Search Results

Last week, we began taking a look at Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? I had intended to continue with that fine story this time but I've been kind of busy, best B. I started this blog back in April of 2020 as a pandemic project, and it's been a big success for me. In that time, I think I've only taken one week off and had maybe two delays, so yay! But today, I'm going to have to hit the proverbial PAUSE button and work on some other things. I'll be back. Till then, thank you and happy holidays!

This week, ladies and gentlemen, a new one…drumroll…Lorrie Moore’s 1994 novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? What? ‘Kay, I’m not sure what you’re reacting to there…the title? I will explain more about the title later, so please take your seat. The novel (widely praised) has been described as a coming of age tale, but I don’t think that does it justice, rather that description is an attempt to pigeon-hole a complexity. We must be vigilant to guard against reductionist thinking, particularly in dealing with art. Thank you. The story is narrated by Berie Carr, a woman who looks back from an unspecified present to incidents in her life—yes, a character narrator who presents the story in first-person, simple past tense. The tone is ironic and humorous—even while dealing with mortal matters. The incidents selected run along two streams in the narrator’s life so far—one is her adult self, dealing with her marriage to a husband named Daniel. The second—the bulk of the novel—concerns her life as an adolescent growing up in the fictious town of Horsehearts, New York. Fictitious, you say? Well, yes, my bro. Berie works at the Story Land amusement park with her best friend Sils—this is a real place; however, it is actually located in New Hampshire. I have been there (driven by it) so I know. Ms. Moore has moved the park to a fictitious town in upstate New York. Frog begins with a page of three quotes, one by Emily Dickinson, one Thoreau, one Shakespeare. All three are interesting, but I’ll pick one for discussion, the Thoreau: “I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.” First, there’s a nice echoing here of the idea of a pond and the book’s title, referring to frogs (who live in ponds—you knew that). Then, there’s the idea of a pond being a symbol. I’m going to say I think the author is tipping us off that the book is a symbol, or contains symbols. Of what, you say? Let’s ponder this and discuss more once we’re underway. At the outset, let’s note that the structure of the novel is not the traditional Chapter One, Chapter Two, format. After that initial page of quotes, we have a page of thanks by the author, then a title page, then the text itself. There are no chapter markers; sections are set off by space, i.e. paragraph and page breaks. A very few sections are set off by a break filled by an em dash (a long line) and these sections are different, showing scenes set before or after a greater leap of time from what comes before. But that’s all. There are one hundred forty-eight pages of text—short for a novel—and the only title is the name of the book, Frog Hospital. The story begins with an adult Berie in Paris with her husband, Daniel; the first line: In Paris, we eat brains every night. The narrator comments that, by eating brains, “I’m hoping for something Proustian, all that forgotten childhood.” We are told the scene occurs in Paris, we must infer that the narrator is an adult from the statement that she has a husband as well as from the adult tone. We should note too that the mention of famous writer Marcel Proust tips us off to something about the book’s style, that it will refer to literary matters, albeit casually. We are tipped off that the narrator is someone who is aware of Proust, a sort of in-joke. The passage continues: “I don’t know why he always strikes up conversations with people next to us.” So the narrator, writing in simple past, is showing these scenes with she and her husband, and also commenting on them to a unknown reader. She’s describing herself in these scenes, eating brains, hoping for something Proustian, interacting with her husband, who seems kind of cloddish, yet, she follows his lead. So another level is that Berie submits to Daniel—although rebelling inside—we are shown this rebellion. Her comments to the reader, presumably from a different time and place, comprise a third level. She mentions her sore hip, which we later learn is the result of Daniel pushing her downstairs. There’s a dynamic of her being “bratty” but submitting to his control. “We walk the quais, stand on all the bridges in the misty rain, and look out on this pretty place, secretly imagining being married to other people—right here in River City!—and sometimes not, sometimes simply wondering, silently or aloud, what will become of the world.” This is in part what I mean by the comic tone—the River City comment. It's ironic and sarcastic. An interesting use of “we” suggests that the narrator omnisciently knows her husband’s thoughts—or imagines she does. The next section—set off by one of those em dashes, begins: “When I was a child, I tried hard for a time to split my voice.” Here, the scene has gone back in time to the narrator being a child, apparently in Horsehearts, New York. . Some description of her life and family is presented, although we don’t know exactly how old she was. In any case, we’re presented with a powerful image here. A young girl tries to split her voice. “I might be able to people myself, unleash the crowd in my voice box, give birth, set free all the moods and nuances, all the lovely and mystical inhabitants of my mind’s speech…There must have been pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.” The narrator shares that “Later, when I was an adult…” and goes on to tell how she heard a recording of Tibetan monks who could split their voices. Then in the next paragraph, we are presented with another leap: “Certainly ‘safe’ is what I am now—or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight…Though there are times…in the small city where we live, when I’ve left my husband for a late walk…I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has to do more with adventure and escape…though finally, it has always stayed to one side as if it were some other impossible life and knew it…It has always stayed.” What’s going on here? Well, as with the Proust reference above, we are certainly cued here that this is no “Dick and Jane” story, it goes deep into a human psyche to show complex thoughts and distinctions, using poetic language. In six pages, the narrator picks out events from four different time periods, the last possibly being the narrator’s present. We learn her marriage was not happy but she remains married—maybe the marriage changed, we don’t know. We learn that as a child, there must have been pain in her, and that she wanted to split her voice to try to give expression to the multitude she feels within. And we learn that she is “safe” now, but qualifies safety as something perhaps not desirable. (those parentheses around the word “safe”). She still feels an old wildness that, being old, must have been with her before. In the next section, we will begin to understand these “symbols” more. Till then. #WhoWillRunTheFrogHospital? #LorrieMoore #AlanBray

We have to talk about the dog. A central part of James Salter’s My Lord You concerns a large dog who appears in many scenes, shadowing the protagonist, Ardis, so intensely that you can’t ignore him (the dog). She certainly can’t. Ardis’ first encounter with the dog is when she bicycles to Brennan’s house. No human is at home. But: “It was a dog, a huge dog higher than her waist, coming toward her, yellow-eyed. She had always been afraid of dogs…” She leaves, telling the dog to go home. But he follows her at a distance. “He seemed to float along in the fields, which were burning in the mid-day sun, on fire…He fell in behind her. She could hear the clatter of his nails like falling stones…He was trotting awkwardly, like a big man running in the rain. A line of spittle trailed from his jaw. When she reached her house, he had disappeared.” Then the dog begins appearing at her house, as if it’s waiting for her. “There just beyond the trees, the dog lay. She could see his ears—they were small ears dashed with white…Awkwardly it rose and after a moment moved, reluctantly it seemed, wandering slowly across the fields, never looking back.” So, let’s recall the story. Something is missing for Ardis, some passion. She meets Michael Brennan at a party; he is wild, drunken, crude—all the things she is not. He intrigues her; she unsuccessfully seeks out his poetry. Knowing he is away, she impulsively goes to his house, and discovers the dog. The dog is willful, curious about her. Huh. Is the dog a kind of surrogate for Brennan? A symbol of mute animal passion—the thing Ardis lacks? I think so, best B. How do we know Ardis is missing something that the dog somehow represents? What we know about Ardis is, well, not much. We know she feels on the outside