Green Mountain Prose
Novel I
Reading this manuscript was an absorbing and highly pleasurable experience. Your fluid narrative and prose style carries the story with relatively few obstacles, and you’ve evoked a time and place, a cast of characters, I was perfectly happy to live in and with for these few hundred pages. And yet more enticing, more galvanizing than the experience I had with these pages is the one that I can project or imagine, based on the further potential of the novel’s materials. If I find this a likable, engaging manuscript that doesn’t always fully take hold or arrive, I see within it the germ of a really wonderful novel that I believe you’re entirely capable of accomplishing.
This question of the novel’s narrator, his position in time as he tells the story of the summer of ’62, should, as you noted, be the “first point” in a discussion of X. You say that you “think it’s clear that it’s an adult looking back.” And it does tend to feel at least a little that way at the start of your opening chapter (“It was 1962 and summer and our minds were already on baseball….”) However, for me, that reminiscent stance is not one that ever establishes itself with a great deal of force or consistency. We quickly swoop into a view, a rendering of the experience, that could with very few changes be L’s take on events as they’re happening, or not long afterward. And in fact it’s that sense of the boy’s experience at or close to the time that really dominates. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could count on a single hand the number of times that we get a truly, discernibly adult perspective, and those tend to stick out, to read as violations of the narrative norm. On rare occasion the narrative departs from an awareness tethered to strict chronology, jumping ahead to mention something L would only learn “later.” But that “later” typically only advances the calendar by mere months or weeks, instead of by decades. On the other hand, there are many instances where we get Lenny’s sensitive and searching awareness at the time of the action, and evidence of how that awareness expands and matures over the course of this unlucky summer. Those tend to be moments of particular, genuine depth and authenticity in the narrative, which don’t rely on a reminiscent vantage point either for their perception or even, in most cases, for the language in which they’re presented.
We have, of course, these two aspects or axes of the narration to consider—the sensibility of the character and the language itself. Actually, I find more inconsistencies in the language than in the sensibility. The voice of the narrator frequently swings, from younger (what could convincingly be Lenny in 1962 or shortly thereafter) to distinctly older and back again. But again, even in cases with fairly radical diction spikes, I most often concluded that the more adult voice wasn’t necessitated by the observations or interpretations being presented.
Not all reminiscent narratives demand a specific or explicit establishment of the adult’s present circumstance. However, I believe that the successful reminiscence does require a raison d’etre, a compelling justification for being set up as such—something I don’t yet find in these pages. Why is it important that this novel be structured as a distant, hindsight view of that summer? What indispensable facet of the novel’s vision can we only capture by filtering the experience through the grown man’s recollection? Often, when a reminiscence possesses that level of essential justification, it’s not only something about the past time being remembered, but about memory itself—the nature or experience of being an adult remembering childhood. Is that part of what interests you about telling this story? If so, I think it needs to become much more deeply integral to the fabric of the narration. But for the sake of devil’s advocacy if nothing else, I invite, even urge you to try and envision the story without that dimension, and see if what matters to you will stand. Frankly, I believe that switching your vision of the book to a non-reminiscent one would functionally entail less revision than making good on the promise of a mature narrator looking back on that summer.
Speaking of promises and making good on them, it’s time to move on to a discussion of some of your story elements, and whether they add up to a satisfying dramatic structure for this tale of a fateful summer.
In your table of “concerns” (#4) you focus on the element of the recovered alcoholic father, and that’s a good place to begin. I definitely agree with your hunch about needing to raise the level of pressure on A/Dad—whether the actual, objective pressure, or the intensity of his reaction to the pressures already in place in the novel.
Those pressures are numerous and substantial in the draft as it stands. This is, after all, a summer where one stroke of bad luck seems to attract the next, in what by a certain mid-way point seems like an inexorable and escalating string, moving from mishaps to tragedies. We begin innocuously enough with the theft of the car. (Technically we begin with the theft of the bat, but right now I’m speaking of tensions for the father, and I’m not certain he knows about that one.) We’re also given a hint of the fact that Dad is trying to leave the factory for a white collar job; that waiting to hear about that, with a certain feeling of hopelessness, is a source of nervousness and anxiety. Even when those are the only immediate pressures afoot, you skillfully lead your reader to worry they could be enough to knock A (“Goddamn it!”) off the proverbial wagon. This combination of a summer when all the luck seems to be breaking against the family and a father vividly remembered as drinking “when anything went wrong” is a worrisome, indeed a potentially lethal, cocktail, and a terrific source of tension for the unfolding novel. We’re waiting to see if or when the father will fall, and wondering what the consequences will be for the family.
Of course the car theft is just the beginning. Before long we have the grandmother’s illness and death, the resulting move of the grandfather into their flat. Just when “What next?” has emerged as a “refrain,” there’s A’s accident at the plant, and resulting loss of gainful activity. If ever there was a formula for a drinking relapse…. It’s just about exactly the half-way point in the novel (p. 171) when we get the line, “He was clearly off balance, the one position a boxer didn’t want to be in, vulnerable to a hard hook.” Okay, author, you’ve got us, we’re waiting…. When, by p. 216, life has “regained a level of normalcy,” with the father back to work and seemingly out of the woods, I’m momentarily soothed but not fooled. I can only figure it’s a diversion, the calm before the real storm, when that loaded gun will go off, that novelist’s “IOU” be paid out, the promise made good upon.
