Catch and Release

There’s hooks and then there’s Anjali Banerjee’s hook in “Satin and Lace” from the Green Hills Literary Lantern:

I hiked up to the Berkeley hills with the intention of leaving my panties and a note on Avery’s front door, so his wife would know about me, at least indirectly.

So did you click right on through to the story? If so you’ve seen that the conflict between lover and wife isn’t ducked. But notice how Banerjee doesn’t go for a dramatic encounter, choosing instead to show the lover fumbling around with a crystal elephant and the wife refusing to reveal any expression as she reads the note. That keeps the tension going into the rest of the story. The ending, however, disappointed me. The last sentence seemed tacked on to wrap up the story quickly rather than ending with another scene. Tacked on or not, it does have a logic behind it: Both the wife and Avery have dissed the lover. The action she contemplates in the final sentence is a result of not being considered a serious threat. Although the last sentence has been made to make sense, I think the reader has been released too soon after being hooked.

A Slice that Smuggles

Here’s another one from the Mississippi Review’s Crime Issue, Scott Wolven’s “Eight Ball.” This is a slice-of-life piece, and although it doesn’t meet my criteria for revealing something about the character beyond the incident, it does reach beyond the incident in a novel way: Wolven uses a story within the story to reveal something about life that is not strictly relevant to the incident. Here’s the embedded story:

"Luce, he looks over to the shore of the backside of the peninsula and see's Indians fishing. You could tell they were Indians because their trucks didn't have plates and they looked dark, with long black hair, just like Indians. There must have been a reservation there. Usually there were at least ten Indians, fishing and drinking beer.
 
Luce starts to yell over, everyday. He's a big guy, loudmouthed, so his voice carries – 'Hey Chiefy' he yells over one day 'I want to scalp your squaw.'
 
He keeps it up, everyday. Maybe half an hour a day. 'Hey Big Chief' and 'Hey Red Man!' And the Indians on the shore would give him the finger, but they never yelled back.
 
He kept it up right through the fall into the winter. Snow came and one of the guards told Luce to shovel off the basketball court. Luce separated off from the rest of us, he went over to the court area to shovel. There was this crack!" Jimmy Work smacked his hands together. "Luce fell down and the snow was all bloody around him. Those Indians blew the back of his head off with a high-powered rifle. We scrambled around for a minute and got back inside the facility. No other shots came." He looked at me and my brother. "I don't think they looked too hard for who did it," he said.

Why is this anecdote in this story? What does it have to do with hunting down Ackerly and getting the narrator paid what he’s owed? Suppose it has nothing to do with the story. Suppose instead that the rest of the story is a frame so that this anecdote can be told. Suppose this is a smuggling operation. Although this slice-of-life depicts one incident—and without any context whatsoever—a larger world is revealed because of the story that Jimmy Work tells. That's another ingredient I'll add to my criteria for a good slice-of-life story: If it doesn't enlarge on the character, it should enlarge the world beyond the incident. Of course, I should also mention that the incident and the embedded story here are not totally disconnected: The two stories reflect on each other. Even if you don’t approve of the means, justice is served in both instances. In that way meaning is also smuggled into the story, a meaning the incident itself does not reveal.

On Cat-feet She Writes

Stacey Richter’s story “The Girlfriend” reminds me a lot of Aimee Bender’s stories: the language is at times incendiary, but you spend a lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on. To recast one of Richter’s lines: “This may not be [a story], he thinks, but it’s an intriguing facsimile.” Aside from the exciting language “The Girlfriend” gets its boogie from two sources. The second, which I’ll return to in a bit, is cats. The first is a subversion of the expectation the title creates. This is not your typical relationship story even though it describes a relationship. Point of view is the culprit here. It’s close to neither character and offers instead an unsympathetic, somewhat cynical commentary on two characters no one else would want to be in a relationship with. The cast of cats, though, are cool. Here’s their introduction:

They end up renting a lousy house with a wonderful porch and a yard full of feral cats. Everything smells like cat piss. They trot along the fence and jump on the roof with a soft thud. They shred the State Bird of Texas and leave it on the porch. The feet are in a separate pile. Betty says she hates the cats, they’re dirty, infested and multiplying, and to please her he agrees.

After that Richter treats us to three cat interaction scenes, which aside from being lively scenes themselves, get the characters to interact more with each other than when the cats are not around. Kind of like those family get-togethers where no one talks until someone shows up with a baby. The cats also bring the girlfriend into focus, she who wears “1950’s cat-eyed glasses.” She even starts behaving cat-like. This cat association goes further in the last paragraph where cat and girlfriend sound nearly as one:

She slipping out into the evening, falling asleep on top of strangers’ cars, coming home smelling like someone else’s house, someone else’s food. She was always trying to get something, trying to get it wherever she could. She was so pretty. The prettiest girlfriend. He buries her in the yard and goes out the next day to a get a new one.

You’d have to work hard to say this story is full of deep literary meaning, but it is a fun read, a reason literature seems to frequently forget.

Read Hard

Here’s an interesting piece from the Mississippi Review’s just published Crime issue: Owen Cecil’s “Rack Hard.” Not a conventional story by any means, Cecil commits crimes you might say. Full of grit and grime; an unreaderly challenge. Starting right off with the uncontextualized accounting ledger. Followed by an excursion into the woods that takes a lot of work to figure out. I labored through this piece several times and came to appreciate it more each time. Thinking I’m a rare reader, though, and have to wonder how many would simply check out, hit the eject button. Puzzlers, maybe. This could be a story for them. A narrative strategy one might use with readers who like to figure things out. Search for clues. Piece it together. Create the rest of the story. The author uses subtraction, the readers use addition, and if that doesn’t work, multiplication. Try an abacus first. Then Higher math. Title should have been Read Hard.