of the party that begins the story. She notices everything—the glasses, food, the house’s décor, the hosts. “It was foreign in a way, like someone else’s house, but half-familiar.” Brennan sits next to her, which is alarming because he’s drunk and kind of…attractive. “Who are you? he said. Another little housewife? She felt the blood leave her face, and stood to busy herself clearing the table. His hand was on her arm. Don’t go. I know who you are, another priceless woman meant to languish. Beautiful figure, he said, as she managed to free herself. Pretty shoes.” Then, her husband, who’s been there the whole time but has not been mentioned by the story, drives Ardis home, saying he “should have taken him and thrown him out,” meaning Brennan. Her husband counsels, “The best thing is to just forget about tonight.” So we do get sense of Ardis being understandably uncomfortable with Brennan’s drunken behavior—he treats her as a sexual object, but as we see, this is intriguing. Her husband seems distant and ineffectual. His lovemaking ends too quickly. We learn more about Ardis when she goes to the library in search of traces of Brennan. He quoted Ezra Pound to her; she reads a Pound poem that mentions “My Lord you,” evidently referring to an older husband and to submission. “Of the things she had been taught she remembered only a few. There had been one My Lord though she did not marry him. She’d been twenty-one, her first year in the city. She remembered the building of dark brown brick…her clothes in a chair or fallen to the floor, and the damp, mindless repetition, to it, or him, or who knew what: oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The traffic outside so faint, so far away. She’d called him several times over the years, believing that love never died, dreaming foolishly of seeing him again, of his returning, in the way of old songs.” In the library, the story sees her: “…her young face that had a weariness in it, a slight distaste for things, even, one might imagine, for oneself. Hmm. So she reads a poem by an author Brennan likes, and it sets off an association to an early love affair she had, a sexual association, my friends. ‘Kay, back to the dog. As we mentioned last week, the dog appears at Ardis’ house after her husband has apparently left, and she escorts the dog home. There, at the house which is Brennan’s house, she enters and searches his belongings, ultimately taking off her clothes. “There in the silence with the sunlight outside she stood slender and half-naked, the missing image of herself, of all women. The dog’s eyes were raised to her as if in reverence. He was unbetraying, a companion like no other…She leaned forward to stroke the beautiful head. You’re a big fellow. The words seemed authentic, more authentic than anything she had said for a long time. A very big fellow.” What’s going on here? Ardis is within an erotic situation, with the dog, but the dog is, I think, not experienced so much erotically but more as a witness, a companion who provokes her to authenticity. And this is a central need for Ardis—she yearns to have real, authentic experiences because she experiences herself as unimportant. That night, she thinks that her life has meant nothing. Something about meeting Brennan, who quickly disappears, and then breaking into his house causes her to feel real. And the dog is her only witness, the only being whom she believes understands her. When she takes off her clothes, she thinks of certain girls in her past, girls whom she admired and judged herself as unlike. I think her disrobing and imagining Brennan finding her is not so much a sexual act/fantasy but a desire to do something she’d never dared do. She is experimenting with being someone new. Of course, it is almost comical that her husband finds her at Brennan’s house, and she has some ‘splainin to do. But, as mentioned, it is later that night that she despairs at the lack of meaning in her life, imagining, as always, that it is other people who have meaningful lives. She ambiguously tells her husband “We have to do something,” and it is his turn to despair over the possibility of losing her. The dog (of course) is there again. Ardis speaks of the dog tormenting her; the dog leads her away. But it is for the last time. At the end, we get that leap ahead in time and the news that Ardis did not see the dog again. “The dog was not outside, nor in his car, nor part of his life anymore—gone, lost, living elsewhere, his name perhaps to be written in a line someday though most probably forgotten, but not by her.” The dog, like Ardis, like the story, disappears, and we are left with a question about what happened after. Does Ardis return to her life as a “little housewife?” Or does the experience told in the story change her, meeting the need she had for meaning? Your call, best B. Till next time. #MyLordYou #JamesSalter #AlanBray

One of the characteristics of James Salter’s writing style is the way time makes big leaps, a feature that is especially evident in his longer works. But in My Lord You, time is also episodic and at times, able to leap tall buildings in a sudden bound. Gaps occur in the narrative, and one gets the sense of the author selecting certain moments for the story out of a continuum. Of course, this recalls our old friend Umberto Eco, and his observation that only pornographic films present continuous time. Fiction generally does not, always making a choice about what to show, and this is a reminder that fiction is not about showing only a mimesis of imagined life but rather, that there is a purpose in what it shows—telling a story. My Lord You begins at the dinner party where the protagonist, Ardis, meets Brennan. The next scene is taken from events on the following day, when Ardis journeys to the local library to read something of Ezra Pound, whom Brennan had quoted to her at the party. She asks for Brennan’s own books but is told he removes them from the library because he doesn’t think anyone is capable of understanding them. Sly humor here from Mr. Salter. The next section (set off by a paragraph break) shows Ardis by herself at the beach, a scene full of sensuous description. The librarian had told her Brennan is out of town, and Ardis goes to the house she’d seen driving home from the party, the “gypsy house.” The implication is that she guesses that the house belongs to Brennan. It is not specified exactly when this scene occurs. Is it the same day she goes to the library? The next? It follows smoothly after the library scene; it feels like the next day, or the day after. It doesn’t matter exactly when, only that it occurs close to the events already related. However, this is one of those leaps I was talking about. The events so far may have occurred over at least two, maybe three days. What else occurs in Ardis’ life during this time? Probably a lot (if she were a real human) but Salter has chosen only these specific things as part of the story. Still within this scene, Ardis goes to what she imagines is Brennan’s house and finds it deserted—except for a large dog which will figure prominently in the story. (More to say about the dog later. Woof!). After another paragraph break, the next scene is situated in space/time: “That night in a cotton robe she was preparing for bed, cleaning her face, the bathroom door ajar.” She and her husband make love. Then the text tells us: “The next morning, she said…” Then, a few paragraphs later: “In the evening they went to a party.” So there are three scenes here. Time is collapsed; significant events are picked out of an apparent twenty-four-hour period. After a paragraph break—by the way, the use of these breaks is itself a feature of style. An alternative would be to have a continuous narrative along the lines of, “Ardis went to bed and slept. In the morning…” Here the gap in time would be more masked. ‘Kay, after the break, we are in a new scene the next morning. The dog is outside her house, and she decides to escort it home—to Brennan’s, she assumes. The house is again deserted; the dog wants to go inside. Ardis decides the dog is hungry. The door is unlocked; she lets the dog in and, rascal that she is, begins searching the house in a kind of listless way. Hopefully, she feeds the dog, although this is not shown. Then in a long, beautifully rendered scene, she takes off her clothes and imagines Brennan finding her—even though this is unlikely. Well, sure, most people would do that. The dog studies her. “You’re a big fellow,” she says. (?) Then she hears a car and dresses in a hurry. However, it is her husband, Warren, who’s come looking for her. He seems a bit suspicious about what she’s been doing but accepts her explanation that she was trying to feed the dog and finally drives her home. After another paragraph break, we are told: “Late that day…” The dog has come over again. Ardis and her husband have dinner, and Ardis confronts her loneliness: “My life has meant nothing, she thought.” At dinner, she says to her husband; “We have to do something.” This comment is ambiguous in that it may refer to Ardis saying