How to Break a Rule

One rule of unity in short fiction is that point of view should not be violated. For instance, if the first seventeen pages of a short story are narrated third-person limited from Agnes’ point of view, you are not supposed to shift, on the last page, and for the first time, into Joe’s point of view. Yet that is exactly what Lorrie Moore does in her story story ”Agnes of Iowa” from her collection Birds of America.And the shift works perfectly. Let’s look at how she does it and why it works (no, Agnes didn’t die).

Agnes and Joe are sitting in a coffee shop in New York when the shift occurs. Agnes has been showing Joe around New York, where she lived in “her mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationaly then” before moving back to her hometown in Iowa and eventually marrying Joe, “a boyish man, twelve years her senior.” Throughout, the story has been narrated from Agnes’ point of view, showing a number of scenes from her small town life, scenes that convey dissatisfaction with a tinge of regret. At the coffee shop in the final scene, Agnes is telling Joe what it was like when she lived there:

”So much seems the same,” she said to Joe. “When I lived here, everyone was hustling for money. The rich were. The poor were. But everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went—a store, a facial place—someone was telling a joke. A good one.” She remembered it had made any given day seem bearable, that impulse toward a joke. It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people using each other and marring the earth the way they did. “It was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.” She looked down at her pie. “People really worked at it, the laughing,” she said. “People need to laugh.”

That is the tone, leading up to the shift. I quoted the whole passage because the story might easily have ended there, with Agnes realizing, perhaps that life isn’t any better in New York, but that laughing got you through it. This is in nice contrast to all the seriousness of the Iowa scenes. But the story doesn’t end there, it moves on and shifts into Joe’s point of view:

“They do,” said Joe. He took a swig of coffee, his lips out over the cup in a fleshy flower. He was afraid she might cry—she was getting that look again—and if she did, he would feel guilty and lost and sorry for her that her life was not here any more but in a far and boring place with him. He set the cup down and tried to smile. “They sure do,” he said. And he looked out the window at the rickety taxis, the oystery garbage and tubercular air, seven pounds of chicken giblets dumped on the kerb in front of the coffee shop where they were. He turned back to her and made the face of a clown.

When I read this story the first time I was surprised with that shift in point of view, maybe it’s one of those writer things, but I noticed it as I was reading it. Still, despite the shift calling attention to itself, it is smoothly done and perfectly matched in tone with Agnes’ rememberence. That’s one reason it works—the tone does not shift with the point of view. Although we are seeing things from another character’s perspective, we still feel as if we are with Agnes. The other reason the shift works is that it tells us something about Agnes that the whole story has been communicating up to that point, that Agnes is feeling “lost and sorry for her that her life was not here any more but in a far and boring place with him,”but would have been overkill if Moore had presented that comment as one of Agnes’ thoughts. Through Joe’s empathy, the reader is shifted towards empathy for Agnes, rather than having to join her pity party. From here the story reenergizes and ends on a climax as Agnes does the clownface, which makes Joe break out laughing and then Agnes starts laughing and snorting, which brings the final shift into Joe’s perspective as the story ends:

”Are you OK?” asked Joe, and she nodded. Out of politeness he looked away, outside, where it had suddenly started to rain. Across the street two people had planted themselves under the window ledge of a Gap store, trying to stay dry, waiting out the downpour, their figures dark and scarecrowish against the lit window display. When he turned back to his wife—oh, his sad, young wife—to point this out to her, to show her what was funny to a man firmly in the grip of middle age, she was still bent sideways in her seat so that her face fell below the line of the table, and he could only see the curve of her heaving back, the fuzzy penumbra of her thin spring sweater, and the garish top of her bright, new and terrible hair.

So the story ends in Joe’s point of view, although it is focused directly on Agnes, which is another reason that the shift works—it doesn’t just go off into Joe thinking about Joe, it is Joe continuing to empathize with Agnes, and more so, he is reaching out to her. Strategically, this kind of shift allows the story to grasp at a straw of hope, one that was not possible as long as we were trapped inside the regretful and self-pitying perspective of Agnes’ point of view.

