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Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life

4/13/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Born April 13, 1906

S. Beckett

My Book World

(Liveright)

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather
Haunted Life. New York: Liveright,
2016.

Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success.

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).

Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.

Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia

Using Texting as a Metaphor

1/29/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
Born January 29, 1860

A. Chekhov

My Literary World

Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”:

Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple.

“At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4).

Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier?

In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time.

At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings?

Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

1/26/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.
Novala Takemoto
Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name.
New York: Farrar, 2007.

This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men.

I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern.

Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy:

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book:

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.

NEXT TIME: My Literary World

Award Winner Nails Story

1/15/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Osip Mandelstam
Born January 15, 1891

O. Mandelstam

My World of Short Fiction

January/February 2018, David Greendonner. “Lionel, for Worse”: This story, winner of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction 2017 competition, is a gem of understatement. Narrated by a woman, she tells of her husband, Lionel, who a month earlier has lost his best friend, Stan. The woman and Lionel discuss how they’d like to have their ashes disposed of someday. While making a trial run on the shore of Lake Michigan of just such a disposition, using ashes from their own hearth, they encounter some high school girls, one of whom says, “I’m so sorry for your loss” (5). The line is both humorous and subtly poignant concerning the man’s true loss.

Profile of author from contributor’s page: "David Greendonner is from Bridgman, Michigan, and is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in fiction. From 2015 to 2017 he was the managing editor of the literary magazine Third Coast" (115).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States | 2-Oklahoma

Vacationing up a Lazy River

12/18/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.
Tom Parker Bowles
Born December 18, 1974

T. Parker Bowles

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 18 & 25, 2017, Zadie Smith, “The Lazy River”: A British family vacations on the metaphorical Lazy River in Almería, Spain. Smith’s latest novel is Swing Time, which came out last year.

NEXT TIME: ON HOLIDAY HIATUS UNTIL AFTER JANUARY 1, 2018

Cat People Sneak Up On You

12/11/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination.
Devdutt Pattanaik
Born December 11, 1970

D. Pattanaik

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 11, 2017, Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”: Margot, a twenty-year-old college student who works at a movie theatre begins texting a young man who turns out to be thirty-four.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

A Dog Story

12/4/2017

A WRITERS' WIT
Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.
Cornell Woolrich
Born December 4, 1903

C. Woolrich

new yorker FICTION 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

December 4, 2017, J. M. Coetzee, “The Dog”: A young woman who passes by the yard of a vicious guard dog each day confronts the owners about introducing her to the dog. Coetzee’s most recent novel is The Schooldays of Jesus.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

November 27th, 2017

11/27/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
Gail Sheehy
Born November 27, 1937

G. Sheehy

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 27, 2017, Will Mackin, “The Lost Troop,":The narrator unravels an episodic tale of American soldiers in Afghanistan, 2008, involving themselves in a series of very unwarlike events. Mackin’s collection, Bring Out the Dog, will come out in March 2018.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

The Perfect Couple

11/20/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Fiction is a report from the interior.
Deborah Eisenberg
Born November 20, 1945

D. Eisenberg

new yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 20, 2017, David Gilbert, “The Sightseers”: Robert and Paulette, residents of a newish high rise overlooking Central Park, prepare for and attend a party given by another couple in their social circle. Gilbert’s most recent novel is & Sons.

NEXT TIME: Farewell to a Piano

Which Way to Turn

11/6/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
At school, if I was ever bored in class, I would draw maps of islands or detailed interior of boats or lists of provisions and equipment I would need when I went camping in the summer.
Michelle Magorian
Born November 6, 1947

M. Magorian

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 6, 2017, Anne Enright, “The Hotel”: A woman flies from Dublin to New York then to Milan and finally to a German-speaking nation she cannot identify. The author’s most recent book is The Green Road published in 2015.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Fatherhood to the Max

10/30/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known. What is never said is that power reveals.
Robert Caro
Master of the Senate
Born October 30,1935

