The Violent Beauty of America: Scott’s “Other Likely Stories”
October 11, 2010
My friend Debra Leigh Scott, a fiction writer, playwright, scriptwriter, dramaturg, writing teacher—an annoyingly multitalented person—has just published her first book-length collection of fiction, Other Likely Stories (Sowilo Press, available on Amazon and elsewhere). What follows is a brief and totally biased commentary.
Other Likely Stories brings together nine linked tales that follow two young sisters, Rachael and Valory Meade, and their cousin Marlena in the American South during the 1960s and early 1970s—the Vietnam War era. Debra typically packs more drama in a few paragraphs than I could manage in an entire novel, and these stories are no exception. In less than 200 pages we get child abuse, rape, arson, murder, war deaths, cancer, the Mafia, prostitution, a car crash, a mother’s desertion, insanity, and alcoholism. The characters are burdened by such cataclysmic pasts that it seems impossible for mere humans to bear the emotional load. Yet there’s an odd tenderness here, and a resilience in the three girls that keeps you reading, makes you think they’ll manage to overcome their personal traumas and the outrageous social tragedies of the era. It’s definitely a time for women’s toughness to emerge. Here’s an exchange between Valory and a college friend, Bina. Bina is describing her parents:
“Picture a grown man,” Bina said, handing me a joint, “sobbing through a Gene Autry record. His wife’s quoting Isaiah and ironing ferociously in the corner.”
“Where are you in that picture?” I asked, holding a hit and passing the joint back.
“Exactly,” she inhaled.
Though life deals out broad, hard swipes to the head and heart, there’s nothing broad about the characters’ reactions. In one story, when the sisters are living with their bitter mother at an army base, their long-estranged grandmother appears at the door, and it becomes apparent that she’s come to their house to die. The girls’ drunken grandfather, Billy, then shows up to reclaim his wife, and 12-year-old Rachael forms a bond with him, only to find that he’s not going to stick around. Look at the subtle interplay of compassion and cruelty here, in a scene on the morning of the grandmother’s funeral:
Shyly, I slid closer to him, gratified at how quickly he closed his roughened fingers around my chilled shoulder.
He looked down at me. “I’ll be goin’ away now, you know. I’m sure nobody in there’s gonna mind it,” he indicated with his head toward the house.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that Billy wasn’t going to stay, that he wouldn’t stay for me. I hadn’t yet realized that these were my last moments of safety.
“I’ll go, too,” I said.
He removed his hand from my shoulder and nodded his head slowly. “That you will, someday,” he said, “and it will be a distance.”
He spoke the words easily, as if the torn fabric of my life could be tacked together by a simple pronouncement, as if the certainty of my mother’s uncontrollable fury was no concern of his.
I wrapped my arms tightly around my chest, where it felt, all of a sudden, as if something big had cracked.
“This is why my mother hates you,” I said, realizing the edges of something too vast to see all at once.
Billy’s face stayed empty. The blue of his eyes was too diluted, too watery; I saw no reflection of myself in them.
“They’re throwing the only one who ever cared about me in a fresh-dug hole today,” he said. “The rest of you can all go to hell, the whole stinkin’ lot of you.”
That’s powerful writing, and after scenes like that throughout the book, the reader emerges with a strange but genuine-seeming view of American life, one full of violent and complicated beauty.
“Nothing will ever feel the same again,” Rachael says in a later story, as the girls escape the scene of yet another disaster.
“It will,” Valory answers. “Once this is the sameness we mean.”
Vacation Technoreads
September 2, 2010
All current fiction must be historical, I decided some time ago. It’s a price we pay for technology.
What I mean is this: The details of our lives, the sights and sounds that give fiction its life, change so fast that anything written today will seem dated in a year or two. If that doesn’t sound obvious, take an example. A couple of years ago, a writer might have described a driver stopping to ask directions. Now readers will wonder why the GPS isn’t working, or worse, they’ll assume the driver is technologically inept.
Reasoning this way, I figure a novelist might as well date the tale immediately. If you’re writing today, place the story clearly in 2010, acknowledging that readers in 2013 will find it quaint.
