A New Feature: The Dialogue-Review

Posted 26 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews, Guest Blogger |

Long Story Short, by Elyse Friedman. House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cloth, 216 pp., ISBN: 978-0-88784-219-1.

If you’re an inveterate reader of this site’s comments, you may recall me responding to Finn Harvor’s thoughts about the potential for blogs to resemble online magazines by suggesting that I’d like to get a few more voices than just my own into the mix around here. Accordingly, I’ve decided to inaugurate a new feature: the dialogue-review. These posts will focus on a specific title, but rather than me pontificating as from on high, I’ll be engaging in a dialogue with selected guest bloggers. We’ll see how this works. If the response is positive, this is a feature I’d like to continue.

In its first iteration, TSR is pleased to feature Derek Weiler, editor of Quill & Quire magazine and author of the blog Stuff in the Attic, discussing Elyse Friedman’s collection of stories and a novella, Long Story Short.

Warning: There are some spoliers contained in the discussion below.

Derek Weiler: Hey Steven,

Thanks for having me a as a guest. I’ll start with “The Soother,” since that’s the story in the book that I’ve read the most, beginning when it first appeared in Toronto Life a couple years ago. I fell in love with this one when I read the scene where Lucas – a Toronto businessman who’s in the middle of one of those breakneck heart-attack days full of errands to run and people to please – has come to his pregnant daughter’s apartment with the groceries she requested.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Well … no, it’s nothing.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Look, I appreciate you bringing this stuff, I mean, I didn’t even ask for half of this, but the thing I did ask you to get is wrong.” Megan looked as if she was going to cry. “I specifically said not to get the plain mango. I don’t like the plain mango.”

“You said mango-vanilla.”

“Yeah, together – mango and vanilla swirled together.”

“I know. I looked for it, but they didn’t have it, honey. So I got mango and I got vanilla and I figured you could mix them yourself.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s exactly the same thing. Except this way you get twice as much.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter.”

What a pitch-perfect capture of human behaviour! Your impulse is to sneer at the daughter, but after all, who doesn’t occasionally feel like a thwarted child over some tiny thing, trying not to and thereby resorting to mental contortions that come out as insufferable passive-aggressive whining?

“The Soother” sets up a hurdle with its gimmicky opening: we see the middle-aged Lucas dressed as a baby, drooling in the arms of a paid, um, fetish-enabler, I guess. But the story works for me because as Friedman proceeds to lay out this guy’s life, we see why he needs to be secretly pampered. Over the course of a day, he’s harassed, put upon, and taken for granted by everyone who’s close to him, from his surly son to his hypochondriac, cheating wife. Sure, everything is just a tiny bit … louder than real life, but not so exaggerated that it doesn’t ring true. It’s also hilarious.

That said, I’m still not convinced the baby conceit is really necessary – it feels like a kind of gaudy gift-wrap, and I think the story would be as strong or stronger without it. But “The Soother” gave me so much pleasure that I was willing to waive my reservations.

Which leads into my overall experience of Long Story Short, which I found wildly uneven. Sometimes mildly so: as with “The Soother,” I found myself overlooking minor flaws in stories that I generally loved, like the novella “A Bright Tragic Thing.” Sometimes more egregiously: there are a couple of stories here, “Truth” and “Wonderful,” that for my money should never have been included at all.

In “Truth,” a couple on a blind date communicate by saying exactly what they’re thinking, rather than the usual bland dissembling. Well, “exactly what they’re thinking” isn’t quite right – what these two actually voice are the subconscious impulses and motives that most of us don’t even articulate to ourselves. And here it’s all played for straight laughs. “Listen,” says the man, “my self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny. Why don’t we go to my place.” The woman replies, “Why not. I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”

“Truth” has some bite in its highlighting of modern anxieties and foibles, and I think it could be a very funny short film or comedy sketch. But for me, that was the problem – there’s no reason for it not to be a film or comedy sketch rather than a short story. It would lose nothing in the translation, and in fact it would work better in those media; the humour’s mostly mild and flat on the page here, because it doesn’t feel like it was meant to be read.

