Five Short Stories You Must Read - Angela Wilson

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried by Amy Hempel. In The Collected Stories, 2006.

This story was suggested reading for a short fiction workshop I once took. The fragmented style of the narrative expanded my ideas about what a short story was, viz. it is a more flexible, ambiguous form, which doesn’t have to do all of the things a novel does, like adhering to a three-act structure.

In the story, the narrator who is visiting a friend in an L.A. hospital, reflects on her guilt at having stayed away for months. Her fears about the situation, prevent her from discussing her friend’s imminent death, openly. Instead, she is fixated on images like earthquakes and airplane turbulence, and a report about a man who apparently dies from seeing his arm mutilated. Privately, she wants to run from the situation, speed down the coast highway and rage all night in Malibu. The story feels like a set of disjointed thoughts – snapshots, shifting between unrelated scenes, while hinting at a plot. The dialogue between the friends is in the tone of their college days; light and ironic.

I came across a quote by Hempel in the Missouri Review, recently, where she responds to criticism about her writing style:

‘Interviewer: ‘One critic says that “your structure is like the mongrel dog in ‘The Center’, part something and part something, and the best are those whose parts almost fly apart but don’t.” You start with your beach ball, and things collect on that’ (1993, p.88).

Hempel: ‘There is a way in which a writer does not have to spell things out, and the reader will get it. There's a way in which the mind works to impose meaning and order automatically on seemingly random bits of information, so you can almost offer these bits up without knowing yourself how they fit together— suspecting that they do—and trust the reader to make some sense out of it’ (ibid).

Reverting to a Wild State by Justin Torres. In The New Yorker, Aug 1, 2011.

I hadn’t heard of Torres, until I came across ‘Reverting to a Wild State’ in The New Yorker. I took out a digital sub over Christmas – the fiction archives date back to the old days and I got a free tote bag. Torres’ essays and stories can be found in Granta, Tin House, Gulf, and other publications. His is also author of the novel, ‘We the Animals’.

‘Reverting to a Wild State’ jumps around a bit, and while some things in the story had me feeling slightly off-balance, the experience was riveting. The first-person narrator does a good job at holding out on the reader, telling the story at an angle to the situation at the heart of it. Which is about a relationship break-up. The relationship itself spans a decade, written in reversed segments: 3,2,1,0.

3 opens in a New York train station after midnight, where the narrator is playing daredevil at the edge of the platform. He’s heading uptown to clean for a man who lives in a penthouse suite. (It’s likely the job entails things that aren’t to do with cleaning.) In 2, the narrator is dining out with Nigel, his partner. The disparity between the two lovers in the way they look and act, is sad and hilarious and savage, and still sticks with me. In 1, Nigel fusses over the old cat, plays cracked records and fills up the apartment with things. The narrator likes to sleep around, and steals opportunistically. Nigel is a jealous lover. The story ends at 0, where the two are just nineteen and working on a farm in Virginia. New love amid a warm summer landscape, enables the reader to relax, peripherally aware of a storm building on a mountain slope.

Do the reversed segments work? I think so. All of the harm inflicted, and the mess the narrator has made of the relationship, feels strangely restored by the end. And although we are really at the start of the relationship, a small feral thing pops up, grounding us in the passing of time.

The Sentence is a Lonely Place by Gary Lutz. In Partial List of People to Bleach, 2013. 

The first time I read this creative essay, my brain hurt. The break-down of sentences and words into units of sound, seemed pernickety. I did enjoy the stuff about Lutz’s childhood, where, ‘Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from otherwhere through the speakers of the television set or the radio . . .’ (p.2). Later, I went back to the essay when my own writing seemed toneless and flat. I’ve returned several times since.

