It took me an unfortunately long time to read this because I moved apartments while I was in the middle of it, lost the book in the move, and then waited a few months before getting a library membership and taking it out. I think I enjoyed it a bit less than I would have if I'd given it my sustained focus. It is in some ways a hard book, because its rhythm is very slow and because so much of it is this minute-by-minute tracking of the mental processes behind everyday activities, which is amazing and it is done well here, but you can miss if you're not paying close attention. It's not an airplane book.
There's a split authorial personality. The core of the book is a portrait of Woolf's mother and father. Their children are running around all over the novel and in some way necessarily Woolf occupies the role of child of her parents, or at least member of her own family. But there is another important character who is not a member of the family but a visitor to their summer house, Lily Briscoe, a painter. Amost Lily's whole being in the book centres around a landscape that she is painting and trying the whole time to get right - not in terms of faithful representation, but rhythmically. It's like Woolf is telling the story of her work in trying to find the right moments of light and shadow to best paint this group portrait. She is both in and out, which is also necessarily true of a writer. And this book gives a particularly good demonstration of that without any self-reference or post-modern piercing of frameworks. Then towards the end the children gain some subjectivity and we see the parents through their eyes as well as through the parents own thoughts about themselves and each other.
I'm thinking about rhythm because I read recently that Woolf once wrote in a diary that writing is all about getting the rhythm. Once you've understood your rhythm and can get into it, the words you use don't matter much. I love that. And this book is so full of awesome rhythms. I love Cam's sequence of emotions on the sailboat going toward the lighthouse. Earlier, she and her brother made a compact (presumably unspoken but real to each of them) to be sullen and unhappy throughout the trip in protest of their father's overbearing, selfish manner. But then Cam's on the boat and the water is spraying and the air is blowing in her hair and she's trying to hold onto being unhappy but she can't help feeling the exhilaration of being on the sailboat. She goes back to the unhappiness for a moment, calling to mind her good reasons for being unhappy and the need for loyalty to her brother, then she feels the pull of the moment, and back and forth until the prior emotion breaks and she is in the good happy feeling, which incidentally also allows her to think lovingly of her father again. I used to feel like that all the time, wanting to hold onto some pact I'd made with myself to resist the temptations of false happiness. The push and pull and the actual slowness and uncertainty of shifts in emotion are perfectly true, as are the depictions at other points in the book of the quickness and randomness of shifts from enjoyment to sudden annoyance at some small thing someone does, and back again. It's like Woolf is telling us that the reality of human beings is really the opposite of the humours theory, that a character is made up of constant minute backs and forths, the sum total of which will create a person who overall seems one way or another, happy or bitter or serious. It makes me think of physical balance, in which stillness is only achieved through constant tiny adjustments of little muscles in different parts of the body that are all active and actually moving the body from place to place in order to attain an overall appearance of stillness.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)
Wolf Hall might be the best political thriller ever written, but then I'm not an expert in the genre. Anyhow it totally gripped me from beginning to end. My only disappointment was that there wasn't more -- I felt like I was cut off abruptly from the ongoing machinations. It has the kind of ending where if it was a movie you'd know they were setting you up for the sequel rather than giving you a stand-alone first film. I guess I'll have to buy a real history book to see how it plays out.
It's a fictionography of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII. He was an extraordinary character if this book is to be believed: became fluent in every language he was exposed to, could make money without even really thinking about it, didn't need to sleep, always knew the right thing to say, was stronger and physically tougher than anyone else even as he grew older, and was really, really knowledgeable about textiles. Also loyal, kind, reasonable, loving and pretty gender-egalitarian for the time period. I was occasionally annoyed, as I got further into the book, that there was almost no criticism of Cromwell. It made him seem un-round, but it's also lots of fun to read a book with such an easily heroic hero. There's more than enough criticism of Henry and the Boleyns and Mary to make up for Cromwell's virtues.
The book isn't moving or worldview-altering, but it is impressive. Mantel is amazing at inventing interior lives and detailed relationships that flesh out the historical account. It's so well done that it's hard to believe they're not fictional. I kept thinking that as I read, and then thinking it must not make a difference. But it must take much greater force of character to add all that to the insides of a real person, rather than making someone up over whom you would have total dominion.