And “Wonderful,” I’d argue, has no value at all. It’s another comedy-sketch premise: a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life that imagines the angel Clarence setting out to show George Bailey that in fact his life has been meaningless and there’s no reason not to kill himself. It’s a too-obvious switcheroo that plays out too obviously for too long – 20 pages! And it’s not rendered with much imagination or verve – unlike “Truth,” I can’t see this one working in any format.

I don’t mean to come on all negative; I’ve barely even discussed “A Bright Tragic Thing,” which, as mentioned, I loved. And I thought the other stories were fairly solid too. In a more expansive collection it would be easier to overlook a couple of duds like “Truth” and “Wonderful.” But Long Story Short is a slim book – one novella, five stories, 200-odd pages – so they have a disproportionate impact.

How about you, what did you think?

***

Steven W. Beattie: You’ve pretty much nailed what most annoyed me about a number of the stories in this collection: they feel more like jokes or gimmicks than well-wrought or carefully crafted works of short fiction. And you’ve hit on the two most egregious examples of this: “Truth” and “Wonderful.”

My problem with “Truth” is that it’s basically one joke stretched out over fifteen pages. It scores all its points around page two; the rest just seemed redundant to me.

Having said that, I do admire the way Friedman pulls the rug out from under the reader in the story’s early stages. When Leslie and Martin first meet in the Starbucks coffee shop, the initial impression a reader gets of Martin is that he’s just a gigantic asshole: “I’m too cheap to pay more than a buck for a cup of coffee. Besides, I’m already buzzing. Just had two cups with another prospective partner at the doughnut shop around the corner.”

And Leslie’s tepid response – “ ‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘How did it go?’” – makes her seem like a bit of a doormat. It’s only as the story progresses that you realize what Friedman’s up to: these are two people without interior monologues, and they vocalize everything they are thinking either consciously or, as you suggest, subconsciously.

The tension between a blind date that follows a rather traditional trajectory – meeting in a coffee shop, moving on to drinks, back to his place for sex – and the absolute, brutal honesty of the two characters results in a kind of absurdism that is rare in Canadian fiction. But you’re right that the story would seem more at home on Saturday Night Live or Comedy, Inc. than in the pages of a literary collection.

And the recapitulation of It’s a Wonderful Life is really unnecessary. This is the weakest story in the collection. Although, having said that, I do admire the ambiguity in the finale. After taking us on a very predictable journey, she manages to leave us with a note of uncertainty as to George’s fate, and I found this impressive. It’s emblematic of my reaction to the collection as a whole that even in the stories I disliked, I could find something of value, even if it was only a moment at the end.

“The Soother” is one of my favourites among the shorter stories, and again I admired the kind of bait-and-switch she pulls on the reader in the early stages. The opening scene reads like a piece of straight naturalism and as a reader you don’t question it or think that there’s anything amiss until you realize that Lucas isn’t a baby at all, but a grown man. The trick over the following pages is to humanize him sufficiently for us to understand his particular fetish.

This story reminded me a lot of Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love,” another story about a man who engages in what society views as aberrant behaviour but who is humanized through the course of the story.

If I had a complaint about “The Soother,” it would be the same complaint I have about the collection overall: it’s a story that’s predicated on a gimmick and it tends to beat the reader over the head with that gimmick. We need to understand Lucas, obviously, and his interactions with his wife and his pregnant daughter are well handled in this regard. But the stuff with the other daughter’s impending marriage and the son who needs to be bailed out of jail felt like overkill to me. We get the point: Lucas is so constantly harassed by his demanding and selfish family that he needs to find succor in the arms of Irma, his surrogate mother, who allows him to return to the oblivious innocence of childhood.

I just wish that Friedman would trust her readers more and maybe pull back a little rather than constantly underlining her points for us. This is one of the signal problems with stories that depend on gimmicks for their effects. They tend to trade in subtlety for a broader, more obvious presentation. Which is not to say I disliked “The Soother,” only that I wish she’d pulled back a little.

