Yet, the repeated conversation, like someone going through old diary entries and discovering a trivial detail predicted the outcome of a past relationship, does show a compelling change in Jack. The diary entry of the story is the remembrance of a conversation, during which Jack’s nomadic girlfriend divulges her desire to leave him. The first time she asks what if she vanished, Jack answers like a boy talking to his mother: “But there’s always a reason, or at least a context,” and proceeds to describe how the C.I.A or aliens must have her. He jokes about listening to her goodbye on his answering machine, or looking for her at the “Department of Missing Persons.” Soon, he is lecturing her on Westerns and Kevin Costner, getting the conversation so wrong, his girlfriend says, “in other words, you’d make fun of me.”
The surprising thing is he gets a second chance to get this conversation right. The girlfriend vanishes, and the reader sees Jack’s changed perspective through a remix of this conversation. He imagines telling her, “O.K., I’ll play. I’d ride to the ends of the earth, to the silver mountains of the moon. […] I’d follow your footprints across borax craters, ford molten rivers that parted like mercury.” This continues, and by the end he is searching through the C.I.A he earlier joked would have her, while also employing the help of a “hypnotist who specialized in negotiating the release of alien abductees.” These melodramas sound more desperate than humorous, and Jack returns to the line from the first conversation: “there’s always a why, or at least a context,” and reveals “You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night. Changed your unlisted phone number. Left no forwarding address so that mail was returned and e-mails disappeared into whatever graveyard file they go to.” Often memories become so heavy, one wants to return to them and try to lighten the load by saying the thing you wished you had said; this story provides Jack this opportunity, and he shows a transformation from cool sarcasm to desperate pleading.
What happens between these conversations, however, doesn’t have the same preciseness. The movie reviews, cyberspace obsessions, pornographic and drugged back-stories are plenty for the story’s hand, so the actual movie "Open Range" sticks out like an extra finger. I’ve imagined a short story using a movie as a conceit, but this one employs "Open Range" more as a diversion than a device. The most relevant connection between the movie and the story is a shared interest in “the war between free grazers and landowners.” Sure, the reader understands the girlfriend represents the free grazers, and the boyfriend is possessed by a virtual landscape, but "Open Range" has such a different tone than this emotional drama; actually it shuns emotions and prides in the campiness of nostalgic, tough guy, reticent morals. This isn’t the right movie for this story – maybe Tarintino’s "True Romance," with its mixture of sex and violence, would’ve worked better. The girlfriend of the story felt like Bruce Willis’ girlfriend in "Pulp Fiction", anyhow, and the car salesman ex-boyfriend reminded me of Sharon Stone’s Lester Diamond from "Casino". In addition, lines from Jack like “her face was so lovely to him that he hadn’t yet allowed himself to gaze at her with the full force of recognition. That was true of her nakedness, too; it dazzles him, and he found he could take it in only glimpses,” ring so false he sounds like Josh Hartnett’s character from "Wicker Park". (Or a dream stud in “Sex in the City,” such crap, too; in relationships, the more beautiful the girl, the more a guy looks. We, men, are consumers. We consume beauty like popcorn.)
Still, the movie reviews do help the story show the cyber-soaked, information overload of contemporary life; opinions so available the main character knows what to think about the movie before he sees it. All this criticism is a click away, and Jack’s compulsive search for the thoughts of others successfully overwhelms the reader. Also, the way the story uses the present tense camera to catch details like the “hygienically bright lighting” of Dunkin Doughnuts, and the quirky sadness of a computer asking “you sure you want to shut down,” is effective.
But the back-story, presented in long, sweaty flashbacks, reminded me why movies are in the present tense. These flashbacks were unnerving and tediously incongruous. We are told Dom is a car salesman in upstate New York, for example, but Jack imagines her “along a familiar cobbled street, past the candy shop and their breakfast café, […] to a Victorian house, where clothes of hers still hang in the closet of the ornate master bedroom, where on a velvet chair the photographs she asks him to delete were taken.”
This isn’t upstate New York, it’s Westchester, maybe Maine. This velvet chair belongs to a college professor, not a used car salesman. And, Dom’s pleas to the girl sound like Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris": “[what’s] this horseshit about differences –as if they ever mattered to you with your clothes off. You’re most devious to yourself. Do you think you’ll ever be as intimate? If you leave, you’ll always be lying. We’ll be, for each other, an absence, like a phantom limb.” This moment of dialogue felt like a porno director trying to add emotional ‘drama!’ to his movie with 'a deep, dirty flashback', when the right money shot would’ve worked just fine.
