructors like Ben Tausig (The Onion), Mike Shenk (The Wall Street Journal) or Patrick Berry (Chronicle of Higher Education), or the puzzles self-produced by the constructors who appear in those prestigious publications (Brendan Emmet Quigley, Patrick Blindauer, Matt Gaffney), it's hard to take the computer-generated slogs that litter the commuter papers seriously. (You can find some examples by following the puzzle links here.) And even in those good publications, the serious crossword bloggers, like Amy Reynaldo or (my former professor) Michael Sharp, note that there are a fair share of duds, most of which revolve around so-called "stunt" puzzles: puzzles that are notable not for their theme or their fill, but because of the quirks of their construction, such as a puzzle that uses only eight letters, or a puzzle that uses every letter in the alphabet . . . four times a pop (a quadruple pangram, not that these are all bad). I spend this time talking about crosswords -- which I'm not-so-secretly devoted to, and training myself to speed-solve (I'm now averaging about three minutes for the easiest, a Monday, and winnowing my Friday/Saturdays below the twenty minute mark) -- because about three "clues" into Mary Morris's "stunt" story, I realized that bad fiction shares a lot of the same flaws as a bad crossword puzzle. For instance:

1. Is the theme blatant and/or unoriginal?
   Yes on both counts: in addition to her awfully punned titled, Morris throws the words RAGE, ANGER, WRATH and REVENGE, into her puzzle (randomly), and then, using the clues as section headers (that have little to do with the story that "ties" it all together), explains how Mickey (Michelle) grew to be jealous of her half-sister, Sara, who was beautiful and always got whatever she wanted, including the boy, Matt, that Michelle was in love with.
    
2. Is the story/puzzle sloppy in execution?
   Not only is the story devoid of new ideas -- Sara is a drug-addict and Michelle covers for her as a child; when they grow up, she refuses to speak to her ever again (over the whole Matt issue), at which point Sara dies, and Michelle feels guilty, but also wrathful. We find this all out in the "clue" for 50D, Furious: "I am using the word was now because if you haven't guessed, Sara is dead. She died a month again. She was murdered, though at first the police thought it was 'by her own hand.'" This has something to do with the confession of a witness -- a pigeon-keeper, known in slang as a "mumbler" -- but given the abruptness of this message, it's nothing more than a gimmick once again, a spot of tragedy meant to give weight to a petty story. As for the puzzle, not only does it clue the word MEAN twice, but it's filled with crap like GIRO and TOPEE and MESSRS and TORI; the two longest entries are APOTHECARYSSHOP and TOTALITARIANISM, neither particularly noteworthy (or relevant).

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Short-a-Day: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 65.

Either I'm getting better at identifying excerpts passing as short stories or The New Yorker is getting less obvious about these fictional teases. I'm going with the latter for this one: the situation's inventive enough such that with a little trimming and focus, Ondaatje could have had a real winner on our hands. Instead, he seems unsure as to which story he wants to tell: so it is that we begin with a cryptic third-person present tense section and end with a first-person narrator remembering the funeral-at-sea of a rich stranger. What's working is the sense of openness that Ondaatje gives to a story that's stuck, for the most part, on a large six-hundred-plus-person boat, and which is predominantly about the coming-of-age of an eleven-year-old-boy. What's lacking is a singular perspective with which to filter all that raw data.

In no time at all, really, our protagonist finds himself abandoned (and abandoning) his poor relatives (he's never slept beneath a blanket), seeing and climbing aboard a ship for the first time, and setting out from Ceylon to England, where he will now live with the mother he never really knew. Though he describes himself as isolated, he strikes up friendships with boys who would have hated him back on the mainland -- "the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius" -- as well as a tender and tenuous crush/connection with his distant female cousin, Emily de Saram, who is conveniently on the same boat. Though he is relegated to the worst table in the banquet hall, known by the eccentrics and poor as "the Cat's Table," he makes the most of his time, and the shift into the first person can be taken as the way in which he lays claim to his own life/destiny. Would that Ondaatje stuck with our hero, too: instead, he ends with the funeral of Hector de Silva; those wishing to know how this affected the boy -- who accidentally had a hand in the death, helping, as he did, to smuggle on board the dog that bit the cursed rich man's throat -- will have to tune in to the full novel.

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Short-a-Day: Donald Antrim's "He Knew"

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 9, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 13.

"At the booth, he counted out pills, his anti-depressants and her anti-anxieties--he carried and dispensed for her more often than not, ever since her suicide attempt--and he asked her, 'How many do you think will do the trick?'"

