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

A Review of THE HORSEHAIR BALL GOWN by Bobbie Ann Mason Published by Virginia Quarterly Review - Spring 2013

The Virginia Quarterly Review gives us yet another look at what it is like to be alive.  This one displaces old memories, both in me and in its characters.

It takes spare time and some bit of love to appreciate the “teacup-and-doily world” in which two old ladies live in self-imposed exile.  The reward here had to do with something that becomes a meditation as a person ages.  You begin to think about fate, and how it works, and how it is defeated, on occasion.  The Greek and Christian sides of that two-headed coin compete for your wavering faith.  Competition is good, I have been told.  Personally, I hate it.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s story resurrects an incident which might have been trivial in many other lives but which was pivotal in the girlhood of “Little Bit” and “Puss.”  Now, seventy years later, after lives of “tabbyhood,” the incident rises up with new power to ally with a new incident, which, like the older one, would have been harmless—not even worth mentioning—in nearly any other life.  But not these.  Mason’s story ends before we see it unwind, but we know it is going to kill the older sister and ruin the other.  It will be an arrow tipped with a poison compounded to kill only them.  Mason shows us that irony can have lethal persistence. 

Lunch at Harvey’s in Lexington, Ky., will remind us of the stubborn wrath of god.  If ever we thought God had grown modern, Mason shows us that still he seeks atonements from the keepers of cold altars.  And, if you should prefer the abstract, we can call it fate.

I stopped.  I remembered almost exactly where to go.  I pulled Mason’s first book off one of my shelves.  Inside was the review from Time Magazine.  It was early in 1983.  It was one of those “Geritol books” I dutifully swallowed— even in the midst of a killer business world several times harsher than almost any other businessman would ever come to know.

I knew that one day, I would write, somehow—and make use of that degree—after the kids were grown and after I had killed my final alligator.  And so back then, and for that reason, I grimly, dutifully read Bobby Ann Mason one-handed, while diapering with the other and an elbow.

No, you cannot expect a young man with the highest testosterone count ever recorded to dote on stories of the life contained in a drop of pond water.  But I am ready now.  I am not confessing that I am a dried stick.  But now, yes, it is right for me. 

Plato had something in the Republic about this (when he and his pals ran into Sophocles), but that shall be another blog, sometime.  Remind me.

Yes, I forgive myself for breezing through her first book.  However, The Horsehair Ball Gown has unlocked it and this next read will be a good one, I predict.  I shall give Shiloh and Other Stories the thoughtful, watchful reading it deserved 30 years ago, when I zoomed through it.  It just did not happen to fit my pistol back then.

Since I believe that I write about what other people think about, I suspect that this shall become a minor trend.  Boomers shall start to read.  You heard it here first.  Border’s may simply have missed it by a few years.  Such a close one!  We will call them “Battered Border’s Better Boomers.”  By the way, what do snotty literary critics mean by “Boomer angst?”

Now remember, neighbors, The Horsehair Ball Gown is not going to be like wrestling a drunk to the barroom floor and going home without a scratch to brag about it.  You are going to have to open it like you do butterfly legs, and you will take it easy.  Hear?  This is going to be like taking time with a woman that you want to see again.

I have always thought that Shakespeare is prized today for a lot of clever quipage that was likely commonplace back then.  The point is, he saved it for us, and now we give him full credit for it all.

Mason does this too.  “Going to heaven in house shoes,” and “Tiptoe Day,” and “Better than sex cake” shall now live on and on.  Mason still has those “Burns and Allen” moments.  A case in point, the old ladies politely listen to the waitress brag about her kid that goes to a magnet school.  When she leaves, they puzzle over why any sane mother would brag on a child that is retarded or disabled.  This will tend to happen to folks who have not read the newspaper for 40 years.

It seems that many years ago, when the two sisters were trying to survive their childhood (with pretty-good, but typically imperfect parents), there had been an older sister and one who had no pet name.  Geisel was wild.

The youngest sister lied to protect Geisel and the middle one would not.  They coerced Little Bit into an honesty that backfired when their father barked so hard that Geisel ran away.

Foolishly, Mom and Dad ignored her letters and so she stayed gone.  Now the incident at Harvey’s in Lexington has raised up dreams of this in Puss.  This rattles both of them.

Still looking to fix things, Little Bit cannot leave well enough alone.  Fate was laying for them in a little chain of innocence—one end of it nearly forgotten, the other as fresh as two Thursdays ago.