11 comments:
i'm sorry, but i can't help but disagreeing with the way you conclude this post. don't you think that sort of "porno director" effect, the idea of this lush interior to the home of this used car salesman, is actually the point?
the keyword, i think, is imagining. he's imagining the alternate life of someone he never took the time to pay enough attention to. just as he is reimagining over and over again the conversation at the end, he is imagining for the first time who she really is/was when he wasn't around, and i think this story is, in part, about his failure to do so accurately. he can't help but imagine the worst--sleazy used car salesmen with velvet armchairs, for instance. the narrator is turning what is probably a fairly humdrum affair into a schlocky romance that oozes hollywood, no?
she asks him what he would do if she'd vanished, and he doesnt take her seriously, doesn't give himself any options, so when she does vanish, he doesn't really know what to do with himself but imagine and reimagine the same things, obsessing over the smallest details.
i think dybek, in this instance, is smarter than you're giving him credit for.
TFNS, thanks for your comment. Is the first comment you as well? The author of the first comment deleted it himself, not me, for the record.
Anywho, I was really joking with that last porno metaphor; kind of a joke that never lifts up to flight, so I don’t really want to defend that last line too tough. Either way, I didn’t mean it to degenerate Stuart Dybek’s intelligence as a writer. This is the first story of his I’ve encountered, and I am sure he may be an excellent writer; like I note, several devices and moments of this story were remarkable. And I agree that the story wants to show how this character’s imagination is overloaded with movieness. The character even acknowledges the exchange in Dunkin Doughnuts sounds too much like dialogue from a movie. So we agree, but in the imagined flashback I wanted something more. You seem to have taken from it, Jack’s inability to imagine his ex-girlfriend in something other than “a schlocky romance that oozes Hollywood,” but this hyper-sexual dynamic is also the way we are told the girlfriend describes her past relationship to Jack in the hospital after her bad hashish trip. Is that scene supposed to be Jack’s imagination at work as well? The narrator tells the melodramatic sexual affair of Dom and Ceil to the reader with authority, which leads me to argue the later imagined scene sounds compatible with the relationship Ceil had with Dom.
Where you seem to think the story wants to point to this flashback and show how Jack imagines his girlfriend and her former lover in such a movie cliché scene, I believe the story never offers any real alternative vision of Dom or Ceil. This flashback is not just how Jack sees Ceil and Dom but how the story sees them as characters. Ceil’s vanishing question, her post hashish, sexually explicit story about her ex boyfriend, the deleted or watched porno files, are essential parts of this story’s stuffing, and they reek of the same cheesiness of the imagined flashback. Jack becomes three dimensional because of the time we spend with him in the present tense, but these other two characters are all in the past or imagined. And this is the point, I guess: our memories have become movies, but in that same breathe, I wanted to find the real Ceil somewhere in the story. Plus, aren’t we supposed to see Jack has changed by Ceil’s vanishing? certainly his conversation with her has drastically changed. Here, instead of a repetition of the movie theatricality, Jack could’ve imagined a realistic scenario of Ceil’s return to Dom, one that revealed their humanity, instead of their pulpy trashiness.
"If I Vanished" is the kind of story I've always imagined brewing in the heads of the over-arted hipster guys who like to sip lattes in Williamsburg bookstores as they read dirty rags and check out over-arted hipster chicks sipping lattes in Williamsburg bookstores while reading dirty rags and checking out over-arted hipster guys who like to sip lattes in Williamsburg bookstores as they read dirty rags and check out over-arted hipster chicks sipping lattes in Williamsburg bookstores while reading dirty rags and checking out over-arted hipster guys who like to sip lattes in Williamsburg bookstores as they read stories like "If I Vanished"...
...but Dybeck deserves more than prankster-critique, so I'll stop my nonsense...
But there's s level of genuine truth and flattery in my opener: I love the mirror effect Dybeck uses of the narrator's girlfriend vanishing juxtaposed with the repetition--the unvanishing-- of the narrator's persona. Nice. And dug the paradox of the girlfriend's erasure from the bottle-fiend's files.
