ALR Summer Book Club: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) is our highlight this week at the ALR blog. Fans of Lahiri’s first published story collection will also want to read her novel The Namesake (2003) and her most recent publication of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) to follow her map of questions about self and family. A story is a series of sentences, one after another, but it does not follow that perfect sentences make a perfect story. While the smooth, minimalist sentences of Interpreter of Maladies can feel unemotional, the stories gather a pathos that will certainly move readers. Her exploration of the Indian-American experience, especially the effect of immigration on the different generations, provides a study of human nature that transcends age, gender, and nationality: everyone hopes and everyone grieves. The nine stories in this collection model for writers the truth that there is no more compelling subject than human relationships.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Lahiri says that she likes her prose to be plain. She continues: “Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can. … My writing tends not to expand but to contract.” The following quote from the title story “Interpreter of Maladies” can be taken as evidence of her success, though plainness and simplicity by no means exclude elegance or emotion. Mr. Kapasi, a tour guide, fantasizes about having a relationship with Mrs. Das, an Indian-American whose family is taking a tour in his cab, and her request for his address to send him some pictures makes him hopeful:

The paper curled as Mr. Kapasi wrote his address in clear, careful letters. … As his mind raced, Mr. Kapasi experienced a mild and pleasant shock. It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief. (56)

This is as smooth as language can get. Mr. Kapasi’s memory of the act of translation, a thematically significant trope, beautifully parallels his trust that he will hear from Mrs. Das again. At first it seems as simple as saying, “This is like that,” but coupled with the fact that Mr. Kapasi no longer remembers several of the languages he once knew, his naiveté here ought to warn him and does warn us readers that all struggles are not rewarded, and that some things will never make sense. By use of simple words, clear verbs, and little decoration, Lahiri describes the dear self-deception that is the source of much of Mr. Kapasi’s behavior.

My favorite story is “A Temporary Matter,” the first in the arrangement. One of the most perfectly constructed stories I have ever read, it describes the slow disintegration of Shukumar and Shoba’s marriage a few months after the stillborn delivery of their first child. That information is delivered on page three with as much sterility as one would find in a hospital: “When he [Shukumar] returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead.” The story’s title is apparent in the first sentence, when the couple receives a notice that due to winter storms, their electricity will be temporarily turned off for one hour every evening for five days. During the outage, over dinner, Shoba initiates a game in which they each tell the other a secret, from a harmless lie to an unfaithful impulse. But the temporary matter gradually becomes, of course, their marriage, and the two secrets that Shukumar and Shoba tell each other at the end of their game are shocking symbols of their grief.

About the symmetry of the narrative structure of “A Temporary Matter,” Shoba and Shukumar are progressing equally on opposite paths, a perfect X. As she spends more time away from the house at her work or the gym, distancing herself from the painful memories and unfulfilled hopes, Shukumar spends more time at home, sometimes not leaving the house for days. In fact, purposefully to avoid Shoba, he moves his desk into the baby’s room, though he does little work on his dissertation. Another reversal is the shopping and cooking, which Shoba had taken great pleasure in, foresightedly buying and preserving food she thought was in excess of their needs, and which she now leaves to Shukumar, who has discovered for himself the small pleasure she left there in the remains of the carefully labeled rice. Dinnertime in the candlelight has become the one time of day when the couple meet to spend time together, but if things continue as they have begun, the routines Shukumar and Shoba have invented for themselves will cease to intersect.

Lahiri’s characterization of the story’s two principle characters—the others are all peripheral, occurring only in Shukumar’s memory except the Bradfords, themselves a picture of what the husband and wife will never be—is built on a slowly amassed pile of significant details. Shukumar’s first description of Shoba has her just home from the gym with the remains of her makeup darkening her eyes, but on the fifth day he reports, “She hadn’t been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat. Her makeup had been retouched recently” (20). This litany of facts assumes significance in light of the last confession Shoba makes at dinner, that she will be moving into an apartment. She is ready to make complete her distance from him, absenting herself completely from the house she treats “as if it were a hotel” (6). At first Shukumar interprets her appearance as a return to normalcy, to their previous intimacy, but after she breaks the news it becomes a sign that Shoba has begun planning for the future again, yet one that does not include him.