they must do something about the dog. However, it may also be a comment on the marriage. More on this to come. The narrative shifts abruptly to Warren’s perspective, presenting another stylistic feature of Salter. Many writers would stick to Ardis’ perspective. The couple goes to bed, and we are still in Warren’s head. “He lay in bed without moving. His wife’s back was turned toward him. He could feel her denial.” The dog is there again, and Warren checks on him, returning to report that he believes the dog is dead. The story’s perspective shifts back to a distraught Ardis who goes outside to be with the dog. “Let me go,” she says to her husband. She goes to the dog, but he is alive and runs off. And we get a lovely passage that is in Warren’s perspective. “She ran after him. Warren could see her. She seemed free. She seemed like another woman, a younger woman, the kind one saw in the dusty fields by the sea, in a bikini, stealing potatoes in bare feet.” This is a powerful moment. Impressionistic, I think, almost cinematic in the way we the reader gets a view of Ardis that she could not herself present, it being impossible to see yourself. It’s supposed to be from her husband’s perspective, observing her as she leaves, but I believe it’s also the implied author showing us what he is seeing—what the story is seeing. After this climax, a final paragraph break creates a section that skips ahead over days and weeks, reporting that Ardis did not see the dog again. We are told she does see Brennan again, “one night in August,” but that he does not acknowledge her. “Kay. I’ve tried to give a sense of how time is presented in My Lord You. It is episodic; the story picks out particular scenes that propel the story forward and tells the tale. Next week, let’s consider what this story is about. Till then. #MyLordYou #JamesSalter #AlanBray

Today, a new one, James Salter’s 1994 short story My Lord You. The story was originally published in the September, 1994 issue of Esquire Magazine, and then included in Last Night, Mr. Salter’s 2005 short story collection. The title, My Lord You, is a quote from a poem by Ezra Pound (actually his translation of an eighth century Chinese poem) and will figure prominently in the text later on. All the stories gathered in Last Night have to do, I think, with longing and desire—although that’s not always clearly articulated by the protagonists. My Lord You has to do with Ardis, a thirty-ish year-old woman living with her husband on Long Island. The time is not determined but has the feel of the 1980s. James Salter was of a distinguished generation of writers including John Updike, John Cheever, and Eudora Welty, but didn’t achieve broad acclaim for his work—at least during his lifetime. (He died in 2015). He wrote several novels, including A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, screen plays, notably Down Hill Racer, and short stories. One of the first things we can note about My Lord You is that the story is about a woman and written by a man. Well, you say, so what? That’s been done a lot. Men write about women, women about men, straight people write about gay people and vice vera—it’s all fantasy. Oh? That assumes men and women (and others) are different beasties and must imagine each other. Should we aim our diamond-cutter at this distinction in My Lord You or should we take the position that the story is written by a human about a human? That latter view assumes that men can imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Are men always and only aware of gender? Are women? Hmmm. Mr. Salter himself said: “I think I write for a certain kind of person—I’m not going to define exactly who, probably a woman—but not for everybody. An intelligent woman…” This is in the context of answering a question about did he have someone in mind when he wrote—a sort of idealized reader who would “get” his creations. I’m not sure this helps. So Salter wrote a story about a woman’s intimate experience and he was imagining a woman reading it and understanding it. In any case, can a man write about a woman and display verisimilitude—that quality of believability that a reader requires to keep reading? The answer lies within another question, my friends: Are men and women fundamentally different or are there fundamental human experiences that transcend gender? Whoa! No clear answer there, but let’s look at this story for gosh sakes. My Lord You seems to be about Ardis, the protagonist, searching for something she’s missing—not a concrete thing but a quality like passion or love. Meaning, perhaps. Okay, that’s a fundamental human experience that both men and women share. She goes to a dinner party with her husband, to a home she’s never been to before. She studies the house and the furnishings, the food, somewhat enviously, as if she feels on the outside of a world. During the dinner, a local appears, a poet named Michael Brennan. He is drunk and disheveled; he behaves badly, flirts in a condescending way with Ardis, and drives off, only to wreck his car. “Ardis hoped he would not notice her again. His forehead had two gleaming places, like nascent horns. Were men drawn to you when they knew they were frightening you? She could feel his eyes. There was silence. She could feel him standing there like a menacing beggar.” Brennan gropes her and is led away and ejected from the party. Driving home with her husband, “They were going down a long empty stretch where on a corner, half hidden in trees, a small house stood, the gypsy house, Ardis thought of it as, a simple house with a water pump in the yard and occasionally in the daytime a girl in blue shorts, very brief, and high heels, hanging clothes on a line…She was driving with Warren and he was talking.” When Brennan gropes her, touching her breast, “She was too stunned to move.” Salter’s style is not to explain much. There is a narrator entity in this story, but it is way in the background. The text is open to meaning making. My reaction to this initial scene is that Ardis is repelled and fascinated by Brennan; who is crude and exciting—both qualities Ardis is not, nor is her husband, Warren. However, the text never says this. We are given impressions. Ardis hopes Brennan will not notice her—this is about half of how she feels. She also wants him to notice her. Then when he touches her breast and makes a drunken sexual proposition, she is too stunned to move. There’s no mention of her slugging him or screaming or feeling angry at the violation. By the way, does this mean that Salter thinks women like to be groped? That they outwardly protest but inwardly are thrilled? I don’t think so. This is a story about a particular person, and it makes no attempt at generalization. However, given the way men and women related in the nineteen-eighties, this situation would tend to represent, I think, a woman’s experience of being molested and humiliated. In this case, the experience provokes a particular reaction in Ardis, given who she is at that particular moment. At a time when she feels like she doesn’t fit in to a world she wants to fit into, a romantic world that includes more direct sexual expression than she is accustomed to, a romantic man approaches her sexually. She does not want to accept his offer, but it is intriguing. The line, Were men drawn to you when they knew they were frightening you? is interesting. It could be taken as a question Brennan is asking Ardis, but it’s not set off in the paragraph by quotes. The paragraph in which it appears shows Ardis’ inner experience, what she notices about Brennan, so the question could be something she asks herself. She may be thinking that Brennan frightens her and that she wonders if he is attracted to her because of that. Someone who lacks power would be afraid of the powerful—maybe for a woman of this time, that is an accurate generalization. But for this particular character, power relations are mixed up with sexuality and desire. Is this true for many women still? Maybe. Is Salter saying this is good? Don’t think so, but the fact that he wrote a story about this theme means he thought it was significant. In any case, after the party Ardis drives home with her husband and notices a house she’s apparently noticed before, a house where she’s seen a girl in brief shorts and high heels hanging up laundry—an intriguing contradiction. This is Brennan’s house, although the text mysteriously doesn’t tell us that at this point. Later on, it becomes clear. Here we are shown Ardis, who’s clearly curious about Brennan, noticing a house that carries an erotic association. I want to be part of your world, I think I do anyway. When you come on to me, even crudely, it’s exciting–maybe not in just a sexual way. Till next time. #MyLordYou #JamesSalter #AlanBray

