A short literary novel with a structure that informs the story, and a traditional horror tale from a master storyteller generated unexpected connections in reading this week.
Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation would probably be considered too twee or the stuff of fiction from The New Yorker for some readers. It's the story of a New York City marriage, of a wife, of her husband, of their child (none of them are ever named), and how they started out and how they carried on and what happened when the husband was unfaithful. But it doesn't read like the oft-told tale it appears to be from that description.
The whole novel is comprised of the short bits of wisdom, whimsy or sangfroid that readers like me underline or copy into a chapbook. And they make a finely woven, coherent, heartfelt story. It is a combination of technique and heart that works well.
From the snippets, it's clear to see the wife didn't do all the things she imagined she would. As a young woman, she planned to be an art monster, to be creative, to matter.
For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.
Now she teaches and tries to survive a colicky baby. Her husband, a Midwest transplant who is famously kind, makes soundscapes of the city. He is introduced to her by her friend, who she calls the philosopher and who is an adjunct professor and late night DJ. Offill deftly chronicles what it's like to be at home with a baby who has colic:
After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.
My love for her seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited. There should be songs for this, I thought, but if there were I didn't know them.
She was small enough then to still fall asleep on your chest. Sometimes I fed you dinner with a spoon so you wouldn't have to raise your arms and wake her.
Offill writes about different kinds of love with vivid, wistful remembrance in only three paragraphs. Some writers cannot do that in hundreds of pages. She has kept in only the important bits, but sometimes reveals them explicitly and other times obliquely. Taken together, they tell us about these characters without names and their hearts.
She also weaves in quotes and bits from other writers, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Buddhist philosophers and this:
Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart ... it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.
(Shades of the subject of
Brecht's Books Go Boom! from Friday on Kate Chopin's T
he Awakening. If only that dratted reading hadn't given us womenfolk ideas about our station.
The only cliched part of Dept. of Speculation is that the husband is unfaithful. Until the end, it's not clear if they will stay together or part. But either way, the feeling of dread has been introduced. Whatever happens, this happened, and it cannot be erased.
There is the same feeling in a very different tale, one of the short stories in Neil Gaiman's current collection, Trigger Warning. Feminine Endings is a monologue from a street performer whose ability is to stand absolutely still for long periods of time. With the proper get-up, the narrator looks like a statue. A tourist in the European city has caught the narrator's eye, a red-haired beauty who sometimes notices the human statute and sometimes doesn't see it; the street performer is that good at blending in. The end reinforces that talent. And the sense of dread that comes just before the final revelation, when the reader realizes what that ending is most likely to be, is so powerful. That the woman in the story resembles Gaiman's wife, Amanda Palmer, and that Palmer has performed as a human statute, makes the story all the more unnerving.
Whatever happens, however it plays out, that feeling will never go away. These two authors to create that powerful feeling in two very different ways in two very different tales.
Gaiman writes at length in an introduction about the phrase "trigger warning" and the academic controversy last year. His conclusion, even though there "are still things that profoundly upset me when I encounter them" is that:
... so much of what we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: we need to find out what fiction is, what is means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else's experience of the story.
We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what they see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?
Because these two reading experiences happened so closely together to me reinforces my belief that there is no one right way to tell a story. What matters is that the writer knows how to use whatever genre, whatever storytelling tropes, whatever power and ability and heart available, to communicate the feelings, the important bits. Structure can be as powerful in this as plot and character.
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