The exception proves the rule. I wouldn’t recommend trying this at home. You have to be a master of craft to pull off this kind of shift in point of view, and Moore is certainly a master. “Agnes of Iowa” as with all of the stories in Birds of America is full of crafty ways to express dark moods with the bite of humor.

Who Blew Out the Candles?

Laura Hird’s story “Routes”, like Stacey Richter’s “The Beauty Treatment,” depends on voice. In “Routes” the narrator is a 12-year-old boy who rides buses to get away from his mother and her boyfriend. The story takes place on his birthday and consists of a monologue as he takes a three-hour route on the 44 bus. One aspect of the voice that seems dead-on is the narrator’s anger. He dishes trash and venom on the bus driver, the other passengers, and everyone he sees on the streets. For example:

I'm fucking willing the bus to get through they auld cunts. Just knock them over you bastard! If we dinnae get up to York Place before them they'll start cramming themselves on, looking at people funny who dinnae get up to give them seats. Fucking cheek. They only have to pay twenty-five pence as well. They get on cheaper than any cunt but they still expect you to give them your seat, and they always seem to have that disgusting digestive-biscuits-in-their-knickers sort of smell aboot them. Some of these auld dears are minging. They should make the smelly bastards hing on the sides like they do in they Paki countries.

When I say his anger is dead-on, I mean that in two ways. The first is that it captures the slag-everyone attitude typical of adolescent boys—if he wasn’t doing so the voice would be less believable. Secondly, as the beginning of the story portrays, the circumstances of his home life give him plenty of reasons to be angry. Those reasons are perfectly captured in the details of the birthday cake:

They could've even had a wee party for me or something, d'you no think? I'm sure they could have got someone to come. Folk'll go to parties even if they hate the cunt whose birthday it is. But what did they do instead? Mum bought a Mr Kipling's exceedingly shitey cake and didn't even put a candle on it, no expense spared, ken? When I went to have a second bit, Scott said, 'D'you want a nose-bag with that, you greedy wee bastard?'

Another passage where Hird commingles voice and theme with particulars that make it especially believable is when the narrator describes the pleasure he gets from the unique way he eats his crisps:

You crunch each crisp down though and store it in your cheek, then when you've got them all there you sook and sook all the flavour out then eat the soggy bit. It's brilliant. The only way to eat crisps, man. The vinegar makes my mouth go all in though.

And then how he eats a Mars bar:

I bite the chocolate off the sides, then gnaw the nougat bit and scrape the toffee off the top bit with my bottom teeth. Then I sook all the rest of the toffee off the bit chocolate and let it lie on my tongue till it melts. It's hard to just keep it there without eating it, but. These fucking cooking programmes mum watches all day go on about how to make stuff and that but they dinnae have any about how to eat it. I'd go on that. I ken how to eat stuff best, how to eat each bit of a bar of chocolate separately. It's a gift like.

In each of these examples, it is the particular details which give the voice of the narrator its authenticity. Of course, the Scots dialect doesn’t hurt either.

The story can be found in Hird’s collection Nail and other stories. Her novel Born Free is also a great read, and features four first-person narrators in alternating chapters.

Diverted Gaze

Back to the withholding aspects of Michel Faber’s “Some Rain Must Fall.” As effective as the withholding of the crucial detail of Mrs. MacShane’s death was at creating inertia, I don’t think it was needed because the heart of the story was not what happened to Mrs. MacShane, but the relationship between Frances and her partner. A fair question to ask is: Would the story have lost anything if it had begun by telling us in the first paragraph that Frances was a teacher trained to handle traumatized students, and that her next assignment was to pick up the pieces after the previous teacher had been murdered in the classroom by her husband? I think nothing would have been lost. We would still have wondered how Frances would deal with the students. And the details of what led to the killing could still come out during the story. Knowing about the death at the beginning could just as easily have created a different kind of suspense—the suspense of why instead of the suspense of what.

In the story the Mrs. MacShane suspense becomes a ruse to divert our direct gaze from where Faber really wants us to focus. After all, before we have any inkling that there is a Mrs. MacShane and that there’s been a trauma in the classroom, we have Frances reminding herself that “my relationship with this man is in crisis.” So, until the suspense ruse is introduced, the relationship is what we think the story will be about. By introducing the Mrs. MacShane thread of the story Faber follows the Frank O’Connor dictum of a story being glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. While we are riveted on what happened in the classroom, Frances’ relationship continues to unravel, and we keep getting glimpses of that unraveling as the MacShane threads plays out.