Last time, we looked at the (long) opening scene of William Trevor’s A Bit On the Side. Let’s continue. Onward! A key element to the brilliance of this story, in my opinion, is the way things move back and forth between the protagonists—on more than one level. This creates tension, as the reader wonders what the resolution will be. We begin with the scene discussed last time where the man and woman meet at the “Japanese café.” The narrator does a lot of the work in this scene, describing the setting and the terms of the couple’s relationship. However, particularly since there are just two of them, the scene and its dialogue tend to focus on first one saying or doing something, and then the other. Thus, she says, “All right?” having noticed something different about him. But he responds, “Absolutely,” denying to both of them his disquiet. This pattern continues with the next section which switches to include only the narrator and the man, who returns to work, wondering what the woman noticed that made her ask, “All right?” He identifies the disquiet he feels but cannot express the cause in language. Then the next scene is the narrator and the two protagonists together again at lunch, however, it is all from the woman’s perspective. She asks the man if the change in him is due to her getting the divorce, and he says no. The next scene is the narrator and the man, who, with inner clarity, thinks that his upset is not due to the woman getting a divorce. Yet, again, he cannot, or the narrator will not, reveal to we the readers what the cause is—not yet. To continue, the next scene includes the narrator, the man and the woman, but is from the woman’s perspective. And then the next section belongs to the man. The narrator handles the end alone. So, not to be tedious, but if in obsessive fashion, we symbolize the man’s perspective as A, and the woman’s perspective as B, the story has this alternating pattern: First scene—back and for the between the two, then A, B, A, B, A, and the final scene, courtesy of the narrator. In fact, the first scene, with its back and forth between the two, is an encapsulation of the structure of the whole story—an encapsulation, not really a mise en abyme. (I knew you were going to ask that). This structure creates an expectation that this back and forth will be resolved. Our intellectual friends would call this a dialectic that demands synthesis. Sure. So what the heck happens? A long answer: In almost each section, suspiciously minor characters appear. Almost at the beginning, we have the taxi-driver, “who came in most mornings.” Two of the music students had also arrived.” American tourists— “the regular presence of such visitors from overseas…” A clerk who sold the woman a pair of boots when the couple was together. The “bagwoman” whom they usually encountered each morning as they left the train. The other people in the Paddington Street Gardens where the couple always has lunch together. And the bartender and waitstaff at The Running Footman, a bar where they regularly meet after work. A cursory reader might conclude that all these minor characters, generally only noted or briefly observed, serve to give the story color and realism, and this is accurate. But there’s more. At the end of the day, (the real end of the day, not the slang expression) in The Running Footman, the man expresses his problem. It is not the woman’s divorce, which created an unspoken question about whether he would divorce his wife, whom he does not want to divorce. It’s that he can’t bear the tawdriness of having an affair with someone he loves so much, and this is because he feels all those minor characters judge them. “It was in people’s eyes, he said.” At all their regular rendezvous, he was aware of people observing them, and, he imagined, thinking: “She was his bit on the side.” “I can’t bear it that they think that.” She experiences a rush of love for him, a bloom of desire, and wants to go immediately together to her apartment to be alone. “I don’t mind in the least,” she said, “what people think. Really I don’t.” But the man says, “My God, I do,” he whispered. “My God, I mind.” And this, best beloved, is the climax of the story, the revelation of what has led the man to resolving to end the affair. And that’s the function of all those seemingly minor characters who the man is intensely aware of. Is this fear of the man’s realistic? Well, first of all, this is fiction; Mr. Trevor can write whatever he wants. It’s up to us to decide. Perhaps, there is more than meets the eye. The man does not intend to divorce his wife and leave his children, so in that sense, the affair is doomed; it must end for some reason. But this unease with other people’s perceptions is a way to express the man’s own unease. He really loves the woman but has no intention of marrying her, and so, fears that he’s treating her badly, like, “a bit on the side.” He does “mind,” he can’t treat their affair as a secondary thing and so, ends it. And, of course this is the significance of the story’s title, an irony in that the woman (or the man) is much more significant than a minor fling but what the couple is doing is regulated by society. The narrator takes us out: “In the plate-glass of a department store window, their reflection was arrested while they embraced. They did not see that image recording for an instant a stylishness they would not have claimed as theirs, or guessed that, in their love affair, they had possessed…Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it, there would still be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for awhile.” So the narrator offers wise and knowing commentary, seeing the whole of these people’s lives. Does this mean the story happened long ago? Nah, it means the narrator is a wise one, that’s all. Love is beautiful and endures past endings; love has its own relevance. Till next time. #ABitOnTheSide #WilliamTrevor #AlanBray

This week, the adventure continues with William Trevor’s 2004 short story A Bit On the Side, published as part of the story collection of the same title. Mr. Trevor, who was born in Ireland but lived in England during the latter part of his life, was 76 in 2004. He died in 2016. He notoriously refused to accept many of the literary awards he received in his lifetime, rejecting these elements of a brilliant writer’s career, but worked steadily, publishing no less than twenty-one novels and twenty-three short story collections. Mr. Trevor is quoted as saying that the stories in this collection have to do with “the fragility of love.” Set in contemporary times, A Bit On the Side concerns the end of a love affair between a man and a woman who reside in London. The action is primarily in the present, comprising the interval of a single day, although there are passages set in the past. Although other minor characters are named, the man and woman are only referred to as “he” and “she.” The narrator entity—always prominent in Trevor’s work—is not a character but an omniscient storyteller who offers a distant but intimate commentary on these two as they confront the end of their relationship. The narration alternates between the two character’s perspective, and then sometimes steps back to make comment. It begins: “In the Japanese café he helped her off with her coat and took it to the line of hooks beneath the sign that absolved the management of responsibility for its safety.” We’ll come back to this first line and consider what questions it raises, but for now, let’s note how this is the narrator’s voice—a character in a story might register the sign but would probably not comment on it, interpreting the official language in such a formal way. Straight off, we learn one of the rules of the story—the narrator entity will be the one showing the action. Consider the difference in style: “I helped her off with her coat and hung it up beneath the sign the café put up, the one that says they’re not responsible for injuries.” This would represent a character narrator and leave less room for ironic commentary. The story is written in third person, and simple past tense, which we know signals the reader that the story’s events have already occurred and that a storyteller is presenting them after the fact. The second paragraph continues, “He hung up his coat…” but then shifts to include the woman’s experience: “…the forecast they’d both heard—she in her kitchen an hour ago, he while he shaved in Dollis Hill…” Thus far, we are shown two characters, described in a scene. A man and a woman have arrived at a café, and the man hangs up their coats. Here’s the first sign of action and conflict, presented by the narrator: “Something was different this morning; on the walk from Chiltern Street she had sensed…that their love affair was not as it had been yesterday.” “All right?’ she asked. ‘All right?’ She kept anxiety out of her tone…” I don’t want to belabor this analysis and go line by line, but— Whew! The importance of this passage is why we keep reading, I think. The reader begins this story, perhaps with some pre-conceptions; chiefly, I’d guess because she/he knows of William Trevor, knows of the high quality with which he writes. But let’s say a reader began this story without pre-conception, or a minimal amount of them, what would “hook” them to read the whole thing? (Yes, the management assumes no responsibility). I think we’ve found the hook right here—the woman senses something is different between she and the man, something that has changed the terms of their love affair since they last were together. The reader wants to read on and discover what this “something” is. But satisfaction will be deferred, my friends. If Mr. Trevor immediately answered this “what” question, you might not have much of a story. No, sir. The action continues with the man denying that anything is wrong. “’Absolutely,’ he said, and then their coffee came…’Absolutely,’ he repeated, breaking his croissant in half.” Aha! He denies there’s anything wrong, and/but breaks his croissant in half. Hmmm. With a lessor storyteller, a character might break his muffin in two, and it wouldn’t relate to anything except perhaps providing atmosphere in a café. But here, I think we can take this as symbolic, best B. Nothing occurs randomly. As Don Juan said, there are no coincidences. Stop. ‘Kay. What’s been established is that there’s trouble in paradise. On page three, we get a description of the two characters and the terms of their relationship. “She was thirty-nine; he in his mid-forties.” They met when they both worked in the same office—she has since left. He is married with children; it’s a significant omission that no mention is made yet of her marital status. “He was a man, who should have been, in how he dressed, untidy. His easy, lazily expansive gestures, his rugged, often sunburnt features, his fair hair stubborn in disregard of his intentions, the weight he was inclined to put on, all suggested a nature that would resist sartorial demands. In fact he was quite dressily turned out, this morning in pale lightweight trousers and jacket, blue Eton shirt, his tie striped blue and red. It was a contradiction in him she had always found attractive. “She herself today, besides the black of her showerproof coat, wore blue and green, the colors repeated in the flimsy silk of her scarf. Her smooth black hair was touched with grey, which she made no attempt to disguise…She would have been horrified if she’d put on as much as an ounce…Eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, unblemished neck: no single feature stood out, their combination necessary in the spare simplicity of her beauty. Good earrings…were an emphasis that completed what was already there.” There are a number of “British-isms” herein that sound a bit exotic to American ears, but overall these are nearly perfect descriptions, I’d say. The man is shown in terms of what he wears and how this contradicts his physicality. The woman is described in relatively non-sexual terms—often a pitfall for a male author. The “good earrings” is a nice touch. What we get are descriptions that link with personality, so that we learn not just about physical appearance but how costume is an expression of a particular self. Contrast the above with, “He was a middle-aged man, slightly chubby, with thin blond hair and pale blue eyes.” This does not convey as much information. The couple “talks about the day,” a mundane subject that indicates they’re both avoiding the subject of something between them. Then: “It was here, at this same table, that she had broken the news of her divorce, not doing so—not even intimating her intentions—until her marriage’s undoing was absolute…’I would have done it anyway,’ she had insisted in the café, though knowing that she might not have…She felt uncluttered, a burden of duty and restriction lifted from her.” So, the narrator is showing us the context for their meeting at the Japanese café. We learn now that the woman was married and that she divorced, apparently keeping it a secret till it was done. The narrator deftly goes back in time to show this and then zips us right back to the story’s present. Another approach might be to have one of the characters present this information, perhaps in thought but these two are unwilling or unable to have these insights, so the narrator must do the heavy lifting. “Wire gauze, I suppose,” he said, the subject now a cat that was a nuisance…” This shows his reluctance to talk about the important things going on—his emotional reaction to her divorcing, changing the terms of their affair from one involving two people married to others, to one where one of the participants is free. A quartet to a triad. “Although such domestic details were sometimes touched upon…his family remained mysterious, never described or spoken of. Since the divorce, he had visited the flat her husband had moved out of…But her flat never seemed quite right, so used had they become to their love affair conducted elsewhere and differently.” And now they part to go to their jobs. They will meet later. Let’s leave them there, my friends. Till next time. #ABitOnTheSide #WilliamTrevor #AlanBray

First, here's a no doubt surprising but at the same time evident deviation. My usual habit is to publish a new installment of this blog on Thursdays each week. It is a great pleasure for me to write them, and I hope that others read and get some happiness as a result. I should say that I learn a lot from these blog posts and that the process of thinking about and writing each one is quite rewarding. That said, this week, I am posting on Tuesday instead of Thursday and further, there will be no post next week. What! Both of these developments are due to Dena and I taking a vacation. Rest assured, while enjoying being away, I will continue to do the hard work of thinking about literary matters, as well as about the next post when I resume on Thursday, November 2nd. What are we supposed to do while you’re gone? Read. ‘Kay. Today, let’s continue delving into Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible. In Snow-Blind, the eighth chapter of the book, we have a story that is concerns a character, Annie Appleby, who is referenced prominently in Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast, although only through the perspective of other characters. Snow-Blind is immediately distinct because it is the only one of the stories in Anything Is Possible that was published before-hand as a short story, and it is, as you would expect, complete and self-contained. In Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast, a guest of innkeeper Dottie Blaine, the woman who comforted Charlie Macauley, tells a long story after spotting a random playbill, eight years old, about an actress named Annie Appleby who was the paramour of a friend. The guest, Shelly Small, describes Annie as being very significant to her. “I think about Annie a lot,” she says. but has lost touch with her. Snow-Blind begins, “Back then, the road they lived on was a dirt road and they lived at the end of it, about a mile from Route 4.” Please remember my thoughts last week about the narrator-entity of Anything Is Possible, as she/he is making another appearance. “This was in the north, in potato-country, and back when the Appleby children were small, the winters were icy and snow-filled…Weather was different then like a family member you couldn’t avoid.” So, my friends, without warning, we the readers are sent back in time and place, apparently to Maine in an earlier time—1960s? Annie Appleby—whom we’ve already been introduced to as a grown-up through Shelly Small’s perspective—is a child who lives with her father Elgin, “a closed book of a man,” her mother, and a brother and two sisters. The family is poor and isolated by this poverty. The title, Snow-Blind, refers to a warning Annie’s teacher issued that one should not stare at the snow when the sun is shining because you could go blind. Annie’s grandmother says, “Then don’t look,” which is significant in a story about ignoring and denying destructive behavior. In the course of the story, Annie grows up, discovering she has a talent for theater. She leaves home as a teenager and becomes a big success as an actress. She stays away from her family for years; they hear stories of her success. Eventually her eccentric father becomes not only demented but assaultive, and is confined in an institution. Annie finally returns home to her ageing mother and grown siblings. It’s revealed—although there were hints of it before—that Annie’s father has hidden a long-term sexual affair with another man, a situation he maintained throughout Annie’s childhood and his marriage. It should be said that the story makes no negative judgment about being gay; the problem that is shown is more the level of deceit involved, the recklessness with which Annie’s father risked everything for his passion. One of her sisters is still in denial about this: “…were it true they would have known. (she says) What Annie did not say was that there were many ways of not knowing things; her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with different colored yarns—some dark—all through it. In her thirties, Annie had loved men; her heart had often been broken. Currents of treachery and deceit seemed to run everywhere; the forms they took always surprised her.” At the end: “Annie looked back at her