The notion of the lights going out is a significant metaphor, one of the few that Lahiri indulges herself in. The act of confession becomes easier for the couple in the dark; on the first night Shukumar moves the impromptu candle holder farther down the table, “making it even more difficult for them to see each other” (11). As they communicate more freely and for the first time in months, Shukumar begins looking forward to the evening, thinking all day about what he will say to his wife upon her return from work. He takes more care with the food and himself, even leaving the house to buy candles to facilitate their nightly game. On the fifth day, however, the electricity has been repaired early, and their truth-telling must occur in the light. After Shoba tells him she is leaving him, Shukumar tells her against her wishes “the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise” (22), the gender of their child, a boy. After these confessions have been received in silence, Shoba turns off the light, and they sit together at the table, crying. In the darkness they become more enlightened, hiding their wounds from the harsh light of day.

Shoba tells Shukumar, “You didn’t have to tell me why you did it” (18), which could be the words of the author herself. Lahiri practices an eloquent restraint from commenting on the morality, decisions, behaviors, or emotions of her characters. Shukumar is drowning in grief, but Lahiri never once mentions the word. Her sentences, clinically correct, only imply the emotional states of the man and woman who did not become parents; even when they cry, she observes the fact like a reporter. Did you find Lahiri’s narrative style appropriate or comforting? Singly, each of these stories carries the lonely reservation of characters walking over strange and foreign ground, missing communications and suffering grief; but together in a collection, that burden might become commonplace through too much familiar treatment. What did you think about “A Temporary Matter” and about the eight other stories? Did you find them too different or too similar? What was your experience reading Interpreter of Maladies?

If you love Jhumpa Lahiri, visit her website or listen to her read and discuss William Trevor’s story “A Day.” If you want to talk more about Interepreter of Maladies, take a look at the reading group guide from Houghton Mifflin or leave a comment.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (both the original and final manuscripts)

Although Raymond Carver may compare to the “indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool” (see last week’s post), he still merits two weeks in the American Literary Review Blog spotlight. And why not? This indie band is popular because of talent. Carver did not lip-sync his way into undergraduate textbooks. He knows something about writing—something the rest of us should pay attention to. And so we are. Last week, we looked at Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? This week’s focus is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (the final book and the manuscript version).

The same kinds of techniques that impressed Zach continue to impress me in this week’s reading. Carver uses minimalism and open-endings to draw in readers. As some of his titles demonstrate, his writing isn’t always the most straight-forward or concise. But it’s accurate and means exactly what Carver wants it to mean (let’s not get into literary theory . . . ). The reader knows exactly what Carver’s talking about and why (until it comes to some of the endings, of course). Carver presents only the necessary facts and does not spend much time describing the woman behind the check-out counter or the green shrub that grows next to the front door. He does nothing of the sort.

Instead, he makes statements such as “in this manner, the issue was decided” (303) from “Popular Mechanics.” This single line tells the reader that a baby dies by landing on a lit stove—a very unpleasant matter that does not require images of burning skin or terrorized screams. The reader can imagine pain and gruesome details well-enough without additional help. Everyone experiences pain, and everyone has the ability to cause pain or to make a mistake. These pains and mistakes become the topic for much of Carver’s writings. He chooses to hone in on the pivotal moments in peoples’ lives—the moments that start a new course. And, most of the time, these changes are not seen as positive from the characters’ points-of-view.

For instance, the story “Gazebo” centers on a husband’s affair that leads to the disintegration of his marriage. The narrator says that he and his wife “fouled” their lives and “were getting ready for a shake-up” (238) even though the husband claims to be the only person in error (along with the maid). The husband cheats, and the two begin to disregard all of their responsibilities and try to make the affair right or disappear. But this is not possible. The man’s actions begin an unstoppable course.

In “Sacks,” a father speaks to his son about how he goes for such a long time without “breaking any rules,” but suddenly cheats on his wife. Even he can’t explain the cause. In neither of these (and in most of) Carver’s stories, the narrators regret the “bad” decisions made. Carver does not celebrate these “rebellious” actions, but shows how all people are capable of acting out of character and that—sometimes—the consequences of said-mistakes change everything in a life. Carver defines those unavoidable human moments of life. Not all pain comes from mistakes, though, and shows up whether we “deserve” it or not. Topics of Carver’s stories also include childhood cancer, growing apart, and old age.