Offered by the Booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon – August 24, 2013

A YEAR SPENT FACING INTO THE WIND

I stayed on the upper deck, next to the helmsman and the wheel.  She hove to briskly each time I gave the order.  Her clean lines made her responsive, and she carried as much sail as we could ballast for.  She could run as fast as any, but like all the rest, we were at the mercy of the winds.

I watched the characters working on the decks below me.  I shouted my orders and they snapped to it—each one of them seeming to think that the success of the voyage rested on his or her shoulders alone.  There were no slackers among the crew.

I had designed the ship the previous year.  I constantly puzzled over the compromises of cargo and speed.  We could not remain afloat forever.  We must reach a finish.  Yet, how much freight was enough became my constant refrain.

We were well underway through February and March.  Then the novel advanced slowly, creeping forward unnoticed like the vernal advance of the spring itself.  From time to time, it would overtake doldrums and stall, with slack sails luffing in a listless sea.  The next, it would dash forward, sailing close hauled, the canvas full, the rigging complaining against the wind.  As spring turned into May, we began making surprising progress.  Each time I turned, there was a long white wake astern for me to see.

I had written the final chapter, and so the destination was known by me all along the way.  Oddly, what was not known was whether the port we’d shipped from was home or if it was the one ahead, the one to which we bent all of our labor.

I had only a general idea of how we would get there.  There were no charts in this area of the ocean.  That was the reason that we had put to sea—to be the first to get from here to there.  Let others make the same run they had last year.  We gladly ventured to the edges of the charts, to the places marked only by the coiling of sea monsters, and by warnings written in other languages.

At the end, I shall have only the vaguest idea of what our cargo might be worth.  To the dockhands at the end, this might only be more of what they already had in plenty.

Still, the venture would never be a failure.  We would have the voyage, at least, if not a profit at the end.  We must wait to see what Report From Mali brings us.  I see the harbor ahead, a stillness beyond the whitecaps.

Offered by the Booktender of the Good Story Saloon - August 23, 2013

A Review of FINDING BILLY WHITE FEATHER, a short story by Percival Everett published in the Spring 2013 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review

Finding Billy White Feather, a short story by Percival Everett, is among those packed into your survival kit of art and ideas, and stowed between the covers of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013.

Everett does not waste your time.  The story begins:  “Oliver Campbell had never met Billy White Feather.”  That is enough to start.  You will learn the rest along the way.

A story is like a car.  Literature is supposed to take you somewhere—when it’s not up on blocks. 

This story is not up on blocks.  It is a four hundred horsepower 4 X 4 and it took me to Everett’s destination quicker than a dog with hot sauce on its ass.  Such is the power of the story.

This time, I think I could have stayed right there, and been happy about it, and telephoned back home to tell them to sell the house and to wire me the money.  I like the way these people talk.

Oliver is a rancher, and a good one by the sounds of it.  Mrs. Campbell (Lauren) is the best wife that ever skipped happily off an altar.  The ranch folk include Hiram Shakespeare, a ranch hand named Oscar, a ranch owner named George Big Elk, Duncan Dwight (a lawyer who investigates cattle rustlers), and Sam Innis—the local vet.

I like these people.  Sam delivers the second of two meditations.

A horse gives birth to twins.  I hate to call the two foals a plot device, but in their brief lives, that is the work they do.  They are beautiful, but they don’t make it.  The vet tells us it was “failure to thrive.”  He tells Oliver:  “I’m going to do an autopsy on them, but nothing is going to turn up.  It just happens.”

The supporting cast also lives on Everett’s pages.  They include store clerks, waitresses, and the boss of a hamburger stand.  They each sound like they should.

The one person we never encounter is Billy White Feather and his is the first, and the foremost, of our two meditations in this story.  Flannery would say that any good character resists summary.  We never meet Billy, but nine characters each summarize him and each differently.  So, do we have an identity crisis here?  A crisis of the self?  Is Everett telling us that people are unknowable?  Or that their descriptions are inexpressible?

Billy shows up twice at Oliver’s ranch.  There is evidence.  He is around, yet we never see him.  Oliver never meets him.

The point is that none of those nine opinions is flattering.  Some of them sound like they would kill Billy if they had the chance, and maybe a chance to get away with it.  I have some ideas about this.  Permit me.

Drama is the Greek word for “deeds.”  In Finding Billy we don’t have many deeds.  In their place, we have meditations, and so the story line is not an arc.  It becomes a chain of incidents, at the end of which Billy White Feather is never found.  Yet the title continually reminds us that we do find him.

