Trouble
with Girls
Marshall Boswell
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95 (cloth)
8One of the mysteries of literary
physics is how the short story—something we are repeatedly
told no one any longer wishes to publish or read—manages
to maintain its significance. From Stuart Dybek to Nathan Englander,
the story has provided a launch pad to some starlit new talents,
and every year one or two collections bust through the firewall
to become, however briefly, Events. Perhaps this is because the
short story has often registered the faint, initial tremors of
American literary change. Minimalism saw its earliest and best
fulfillment in the short story, for instance, even though its
most cunning practitioner, Raymond Carver, never managed to finish
a novel.
A chronological walking tour of the American short story might
look a little like this: Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow,” Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Hemingway’s
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Flannery
O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” John
Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” and Denis Johnson’s
“Emergency.” Melville and O’Connor thought life’s
metaphysics could be unpacked within a single short story, while
Hemingway believed the story capable of withstanding a head-on
collision with death itself. To look at the Library of Congress
data on a short-story collection published today will inevitably
turn up some mild-sounding encapsulation such as this: “1.
United States—Social life and customs—20th Century—Fiction.”
Whether this winnowed subject matter and decimated ambition can
be blamed upon the publishing industry (so covetous of a theme—any
theme—around which to wrap a set of stories), our Masters
of Fine Arts programs, or the exhausted nature of the form itself,
who can know? All we can know is that writers will keep writing
short stories, and they will keep getting published, if only by
smaller and smaller houses and magazines (which by and large is
already the case), because for a small but determined number of
people the short story means something more than a suggestion
of what a writer might later be capable of.
“The Archetype’s Girlfriend,” the first story
of Elizabeth Crane’s collection When The Messenger Is
Hot, begins: “Sarah or Anya or Max is five foot ten,
five foot nine or five foot eight, but never shorter, and she’s
naturally thin. She’s thirty or she’s twenty, or she’s
almost forty and looks ten years younger even when she rolls out
of bed in the morning.” And so the story goes, on and on,
a catalogue of mutually exclusive and contradictory topic sentences
about a pseudo-mythical girlfriend. How Crane manages to tell
a story without stability of character or anything resembling
a plot is jaw-dropping. She takes every imaginable scenario (“You
meet when she slam-dances into you at the Mudd Club, or at a gas
station where she’s shoving and cursing at a guy twice her
size” and combusts and spectralizes it; the story becomes
a prose poem about the endless possibilities of love foiled.
Crane, one gathers immediately, is a shrewd and willfully self-destructive
writer in the Malcolm Lowry or Sylvia Plath tradition. For every
moment of thoughtfulness there is tedium to match it. Each winning
passage is soon followed by something infuriating, and a troublingly
insightful sentence will drag behind it something trite or shallow.
But this is, one suspects, the point. Crane’s language is
smart but inelegant, affected but inarticulate. Most of her main
characters are “arty” women of uncertain employment,
Manhattan-born (though they have usually left it behind), and
have histories of alcohol abuse, own small dogs, and display the
neuroses of the arguably mentally ill (talk of suicide has a tendency
to surface in these stories as though it were just another life
option). One story finds a hapless young woman moving into a wealthy
friend’s solarium on the Upper East Side and, strangely enough,
making what remains of her life there. There is something very
winning (if slightly Rumsfeldian) about an author able to proceed
from a logical premise, continue on into a completely illogical
complication, and maintain throughout the same spotlessly logical
tone.
“Something Shiny” begins this way: “So get this:
they’re going to make a movie of my life.” The story
gives us Wendy, a newly feted memoir celebrity who allows an actress
named Apple to move in with her to “experience” her
life. (“Maybe,” Wendy wonders, “she knows George
Clooney’s e-mail address.”) Apple quickly begins to
impersonate Wendy to her friends and family: “And then, as
if it isn’t enough that she’s stolen my name and my
difficulties, some of my friends go up to her after the [Alcoholics
Anonymous] meeting and . . . ask her to go get coffee
at Utopia as though she’s me.” The thing is, she is.