It's a fictionography of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII. He was an extraordinary character if this book is to be believed: became fluent in every language he was exposed to, could make money without even really thinking about it, didn't need to sleep, always knew the right thing to say, was stronger and physically tougher than anyone else even as he grew older, and was really, really knowledgeable about textiles. Also loyal, kind, reasonable, loving and pretty gender-egalitarian for the time period. I was occasionally annoyed, as I got further into the book, that there was almost no criticism of Cromwell. It made him seem un-round, but it's also lots of fun to read a book with such an easily heroic hero. There's more than enough criticism of Henry and the Boleyns and Mary to make up for Cromwell's virtues.
The book isn't moving or worldview-altering, but it is impressive. Mantel is amazing at inventing interior lives and detailed relationships that flesh out the historical account. It's so well done that it's hard to believe they're not fictional. I kept thinking that as I read, and then thinking it must not make a difference. But it must take much greater force of character to add all that to the insides of a real person, rather than making someone up over whom you would have total dominion.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Modern fates
Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, 2005) is a modern-day, Japanese Oedipus Rex. There are some alterations: the person who foretells that Kafka Tamura will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister is not a disinterested augur but the soon-to-be-murdered father himself, who doesn't banish Kafka for it, and seems quite content with the arrangement, and in fact he probably was the one to ordain it. Fifteen-year-old Kafka bans himself from the kingdom, a great gated estate in Tokyo, maybe in order to avoid the curse but mainly to avoid his odious father entirely. His mother and sister left home when he was small and he does not know either of them. Lots of mystical events ensue, some of which are explained and others which are not.
It's very replete with cultural references, but in a way that's not annoying. There's a marriage of Western and Eastern artistic heritage that I find interesting. Many of the characters are conversant with the western literary and musical canons, and they also have a great interest in Japanese literature and art. I enjoyed feeling like that cleavage between the two histories isn't necessarily as deep and immutable as my university great books classes made it seem. I also like thinking about a world in which people are so in touch with literature and art, so day-to-day affected by them.
It's a fantasy book, I guess. Its mystical events are not just backdrop but central stage, the meat of the story. But it's an inward-looking, character-driven sort of fantasy. Even the other-worldly slime-being who climbs out of a dead man's mouth looking for a portal seems has personal salvation in mind.
It's very replete with cultural references, but in a way that's not annoying. There's a marriage of Western and Eastern artistic heritage that I find interesting. Many of the characters are conversant with the western literary and musical canons, and they also have a great interest in Japanese literature and art. I enjoyed feeling like that cleavage between the two histories isn't necessarily as deep and immutable as my university great books classes made it seem. I also like thinking about a world in which people are so in touch with literature and art, so day-to-day affected by them.
It's a fantasy book, I guess. Its mystical events are not just backdrop but central stage, the meat of the story. But it's an inward-looking, character-driven sort of fantasy. Even the other-worldly slime-being who climbs out of a dead man's mouth looking for a portal seems has personal salvation in mind.
An Upper-Middle-Class Manifesto
1. We will not hide our disapproval of drunks, especially if they are men of colour, walking on our streets.
2. We try to avoid all contact with people not like us, including changing our route so as not to drive through their neighbourhoods on the way to our summer cottages.
3. We will not hide our disgust, even when we are invited into people's homes and treated with civility.
This is what I get from Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970). Jonathan Franzen, in his 1999 introduction, puts it this way:
When I wrote about Fox's kids' book a few months ago I said I thought it was the perfect novella experience - more concise than a novel, but with more depth and breadth than a short story. This book, still a novella but over 50% longer than The Stone-Fraced Boy, at 153 pages, is more like a short story with a few extra scenes spliced in. Nothing happens. I like many novels where things happen very slowly, but there's usually something. Here there's a cat bite which might be infected but turns out not to be. There's no character growth, there's no realizations about their worlds or themselves, there's no change of situation of any kind. It's written nicely enough, and for the first fifty pages or so I enjoyed it, but then the relentless whining about poor people, without any authorial distance or perspective, got to me. I read to the end thinking there would be some kind of redeeming change in these people, but there wasn't. I found it too hard to take their eponymous desperation seriously when they were so callous about everyone around them.
2. We try to avoid all contact with people not like us, including changing our route so as not to drive through their neighbourhoods on the way to our summer cottages.
