"Cold Little Bird" by Ben Marcus

This story can be found in the October 19, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine. 


First Line: "It started with bedtime.  A coldness.  A formality."

Last Line: "On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing."

I have not been so stunned and haunted by a short story since I read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in high school. 

And I mean that in a good way - in a "falling over and dripping with inexpressible words of praise" kind of way.

Wow.

Read it AND listen to it on SoundCloud.

Wow.

A story with no real resolution at the end (amazing Chekhovian style!), and a possibility of hope, but that even that possibility isn't solid. The only solid thing here is hurt.  It is the only thing that is tangible and seemingly immovable.

This story is not "inventive" - who said that fiction is more honest than truth?  "Cold Little Bird" is realistic with spot-on dialogue, eerie insight into the mind of the male protagonist, and a truthful examination of the affects a child's troubles can have on a marriage, a family.

A husband and wife and their two sons.  One very normal.  One very not - or is he just "sarcastic" or "acting out" because of his parents' tensions?  

Martin and Rachel respond to Jonah differently - and that is to be expected.  One parent is a man and the other is a woman.  And their reactions to each other's response is completely understandable.  The influence we have on those we love is fantastically deeper than we can imagine.

"Grow-Light Blues" is the only other Ben Marcus story I have read... but I am convinced of his power as a story-teller.  His tales are timely and well-crafted, touching uncomfortable topics in a unique way...

Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ben_marcus_3041200.JPG/220px-Ben_marcus_3041200.JPG
 

Married Love and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

I read "Silk Brocade" in the July 27, 2015 issue of The New Yorker Magazine and I knew immediately I discovered another author to love. In a tale about a young dressmaker, post-war England, a daughter, and a length of silk brocade, I discovered a writer who is a master of the short story. In just a few pages, Tessa Hadley lays out lifetimes and heart lines that stun and continue to linger well after the page has been put down.


I couldn't get enough of Ms. Hadley's writing, so I immediately purchased "Married Love and Other Stories." Not only a New York Times Bestseller, it was also the New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year for 2012. In these twelve stories, I found the skills of Chekhov and Mansfield emanating from one of today's writers

A young co-ed marries her much-older professor, not finding what she longed for. A cleaning woman sits in judgment of another woman she works with. A young couple meet each others' families, discovering they see life through different lenses. A love triangle finally simmers down into one tidy couple - post World War I. A girl creates an unlikely companionship during her parents' parties. A brother worries about his sister while snowed in at an airport. A soap actor offers a respite to a woman during a family gathering. Three godchildren observe and begin to understand the intimacies of adulthood. The mourning of a suicide and a misunderstood song lyric bring truth. The Caves of Lascaux hint at the "slight thing" that tilts a relationship in the wrong direction.
"Pretending" doesn't change reality. And the death of a producer leads to the "ordinary."
Ms. Hadley's writing is understated, incisive, and penetrating. Her stories are real - not contrived. She manages the tangled labyrinths of human relationships and embraces the essential elements of womanhood. There is a fine line between observing and becoming absorbed, and the reader is encouraged to walk that line.

The sentences of these tales imperceptibly melt into paragraphs. The paragraphs blend quietly into sections, developing into nice, neat packages. Everyday existence - the beautiful highs and the dramatic lows - are ordinary, but also beautiful and telling. The details are exacting, unearthing more than we realize within our own lives. Noting the character's subtleties encourages us to notice such nuances in the world around us. 

Thoughts - once secret and vulnerable - are now put out in the open in "Married Love and Other Stories." The characters are mysterious creatures to themselves no longer. Instead, they find kindred souls in the readers, enchanted by Tessa Hadley's storytelling.

This review originally appeared in The Canon City Daily Record.

Photo credit:  http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/516x3%2Beqi-L._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
 

"Major Maybe" by Ann Beattie

The story can be found here in The New Yorker.

First Line: "The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her."

Last Line: "Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor."

"Major Maybe" is a story of a memory - nostalgia.  It is about an image that pops up and takes the narrator back to a time that is rich with thoughts, choices, feelings.  A time when she was free to not choose and a time when she was able to observe and live without judgment. 

Remembering the red-haired woman's "mad dash into traffic" brought up recollections of a neighbor's dog, accused by the woman to be a devil.  The narrator's memories are further pressed into the building she lived in, the neighbors, her roommate, their affection that had its brief moment.  We dance along with Beattie in and around these images.  Up one tangent, and down another.  We follow her from an abrupt passionate moment with her roommate to her current state: married and remembering those days gone by.  All of this brought about by a picture she sees in a magazine of her old apartment.  

With my first reading, I felt like I was the tail-end in a game of Crack-the-Whip.  Beattie took me one direction, and then yet another.  The tone was both conversational and poetic. I was excited to follow where it would go.

But then it ended.  Sharply.  Beattie took a turn that left me stunned, fallen on the grass, gasping for fresh air.

Even so, I love the last line.  It echoes.  It lingers.  It made me ponder and made me go back into the story to find it's importance - to find why it hovered in my mind.

But it also made me question what a story is.  

At first, it seemed a poetic vignette - a lyric.  A snapshot-memory and then, life goes on.  How is this a shorty story?  What is the purpose in sharing this bit of nostalgia?

The purpose of the short story is to elicit a response from the reader.  Someone has insisted that they entertain. And Chekhov has said that writers are to ask the readers questions, not to answer them.  But each story must have a beginning, middle, and end.  That's what separates it from vignettes. 

I read again "Major Maybe" looking for the plot, the questions, looking for my answer to them.  And it was the ending line that kept haunting me.  "Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor."

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ann Beattie said:

Certain things that I like about endings—endings that hint at the whole story, that let you know there is an arc, but that offer some related image or emotion, instead of decoding the initial image, or pattern, or symbol, endings that alter the tone and the mood just a bit. I realize that some people criticize me for being arbitrary with my endings. I think my stories are very determined. I can tell you the reverberation I have in mind for each element in the story. I can’t make you read it that way, but it’s been contrived, and then revised. What is there is intentional.

I can see it. There is an "intentional" arc in this story.  Both the plot and the characters shift from where they were in the beginning.  There is a beginning, middle, and end.  The narrator shifts.  And her life has shifted with her.  

I can see it, but I had to look really hard, with eyes squinted, to see it.

The thing that remains?  Something "indelible".  Memories.


My "response" to this story?  "And?  So?"

Did I find questions here to examine?  Yep: "What is the author trying to do here?"

Was I entertained?  For a bit. 

Do I still think this is really more like a photograph despite the beginning, middle, and end and the narrator's shift?  Does this feel like a vignette forced to dress-up like a short story?

Yes.