Well, you know what happens, and what doesn’t, far better than I. The loaded gun that is the father’s vulnerability to alcoholic “relapse” never goes off. (The gun that does go off is in a different family altogether, which we’ll talk about.) As I read on through the latter third of the novel, after a certain point I stopped feeling that deliciously painful reader’s worry about the characters’ lives, and began feeling a not-so-pleasurable anxiety about the novel’s construction. The more pages I turned, the closer I got to 300, the more that anxiety grew, and finally shifted to a sense of doomed certainty: “It’s too late, there aren’t enough pages left, nothing’s going to happen around that whole issue….”
I wouldn’t want to argue that a “relapse” by the father is the only satisfying dramatic path you have open here. There’s much to be said for a novel’s ability to subvert expectations, to put one gun in place but then detonate the explosion from a direction we couldn’t anticipate. And, sometimes, to make that explosion a quiet one, possibly underground, though ideally, as such, profound in its reverberations.
So what about the threat of relapse ultimately proving to be a red herring, and the novel’s employing a strategy of bait-and-change-hooks, to follow the fish image? Could this be what’s happening with the S plot line? Dad doesn’t turn back to drink, but instead strays in a different way, through adultery….
As an “explosion,” the S liaison may indeed qualify as a quiet or even underground blast, but I wonder if it isn’t too much so in this version. This, interestingly enough, circles us back to that matter of how old a narrator is telling the story. Does the “affair” with S ever take place, or is it really just a friendship with intimate overtones, an alluring possibility that’s thwarted not only by circumstance and neighborhood code but by A’s righteous, abiding love of his wife and family? Does it seem so subtle and ultimately subverted in the draft now because that’s how it is, or because we’re only getting the boy-L’s perspective—the view of a preadolescent who, in his relative innocence, understands at moments that there’s “something wrong with this picture,” and yet never explicitly leaps to damning conclusions? We never do get a reminiscing adult’s more seasoned perspective, his speculations about what might have really been happening that his younger self wasn’t capable of recognizing or even imagining.
That ambiguity aside, I do think the S relationship plays a fruitful role in terms of the larger story dynamics, and the father’s character. I like the idea that S can speak to parts of the father he thought he’d given up or rejected; that she can remind him of being a champion; of taking chances, or trusting his luck. Are these feelings L’s mother has forgotten how to nurture or support for her husband? Or is she simply too busy caring for others and working to have anything left for him? There are hints about these issues, but I’d like to see a fuller development of the marriage and both individual parents, whether it’s from an adult’s hindsight view or through the young L’s awareness.
I strayed into the subject of S, but I’m not done with the father’s drinking yet. The idea of a relapse certainly is a live plot possibility to consider, and one in which S, along with other strands in the novel, could be entangled. The fact that it seems almost inevitable—the loaded gun—doesn’t detract from its compelling potential, because of course the question is exactly how it will happen, and get resolved, and impact the family. It seems, from one vantage point, the Big Story you’re sidestepping. If all the bad luck of the summer of ’62 doesn’t knock Dad off the wagon, why are we setting the story then? Why aren’t we telling the story of 1956, when he was still drinking in that ruinously “untimely” way of his? To come at it from a different angle, if we are telling the story of the summer of ‘62, which is the big and important story for reasons independent of the father’s drinking, then why are we talking about the alcoholism to start with? Why is that set up as the threat (or a threat, but a major one) hanging over the novel?
Perhaps it’s revealing that you’ve shifted from an opening chapter or prologue that focused squarely on the father’s past drinking to one where it gets nary a mention. Is this primarily a novel about these two brothers and their changing, dangerous life in and beyond their Polish Chicago neighborhood? A novel where their family dynamic is somewhat in the background? Or is it most centrally about the family, with the kids’ outside social life present in a secondary degree largely serving to advance that prime focus? The natural tendency is to cry out, “But it’s both!” and that can be true. Nevertheless, there’s a level at which it’s important, for the sake of assessing your structure, to answer this question as if it were more purely an “either/or;” to grant that while a novel can indeed accommodate a range of focal subjects and elements, they tend to exist within a kind of “hierarchy of focus,” as opposed to all having equal or indiscriminate value within the novel’s construction.
I assume it’s fair to say that the novel’s prime focus is L’s “coming of age” through that summer. This gives us a tool with which to evaluate the role of different story elements that contribute to his process of maturation. If nothing happens around the father’s alcoholism that summer except that family members worry a bit more than usual about a possible relapse, then it seems a minor, background element, one which you could indeed treat in narrative summary rather than fully dramatized scenes, and which even then would not get a great deal of emphasis. Leaving the father aside for a moment, it seems the truly central relationship in the novel is between L and his older brother. Your opening sentence clearly expresses that: “I’d turned eleven a month earlier, but it seemed that J’s becoming a teenager put more than just another year between us.” So much of the novel revolves around the shifting dynamic between L and J, the alternating currents of co-conspiracy and rejection/exclusion. It’s a complex and complexly drawn relationship, where even the conspiracy has undertones of “abuse”: J letting L in on things as a way of implicating him and therefore guaranteeing his silence, his covering up of his older brother’s misdeeds or adventures. J crosses a lot of boundaries that summer. So what’s the lesson, for J himself but most crucially for L, in the outcome of those adventures? As with the explosive potential of the father’s “affairs,” I don’t feel you push the envelope of possibilities far enough in this area. I’m not saying I want J to get shot and killed that night at the Ks’ apartment, but I do feel he ought to get closer to the drama, to some kind of more personal consequence. I mean, the set up is there so something could happen to J; so he could end up driving off in that police car, end up with some blood on him. That’s still J’s experience, his loss, and not L’s own, but at least it brings the climactic action a crucial step closer to our protagonist.