The sentence is a lonely place because words don’t feel like they belong together, Lutz says. ‘Writing is rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off’ (pp.101-102).  Words need to ‘rub off’ on each other – disperse consonant and vowel sounds into their successors. He examines the prose of some notable authors, which he believes to be rich. For example, the four word phrase, ‘acutely felt, clearly flat’, in Christine Schutt’s story, ‘The Blood Jet’. Here, clearly flat ‘. . . contains the alphabetic DNA of the first phrase.’ Almost. The adjectives felt and flat ‘. . . begin with a tentative-sounding, deflating f and end with the abrupt t.’ As well, ‘. . . the richness of receptivity summed up in felt has been leveled into the thudding spiritlessness of flat’ (p.99). And so on.

How does Lutz’s prose look on the page? Below is an excerpt from his short fiction collection, Stories in the Worst Way, 2009.

‘She had a strapping, hoydenish body. She maintained a sunlamped handsomeness. But she was hygienically delinquent. I wondered what my predecessors had made of the ashtrayish, perspiry nimbus she almost always hazed around herself’ (‘Recessional’, p.104).

While Lutz’s sentences are uniquely inventive, they can also seem confounding. To what extent then, should we choose one word over another because of its sound – what if the writing doesn’t make sense? In Lutz’ scheme of things, sentences unfold tonally, rather than perhaps, logically, conveying meanings in ways which might not seem syntactically ‘correct’. In any case, the sentences are catchy to the eye and ear, and are more accessible, I think, as we grow into them.

Midnight in Dostoevsky by Don DeLillo, in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, 2011. Also published in The New Yorker, Nov 30, 2009.

I knew little about Don DeLillo until his name cropped up in a book I read by Brooks Landon: Building Great Sentences. (There was consensus among my writing pals that my sentences could be wordier.) Landon teaches a class in the English Department at Iowa, which focusses on building complex sentences. His book tells you how to grow a kernel sentence into something more complete. Diagramming and numbering of various sentence levels, viz. base clauses, modifying clauses, subordinates, coordinates, etc., is involved. I’ve little doubt I’d flunk Landon’s class at Iowa. He said DeLillo’s fiction was full of these sentences, so I had a look. I don’t know if DeLillo thinks his sentences are ‘cumulative’. At any rate, they’re masterful. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’. 

‘We were two somber boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle-stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen’ (p.119).

 The text is flowing with sentences like these, and the plot is intriguing. Two freshmen, Robbie and Todd (Robbie is narrating), are curious about an old man in a hooded duffle coat they encounter on the streets near their campus, which is located somewhere in north-east America. They walk the town between lecturers, filling in backstory about him and arguing over the details, intensely. The dialogue is superb in the way the two students get at each other. Todd is interested in facts, while Robbie’s imagination is unending. They weave Ilgauskas into their story, a philosophy professor who teaches Logic, and doesn’t make much sense; believing him to be related to the man in the hooded coat. Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky, they discover. When it becomes clear to Tom how they can find out the truth about the old man in the coat, Robby is dead against it, and at this point, the impasse between reality and fantasy, comes to a head.

Winterreise by Christine Schutt. In A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer, 2005.

This tale is set in New York City, amid the yellowing ginkoes in the park. The narrator witnesses the deterioration of Margaret, her life-long friend and walking buddy, who has cancer. It is a Thoreauvian tale, about the swift passing of time. Though the prose lingers, laying bare the anguish between the two friends. On their walks, the narrator discusses her readings of Thoreau, who sought nearness to nature. The vivid imagery in the language, and the infusion of rhythm and rhyme, heightens the impression of character, place and time in this tale.

‘Used to be even in the rain we walked hooded in water-repellent bicolor suits that swished and sounded as if we were fat when we were thin, both of us, Margaret and I, and only walking for the routine and the way it felt, hands free, holding nothing. Children, leashes—my first husband—we left even the dogs sleeping to meet each other at the entrance to the park marked by the great elm, that folktale tree with its house-wide trunk sprung green. We meet there still although not as often—and no more in the rain’ (p.137).

Angela Wilson lives in Wellington, Aotearoa, NZ, where she writes and learns te reo Māori through Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. She likes clean air, big dogs and stand-up comedy. Most of it.