So, picking up a quick vacation read, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson—one of the few times I’ve managed to get to a bestseller within five years of its pub date—I was nonplussed to come across passages like the one below, when the heroine, punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, decides on a new computer:
Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.
Originally published in 2005, translation copyright 2008, and already so outdated that geeks might laugh. This confirms my argument, I suppose, though the excessive detail still makes the author’s point about Salander’s obsession, and perhaps will continue to do so 20 years from now. Maybe that’s another possible tack, then—wade so deep into the nitty-gritty of the characters’ environment that the reader can’t help but accept it as a world of its own, whether dated or not.
My “literary” opinion of Larsson’s mega-phenomenon? Its dense, driving plot, spiced with multifarious secrets, conspiracies, violence and sex, helped pass time on the airplane. Yet I didn’t care how the mystery turned out, and the characters developed so little that I feel no compulsion to read the other volumes in the trilogy. Until I’m stuck on another plane. (I do admit to a vague curiosity about what the dragon means.)
By the way, Larsson’s underlying assumption—that a girl with tattoos and facial pierces looks out of place in the workaday world—itself seems, by today’s standards, almost quaint. Maybe the Swedes are stuck on an old-fashioned twentieth-century airbus; if so, at least they aren’t being charged for luggage.
Pondering Philip Hensher
August 9, 2010
Sheffield by Lewis Skinner (detail), Wikimedia Commons
Been reading The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, recommended a couple of years ago by a friend who follows the Man Booker nominees. Feeling so strangely about it that I checked Goodreads to see what others are saying online. Not only are opinions mixed. but a number of readers, like me, seem to be struggling with their own reactions.
The long saga of two very ordinary, and on the surface boring, English families, The Northern Clemency opens in the 1970s and advances with great ponderousness into later decades. The writing is vivid, though too decorative for my taste, and the characters turn out to be mildly interesting—at long last, after the reader has become even more fed up than they are with their tedious lives. Obviously, since I’ve kept reading for nearly 600 pages now (of more than 700), it’s not the tedium that makes me ambivalent. Nor is it that the characters are mostly unlikeable as human beings.
One of my problems, I think, is the sheer moment-to-moment unpleasantness of the daily life and the environment, as Hensher describes them and as the characters experience them. Here’s a passage from early in the book when the Sellers family, transplanted from London, first encounters Sheffield:
“‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie [the father] said, ‘these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?’ Francis [the son] looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.”
The false teeth and the egg-box, jumbled in with a strange allusion to Eros (as a hero? on a public building??), give the scene a faintly revolting tinge. Now, I’d be the last to defend postwar architecture wherever it happened to be plopped. Granted, too, these are Londoners who don’t yet (and may never) appreciate the North. Yet it feels like the author’s own disgust must be creeping in. The first several hundred pages of the novel have so many passages of this variety that the narrative seems to be overhung with a fetid gas.
Thankfully, in later chapters, as certain of the annoying, pedestrian characters fumble into an everyday brand of heroism (with little help from Eros), the author’s lip seems less firmly curled. Here he describes a hidden wooded area from the point of view of Daniel Glover, a young man who seemed irredeemable at the start of the novel:
“He loved the summer here; loved the hover of the dragonflies over the soupy surface of the river’s pools in summer; loved those clouds of gnats like a hot fog about your head, clustering under the stickiest trees; loved the underwater hover, like a mirroring of the dragonfly hover above, of the sticklebacks, and the occasional glimpse of a bigger fish, or the thought of a bigger fish as the surface of the water gulped like a hiccup, and it must have been a carp, perhaps, taking an insect.”
There’s little conventional beauty here, and still much to repel, but we understand why Daniel loves the area, and we see that it has attributes that might be loved. Much like the ungainly, sticky, soupy characters themselves, perhaps.
Did Hensher consciously manipulate his prose to lead us on a long journey from ickiness through resignation into appreciation? Or did his style simply mellow as his characters and their actions grew less loathsome?
Enough speculation; got to finish the book.
(Later update: Reached the end. Still ambivalent. A bit of sensationalism late in the book felt arbitrary, unnecessary to the plot, making me realize that after hundreds of pages I had little sense of what the characters would do next. This uncertainty is probably true to life, but annoying in a novel. Shouldn’t a literary work have more logic than the messy world out there?)
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