There were a number of places where I experienced that sort of let-down, feeling that an element or action hadn’t been pushed far enough in terms of drama and direct, personal consequence for our central characters. I definitely had that sense at the end of the whole July 4th celebration, because even with the implicit danger of fireworks, J’s secret plans, the fire in the park and that panicked mob scene, nothing happened to anyone in L’s family. Another event that’s a focus of fear for L, and accumulates some sense of dire portent for the reader, is the trip to visit his grandmother’s grave. We get a sort of “near-miss” there too, with L’s sister falling into the pond, but the only consequence is a muddy t-shirt. The K family saga is plenty tragic, but it has that disadvantage of being fundamentally removed from our focal brothers, from L especially. It struck me that a few of the most dramatic scenes in the novel are actually delivered to us second- or even third-hand—accounts of events only relayed to L by J, or that R told J who then tells his kid brother. A certain amount of this may be workable, but after a point you have to question this twice- or thrice-removed aspect of the narration. Would it be better to focus on drama L witnesses and participates in more directly? Think about this tendency to have the real action of the novel happen off-stage. Another example is M’s family tragedy, the ice cream truck accident. If shit like that happens in this neighborhood, in these kids’ lives, why not bring it into the novel’s present dramatic action? To push a bit harder, why couldn’t it happen to L’s own baby sibling? I’m not advocating gratuitous loss or morbidity, but if tragedy belongs in the piece, then let’s bring it on stage and look at it.
I think the novel can only stand so many near-misses before it delivers a hit—and one that strikes home, or close to it. And yet maybe this pattern of near-misses—miraculous escapes, when viewed from a different angle—is the whole point, with L coming to realize just how lucky he is, to see his family as charmed instead of the opposite: the family that dodges the bullets (there are certainly plenty to dodge). There is that moment when L comments to J that they’re fortunate to be in their family, as opposed to the Ks’, but that doesn’t come in any kind of climactically epiphanic location. With all the focus on luck of different kinds, I don’t experience a clear enough overall movement in L’s perspective on his luck and his family’s.
I like the fact that our 11-year-old hero tends to obsess on luck and/or destiny, that he’s superstitious in his beliefs. This is the story of a summer of rotten luck, a cursed summer, and how, possibly, it gets transformed into a summer of blessings, rewards, however hard-won. This theme certainly emerges through many of the story’s materials and motifs, and yet it’s not presented in the sort of frontal way which orients our thinking around it right from the get-go. Here we return to the subject of the narrative stance, and also the matter of how you focus the novel’s opening. You speak in your recent missive about getting “the plane to take off,” and I’d extend that metaphor, to look at the importance not just getting it off the ground, but deciding in which direction you’re pointing it.
A reminiscent shaping of the novel’s perspective could be useful in this regard; with that hindsight remove, it’s easy and natural for an aware and articulate narrator to direct our attention. And yet that’s not the only kind of narration that has the sort of clear shaping and focus I’m looking for, and which I find this novel still lacks somewhat. Even a narrative from the viewpoint of L at the end of the fateful summer could provide us with that sort of shaping perspective. I noted at the end of Chapter One a feeling of “formlessness,” of not having my attention clearly galvanized around a particular issue or plot line, in spite of the various interesting threads introduced. While making my way through the manuscript, I continued to experience this feeling, a sense of narrative materials somewhat more meandering than fully directed. The narrator himself can provide that “direction” or shape more or less explicitly. But finally, you as the novelist, through your careful organization of all the events and details, need to be supplying the context that lends the movement this sort of clear, forceful vector.
Novel II
As you already recognize and address most fruitfully in your letter, there are "plenty of issues" with this first of your projected four novel sections. There are also great strengths in the draft, and the hours I’ve spent with the chapters have been richly absorbing ones.
The setting of your story in place and time—at this moment of historic transition in a (to me) remote and fascinating corner of the world—is enviable terrain for a novelist. It’s obviously a place and time you know well, and you’ve been able to bring that knowledge—political, social, cultural, artistic—to the page with a tremendous intelligence and authority, so one of the pleasures of reading is educational. On a concrete, sensory level, you also bring this place to life on the page through your gift for vivid descriptive detail, in passages woven into the context so they don’t stop the flow of the story but which, nevertheless, I often found myself pausing to admire. Then of course we’ve got the characters and their various plot lines. As I’m sure you realize, weaving this complex fabric of intertwined lives in a multiple viewpoint construction is an ambitious design. You liken yours to “many first novels” in the sense that it deals with a search for identity and self. But most first novels do this through the relatively simple journey of a single character, where you’re taking on a far more complicated and challenging project. That said, I see every indication from this draft that, given the needed time and application, you’ll be able to rise to the challenge and pull off this structure, creating what by rights should be an elegant, richly engrossing, world-class novel debut.
