Daniyal Mueenuddin's NAWABDIN ELECTRIAN

This week’s story, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “NAWABDIN ELECTRICIAN”, continues the New Yorker’s global trend. The magazine has featured stories set in Germany, Communist Russia, bloody England, Ireland, and France, and “Nawabdin Electrician” welcomes a new setting: Pakistan. For me, the author’s indigenous knowledge of the culture strongly suggests Pakistan is his place of origin. Consider moments like after Nawabdin has received his motorcycle. The narrator says it “increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs.” This observation reveals the material distinctions of class in Pakistani culture to such a rich extent that the reader feels the authenticity of the narrator. Another incident of impressive cultural revelation is the scene where Nawabdin asks his boss for a motorcycle. Instead of speaking to his desire, he passively aggressively says “I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But, sir, on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery fell on me –I cannot any longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm.”

These cultural insights permeate throughout the story and speak to one of its major themes. Our global world consists of first-world digital modernity and third-world indigence, and Nawabdin exists as a median of these extremes. He works for a landowner who only cares for issues that “touched on his comfort – a matter of great interest to him.” While on the other hand, he knows his fellow country men “from the poor country across the river. Every year, those tribes came to pick the mangoes at Nurpur Harouni and other nearby farms, working for almost nothing.” And within these extremes, Nawabdin “flourished on a signature ability: a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of its meters.” The diction used here signifies Nawabdin’s metaphorical significance. Words like ‘flourished’, ‘slowing’, ‘revolutions’ tell the reader Nawabdin’s “local genius for crude improvisation,” represents a segment of Pakistani society that seeks to clog the wheels of progress, of modernity. A business man like Nawabdin is able to thrive in Pakistan, using a medicine-man like knowledge of mechanics, and live a workday that “viewed from the air, would have appeared as aimless as that of a butterfly.” What happens to an individual like Nawabdin in the post-industrial, digitalized world? His stature would slip away like his motorcycle almost does.

That we learn all this literal and metaphorical information about Nawabdin through back-story is the story’s most glaring flaw. It takes the narrative six New Yorker long paragraphs to come to its actual start. As far as plot, the most relevant information provided in the back-story is how Nawabdin convinces his boss to buy the motorcycle, and this could’ve been described in two sentences, instead of a drawn out scene. Little of the other information informs the plot, especially the long domestic scene with Nawabdin and his daughters. One could argue the later scene of Nawabdin telling his robber, “my wife and children would have wept all their lives,” is given more weight by the earlier domestic scene, but I think not. The reader doesn’t need to be convinced Nawabdin loves his wife and daughters, and seeing him give them sugar doesn’t achieve this anyway. I say this, because the story doesn’t have a clear thread of connection between the story’s first and second half. Suddenly, a new paragraph starts, and the reader is told, “One evening a few weeks after the family’s festival of sugar, Nawab was sitting with the watchman who kept guard over the grain stores at Nurpur Harouni.”

And this evening becomes the conflict of the story. Nawab is driving his motorcycle, and a man waves him off the road. The man wants a ride, and Nawab, skeptical initially, is convinced when the stranger says he is from Kashmor, and Nawab remembers the farmers from this county who after working for little pay, “give a feast, a thin feast, at the end of the season, a hundred or more going shares to buy a buffalo. Nawab had been several times, and was treated as if he were honoring them.” The memory illuminates the issues of class and distinction in Pakistan more than most of the previous back-story. We see Nawab’s divided loyalties. He knows the men from this county are poor, yet he is poor too, and identifies with them, while also being treated like an honored superior by them. This memory doesn’t come without a cost: the stranger rewards Nawab’s kindness by sticking a gun in his back and trying to steal his motorcycle.