Apple has successfully become Wendy, and soon Wendy is
literally invisible. Whether Crane’s narrator has gone cuckoo
for Cocoa Puffs or the story is a kind of urban magical realism
is left up to the reader.
In this mode, of course, Crane is not alone. Some of the best
stories being published today seem allergic to straight vanilla
realism. Indeed, one of the most interesting movements in contemporary
American fiction is this absurdo-realism practiced by writers
such as David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders.
Absurdo-realism has come to us almost exclusively through the
conduit of the short story, something for which we should be thankful,
especially when so much contemporary short fiction comes off as
free throws dutifully shot in anticipation of the five-on-five
intensity required to write longer work. Speaking of Wallace,
is it now safe to say that, among writers of a certain age and
inclination, he is the single most influential writer currently
working? With the 1,000-page shadow of Infinite Jest looming
over his career, it is sometimes forgotten that nearly half of
his books are short-story collections (including his upcoming
volume). The self-consciousness, the footnotes (which Wallace
might now choose to leave to his disciples), the staggeringly
sharp eye and the remarkable ability to write for pages and pages
only of detail—all are part of the way many of us
write and think about writing now. One can see this in the journal
McSweeney’s (which shares Wallace’s spirit but
not always the relentlessness of his moral engagement) and in
the work of younger novelists such as Chris Batcheldor and Mark
Danielewski. And one can see it in Elizabeth Crane. “The
Super Fantastic New Zealand Triangle” (the title alone is
Wallaceian!) tells a story whose particulars are provided, mainly,
in nineteen footnotes. Sadly, it is the collection’s low
point, forced and unfunny, a waxen version of something that only
Wallace could have made come alive. “Josie and Hyman Differ
in Their Use of the Word Fuck” is, on the other hand,
one of the collection’s most devastating pieces, so deadly
in its vision of men and women that, despite its title, it should
see a steady future of anthologization. Josie meets two men: Hayes,
a boring banker (the khakied tribes take an anthropological drubbing
in Crane’s world); and Hyman, a composer; she begins to date
both of them. The discomforts and shibboleths of modern courtship
are brutally well revealed. Here, Hyman and Josie have dinner
in a Thai restaurant:
She has never had Thai food before . . .
and Hyman orders a variety of dishes for them to share, happy
to educate. Josie has had just about all the education she feels
she needs . . . but overall she is highly impressed
that Hyman is so intelligent and especially how that reflects
on her.
As for what can only be called the Cancer Stories—there
are at least three—“Year-at-a-Glance” is the most
successful: “And when my mother comes home as beautiful and
put together as ever but still attached to the oxygen tank and
has to sit down on the second stair from the exhaustion, I retain
the assumption that she’s still cured but just tired and
following the precautionary miracle cure maintenance of using
the oxygen and not overexerting herself.” Aside from poems,
short stories are probably the most obstinately autobiographical
literary form, and it comes as no surprise when one turns back
to Crane’s dedication page to find: “For Mom, in memory.”
Perhaps, in stories such as “Year-at-a-Glance,” rather
like Lorrie Moore’s justly famous “People Like That
Are the Only People Here,” we are learning that the short
story is no longer capable of taking on death, at least not in
the manner of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The world
of the story is no longer so terse and manly (“The marvellous
thing is that it’s painless,” Hemingway’s Harry
says chipperly of death); indeed, perhaps we have had far too
much manliness about death. Perhaps Crane’s approach of sad
impotence is more honest. As one of her characters narrates: “This
is followed by me explaining to the nurse practitioner that . . .
sixty-three is an unacceptable age for my mother to die.”
“Return from the Depot!”—about a woman whose deceased
mother returns, apparently from the dead, to get her own television
show before disappearing again—takes away from some of the
power of “Year-at-a-Glance.” In the story Crane metarefers
to its plot as “this whole mom-coming-back thing,” sentiment
with which the reader swiftly agrees. In Crane’s mother stories
there is too much pain and not enough art. As a person, one wishes
to reach out to their author, but as a reader one recoils. Art
should ideally demonstrate what one has learned from trauma, not
that one has suffered it. One senses that Crane explicitly understands
this in the novella-length story “An Intervention.”