I appreciate your letter's apt pinpointing of structural issues with the novel opening. The Bela Vista party versus M’s arrival in
For the sake of argument, I’ll put in a plug for liberating yourself, as it suits the needs of the novel, from some of the stranglehold of “historically accurate” dates. Not dates for things like the handover of
Meanwhile, M’s arrival would be another, entirely worthy candidate for kicking the action off. There’s a degree to which I find novelists, especially first ones, needlessly insecure about “hooking” their readers, in a way that sells short the inherent interest of their story and characters. I’d be happy to first approach
This returns us to the notion of the expatriate novel. M and K, the journalist and the artist, are both expatriates, entering the historical Macanese moment from that perspective. R, on the other hand, is a native, though she might consider leaving
The problem with the “talking heads” syndrome goes beyond the matter of ensuring scenic variety and sufficiently dramatic action. This is a novel where you’re teaching the reader about a place and its history, and that’s a wonderfully enriching dimension. Luckily, you’ve got a couple of characters who are, as I said above, in the natural position of “students,” each of whom is finding a series of willing teachers. This provides a handy, organic context for bringing information into the text. And given the pivotal moment in Macanese history where we stand, even the more rooted characters have occasions aplenty to reflect, in ways that might at some other time feel forced or contrived, on
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I did in fact stick to the original plan of reading this manuscript in its entirety, in spite of your warnings about the status of the material after the first, recently revised segment. If I’d only read those opening 39 pages, I never would have even seen K make her appearance, as that only happens on p. 62, and so wouldn’t have been in any kind of position to grapple with the overall shape of the narrative. And having witnessed her entrance onto the scene, I was more than a little curious, hitting the next process-related cut-off at p. 78, about where you’d gone with the story.
And so I read onward.
When I say I was “curious,” I don’t, alas, mean in that wholly desirable sense of the curiosity of the engaged and believing reader. More curious in the sense of bewildered, hoping for illumination or some kind of turnaround (as in the “
I do think this story is essentially flawed, not because its execution is still rough and/or incomplete but at the level of its basic conception. To organize my discussion of why I feel this way, it will be useful to first consider, separately, what you tag in your notes the “primary” love relationship in the story.
D and H’s “love story” is patchy in its development and therefore not yet fully satisfying, but richly compelling and promising as a focus for the novella.
I’m quite captivated by the start of their live-in relationship; by the predicament of this free-spirited lover of women who suddenly finds one of his regular stable of non-committed babes on his porch with all her possessions. I’m delighted by the picture we get of K’s happy and harmless promiscuity. (I mean emotionally harmless; since your dates tell me this isn’t set in the halcyon, pre-AIDS era, I can only assume he juggles these various partners with the proper precautions.) I don’t find him in any way reprehensible or even suspect for being a man with these various sexual friendships. He’s young, after all; he genuinely likes and appreciates the women, as we glean from his descriptions of them and their charms; and he doesn’t seem to be misleading anyone.
So along comes H with her cartons and D undergoes a most interesting metamorphosis, where he discovers, to his surprise, that he actually likes this arrangement. At the same time, there are conflicts around the edges of his and H’s coupled, domestic bliss, and those too are interesting to explore. There are some gaps in that exploration, as I note on the text, though these could be readily and effectively addressed through revision and further development.
Then of course they hit a big turning point, with H’s pregnancy. Here the gaps in the narrative become even more glaring. Obvious questions abound, which, again, I touch on in the marginal notes. We get a piece of an account of that period, during which H apparently learned of the pregnancy and broke the news to D, much later on, when the two meet at H’s school and touch on the topic. So partly it’s that matter of organization, chronology: we need to understand what’s happening between them, and inside D, while that part of the story is getting narrated. It’s more than that too, of course, because it’s not as if you have some whole developed scene or series of scenes you just need to relocate through your newfound cut-and-paste method. The later discussion with H suggests what the dynamic might have been between them around the pregnancy news, but doesn’t develop that period; doesn’t convey it to the reader as part of D’s lived experience.
So, more gap-filling, the need for which becomes pretty readily apparent when you look at the piece in chronological sequence, as you’ve started to do in this new, clearer way. Nothing insurmountable as revision tasks go; rather straightforward actually. H makes the surprise announcement of her departure—I very much like that image of D standing there as surprised as when she arrived—and we enter the next phase of the piece, where we would also need holes filled, D’s experience revealed more completely. Surprise, confusion, hurt, anger, betrayal, loss, relief, liberation…—all these complex and contradictory feelings: a pure goldmine of a fictional situation. So there’s that whole separation phase of the piece, where D takes that journey into a life After H, which he discovers isn’t the same as Before: a “falls” that can’t simply reverse itself.
Through that time we’ve got his relationship to his work, which goes through various phases of transformation—a downhill slide, followed by a rededication or rediscovery. There’s also his relationship to the water, which overlaps with his love of wood in the form of the dory, and which is another realm where things shift, where he has an experience of reconnection or rediscovery without H.
This is a fertile time to explore, and you’ve already done a lot of good work with it. The sense of D’s connection with wood, and then with that ancestral craft of boat-building, is a distinctive and vivid element of his character. The themes and metaphorical patterns relating to water are another extremely strong element of your story. My imagination is captured by the “
So we have the period of separation, where D has some things he must learn before a reconciliation with H would be possible or even desirable. And then the reconciliation itself, followed by the “flash-forward” at the end to the framing moment, one year later, when they’re happily married with their baby daughter. It’s a “compromised life, patched together from what H wants and what [he] want[s],” but the “quilt” is a lovely one, really the most one can hope for, embodying a more mature view of love and marriage than either D or H likely started with, bringing me to a point in their journey where, when D proclaims, “I’m the luckiest man alive,” I’m wholly convinced by it.