No matter the topic, though, Carver only includes details that matter (as stated earlier). Just as with Tobias Wolff, Carver’s stories challenge me to include only pertinent details (a kind of tricky thing to do). As Mr. Vande Zande pointed out last week, all of Carver’s minimalism and partiality to everyday heartbreaks solidify at the end of his stories. In the “Tell the Women We’re Going,” Carver describes the relationship of lifelong friends (Bill and Jerry) and the aspects of life they’ve shared (and that’s pretty much everything). But something changes at the end. The two men hit on two girls (their ages aren’t given) and the narrator believes that this is a kind of innocent event (as innocent as adultery can be).

Carver shocks the reader in the very last paragraph of the story: “He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (264). Bill and Jerry did not share this event and Bill is left trying to figure out how it all happened. And so is the reader. The events are clear, but their meaning is not—just as in real life. Meaning in life—and in stories—cannot be forced.

The open-ended stories that Carver uses to gently lead his reader to meaning tend to be stronger in the final version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? The final version of the manuscript includes a one more story and a different mix of the others. What strikes me most about the changes Carver made to the stories does involve details given and the endings (one the same in some instances). In “Why Don’t You Dance?,” the final version includes this description of the homeowner:

“The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. The saw the television set going and the boy on the couch” (225).

This version includes much less detail about the man than the original:

“Max came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sanwiches, beer, and whiskey. He had continued to drink through the afternoon and had reached a place where now the drinking seemed to begin to sober him. But there were gaps. He had stopped at the bar next to the market, had listened to a song on the jukebox, and somehow it had gotten dark before he recalled the things in his yard” (753).

Carver deleted much of the detail from the first draft of the story. This gives the reader much more independence to find out who Max is and why the furniture is in the yard. The original description makes Max out to be a desperate lonely man “drinking away his sorrows.” While this is still true in the second version, Carver leaves this information out, adding a bit more mystery to the story for the reader—causing the link between both the girl’s and Max’s desperation to be less apparent.

The original version of “Tell the Women We’re Going” includes much more detail—more unclear detail—than does the final version. Earlier, we looked at the concluding paragraph of the final version of this story. Carver quite bluntly inserts a scene where Jerry undoubtedly injures (or kills) two girls with a rock. The original version, though, is much more unclear:

“But Jerry was standing now in front of him, slung loosely in his clothes as though the bones had gone out of him. Bill felt the awful closeness of their two bodies, less than an arm’s length between. Then the head came down on Bill’s shoulder. He raised his hand, and as if the distance now separating them deserved at least this, he began to pat, to stroke the other while his own tears broke” (844).

To me, there seems to be some pronoun confusion here (maybe on purpose)? I am not sure whose bodies are close together . . . Bill’s and Jerry’s and Jerry’s and the girl’s? I am betting the second, but this is merely a guess. This ending also leaves much room for confusion regarding whom all is dead (both the girls or “just” one?) and who is patting whose head? Sometimes I am a dense reader, but I did not feel confused whenever I read the final draft of the story. Instead, I knew who killed who and the ramifications this cost—or what this signified in—Bill and Jerry’s relationship. Carver toned-down the details in order to clarify his main point so that the reader can connect the dots in the proper way. This is one kind of lesson writer’s should take away from Carver.

For the sake of length, I’ll leave it here. Do make sure to read the Selected Essays section of the collection. The essays shed light on Carver’s background and also his writing process. His essays alone deserve two or three blog spotlights.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's Collected Stories (more specifically, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?)

I have to admit that for a long time I just did not get Raymond Carver. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with him or anything—I’d read and taught “Cathedral” a dozen times, of course, and I plowed through What We Talk About When We Talk About Love one rough afternoon while having a double whiskey in the tub¹. It’s mostly that I thought he embodied the failings of the modern literary short story, that they are open-ended, obtuse affairs that begin in medias res and end in medias res. Hemingway meets Bukowski with less machismo and less of a desire to make a point. I am not beyond admitting that I am sometimes an idiot. And that’s the case here.

Everyone’s favorite Bulgarian, Miroslav Penkov², compared Raymond Carver to an indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool, and he might be right there. But listen: many of the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please knocked me on my ass. Reading it, I got what Carver was trying to do in a way that I didn’t as an undergrad or even a master’s student.

