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Upside-Down Family

6/27/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
 . . . we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes—this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Born June 27, 1872

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureGrant Cornett
June 27, 2016, Paul Theroux, “Upside-Down Cake”: In this story narrated by a son named Jay, a large family gather to honor their mother on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. ¶ These seven adult children are welcomed by their mother with about as much zeal as when they are children:

“Child-hating was not a pretense for Mother, the jokey exasperation of a sentimental woman, who spoke of her children insincerely as rug rats and burdens. She had already raised seven of them, plus the ghost of Angela—why more? Children bored her, they irritated her, they were always in the way. Worst of all, they took attention away from her” (62).
The mother’s animosity toward children, including her grandchildren, as one can imagine, has done little to create seven secure adults—though all seem to be educated and well connected. Sarcasm and dark irony reign supreme at the table in a restaurant called the Happy Clam. The meal limps along until dessert is served:
“Mother smiled at the slumping, soggy cake, topped with eight lurid pineapple slices, most of them with a cherry in the middle, two with candles, and, on the sloping side, “MOTHER” spelled out in shaky worm-cast piping, with scrolls and roses around it.
     ‘Make a wish, Ma,’ Franny said. ‘Pineapple upside-down cake. Your favorite’” (61).
At this point three more guests enter the room, a grown couple and their child, and all seem to be counting their fingers, to determine who these outsiders are. In a way, it doesn’t matter. This family doesn’t merit the presence of anyone decent, let alone the narrator’s thirty-eight-year-old son he once put up for adoption, his son’s wife, and their young child. Yes, it’s a mean trick for Jay to play on his family but one that they probably deserve. Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads is the author’s most recent book.
Photograph by Grant Cornett.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Bettyville Is a Powerful Book

6/24/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.
Jandy Nelson
Born June 24, 1965

My Book World

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Even if you don’t read this book (but I suspect you will) you must watch Hodgman’s reading on C-SPAN’s Book-TV. His wit is a razor-sharp knife crusted with the salt of a Bloody Mary. It cuts both ways—going in and coming out—and you either laugh or cry or both as the joke pops up in front of you like a sudden obstruction in the road. In this particular reading he shares the stage with another gay man of the same age, writing a memoir about a dying parent whom he is called upon to care for. (I have Bob Morris’s Bobby Wonderful on my shelf ready to start at any moment).
 
I love, love, love how Hodgman drifts in a fairly chronological line from beginning to end, yet, like an amoeba, darting or sometimes gliding, into the past to fill us in on a bit of information we must have about the past: his years as a student at the University of Missouri’s noted school of journalism; years that he works for Vanity Fair; years that he slaves as an editor for a large publishing company (who lets him go under the guise of “restructuring”). Back and forth we drift with him as he cares for his elderly mother now beset with many problems. Back and forth we drift, as he divulges only enough information to keep us returning for more, with him as he becomes addicted to drugs (particularly speed). Back and forth we drift with him between caring for Betty in Bettyville, a little town of her own making, as he spends summers on Fire Island at the height of the aids crisis. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, that we will have to live through Betty’s funeral after she dies of cancer, but no. Hodgman’s book isn’t about Betty’s death; it is about her life. And his. And how the two have come together in not always such a beautiful manner as mother and son. If you have been through, are going through, or will ever go through caring for a parent, this book is one that just may help you to cope.
 
A few nuggets from the book:
 
        “My counselor in New York, Paul Giorgianni, asked about my family, my life, my feelings, sex life, vices. When he asked if I used drugs, I said only when they were available. He asked if they were a problem. I said not for me. He said I should not use them as an avoidance. Why else I would [sic] use them?
           ‘You don’t have to entertain me,’ he said.
           ‘Then what are you paying me for?’
           ‘You are hiding from your feelings.’
           ‘Can you teach me how to hide a little better?’
           ‘Why did you come here?’
           ‘Lobby art.’
           ‘Why did you come here?’
‘Because I can’t get a job.’ I explained that I could not get through an interview and that I kept making a fool of myself on dates. ‘I lose myself,’ I told him. ‘I go away. I can’t be there when I need to be. I go away’” (167).
 
