Van Gogh Intensity

In “Please Help Find” Stewart O’Nan uses two approaches that make this story so powerful. The first approach is that he doesn’t dwell on the causes of Janice’s illness, nor does he psychoanalyze the character, or allow her to psyche herself. Janice is matter of fact about her illness, almost happy in a way, as here in the midst of a suicide attempt:

She didn’t want anything anymore, and she felt good about making that clear. How satisfying it was to finally say what she meant.

So O’Nan is wise to keep the story focused on the trip to the college and the search for the dog. He provides just enough back story and explanation so that the ending will work, but not so much that it takes over the story. He doesn’t let the focus shift into what caused Janice to feel the way she does.

The second approach O’Nan uses is to make the story richly sensual and that richness comes from Janice’s filter. She is depressed and suicidal yet notices the world around her with a stunning clarity that appears to be aesthetic pleasure. Here’s Janice describing her suicide attempt:

It took longer than she’d thought, and after a few minutes she got up and stood at the window and watched a boy ride by on a three-speed, a baseball glove impaled on his handlebars, the tassels flying from his grips. She was holding on to the gauzy curtain, feeling the grittiness between her fingers. Little waves of heat shivered on top of the cars. She felt she could reach out and pinch the cars between her fingers and squish them like lightning bugs if she wanted to.

The story is full of such keen observations, and usually linked directly with Janice’s senses—“feeling the grittiness between her fingers”—and this presence in the world she intends to leave is a crushing irony, which is perhaps the story’s source of power. How so present and yet not make it? Indeed. Van Gogh intensity. And the deep emptiness inside.

These two approaches work together like the grittiness of those drapes between Janice’s fingers. Not dwelling on the causes, while showing us her intense sensual awareness of reality, makes her suicide, especially after the epiphany, all the more acutely felt.

Epiph This

Stewart O’Nan’s “Please Help Find” is a story that kicks butt and takes names. Read it quick because I’m going to discuss the ending first. This story held me all the way through, effortlessly keeping me locked in its story world. I loved the ending, not so much for what it was, but for what it wasn’t. On the first reading I found myself chaffing a bit when Janice had her moment of empathy for her mother and then reached out to her in an act of genuine love, an act that seems to change everything epiphany-like. At that point I momentarily left the story world and thought, Damn, this was such a good story up to this point. So when Janice thinks back on that moment—that epiphany—and then successfully commits suicide, well, I was practically cheering. [As must have been the Ploughshares guest editor who selected this story, Mr. Against Epiphany himself, Charles Baxter.]

How brilliant is that move at the end? O’Nan just sucked us in, made us think it was one kind of ending, and then nailed us with the surprise that was true. Because based on everything else O’Nan showed us in the story, it had to end this way for Janice. To paraphrase Carver, the epiphany only meant things were about to get worse.

Three-course Meal

In “Broth of Heaven” Lan Samanatha Chang uses a three-part movement to bring her short-short story to a close with a cymbal crash. The first movement has the narrator describing how she prepared meals for rest home residents and recently had started bringing take out and special ingredients from downtown, which makes her feel “necessary, even happy.”

The second movement comes in the middle of her conversation with Mr. Tao, when she reminisces on all the exquisitely prepared meals she made for her husband before he walked out on her. His leaving is still a source of confusion and hurt.

The third movement comes when Mr. Tao launches into a diatribe over all the exquisitely prepared meals his wife—who died before him—had made. Meals that were the source of his longevity, a longevity that is now keeping him from joining his wife in heaven sooner.

The story ends there as the narrator quietly slips out of the room. We are not told how she feels at that moment, but are left to intuit it from the three-course meal that Chang has served us. Which is a beautiful way to suffuse a short story—that is actually a single short scene—with layers of meaning. Using the motif of the loving preparation of meals, Chang shows us three different responses, and in the process shifts the narrator through a variety of emotions.

Don’t Try This at Home

Marian Keyes’s story “Soulmates” uses a somewhat rare form for a contemporary short story—it spans more than a decade in time, is narrated omnisciently, and is virtually all narrative summary. What passes for scenes are snippets of dialogue sprinkled amongst the narrator’s summary and analyses. The story reads like the summary of a novel, or a treatment for a screenplay—either of which it may in fact be. The only thing that makes it story-like is the opening scene fragment, which is used to create a narrative hook. That hook is “resolved” by being repeated at the end of the summary. This is akin to starting a joke with the punch line, telling the body of the joke, and then repeating the punch line. As I said, a rare form, and not one you’d ever advise someone to attempt.