Its plot is pretzelly, its subject matter (movie stars, Alcoholics
Anonymous, and dating) a Cranian admixture of the banal and fantastic,
and its telling is close to insane. The narrator, speaking of
one of her boyfriends, notes, “Plus a lot of the time he’d
say stuff that just didn’t make sense, but you knew he really
thought it did, and that he was sharing some big life truth with
you that was the equivalent of ‘New York City is essentially
run by a big blue horse.’” “An
Intervention” is also something approaching a tragicomic
masterpiece, and the reason to own this book.
When she is at her best, one feels that Crane has struggled and
succeeded to communicate something she has learned through much
toil. At her infrequent worst, one feels simply unloaded upon:
Here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about—don’t
ask me what it means. But one reads anyway, goaded by Crane’s
intensely personal vision, and there is no higher praise than
that. Something is happening to the short story in these piqued
and spiky pages, something not yet successful enough to praise
unreservedly, but something compelling enough to make one eagerly
await Crane’s next book.
* * *
As his title makes plain, Marshall Boswell’s breezy, sharp
Trouble with Girls organizes itself along gender-schism
principles with which Elizabeth Crane would likely have sympathy,
even if their worlds could not be more distant. Crane is cynical,
urban, and eastern, while Boswell is sunny, suburban, and southern:
people in his stories state without shame the sororities and fraternities
to which they belonged. Boswell’s breeziness is deceptive,
however, and many of his stories deliver punishing body blows
to male vanity and its transubstantiation in the usual small debauches
(one-night stands and masturbation being the most depressingly
prominent). Not surprisingly, these stories will offer female
readers looking for clues into male psychology very little reassurance.
Boswell, the author of a fine scholarly book on John Updike and
a forthcoming book on the work of (who else?) David Foster Wallace,
takes the leagues of deep reading he has done of these two masters
and managed, inventively, a middle ground. Boswell wields a perversely
sensuous Updikean eye (“the wide warm animal fat of her buttocks”)
and broils within a hilariously paralyzing Wallaceian self-consciousness
(“You are twelve—thirteen, whatever—essentially
nondescript: a confusion of hormones and dread.”) The collection’s
first story, “Ready Position,” is the disassociated
stream-of-consciousness mind-spelunking of a boy named Parker
standing in right field, daydreaming and sporting an invincibly
mortifying erection. The story somewhat resembles Wallace’s
brilliant “Forever Overhead,” in which a boy stands
atop a diving board and simply thinks; both stories turn on the
horrified realization that life will not much improve beyond the
frontiers of age thirteen. Here too we encounter Boswell’s
gemologist-like talent for finding and bringing out fine detail:
Parker feels only “allegedly involved” in the game before
seeing “that Little League rarity: a perfect pop fly.”
And, as Parker feels the astonishment of the ball smacking into
his mitt, his “penis softly melts” in his pants.
Although all of these stories are about Parker—Boswell’s
authorial intimacy makes him seem Rothishly close to an old-fashioned
alter ego—they shift between second-, first-, and third-person
narratives. The third-person Parker stories seem the most successful,
even though Boswell’s channeling of the teenage-boy voice
is splendidly mordant, if not always believable. Of his torture-dispensing
older brother Parker notes, “For him, agony was both an essence
and a palpable reality. One of his favorite forms of torture was
positively Platonic . . .”
Stories such as “Born Again” (about a Christian Bible
retreat for kids where everything is predictably drenched in hormones)
and “New Wave” (about Parker’s miserable attempt
to go suburban punk) are merely entertaining. Boswell probably
could not write a bad story if he tried, but one wearies slightly
of the younger Parker and the occasionally slangy writing, which
often brings to mind Updike’s “A&P,” that weirdly
over-anthologized bit of treacle from an oeuvre abounding in jewels.
But even the lesser stories show what Boswell is able to do with
the minutiae of observation, as when he describes “the thrilling
slide of the thumbnail” down the left side of a brand new
record album. As Parker gets older the stories grow stronger.
