If You Like That Sort of Thing

Thoughts on some John Cheever stories

“Goodbye, My Brother,” the first story in The Stories of John Cheever, is—among other things—an exercise in the use of POV, and the possibilities inherent to the use of an  unreliable narrator. 

After setting up the importance of family loyalty, the narrator introduces us to his brother, Lawrence, returning for a visit to the family’s vacation home after a long absence from family affairs, and a longstanding lack of communication. Lawrence: un-liked for his aloofness, his gloominess. Tensions are high as the family reunites, all while Lawrence continues to brood, distancing himself from his family. But much of Lawrence’s inner life is only guessed at by the narrator, so consistently as to be almost obsessive. The narrator is increasingly angry at his brother, for no particular reason, and he often gets angry only after imagining what Lawrence’s feelings and observations would be in any given moment if he were to voice them—never, or at least only rarely, for something Lawrence actually does.

“I suppose Lawrence thought…” he writes, in a number of variations, all of which serve to characterize Lawrence entirely unfairly, the intention of his actions perhaps misread or misinterpreted without him having a chance to defend himself. The POV becomes more and more questionable throughout as we realize the narrator has his own prejudices that he’s working through. And Cheever handles this very delicately, never being too obvious about what he’s showing us but also making sure that it’s there on every page. 

The last paragraph of the story, also, is incredibly powerful. As the narrator watches his wife and his sister swimming together in the sea, he wonders again about Lawrence, who by now has gone away:

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?

I read this as an indictment of the family, in the context of the sea having been a sign of the past, the shoreline being described as eroding—“a house built at the edge of the cliff on a sinking coastline.” The one who’s failing, of course, is the one who doesn’t notice anything wrong in the world, the one who lives entirely in an imaginary world where everything is rather peachy. There’s a great moment in the middle of the story when the narrator writes about Lawrence:

“I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure.”

Lawrence, as someone who lives in the present—moves around a lot, tries different things—is antithetical to the family’s tendency to ignore problems, such as the mother’s desire to keep patching up the house, planning future reconstruction work even as it very well may be a lost cause (which Lawrence maintains is the truth of it). The narrator is emblematic of this, and even though we’re in his voice for the whole of the story, the theme still works its way in, testament to Cheever’s subtle handling of POV.

“The Enormous Radio” is another story that hides a harsh truth within what is ostensibly a tale about a housewife’s curiosity, and her slow realization that she doesn’t know people as well as she thought—that it’s actually impossible to truly know the people around you. Through the new radio that her husband buys her, she can hear what goes on in her neighbors’ apartments, and it horrifies her. And she thinks that her life isn’t nearly as bad as those people’s—that the problems they face are unique to them, and that she and her husband and children don’t have that kind of darkness lurking just below the surface. But in the final scene, a blowout fight with her husband, she realizes that she doesn’t even know him as well as she thought she did, and that he actually harbors a deep bitterness towards her. The whole notion of surface vs. interior reality is brought out in a dramatic way.

There’s a great bit of dialogue in which she asks her husband: “You love me, don’t you? And we’re not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?” To which he answers, “No, darling.” But which question is he answering? Does he actually not love her anymore? (Because his answer to the second question, in truth, is a resounding YES, as we discover in the climactic tantrum.)

Cheever is very successful at letting the true essence of his story bubble up slowly until eventually it’s the only thing you can see—as in “The Swimmer,” a story which slowly devolves from cocktail party whimsy (full of nostalgia for a certain class, a certain type of suburban landscape, a certain kind of Sunday afternoon) into a sort of surrealist, existentialist story about social unevenness, alcoholism, and general human decline. Cheever wears down his protagonist as he embarks on his mission of swimming across the county via his neighbors’ swimming pools, and we see embedded in his journey a figurative darkening of the sky—marked by a literal storm, “a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance”—and a gradual awareness of his own decline. But Cheever is a master of suspension and restraint, and we don’t see, until the very end of the story, the true nature of Neddy’s failures. I think what worked so well for me here was the lack of literal interpretation, the feeling that things aren’t quite right in Cheever’s world but that we also can’t quite tell what it is. Again, his genius use of dialogue: Neddy sees the world one way, but we see the unreliability of that worldview through dialogue, when he visits friends and former lovers and is met with a certain disdain that we weren’t led to expect based on Neddy’s own explanation of his circumstances and his social standing.