        “Back in my office, I reviewed the form calling for everything but organ harvest and the renunciation of God and country. It was lengthy. I got a little emotional. I felt like Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? When I tried to call my authors to tell them what had happened, I froze. Within moments, the publisher was back at my door.
           ‘Have you signed the form yet?’
          I didn’t respond. My head was full of voices; I went outside to try to get it together. As I passed the publisher’s office, the question came again.
           ‘Have you signed the form yet?’
          I stayed in bed for days, listening to the voices fling curses. I hadn’t worked hard enough. I hadn’t gotten it right. Work was all. I am nothing, nothing without work. No one is. Not without work. Harry worked hard. Bill worked hard; Mammy worked hard; Betty worked hard. Shut up’” (234).
 
“Sometimes a few decades of Final Net are all an honest woman can count on in this life” (238).
 
“It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, ‘Thirteen inches in the Poconos.’
           ‘Is that a porn film?’ I asked” (238).
        
“It is interesting, gratifying even, to watch this almost human let down his guard, warm up, grow less frightened. I have watched him transform from a pup reluctant to leave his mat or crate to a daring household forager who considers it his God-given right to poop copiously in the middle of the living room. ‘Get some OdoBan,’ a neighbor advises when I share our housebreaking problems.
           ‘How much,’ I ask, ‘do I take?’” (273).

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016



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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Russell on Target Again

6/20/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.
Vikram Seth
Born June 20, 1952

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureLuke Pearson
June 20, 2016, Karen Russell, “The Bog Girl”: Cillian Eddowis, fifteen-year-old inhabitant of “this green island off the coast of northern Europe,” discovers a young woman his age buried in the bog where he works liberating peat from its natural environment. ¶ That he takes the Bog Girl, this 2,000-year-old body preserved by its acidic past, home with him is bizarre enough, but with the following sentence one is once again in the midst of a Karen Russell story:

“In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park” (61).
One has suddenly left every earthly story one knows and landed in Russellville—a place where almost everything seems normal about the love affair between a fifteen-year-old and a perfectly preserved (for all one knows) fifteen-year-old who has been preserved for 2,000 years. Nearly everything is normal about their budding relationship, except that Bog Girl never speaks. When she finally does, uttering a language that is no longer spoken anywhere on earth, Cillian is frightened back into reality, and their relationship ends like many adolescent relationships do:
“He was not who she’d expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teen-ager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water” (69).
Russell has prepared the reader for this ending. One finally apprehends the overarching metaphor one might have missed for the forest. Every adolescent has experienced this realization about one’s first lover. It’s over. It simply is. Russell’s most popular book may be Swamplandia! I know it’s one of my favorites.
Illustration by Luke Pearson.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Courage in the Lion's Den

6/15/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.
Adam Rapp
Born June 15, 1968

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Jonathan Foer's story is the fourth in a series of four. —RJ
PictureMirka Laura Severa
June 6 and 13, 2016, Jonathan Safran Foer, “Maybe It Was the Distance”: Three generations of the Bloch family—Irv, Jacob, and Max—head to Washington’s Reagan airport to meet their Israeli cousins. ¶ The middle cohorts—Jacob and Tamir—are the focus of this story seen through Jacob’s eyes: his struggle as a novelist juxtaposed against Tamir’s arrogance over having accumulated a massive fortune. Jacob recalls for the reader two significant events the cousins share: one in which, as teenagers, in Tamir’s bedroom in Israel, the boys masturbate side-by-side repeatedly (viewing the same pair of breasts via the computer) as if it is a sport; second, an incident which takes place in DC on the eve of Jacob’s bar mitzvah, where, in the middle of the night, Tamir jumps into the lion’s den at the National Zoo and expects Jacob to do the same. The dare to be courageous, the challenge, is indicative of the implicit contract in their lives, the American Jew leading a rather easy life compared to the Israeli facing death every day. Following their grandfather’s funeral years later the two have a short exchange, the tenor of which seems to encapsulate their lives:

“‘It was a hard day,’ Tamir said.
‘Yes, but the day has been decades.’
‘But it’s felt like only a few seconds, right?’
‘Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I find myself saying, “I’m going through a passage.” Everything is a transition, a stop on the way to the destination, turbulence. But I’ve been saying it for so long I should probably accept that the rest of my life is going to be one long passage: an hourglass with no bulbs.’
Tamir leaned over and in a low voice, almost whispering, said, ‘You are innocent.’
‘What?’ Jacob said.
‘You are innocent.’
‘Thank you.’
He pulled back and said, ‘No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.’” (77).
But the fact that Jacob lives in a country where, in certain respects, he can remain a child, trusting, is not insignificant. This entire story is adapted from Foer’s forthcoming novel, Here I Am, due out in September.
Photograph by Mirka Laura Severa

