This Little Piggy

Here’s another aspect of Ron Carlson’s story “The Potato Gun” that I forgot to mention: The pigs!

They all saw a pig step onto the road, unhurried, and then five more javelinas came out, picking at the sweet grass along the rutted dirt path. "Wow," whispered Alison. "Look." Libby came against Cooper and took his arm. More of the animals emerged, a dozen, then more, big and small, some babies trotting comically behind the pack. They were all starting and stopping, rooting and bumping, as they crossed the road. A midsize pig trotted up and mounted one of the females who had stopped to eat, and he humped on her casually amid the grouping. "Oh, oh," Deanie said, and all four of the young people raised their hands and laughed.

In terms of narrative flow, this passage introduces delay before the shooting of the potato gun and thus is a suspense builder. It is also a slight diversion that keeps the ending scene from being solely focused on just one thing. It also introduces humor with the pig humping and the hand raising. And, of course, it’s a bit of obvious symbol making. The baby pigs and the humping says life goes on. Itself another form of antithesis in a story where death has been one of themes. That the pigs are to be taken as emblematic of life is reinforced as the story closes. First comes the reminder of death:

He was ready to step it off when there was a hand at his sleeve: Alison.
   "Trevor told me about his grandmother. I'm sorry for your loss."
   "I appreciate that," he told the girl.

Then, in the story’s final sentence, we get the pigs again:

When he finally put his rag in his pocket, Cooper could hear the pigs working hard through the brush for these succulent wonders.

Here the pigs are associated with the potatoes—no longer ammunition, but food, a source of nourishment, life—which are described in the story’s last two words as “succulent wonders.”
 
So Carlson has used not just all the tools in the shed, but some of the animals in the barnyard, too.

As Easy as Mashed Potatoes

With a traditional story such as Ron Carlson’s “The Potato Gun” one way to judge the effectiveness of the ending is to ask yourself how apparent is it that the character has changed. If you can quickly say, yep, Cooper seems different at the end, then the story’s arc has been successfully realized. A further test, what I call the Baxter anti-epiphany test (after Charles Baxter’s “Against Epiphanies” from his essay collection Burning Down the House), is whether or not the change is recognized because of action or because of a narrated epiphany. Carlson sides here with Baxter: Cooper does not speak an epiphany nor does the narrator attribute one to his thoughts. Yet the change is obvious. Thanks to the potato gun.
 
This is a form of ending that John Gerlach in his book Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Story termed completion of antithesis. Carlson’s ending fits this determination by a number of measures. Gerlach writes:

Circularity, a return to any aspect of the beginning, through verbal of situational echo, is one form of antithesis.

So, by returning to the potato gun at the end, Carlson is signaling closure. When they drive off with the potato gun we know the end is approaching, the terrain, the story’s arc, has been traversed and the journey is about to wrap up. Gerlach would call the two potato gun scenes “antithetical markers” whose purpose is to “indicate that boundaries have been established, so that new territory (in its metaphorical sense) need not be explored.” The mother has been buried. The mayor liked his transit report. His son has been to the prom. Anyone who doesn’t understand, please raise their hand. (I thought it was a stroke of brilliance when the hands went up again as the pigs humped—another antithetical echo in the ending.) And by letting Trevor shoot the gun Cooper has found “a way in,” which is what he sought at the beginning of the story after “he’d got it wrong forty times before.” Forty one, counting the opening scene.
 
Gerlach further writes of antithesis that it is:

any opposition, often characterized by irony, that indicates something has polarized into extremes.

And we see that polarity at work in this story. At the beginning Cooper is afraid of the potato gun: “he didn’t know how to hold the thing; it felt terrible.” And he calls the police to find out if it’s legal. On the other hand, at the end of the story Cooper is opening a gate to drive out onto state land and egging Trevor on as he shoots the gun. Here’s Gerlach again:

If the story passes from positive to negative or vice versa, from down to up, if a character changes from hating to loving something or someone, the movement from the extreme of one pole to the other carries what I term antithetical force.

At the beginning of the story Cooper is unsure, uptight, and fearful. Here’s an example—with an epiphany even Baxter would love—that shows all three:

He'd already formed a picture of that savage group blowing round holes in the block walls and the stucco houses. "I don't know," Cooper said, "if it's legal." He looked out the open garage door at the fresh spring day, now gone for him. "We may not be allowed to have this in the city." He hated how that sounded, but he was scared of the thing blowing up or hurting someone. Cooper's father would have said, "Let's go out and see what this baby can do," but it had skipped Cooper, that confidence.

At the end he’s directing things, proclaiming victory, and laughing:

Cooper had everyone stand behind Trevor, and the boy in his tuxedo trimmed a potato and rammed it into the barrel. He charged the chamber with a touch of butane and, holding it aloft, touched the end with the automatic match. The noise was a two-part wa-whump! and they all strained their eyes in the night sky. Trevor, careful to keep the barrel pointed away, turned to them and said, "Sweet."
   "Victory is ours," Cooper said.
   "How far did it go?" Justin asked.
   Trevor fired it four more times, and then Cooper drew a line in the sand with a stick. "I'll go straight out the road." Cooper said. "When I wave my arms, I'll be at a hundred yards. Fire straight, so I can measure." . . . Cooper waved again. For a while that was what they did late in the night and into the early hours after the junior prom. Cooper was laughing as his wonderful son shot potatoes into the desert.

That’s how we know Cooper has changed. No epiphany is needed. Combine Fitzgerald’s dictum that character=action with the antithetical markers Gerlach describes and showing change is a piece of potato.