SUDDENLY, A KNOCK ON THE DOOR (by Etgar Keret)

Etgar Keret writes in a deceptively casual style, conversational at times, even, and his very short stories can seem airy until suddenly they punch you in the face with a raw emotion, a harsh political statement, or just a sudden revelation. What I love about the style is that all the writerly work is invisible; the craft is so deeply embedded that everything feels so natural, until you realize that there really is a lot going on in terms of construction. He also weaves fantasy elements into his work in such a natural way that it doesn’t seem fantastic at all: the world he’s describing seems entirely real.

For example, one of my favorite pieces in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is “Unzipping,” in which a girl discovers that her lover has a zipper under his tongue. She opens him up and finds another man inside him, a man very different from her lover: sexier, more dangerous. But “life with Jurgen wasn’t easy” and he eventually leaves her. Later, she finds the “wrapping” which once contained her previous lover and wonders whether it was a mistake to open him up and discard him. Then she also finds that she has a zipper under her tongue, too, and the story leaves us with her wondering whether or not to open it: “It made her very hopeful but also a little worried—mainly about freckled hands and a dry complexion. Maybe she’d have a tattoo, she thought, of a rose. She’d always wanted to have one, but never had the nerve. She’d thought it would hurt a lot.” So what we have is an allegory—the idea that we leave people behind because we’re always looking for something a little bit better, and we change ourselves, too, wondering what life would be like lived another way. She tries to “imagine what she’d be like inside.” The zipper metaphor works so perfectly and seamlessly, eliminating the necessity of certain scenes—a breakup scene with her previous lover, meeting Jurgen for the first time, etc—and compresses the reality of the story, letting the most important elements resonate most strongly. And in “What, Of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” a guy is making a documentary in which he knocks on doors and asks people what they would wish for if they found a talking goldfish that granted three wishes, and he ends up encountering an old Russian man who actually has such a goldfish. But the whimsical element is quickly replaced with tragedy when the device becomes imbued with its real purpose: to reveal how lonely the old man is, having saved his third wish only because he didn’t want the goldfish to go away.

In the title story (which is also the first story in the collection), a character says, tellingly, to a writer named Etgar Keret: “Don’t you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck. Use your imagination, man, create, invent, take it all the way.” This can be read as a sort of mantra, a lens through which to investigate the book: “reality” as “too safe,” a failure to “take it all the way.”

            In “Joseph,” Keret’s narrator lies to himself, or hedges on the truth, in ways that point to a general inability to be sure of anything at all. From the opening:

“There are conversations that can change a person’s life. I’m sure of it. I mean, I’d like to believe it. I’m sitting in a café with a producer. He’s not exactly a producer, he never produced anything, but he wants to.”

Twice there we have a declarative sentence undermined by a hedge—“I mean, I’d like to believe it”; and “not exactly a producer”—which does some great work in terms of characterizing the narrator, getting us into his frame of mind. The unreliability of narrators is something pervasive in these stories, too. “Teamwork” begins with a father explaining that his son wants him to kill his grandmother (the narrator’s ex-wife’s mother): “My son wants me to kill her. He’s still young and doesn’t express this perfectly just yet, but I know exactly what he’s after. ‘I want that Daddy should hit her hard,’ he says.” The dialogue is what drives home that the son is actually very young, unaware of the import of his suggestions, and turns the first two sentences back against the narrator—we realize he’s fabricating this murder plot for his own reasons, but justifying them as his son’s wishes. Dialogue is a great way to reveal this unreliability, because then we don’t feel like the narrator’s internal monologue is forced; usually when we can easily see through a character as he lies to himself, it’s hard not to wonder why they can’t see what we see.

Many of the stories have a metafictional element to them, in the sense that they are stories about stories—and sometimes stories about the act of writing. The title story involves a writer being forced to write a story by intruders in his home. “Creative Writing” is a brilliant piece about a husband and wife, told almost entirely in the context of the stories they write in creative writing classes. The stories they write, and the metaphors contained within them, are the way we discover the problems in the story’s central relationship. And in “What Animal Are you?” a writer is asked by a reporter to “write something on the computer because it always makes for great visuals”—she’s filming him for German Public Television. At first he just pretends, but then a story emerges, which feels at first like a recounting of the very real, diegetic events, but becomes a story about the narrator’s troubled relationship with his wife and son—and the lies we tell ourselves and others. I love how Keret is able to write about writing and still be telling a story that has an emotional core, a relevance outside of a conversation about craft.