I wonder if Everett worried over his ending.  Maybe it came out pure and true in a single exhalation of the unconscious.  I am not saying his ending is wrong.  I am saying that I can imagine other endings.  Some of them would complete the arc of the story line.

The neat thing is that maybe a lot of different endings would work.  So, what does that say about a story that is so facile?  It might be saying something good about it, something very special.  The ancient Greeks had many versions of their fables.

At the end of the story, “a woman” tells Oliver, “Fuck you,” and slams the door.  Then a five sentence coda, then oblivion.

We never find Billy White Feather.  Nonetheless, we find much else.  Some of it we know, without knowing how we know.  And some of what we know has no name.  The reader must become a mystic.  The reader must find the theme and provide an end.

This is an example of “creative ambiguity.”  This is an instance of where the reader does the work, if he wishes, if he can.  The ineffable is a difficult subject for an impatient mystic.

Sometimes an idea is like a baby bird.  If the author holds it in his hands, it flies away.  Some ideas resist becoming concrete.  Maybe motivation helps.

We have an ending, but not an end.  In place of the story’s end, we have a meditation.  You expect a meditation with a poem.  You expect a story to have an end.

Everett cannot (or will not) come out and say it.  He has to make you come out and say it.  The end is up to you.  Everett provides us an ellipsis (a workplace for us to finish it).  Americans are impatient mystics. I'd rather not wait for Wakan Tanka to appear to me at the end of a buffalo dance.  I’d have to change my life so I could read my stories.

There might be an end if the main character had a motive equal to his actions.  Oliver drives into the next state trying to find Billy White Feather.  He has every reason not to go.  Everett’s problem is that Oliver has no good reason to make the trip.  Everett is messing with my willing suspension of disbelief. 

I’d like to see Oliver assume that someone had murdered Billy.  I’d like this to be a part of the finishing coda, just after the door slams in his face.  Everett has taken pains to show nine characters with opinions of Billy ranging from dislike to hatred.  There would be no shortage of suspects.  All we need is nine more sentences, earlier in the story—each a little different, yet each foreshadowing menace.  This provides a motive for Oliver’s obsession with finding Billy White Feather.

We don’t have to have blood stains—just complete the story’s arc.  Maybe Billy has tricked Oliver into driving far away so that he can appear at his ranch at the end (when Loren is alone, a la Hitchcock).  Maybe Oliver can complete the arc by unwittingly bringing a message to the story’s final place and final character.

I’d like to think that Everett wrote it with a murder.  I’d like to think that the Virginia Quarterly Review (God bless ‘em) turned up their nose and said, “We don’t do murders around here.  Perhaps you should turn this in to Ellery Queen, Mr. Everett.”  I’d like to think that Everett is a practical man and said, “Fine, fine.  I’ll revise and send it back in tonight.”  Everett wants to thrive.  The vet was right.  Life persists like that.

I wonder if Oliver is Everett's alter ego.  Percival and Oliver each have three syllables.  Hiram Shakespeare addresses Oliver as brown man.  Maybe one of Everett's great-granddads was a Buffalo Soldier, or maybe Everett wishes he had been.  That would be very cool.  Even just wishing it is cool.

Oh, before I leave you.  Did you know that a “white feather” is a conventional symbol in Europe?  Was I supposed to be meditating on this during the read?  All things considered, it remains a remarkable story and any problems with it might be mine as a reader.  Perhaps I am just an oaf.  There are many of us.  Barbarians are not at the gate, only oafs.  Can we have a place at Mr. Everett’s table, too?  We want to thrive, too.

Offered by the booktender of the Good Story Saloon (August 18, 2013)

A review of Snow Blind, a short story by Elizabeth Strout, appearing in the Virginia Quarterly Review Spring, 2013

SNOW BLIND, a short story by Elizabeth Strout, is part of the feast offered up by the sparkling Spring, 2013 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

In her story, Strout renders an updated example of the ancient form of the “fairy tale.”  Her version is complete with a recognizable ensemble of characters and settings:  the goose girl (the youngest among other children of her family and a neighbor’s), the wise and infinitely durable old woman (the grandmother of the goose girl), two sets of lamentable parents (one of whom is driven mad by shame, and another of whom is revealed to be a shameless monster) , a dark forest provided with a troll—unseen, but on the loose (4^th grade teacher), and a band of magical people who take the goose girl away from all of this to care for her in a land of enchantment.