I trust you haven’t missed the fact that I’ve written K out of the ending in that description. The patchwork quilt that is D and H’s marriage no longer “covers this space where K was,” because that space doesn’t exist in the version of the story I’ve sketched for us. And if you haven’t already begun to suspect this (perhaps with a sinking feeling, perhaps with a sense of relief and even elation) as you’ve followed my discussion so far, I’ll come out and say it now: I’m of the view that K doesn’t need to exist, or—more forcefully—shouldn’t exist, in this story.
The reasons for this are two-fold. First is the fact that with D and H and the shifting tides of their relationship as it ultimately leads to the marriage, you’ve got a full and complex and challenging story in its own right, a natural candidate for novella-length treatment. To tell that story, to tell it fully and beautifully, to reveal not only the characters but this marvelous place they inhabit, to work and bring to fruition all the systems of imagery—this seems like a worthy ambition for you at this stage; for any writer, actually.
The second reason has to do with the K story itself, and its natural liabilities. I can well understand why previous readers have had serious problems with K, and D’s interest in her. You’d certainly have to do some recasting in the revision to get away from the rather potent sexual dimension of his attraction as it’s currently written. Unfortunately, what would remain, or replace that erotic infatuation, is problematic for the story also, in my opinion.
Outside of the sexual infatuation—which may be inappropriate from a societal view but is in fact perfectly understandable—the sudden “love” D feels for this cousin he’s apparently never met before, this powerful desire to help and protect her, is not rendered even close to believably in this draft. It’s just too sudden and instantaneous, and as such too overwhelming in the power it claims. If there’s an identification based on particular aspects of D’s history, you could develop that, but I think the key word is develop here. This strong feeling or complex of feelings he has for K would have to be developed over some time, or at least, if the time-frame is tight, through lived experience in which the reader participates. One of the things about erotic infatuation is that it can be essentially instantaneous in its inception, where the other kinds of emotions you discuss in your letter, at least at the level of intensity you’re asking the reader to buy, don’t really come into being on that sort of timetable.
So, okay. Let’s say that even though you haven’t succeeded in doing so yet, you could make me believe in this rather immediate and intense bond that springs up between these two cousins, in spite of their ten-year age gap. You could cast it as more or less problematically complicated by erotic desire. The older male cousin’s wrestling with this socially unacceptable attraction could be part of the conflict, as he grapples with those other facets of the connection—that genuine sense of identification, that desire to help and “save.” Yes, indeed, there’s a story there, in fact an extremely compelling one. Finally what I conclude, though, is that it’s a different, second story. That trying to meld it with the narrative of D and H in this novella form as currently construed may be a doomed project.
If you want to look at D’s conflict between freedom and security, you don’t need the troubled 15-year-old cousin who enters from out of the blue on p. 62. You’ve already got everything you need right in place, on stage already in D’s coastal community. You’ve got those former lovers, A and the rest, who offer a perfectly natural opportunity to explore that conflict of freedom versus security.
If you do want to explore the viability of having a “strong, loving friendship” outside of a marriage, the extent to which the marriage will be inevitably threatened by such a friendship, well, that’s a terrific theme too. But that exploration would be better served by a set-up where the onset of the outside friendship represented the story’s chief, so-called “unstable condition,” coming into a marriage that was essentially stable, if shaky beneath the surface in ways this friendship challenge brings to the fore. This is the sort of configuration I picture when I hear some of your letter’s plot brainstorming. (“What if the couple invited her to live with them, or with another relative nearby?…”) But having the “secondary” friendship enter a situation where there’s not even a marriage yet—where we’re dealing with a “primary” relationship that’s awfully conflicted, indeed endangered, in its own right—isn’t a very inherently or clearly functional way of designing the story. If you were to tell a story that had centrally to do with the entrance of this other person, this other sort of relationship, into the terrain of an existing marriage, that’s an aspect of the story’s focus we’d need to get early on, very close to if not literally right at the story’s opening. (This connects to your wrestling with the novella’s implied hindsight/framing stance, and how it sets up the context for the narration.)
Meanwhile, my mind can easily spin out on the possibilities of that other story, the one where the issues surrounding K take center stage, and aren’t a “secondary” relationship. Maybe you deal, within that, with all the issues that stem from the decade’s age difference, the confusing factor of the “Lolita” attraction, and so forth. You might also think of it differently, without that particular complication. Say D is ten or eight years younger, at an age where a sexual attraction to K wouldn’t be seen as inherently “predatory and self-deceiving.” Say they’re these cousins who’ve never met, who come from very different lifestyles and families. Say she shows up with her messed-up family for a vacation on his
I should stop, let you take over the process of imagining those possibilities. But I really do think you’d do well to “divide and conquer” with this story’s structure. To think about H and D for the present novella, and then toy with all the possibilities of K and (a probably renamed) D for a second piece, perhaps a novella as well. In these sorts of cases, I always figure one of the bright sides is that very fact of having two stories instead of just one. Especially if it’s two that can work, that you can complete and fully achieve, as opposed to one that seems to be a sort of continuing revisional albatross.
