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.

Maxim Biller's "THE MAHOGANY ELEPHANT"

Monday night, I read the interview between the New Yorker and Maxim Biller. Often writers annoy me in interviews, but Biller made me a believer when he said, “I always try to keep it simple. I think the writer has to write in such a way that people know what he is talking about. Only then can they start to discover the secret of the prose behind the prose.” Has there ever been a clearer evocation of the Hemingway school of prose? the secret behind which universal emotions are exchanged. Like Hemingway, Biller’s story, THE MAHOGANY ELEPHANT is more like a beautiful scene in a play than a narrative. Not that it doesn’t progress, because it does. A middle aged man, about whom no physical detail is spared, and his girlfriend – less described than the boyfriend – come together after three months apart. She has returned from India, a trip after which they’ve agreed to marry or never see each other again. 

However, it doesn’t look hopeful: she tells him she didn’t miss him, and gives him a present that he throws into the trash. They talk awkwardly, and she tells the boyfriend how the present has more importance than he or the reader expected, prompting the main character to search through the trash for the elephant. We find she lost it three times, and he has lost it a fourth. She helps him clean the mess of the trash, nevertheless, and jokes that they are done; a joke both the reader and character think is true. The narrator waits for her to urinate and realizes he isn't really sad about the break-up, more ready to start the joy of being alone. (funny, since alone he will be.) But, he is wrong; he finds her in his bedroom, clothed, and resigned to marrying him.

That’s it. We are given very little back-story, no long, exquisite stream of conscious, no highfalutin epiphany or grand understanding of life. The plot is a woman’s surprise decision to bind herself to a lifeless relationship. But, the remarkable victory is how individualistic and universal both characters feel. The waiting lover is described as, “he sorted out his photos, rearranged his books, moved the furniture around, and then he went on waiting.” This could be any guy killing time, but the next detail give us a key personality insight: “After that, he read all the letters he had ever received and threw most of them away, and then he bought a large map of India and hung it above his bed. Or rather, he didn’t buy a map of India, but that was what he really wanted to do.” This moment reveals to the reader that despite the narrator's claim to care about this woman, he feels little sentimentality about the relationship. Furthermore, we come to see him as the type to imagine hanging a map of India as a sign of endearment, but doesn't actually do it. 

Throughout the story, whether he is looking outside at the “large green leaves,” analyzing his girlfriend’s urination patterns, texting her apology's while she is flying, petulantly making “up his mind to say as little as possible,” forcing her to drink wine instead of water, or throwing away the elephant she gives him, the reader sees the pettiness of the boyfriend. He is waiting for her to make a decision, while asserting very little himself; his passivity along with his desire for her “to suffer a little; he wanted her to say it and feel unhappy about hurting him” make the reader empathize with the girlfriend and want her to get away.

She doesn’t, instead she dies in the end; not literally, but examine how her voice and her appearance is described in the story. One of the first details we learn from the boyfriend is “she had lost weight on her travels […]She was tired […]she’d gone away to recover from feeling tired all the time, and now that she was back she was still tired.” He goes on to say, “And she’d grown older. Older or harder or more serious – he wasn’t sure which. There was a gray tinge to her tanned skin, the kind you usually see only on older women.” 

Also, one of the story’s most marvelous lines is assigned to her. The boyfriend asks how she wants her water, and she says, “room temperature.” Such a nice moment, because the emotional temperature of the room is so dry and dead, for her to want her water this way anticipates her last decision. The set-up for this revelation is telling. The boyfriend is looking for his girlfriend, and the narrator notes, “she said quietly,” and then a line down, “she said even more quietly.” The boyfriend can’t locate her, and her voice is dissipating like she is on her death bed, which becomes literal when the boyfriend finds her “in the bedroom. She was lying in his bed fully clothed,” like a person in a casket, I would add. The narrator, however, gets the same point across in the last sentence: “She lay there in his bed fully clothed, and then she turned on her side, laid her head on the pillow and put her hands under it, and looked at him gravely and sadly.” Note the use of the adverb gravely, never used more appropriately.

Again, that’s it. Except there is more, an element of what I will call magic, meaning less rabbits out of hats and more a sense of the metaphysical or spiritual. The lost elephant adds this to the story and throws off easy interpretations, taking the story a step further. The elephant’s fourth disappearance is a great metaphor because it tells you everything and nothing. The magic is that the lost elephant suggests an alternative force sending both characters a message, which is brilliant, because it’s a message neither the reader nor the characters understands but knows is important.