NEXT TIME: My Book World
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Langston Hughes Part of New Yorker Summer Fiction

6/13/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Born June 13, 1893

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Langston Hughes's previously unpublished story is the third in a series of four. —RJ
PictureIllustration by Noé Sandas
June 6 and 13, 2016, Langston Hughes, “Seven People Dancing”: Written in 1961 and found among Hughes’s papers at Yale University, this sort of prose poem spins like an LP, the story of an evening at a fairy’s apartment. ¶ Marcel rents out his place in Harlem to couples who wish to dance (and apparently more). For a price he provides the music of twelve stacked records plus liquor. The phrase “seven people dancing” becomes a refrain throughout the story, signifying that Marcel, the fairy, is always dancing alone. One of the couples is “mixed,” the girl white. When a tall, dark man indicates he doesn’t have the money to take advantage of the use of Marcel’s tastefully decorated bedroom, “the white girl” says, “Oh, but I do.” The next record falls onto the turntable and places the story in a definite era:

“It was a Dizzy Gillespie record, and what it said without words summed up the situation pretty well. It was not that room but the world in that room that was in the record. The music was uranium, and those seven people, had they been super-duper spies, could not have known more about atomic energy—that is, its reason for being a mighty way of dying, “Oh, but I do” being a component” (61).
This piece may once again demonstrate why unpublished works of dead authors should not necessarily be unveiled in this fashion. Did the story receive the same number of cuts or edits that the stories of living authors receive? There may have been a very good reason that Hughes’s story went unpublished until now. Was it because he didn’t wish for people to speculate on his sexuality? Was it because the piece was a work-in-progress? Was it because it somehow lacked the luster of his important works? The editor always must ask herself, “If I could contact the author in the hereafter, would he want this story to appear in The New Yorker in 2016?” Of course, there is no definitive answer. The questions is the answer.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016
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Armies Still Marching

6/10/2016

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 A WRITER'S WIT
Most children—I know I did when I was a kid—fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that—you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar.
Maurice Sendak
Born June 10, 1928 

My Book World

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Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night:
History as a Novel/The Novel as History
. New York: New American Library, 1968.
           
Almost fifty years after its publication, The Armies of the Night needs no summary. For that you can easily consult Web sources and get a take on its juxtaposition to similar literature of the time period. Nor need I comment much on the author's penchant for referring to himself in the third person. I merely thought it was about time I read some Mailer, and because this tome was recommended to me by friends, I selected Armies. It so clearly limns the times in which I lived as a youth who, except for a certain dumb luck, was spared the agony of being called to serve in the Vietnam War.
 
Instead, I offer, as usual, what I believe is perhaps the book in a nugget, what the novel is all about—a passage from the chapter, “Why Are We in Vietnam?”:

“Mailer had been going on for years about the diseases of America, its oncoming totalitarianism, its oppressiveness, its smog—he had written so much about the disease he had grown bored with his own voice, weary of his own petulance; the war in Vietnam offered therefore the grim pleasure of confirming his ideas. The disease he had written about existed now in open air: so he pushed further in his thoughts—the paradox of this obscene unjust war is that it provided him new energy—even as it provided new energy to the American soldiers who were fighting it.
 
“He came at last to the saddest conclusion of them all for it went beyond the war in Vietnam. He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane. The country had been living with a controlled, even fiercely controlled, schizophrenia which had been deepening with the years. Perhaps the point had now been passed. Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. The average American, striving to do his duty, drove further every day into working for Christ, and drove equally further each day in the opposite direction—into working for the absolute computer of the corporation” (188).
 
“Christians had been able to keep some kind of sanity for centuries while countenancing love against honor, desire versus duty, even charity opposed in the same heart to the lust for power—that was difficult to balance but not impossible. The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no Mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition—since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic” (188).

Wow! (No emoji needed.)

