Seven Stories

There’s no New Yorker magazine story to digest this week, so I have decided to discuss the relationship between the seven stories we have dissected here together. First though, I want to make sure all readers of this blog know they are very, very welcome to post comments. I don’t delete anyone’s comments, besides my own once, and I don’t mind if you disagree with me. I welcome all perspectives: hipsters, casual readers, rappers, player haters, anybody, even Vegetarians. The reason I started this blog is because I would often read New Yorker stories and want to share thoughts with someone. Sure, I have a few friends, but I wanted a wider discussion. Therefore, please comment.

A few different friends have asked me which of the seven stories so far is my favorite, and this is a hard question. With the exception of Homework, all these stories, in some way or another, bear the mark of great fiction. People often speak despairingly about The New Yorker’s fiction; however, I find the magazine’s stories offer some of the most interesting work around. So, my favorite story was a close contest between Saunders’ PUPPY and Biller’s THE MAHOGANY ELEPHANT, but my final choice would have to be Saunders’  PUPPY. This story prompted my first post, and I remember reading it twice and feeling amazed by its language, its two main characters, and the way it subverted my expectations and associations. My post on this story has more than a few typos (as many do), and I hadn’t yet learned the narrowness of blog world, so my paragraphs are tyrannical, but I do think the story is worth readers’ attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was anthologized in the Best American Collection.

Also, friends have asked which post and discussion is my favorite. This is easy. The discussion of WILDWOOD was intense; with Yunior coming in to correct my assertions about the end of the story. Really, our different perspectives stemmed from the subtle line between the narrator and the writer. Often, the narrator makes decisions about how to describe a character’s emotions to make a point. I found the narrator’s description of the story’s last moment to be unsatisfactory, but Yunior argued the ending was suppose to be unsatisfactory, and hopeful, and elastic. Then, ended his last post with, “What I’m celebrating, if I’m celebrating anything at the end of that story, is that a VISION IS COMING! Which is my way of metaphorizing my belief that on its best days the world i inhabit and try to represent the life, never fails to keep offering us chances to awaken to ourselves.” 

Such a great, hopeful sentiment, it was worth repeating.

Speaking of comments, there have been some damn good ones. Sometimes, I feel like the comments outshine my posts, so they are worth their weight in.....megabytes? Particularly great ones are Lit Up’s response to “HOMEWORK”, Fitzcarraldo’s response to “1966,” and Pena’s response to “WILDWOOD.”

Now to what exists in common between these seven stories. I would say all of them deal with relationships, whether between siblings, parents and children, or lovers. They illuminate the struggle of relationships. Even the most functional pair in the batch, for example, Hester and Bartholomew, shield thoughts from one another. Bartholomew never tells his sister, the closes person to him in the world, how he has lost his faith; instead he sacrifices for her and finds religious ecstasy in her death.

Maybe sacrifice can be understood as one of the larger themes of all these stories. In IF I VANISHED, the main character has to sacrifice his girlfriend to grow and understand the importance of a question. Wildwood; the daughter’s desire for change, liberation, and freedom, come with the sacrifice of conformity, whether there is beauty in her potential for change or not, there is also tragedy in her false epiphany. Biller’s girlfriend has to make one of the most surprising and tragic sacrifices of the group: an unwanted one. She decides to sacrifice herself to a boyfriend, who no longer really cares for her. Her decision seems to stem from a desire for oblivion, similar to a gambler’s dingy, green-eyed desire to lose his money. Helen Simpson’s story is the exception. No one sacrifices anything in her story, except maybe the reader who loses his or her time. (I am kidding. The story wasn’t that bad; really it felt like the New Yorker’s editors failed to ask her to write a second draft…?) Back to sacrifices; in 1966, both brothers sacrifice their innocence (and possibly their lives) for the perverse, false machismo of war culture, a trap more harmful than any of the drugs taken in JESUS; SON. And Saunders’ PUPPY may have the funniest and most poetic sacrifice of all: an innocent little dog is killed so a wife can feel the intimacy of her husband’s fart-like wail, once again.

One could argue these stories taken together illuminate the sacrifices life demands from us all. I agree. So you all better give it up. New post, next week.

Denis Johnson's "1966"

Perhaps, the most important exchange in “1966” is the phone conversation between the brothers, Bill and James. Both are confused, young men headed down the same road, the older brother just further along; and if this story’s split narrative is meant to show two bones in the masculine psychological anatomy – one the narrative of Bill’s shore leave, the other James’ decision to join the military – than this conversation is the joint linking the two.

