If you haven't read "Killings," please listen up.
Calvin Trillin grew up in the Midwest--in Kansas City--and attended Yale. He developed an interest in writing. Writing, he says, is *not* primarily about sensitivity. Or an ear for dialogue. Or even curiosity. Writing is about confidence--first. A willingness to believe you have something to say, and then the chutzpah of "putting it out there." Trillin, it seems, has had many decades of confidence, confidence in spades.
Beyond that, he also has the other stuff: curiosity, sensitivity. He finds outlandish characters and gets inside their minds. He makes us see how colorful figures operate. (He's like the director of "Gloria Bell," who found inspiration by turning a camera on his mother. Trillin seems to erase himself from his own stories, and to "meld" with the people he writes about.)
Trillin also thinks outside the box. He says many people write about killings as a way of trying to isolate major demographic trends: "This slaying is part of a recent phenomenon whereby shady characters in Iowa, all over Iowa, murder one another." The demographic trend never interested Trillin. Like a poet, Trillin always wanted to get more and more and more intensely focused on tiny things. To name all the fascinating attributes of one grain of sand. To leave all the generalizing to other people.
In "Killings," over a span of maybe forty years, Trillin travels to the various States of America and interviews murderers and colleagues of murderers. The stories don't involve famous people. Often, the stories seem not to have any sense of "closure." And yet almost every single story is sensational.
Cambodian families arrive in a liberal area of Kentucky; one Cambodian man ends up trying to murder his own children. Is that because other Cambodian refugees were quietly threatening and terrorizing this family (and making existence seem unbearable)? Or because the father had a mental illness? Or because someone in the family had found an ominous sentence in a sloppy English-to-Cambodian translation of the New Testament? Or did several factors combine? Who knows?
And, elsewhere, a shady figure recruited by the police ends up shooting a drug dealer. Was this guy really in danger of losing his life, as he claimed? Or had he never really abandoned his own shadiness? Had he used the new "police informant" cache to justify outrageous and lethal behavior? Trillin has suspicions, but he also acknowledges that we simply don't get to learn all that we wish to learn--in this life.
My favorite story involves two outspoken women in a wealthy town outside of D.C. The women became entangled in a fight about a tiny, tiny piece of property. Eventually, the fight led to one woman shooting and killing the other woman's assistant. As the months passed, both women became ridiculously grandiose, clothing their own behavior in language that would be more appropriate for a civil rights struggle. "We must stand up to bullies!" "I feel like Rosa Parks here!"
As Trillin observes, if either party had said, "I was wrong and I'm sorry. I was upset and acted like a child." -- the death, and ensuing legal struggle, would not have happened.
We can be very petty and vulnerable and thoughtless, and sometimes our frailty leads to catastrophic nonsense. That's the message, over and over, and it's something Trillin (and therefore the reader) takes to heart.
Even if human foibles aren't your subject of interest (and how could this be possible?), you may want to study Trillin simply for the quality of the writing. Detailed, unpretentious, briskly-paced, humorous, compassionate, multi-layered, clear as day: Almost every sentence is near-flawless.
Have I overstated my case? Such is my zeal! Thank goodness for Calvin Trillin...
Calvin Trillin grew up in the Midwest--in Kansas City--and attended Yale. He developed an interest in writing. Writing, he says, is *not* primarily about sensitivity. Or an ear for dialogue. Or even curiosity. Writing is about confidence--first. A willingness to believe you have something to say, and then the chutzpah of "putting it out there." Trillin, it seems, has had many decades of confidence, confidence in spades.
Beyond that, he also has the other stuff: curiosity, sensitivity. He finds outlandish characters and gets inside their minds. He makes us see how colorful figures operate. (He's like the director of "Gloria Bell," who found inspiration by turning a camera on his mother. Trillin seems to erase himself from his own stories, and to "meld" with the people he writes about.)
Trillin also thinks outside the box. He says many people write about killings as a way of trying to isolate major demographic trends: "This slaying is part of a recent phenomenon whereby shady characters in Iowa, all over Iowa, murder one another." The demographic trend never interested Trillin. Like a poet, Trillin always wanted to get more and more and more intensely focused on tiny things. To name all the fascinating attributes of one grain of sand. To leave all the generalizing to other people.
In "Killings," over a span of maybe forty years, Trillin travels to the various States of America and interviews murderers and colleagues of murderers. The stories don't involve famous people. Often, the stories seem not to have any sense of "closure." And yet almost every single story is sensational.
Cambodian families arrive in a liberal area of Kentucky; one Cambodian man ends up trying to murder his own children. Is that because other Cambodian refugees were quietly threatening and terrorizing this family (and making existence seem unbearable)? Or because the father had a mental illness? Or because someone in the family had found an ominous sentence in a sloppy English-to-Cambodian translation of the New Testament? Or did several factors combine? Who knows?
And, elsewhere, a shady figure recruited by the police ends up shooting a drug dealer. Was this guy really in danger of losing his life, as he claimed? Or had he never really abandoned his own shadiness? Had he used the new "police informant" cache to justify outrageous and lethal behavior? Trillin has suspicions, but he also acknowledges that we simply don't get to learn all that we wish to learn--in this life.
My favorite story involves two outspoken women in a wealthy town outside of D.C. The women became entangled in a fight about a tiny, tiny piece of property. Eventually, the fight led to one woman shooting and killing the other woman's assistant. As the months passed, both women became ridiculously grandiose, clothing their own behavior in language that would be more appropriate for a civil rights struggle. "We must stand up to bullies!" "I feel like Rosa Parks here!"
As Trillin observes, if either party had said, "I was wrong and I'm sorry. I was upset and acted like a child." -- the death, and ensuing legal struggle, would not have happened.
We can be very petty and vulnerable and thoughtless, and sometimes our frailty leads to catastrophic nonsense. That's the message, over and over, and it's something Trillin (and therefore the reader) takes to heart.
Even if human foibles aren't your subject of interest (and how could this be possible?), you may want to study Trillin simply for the quality of the writing. Detailed, unpretentious, briskly-paced, humorous, compassionate, multi-layered, clear as day: Almost every sentence is near-flawless.
Have I overstated my case? Such is my zeal! Thank goodness for Calvin Trillin...
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