“Stir Crazy” details Parker’s relationship with
a stripper (“nocturnal secretaries,” Boswell nicely
calls them) and manages to test Parker’s cheer as life’s
darker particulars (when, for instance, the girlfriend describes
for him “fucking” the stripper’s pole) encroach
upon him.
These later stories find Parker’s trouble with girls becoming
truly troublous, and it is to Boswell’s credit that the girls
in question are always sharply if not always fairly drawn. In
“Karma Wheel” we meet Trina, of the Trina Vortex, “the
term he [Parker] had devised years ago to describe the strange
emotional experience of arguing with Trina. The thing about her
emotional logic . . . was that it had an uncanny knack
of achieving a kind of self-referential clarity.” Such as
when she steals her scary ex-boyfriend’s gun collection.
She has done so, she explains, because her mother wants to commit
her to a mental institution.
The unfortunately titled “Venus/Mars” is actually one
of the collection’s best stories. Parker’s best friend’s
fiancée, Pamela, decides to escort Parker into the pheromonal
morass of the New South’s singles scene. She does this first
to sexlessly amuse herself out of her relationship drudgery and
second because of her theory that women respond to women, not
men. “Any guy,” Pamela tells Parker, “who’s
with a beautiful girl must have something. . . . The
guy with the beautiful girl becomes the target.” Basically,
she seeks to get Parker laid. Boswell, God help him, writes awfully
well about the slight but alluring pleasures of unattached nightlife:
“Talking to a strange woman in a bar is like trying to sustain
a Ping-Pong ball in midair by leaning your head back and blowing;
if you stop to breathe, the ball falls.” Of course, Pamela’s
theory plays out marvelously—until she and Parker fall in
love. The cruel twist the story enjoys at its conclusion reveals
the shrewder, emotionally harder writer one senses lurking behind
the brighter curtains of Boswell’s other stories.
As with Crane, Boswell has stashed his collection’s triumphs
at the end. “Between Things,” which finds Parker in
a post–grad school drift and attempting to tomcat his way
out of love with a “petite, elfish sprite” named Rachel,
begins this way:
In between things, Parker slept with
Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn’t do it, even insisted,
sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely
out of the question. Yet for one reason or another, reasons he
did not always care to examine, he just kept doing it. Over and
over again. Even after he said he wouldn’t. And he said it
all the time.
The story gives us one killingly funny observation after another:
“Parker and his graduate student colleagues liked to theorize
about the real world. Many of them wrote papers about the real
world.” “‘Oh God’—dropping
back onto the pillow, her [Rachel’s] hands in her hair—‘now
we sound like Cheever characters.’”
“‘Marketing? Isn’t that where
they create all these false expectations and phony desires . . . ?
Or am I getting that confused with pornography?’”
A story as wry as “Between Things”—which like “Venus/Mars”
skips along before stabbing its reader through the heart with
a candy cane—is enough to make one wonder if David Lodge
might not finally have his American inheritor. The last story,
“Spanish Omens,” which (unexpectedly) gives us Parker
and Rachel on honeymoon in Spain, is a terse, almost bitter story
about the inevitable disappointments of marriage, and could have
been written by the placidly illusionless Updike of Too Far
to Go.
* * *
Marshall Boswell is bravely upholding the traditional short story,
using David Foster Wallace as a partial guide; Elizabeth Crane
is interestingly deviating from the traditional short story, using
David Foster Wallace as a partial guide. Their books join a panoply
of startingly strong first short-story collections published recently,
among them Robert Anderson’s Ice
Age, Adam Haslett’s You
Are Not a Stranger Here, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The
Interpreter of Maladies, Tom Paine’s Scar
Vegas, Anthony Doerr’s The
Shell Collector, and Erika Krouse’s Come
Up and See Me Sometime. Where Boswell and Crane seek next
to take the form is up to them, but one hopes that they will not
abandon it. The American short story needs them both, if only
to figure out what on earth it is going to be next. <
Tom Bissell has published work in Harper’s, Men’s
Journal, and other publications.
Originally published in the April/May
2003 issue of Boston Review
home