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016
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Art Uber Alles

6/8/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Born June 8, 1903

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Ben Lerner's story is the second in a series of four. —RJ
PictureBen Wiseman
June 6 and 13, 2016, Ben Lerner, “The Polish Rider”: Sonia, in the act of retrieving two paintings from her gallery owner so that she can clean them up before a show, leaves them behind in an Uber car and spends most of the story attempting to re-retrieve them. ¶ Lerner seems to insert himself as character/narrator of this story: a writer who is attempting to help the polish immigrant Sonia, among other things, navigate the nasty waters of Manhattan Uber riding. Lerner-as-narrator touches a lot bases to create this breathless narrative: how he and Sonia are the same age, he being from Topeka, she from Krakow; how he is a writer, she a visual artist; how art history informs both their lives; the fact that Sonia’s entire oeuvre is based on the image of the famous kiss between Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev—an image she has created variations of over and over again.

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The reader senses they will not locate the lost (stolen?) paintings. What seems most important is how cold, cold, cold life still is (and always will be) for struggling artists, particularly in New York City—and how petty theft and the bureaucratic ineptitude of a fairly recent start-up only exacerbates that cold, cold life. Lerner’s most recent book is The Hatred of Poetry.
Illustration by Ben Wiseman.

NEXT TIME: My Book World
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It Takes the Women of a Village

6/6/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
Steven Johnson
Born June 6, 1968

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Zadie Smith's story is the first in a series of four. —RJ
PictureRichard Mosse
May 6 and 13, 2016, Zadie Smith, “Two Men Arrive in a Village”: In this story two men enter an African village and commit rape and murder. ¶ Smith’s use of first-person plural allows the reader to peek over the narrator’s shoulder of this devastating scene. She could be one of its courageous women who form a circle around a young girl whom one of the men has targeted to satisfy his lust. The strength of the village women really comes to life, however, at the end when the chief’s wife returns to the village and learns of what has happened:
 
“But our chief’s wife stood up suddenly, left the room, and walked out into the yard” (47).
 
The reader has no sympathy for the men who have entered her village uninvited. Smith’s novel, Swing Time, will be out in November.
Photograph by Richard Mosse.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue Continued

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The Price of Saltness

6/3/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
A lot of compelling stories in the world aren't being told, and the fact that people don't know about them compounds the suffering.
Anderson Cooper
Born June 3, 1967

My Book World

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Highsmith, Patricia. The Price of Salt. Mineola NY: Dover, 2015.

How many times have I read a book because first I saw the film (and yet how many times have I not)! The most recent example, Carol, starring Cate Blanchett in the titular role, inspired me to read the novel. I’ve read Highsmith’s work before: The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Underground. I’m not sure, in spite of the awards won, that she’s ever been truly honored as a writer. The Price of Salt is not “just” a woman’s book or a “lesbian romance,” as some critics have suggested. The novel, originally published in 1952, portrays the story of two women who travel from New York to the West, and it heightens the ideal of love rather than diminishes it. Through its specificity of love between two women of a certain time period of a certain geography (ranging over two-thirds of the US), the novel creates a universality that is appealing across a vast number of readers.
 
Depending on whom you read or side with, Highsmith’s title bears a biblical reference. It may either refer to Lot’s wife or Matthew 5:13. I prefer to think it is the latter: “‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored. It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.’” Could it be that Highsmith chooses to be quite specific, referring to Carol’s nefarious husband perhaps, when she suggests that a relationship without love might as well be stomped on by men? In chapter twenty-two Highsmith makes perhaps the most transparent reference to this idea of salt: “In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?” (225). Therese now believes that everything with Carol is over, but a small part of her also believes that the salt, the flavor, of their relationship shall in some way be restored. And she is right. The final paragraph, though it may be “romantic,” is certainly not sentimental (see below).
 
Some nuggets:

Therese senses a certain role she’s been playing with regard to Carol and their magical trip westward. “But at moments she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky” (174).
 
“Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist” (199).
 
“‘But the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women’” (221).
 
And here is the final paragraph I mentioned before: “She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the room where a piano played. The lights were not bright, and she did not see her at first, half hidden in the shadow against the far wall, facing her. Nor did Carol see her. A man sat opposite here, Therese did not know who. Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw here, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never see before. Therese walked toward her” (248-9). Just like the film!
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
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