My Top Five Literary Moments
(1) Several small bits in Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly, Too." This is likely my favorite short story, full stop. It's about a woman who leaves the midwest to visit her ostentatiously successful sister in Manhattan.
We learn early on that the protagonist is maybe losing her mind. She is an academic; she is hard at work on a history of presidential jokes. I'm obsessed with the title of this work-in-progress, "Hearing the One About: Humor and the American Presidency." The protagonist has recently purchased her own house, and she is so startled to own property, she has wandered around the lot with a hammer and nails, affixing exuberant signs to various objects. Attached to a tree, a sign that says: "My Tree!" Her course evaluations indicate that her work has been slipping: "Professor X arrives late to class, skipping and humming GETTING TO KNOW YOU. She carries hot cocoa, which she offers us sips of. Is this scholarship?"
Of course, it becomes clear that the protagonist is likely dying of cancer. (A plot is: crime, cover-up, investigation...but we often get the sequence in reverse: investigation, flashback to the cover-up, flashback to the crime.) The story becomes distressing and even frightening at the end, without warning--just as life tends to become distressing without warning. There is playtime, then it's over. I love this protagonist, and I love her story.
(2) "The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that losing them is no disaster." These lines are so canonical, we forget how weird they are. The perfect iambs, as if we were back in Shakespeare's day. (Formal constrictions are sometimes--paradoxically--a liberating force.)
The speaker is so authoritative, you might miss the fact that she's full of shit. She is like a Sondheim character, lying to us and to herself. It's not actually easy to master grief. If it were, we wouldn't have fiction; we wouldn't have art. "Practice losing farther, losing faster": As if grief, like curling, were a skill to be studied. The progression of objects lost: keys, a continent, YOU. The way the speaker cracks in the final moment: "This may look like--WRITE it!--like disaster." We finally get access to the inner voice, willing the outer voice to present us with this silly facade. The mask has dropped.
(3) I have always loved the protagonist in Alice Munro's "The Children Stay," who has a dawning, sickening realization that she must leave her chipper schoolteacher husband. The way she is casually, cheerfully bullied. The way she and her father-in-law seem to share a bleak, wordless understanding. The climactic scene, after the big extramarital transgression, when the protagonist stands in a public bathroom and scrubs her "hard-used private parts," and begins to understand what she has done. And the final, ironic bit of Munrovian cruelty: None of this will prove to be "worth it."
(4) "Every time I start to get defensive, I remember lasers are expensive." This is Sondheim's George, in "Sunday in the Park," willing himself through an awkward donors' event. Sondheim introduced me to the idea of subtext. George conjures various cardboard images of himself, laughing freely with obnoxious rich people--and, at the same time, George addresses us directly. He lets us in on his actual thoughts. "The art of making art is putting it together." There are some nice throwaway moments in the dialogue. What do you say when you have nothing nice to offer an artist: "Oh my! Your installations! They're getting...so....large!"
(5) Amy Bloom's "Claire" stories. These are four stories that span several years. At the start, Claire, reasonably happy in her marriage, finds herself servicing her hugely fat best friend, late at night. ("They have 110 years between them.") The painful whirlwind of adultery becomes a source of comedy. Claire finds herself sneaking fatty foods to her gout-stricken lover; Claire does not need to play the good wife. Part of indulging in this love is sacrificing Claire's friendship with her lover's wife; in a twist of fate, Claire finds herself channeling this friend's Martha Stewart tendencies as a means of getting through the lover's (eventual) funeral.
One psychological detail I enjoy: Claire needs someone, some family member, to be complicit in her affair, so she takes her lover to meet her aging uncle (once "the Casanova of Great Neck"). The event explodes in her face, as Claire might have anticipated, and the uncle whispers, "Don't do this to me again." The series ends with Claire alone and in mourning, wandering around in a bathrobe and talking to a nosy raccoon. She has had just a short period with her lover. You sense she would do it all again.
Ellie Kemper has said her favorite writers are bards of the suburbs--Munro, John Cheever. People who can find all the hidden, queasy life within apparently quaint towns. I'd add Bloom to the list. Everything seems on fire in the Claire stories; a bland world of Olive Gardens and Lane Bryants suddenly seems teeming with dangerous emotion. That, there, is difficult to pull off--and it's wonderful.
*Another thing I love in Lorrie Moore's story. An undergrad approaches. She wears a big leather bow on her head. She whines: "I just want my major to MEAN something!" And the professor says: "That's your first mistake." She shows the kid to the door and says, "Nice bow!" Etched in my memory--permanently.
