Diane Greco’s story “Alberto, A Case History,” a Summer Seminar contest winner, is in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Fence. I met Diane at a conference way back when and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. She’s a tremendous person all the way around. So grab a copy of Fence and enjoy.

I often leave a story with questions I don’t want to ask. For example, I’ve been reading Emily Raboteau’s “Eye of Horus” and have certain complex reactions that go to Emma’s reactions to events and to her voice. In the story, Emma experiences disruptions to her family and personal life that leave her empty and without direction, and she ends her tale waking up to her mother. The direction of the narrative isn’t the problem for me. I simply don’t believe Emma’s telling. It’s difficult to explain this personal reaction. Here’s an example

During the third week of my recovery, the phone rang and my mother answered it. I could hear her from the porch where I sat eating a nectarine, watching the neighbor’s cocker spaniel dig a hole underneath our rhododendron bush. I admired the dog’s single-mindedness.

I have known a hardy rhododendron in my day (should I say this?). This focal knot of an image is nice and clear but I don’t follow why Emily would observe the dog’s action as single-minded. The dog appears busy digging a hole, sure, but Emma is trying to deliver beyond the act. The dog is digging single-mindedly. Or perhaps the dog is digging. There’s a difference. I’m left wondering if she in fact does admire this or whether this is just something to add because the image isn’t enough.

Other areas of the story perplex me. Emma finds herself in a relationship with Poresh, a dashing scholar and ex-student of Emma’s father. He’s not good for her. He says things like, “You’re sulking” and “Don’t be rude.” She describes him this way: “Because of his melodic multi-continental accent and his eyes, which were the color of maple syrup drenched in sunlight and dressed with lashes thick as pine needles, we all had a crush on him . . . ” No, I don’t buy this language: it’s too eager to please. The eyes become sloppy, the pine needles amazingly strange. Yikes.

When the relationship ends, Emma’s sickness is unconvincing. The primary reason develops from the relationship I’ve developed with Emma. Emma seems to want us to know that she’s headed towards a realization that her mother is more than what she allows; the narrative commits to this. But this inevitability feels like this question sounds: “What’s that bob doing in the water?” Answer, “I’m fishing.” Raboteau isn’t quite fishing, but Emma reads too much like a lure. I think this adds up to a story whose character is still deeper than the story permits the reader to go at this point.

P.S.
Many of the stories in the current StoryQuarterly read this way. They read as too much and unfinished.

So what if a story is written from the perspective of the story machine.

Henry entered the dark room. He heard a low tone that reminded him of the heartbeat of an underground beast. So he knew he should be scared.

Henry smiled, stomping enslippered out onto his porch. The music rose like yellowmeadow butterflies. So he knew he should be happy.

Henry’s head fell to the tabletop. The music seeped in from the left, easing down darker scales, which suggested to him that something about sadness had or was soon to happen.

Henry just couldn’t stop chuckling to himself. As he moved room to room he couldn’t get it out of his head that a laughing crowd saw everything he was doing and this just gave him all the joy in the world.

The NYT top sellers list still has James Frey’s (novel/memoir/scifi/western?) as tops, which means that it’s still flying off the shelves, right? The thing is still viable in the market place. Reminds me of Sandoval’s remark about the nature of uncertainty and books.

Timothy Melley in his story “The Prince of Natick,” writes a nice mix of people in a story that ends with busted pipes. It’s a frustrating story, not because the telling comes off like unbuttered toast, but because Mick Kosloski, the boss forman of the Water Division of DPW, orders the good work of Karl Osberg (“the scariest human” the first-person teller has “ever sat next to”) destroyed and blames beavers for problems everyone else could actually figure out.

The story jabs the reader with lots of asserted characters against a background most people never see–the sheds, the reservoirs, the rust at the other end of the water faucet. Here’s Mick:

Mick had white hair and a leathery face with deep weather-beaten crags. He shuffled and talked in a weird, gurgling lisp. He looked like someone who had gotten loose from my grandmother’s nursing home.

Mik’s big problem in life was thinking up ways to keep his crew busy. He looked at me and Stan like we were a pair of migrain headaches.

I like that last active expression of Mick, but think Mick’s walk and “gurgling lisp” is a little fuzzy, like a photograph taken by shaky hands.