R. Caro

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

John Clang

***October 30, 2017, Joseph O’Neill, “The Sinking of the Houston”: A Manhattanite father of three teens sets out to retrieve his mugged son’s phone. ¶ This story which strikes one note at the beginning—FATHERHOOD—quickly veers and intersects a larger history. In his high-tech fashion—monitoring son’s mugger by way of a track-your-child app on his own phone—Dad looks to rectify this wrong. After weeks of surveillance, he sallies forth in what looks like will be a kill and in the elevator encounters an old-man neighbor who soon reveals that when he was a teen he’d survived the sinking of the Houston in his engagement with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1962. The reader never learns whether Dad locates the mugger, but this chance meeting with a former teen does seem to change the context of his mission. O’Neill’s collection, Good Trouble, comes out in June 2018.
Photograph by John Clang

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Strangler Bob and Other Freaks

10/23/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.
Ned Rorem
Born October 23, 1923

N. Rorem

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 23, 2017, Denis Johnson, “Strangler Bob”: In 1967, eighteen-year-old Dink lands in jail for car theft along with a cast of characters with names like B.D., Dundun, and Strangler Bob. Johnson’s posthumous collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, comes out in January 2018.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

More Than One Snake

10/16/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
Günter Grass
Born October 16, 1927

G. Grass

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 16, 2017, Tessa Hadley, “Funny Little Snake”: A nine-year-old girl in 1960s London goes to visit her father and young stepmother who at first does not want the child around. Hadley’s latest book is Bad Dreams and Other Stories.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

To Like or Not to Like

10/9/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it—this is a hard lesson.
Bruce Catton
Born October 9, 1899

B. Catton

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 9, 2017, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum , “Likes”: With the 2016 election and a twelve-year-old ballerina’s social media posts as background, a father attempts to cope with his daughter’s puzzling leap into adulthood. One of Bynum’s recent books is Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Memorial with a Hole in It

10/2/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
Born October 2, 1904

G. Greene

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 2, 2017, Ben Marcus, “Blueprints for St. Louis”: Roy and Ida, architects designing a memorial for victims of a mass bombing, differ on how to achieve their goal—just as they differ on how to live as a married couple. Marcus’s most recent collection is New American Stories.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

A Bachelor Party to Remember

9/25/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Born September 25, 1897

W. Faulkner

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 25, 2017, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “As You Should Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died”: When police storm the door of a man, he, as narrator, assumes that his friends have designed an elaborate practical joke in lieu of bachelor party. Khemiri’s latest book is Everything I Don’t Remember.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Negotiating That Last Sunset

9/18/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
Steven Pinker
Born September 18, 1954

S. Pinker

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 18, Edwidge Danticat, “Sunrise, Sunset”: A Miami Haitian family must accept that their aging mother is suffering from dementia and her daughter from postpartum depression. The author’s most recent book is The Art of Death.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli

NEXT TIME: My Book World

When a Bowl Is Not Just a Bowl

9/4/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Richard Wright
Born September 4, 1908

R. Wright

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 4, 2017, Miranda July, “The Metal Bowl”: A young woman makes a single but popular pornographic video, a momentous event that continues to influence her life seventeen years later. July's most recent novel is The First Bad Man.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Running Scared

8/28/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Born August 28, 1749

Goethe

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Cromwell | Rea

***August 28, 2017, Lauren Groff, “Dogs Go Wolf”: Two unnamed girls, ages four and seven, are abandoned at a fish camp on a Florida island and must fend for themselves. ¶ This story unfolds as any living nightmare might, with the consciousness of the two girls running wild like the story’s dog which keeps returning to camp then running into the woods: revealing their squalid nomadic past, the unnurturing nature of their mother and all her friends, the everyday search for food when sources run out, boiling stagnant pond water to stay hydrated until they run out of charcoal and must gather wood. The abuse of abandonment multiples tenfold each hour they are without loving, adult care. When other people arrive on the island—after what must be weeks—the girls don their mother’s shifts and apply lipstick to greet them. The older girl

“put the lipstick back into her pocket. She would keep the gold cartridge of it long after the makeup inside was gone and only a sweet waxy smell of her mother remained” (74)

Haunting, yes, haunting that a child would still think fondly of a parent after being treated so harshly, but that’s exactly what many of us do, find it in our hearts to forgive. Groff’s most recent novel is Fates and Furies.
Photograph by Rose Cromwell