The movie and pop-culture references? Do wonder if the references were unplugged, would the story deflate without its scaffolding...Yeah the references annoyed me, in part because I'm way under-arted up against Dybeck, but also because they created in this relatively humble, low-brow reader the sense of sitting in on a "you had to be there but you weren't" conversation. Except I was there for "Open Range": thank god a an over-arted friend got me to watch it last year. And I did enjoy the narrator's critique of the movie, a movie I actually liked because of the horsies and the Velveeta luv story in rustic surroundings. The other references, well, I was absent for so I pretty much glossed over--couldn't connect to the implied emotion.
I got the sense that the character had a hyper-occupied mind and a lonely heart. There are people like that, who fill their heads with art to escape the artlessness of their lives. So I think Dybeck captured that well. But god that's just so sad to me.
Overall, I liked the right now feel of the story, among other things. Wish I could make clearer references to the story, but my copy of NYer vanished among my moving boxes.
Despite being a probably over-arted hipster guy (unfortunately no longer in Greenpoint/Williamsburg) who drinks coffee in bookstores and writes for a dirty rag while checking out hipster girls who're doing the same thing, I had never thought of writing a story like this. The one I've been wanting to write doesn't involve nearly as many pop references (although it does involve a girl very much like Ceil). I'm almost amazed text messaging wasn't mentioned. But you can't include everything I guess.
Dictionary.com helpfully defines the word "ceil" as a verb: To provide or cover with a ceiling. Interesting definition for Ceil, who threatens to vanish and then vanishes. Is the name Ceil a metaphor for Dybek's attempt to contain, or at least protect, this otherwise free-grazing character? Interesting name.
The story is really sifting through so much contemporary detritus--with the brand names and movie stars and Internet sites--for Ceil herself. Jack is kind of cyberstalking her but at a remove, out of "curiosity" he says, which is the form his missing her has taken on this snowy night, fortunately. Ironically enough, it seems to have been his curiosity (with his over-artedness on display in the first section) that perhaps led her away, or distracted him from her in the first place. He has so much on the brain, so many cultural references banging around and ready to be quoted, that he may have occasionally forgotten she was there! And when she vanishes, well. He must have expected it would happen. And contrast his over-active imagination and hesitance to look at her (as A. quoted: "he found he could take [her nakedness] only in glimpses" since she's so beautiful]) with the Italian used car salesman (the significance of that Italian! He's not just a regular used car salesman. There's a hint of class attached to that cheesy, much-filmed cliche) who takes photos of her spreading her pussy for him--the most intimate shot possible. Interesting that Ceil at some point said that Dom (great name, btw - as in Dominick, Dominatrix, Dominator), via the dirty routines of his photographing her, mirrored her own repressed dirtiness and made her feel clean. When Jack (Jacking off?) thinks about ceil visiting Dom the last time, he has Dom drag her photos into the Trash. As if that's where they were going to stay, defining their relationship and sexual intimacy as Trashy. But of course she asks him to remove them from the Trash. She doesn't like to think of their thing as Trash. It cleaned her after all. Jack may have made her feel dirty, with his avoidance of her body. (When A. says this is unbelievable, I have to think he's speaking from his own experience with beautiful women; a personal tendency to take it all in. In my experience at least, there've been times when a naked girl's beauty is too much, you can only really take small doses here and there. I've also thought, once or twice, that staring might lead the beautiful girl to think you're obsessed strictly with her body - that it'd be better, or wiser, to be discreet and enjoy her beauty in pieces.)
Anyway. Ceil's relative absence from the story was I thought appropriate, as she's the vanishing girl. And we get the same kind of fractured glimpses of her that Jack got of her nakedness, of her face. He jokes that after a few weeks of her absence he can hardly remember her face. And she jokes that she's offended. (They're joking here because it's such a serious topic - the loss of one another, the passage of time and memory.) But the pieces we get of her made her fairly vivid in my mind - both through objective narration (the fish incident) and through Jack's subjective lense. And the use of Open Range (which I haven't seen). I don't know. But would True Romance have been better here? That might have made the thing more sentimental, more overtly hipster, more pitifully "Indie." Like, of course these two are talking about True Romance. And that title would have definitely fucked things up. Whereas at least Open Range (vs. Ceil/ceiling) has the randomness of an off-hand cultural reference plus the significance of being cheesy enough to expose Jack's higher standards for love - which he nevertheless falls short of, it seems, in his relationship with Ceil.