What Antrim's really asking here, of the reader, is how many pills will it take for this story to jump from a light and uneventful Mid-Manhattan shopping stroll between two lovers -- an older, washed-up comic actor, and his younger, never-washed wife -- the sort of tale you might find in the Fashion Issue, into a tragic tale that represents the modern American condition. In my mind, there aren't enough pills in the world to doll this up: American problems are so slight and self-obsessive enough already that it's hard to write about them, particularly when you choose, as Antrim has, to have the narrative tone reflect that self-suffering gloss. (Far better to do as Jonathan Franzen does, writing around the situations so as to give us a fuller view, not of the problem, but of the roots and results.)

There's a nice moment in which the young wife frets about not fitting the Empire waist at Barney's ("It is my tits? Are my tits too small? Is that the problem?") and he comforts her by making a joke about her height -- a callback to the quaintly romantic way in which they first met -- and it looks as if we'll really learn something about these characters. But no; as it turns out, the story is vapid, and has merely been attempting to siphon off the vapors of a more serious subject. Worse, it is unconvincingly vapid: bland, unnecessary descriptions come at us in waves, telling without ever showing, all with an almost impressive lack of action and that distinctly indistinct (American) gloss: "The man was about thirty-five or maybe thirty-eight or -nine years old, forty or so, and his wife was coming up behind.... The man's wife looked plain, with short brown hair and a small chin, though, on the other hand, she was attractive."

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Short-a-Day: Sam Lipsyte's "Deniers"

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 2, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 80.

A surprising, spry story about survivors: then and now. Mandy's father, a Holocaust survivor, opens the story with a bang: "Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut." You survived, in other words, by moving on and past it: denying, in a sense, what had been done to you. The more he dwells in the very real past, the further his wife gets from him, attending adult motels with a representative from Shell Oil, and so after she, depressed at the end of the affair, kills herself, he silently acknowledges the death and never speaks of it again. Now, in a nursing home, he still can hardly speak to his daughter about the past, his or theirs.

The daughter, meanwhile, suffers from her own memories, perverted or at least confused in many ways by all the silent denials; she winds up an alcoholic and a druggie, a victim of her own making. Her solution, unlike her fathers, is to ceaselessly talk about her problems -- in Anonymous meetings -- and to her friend, a liberal poetess who loves to absorb her anguish and wring it into verse. She winds up in a relationship with a tall man whose azure -- intensely blue -- eyes foreshadow his intensely Aryan origins, but after a liberating dream, she chooses not to flee from the former hatemonger, but to allow him to confess his sins: to speak, to not deny the past, but to move on in some middle ground. (All the while, however, thoughts of suicide -- her mother's abrupt note, "Oh shit," -- continue to flit through her mind, so perhaps this "peace" is untenable: maybe we can't deal with everything.)

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Short-a-Day: Thomas McGuane's "The Good Samaritan"

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 90.

What makes someone good? Barney, a temporary ranch-hand hired by an accidentally injured Szabo, is an efficient, respectable man who silently inserts himself into taking care of the work assigned him, slowly branching out to a brief affair with Szabo's somewhat lonely mother, and even going so far as to visit Szabo's federally imprisoned son, David. Though his odd involvement and direct -- offensively so -- talk throws Szabo, the man manages to improve everything he comes into contact with . . . right before he steals a valuable painting from Szabo's mother. On the other hand, Szabo's diligent, hard-working, and stagnant approach to life has led his ex-wife to take crazy risks (and eventually divorce him), leads his customers to think he's crazy, and has left his son feeling alienated . . . even though he regularly visits the prison, and makes it clear that David's always welcome to return home. Depending on the situation, any man can be good or bad, and even the theft of the painting isn't an awful thing -- he convinced the mother to purchase insurance.

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Short-a-Day: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "A Withered Branch"

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 18, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 22.

[Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.]

"I met my twin soul at dawn on a narrow street by the cathedral," writes the short-story writing protagonist of Petrushevskaya's piece. She has just arrived in Vilnius, and despite the narrow sexual escape of the previous night, in which her hitchhike-enabling trucker chooses not to rape her, she feels alive. She is open to the world, and in that light, she is welcomed by this "twin" -- "a modestly dressed woman of about fifty, wearing a kerchief," who offers, knowing that all the hotels are full, to let her stay in her home. She is greeted with dinner, given a spare key, treated kindly, and unlike your traditional short story, this does not end badly for either one.