I suggest you take some time to digest this, in preparation for making some decisions about your next move with the piece. It doesn’t make sense to delve into further specifics until you’ve made at least some sort of provisional, working choice of where to go with the draft from here. Pragmatically, taking K out might be the path of least resistance, since she’s absent from the recently revised pages. So you could readily swing into a phase of gap-filling with the D and H story.
I want to be very clear in expressing that I’m quite taken with all of the possibilities this story suggests, and also with some stretches of truly gorgeous writing and image-making I see in these pages. I’m hoping our work together can help you to harness what I experience as your substantial writerly gifts toward the shaping of a luminous finished novella.
I found a lot of rich interest in this story, interweaving the chronicle of the Toledo-New York road trip and its progressive discarding of “extra baggage” with the reflections on S’s back-story, culminating in the recent history of the wedding as it touches on her relationship with her parents (her mother in particular: once again we have one of these sort of invisible husbands). Exploring the ways in which S has felt “weighed down by [her] mother’s past” through this catalogue of all the things that she throws away is an intriguing and effective device for the story, and the inter-cutting of the different strands of the narrative is skillfully handled, well-paced. I also very much like the way the story sets up E as this Gandhian non-materialist, while the Indian-American narrator must, in contrast, struggle with all the baggage of her immigrant mother’s embrace of the materialist “American dream.” As elsewhere you have a firm, vivid grasp of the cultural intersections and divides that define the narrator’s experience. The attempt to deal with the weight of this cross-cultural baggage works in a powerful way both literally and metaphorically in this story structure.
I also can’t help noting the emergence of what seem to be recurring and even obsessional themes for you, not only with the cultural issues relating to immigrant and second-generation experience, but specifically with the mother-daughter relationship, with material possessions—and particularly clothes—serving as a resonant vehicle for playing out the power struggles inherent in the relationship. I’m thinking, naturally, of “X,” with its prom dress and jewelry, in connection to the wedding gown of this piece (and more jewelry, including the earrings that give rise to the title). I find that when I point out the existence of such recurring themes and motifs, writers sometimes tend to get paranoid, panicky, thinking, oh no, she’s telling me my work is redundant—when that isn’t at all the message I’m sending. It’s fine, in a body of work, to have these correspondences, overlaps. Don’t all the great writers have their recurring themes and motifs? And I think it’s an important stage in the development and assessment of an “emerging body of work” to recognize these subjects and themes that keep drawing you, in their different story manifestations. So I simply wanted to share my recognition that clearly, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and their estrangement, is a crucial theme for you, and one to which you’ll no doubt return, as you work to penetrate its various truths and aspects ever more deeply. If and when you write a first novel, I would be surprised if that subject were not at the heart of it.
So back to this story. Once again I feel like I’m admiring a piece of yours with some reservations; that I very much like what it does but don’t quite feel it goes far or deep enough; that you’ve created a structure which could give us even more of the experience of your narrator.
In this case, I’m looking specifically to probe more deeply the emotional dimensions of this material divestment—to see a more definite emotional movement along that arc of the story.
The progress in the back-story tale of S’s conflict with her mother over the wedding certainly lends the story a feeling of movement, climaxing in the dramatic scene with the fire in the trashcan, and S’s realization of what her mother has done. From there, we get an appropriate denouement movement with S’s rejection of the wedding sari, and the wedding “snapshot” of the final section, with her alternate wedding clothes and friends-as-alternate-family.
Important as this level of movement is for the story, it’s something of a structural device or illusion, because in effect, emotionally, it’s a movement S has already experienced, as opposed to something that’s actually shifting within her over the course of the
On p. 3, S gets that first “urge,” the “‘Throw it!’” impulse. That first bowl fling leads to the desire to throw more, so we can assume it felt good, that liberation from baggage both physical and symbolic. And yet we don’t really explore those feelings, that experience, beyond what we’re getting by implication. Is there anger in the throwing, a kind of direct, “Take this, mother” link? Or is it somehow more purely “Gandhian,” abstracted from immediate, personal feelings about her mother, based more in the idea that she just “doesn’t need” this stuff? There’s a good opportunity to get at some of these nuances on p. 7, when she confesses what she’s doing to E and he asks her to explain. But her response is handled in a fairly minimal way (“We didn’t need it any more.”), which doesn’t tell us anything new, and he never probes further.
She moves from the Correlle dishes to stainless steel and eventually on to Tupperware. Somewhere in there are the birthday earrings (yes, the sequence will become more clear when you work out the map details, even though you’re presenting the earring discard non-chronologically). What exactly is the progression here? Is there an emotional logic to the movement of what she throws when, in what order of escalation? There may be, but I don’t think the reader is fully or clearly feeling it. On p. 17, we get the last divestment section, where there does seem to be a movement toward more personal items, things not just taken as discard/hand-me-downs from the mother like the spare dishware but that the mother had specifically bought for her, i.e. the suitcase of clothes. The final item in that paragraph is indeed highly personal—“the mattress cover [the mother] herself had used on her bed,” something in its way almost shockingly intimate to have been handed down or passed along from mother to daughter. So is that the movement we’re sketching?: from the more incidental hand-me-downs to actual gifts; from impersonal household items to ones that are intimately personal (I’m almost surprised she doesn’t have a suitcase of Mother’s old underwear!)? And yet in the midst of that p. 17 paragraph we get a wrench in the works, in the form of the pillow she’s slept on since college, which may have nothing to do with her mother. The “faint tea-colored stains” are her own, I’d presume. I’m not sure about the origin of the “towels and bed sheets.” Anyway, I don’t want to suggest an absolutely anal need to fit every last item into a pattern…though in the main I do think pattern and delineated movement would help define the emotional movement of S’s baggage-shedding experience.