I see the same kind of problem – the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness born of adherence to a fictional conceit (or gimmick) – at work in the novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” although interestingly it didn’t bother me as much in the longer work. Perhaps because the gimmick here was less self-conscious, or perhaps it had something to do with the room she gave herself to develop the various characters in more detail.

It might be appropriate to turn our attention more directly on the novella for a moment.

***

DW: Not to dismantle “The Soother” even more, but one major difference between that and “We So Seldom Look on Love” is that Friedman’s story is much more pat: guy suckling a soother on one side of the equals sign, everyone in his life taking advantage of him on the other. Which is why I wished the baby-fetish angle had been left out altogether; for me, Lucas’s dynamics with his family were plenty interesting and funny enough without having to be used to justify a pathology or something. “We So Seldom Look on Love” is (at least as I remember it, not having read it for a few years) more associative and mysterious, which I think is more suited to a story that is truly interested in “aberrant” behaviour.

But back to the novella. “A Bright Tragic Thing” is about two Toronto teenage boys, Dave and Todd, who like to collect the autographs of cheesy TV celebrities for their ironic kitsch value. Dave writes to Murray Mortenson, who was a teen star on Mother Knows Better in the 1980s and who now lives in conveniently-close-to-Toronto Rochester, New York. Dave is just hoping for a tacky souvenir of some kind. But Murray, who was a Z-list celebrity at the best of times and is clearly unused to fan attention, starts calling him on the phone for long heart-to-hearts – which Dave surreptitiously tapes so that he and Todd can chortle over them later. The only problem is that Murray seems to be developing an unhealthy attachment to his new phone chum.

Whew. Let me catch my breath.

Like most of Friedman’s work, this one benefits immensely from taking place in a world that is recognizably Toronto in 2007, and not, like so much CanLit, some alternate reality where supermarkets and televisions and the Internet don’t exist. And her teenage characters are also refreshing – gawky and cruel and snide but plausible and, at least in Dave’s case, still sympathetic.

Mostly, though, I liked the progression of the story. The escalation of Murray’s encroachment on Dave’s time. The way Friedman slowly differentiates Dave from his friend Todd, first by circumstance, later by temperament, and eventually by moral choices. Dave’s high school romance, which felt a bit rote but was still quite charming.

I especially liked the ambiguity of what exactly the story seems to be about. As Murray gets increasingly needy and eventually shows up in Toronto, you wonder just how much he’s going to invade/ruin this boy’s life. But at the end it becomes clear that “A Bright Tragic Thing” is really concerned with something else entirely, something much more resonant and satisfying.

That said, the novella certainly has imperfections. I won’t dispute that Murray is cartoonish, never totally gelling as a believable person. The proverbial Chekhovian gun on the wall serves as an obvious plot device. And technically, Friedman’s prose is serviceable but unremarkable. As you mentioned, she could stand to trust the reader more; she has a habit of spelling things out just a touch more than necessary. (The last two sentences of the novella, for example – are they not completely superfluous?)

And you?

***

SWB: Well, the last two sentences make explicit something that could have been inferred from the paragraph before, and you’re probably right that the ending would have been more effective if we’d been allowed to make this inference ourselves rather than having it spelled out for us. However, that didn’t really bother me.

What did kind of bother me about the two teenage boys (and Helen, Dave’s would-be girlfriend) is that they seem to suffer from the Dawson’s Creek syndrome: that is, they speak and interact at a level that seems far too advanced for what normal teenagers might be expected to engage in:

“Your unsullied Klinger is comparatively lacklustre. In short, a bore.”

“I’m depressed.”

“You should be.”

“It’s more effective to shoot yourself.”

“True.”

“Why waste good narcotics?”

“You’re right. Especially since my father owns several pistols.”

“Well there you go. Pistols at dawn.”

“I can challenge myself to a duel.”

This dialogue is self-consciously ironic and witty, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of dialogue teenagers – even smart, self-consciously ironic teenagers – would actually carry on. This lends a note of artificiality to the story for me, but is not enough to entirely mar the experience of reading it.