As it turns out, the woman, Jadviga, is just looking for someone with whom she can talk. "She has been quiet, saying nothing to her new neighbors. They would never accept such tragedy, would shun her the way her old neighbors did in Panevezys." It's not clear how long she's been bearing this weight, and the cultural boundary between America -- which practical brags of its suffering -- and Russia makes it unclear if there's something else behind the loss of her husband, daughter, son, and son's husband in what appears to have been an accidental fire. The point, I guess, is that she's not accepted or that she feels unaccepted, and in that, our narrator can relate, for she has an asthmatic son (currently in a sanatorium) and a dead husband who was paralyzed for a fifth of his life. ("By the end he was so emaciated he looked like Jesus.")

The difference between them is that our narrator has something to live for -- her son ("my child, my savior, my treasure" -- whereas Jadviga is the titular "withered branch on a dead tree." Nothing more to the two-page story than this; just a moment in which grief is temporarily alleviated by the simple act of sharing it. Certainly not my cup of tea, but there's nothing offensive in Petrushevskaya's writing, and she lays out desperate times in an almost depressingly neat prose.

Short-a-Day: Keith Ridgway's "Goo Book"

 Originally published in The New Yorker, April 11, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 52.

Not the good book, mind you, that much is clear from the opening line -- "It was fucking hot" -- and the first section's introduction to our anti-hero, the sort of man who "slid through [tourists] like Jesus through children" and "came out the other side with a box purse and what his fingers had thought was a wallet but turned out to be a notebook," a character who dreams of the girl he has just slept with beside the canal as "probably snoring now, dreaming" or alternatively "being robbed, raped, murdered, bullied, torn apart, and if the canal had a tide she would drown, just for him, just because of him." He's the sort of person who worries that one can love too much, the good thief who goes out of his way to return the stolen notebook because he's filled with sentiments himself; he wants only emotionless money.

No, we're talking about the goo book here, a book that he has started to record his sentimental thoughts in -- and which she, his girlfriend, has started to do the same -- as "They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them." They are anti-Romeo and Juliet, a pair of damaged lovers who like to tie one another up and be hurt because of the way in which they hate themselves: "She hated her name. He hated his name." The book, then, is for tenderness and dreams; their physical lives, on the other hand, are partitioned from that, are meant to take on all the roughness of the world. Ironically, it's not clear that our protagonist knows much of the actual roughness out there: his father has gotten him a job working for some potentially violent characters, deal-makers that he serves as driver for, but he's never actually seen violence done -- he only suspects it. When police collar him and try to turn him, he not only agrees to their terms (easily coerced and fearful of prison), but winds up sleeping with one of the officers, a man named Hawthorn.

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Short-a-Day: Ramona Ausubel's "Atria"

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 4., 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 38.

What's the line -- if there is one -- between humans and beasts? High-school sophomore Hazel Whiting doesn't see much of one; life is a "soggy thing" to her, her peers look "like helpless, hairless baby rats," and she decides that she will "survive each of these endeavors by not becoming invested." And yet (a phrase that echoes through her mind), she winds up convinced that her mother -- who has already raised the daughter's three older sisters -- wants her to grow up faster, and so she sleeps with a beer-drinking and jerky-chewing clerk at the local 7-Eleven. Animals come into play again:

"Mmmmmm," he said. "Mmmmmm," she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long dark distances.

Her final observation's a bit of a cliche -- "She had done this grownup thing, yet she suspected that her mother would find her even more childish for it" -- but the distance in her voice keeps the story fresh, a tone that's needed since she is raped by a stranger in the next section, and checking her urine two paragraphs later: "Hazel sat on a closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright-blue plus sign on one end."  But it's here that the tone starts to peter out: Hazel imagines the child within her as a menagerie of animals, from a "glowing fur baby" to a "large bird of prey," and various others. There's a little history given about her mother and sisters, who believe that their dead husband/father will return through the child, which might explain Hazel's disassociative fantasies, and yet . . . .

In the story's climax, she has given birth and is left alone with the baby. As it begins to cry in its bassinet, she goes to comfort it -- not as baby, though, but as what she recognizes it to be: a seal. She collects the blowing dew from the four-AM wind and sprinkles it on the child; when this is not enough, she begins to wring out a dirty mop atop the child; finally, she lifts up the entire bucket and soaks the baby through and through. The story ends there, with the two of them naked in the dark room, the "seal" suckling at her breast -- and it comes as a disappointment, an "Is that all?" moment. The language is fine -- "The bundle coughed one beautiful polished river rock of a cough" -- but with Johnny the 7-Eleven clerk popping in, the sisters and mother responsibly caring for her, the town shipping her endless sympathy casseroles, it's hard to resolve the story's ultimate destination and abandonment of its prior threads. 