Drama ensues. Nawab refuses to lose his bicycle, receives three bullets in the lower part of his body, and moans “O God, O mother, O God”. The robber, lacking Nawab’s mechanical prowess, is unable to kick off the motorcycle, and runs into the reeds, where he is shot and screams “Mother, help me.” (Notice how both men invoke a plea to their mothers under duress.)From here, the story becomes a treatise on forgiveness. The robber and the victim lie next to one another in the hospital, and the robber pleas, “They just said that I’m dying. Forgive me for what I did. I was brought up with kicks and slaps and never enough to eat. I’ve never had anything of my own, no land, no house, no wife, no money, never, nothing. […]My mother’s blessing on you.” 

The New Yorker reader has followed Nawab the whole story, and never truly felt the transference of identification. I never became Nawab, until this moment. For the first time in many New Yorker stories, I wondered what I would do in this situation. Would I forgive my trespasser? (Ironic of me to invoke a Christian ideal; we are in Pakistan for God’s sake.) Nawab doesn’t. “Never. I won’t forgive you. You had your life, I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong.”

A.L. Kennedy's "WASPS"

The vision of domestic motherhood in A.L. Kennedy’s “WASPS” is redolent of the former New Yorker writer John Cheever, except his hallucinations of patriarchal emancipation never expressed the misery or the loneliness of motherhood elucidated in “Wasps.” The story opens, like the mother’s morning, with the sound of two boys “thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, […] The first fight began as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing.” 

This story’s mother drifts between asleep and awake, and her rambunctious boys, cascading down the stairs, penetrate even her dreams: “a place like a fishmonger’s shop, except all the fish in it were still alive –tethered by hooks through the bodies and heads, fluttering by the white tiled walls and hanging in strings of blood, staring at her while she kicked and wallowed.”

Except this morning is unique. The boys are bickering because “their Da was going away again,” and this is “how they dealt with it – the leaving – by giving each other reasons to cry and reasons to be angry.” The plot of "Wasps" is the chaos the father’s departure has on the boys and the mother, but its sympathies lay more with the mother than the boys. Often her sons – neither distinguishable from the other – have the petulant attitude of band mates. The mother says of them, “they were not speaking. Jimbo was tearful and Shawn brooding, each of them, she knew, on the verge of telling her how badly he’d been treated by the other.” Ray is leaving his boys as well as his wife, but the story knows he can’t totally abandon his sons the same way he can his wife. He's inside them. The mother alludes to this, saying “it occurred to her that [Shawn] would be an appalling teen-ager. Quite possibly Ray had been, too.” Another time she says, “the weight of an older brother’s responsibilities and trials hardened his jaw enough for him to look very much like his father.”

For the mother's sake, let’s hope they don’t become too much like him. Ray demeans his boys and his wife throughout the story. The night before his departure, for example, he tells his youngest son, “Well, Juggy, anyway – there would be no money to buy him if I didn’t go off and work. Your mother doesn’t earn any money. […] Your brother and you are both very expensive. […]Would you want to be a homeless boy with nothing?” The reader recognizes the cruelty of this transference: a boy being held responsible for his father’s departure. Ray does this again later in the story. He has overslept and tells his wife, “slept in. You should have woken me. I’ll be racing all the way now.” These moments of transference give a peak into Ray’s ability to remain blameless, which is important because the story suggests these supposed business trips admittedly involve other women. (This aspect of the story is never clear, likely because the reader - like the wife - never gets a straight story.) His damage, however, isn’t limited to the psychological. Right before leaving, the narrative shows him “play fighting, with easy strength in the thin forearms, wiry cunning. The boys squealed and he shook them more, going slightly too hard at it, the way he usually did, until their faces were still pleased but their eyes were very mildly afraid.”

At this point I had to stop. What the hell is going on? Last week’s story, this week’s story; neither presents a single redeemable quality in the male characters. Often Lit Up and I have agreed that male New Yorker authors have got kicks and giggles at the expense of the story's female characters, but both these authors aren’t giggling as they use these stories to kick these worthless men in the abdomen. This is where both stories fail for me. I know there are men with SOME positive qualities; therefore my sympathy for these female characters erodes. I ask: Why did they marry these assholes? Neither story offers any explanation. When the mother says, “I do believe that you still love me,” about Ray, the reader wants to roll the magazine and swat at her like swiping for wasps. What is she talking about? This guy hasn’t expressed any love for her or his children. He hits one of his boys with the door in the process of leaving and doesn’t break stride. No matter what this mother may think, her husband has nothing to do with Every Man. She has simply married a complete jerk.

