A Review of Danzy Senna's Short Story CAROL ANNE, from the Spring 2013 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review

The Spring 2013 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review includes a short story by Danzy Senna entitled Carol Anne.  This is a fine story and well told.  By this, I mean the story is well told.  The word count is longer than the story.  Sort of like having your shirttail out in back.

The arc of the story is sufficient for its word count of 4,500 and vice-versa.  Sufficient, just barely.  It could easily have been three times as long.  Furthermore, not all the 4,500 words are used for the story.  Some of them are diverted on behalf of motivations which I have little chance of guessing.  And if I did guess them, I do not have the robust piquancy of intellect sufficient to understand them.  None of my business anyway.  Live and let live.  But what about the story?

When I began my reading,  my initial reaction was:  “Holy cow, a conceit.  Whadayaknow about that?” Way cool.

Yes, you don’t find those much anymore.  And finally, in this one, you don’t find it here either.  It just doesn’t get used like that.  It could have, but it didn’t.  It had the makings of an Elizabethan conceit, but it never got farther off the ground than plot device or symbol.  Too bad.  The mixed-up, tricked-out suitcase could have been one for the ages.  Unfortunately, this suitcase is not the only baggage packed into the word count.

This is a story of pretty, preppy, precious, picky people piddling their lives away, pondering diurnally (alliteration skids to a halt, thud).  That’s okay.  You want to get out of Yoknapatawpha County once in a while, is this not so, mon frère et mon petite?

However, it is the dark truth of dabblers that they never finish anything, and these characters do not.  There is an ending, but not an end.  There is a ballistic arc of travel, but we never see it land.  Our ending is to watch the sun almost rise.  Fortunately, I had a piano sonata on the record player and so the overall experience was satisfying.

Now Flannery urges us to just have (I know, I split that one.) the experience and stop there.  She hisses when people begin trying to drain stories of their theme and (worse) poke around for handy aphorisms to save for the next time life’s logic fails.

The story is slowed by the extra weight of popular themes it is shanghied into carrying on behalf of the sinecures for race and homosexuality.  This boosterism is stuck all over the outside of the story like “fragile” stickers.  With 500 more words, you could have saved the whales, prevented forest fires, and condemned fracking.  Once so intoxicated, this leads to polemics and, ultimately, to manifestos, leaving the reader a sadder man, but wiser.  

The result of this was that I kept reading while putting all thoughts of the characters aside.  I started poking around for themes.  I became confused and quit.  Was I being entertained or educated?  For a moment, I wondered if I was waking up in a women's studies class somewhere. 
With those subjects thrown-in our word count needed to grow.  Or else, it needed to be cut down and this converted into a poem.  There it is:  stretch it, or shrink it.  To the rack or to the dryer with it.

So, I went outside and cut the grass and then came back in reinvigorated and prepared to do what I always do at times like these:  reread and skip over the boring parts.  

That done, I pronounced myself entertained with the remaining 3,000 words, not exactly giddy with it, but at least bemused.  I closed the heavyweight glossy covers of the VQR, hand-pumped a new five gallons of yellow highlighter, and waited to make the next journey from my tedious and pointless life and into a fashionably tedious and pointless life.

Offered by the booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon.  August 26, 2013