in which I review THE GREAT GATSBY

From the beginning of my review of The Great Gatsby for Slant Magazine:

From Willy Loman and his diamonds in Death of a Salesman to the Joads and their famous westbound road trip in The Grapes of Wrath, revealing the American myth as a shiny yet futile fantasy is nothing unfamiliar in literature, but doing so while implicating an audience in its own excess is a more complicated project, one handily taken on by Baz Luhrmann in his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's mostly undisputed masterpiece The Great Gatsby. This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world, as Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) would undoubtedly describe it. Decadent prose is transformed into a decadent filmmaking style that defies modesty in the most brutal sense. Gone are Fitzgerald's incisiveness and subtlety, but they're replaced here by Luhrmann's grandiosity, equal parts Gershwin and Beyoncé and Jay-Z—a larger-than-life worldview that sometimes grates but also frequently charms, despite an uneven script with a penchant for condescension. But these are fireworks that are meant to burn out, and when the exterior of light and color and magic burns away, it's up to the doctor in the room to see if a heartbeat can be detected.

Notes after reading some Tobias Wolff stories:

The magic of “Hunters in the Snow,” one of Tobias Wolff’s most famous stories, is what’s not being said: that the negligence of two men is causing a third man to die. Tub has shot Kenny while on a hunting trip after a miscommunication, and now Tub and his friend Frank have the responsibility of taking Kenny to the hospital before he bleeds to death. The problem is that the truck has no windshield and it’s freezing outside, so they have to keep stopping to warm themselves up, all while dealing with their own personal problems: Kenny’s marriage is falling apart, and he’s fallen in love with a teenager; and Tub has become an over-eater, getting fatter and fatter, and all he wants is to be able to tell someone, for someone to understand him. Meanwhile, Kenny is dying in the back of the truck, and the last line points to the inevitability of this conclusion with a cruel directness.

Another road story is “Powder,” about a father driving his son in very dangerous conditions on a closed road towards home. What’s really just a situation with no ultimate conclusion—two guys in a car going home—becomes an odyssey of a father and son’s relationship over time, the journey that day becoming representative of a whole life lived: “And the best was yet to come—switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe.” Wolff works this way frequently in his short fiction, revealing surface details—dialogue, exposition, simple straightforward events told in chronological order—while embedding the real story, the real import of what’s happening, in the subtext. “Bullet in the Brain” works very similarly to “Powder,” a small or isolated incident becoming a whole world; in “Powder,” time expands to incorporate the whole of a relationship, while in “Bullet,” time slows down to give a dying man a new perspective just as the titular bullet slices through his brain. And in “Leviathan,” one woman’s slow breakdown and submission to drug addiction is only addressed directly at the very end of the story, when her three friends smile at her as she prepares to snort meth: “Their faces were rosy with candlelight. They were the faces of three well-wishers, carolers, looking in at Helen through a window filling up with snow.” The perspectival gesture—the act of them actually looking at her—mimics our own looking, our own final framing of Helen alone, distinct from these other three who are able to manage their drug habit (and their depression, where it exists) without letting it consume them. The story lives in these small visual cues: who’s looking at who, and why. Wolff manages it perfectly.

“The Other Miller” is a story about a man whose mother dies before he’s able to atone for shutting her out after she married his former teacher against her son’s selfish wishes—a fairly straightforward setup, except that the protagonist thinks this is all a mistake, that another guy with his same name is the actual son of the dead woman, and that the army (where he’s currently serving) has mixed them up. Like in “Hunters in the Snow,” we’re pretty sure we know more than the characters about what’s happened: that it actually is Miller’s mother who has died, and there has been no mix-up. This knowledge on the part of the reader serves to implicate us in the tragedy of the protagonist’s not-knowing. The sadness of what has happened becomes all the more poignant as we cringe while Miller remains convinced that his mother is still alive. The story he tells himself about his past, too, is imbued with this same sense of inevitable dread: we hear how he unfairly shunned his mother, and we also know that she’s (probably) now dead, so the whole story has a “what might have been” feel to it, like watching a video of a car crash knowing already that there were no survivors. When Miller is forced to visit a gypsy fortune-teller, he is understandably wary: “There’s no predicting what a fortune-teller might say, and once it’s said, no way of keeping it from happening. Once you hear what’s out there it isn’t out there anymore; it’s here. You might as well open your door to a murderer as to the future.” Some part of Miller is afraid of knowing the truth, and this is how he lives his life: not wanting to know about the future. And this thematic truth is woven into the structure of the story itself, the form of the narrative. The story elements become greater than the sum of their parts.