(1) Several small bits in Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly, Too." This is likely my favorite short story, full stop. It's about a woman who leaves the midwest to visit her ostentatiously successful sister in Manhattan.
We learn early on that the protagonist is maybe losing her mind. She is an academic; she is hard at work on a history of presidential jokes. I'm obsessed with the title of this work-in-progress, "Hearing the One About: Humor and the American Presidency." The protagonist has recently purchased her own house, and she is so startled to own property, she has wandered around the lot with a hammer and nails, affixing exuberant signs to various objects. Attached to a tree, a sign that says: "My Tree!" Her course evaluations indicate that her work has been slipping: "Professor X arrives late to class, skipping and humming GETTING TO KNOW YOU. She carries hot cocoa, which she offers us sips of. Is this scholarship?"
Of course, it becomes clear that the protagonist is likely dying of cancer. (A plot is: crime, cover-up, investigation...but we often get the sequence in reverse: investigation, flashback to the cover-up, flashback to the crime.) The story becomes distressing and even frightening at the end, without warning--just as life tends to become distressing without warning. There is playtime, then it's over. I love this protagonist, and I love her story.
(2) "The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that losing them is no disaster." These lines are so canonical, we forget how weird they are. The perfect iambs, as if we were back in Shakespeare's day. (Formal constrictions are sometimes--paradoxically--a liberating force.)
The speaker is so authoritative, you might miss the fact that she's full of shit. She is like a Sondheim character, lying to us and to herself. It's not actually easy to master grief. If it were, we wouldn't have fiction; we wouldn't have art. "Practice losing farther, losing faster": As if grief, like curling, were a skill to be studied. The progression of objects lost: keys, a continent, YOU. The way the speaker cracks in the final moment: "This may look like--WRITE it!--like disaster." We finally get access to the inner voice, willing the outer voice to present us with this silly facade. The mask has dropped.
(3) I have always loved the protagonist in Alice Munro's "The Children Stay," who has a dawning, sickening realization that she must leave her chipper schoolteacher husband. The way she is casually, cheerfully bullied. The way she and her father-in-law seem to share a bleak, wordless understanding. The climactic scene, after the big extramarital transgression, when the protagonist stands in a public bathroom and scrubs her "hard-used private parts," and begins to understand what she has done. And the final, ironic bit of Munrovian cruelty: None of this will prove to be "worth it."
(4) "Every time I start to get defensive, I remember lasers are expensive." This is Sondheim's George, in "Sunday in the Park," willing himself through an awkward donors' event. Sondheim introduced me to the idea of subtext. George conjures various cardboard images of himself, laughing freely with obnoxious rich people--and, at the same time, George addresses us directly. He lets us in on his actual thoughts. "The art of making art is putting it together." There are some nice throwaway moments in the dialogue. What do you say when you have nothing nice to offer an artist: "Oh my! Your installations! They're getting...so....large!"
(5) Amy Bloom's "Claire" stories. These are four stories that span several years. At the start, Claire, reasonably happy in her marriage, finds herself servicing her hugely fat best friend, late at night. ("They have 110 years between them.") The painful whirlwind of adultery becomes a source of comedy. Claire finds herself sneaking fatty foods to her gout-stricken lover; Claire does not need to play the good wife. Part of indulging in this love is sacrificing Claire's friendship with her lover's wife; in a twist of fate, Claire finds herself channeling this friend's Martha Stewart tendencies as a means of getting through the lover's (eventual) funeral.
One psychological detail I enjoy: Claire needs someone, some family member, to be complicit in her affair, so she takes her lover to meet her aging uncle (once "the Casanova of Great Neck"). The event explodes in her face, as Claire might have anticipated, and the uncle whispers, "Don't do this to me again." The series ends with Claire alone and in mourning, wandering around in a bathrobe and talking to a nosy raccoon. She has had just a short period with her lover. You sense she would do it all again.
Ellie Kemper has said her favorite writers are bards of the suburbs--Munro, John Cheever. People who can find all the hidden, queasy life within apparently quaint towns. I'd add Bloom to the list. Everything seems on fire in the Claire stories; a bland world of Olive Gardens and Lane Bryants suddenly seems teeming with dangerous emotion. That, there, is difficult to pull off--and it's wonderful.
*Another thing I love in Lorrie Moore's story. An undergrad approaches. She wears a big leather bow on her head. She whines: "I just want my major to MEAN something!" And the professor says: "That's your first mistake." She shows the kid to the door and says, "Nice bow!" Etched in my memory--permanently.
Comments
Post a Comment