What it comes down to, in many cases, is tension. The worst thing in the world would be to be in a Raymond Carver story. I’m talking specifically here about “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and “What’s in Alaska?” Both of these stories involve social situations under duress—in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” a writer and his wife make an unannounced visit to the people living in their old home, and in “What’s in Alaska,” two couples get together to get high³ and eat junk food. In both, what’s marvelous is how the conversation starts fraying at the edges as the story progresses, leaving the reader waiting for something truly awful to happen without quite knowing what it will be or if it’s deserved. In “What’s in Alaska?” that awful thing doesn’t happen, as Carver carefully balances the conversation of four people who are high as hell and both trying and not trying to talk about the fact that there may be an affair going on, but we’re still left with a chilling image, which I’m going to quote here:

Just as he started to turn off the lamp, he thought he saw something in the hall. He kept staring and thought he saw it again, a pair of small eyes. His heart turned. He blinked and kept staring. He leaned over to look for something to throw. He picked up one of his shoes. He sat up straight and held the shoe with both hands. He heard her snoring and set his teeth. He waited. He waited for it to move once more, to make the slightest noise.

This last paragraph has nothing at all to do with the events that came before, but thematically, it’s perfect. It captures the man’s anxiety, the sense that something is wrong and has always been wrong under the surface or just out of view, without giving him any sense of resolution.

I suddenly feel like I need to re-read “Put Yourself in My Shoes” to really get at it, so I’ll just say that it has the same kind of tension as “What’s in Alaska,” only in this case it boils over into an ugly confrontation and a deliciously meta⁴ final line: “He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.”

Another thing that Carver does well is capturing that sense that something is wrong without quite letting the reader know what. In a less skilled writer’s hands, this trick would seem like cheating or not being forthright with the reader. “How About This” is a good example of what I’m talking about, but it’s all over this collection. In it, Harry and Emily are returning to Emily’s childhood home to live. It’s a cabin in the woods without electricity or running water, and Emily is afraid that Harry won’t be able to handle it. More than that, she’s concerned about dragging up old memories. The undercurrent is why they’re coming back here at all, and through the course of the story it is revealed that they are largely there because they don’t have the money to be anywhere else. The story ends with her doing cartwheels and handstands (as a child, she’d wanted to be in the circus) while he tries to light a cigarette. Look at these two passages, one close to the end of the story and then the very last passage:

He was pleased he knew himself so well. He would be all right, he decided. He was only thirty-two. Not so old. He was, for the moment, in a spot. He could admit that. After all, he considered, that was life, wasn’t it? He put out the cigaret. In a little while he lit another one.

And then:

He was reaching to light a cigaret with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.


“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.

I feel like they speak for themselves; those last lines encapsulate everything that’s wrong with their situation, and what they need to do to make it out. There’s hope, but it’s not a productive, let’s all read The Secret kind of hope—it’s bittersweet, it’s bearing the weight of probable failure, and it’s life-affirming in its honest appraisal. That’s what Carver’s all about⁵.

I’m talking a lot about the way Carver ends stories because that’s where the magic is in his stories. Everything in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please is spring-loaded, and even the stories that don’t have that gut-punch at the end (“Fat,” “They’re Not Your Husband,” “The Collectors,” “Are You a Doctor?”) get wound tighter and tighter in such a way that the lack of release becomes a release in and of itself.

I could go on, but I always feel like talking about stories does them a disservice in a way, especially minimalist stories.  I feel like a tourist at the zoo saying, "Did you see?  Did you see?" as if that adds to the majesty of what the lion has just done.  So I'll leave it at that for now, and we'll see what fruit the comments bear.

For those of you keeping score, next week, Elishia is going to discuss stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as their manuscript counterparts from Beginners. On June 23rd, Kelly is going to talk about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies; on June 30th, Hillary is going to talk about Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi; and on July 7th, I’m going to be back to discuss Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. There has been talk of keeping this thing going through the end of July, so if you have a recommendation of an author’s first short story collection that you’d like to see us talk about, well, that’s what the comment section is for (I am personally partial to Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help).