siblings…They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment, Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had…simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.” It’s worth it to risk snow-blinded-ness for transcendence. No? So, the story draws a link between Annie and her father. In the course of the tale, Annie doesn’t so much as transform as she grows up and becomes someone very different than her brother and sisters. Yes, it is a coming-of-age story in that sense if one feels the need to label. Long-time readers of this blog who have read Anything Is Possible are no doubt nodding in a self-satisfied way and thinking, Aha! A mise en abyme! Yes, best B. that’s exactly what we’ve got here. Snow-Blind is a reflection of the whole story. The parallels are that all the chapters, but explicitly Sister, tell a tale of Lucy Barton, who grew up in a poor and dysfunctional home and escaped to find success as a writer. And in Snow-Blind, Annie Appleby does the same, escaping a dysfunctional home to find success. In each story, those left behind envy and resent Lucy and Annie. What’s different is Snow-Blind’s time structure which begins in the remote past and moves forward, and that the protagonist. Annie, really does seem to escape and find a better life; Lucy Barton, despite being idealized by the townsfolk, seems more troubled. For Annie, as is true for many of the characters in the book, Abel Blaine’s pronouncement at the end is most fitting. “Anything is possible for anyone,” that is, one’s troubles don’t have to be a life sentence. It is possible to change for the better. A good message. Till next time. #AnythingIsPossible #ElizabethStrout #AlanBray

‘Kay, during our time discussing Elizabeth’s Strout’s Anything Is Possible, I know that you’ve been itching to suggest that the structure of this novel is an example of polyphony. What! Well, it isn’t. You’re making this up! And nobody here was itchy. It was Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who applied the musical term polyphony to literature, pointing out how, in Dostoevsky’s novels, the characters’ voices are not subordinated to the voice of the author, thus giving the effect of a number of people telling a story. This is a notoriously tricky concept. Bakhtin writes about how in a polyphonous novel, the characters may actually argue with the narrator over the telling of the story. Since a novel is written by an author, this seems paradoxical, no? A single human author is responsible for an illusion of many voices. How is this accomplished? Of course, the answer lies in the relationships between the implied author of a novel, its narrator, and its characters. Yes, an implied author could create a narrator entity who has a different understanding of the story than a character. And this gets us into the whole wild world of unreliable narrators. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, for example, the narrator is a character who is relating the story of the several characters to the reader(s). At times in the book, it’s clear that this narrator is mistaken about the events and/or unaware of them. So, in Anything Is Possible, we have a story about people in a Midwestern town who each have their own chapters and perspective, their own plots that synergistically are more than their parts. It is a story being told by a number of characters. But—and this is a big but—there is a narrator who presents a unified view from the perspectives of many different characters. This is not polyphony, best B. How does this narrator work? Well. First of all, this narrator is not unreliable, in fact she/he is eminently reliable as far as I can tell. (As reliable as I am). There are times when the characters surprise each other; there are times when the characters “see” different aspects of each other, but this is all presented by a gentle, omniscient narrator who is discrete and keeps to the shadows. Let’s look at a particular chapter for examples. Windmills begins with the narrator entity telling us, “A few years ago, with morning sunlight coming into her bedroom, Patty Nicely had had the television on, and the sunlight had caused whatever was on the screen to be unseen from certain angles.” ‘Kay, I have to say, first of all, that is a wonderful first sentence that encapsulates all the stories and the whole book, showing it as a sun that illuminates people seen from different angles. Whoa! But more to the point of spotting the narrator and her/his characteristics, who is speaking here? Some entity, unidentified, shows us a scene from “a few years ago,” using the past perfect tense, also called the pluperfect, a verb tense used to talk about something that happened before something else that is also in the past. Huh. So, Patty Nicely had the television on at a point in the past that was before a different point in the past, and the narrator wants us to pay attention to this. Several paragraphs later we are told, “The reason she remembered this now—the fact that Lucy Barton had been on television—was because she had then told Sebastian about the woman.” (Sebastian was Patty’s husband, now deceased). After a paragraph break, we have, “Today she drove with her car’s air conditioner turned on high…” We have several markers of time. A scene is shown that occurred in the past—prior to another past which is called “today.” This naming of “today” as the past is something only a narrator would do. So, there is a disembodied narrator who is showing us a story very close to Patty Nicely’s perspective. A different author might even do away with this layer and render the first sentence this way: “A few years ago, with morning twilight coming into my bedroom, I had the television set on, and the sunlight had caused whatever was on the screen to be unseen from certain angles.” Perfectly fine, you might say, but the difference is a loss of perspective. Okay, a gain of directness, too. But as Ms. Strout has it, “we” are invited by a narrator (who has her own warm presence) to “see” something through her eyes and mind. In the second example, a character is telling us a story about herself. In the first example, there’s room for considerable distance between the narrator and the character, i.e. they may disagree. The character, Patty, may be shown as unreliable (she is). In the second example, this distance disappears—unless the character narrator is looking back at herself in a judgmental way or is just deluded. It’s style. Wait, does this even relate to where we started—trying to determine if there is a consistent narrator, whose consistent presence would make the whole story not polyphonic? Pretty much. This narrator who shows us Patty Nicely at two different times in her life does the same thing in each story, utilizing a consistent voice. Let’s look at a passage from Mississippi Mary, the fifth chapter. “The sun went behind a cloud as they walked back to the caseggiato, and this changed the light dramatically. The day seemed suddenly autumnal, yet the palm trees and brightly painted buildings were at odds with this, even for Mary, who—presumably—should have been used to it.” ‘Kay, who is speaking here? It’s the narrator of course—how do we know this? It’s subtle. A naïve (but maybe one who is having fun) reader might gloss over nuance and think they were reading a passage showing the character’s experience of walking back home. But then we have the observation that the character, Mary, should have been—presumably—used to the contrasts. Uh, Mary wouldn’t make that observation about herself; it’s the narrator who is presuming. And it’s that consistent voice we read in Windmills. In the seventh story, Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast, we have, “For no reason she could think of, and it may have been nothing more than the way the sun was slanting then across the hardwood floor, Dottie was suddenly visited by the memory of one summer of her childhood…” Again, the narrator is setting a scene within the story, marking it as a memory. Let’s read it as a first-person statement, “For no reason I could think of…I was suddenly visited by the memory of one summer of my childhood,” Hmmm, sort of…shallow, no? (value judgment). But, when you have the narrator—the same narrator across all the stories—telling it, you gain another layer of familiar perspective. Someone else is seeing the action and telling you their version of it, and their version is the same one you’ve abided with throughout the whole book, thereby tying it together. This is not Dostoevsky, itchy. But it is something equally as profound. Till next time. #AnythingIsPossible #ElizabethStrout #AlanBray