Strout begins by observing olden forms.  She does not begin with “once upon a time,” but nearly so.  She starts with, “Back then the road they lived on was a dirt road…”  The road ultimately serves as a minor plot device helping us with the breadth of years, when, near the conclusion, the road, now modern, becomes widened and paved.

Permit me to interrupt myself.  The term “plot device” falls short.  “Plot device” fails in the way “machinery” fails to describe a “machine.”  I prefer the term “plot coupon” (although it can be used derisively) because (as has been said by Nick Lowe) your story collects enough plot coupons, and you trade them in at the end for a denouement.  Since we know that a story must be prepared all along the way for what happens at the end, Nick’s term seems to fit. 

While we are at it, let us look at the term “denouement.”  This is the French word for tying a knot and for gathering in a net.  This seems also to be a good fit for an ending that must be satisfying to the reader in the way that a crisply tied-up package is satisfying on birthdays.

Plot coupons are important for Strout as she seeks identification for Snow Blind as a linear descendant of the fairy tale.  Just as with fingerprint identification, there must be a sufficient number of points of alignment.

Strout has (by my count) sixteen plot coupons all during her story’s first two-thirds.  These not only prepare for her ending, but also, they give her story membership in the category of “fairy tales.”  Six of those coupons are repeated references to “the woods.”  Many fairy tales have their dark woods, as does this one.  This being a modern fairy tale, sinister things also go on in the neighbor’s house, but we needed a woods (or at least some major touchstone with the older form) if Snow Blind was to be considered a fairy tale.

Lousy parents and dreary childhoods are also hallmarks of the genre.  Snow Blind does not have the evil stepmothers of Snow White and Cinderella, but the characters Strout brings to the story are worthy of censure.

In place of fairy godmothers and charming princes, Stout creates an industry of good hearted “theater people” to whisk the goose girl off to safety and to finish the job of growing her up.

Another artifact that gives this modern story is “olden” feel, occurs near the end when the author breaks the fourth wall, allowing the narrator (a gentle Mother Goose sounding narrator), to kindly and ironically address the reader.

At the end of the story, we have three parts:  the explication of the title, the finishing coda, and certain concluding scenes at the goose girl’s old house, at the neighbor’s old house and at the nursing home where the father of the goose girl wrecks havoc.  The ending works.  The story should have ended with the ending, but it shows itself to be too insecure to stop talking.

One of the final Beatles songs stopped very suddenly (with dramatic effect), perhaps that could have been tried here with the final mention of the evil 4^th grade teacher.

The early explication of the title (during a conversation with Grandma) should have been “well-enough” left alone.  The finishing coda wanders off into unsupportable abstractions as Strout tries on a unifying theme for both victims and predators.  Beyond this, the coda becomes “creepy” (a heedless extravagance at the wrong time in the story, when we are trying to sort things out).

Snow Blindness becomes a symbol.  A symbol is a metaphor given meaning by the story.  Now we see that the symbol of snow blindness (the physical condition) attempts to serve the story.  It does not work, simply because the story has not connected with it sufficiently for meaning to exist.  So, it becomes a kind of dangling metaphor.

A good title refers to the core idea of a story without being stronger or weaker and without misleading the reader.  Perhaps if snow blindness had been a recurring theme, it might have worked, but as it is, after a brief and early mention, it was stuck on the back end, like a shipping tag.

Indeed, more than simply not working, the title (at the end) seems to supply an apology for the two miscreant fathers.  The coda tells us that the two fathers were dazzled, causing them to heedlessly risk everything in pursuit of two of society’s taboos. 

With this, even though the finishing coda fails, and even though the title fails to support the denouement, the denouement does now perform additional useful work as it brings into focus the last of Strout’s hallmarks of the fairy tale.  This is the subject of society’s prohibitions and the breaking of prohibitions.

The Thompson Motif Index of Folk Literature lists hundreds of taboos as hallmarks of the fairy tale genre.  While most are innocent, or even flippant (peeing on a fire, counting stars, travelers looking backward), some of them are just as raw as the shame-wringing taboos of Strout’s fairy tale.

Taken for all its worth, the story can be counted a success.  It is enough that Cinderella and Snow White have new company with the addition of Annie Appleby (our goose girl of Strout’s contemporary fairy tale). 

Offered by the booktender of the Good Story Saloon   (August 17, 2013)