Another aspect of the story’s material and its organization that confuses my sense of that experience is the tendency for S’s associations with the household goods of her mother’s to be rather untarnishedly positive. Note the honey-sweet taste of the water her mother served her in the barrel-shaped glass on p. 10; the irresistibility of the Tupperware-stored puffed rice with peanuts on 16. Mind you, on its own terms, I like the fact that the crunching sound the mother made with the snack was an enticement, reversing the more typical image of the younger person repulsed by the sound of the elder’s chewing. But do you see how in a larger sense these positive or wistful associations may muddle the issue?
Maybe, though, muddling the issue is a good thing, and we want to see that ambivalence. But again, it’s an aspect of the experience you don’t really explore or organize in a way that the reader can get a firm, shapely grasp on it. We get another, perhaps crucial hint of it toward the end of the story, with the wedding sari. S is able to recognize that the sari fabric is “gorgeous,” but also, finally, that it isn’t her. Maybe that expresses the essence of what the journey’s about for her. Even if her mother can’t accept (or to put a hopeful spin on it, can’t yet or can’t entirely accept) the differences, the daughter must learn to, in order to move on with her life, unencumbered by the excess baggage. These ideas are in the story, at least in nascent or embryonic form, but what I’m suggesting is that the story’s structure and organization, as well as its emotional elucidation, needs to go further in bringing them out for us. Right now, it’s almost as if the throwing away of the objects is a kind of a gimmick or gag that the story keeps playing, but in the same way, without really moving us forward through different dimensions.
I don’t really think the story is so much about S’s relationship to things as to her mother. Note that in the opening paragraph, in the catalogue of “essentials” she needs “to make a life, to feel comfortable,” we get the final item of “love.” Is the love of E, and their friends, sufficient? Is her mother’s love, along with the Tupperware and mattress cover and jewelry, just “extra baggage” now too? Is throwing away the burden of our mothers and their pasts really as easy as tossing out some old Tupperware? I think that in contemplating a next stage of revision, the story needs to take a closer look at these sorts of questions, this deeper conflictedness. Where is S, really, at the end of the story? Before the shot of the wedding pictures, in the short, penultimate section, we get a flashback to her childhood ambition to repay her mother for the sacrifices she made to provide her daughter with “opportunities.” And what about now? Is that desire to “repay” her mother presented as a bittersweet irony on her own girlhood foolishness? Has she rejected the value of her mother’s sacrifice, or of the opportunities her immigrant parents provided her? Or is she just profoundly embittered by her mother’s inability to “understand [her—S’s] life’s choices in any other context” but that of her own experience (the early poverty, the dowry-system humiliations, the chasing of the American Dream, etc.)? Again, I need the story to pull its material together in a way that makes more clear the emotional arc of her journey.
For such a brand-new story, I find this piece delightfully engaging and promising. I like the way it moves back and forth through time courtesy of this “modular” organization; I like its views of New York and NYC living (reminding me of that intention you voiced to write about the city as lover); I like the way it uses the realistic stuff of our 21st-century moment, like cell phones and Starbucks. Considering the inspiration just struck you late in August, what you’ve achieved with the draft so far is rather astonishing, and I’m not surprised that the effort has had the effect of exhausting you! Once you’ve gotten a breather, I think the story is also terribly ripe for entering its next stage of revision.
There are a number of interesting themes or thematic/metaphorical elements at play in the piece, and as appropriate to this stage of the story’s development, I don’t think you’ve thought them all through to full realization or articulation yet. Many of the blue-ink (second-read) comments aim to pose questions about the role of this or that element, with an eye to getting you thinking more clearly, and perhaps functionally, about them. Obviously this is the story of a love relationship, with its respective two characters, from one member of the couple’s—G’s—viewpoint. I suspect this is where whatever you’ve drawn on from “real life” both inspires or animates and hampers the narrative’s realization. Because to an extent, as is typical of quasi-autobiographical source material, what comes through the story least clearly is the characters themselves, and so their relationship, which can spring to life or function in such a story almost as a separate, third character. We get wonderful and evocative glimpses and telling details, but there’s a sense in which you’re still taking their development, their characterization, too much for granted, because they already exist for you. (This is my presumptuous interpretation, anyway, based on your “confession” about the partial origins.) So that’s one of the dimensions in which I see this next stage of work fleshing out the bones of the structure. I don’t feel, on finishing this draft of the story, as if I know as much about G and S as I would like to. And so I don’t feel like I fully enough experience the dynamics of their relationship.
I mention in some of the marginal notes my sense that I’m not sure what the guiding question of the story is. And yet, the more that I mulled on it, and as I reread, I began to understand more clearly that the Rilke passage “On Love” plays a central role in this. So really, it’s not as if I have no idea what the guiding question is, but more that I think the story, in its understanding of its materials, needs to further refine and realize it.