Short-a-Day: Lore Segal's "The Ice Worm"

Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 81.

A small story, no doubt, but far from a slight one. If Segal had written merely of Maggie's "small ice-worm of panic" upon finding that her elderly mother has been lost in the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the hospital's emergency admissions center, this would have been nothing new to the genre. Instead, however, Segal spends the first third of the story having the grandmother, Ilka, telling Maggie's son, David, a biblical story: she gets us invested in Ilka through the open love of the grandson, and sets a benchmark for Ilka's lucidity -- the way she carefully skirts around the violent confrontations between King David and Ishbi-benob of the Philistines -- that gives her growing senility more of a bite. This opening is such a heartwarming and simple expression of family that it's really only a matter of time before this storyline winds up on Parenthood, though Segal goes the extra mile to throw in a few observations about saintly Maggie's self-worth: "Good people don't think they are being good when they like doing the good thing. If they did it with gritted teeth, then they would think that it was good!"

The second third of the story covers Maggie's attempts to cope with the Kastel Street Social Service office (which indicates heavily how problematic eldercare is in this country, and how awful it may become if social services are cut); it notes, too, that for all our growing intimacy and affection for her mother, Ilka, we cannot justify giving her special treatment, for she is not the only suffering old person, nor is Maggie the only daughter struggling to provide for an aging relative (and Maggie has the calming help of her husband, Jeff, a man who, despite being "married to [his] own priorities," makes his wife's problems one of those priorities):

Maggie's idea was to place Ilka's face where Ms. Haze's eyes, as she seated herself in her chair, could not help meeting Ilka's eyes. And here Maggie's eyes met the eyes in the faces stapled, glued, and paper-clipped to all the notes and letters, and correctly attached in the upper-right corner of the applications waiting for Claudia Haze's perusal, determination, and appropriate action.

So it is, then, that the final third of the story does not simply set us on Maggie's ice-worm-driven side: we understand the terrible triages of the hospital, the impossible -- and thereby impersonal -- choices of the bureaucrats, and the awful truths that nostalgia forms because time has moved on -- things are no longer as they were, because they simply, bitterly are the way they are now. Well told, Segal, well told.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, The Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon"

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.

My dutifully proud -- wear a mask and your face grows to fit it. Avoid all mirrors as though -- and no, worst, the black irony: now his wife and girls are bewitched this way now as well you see. As his mother -- the art he perfected upon her.

Written as a monologue (complete with humorously bleak medical stage directions) from FATHER to a "you" that starts out as a deathbed confession to a priest (a Father) and his divine sister, this story is filled with mid-sentence pauses and shifts like the ones above, and rich with a sense of this narrator's unreliable character, a fact that emphasizes the broader point Wallace is making (in his work) about perception and (I'll say it again) empathy. The key phrase here is "Wear a mask and your face grows to fit it," because for years, the father has been living a lie, refusing first to tell his wife that he detests their son, and then never admitting to his son -- with whom he awkwardly interacts -- that he's a detestably selfish hindrance to the father's own happiness. In this, the story shares unhappy secrets with "Adult World" and, more accurately, "Suicide as a Sort of Present," which, if you assume to be talking about the mother from this story, is really kicking things up a notch, for it says that both the father and mother detested the child, but both hid it -- the father, out of love for the mother, and the mother, out of her outward attempts to face her inner emotional difficulties. Even on its own, however, the story is a gripping piece, and yes, one that demands to be performed in a theater.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person"

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.

Here's the most emblematic story of Wallace's c. 2000 fiction-writing style: a clinically written, circuitous, and emphatic third-person narrative about the self-torture that comes from losing an ability to empathize with and trust in the world around oneself. "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror," begins the story. We hear of the various medications she's been on, without effect, and learn of the horrifyingly petty Blame Games her divorced parents played over the costs of raising her, a childhood that has vestigially shaped the way she is now, with specific regard to her inability to blame anyone but herself. This is true to the extent that when she calls her Support Group -- her long-distance "friends" -- she spends as much time apologizing for her interruptions and pitiable behavior as she does attempting to talk about the formative traumas in her life, a vicious circle in which she feels demeaned by her attempts to feel less demeaned. (For example, she is mortified by the amount of money she spends to "force" her therapist to listen to her -- not because she doesn't have the money [and this reminds her of how her parents haggled over the principle of raising her] but because it re-enforces that she is the type of person who has to pay someone to be her best friend.)