___________

1. For my money, a bath and some whiskey will solve pretty much all the troubles of being alive.
2. At least, here at UNT and in the ALR offices. I am sure there are other wonderful Bulgarians over where the Balkan mountains are proud, where the Danube sparkles, where the sun shines over Thrace and blazes over Pirin.
3. By the way, this story is a master’s class in and of itself in writing characters who are high.
4. I do so love the meta
5. See also the absolutely heartbreaking “Jerry and Molly and Sam” and “The Student’s Wife” for more examples of this.

ALR Summer Book Club: Our Story Begins

Wolff's latest collection features ten new stories, along with twenty-one oldies, and offers readers a quarter century of quality short fiction. His work, though arguably underrepresented in classrooms, remains one of the most unique and engaging examples of contemporary American fiction at its finest. Our Story Begins, like most collections, undoubtedly suffers from weak spots. Taken as a whole, however, Wolff’s stories are absolutely, and often inexplicably, both groundbreaking and transformative. All memorable writers, put simply, must approach the human condition from a perspective worth taking. That is, a perspective that reveals another small piece of the unexplored. Wolff, to be sure, accomplishes this—through technical and philosophical originality—while also giving writers and theorists a case study that demands diligent attention.

So yeah, that’s my two cents as a reviewer. As a writer, I find in Wolff’s fiction much more than this space, or my willingness, will permit me to discuss at length. I’ll confine this post to a few elements of craft and a few elements of criticism that particularly interest me, and hopefully it sets the stage for a more comprehensive conversation.

First, I want to say a few things about Wolff’s beginnings. The first few paragraphs of his stories are usually the most crucial. They provide the details of characterization that allow us to understand and interpret everything that follows. Wolff’s endings often correspond in some way to his beginnings. He often echoes, or makes us remember, something that we may have temporarily put out of our minds. These returns, I think, lend unity to Wolff’s narratives. They also provide the ammunition for the punches he delivers in so many of his stories’ last sentences.

This, on the other hand, is Tobias Funke.

The collection’s leadoff story, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” provides a good example of this. Mary’s deafness is briefly mentioned in the fifth paragraph, and it nearly disappears until the last sentence when she turns off her hearing aid “so that she would not be distracted again.” This sentence resonates, not only because it illustrates the extent to which Mary’s character has grown, but also because it returns us to that which we may have forgotten. The hearing aid—a simple detail, perhaps an example of Boswell’s “narrative spandrel”—resonates for the story beyond what it might have if Wolff hadn’t deployed it early on. The reason for its resonance, I think, isn’t simply that it returns. Nor is it simply that it gives the protagonist an object upon which to act out her transformation. The crucial point here, I think, is that the object itself undergoes a transformation. No longer is the hearing aid a symbol of weakness; rather, at the end of the story, the hearing aid is a symbol of strength. Mary’s handicap, essentially, becomes her advantage. She embraces her identity, her minority status, effectively enabling herself to stand up to the majority.

The simultaneous transformation—of both an object and a character—offers one way for Wolff to achieve narrative unity and resonance. In other beginnings, Wolff doesn’t rely on a single object. In “Smorgasbord,” for instance, the protagonist introduces the general motif of food long before the prospect of dinner at a buffet arises. He also draws class distinctions between himself and his classmates, and admits his possession of an insatiable appetite, all in the second paragraph. At the end of the story, the loss of his innocence corresponds with his purchase of satiation. Desire, like hunger, can only be satisfied through the possession of the material and monetary wealth that the narrator covets. We know this from page one, but the poignancy of the consequences foreshadowed at the beginning will only hit home in the last paragraph. Essentially, Wolff subtly foreshadows cause to subtly strengthen both cause and effect. The narrator experiences a short term consequence of his subjection to the perverse indoctrination of capitalism when his relationship falls apart; on page 225, though, Wolff also hints at the long term consequences of the narrator's experience: "we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to." Here, the narrator's voice suddenly speaks to us from the distant future, and yet, even this older and "wiser" narrator understands the futility of resisting the army of cultural apparatuses from which he must choose to accept either satisfaction and destruction together, as a package deal, or destruction alone.

Similarly, Wolff might introduce a character’s habit—his tragic flaw, perhaps—in the beginning of a story, which sets up its return and resonance in the end. In the fourth paragraph of “Firelight,” the narrator and his mother exercise the “power of looking” as they shop for unaffordable goods and services. This causes the narrator to worship appearances, and it results in his ultimate unhappiness at the story’s end. To really believe in something rather than its mere appearance, for him, is to “make it vanish.”