The Rilke quote, as you know, has to do with the need for each person within the love union to first “ripen, to become something in himself.” When G wonders if she’ll “ever be worthy of love,” it seems she’s questioning that facet of her “world”-ness or self-sufficient personhood. Given that S is the older and presumably more evolved partner, and that she’s infatuated with him before they ever actually meet, it’s natural to assume that he’s already “something in himself,” but that the question or issue lies on her side of the selfhood equation. Is G enough of a “something,” a person, a “world,” to merit his love? Or is she still too “unclarified, unfinished"? This would make sense as a guiding or driving question, and yet the story doesn’t really seem to pursue that thread very clearly or forcefully. In the scene where she spoke with her uncle after an earlier breakup with S, what she ends up questioning in her mind is her own “capab[ility] of loving another human being,” which as you’ll see from the ms. comment confuses me, confuses my sense of the story agenda. In a couple of other places the question of his capacity for love arises, in particular with G’s relatives. His status as an intellectual is especially implicated in this regard. Is he truly less capable of committed love because he’s an intellectual? This of course sends me back to the story’s opening sentence, where we’re told that S “wants intellectual freedom.” Again, I need to discover more about what this means, and how it relates to the various terms of the Rilke passage. Does he want intellectual freedom because that’s rightly in the nature of selfhood and consonant with rather than in opposition to the bond of love? And how do we assess her desire for the armoire, which the structure of that opening sentence places in a balance (opposition?) with his desire for intellectual freedom?
There are several flags in the manuscript pointing to the thematic importance of home for G, and the armoire seems to be about that sort of “nesting.” Her vision of the contents of the armoire goes through a transformation between its first appearance on p. 2 and its return at the end of the piece. We’ve got the “domestic city” of towels and bedding in both, but the change has to do with the books she sees shelved, first just her own “sacred” volumes, but in the end, his books also, along with the statue symbolizing “good luck for a married couple.” Do these two visions of the armoire’s contents represent the two stages of love as presented by Rilke—first the mature selfhood and only later the merging? This could be the case, and yet I’m not yet seeing the story’s dramatic and emotional movements taking me in that direction, so that the ending is earned and fully articulate of its significance.
Let’s think about what actually happens in the present story.
1. Saturday: G sees the armoire while S’s tied up on his cell phone.
2. Sunday: G wakes up nauseous, then has a vision of a new arrangement for the furniture in their apartment. She makes some adjustments; S wakes but goes back to bed; she continues arranging.
3. Later Sunday, S heads off on long walk to
I like the notion that in concert with whatever “flashback” material we experience through the modularly interspersed sections, the emotional action of the story could get accomplished through these fairly small, domestically non-dramatic movements. So it’s not the scale of events that I’m calling to question, but rather their residue or direction. You need to think about what emotional trajectory you’re looking for the movement of present scenes to accomplish, in order to arrive at the end of the story. Does G realize something about the nature of love, and of their relationship, on this particular weekend? Does she make some significant interior movement, albeit a small one (“Perhaps not exactly the ‘vast distances’ Rilke had in mind, but a step in the right direction”)? How does the notion of home, as opposed to the state of lostness and homelessness she experiences on being locked out, connect to this process? Does she realize that she really does have a home with S, a metaphorical armoire that can hold both their books? Or does she get some sense that home seems less important or maybe just portable, as it is for L and P? How do these themes and elements fit together?
I have the sense that all of the puzzle pieces are here (or at least suggested), but that now you have to work on their orientation and fit, and on what precise picture emerges from the completed arrangement.
Some other elements I haven’t yet mentioned, and which intrigue me:
The matter of the Indian caste system, and how S’s belonging to the intellectual (or priestly) caste of Brahmins might be an obstacle to their love. A good deal is made of this question in the text, but then I’m not sure where if anywhere you finally go with it. Or with the whole matter of family. G becomes increasingly distant or estranged from her family, especially her mother, though her parents supposedly sought to escape or transcend the caste system on leaving
The notion of waiting: G earlier in her life waiting for love, and then always waiting for S, through the history of their relationship and then also in the present action. She recognizes that she’s always waiting for him, that she always has waited. But does she undergo any shift in her understanding of this waiting, or any new resolve regarding it? What’s the connection between Rilke’s notions of selfhood and love and the idea of G’s waiting? What impact does her exposure to L and P, their quirkily portably-homey lifestyle, have on G in this connection? What if something has shifted in G to the point that when S finally arrives at Starbucks, she’s no longer waiting? You’d need to be subtle with this, you wouldn’t want it to be too obvious or formulaic, but it’s a direction to think about. Also how the themes of “home” and “waiting” relate or interact with each other. A sense of home, after all, is another thing that G’s been waiting for, but seems to be attaining finally.
I’m also intrigued by the information we get on “G’s trajectory,” namely giving up a doctoral track in microbiology and immunology (a fellowship for which S followed her, which would seem to be a refreshing reversal of pattern in the relationship) and then ending up as a kindergarten teacher. Nothing wrong with teaching kindergarten, certainly, but it’s a change, and I wonder what it’s all about, and how it relates to tensions within their relationship. Part of me would like to see her in that kindergarten classroom at
Lots of questions, but all because there are so many possibilities, and such a rich world of suggestions in this early draft. I feel confident that you’ll manage to clarify and deepen the emerging thematic and emotional materials, and use this structure to create a story that lives engagingly in “three dimensions.”