“A Bright Tragic Thing” evinces the same kind of repetitiveness around a central conceit that is evident in “Truth” and “Wonderful,” but the gradual escalation in the relationship between Dave and Murray, the ex-TV “star,” prevents this from becoming boring or tedious.

Some elements of the novella do capitulate to the obvious: the gun on the wall is not just proverbial or metaphoric – it’s an actual gun, and there’s little question from very early on about how the story is going to end. I would have been happier with a more cynical ending, which would have had the effect of implicating the reader in the story’s satire. As it is the reader, along with Dave, is allowed off the hook: we can laugh at Murray’s gormlessness while always retaining the moral high ground. This feels ever so slightly like a cop-out.

I realize that to a certain extent I’m criticizing the story based on what I wish Friedman had written rather than what she actually did write, which is unfair. And I don’t want to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the story – I did, I just wish that she’d been a little more uncompromising with it.

I agree with you that “We So Seldom Look on Love” is superior to “The Soother,” and perhaps I link the two in my mind only because they’re both about fetishists of one kind or another. Gowdy’s story is much more allusive and subtle, whereas Friedman tends (here and elsewhere in the collection) to make all of her connections explicit for the reader.

In this regard, we haven’t even touched upon “Lost Kitten,” which is the one story that largely eschews this kind of explicitness. It’s a darker story, with an ambiguous ending that opens out into some very creepy areas of implication. The woman in it is obviously touched in some way, but exactly how is never made clear. And the relationship between the two roommates – their respective moral codes (or lack thereof) – is nicely handled. This is the darkest story in the collection, but also, I think, the most elliptical and least contrived.

Or is that just me?

***

DW: First, to defend “A Bright Tragic Thing” a bit: the dialogue doesn’t seem that implausible to me, given that these are seniors about to graduate, and brainy/geeky seniors to boot. Sure, it’s a little stylized and more polished than the way real people would talk, but hey, that’s true of almost all dialogue. (I think it was Van Wyck Brooks, though I might be misremembering, who wrote an essay pointing out that it’s a mistake to think that Huckleberry Finn captures “real speech,” because if it did, the book would be repetitive, incoherent, and boring.)

I’m also not sure that your proposed ending would be more effective; in fact, I feel like a more cynical “oh, what a crazy world we live in” ending would just end up letting everyone off the hook, reader included. There’s something almost refreshingly old-fashioned in the story’s finale, with its insistence that the choices we make matter. Though I will concede that the moral victory Dave appears to earn – by, um, showing some compassion and no longer acting like a complete asshole – is a pretty minor one.

But yes, “Lost Kitten.” I absolutely agree that the woman is one of the most memorable characters in the book, exactly because we know she’s off in some way but we don’t know how or why. And I thought Friedman brilliantly handled the scenes in which the reader picks up significance that eludes the woman: the visit from the two sons of her mother’s “friend,” or the description of the Late Serial Killer décor in the guy’s apartment. For me, the revelation of the split personality of the “roommates” (OK, I guess you should really make sure that spoiler warning goes up) still felt a little gimmicky, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy the story. And I agree that the weird moral distinctions that the psycho “roommate” makes were very well rendered.

Personally, I didn’t find the ending ambiguous, though; I just assumed she was a goner. Similarly, I assumed that the man had jumped into the river at the end of “Wonderful.” But in neither case are we shown anything definitive, so it is open to interpretation.

***

SWB: It’s those moments that are open to interpretation that really mark the collection for me. They tend to open the book up in ways that the more obvious, contrived conceits don’t allow for. I think that if Friedman could just allow for her readers to make certain connections for themselves, rather than insisting on beating them over the head at every turn, she could produce something really spectacular.

1 comment to “A New Feature: The Dialogue-Review”

August, November 28th, 2007 at 2:21 am:

• I like this new style. I was going to say that it ran a little long, but in retrospect I was pressed for time when I read it earlier this afternoon. I’d actually like to see more of this kind of conversation in the CanLit world. Good show.

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