Alas, similar to last week’s main character, this one feels paralyzed. So much so that her inaction has permeated the language to the extent that several sentences have no verbs. But, different from last week, this narrative uses the weather to express the turmoil the mother feels inside. The story’s third paragraph describes how “the house had grown disturbed – doors pestering at their frames whenever the weather drew breath, clatters on the roof, something twisting, searching overhead.” Later, “in the garden, wind was clawing at the flowers, breaking things; the trees wild with it beyond the fence.” And, finally the last image of the story provided some reprieve; I rejoiced as the weather punished the absent father/husband in a way I’d wanted the entire story: “it buffeted him, punched his tie against his face, slapped under his coat.”

This ending gave a minuscule of satisfaction to a story determined to illustrate the despair of domestication. (I am not making this stuff up people; these stories are filled with extremely unhappy people. One wonders if the writers aren’t guilty of a little transference.) I enjoyed the story, especially appreciating the intelligence of the writing and the willfulness of the vision. (The story made me want to send an email to female friends: your biological clocks may be ticking, marriage bells ringing, but those bells will turn to a deafening shrill, and children will mean the end of time.) But for the life of the New Yorker's fiction, I have to object to the domestication of the reader. Please, New Yorker, let’s take these stories outside for a change. The summer is almost over. 

Antonya Nelson's SHAUNTRELLE

The most elegantly hypnotic aspect of SHAUNTRELLE is the setting. Never lifting to a bird’s eye view of the Texas town, the narrator’s observations show a Houston in transition: the wealth is spreading, the neighborhoods changing. This place, a limbo between poverty and wealth, is the new home of our recently divorced main character, Constance. 

Her first night at Laventura corporate housing, she looks “directly below, six floors down, [at] people waiting for a bus.” These cursing neighbors are part of the “empty businesses, their doors padlocked, […] while on the street loitered a fleet of people pushing grocery carts. This detritus, man-made, earth-grown, was a kind of moat surrounding the building proper, this modern fortress.” A castle surrounded by a wasteland is the narrator’s metaphor for gentrification, and the characters are aware of their tenuous residence. Constance’s new roommate, the renovating Fanny Mann, notes “the neighborhood’s gentrifying, but somebody forgot to tell the winos.”

The displacement of New Orleans – the invitation to gentrification – isn’t forgotten by the story, either. One night, Constance dreams of a town “with unsteady buildings teetering up its sides, a body of water lapping at its base.” And out of the detritus of New Orleans comes Fanny Mann. But, instead of suffering the alienation of dislocation, “she was taking advantage of the exodus to have her nose sculpted, her face vacuumed, her tummy tucked, her breasts bolstered, her neck tightened, her teeth veneered, and the spare skin around her eyes snipped away.” The story uses Fanny’s plastic surgery binge to literalize its metaphorical theme: transformation. Constance and Fanny Mann are both abandoned women – Constance from her daughter, husband, and lover; Fanny from her dying best friend – and the story illuminates the potential loneliness of their lives. They weather this coming storm, however, with different colored umbrellas. I want to say Fanny Mann is in the tradition of the elegant, bitter grandmothers of Faulkner’s Mississippi, but really she reminds me of the sad and swanky housewives of Dallas – a show Nancy Franklin’s television review mentions. We are told Fanny Mann “worked hard to make people laugh. Or at least smile, if only at her effort. It was Fanny Mann’s most appealing characteristic; she was a flirt, down to the makeup and heels.”

This is the opposite of Constance, a character as dry as Houston, she depresses the story. What is it about this woman that drove me to the brink? I didn’t understand how she could have partaken in an affair for five years and been unaware of her lover’s lack of interest in a relationship. People’s personality shifts can hit us like blindside blitzes, but her paralyzed desperateness made her voice stifling. My frustration reached its peak when Constance opened her computer, hoping “it would sparkle like a treasure chest, perched here on the windowsill of the living room. The screen would be radiant, flooding the dark apartment, and a hundred messages would await her. She longed for every single space to be filled with Kendal Kirkendoll.”