To Faber’s credit, he brings these two story threads together in the powerful scene at the restaurant when one of the parents asks Frances if she is going to be the permanent teacher. After the parent leaves there’s this exchange:

God, how she disliked herself for pleading impotence when that had nothing to do with why she must move on! This pretence of being the passive slave of higher authority - it was a deplorable lapse in dignity, an act of prostitution.
And to top it all off, she was going to break up with her man.
'I've seen you like this before,' observed Nick quietly from the other side of the candles. 'You always get like this just before the job's over. Those kids that survived the bus crash in Exeter, remember? A few days before you finished up there, we had almost the same argument' - he smirked -'almost the same restaurant. And that time in Belfast-'
‘Spare me the details,' she groaned, tossing her fork into the mound of rice and taking a deep swig of wine. Ask the proprietor if there are any rooms free for tonight. If so, book one.’
He stood up, then hesitated.
'For how many people?'
'Two,' she chided. 'Bastard.'

We now know who has the lasting trauma—it’s Frances.

This story is the first one in Faber’s story collection of the same title Some Rain Must Fall, which won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 1999. This collection stands out for me because of the variety of styles, techniques, and voices Faber pulls off. Fifteen stories and none of them seem as if they were written by the same writer. Not all readers will appreciate that in a collection, but as a writer, I think it’s a great accomplishment. Faber’s novel Under the Skin was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2001. He discusses the novel in this interview. And the Barcelona Review also has a wide-ranging interview in the same issue that “Some Rain Must Fall” appeared.

Story Inertia

Michel Faber’s story “Some Rain Must Fall” uses the withholding of a crucial fact as a device to create suspense. I’m of two minds regarding that withholding device: I like it because it creates inertia; and I don’t like it because nothing is gained by its use except inertia—the story would be equally compelling if we knew up front what happened to Mrs. MacShane.

First, let’s look at how Faber builds suspense around the Mrs. MacShane thread in the story’s first two pages. That Frances, the protagonist, is on the first day of her new job we learn in the story’s second sentence. And she knows “as a professional” what the children crave. Further, we learn that “she was their new teacher and had been imposed on them at short notice.” And she’s not you ordinary teacher:

Out of the corner of her eye, Frances observed one of the school's other teachers watching her from the doorway of the next room, no doubt wondering if Frances was really worth three times an ordinary teacher's salary.

Why is she there on such short notice? Well it can’t be the previous teacher’s performance:

Though scarcely interested in their handwriting at this stage, she noted that nobody was conspicuously incompetent: Jenny MacShane, their teacher until last week, can't have been too bad.

So, here, at the end of the first couple of pages we know that Frances has been brought in at short notice—and at an exorbitant salary—to replace a teacher, and not because the teacher was incompetent. Why? Faber doesn’t tell us just yet. The story progresses, adding more weight to the other story line—Frances and her relationship to her partner—and then using the first student essays to further the mystery about what happened to Mrs. MacShane. The only additional clue offered is that it had something to do with her crying.

In the middle part of the story Frances’ role as trauma abater—which gives a clue that Mrs. MacShane’s departure involved trauma—is played up in these two passages:

She'd figured out almost immediately which of the children were the touchy-feely ones, and she drew them to her as bait for the others. Her talent was to radiate safety and the restoration of order. It was a gift she had possessed well before all her years of training.

And:

Frances had a feel for the group as a whole, its tensions and safety valves, its flame-haired explosives, its doe-eyed emollients. The shock of the last day the children had spent with Mrs MacShane was working its way through their systems at different rates; Frances guessed that either Jacqui Cox or Tommy Munro would be the first to crack, in some spectacular incident that would appear to have no connection with their old teacher.

Which Faber follows with these further teasers, “but his old teacher wasn’t fine at all;” and “her essay had devoted two matter-of-fact lines to the circumstances of Mrs. MacShane’s departure.” Then the suspense is further elevated when Frances walks the two children to the caravan park:

Harriet made a little speech, spoken at a gabble as if escaping under pressure.
'Mrs MacShane used to come here sometimes after school. To see a man who's moved away now. They made loud noises together inside his caravan for hours, then she'd go home to the village. It was sex - everybody knows that. That's why Mr MacShane got so angry. He must of found out.'