A Shed Full of Sharp Tools

Here’s the first of several blogs on Ron Carlson’s story “The Potato Gun” which was originally published in Esquire and is included in his recent collection (just out in paperback this month) At the Jim Bridger. The first thing that struck me about this story was how traditional it is, a story in the classic model. It’s linear. A problem is presented and solved. Not a fresh approach at all. The kind of structure MFA students are often steered away from. The kind of story many editors say they’ve seen enough of. Yet there it is earning a nice paycheck for the author at one of the top magazines. The story also takes as one of its topics the death of a parent. Boy, there’s a theme that’s never been written about before. I’ve seen guidelines from a number of literary magazines that specifically state “no more stories with dying parents.” Yet Carlson pulls it off. The story is also a virtual encyclopedia of standard fiction writing techniques. That makes it a great teaching story. Want to know how to show rather than tell? How to use an objective correlative? Make a flashback seamless and relevant? Render emotions in ways that aren’t cliché? Reveal character using doubles? Run story arcs on multiple tracks? Convey meaning with dreams? You want Irony? It’s got that too. It’s even got sex (okay, not graphic), drugs (okay, booze), and rock-n-roll (okay, vintage Ricky Nelson). Carlson uses every tool in the shed. Not a dull one in the bunch.
 
I’m going to discuss the ending in detail tomorrow, so I’ll warn you to read the story before then if you haven’t already.
 
Today it’s that dying parent. A mother. How’d he get away with that verboten theme? First off, the story is not just about the mother dying. It’s an important part of the story, but not the sole focus. The more insistent (and explicit) theme of the story is the relationship between Cooper and his son Trevor. And beneath that surface is the theme that is revealed indirectly: Cooper sees Trevor growing up and becoming a chip off the old block. The double that becomes a mirror. A number of other topics meander through the story and help to divert the focus from the dying parent: Cooper’s attitude to his work; the way his wife serves as an emotional conduit; and coping via compartmentalizing his interior life. It’s a long story with plenty of multi-tracking going on so it never seems to be a dying parent story. So the moral is: Don’t single-track the story.
 
Equally important is that mother’s death is dealt with obliquely. He gets the phone call. He makes arrangements. Writes the obituary. Condolences arrive. One brief paragraph where he says good-bye at the funeral home. A couple of sentences about the memorial service. Then scattered moments of grief and some stray “sorry for your loss” comments, and that’s it. That’s a story arc in itself. Except Carlson never makes any of these points on the arc (with the exception of the good-bye paragraph) the sole focus of any scene. They always come up in the context of something else. Here’s a perfect example of what I mean:

Helping Trevor with the bow tie for his tux ten minutes before, Cooper had said, "This is a new record for ties in a week." He'd stood behind his son the day before and formed a Windsor knot in a blue striped tie which then Trevor pulled apart and redid, saying, "That's clever how it cinches." In one minute the boy had mastered ties. That tie had been for the memorial service, which had filled the little chapel. They had all been people his mother had talked to, counseled over the years, a collection of her puzzle buddies, the neighbors, her nieces and nephews. Cooper had given the eulogy, stepping through the stages of his mother's life by keeping his back to the canyon, not letting his mind look over the edge.
   Now Trevor came out of the house walking stiffly in his tuxedo, carrying a little corsage in a plastic box with both hands.

Carlson doesn’t give us the scene at the memorial service, instead he relates it offhand as Cooper helps Trevor get ready for the prom. That’s how to make a story about a dying parent not about a dying parent.

Here's Looking at You

Daniel Wallace’s “A Night Like This” has a tidy three-part structure: before the sex-date, the sex-date, and the aftermath of the sex-date. As with any good sex-date, the story has multiple climaxes. The first climax is one many of us can appreciate/curse:

After it was over, we lay beside each other, breathing. As fast-paced as everything had been up until then, it was weird, just lying there, still. I'd left the bathroom light on, with the door cracked, and a thin path of light edged across the room and fell against my dresser. We were both looking at it. On the top of the dresser was a little photograph of my wife, unframed, leaning against a candlestick holder . . . I had found the picture the other day and something about it, I don't know, it was just a nice shot of her. But looking at it now, with this woman, it made me wish I had put it away.
   "Who's that?" she asked me.
   "That picture?" I said. "Nobody."

And to add insult to injury, when she asks him if it’s his girlfriend he says, “I don’t have a girlfriend.” At this point, as with any good climax, the story gets interesting as it climbs towards the next peak, which is a doozy, one that rocks his world:

"It's none of my business," she said, "but I should tell you, you know, for the next time this happens to you. It's maybe best not to have a picture of your ex-wife on display. It kills the mood."
   She smiled at me then, in a friendly way, and I knew, just the way I knew a week ago we were going to be having sex that night, that we were never going to be having it again. It just wasn't going to work out. I knew in a heartbeat we weren't going to be seeing each other again, all because of that picture I had on my dresser, and the way the light fell on it so that we both could see. The way she said the next time this happens to you. The next woman, she meant. The next her. And I thought, How wonderful. How wonderful that I would get to go through this all again, the movies and dinners, the incremental kissing, the flirting, the figuring of each other out, just to get right back to this place. Jesus Christ! I thought, I might have to do it ten times, even more.

You might call that a kind of an epiphany, but notice that it is not pure navel-gazing, but comes about because what she says to him, the way she delivers the truth that hurts.
 
Deceptively powerful for such a short piece, thanks in good part to the miniature three-act structure.