Truthfully, one wonders if Fanny Mann isn’t actually worse off. Despite her sanguine personality, Constance comes to see Fanny as a “person built of incongruous parts, her calves too fine for her feet, her neck too brief, her chest too broad.” The story may joke about this character’s quixotic belief in plastic surgery, but it reminds the reader this dream is Fanny’s fortress against the sadness gathering, spiraling, and waiting to destroy her castle. At the story’s end, Fanny tells Constance, “You visit and I’ll introduce you to my future sugar daddy’s unmarried son. I have the whole fantasy worked out!” This exchange stings the reader with its emptiness, because Fanny likely shared similar ones with her recently deceased best friend. These single older women, white and privileged, seem to be in an emotional limbo as well as a physical one. Beneath them is a crushing loneliness that haunts the characters and the story.

Like many New Yorker stories, this one uses a metaphor to imply the story’s theme. Constance is reading the book her daughter loaned her, and the narrator describes its plot as “two gay girls, runaways, [who] were making their living as prostitutes. One, Jo, was a heroin addict. The other, Deezy, merely drank. […] When they reconvened, after desperate nights, they wanted only to abuse their respective substances.” This novel's plot speaks directly to the situation of Constance and Fanny. They have come here together, both addicted to a drug called fantasy. Fanny dreams of a fairy tale husband as a reward for her desperate attempt to recreate her body, and Constance is waiting for a prince charming she knows isn’t coming.

Up till now, I have ignored the most mysterious device in the story: the several cases of mistaken identity. Two times Fanny Mann leaves Constance home alone, and a visitor comes to the apartment looking for its former residents. The first is a woman knocking on her door, asking for the Shauntrelle of the story’s title, next is a man calling, pretending to be downstairs, and yelling to see Gerald. The story is cluttered with these former patrons of the apartment: Ray, Shauntrelle, Gabrielle, Felicia; and these ghosts become the shared identities of Fanny and Constance. So much so, that at one point Constance calls Fanny, Felicia, and later Fanny does the same, mistaking Constance for Shauntrelle.

Yet, towards the end I wondered about Constance’s husband. Couldn’t she return to him? The reader is told he has too much pride, but doesn’t loneliness await men same as it does women. Constance remembers a time when Kendall, her lover, complimented her college aged daughter, and realizes, Kendall “was of an age, his mid-thirties, that had sexual rights on either side of it – to both mother’s and daughter’s generation.” This is important, because this story focuses on these two women gone with the wind, rain, and levees, but doesn't allow the reader or the characters any vision of a Clark Gable to save the two Scarletts up in the burning mansion.

"IF I VANISHED" by Stuart Dybek

This story, If I VANISHED, put in my mind the image of a pie graph. In red, twenty percent of the story is about the movie, Open Range; blue shades the thirty percent that focuses on Jack’s emotional response to abandonment by his former girlfriend, another twenty-five, cloaked in digital green, is an expression of cyber-space neurosis, and the last quarter of this dubious story is the white repetition of a conversation. Pretty confusing image, I agree, and a second read makes it less clear what holds all this data together.

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.

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.

Helen Simpson's "HOMEWORK"

When the first line of a story is a young boy groaning, “I can’t do it,” and the last line is that same son’s proclamation: “You go. I can do it now,” the reader expects the story to have shown a positive change in the son; however I think George ends “HOMEWORK” telling his mother to leave, not from renewed confidence but realized fear. His mother has shown she is on the verge of madness. Herein lies the most inventive device in “Homework”: the plot, better described in this instance as the trick. The story takes the campy, movie-like scene of a mother helping her son with his homework, and subverts the reader’s expectations. Instead of helping her son write a typical answer to the English teacher’s “Write about the Most Life Changing Event” assignment, she convinces her son to write a miserable, fictional story of his life that says more about her own confusion and sadness than it does about his life.