NEXT TIME: My Book World

The Difficulty of Calming Shame

8/21/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I worked at Sears as a salesperson when I was in college. Makes me nicer to folks to have to stand all day and be nice to picky people.
Sharon M. Draper
Born August 21, 1948

S. Draper

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Tillmans | Zwirner

***August 21, 2017, Garth Greenwell, “An Evening Out”: A man celebrates the end of his seven-year teaching career in Bulgaria through a drunken night out in Sofia with two former students, both male. ¶ Perhaps the nameless narrator (except for Gospodinut, male teacher), Z., and N. are emblematic of the shame the story engenders when, in an unseemly display, he gropes and ogles one of the men on the dance floor of a noisy night club. Perhaps the excessive clamor, the excessive liquor, the excessive jubilance numb Gospodinut’s shame, but in the soberness of morning he is positive it will overwhelm him. Yet as he staggers toward his campus apartment, Mama Dog, a mascot, approaches him and becomes symbolic of a subtle change about to take place in Gospodinut’s life. This story achieves what most writers of gay stories would kill to achieve: both a specificity and universality that arrive in harmony on the page. Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, came out in 2016.
Photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans c/o David Zwirner Gallery

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Our Desires Elude Us

8/7/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Early in my career, I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back.
Betsy Byars
Born August 7, 1928

B. Byars

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Richard McGuire

***August 7 and 14, 2017, Don DeLillo, “The Itch”: Robert T. Waldron, forty-four, possesses a body that itches symmetrically (both thighs) and when he takes his shirt off. ¶ Of course, his problem is more complex than that. Robert has itched with his former wife and now with Ana, a new lover. He sees three different seemingly eccentric dermatologists, each prescribing different yet ineffective remedies. One even asserts that the itch will always be with him. Just a gut feeling, but I believe Robert’s itch is a metaphor for his desires. What desires? Any and all of them. All persons itch for something or someone their entire lives. Though this story is not entirely appealing it is one I do admire, carried off with great aplomb by a skilled fiction technician. DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K, came out in 2016.
Illustration by Richard McGuire.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Christina Is Astonishing

7/31/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in American Psycho. In 1993, every day was “Let's get lost.” I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be found.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Born July 31, 1967

E. Wurtzel

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**July 31, 2017, Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224)”: In this first-person account of a true story the eldest sister of three recalls the narrative of her troubled sister, Christina. Quade’s collection, Night of the Fiestas, came out in 2016.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Dangerous Crossing

7/24/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us The Village Voice and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
Gus van Sant
Born July 24, 1952

G. van Sant

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Jon Lowenstein

***July 24, 2017, Cristina Henriquez, “Everything Is Far from Here”: A woman crossing over the border from Mexico into Texas is separated from her five-year-old son by the coyotes responsible. ¶ Fiction or not, this account is the most realistic, it would seem, that I have ever read: mothers waiting for children in the American detention center and not always being reunited, sickening food and water, other disenfranchised who are even more callous than the attendants, more abuse: “To throw up is to disobey orders” (54). Hope, like new skin, regenerates itself each day, yet it can be dashed abruptly:

“And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground” (55)

Every American should have to spend a day in the protagonist’s shoes if for no other reason than to see what some must undergo to seek the privileges others more than likely take for granted.

“It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind” (55).

A sad truth. The author’s latest novel, The Book of the Unknown Americans, came out in 2014.
Jon Lowenstein, photographer.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Surviving the Accidents of Life

7/10/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.
David Brinkley
Born July 10, 1920

D. Brinkley

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**July 10 and 17, 2017, Hye-young Pyun, “Caring for Plants”: A man survives a car accident that his wife does not, and his mother-in-law moves in to care for him in a rather bizarre manner. Pyun’s novel, The Hole, comes out in August.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Rarified World of Skiing

7/3/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
Born July 3, 1937

T. Stoppard

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**July 3, 2017, Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Skier”: An Italian boy follows a Swiss girl up a ski slope, climbing past the end of the lift, to a rarified world of white hares and partridges.

NEXT TIME: My Book World