I also noticed something consistent and evocative in the construction of many of Wolff’s paragraphs. He’ll often embed atmosphere (particularly, weather, in “Soldier’s Joy,” a story that is densely atmospheric and rooted in the metaphor of rain mirroring the main character’s muddied internal life) in the very center of a paragraph, sandwiched between powerful actions. For example:

Hooper parked the truck halfway up the drive and walked the rest of the distance. The rain was falling harder now, tapping steadily on the shoulders of his poncho. Sweet, thick, almost unbreathable smells rose from the earth. He walked slowly, gravel crunching under his boots. When he reached the gate a voice to his left said, “Shit, man, you took your time.”

And then:

Hooper shook out a cigarette and bent to light it. “Hey, all right,” he said. “One match.” He put the case back in his pocket and cupped the cigarette under the picnic table to keep it dry. The rain was falling lightly now in fine, fitful gusts like spray. Misty gray light was spreading through the sky. Porchoff’s shoulders kept twitching, and his lips were blue and trembling. “Put your poncho on,” Hooper told him.

The form itself embeds a sense of setting and “weather” (in both the literal sense, and in the sense that the weather of a story is the circumstances within which the action takes place) within the action so as to imbue the action with a sense of atmosphere. The construction of the paragraph allows the story to keep moving while also giving the reader a very clear sense of the story’s world, as well as the internal world of the narrator; as Wolff is not a writer who deals much with the interior lives of his characters, he relies instead on outward circumstances to reflect the inward. Here, the rain reflects the narrator’s mental state: “falling harder now, tapping steadily,” and then “falling lightly now in fine, fitful gusts”—updating us on the state of the rain is updating us on the narrator’s development, and his relationship to the story’s action.

New URL

You can now find this page at http://richardscottlarson.com.

Sorry for any dead links or bookmarks!

Writing is "scary and shitty"

From an interview with Claire Vaye Watkins:

RM Right, and you’re working on a novel, is that right? How is that going?

CVW Oh, it’s awful. It’s going awfully. I’ve told friends in the past that if something’s scary or shitty, that’s a good sign because most good things started out as scary and shitty. But I’m starting to think that that was bullshit, what I was telling them, because it doesn’t feel fun or good. But it never really feels good for me. I always kind of dread writing. Sometimes I even get a stomachache before my writing time. Just winding myself up about it.

Thursday elsewheres:

Kevin B. Lee on Room 237.

Pablo Neruda exhumed!

I really love these fan-designed LOTR covers.

A great profile of Laird Barron over at Weird Fiction Review.

William Friedkin, no bullshit.

Rick Yancey's The Fifth Wave sounds interesting...

Dale Bailey on The Bad Place: the importance of setting in horror fiction.

The reemergence of Zelda Fitzgerald. I have a cat named Zelda Fitzgerald, and she emerged almost two years ago. But then again she's very much a trend-setter.

Some random thoughts on Donald Antrim's ELECT MR. ROBINSON FOR A BETTER WORLD

The form of Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is as hypnotic as the narrative itself. Working without line breaks or chapter breaks, the text forms one cohesive whole, forcing the reader to mediate his or her own experience of the narrative world without ever being told to stop digging deeper, without ever being told to stop for a moment and reflect. The insularity is not arbitrary: the setting of the novel is a strange yet familiar town (“a watery place familiar but not familiar, home but not home”) which has seemingly been cut off from the outside world, its residents left to fend for themselves within increasingly complicated social structures. Antrim tells his story largely in flashback, too—non-chronologically, even—and yet still retains momentum; the structure seems to work like memory does, elliptically, in fits and starts, full of diversions. And, aside from the absence of line breaks, there’s also another lovely technique Antrim uses to further focus our reading experience. In moments of heightened scene, Antrim cuts out dialogue tags, focusing the sentence on the action, almost like a screenplay: “ ‘Okay,’ vanishing, with the refreshing… ” … or here: “ ‘Call me Pete,’ following her into the warm kitchen… ” The effect is fluid, yet powerful, rendering the scene with more immediacy.