“Natick” is told against a contemporary world where private contractors do all the work and the employees of the DPW are left to fiddle away time, money, and potential under the eye of an incompetent boss, Mick. It’s in this world that the protagonist, who’s working a public works job to save money for school, will get a new glimpse of “the truth.”

The street shimmered with heat. I hesitated. “How did Mick get to be in charge? I mean, he seems to make a lot of mistakes.”

Karl snorted and laughed a little to himself. “Haven’t you heard? Shit floats. Take a look around you.”

This was a depressing new way to think about life. I had always assumed people got ahead by working hard and possessing talent.

The reader may perhaps smile at the naiveté of the protagonist (since all of this is a retelling of a constant in human affairs with plenty of counterpoint, of course) but the story ends with that image of destruction in a new light for the protagonist, a sense, I would say, not just of deformity but of confusion. The protagonist, along with Karl, witnesses and takes part in the very thing we know he despises: stupidity.

How are we supposed to work and live? We’re supposed to work hard and obey the law? We’re supposed to do better than our parents? Get there on time, meet deadlines, speak our minds, be smarter about things. This is supposed to work. It’s what we tell the kids. We tell the kids that George (insert last name here) never lied and that the bible is full of wonderful stories, skipping over the massacres and the Book of Job. Short, funny words now, longer convoluted ones later because when older we really don’t want people to “get it.” It’s the kid who gets the Onceler’s last Truffle Tree seed, not a man or a women, remember. This is a kind of coming-of-age narrative, when the things of childhood are set aside to make space for “the truth.” Mick breaks Karl’s work because he doesn’t want to finish the job.

While I waited for Sully to snap another pipe, I looked for Karl. He stood next to his truck, staring into the distance. He seemed deep in thought, but I realized he was watching Stan walk away from the job. All the fury had drained from his face. He looked like a big, lonely kid who was used to being left out of things. I wondered what he was thinking, whether he envied Stan or just hated him, whether he wanted to walk away himself. A moment later, he looked over at us as though he had just noticed us all there. He reached into the truck bed and removed a flat shovel. Then he began scooping the broken pipes into the dump truck as if it were something he had done every day of his life.

There’s a lot to say about all of this, but here’s one little point to make about the story as a whole: Karl’s gestures are a surface. I see him move everyday. But the gesture doesn’t reveal or link back through the ages. The story reveals the space behind the gesture, a sort of uncertainty of movement, a piece of a crazy quilt that can’t be unroled or rerolled or requilted but you can add more thread to it.

That said, I found the story too formulaic. Could be coming-of-age, but it becomes good guy/bad guy. The bad guys win because we let them win. Maybe Karl did walk away; maybe Mick says, “Okay, let’s finish.” Maybe Stan punches his mayor dad and trips him into the trench. Maybe, maybe not.

Odd, Mr. Sandoval has urged a new post because he has lots more to say. The post and comments in question can be found via this link. He responds:

“Josh,

Prove to me that a book “lives” and I’ll give you a million-dollar gumdrop. The “state of the author” is exactly the point: The great author on his deathbed whispers to his executor: “Tell them everything I wrote was pure fabrication.” The executor keeps this revelation to himself, keeping the world in ignorance. Humans live, plants live. Even Steve Ersinghaus, who has provided me the space here lives. He just doesn’t know why.

Susan,

Very poetic. But ultimately misguided. If a human is a book, then you would agree that a book is a human. Jokes aside, if a human is a book, then you ascribe real knowing of your fellows to pure inexactitude. Therefore, we can never know who are friends are.

Disrespect of books. Burn them all and who would care: if given the chance, how many of yours would you die for. The whole notion of the reader “changing” the content of a book is a complex modern myth. What was changed needs something original to compare to, right?

George,

You’re assuming that there was meaning to lose in the first place (there may be, I don’t know). I disagree that the reader is “free” to engage content as you suggest, which also assumes chains a priori, and that the content can be used other than in a discardable English paper. Or do I detect you walking with Rousseau, for whom letting go was a disentangling, but I suspect he disentangled himself into simply another net. Give me covariance any day. And why does the hypertext hedge; books don’t? I submit that we all author to some degree or another. Susan would agree with that, I think. We all want control. But the more we rely on books for that control, the more we waste shelf space.

I think you all have been brainwashed by the culture of the book. What did those Neanderthals do prior to their invention?”