So far as stories go, it's an excellent mood piece: we feel clutched at by the depressed person's intense needs, in the sense that we are almost dragged down with her, reaching the point at which we want -- like her friends -- to hang up the phone and stop listening. And yet we are also fascinated by the intricacies of her thought process, in which everything has a coded secret meaning; we are forced to wonder what it might be like to worry so much about how others see us, to be unable to forgive or forget or simply Be There (the code that she ignorantly uses to describe her Support Group's support). The unappealing nature of the story, which is really dryly written, in the flat tones of the depressed -- i.e., those who cannot feel/connect with themselves or others, but do, sadly, realize and fret over this (as opposed to psychopaths) -- shows that the story is having a successful effect on the reader. You sort of have to judge/see for yourself:

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 86.

Creativity now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C-sharp siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. "Soon, myths about myths" was the sirens' prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC [before cable] mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation's terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.

So yeah, don't get hung up on whether or not you'll be able to follow the many in-jokes Wallace makes here about Agon M. Nar (Agamemnon) or the titular "Tri-Stan" and "I Sold" (Tristan and Isolde) or the blatant Nar(cissus) and Ecko (Echo) -- our humble author is quite upfront about his recombinant sources and parodic intentions, and so while the story isn't particularly deep -- beyond pointing out flaws in our relentless entertainment cycle that Wallace has made, better, elsewhere -- it is followable and, more importantly, funny, even in the weird non-poetic and well-endowed vocabulary of the semi-shorthand that the narrator, "the fuzzy Hensonian epiclete" Ovid the Obtuse, uses.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 95.

And so but here's the story that's almost the total opposite of "Church Not Made with Hands": it's poetically written, sure, but in a familiar and intimate second-person that thrusts us into what is an easily recognizable situation: a pubescent thirteen-year-old boy ("Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning"), on his birthday, decides to grow up by plunging off a local swimming pool's diving tower. Time slows for him in this formative moment and his senses flare to life: there is nothing too small to be detailed as he climbs out of the pool, stands in the line that snakes past the "SN CK BAR," and prepares to climb the ladder, feigning the boredom of waiting that comes to those who have done something before, who can no longer appreciate the experience with fresh eyes.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Church Not Made with Hands"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 0.

First, an epigrammatic quote from A. O. Scott's New York Review of Books article on the oeuvre of Wallace (c. 1999): "Wallace, then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic. That is, his gambit is to turn irony back on itself, to make his fiction relentlessly conscious of its own self-consciousness, and thus to produce work that will be at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth." I lead with that, because to me, that's the essence of Wallace's best writing (both fiction and non-fiction): work that is relentlessly conscious, work in which we can see the writer struggling to name the world around him, to understand it, a God-like task that is made simpler for the reader, who is led to realize that We Are All in the Same Boat.

Which brings me to "Church Not Made with Hands," the first piece of Wallace's I've read that appears to be struggle-free. In the worst way possible. Confusing from the get-go -- "Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day's colored dark" -- the work gets more pretentious from there, hinting only briefly at Day's profession as a part-time art-therapist and his own mental issue, the brain damage done to his wife's daughter, Esther, whom was caught in the suction part of their private pool, and whom he (a non-swimmer), was unable to save. Elements of this permeate the story, it's true, from the use of color -- particularly pink and clear blue -- to the waterlogged writing itself, through which one struggle to find purchase. But rather than make you ponder the situation, these distant, distant third-person characters, the work is ponderous, filled with apparently meaningless descriptions and short sentences that fly by: "Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield's sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory."

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Adult World (I) & (II)"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 76.

You may have noticed by now that many of Wallace's stories don't exactly end. After watching the author struggle within the fiction of "Octet," the logic behind this becomes clearer: to end a story is to, in some way, resolve it; in turn, this can be said to then absolve the reader of any obligation to come to terms with it, much in the same way that when an answer key is provided to a student's mathematics homework (when it is presolved), the student has less motivation to derive a logical/fitting answer. For this reason, Wallace splits "Adult World" into two stories. (I) is a three-part exploration of an "immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife" who, after three-and-a-half-years of worrying that she's hurting his "thingie" when they have sex, has an epiphany that accounts for all the subtext in her dream images and for her husband's peculiar quirks. (II), on the other hand, is the fourth part of the same story, written as a schema (a formal outline often done in shorthand, as Wallace was wont to do), the part that actually explains the nature of the epiphany and details what happens next -- a sort of "ending" that Wallace was apparently unable to force himself to seriously write (as in, as an actual story segment, and not just as the writerly, self-conscious outline of such), and throughout which there are bracketed notes reminding the author to "avoid ez gag."

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