Ceil's humanity I thought was revealed in her (or Jack's imaginative her) near-contempt for the avoidance of reality, of her inevitable disappearance from her life. Goddamnit, Jack, she's thinking. This is serious! (Maybe she led him intentionally astray there with Open Range, which she knew would annoy him?) Someday I'm going to be gone. You can't take a second and think about that and come back to me with a genuine, human answer? You've got to retreat into imdb?
Lastly I wanted to point out what I thought the best moment in the story. The end of his self-consciously scripted conversation with the Dunkin Donuts girl. Just when he's realized the damn thing's scripted, that he can't escape his own Moviegoer tendency to see life in terms of cinema and remembered art, she bursts through the script with a real emotion, with reality. ""I told him it was my last night working here," she says. "I just wanted to say goodbye." Like, holy shit, right? He had to end the passage there. Reality bursting through his own tendency to compartimentalize, to ceil reality, blah blah. But pretty good.
Fitzcarraldo, I'm so glad you prove me wrong about hipster guys (but you liked the story, though :-)). I dug your post--along with the rest of the comments that came before it: tnfs's disagreement with a. and a.'s subsequent clarification.
That you went as far as looking up Ceil's name and connecting it to "Open Range" (movie referenced throughout by Jack) is great, as well as your inventing possible etymologies for Dybeck's choice of his characters' handles. Whether or not they are deliberate choices on Dybeck's part, there are subconscious associations inherent in names. You offer yet one more element to consider when reading stories. The only problem with opening this door is that it makes writing these comments even more difficult: the text box is so small that the briefest of thoughts seem to lengthen the scrollbar to infinity.
So just to digress from fitzcarraldo and Dybeck, I've been wanting to comment on the act of commenting. All the stories critiqued in this blog so far have a level of complexity that can easily get flattened by the comments in these claustrophobic text boxes. And I know how hard it is for writers to write, much less possibly come across sometimes highly concentrated blog commentaries. For me, trying to make sense of a story in this form is like seeing a complex image up close and choosing which elements to focus on. In the end, I try to zoom out and gauge the elements that still show up on the story's Google Earth image. I like how a. does tight zoom-ins and how other posts approach the story from other magnitudes.
The last paragraph of fitzcarraldo's post contains what I think is the importance of the diversity of opinions in these posts (he/she being arbitrary in this context):
"...the best moment in the story. The end of...self-consciously scripted conversation...Just when he's realized the damn thing's scripted...she bursts through the script with a real emotion, with reality...Reality bursting through his own tendency to compartimentalize...blah, blah. But pretty good."
Look at the skeleton of the story, the building blocks, the structure. Jack's thoughts, actions, visits to Dunkin' Donuts and Blockbuster are real life. Vivid, non-vanishing. Through his eyes we see what is and has vanished. The rest is how he imagines it, how he sees it vanishing. And what he didn't see... how it vanished. Why take it apart piece by piece. Feel it. Did no one notice the music? It's a beautiful piece of writing.
For the first time, I actually read your blog shortly after reading the story. Finally, I know what the hell is going on.
I actually really liked the story. However, I have always been prone to love stories, particularly love stories with a character nostalgic for a past lover.
I really identified with the male character: How casual conversations can later take on meaning. How memories can become obsessive. How a person can think about their former lover's relationship with other lovers. How movies can define significant moments in the relationship.
The story felt real.
Nevertheless, I think your criticism pointed out some things I didn't like about the story but had not completely formed. I especially like your breaking of the story in a pie chart. The interesting thing is all the parts of the pie are intertwined, which makes the story sort of drag. I was not interested in the sexual transgressions with the past lover, the analogy to the relationship between the cab driver and the coffee worker, (even though, I admit I didn't spend much time thinking about the symbolism or meaning of the cab driver telling the waitress it was his last night coming to the shop and her desire to see him one last time .)or the imagery to snow.
The story could have been more focused.
Also, before closing, I should say I was really impressed with your connections in the story. A lot of things you pointed out, I didn't recognize. That's much appreciated and really makes your blog worth reading.
The writer of everythingbutthefiction.blogspot.com has written a superior article. I got your point and there is nothing to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not disagree with: The highest compliment someone can give is to say you made them think. I will be back.
Good dispatch and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you seeking your information.
I have been visiting various blogs for my term papers writing research. I have found your blog to be quite useful. Keep updating your blog with valuable information... Regards
Post a Comment