And finally, just before the end of the story, the withheld fact is divulged in another student essay:

Something very bad happened here last week. Our teacher Mrs MacShane was giving us a Maths lesson when her husband came in to the class room with a shot gun. He swore at Mrs MacShane and hit her until she was on the floor. She kept saying please not in front of the children but it didn't make any difference. Then her husband told her to put the end of his gun in to her mouth and suck on it. She did that for a few seconds and then he blew her head to bits. We were all so, so scared but he went away and now the police are looking for him. Every time I think about that day I feel sick. I ask myself will I ever get over it?

What is significant about the slow unveiling of this fact by the author is that from a logistical sense Frances would have know that fact when she accepted the assignment, and, further, the final essay excerpt is shown to the reader after the time in the story when Frances would have read it. So the withholding of the information is not embedded in the plot—it is a pure case of the author manipulating what is divulged to the reader for the sole purpose of creating, heightening, and finally releasing suspense. It is a textbook example, in fact.

In my next posting I’ll discuss why such authorial tricks, however, successful, weren’t necessary in this story.

"My thoughts: fuck, shit, etc."

I get excited when I read stories such as Stacey Richter’s “The Beauty Treatment,” which first appeared in the February 1997 issue of the Mississippi Review, and later in her collection of stories My Date with Satan, excited because right from the first sentence we’ve got voice.

She smiled when she saw me coming, the Bitch, she smiled and stuck her fingers in her mouth like she was plucking gum out of her dental work.

I want to keep reading to see where this voice will take me and also to see whether the narrator can keep this language game going to the end. Richter does.

Voice is a product of language, so what language does Richter use to create this narrative voice? The most obvious element is the moniker the narrator gives her best friend, the one who slashed her: she is “the Bitch.” The narrator uses “the Bitch” 66 times.

Then there’s her brand awareness, particularly brands as a symbol of class: “My outfit is DKNY. My shoes are Kenneth Cole;” and “She wore deep brown lipstick from the Soul Collection at Walgreen’s.”

And her awareness of the trappings of the rich: “Once my mother had sufficiently calmed down, she paged Dr. Wohl, who’d done her tits;” and “her daddy showed up with two lawyers and escorted her out of there like she was Queen of the May parade.”

Another aspect of the narrator’s voice is her ability to size up a situation:

The Shrink looks like she came straight out of a Smith alumni magazine-Ann Taylor suit, minimal makeup, low-heeled leather shoes. The picture of emotional efficiency. Her office, too, is a symphony in earth tones. She checks me and the Bitch out, then says something like, "Katie's been grappling with the conflict that occurred between the two of you, and now she needs to know how you feel about it."

She does not blink twice at my scar. She does not look at me with infinite compassion. I realize whose turf I'm on. She's an employee, and the Bitch's father writes the paychecks.

Her use of figures of speech is another element of her voice: “like she’s been pumped full of pink fluid and some has pulled the plug;” “I was a goddamn Jewish Joan of Arc;” “our favorite teacher, Mrs. DeMarzo, who talked like Katharine Hepburn;” and “like the first day she came to school with braces.”

Even her emotions are expressed in voice:

It wasn't like I looked normal, but I was learning to adjust. I was feeling okay about myself-I rented The Big Heat, where the heroine gets coffee flung in her face, and I was beginning to feel like being slightly maimed was kind of romantic. I mean, I got noticed, and I looked just fine from the right side.

And gems like this: “I did not want to see her. No Bitch for me.” And my favorite:

The Bitch had slumped over in her swivel chair and I didn't even want to look at her. My thoughts: fuck, shit, etc. It was weird. I began to feel practically like she was my friend again, us having had a simultaneous cry. I did not want that. I wanted her to stay the Bitch.

One final aspect of the narrator’s voice is worth mentioning although it is hard to pin down with actual examples, and that is her overall self-aware tone. The narrator knows that image can be put on or off by changing clothes, hairstyles, or vocabulary. This tone comes through cumulatively by the examples she uses to narrate her story. Tone also comes through in the basic irony of the story: the scar—the Beauty Treatment—is the one thing she can’t put on or off.

