But I Go to Hospital: A Dialogue Review

Posted 11 December, 2007 in Book Reviews, Guest Blogger | No comments

Orpheus Lost, by Janette Turner Hospital. Knopf Canada, $32.95 cloth, 358 pp, ISBN: 978-0-676-97942-8.

The second installment of TSR’s dialogue reviews features me in conversation with Kerry Clare, author and essayist, whose work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. She is a regular contributor to the Descant blog, and she is the author of the blog Pickle Me This.

Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.

The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.

Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.

I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.

I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.

Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.

So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.

How about you?

***

Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment. In large part, this is because I have been exposed to Turner Hospital’s work before, and so much of it is just so much better: more alive, more potent, more riveting. The new novel, by contrast, was, for me, too mechanistic in its construction, too reliant on coincidence and forced parallels that are used to move the plot along, and without the complexity – both narrative and linguistic — that ignited Due Preparations for the Plague and – especially – Oyster.

I’m surprised that you found the descriptions of the Daintree rainforest compelling: for me they seemed like filler. Indeed, Mishka’s entire backstory positively dragged for me. I’m not sure why it was necessary to include it in such detail. The best sequence in the novel – the sequence that was the most compulsive, that most had me turning the pages in the frenzied manner that you described – was Cobb’s interrogation of Leela, in which he lays out the circumstantial evidence underpinning his suspicions about Mishka’s terrorist connections. The Mishka section that forms the lengthy central portion of the novel was slow, laboured, and unnecessary.

But to return to the descriptive passages for a moment. What frustrated me was what I perceived as their general lackadaisical presentation:

In those days, before the fruit-cropping time, before sugar gave way to avocados and passionfruit and mangoes, the cane stood to attention in green and purple-plumed ranks each morning and saluted as Mishka arrived at school. The cane marched to the very boundaries of the buildings and yard, an invading force, every day gaining ground, every night sending out advance reconnaissance troops, so relentless that children playing cricket or soccer would stumble over spiky green shoots the next morning. This was the growing time. Once the cutting and crushing began, once the cane trains were trundling along the narrow steel tracks to the mill, the air was so heavy with a mist of molasses that the drowsy children would brush soot from their arms and lick sugared air from their lips.

There’s nothing technically wrong with this (although the accidental rhyme in “cane trains” is a bit off-putting), but neither does the prose leap off the page; it’s competent, but uninspired.

By contrast, the description of the outback at the beginning of Oyster is much more vibrant and bracing:

There was also, and still, the drought. More than that, perhaps the worst thing, was a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself. We gave it a name. We thought, I suppose, in some primitive way, that if we mocked it, it might decamp and leave us alone. Old Fuckatoo, we called it.

The Old Fuckatoo is roosting again, we would say, pressing handkerchiefs against nose and mouth.

The Old Fuckatoo could brood, close and suffocating, for days, then it might lift a little, depending on the sway and twist of convection in the desert air. Mostly, when it nested and tucked us under its fetid wing, the stink of dead cattle would predominate; or else that particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep. On certain days, when hot currents shimmered off Oyster’s Reef, we could detect the chalk-dust of the mullock heaps, acrid; or, from the opal mines themselves, the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts. Sometimes there was almost nothing, just the blackness of the outback heat, and this felt like a grace newly recognised. On other days – there was no escaping it – an altogether more disturbing trace prevailed, some terrible and indefinable emanation that suggested … but no one wished to think about what it suggested.

Some, in retrospect, claimed it was moral decay; though it was probably the simple stink of fear.

The latter passage is much more muscular, more invigorating, than anything in Orpheus Lost. The extended military metaphor describing the cane in the passage above pales, in my opinion, beside the “mephitic fog … that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself,” or the “particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep,” or “the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts.” All of which is a shame, because, knowing what Turner Hospital is capable of, I had the impression that this time she was just phoning it in. (I thought the wooden dialogue was not a result of the unconventional nature of the characters, but was merely wooden dialogue.)

But I want to ask you about your reaction to the incorporation of the Orpheus myth as the overarching metaphor in the novel. As you mentioned, the first time Leela encounters Mishka (in the subway, which is not really all that subtle …) he is playing Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice.” The Orpheus myth is referred to again and again in the novel, and is turned on its head in the final stages, when Leela goes searching for the missing Mishka, essentially reversing the roles of the original protagonists. Did you accept this as a conceit for the novel, or did it seem overly forced to you?

***

KC: To be honest, I’m not sure it’s fair to critique a book for not being another book. Nor do I think that “leapage off page” is such a measurable attribute for prose that one could draw a line under it, or at least agree with another upon where to do so. I adored the descriptions of Mishka’s Hungarian grandparents’ strange European house in the rainforest, and the rain, the birds, the green. I can see it, though I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life and I’m not even sure if it could really exist.