Lots of fantasy or absurdist elements flit into the narrative—people turn into animals (in a  beautiful representation of a marriage’s  breakdown, the protagonist and his wife turn into two different animals, one a fish and another a land mammal: they can no longer occupy the same habitat); two families go to war in a public park which is now filled with land mines; and there are many more instances of weirdness—but the novel still feels realist, grounded in the world we know, and that’s due to how meticulously Antrim paints these people and their circumstances, never teetering too far towards any one effect. Rather, the effect is many things at once—humor, horror, and everything in between.

The first sentence itself is a wonder:

See a town stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish. That’s what my wife, Meredith, calls the ocean.

We have “rotted” and “broken” fruits which are also “delicious,” establishing a binary which follows through the whole novel, this idea that things can possess two opposing qualities at the same time; we have marine signifiers in “fishbelly” and “bathwater seas,” as well as (of course) the final image, the summation of what we’re seeing: “the sunken world of fish” (according to his wife, the ocean itself, marine symbolism—and the idea of drowning, which manifests itself in a variety ways—being inherent to the novel’s language). And we have movement, too, the town “rising” and “cutting upward” through the seas, this idea of a sunken world, rather like Atlantis, or the common trope of the domed city. The sentence unsettles us, revealing that we aren’t on solid ground. The terrain will shift. And we have to pay attention, because the meanings won’t always be obvious.

Antrim also has a way with economically painting pictures through startling word choice. He uses literal colors—“It was a black hour”; “dim light spilling yellowly”; “the sea, faintly, blackly visible”—but also joins words in a way that illustrates the binaries present in the world he’s building, such as in “Barbara looked unhappy and sexy” or “exquisite distres,”; a man who looks “fungal” and who elicits a “menacing, beery chuckle”; things being “wetly alive”; the presence of “anxious chaos”; and also the strangeness of “savage foliage”—the implication being that the world itself, the physical/natural world, has also gone wild. The deliberateness of these word pairings demonstrates Antrim’s control over the world of the novel, the descriptors (the words themselves) being just as startling and unsettling as the events of the story. In this way, the text itself (form) points to the novel’s arching themes (content).

Monday elsewheres:

Jeff VanderMeer offers some more details about his Southern Reach trilogy, and the film adaptation currently being developed.

Hugo Award nominations!

Laura Miller on sneaky author tricks.

A bit more info on the forthcoming Under the Dome TV adaptation.

An interview with Adrian Van Young, whose debut collection sounds awesome (and who also writes interesting stuff about horror movies). A snippet from the interview:

I think that film at large has this intensely versatile index of visual cues and techniques that can’t be overestimated as an asset to writers of fiction. The two mediums have a tremendous amount in common, which you see not only in the contemporary work of someone like Jonathan Lethem, but also in books that were written pre-cinema, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance. For my money, that scene early in the novel where Victor catches sight of the monster illuminated, briefly, by the lightning encircling the Alps, is one of the most cinematic pre-cinematic scenes in literary history. If it’s even possible to say something like that…

And lastly, the awesome Brian Francis Slattery has won the Philip K. Dick Award for Lost Everything.

Review of THE EXPLORER by James Smythe

My review of The Explorer, the latest novel by James Smythe, was posted today at Strange Horizons. From the beginning of the review:

There’s plenty to love about James Smythe's most recent novel, The Explorer, the story of Cormac Easton, a journalist launched into space as part of a team aiming to go further into the unknown than anyone ever has before. Their journey is to be "a voyage to rival Columbus, to rival the stories of Jules Verne" (p. 88). And indeed, the exploration motif is front and center throughout the novel, a rhetoric which is seemingly a direct response to the recent scaling back of manned space travel. The romance of exploration is perhaps hammered in a bit too hard, buffeted by a few too many flowery paragraphs explaining humanity's history of exploration and the idea that exploration is part of human nature (which sounds especially clumsy in dialogue), but it’s a welcome attempt to literalize a sentiment which often gets lost in all the science. Cormac, who is vocationally a writer rather than a scientist, is the perfect character to take on this role. Cormac's presence on the ship is predicated on his ability to tell the story of the expedition, to package it for the eager audience back home, and the novel itself can be read in that manner, too, much like a captain's ledger in the days of exploration by sea travel: a chronicle of exactly what happened, and exactly what was found.