Let’s continue our exploration of Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible. Last time, we began looking at a prime structural feature of the book, that it is made up of nine somewhat autonomous stories, connected by characters, theme and narrator. We studied the first chapter, The Sign, and concluded that it could function as a self-contained short story. (You’re making your blog sound a lot more coherent than it really is.) ‘Kay. Thank you. I refuse to get involved in one of these childish arguments. Another chapter is entitled The Hit-Thumb Theory; its protagonist, Charlie Macauley, is a resident of Carlisle, Illinois, which places him in the vicinity of where most of the book’s protagonists live. Charlie, previously referenced in Windmills as Patty Nicely’s crush, is a Vietnam veteran with a severe PTSD condition whose origins are left to the reader’s imagination. The title refers to an idea he developed in Vietnam that if you should accidently hit your thumb with a hammer, the pain will be delayed after a moment of surprise during which you wonder if you’re really okay. And you aren’t. In Hit-Thumb, we find him unhappy in his marriage to Marilynn (also introduced in Windmills) and in the midst of a long-term affair with a woman named Tracy. The story begins with Charlie waiting in a hotel room for Tracy, with no knowledge that this is to be their last encounter. “Waiting for her to arrive, Charlie Macauley watched from the windows as twilight began to gather.” This is a great first line, as, by the time you reach the end, it will resonate in a story about a man struggling with darkness. After a memory of he and his wife in their youth, he closes the ancient window blinds. “Panic, like a large minnow darting upstream, moved back and forth inside him. He was suddenly as homesick as a child sent to stay with relatives…I want to go home, he thought, (but) it was not his home in Carlisle, Illinois, where he lived with Marilynn that he wanted to go home to, his grandchildren just down the street. And it was not his childhood home either…He did not know what home it was he longed for, but it seemed to him as he aged that his homesickness would increase and because he could not tolerate the Marilynn he now lived with…he did not know what he would do and the minnow darting through the stream of his anxiety…swam to the woman who might or might not show up here…and not one place seemed stable.” The woman, Tracy, does show up but instead of the sexual encounter Charlie anticipated, she indicates she must talk to him about a serious matter. “He knew instantly. His instincts had been honed in youth and this ability had never left him, the one to detect disaster.” After an initially transactional affair that has become mutually caring, Tracy asks Charlie for money, ten thousand dollars, because her son is in trouble, owing the money to drug dealers. Charlie refuses: he has that sum of money but feels used by Tracy whom he thought really cared for him. “…they fell in love—he had loved her really from the start and she said she had fallen in love with him too, and told him her name was Tracy…And that was how it had been for seven months now: desperately in love. Charlie did not like desperate.” Besides, if he gave her that sum of money, his wife would find out. He lashes out at Tracy, reminding her that she is an escort, that she means nothing to him beyond sex. But of course that isn’t true, and he decides to give her the money. “The bewilderment of how much he loved her—yet that was more knowledge now than feeling—when not on any conceivable level did it make sense, except for the only one that mattered: She had saved him, given him the space within which he could breathe.” He gives Tracy the money and tells her never to contact him again. After they part, he begins to have a PTSD-related panic attack and decides to go to a local B&B for the night. He has some medication but can’t take another dose for several hours. The B&B is run by Dottie Blaine, another character in the book who will soon rate her own chapter. Charlie asks if he can stay up and watch TV with her while he waits for the onset of a severe panic attack. “But now, for the first time, it occurred to him…that there was something far more frightening: people who no longer felt pan at all. He had seen it in other men—the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them. “So Charlie, a tiny bit, sat up straighter, and he stared pretty hard at the television set…He waited and he hoped, he practically prayed…Dear God, please could you? Could you please let it come?” It should be said that, in a later chapter concerning Dottie, the B&B owner, we are shown what transpires in this scene, from Dottie's perspective. In another chapter, we learn that Charlie subsequently leaves his wife and gets involved with Patty Nicely. But in Hit-Thumb, we get a complete story. Charlie has been using the affair with Tracy to manage the PTSD pain he feels and with the affair’s end, the pain resurges although he realizes that the ability to feel anything makes him more human. And this is the Hit-Thumb Theory in action: Charlie has a delayed response to the end of a very meaningful affair. As with The Sign, we have all the features of a short story in The Hit-Thumb Theory. It is self-contained, not requiring any contextualization by the larger collection—although there is that synergy created by reading the whole thing. A protagonist transforms. Charlie realizes he’s been dulling the pain he feels by a love affair, and that he must experience it in all its awfulness as to do so validates who he is. Very well. Have the critics been silenced? Let’s continue next time. Till then. #AnythingIsPossible #ElizabethStrout #AlanBray

Last time, we began discussing Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible, focusing on how the nine stories are linked by theme and character. An important question about this book is whether it is a novel or a collection of short stories. I mentioned that one can read each story separately, although reading them all has a synergistic effect. Let’s examine this separate-ness issue more. Do the various stories have the characteristics of short stories, or do they behave more like the chapters in a novel? A novel, let’s remember, is a different beastie in that each chapter is a step in a sequence about transformation. To review, what are the characteristics of a short story? A weighty issue, my friends. Some take the position that the essential characteristic of a short story is its length—typically between one thousand and ten thousand words. A novel is longer. Well, that seems kind of an easy way out. Here’s a definition that covers length but also gets at self-contained-ness (is that a real word?), the quality of something being complete onto itself: A short story is a piece of prose fiction that can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. Here are a couple of other views: A story should be a story; a record of things happening full of incidents, swift movements, unexpected development, leading through suspense to a climax and a satisfying denouement. Anton Chekov thought that a story should have neither a beginning nor an end. It should just be a "slice of life", presented suggestively. In his stories, Chekov does not round off the end but leaves it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. ‘Kay. The first definition emphasizes the need for a short story to have a climax and satisfying conclusion, the second presents the idea that a story should be open-ended and not conclusive. I’ll have a go: A good story shows a protagonist transforming. In a novel, the protagonist is shown at the beginning the way she/he is or was before transforming, usually because of some sort of dilemma. Then the story shows how particular experiences and interactions with others create a moment of crisis that leads to transformation. A novel accomplishes this process over its whole course; a short story must do so in a much shorter space. So, if each chapter in Anything can be read as a short story, it should have these structures. Let’s look at the first chapter, The Sign. Two characters are introduced, Tommy Guptill, who is arguably the protagonist (the story begins and ends with him) and Pete Barton, Lucy’s brother (remember that Lucy is a thread through all the stories). Tommy begins in a sort of pleasant trance state in which he has rationalized tragedy (the long-ago destruction of his dairy farm business and family home) by a belief that, during the disaster, God spoke to him and assured him that everything would be all right. He has worked for years since as a janitor, a job where he encountered and tried to help Lucy Barton, whom he knew of because Lucy’s father had worked for him on the dairy farm. One of his current helping projects is Lucy’s brother, Pete, an isolated and limited man who is largely shunned by the community. So here, the story has begun with a view of the protagonist—Tommy—as he is before the events of the story change him. He is resolutely positive and believes that bad things happen to people to make them appreciate what’s really important in life. During the fire which destroyed his farm, “he had felt—undeniably—what he could think was only the presence of God…pressed up against him and conveying to him without words…some message that Tommy understood to be: it’s all right, Tommy.” Tommy goes to visit Pete Barton and is surprised when Pete asks him to stop dropping by. “You do it to torture me,” Pete says. Tommy is mystified, and Pete explains that it was his father who deliberately set the