Another aspect of Wolff that I admire is his Chekhovian ability to maintain detachment and objectivity without sacrificing feeling or emotion. Wolff’s voice is never cold, nor is it sentimental. A few reasons for this, as far as I can tell: Wolff knows when to dive into a character’s head, and he knows when to stay out; he knows what information to give us, when to give it, and how; and he knows how to withhold commentary and let the action and characters (both major and minor) speak for themselves.

In “Hunters in the Snow” and “The Liar,” Woolf uses narrative detachment in two very different ways to achieve the same effect. Both stories feel distant, and both are deeply invested in their characters, but their degrees and methods of measured detachment are quite different. “Hunters in the Snow” works because Wolff stays out of his characters’ heads for most of the story. He zooms out and watches them slowly destroy each other. To hear their thoughts would be to diminish the effect of their mutual destruction. On the page, a character's thoughts lend them greater self-awareness and greater self-consciousness. If Wolff had brought it to our attention that Tub, Frank, and Kenny were aware of their individual cruelties to one another—or that they were capable of situational circumspection—then we might be more prone to pass judgment on their despicable actions. As it stands, we watch the wintry coldness of each characters' outer tragedy unfold without jumping into the warmth of their inner selves.

“The Liar,” on the other hand, demonstrates Wolff’s unparalleled ability to create perfect first person narrators. This entire story leads us, not to a transformation of the protagonist, but to the revelation of how deeply pathological he is. Rather than a turn, there is a no turning back. Like so many of Wolff’s first person narrators, the genius of the character development in “The Liar” is that the narrator’s acute unreliability is never clear enough to cause readers to give up on him. Wolff gives us just the right amount of information, such that we cannot accuse him of withholding or manipulating. He lets the narrator speak for himself, and it works because, despite his pathological lying, he is ultimately sympathetic toward his mother and utterly self-aware. The simultaneous detachment, drawn from the narrator’s objective, unsentimental recounting of the “facts,” not only makes for a fascinating character, but its juxtaposition with the narrator’s sympathy allows for the sadness of the inner story to shine through without seeming forced, manipulative, or predictable.

“The Other Miller,” my favorite story in the collection, works in a similar way. The point of view is close third person, but it feels like first person. Though some readers may anticipate the ending, this certainly does not diminish the experience of all that leads up to it. Like “The Liar,” this story is a journey into the mind of a character who understands—yet simultaneously rejects—his own situation. The slow, steady reveal of information—Miller’s relationship with his mother—juxtaposed with the action occurring on the surface—Miller’s diabolical plot to escape active duty—provides just the right amount of inner and outer story to make the ultimate revelation of the totality of Miller’s shock a powerful one. Wolff brilliantly stays out of Miller’s head unless it’s to tell us how nervous he is about getting caught impersonating himself. He also creates a convincing story by giving the two minor characters agendas of their own—they aren’t simply set pieces or devices. They drive the story because they are interesting, and their personalities and machinations distract us from the truth of Miller’s mental condition.

I think I’ve gotten long-winded, so I’ll wrap it up. I had hoped to throw some theory in—because there’s much here to be thrown—but alas, I’ll save it. One lagniappe I will add, though, is that Wolff’s stories are all immensely concerned with identity construction. Many of his characters are searching for ways to define themselves by first defining their not-selves. Crisis hits them when they run up against something that they don’t understand. Their first instinct is to fill in the blanks. If a blank clings to its vacancy, however, there arises a confrontation with the unspeakable Other. Besides its potential for theoretical musing, this also provides an interesting template for storytellers: confrontation with Otherness requires that the protagonist explain it away (fundamental misunderstanding) or become it (fundamental self-betrayal). After this choice, the protagonist fights a battle to maintain whatever sense of self in which the choice represents an investment. “Deep Kiss,” for example, follows a character’s perpetual misunderstanding of the other that ultimately results in his inability to define himself. “Desert Breakdown, 1968” follows one character who projects his dreams onto the other and thus causes his own downfall, and another character who accepts Otherness as unspeakable and thus finds the strength for self-preservation. “Next Door” also details two characters’ different approaches to explaining the inexplicable, and the last paragraph hints at the arbitrariness of all such approaches.

Anyway, I’m throwing in the towel now. All in all, amazing collection. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Hubbs out.