Consider when our narrator is helping George write a fictional emotional response to his parents’ fake divorce (the mother’s exercise becomes more morbid, the more one considers it) and starts to suggest her own childhood dreams as a template: “You could put a bad dream in, George; that would take up a few lines. / ‘What about?’/ Oh an earthquake perhaps. I was always dreaming about earthquakes and floods and fires when I was your age.” The reader begins to see that the mother’s suggestions are connected to her experiences, and this becomes further illuminated when plot decisions for the assignment are taken from her past. The mother tells George, “You might even ask if you can go and live with your grandma for a while,” and later informs the reader, “When I went to live with my grandmother for a while, she had enough to eat but not quite enough to keep warm.” By this point, the reader has no doubt that this fictional assignment has become an expression of the mother’s unhappy childhood and domestic frustration.

That said, “Homework” has major weaknesses, and left this reader disappointed. The most glaring failure is George. A case in point is when he complains that the boy of the assignment shouldn’t have to cook, because “kids should be looked after by their parents,” and the mother responds, “You’re thirteen, George!” This moment is striking, because it speaks to the story’s flaw. George isn’t thirteen; he’s eight, maybe nine. There could be a cultural difference at play, but America’s thirteen year olds are seventh graders and eight graders, and already asserting an identity. Boys this age don’t ask for homework help (even the assignment seems implausible), and have started to feel a bulging distraction in their pants. I wouldn’t be surprised if this George still believes girls have cooties. (I must be crazy; even the boy of the story’s title page photograph doesn’t look thirteen.) Okay, maybe this George just happens to be sheltered and naïve. This could be true, but this wouldn’t explain his responses to his mother’s traumatic suggestions: “why,” “What happens next,” “cool,” all make him feel unreal. His mother is weaving an alternative life for him – one quite tragic and depressing, and his most adamant concern is will his teacher accept the assignment.

Furthermore, almost as a lesson on how not to write, the reader is told George “said grimly,” “said dryly,” “looked up from his pad suspiciously,” “smiled reluctantly,” and “asked hopefully.” These are just the adverbs assigned to George in the last page of the story, and it is clear, somewhere in all these adverbs, the writer wants to show the tension George feels about his mother’s homework help, but my first read, one I attempt pen-less, became so distracted by these adverbs, I had to grab a pen and circle them. The complexity of a character can’t be fully dependent on a part of speech, especially not adverbs, yet this seems to be the story’s mode of operation. This wasn’t the only grammatical tick, either. Too many times, the story ends a moment of dialogue with a gerund clause. Examples: “George said, propped up on his elbows, eyeing me with wary optimism,” “I know, he said, spreading his hands palms upward in front of him,” “No, George said, shaking his head firmly,” “Life-changing event, I said, returning to the business in hand.” These four gerund clauses all are from the story's first page, which has three more I didn’t report. I find grammar in stories works best one of two ways: either so subtle and clear, the reader passes through it without pause, or so complex and elastic, the reader wonders how the writer composed the wonderful, mystery of the sentences. 

The language of “Homework” may lack mystery, but there is an elusive thread in the story. The narrator tells the reader, “Last week I’d been making flapjacks while [George] stood by to lick the spoon, and I mentioned that I’d always liked the picture of the lion on the Golden Syrup tin. ‘Out of the strong came forth the sweetness,’ he read aloud, peering at the green-and-gold picture.” This phrase does strike the reader as interesting, and it returns during the story’s second to last paragraph, which breaks the fiction’s otherwise consistent tone. “When a man loses his temper, people say, That’s the Irish in him, or the Scottish, or the Viking. […]Dirty players or terriers are what they call footballers with that anger-stoked edge, but strength without sweetness is no use at all.” These two references to sweetness and strength are the subtlest thread in the story, and perhaps the most interesting, but I am still unsure how they interact with the mother/son relationship of the narrative. Is the reader supposed to see the mother as the strength or the sweetness? To me, she seems like someone whose life has stepped “onto the tines of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle [has reared up and hit her] in the face.”

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.