fire that destroyed Tommy’s business and that Tommy knows this and visits Pete to remind him of what his father did. Tommy doesn’t want to believe that Barton Sr. set the fire and suggests Pete is mistaken. Tommy tells Pete about his experience of God appearing to him the night of the fire, something Tommy has never told anyone before. Pete responds: “So you believe that.” He says this not in a challenging way but more out of sincere curiosity at encountering someone who is capable of such a belief. Tommy affirms he does believe and tells Pete: “I guess there’s always that struggle between what to do and what not to do…to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we’ve done that’s hurt other people—that keeps us human.” Pete says in response that his father was remorseful about setting the fire. Pete continues that he was wrong about Tommy wanting to torture him and that he’d like Tommy to come by again so they can have “talks.” Tommy agrees, although he’s aware he really doesn’t want to. Tommy drives home and feels an increasing sense of fear. He doesn’t understand why he told Pete about his experience with God and is shocked that Pete questioned whether it really happened. Tommy feels an emptiness he hasn’t felt before, an absence of God. He goes home and talks with his wife Shirley, telling her about his experience with God the night of the fire. “But now I think I must have imagined it…it couldn’t have happened. I made it up.” His wife reassures him, saying it could have happened just as he believed. “And then Tommy understood…his doubt—(his sudden belief that God had never come to him)—was a new secret replacing the first.” ‘Kay. Tommy transforms significantly over the course of the story. He goes from sureness to doubt because of his encounter with Pete Barton. At the end, there is no neat tying up of the doubt, no happy ending. We are left with a man whose coping mechanism have been shattered. Later in the book, we learn that Tommy, his wife, and Pete Barton have been working at the local soup kitchen since the events of The Sign, and we can speculate that Tommy derives peace from this charitable work. But at the conclusion of The Sign, we are left with a human in despair. So, referring back to the definitions of a short story we began with, The Sign seems to have those characteristics, but is also embedded within a larger work. It has transformation of a protagonist, unexpected developments, and a crisis leading to an open ending. It is self-contained, in that you don’t need to read all of Anything to comprehend it. Next time, let’s look at another of the stories, hunting for transformation. Till then. #AnythingIsPossible #ElizabethStrout #AlanBray

This week, a new one, Elizabeth Strout’s 2017 book Anything Is Possible. Dena recommended Elizabeth Strout to me; I’ve read Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and this is my fifth read of Anything Is Possible. Yes, I like it. Possible is a little different from many contemporary novels in that structurally, it is a series of nine stories, linked by reference to and occasional appearance of one character, Lucy Barton, who, notably, is always seen by others in the stories, never having her own perspective. Of note too is that she is an author who lives in New York City, and this is true of the real author, Elizabeth Strout. The stories are also linked by being about people (including Lucy) who are from the fictional town of Amgash, Illinois. As far as I can tell, only one of the stories, Snow-Blind, was previously published, so we can speculate that Ms. Strout intended for the stories to be published together, i.e. it’s not a collection of previously published works. Of course, you immediately object that this linked short story format is not unique, and I do not disagree. Sherwood Andersen’s Winesburg, Ohio is similar, and a lot of the heavy hitters—Hemingway, Faulkner—have published linked short stories in one book. What does this mean—linked short stories? As I said, they are linked by reference to geographic place and a character Lucy Barton. Other characters also are referred to in more than one tale—Tommy Guptill and his wife, Abel Blaine and his sister Dottie, Charlie Macauley, and Patty Nicely, and of course, Lucy’s brother Pete. Moreover, each story is linked to the others by their treatment of particular themes and by a consistent narrator’s voice. The stories are all in third person and in the simple past tense, with sections that dip back in time. A close reading will reveal that, although most of the stories seem to occur at the same time, there is some movement forward. Pete Barton, who appears in the first story The Sign, tells his sister Lucy in Sister, that he’s been working at the soup kitchen with Tommy Guptill and his wife for about a year; in The Sign, the story is about Pete and Tommy but there is no mention of a soup kitchen, so we can infer that at least a year has passed between the events in The Sign and those in Sister. We also have the early stirrings of love between Patty Nicely and Charlie Macauley in Windmills and The Hit Thumb Theory, and then the later mention in Mississippi Mermaid, that they have become a couple. And one of the stories, Snow-Blind, occurs largely in the past. (This story, about the actress Annie Appleby, is a kind of mise en abyme for the whole book—more on this to come). Actually, most of the bad things that the characters are dealing with in the book’s present have occurred in the past. The book’s present is a time of reconciliation and recovery—but that doesn’t mean it’s always happy. Can you read each story as an independent short story without reading the rest? Yessir, and that is one of the reasons this book is such an achievement. However, there is a synergy created by reading the whole thing, as each story contextualizes the others, creating a sort of tapestry effect, meaning you wind up with a richer perspective than you’d get from just one character’s perspective. A tapestry dealing with shame, trauma, and redemption through connection. As I have said, the narrator repeats some information across the stories, and this repetition, I believe, works to tie each story together. For instance, most of the stories—especially in the first half—state that the events are occurring or did occur in Amgash, Illinois. The present time of the book is the reference time for the characters and narrator. For instance, Windmills begins with the narrator stating, “A few years ago…” Most stories reference Lucy Barton, as well as the memories most of the main characters have of how poor her family was, that she escaped and became a writer in New York. Many characters appear in more than one story, for instance Angelina, Patty Nicely’s friend, who journeys to Italy to see her mother in Mississippi Mary. Charlie Macauley has his own story, The Hit-Thumb Theory, but does a “walk-on” in others, Windmills, and Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast. Annie Appleby figures prominently in Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast, and then has her own story, Snow-Blind. These things are obviously not coincidence but the work of Ms. Strout who wanted to create running threads that would connect different parts. Lucy Barton is arguably the center and of course, comes to us through other books, an interesting phenomenon in itself. In this book, she is an adult, a successful author who has left her family and small-town roots and has never returned—till the events recounted in Sister. Most of the other characters know of her and harbor feelings of anger and envy at her seeming success and escape. They see her on TV screens; they encounter her at author events in other cities, they gossip about her to each other. She is remembered, along with her siblings, as being desperately poor and abused by her parents. She is a kind of lightning rod, if you will, to many of the others. “The Barton family had been outcasts, even in a town like Amgash, their extreme poverty and strangeness making this so. The oldest child, a man named Pete, lived there now, the middle child was two towns away, and the youngest, Lucy Barton, had fled many years ago…” The narrator in The Sign. “”I was supposed to be named for my aunt, but at the last minute my mom said, Fuck her…She’s a bitch. She thinks she’s better than any of us…I’ve never met her. She lives in New York…” Lila Lane in Windmills. “I saw Lucy on TV a few years ago. Hot shot. She wrote a book or something. Lives in New York…” Patty Nicely’s mother in Windmills. “And this made him think of Lucy Barton again, how terribly poor she had been as well, how he went as a kid to stay with her family…she would go with him to look for food in the dumpster…” Abel Blaine in The Gift. Lucy is the one who the characters believe escaped the trauma of their lives. But this is an idealization. It is in Sister that the reader learns more of the truth about Lucy and how she has not been able to escape her roots. ‘Kay, let’s adjourn there and return next time. Till then, my friends. #AnythingIsPossible #ElizabethStrout #AlanBray