However its form came about, the story is an enjoyable read, carried mostly by the hip, knowing, narrative voice and the author’s style, the way the summary sentences flow one after the other. One other aspect of Keyes’ craft helps the narrative summary avoid boredom—her use of details. The story is full of specific textural detail, which makes it feel scenic even though it isn’t. So the story avoids being simply a case study, a summary by analysis—although there is plenty of that—because Keyes has included enough cultural verisimilitude so that time and place is conveyed. The result is a convincing portrayal of the relationship arc of the soulmates and the satellite friendships that orbit them. A nice alternative to the story 101 gospel of scenic portrayal. Just don’t the try summary approach without the details.

If I were to attempt a story using this form I think I would drop the opening punch line. I don’t think that that repetition is as effective as using different scene snippets for the beginning and ending. Better to use a different narrative hook, and save the punch line for the ending where it can come as a surprise rather than as a repetition.

Shown the Back

I'll say this right off, "The Spot" is not one of Chris Offutt's better stories, mostly because it is a present tense narrative that ends with the narrator dying. That's a tired device. Still, there is much I like about the story: The way Offutt weaves theme through the narrative; the way he lets the narrator's life experiences surface authorial wisdom; the original figures of speech; and of course the great scene with the realtor, which draws together all of the story's strengths. Here's an example from near the end of the realtor scene:

She takes in a breath of air big enough to give life to a mule. She hunches her shoulders.

“I’m talking mobile home community,” she says. “I’m talking ten thousand dollars per lot. I’m talking serious development.”

Her satchel starts ringing. She pulls out a phone and turns away for privacy. Right there on my land, she shows me her back, and I remember the eight-family party line we had when I was a kid. There was so many people listening in, you didn’t use the phone to talk to one person, you used it to spread gossip through the hills. Many’s the person the whole creek got mad at over lies that started on the telephone. People don’t think nothing of making a lie bigger. It’s truth they want to be small.

The realtor turns around and smiles. “Where were we?”

“You and your bunch want to fill this holler with trailers. You’ll not be satisfied until you have baldheaded these hillsides.”

“You’re mistaken,” she says. “The intent is always there to preserve the integrity of the natural landscape.”

“See how you are. As soon as you start lying, you stop talking English.”

It's all there: theme, wisdom, and figures of speech. The other thing this scene with the realtor does is raise the ante on the sentiments expressed in the first part of the story. It is no longer just the reflections of an older woman returned to her childhood home, now it is a conflict that dramtically shows the truth of what the narrator has been thinking and feeling.

I wish the story had continued further along this confrontational route; sending the narrator out into the woods to fall seems a bit of a cop out.

Offutt writes descriptively about the natural world better than any writer I can think of. It's a consistent feature of his writing, the close observation and precise recording of how nature looks and feels. If you want to write about nature in the way Offutt does, the first thing you'd better do is spend some time in nature with you thinking brain turned off and all of your sensory awareness turned on full.

Omniscient Grease

Brock Clarke's story "The Fat" employs an omniscient narrator, which, though frequently used in novels, is much less frequently used in short stories. One of the reasons that the omniscient voice is rarely used in short stories is because it tends to distance the reader from the characters, which is precisely what we as readers often seek in shorter fiction—that close indentification with the characters. Another reason the omniscient voice isn't used much in short stories is that it is especially well suited to ranging freely over a wide expanse of time, and there too, story readers expect time to be narrowed, focused on the pertintent events. Clarke, however, doesn't violate these readerly expectations—he stays focused on the two characters, the editor and the reporter, and, although free-ranging through their back-story, stays focused on their present activity—which is why I think his use of the omniscient voice works in this story.

The other reason—aside from exploring many characters and a wide expanse of time—for using an omniscient voice is to give expression to a narrator's (typically the author's) voice. The omniscient voice is particularly well suited to that psycho-analytic voice that burrows into the character's world and shows not so much about the inner workings of the character—who after all is just words on the page—as it shows the narrator/author's perceptual powers in analyzing human nature as it is reflected in the characters.

Rule one, if you are going to attempt an omniscient voice in a story—that is, if you are going to analyze your characters and their lives—is that you had better have something perceptive to say. You must be in possession of some truths. And I think that Clarke's story gets its power from the truths he possesses and is willing to express.

The other point I would make, and this is not a trivial one, is that omniscience is probably the only point of view that would work in this story. Why? Because an omniscient narrator can voice irony and humor. A note niether the editor of the reporter can hit—they know one note and it is self-pity. Their stories, if told in first-person or close third, would be maudlin self-pity parties. Clarke avoids that tone, while still letting us see that that would be the case, by adopting the omniscient voice, which hovers above the two characters. A stance which also provides a sliver of hope, something every story probably needs, regardless how slender it may be.