But I do understand now that I was lucky to have found Turner Hospital with this particular effort, and look forward to Oyster and the impossibility of disappointment. Do you think that without Oyster as comparison, you would have still been so disappointed with Orpheus Lost? Do you think you would have bothered to read it at all based upon its premise?

And speaking of Orpheus and his myth. No, you’re right that there’s nothing subtle about it. It’s right there in the title I suppose. But then subways are places people go and musicians are there and nothing about that in particular seemed forced to me. What I liked about the whole conceit was that nothing about the metaphor is ever easy after Leela encounters Mishka in the subway. The novel doesn’t run parallel to the myth, but rather pieces of the myth are scattered in shards throughout it, and no attempts at reconstruction could make for a whole that I could discover. But my attempts at discovery made for such an engaging process all the same, and my failure to solve the problem has led to the novel’s haunting quality, and a desire on my part to engage with both stories further.

Am I right to suspect that you did not come away feeling the same?

***

SWB: Yes, you’re right. I felt that the Orpheus myth was handled a bit too heavily to be satisfying. Of course it’s not inappropriate for a street musician to be found playing in the subway, but within the larger narrative context, the fact of Mishka’s first appearance there (i.e. in the underground), combined with the piece he is playing, seemed like Turner Hostpital was laying it on a bit thick. I had the same “Oh, come on!” reaction that I had when Al Pacino’s devil character is shown descending the stairs into the subway in The Devil’s Advocate.

There are other unsubtle moments as well. After her meeting with Cobb, Leela has “a fleeting image of Mishka with a ferryman in a boat, crossing to somewhere.” When Mishka is being “interrogated” following his rendition, he refers to himself as Orpheus and to his tormentor as Cerberus. The covert mission that Cobb initiates at the novel’s end is codenamed “Operation Underworld.” There were times while I was reading the novel when I felt as though I was being beaten over the head by the metaphoric resonance.

Similarly, I thought that much of the novel was too neat, too tidy to be satisfying. There is the forced parallelism of having Leela return to Promised Land to find both her father and Cobb’s father afflicted with cancer, for example. And I thought that the epilogue was really superfluous. It makes explicit things that would be better left ambiguous, such as Cobb’s ultimate fate.

As for the comparison with Oyster, you’re right in saying that “leaping off the page” is a vague critical standard; prose that leaps for one person might hobble for someone else. You’re also right that it’s unfair to fault Orpheus Lost for not being Oyster. The comparison I drew above was meant simply to illustrate comparable sections in the two novels in which I felt Turner Hospital was operating at a lower pitch in the new book. Had I not read – and loved – Oyster, I doubt that my reaction to Orpheus Lost would have been much different: I’d still find much of it heavy-handed and contrived. But, knowing how powerful Turner Hospital’s writing can be, my sense of disappointment was surely heightened.

Would I have picked the book up were it not for my previous exposure to the author’s work? Possibly, because the subject – the current climate of geopolitical paranoia (and the effects that has on interpersonal relationships) – is a touchstone of our shared historical moment. Indeed, it’s the subject that artists who engage with the world as it is seem unable to shy away from. Post-9/11 literature has become almost a subgenre of its own, with authors as diverse as Jay McInerney, John Updike, Ken Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo having taken it up. There has been debate as to the efficacy of this; my own feeling is that artists are obligated to deal imaginatively with our most pressing emotional issues – love, fear, anger, confusion – and that, given this obligation, 9/11 and its fallout is the one subject that is all but inescapable at this point.

Having said that, the subject alone does not make for a compelling novel. It must be well handled, and my own feeling is that in this instance, Turner Hostpital fell short.

***

KC: There was a neatness to the novel, you’re right, though I suppose that’s to be expected from any book that begins with, “Afterwards, Leela realized, everything could have been predicted from the beginning.” Further, yes, perhaps it was too tidy, though I remain fascinated by how hard it is for us to accept coincidence in fiction sometimes.

Regarding the tidiness, though, what I liked about it was that tidiness could be created from such a mess. To create a tidy book out of myth, music, math, and intrigue (could not find a synonym beginning with “m,” unfortunately) is no mean feat. Orpheus Lost has served to broaden my literary horizons — toward Turner Hospital’s work itself, of course, but also to the myths, music, math, and intrigue I so often fail to consider, so ensconced am I in my usual bookish bliss. I enjoyed that I could be excited about such things at all, and how gripped I truly was.

A New Feature: The Dialogue-Review

Posted 26 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews, Guest Blogger | 1 comment

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.