Indirection

David Gates’ story “A Wronged Husband” uses an uncommon narrative strategy—it features a first person narrator who addresses the narrative to an off-scene “you;” his wife who has just left him. So the narrative is not addressed to the reader, but to the other actor in the drama. Stylistically the narrative sounds like a letter. Even more curiously, Gates actually recounts several scenes between husband and wife, plus one between the narrator and his brother. But rather than portray these scenes dramatically, he tells the “you” about the scene, and uses indirect dialogue throughout. This strategy has the effect of distancing the reader from the narrative because we can never forget that we are being told the events obliquely, almost as if we have found an unsent letter rather than a short story.

An advantage of this approach is that it disguises the pretense of fiction. Instead of dramatizing the events and asking the reader to suspend their disbelief, we have a narrative whose clunky indirectness has the authenticity of seeming like a found item. It reads like something a wronged husband might write, perhaps at the request of a therapist. Its very lack of the feel of fiction makes it seem authentic, and thus effective as fiction.

That said, it wasn’t a story that made me want to read it again. Indirect dialogue has its place, but Gates’ over reliance on it in this story took the life out of the technique.