I’ll stop there, and resist the urge to analyze this story from a lit crit perspective. Suffice to say that much mileage could be made by analyzing the story through the lens of feminist theory, particularly as it relates to body image. Contrast that analysis with one from the capitalist/consumerism perspective and you’ll be having some fun.

Several other of Richter’s stories are online, so checkout The Ocean, When to Use, The Cavemen in the Hedges, and Rules for Being Human.

Elements of Particularization

Generally I prefer stories that are more scenic, so Jackie Kay's story "Physics and Chemistry" in the March-April 2002 issue of the Barcelona Review, which is virtually all narrative summary, was one in which I kept waiting for the scene. Although the summary kept going on and on, I found myself enjoying the story. One reason is the affectation of referring to the subject characters as "Physics" and "Chemistry"—particularly when it is revealed in a snipped of a scene that these names are in fact the way the characters refer to themselves.

Physics suddenly came to life. Mr Smart, said, didn't he, the pair of them. 'Do you mean to say that you have also sacked Chemistry?' she asked, appalled. 'Who?' Mr Smart asked, puzzled. 'Miss Gibson, you know, Iris. Have you sacked Iris?'

The other aspect of craft that I enjoyed about this story is the marvelous way the characters are particularized. Here's an example:

Some nights they sat at dinner - Physics in her chair by the kitchen door and Chemistry in the one opposite, and the weight of all the things they'd listened to in silence moved around them like molecules. The dinner in the middle of the table, the organic vegetables cooked in lemon grass and coconut oil, sat between them, a bright, colourful wok of strange ingredients as far as Physics was concerned. If Physics had her way, she would have a roast lamb, two veg and mashed potatoes and a nice wee jug of gravy. She ate all these unfamiliar; oddly upsetting, foods out of love. Her very palette had transformed since Chemistry's culinary habits had turned foreign a few years back. Chemistry always wanted to do things differently. Physics had to be forced to change. In the kitchen, the flushed pleasure on Chemistry's cheeks, the brightness of her voice and eyes, when she held out a spoon and said try this and pronounced some strange words like gadoh gadoh or sayar lemak or sambal tauco, made Physics want to drop to her knees with love and disappointment.

Of course this is not the first time that food has been used to portray character, but this kind of particularization—where facts are combined with an emotional element—is especially effective at bringing characters to life.

"Is he on narcotics?"

I have to say that I was not impressed by Alan Warner's story"Costa Pool Bum" when I first read it. For one thing, his inconsistent use of commas annoyed me. Did he never read this story aloud? The story also seemed a bit thin. A single scene, a single conversation, that seemed to accomplish only a few ironic reversals of the narrator's perceptions.

Still, this story has stuck with me, so I thought it would be useful to discover why. One reason is that great line, "Is he on narcotics?", which so bluntly punctures the pool bum's line of bullshit. This line of dialogue strikes me as the most natural, the most real in the story— that is, a line someone might actually say. Most of the dialogue seems contrived and overwritten, but not that line.

I think the narrator is problematic in this story. He narrates as if he doesn't know the truth of his circumstances, while at the same time admitting some emotional truths (which strikes me as opposite of how most people behave). He acknowledges that he's using a facade as a psychological weapon—"My front disquised this and might be his failing"—yet seems oblivious that this front is transparent to others. When caught, he quickly admits his lie, yet seems shocked to find that his opponent knows something about him that sounds as if it were common knowledge to everyone.

So what sticks with me is the story not told—the real circumstances of the pool bum's life. A strength of the story is the nice device of the opponent wiping away the narrator's facade—he tells us what the narrator can't or won't. What I'm undecided about is whether not seeing the hidden story dramatically is a strength or a weakeness. The story leaves me intrigued, but ultimately unsatisfied because I'm not conviced that anything is at stake for the narrator besides his facade. Perhaps seeing a piece of the hidden story in a scene would have convinced me that he did have something at stake. On the other hand, perhaps Warner meant to show that the narrator in fact had nothing at stake, that he really was just a pool bum. In that case, the narrator's slip-sliding narration becomes part of the portrait.