And, this joint is strongest when the conversation’s tension is sustained through the character’s unspoken emotions. The brothers’ awkwardness, for example, is shown through lines like, “O.K./O.K./Hey, tell mom I called, O.K.?And tell her I said hi. /O.K. /O.K…Tell her I love her. /O.K. So long.” Much of this back and forth banter seems mundane, but it works as silence between outbursts like Bill’s assertion of distaste for Honolulu’s weather: “Hey, kid, imagine this – did you ever lift the lid on a kettle full of boiling sewage? That’s what it’s like stepping out on the street in this place.” Furthermore, because the narrator rarely registers Bill’s emotions, the reader understands them through his descriptions of the weather, like when Bill warns James, “the tropics ain’t no tropical paradise […] It’s full of rot –bugs, sweat, stink, and I don’t know what all else. And most of the beautiful tropical fruit you see, it’s rotten –it’s mashed on the street.”

Yet, James ignores his older brother and decides Bill is “probably an alkie, like his father.” The revelation of the brothers’ different fathers helps to explain the distance between them, and Bill tries to overcome it when he tells James: “Well, you stay out of trouble. Learn by [my father’s] example,” but James responds, “I don’t follow none of his examples, I don’t even look at his examples.” This is important, because by ignoring lessons from both his brother and his brother’s father, James is following their footsteps, and Bill, aware of the real trauma of war, knows the tragic failure of this conversation and says it “just made him more depressed. His brother James was stupid. His brother James was going to end up in the military, too.”

After this phone conversation, Bill heads to a dive bar, and meets a civilian tanker named Kinney, and an unnamed, ex-marine, bum. Racist tirades and pitchers of beer start the conversation, and the bum goes on to describes the hats Vietnamese women would wear and how he yanked one “right off the bike, man, […] I saw one this one time where she was all bent like this, man. Her neck was snapped.” This description of a woman’s snapped neck is trumped later when the Bum tells about the time he saw a woman’s genitals mutilated. Bill doesn’t believe these stories, but the violence of war has affected him, and later and drunker, he removes his “white bucks with red rubber soles,” and pontificates his view against war, saying “I think, really, there ain’t that many different kinds of people on this earth. And that’s why I’m against war.”

Bill may have become a pacifist, but his younger brother will join him in Vietnam soon. This same night, James and friends search for a party they aren’t able to find; and, instead, parked in the middle of nowhere, they sit in the bed of James’ truck and drink warm beer. High school banter passes the time, and James deciding he prefers Rollo’s girl, Stevie, to his girl, Charlotte, drives both his friend and girl home, only to return Stevie to nowhere, this time alone. James tells Stevie his plans to join either “the Army or the Marines,” which gives him the confidence to kiss her. They kiss and she says, “I’m trying to think, Does this man kiss like the Army or like the Marines?” This exchange ignites intimacy between them, which leads Stevie to try and probe James, asking about his father, but James ignores her and tells himself, “So now she suddenly thought they should tell their worst secrets to each other.” He leaves to urinate this intimacy from his body and returns to say, “I just made up my mind: I’m joining the Army Infantry.” Determined, he claims he’s “going to get over there to Vietnam. [..] Going to fuck up a whole lot of people.” The reader knows, mainly himself.

Bill is “in agony, dealing with bare feet on the hot sand, and now on the black asphalt.” Bill has left his shoes on the beach, and the heat beneath him represents the hell that awaits. He, Kinney, and the Bum, find themselves unwittingly helping Kinney collect on a debt, and out of nowhere, Kinney shots the debtor, and Bill, surprised and confused, tries “to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.” Soon the Bum, afraid of the cursing Kinney, is hiding behind a bus, and Bill is stumbling in a post-traumatic haze; his unhappiness defying his mother’s assertion that the war “didn’t hurt [Bill], I suppose.” James, aware of his mother’s financial insecurity, promises his tired mother, “You send me the envelope every month, I’ll send you some money back inside it,” and gets her to all but agree to sign her second son away to a war that has already damaged the psyche of her first. James’ promise, a promise the reader imagines Bill made too, seems unlikely, since Bill has been “assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base,” and the story’s last line that “hard times are coming,” suggests a similar future for James. By the story's end, the reader knows the Vietnam War will damage both sons, and the only brother left, Burris, first shown, “peering down the barrel of a cap pistol while he pulled the trigger repeatedly,” will have to wait a few decades to prove his masculinity and join his brothers’ misery.