3. We will not hide our disgust, even when we are invited into people's homes and treated with civility.
This is what I get from Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970). Jonathan Franzen, in his 1999 introduction, puts it this way:
Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free World's leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred.I don't want to sound mean or petty, but it just makes him sound like he's signing on to the manifesto. Franzen lives in Brooklyn, like Sophie and her husband Otto, and maybe he's also against drunks walking on the sidewalks of his neighbourhood. The Free World's leading city? I find it funny that New Yorkers always say that as though it's trivially true.
When I wrote about Fox's kids' book a few months ago I said I thought it was the perfect novella experience - more concise than a novel, but with more depth and breadth than a short story. This book, still a novella but over 50% longer than The Stone-Fraced Boy, at 153 pages, is more like a short story with a few extra scenes spliced in. Nothing happens. I like many novels where things happen very slowly, but there's usually something. Here there's a cat bite which might be infected but turns out not to be. There's no character growth, there's no realizations about their worlds or themselves, there's no change of situation of any kind. It's written nicely enough, and for the first fifty pages or so I enjoyed it, but then the relentless whining about poor people, without any authorial distance or perspective, got to me. I read to the end thinking there would be some kind of redeeming change in these people, but there wasn't. I found it too hard to take their eponymous desperation seriously when they were so callous about everyone around them.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Boring old good and evil
The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966) struck me as very similar to her novel A Fairly Honourable Deafeat, in that it's also very overtly about the struggle between good and evil, and it also has two male centres to represent the two ideals, with all the women and some beta-male types traveling between the two poles (pun intended) to create the action of the novel. It's impossible to miss, even if you tried: they're compared at some crucial moment as being one white and innocent, the other black and threatening. We are given no psychological insight into the evil man, he is learned through glimpses caught by others. He is very sexual, and uses sex variously for control, for revenge, for otherworldly communication. There is a bit more exposure to the good man and his thoughts, although as a person he is strangely undeveloped. His biggest characteristic is that he suffered a lot (concentration camps, refugee camps, then abject poverty in England) after having had a glorious and uber-privileged early childhood. By his own account, he stopped really living a long time ago -- he only tried to survive in a little corner, without possessions or purpose other than bringing up his son, who he isn't close to and who has no respect for him.
The Time of the Angels (1966) is probably my least favourite of the four Iris Murdoch novels I've read, and I'm not usually a huge fan of hers anyway. I like the easy-read-but-not-empty feel of them. But they lack feeling and psychological depth. Murdoch seems to set her characters up as symbols for ideas, which makes them very artificial representations of human beings. She's very good at detail and complexity that makes things come alive, but all the characters are too much one way or another, too self-conscious and too-frequently philosophical in their conversations and in their desires.
The Time of the Angels (1966) is probably my least favourite of the four Iris Murdoch novels I've read, and I'm not usually a huge fan of hers anyway. I like the easy-read-but-not-empty feel of them. But they lack feeling and psychological depth. Murdoch seems to set her characters up as symbols for ideas, which makes them very artificial representations of human beings. She's very good at detail and complexity that makes things come alive, but all the characters are too much one way or another, too self-conscious and too-frequently philosophical in their conversations and in their desires.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Getting out of Hebrew school
The central theme of Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmoszgis (2005) is life as a Latvian/Eastern European Jewish immigrant in suburban Toronto. The stories are chronologically arranged: you follow the narrator from his first years in Canada, where he doesn't understand much of what's said at school and his parents are poor, struggling and confused by the language, to his adulthood where he seems to be a kind of suave, quirky writer guy.
I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.
A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces. The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.
The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.
I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.
Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.
I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.
A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces. The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.
The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.
I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.
Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The futuristic past
Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991) opens with a scene of a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium. A girl's parents sitting in the bleachers look through their binoculars to find their daughter among the six and a half thousand couples on the field, being group-blessed by their religious leader/marriage officiant. It's a very eerie scene, and for someone who isn't much of a history buff it seems very sci fi. Also, the title, indicating a future second Maoist or Mao-analogous era. I went along thinking I was reading sci fi until some hundred or so pages in where it mentions Moonies. I looked up the Moonies, and found out that they used to practice these mass weddings. The biggest one was at Madison Square Garden (incidentally, this is still going on -- according to the Telegraph, there was a 40 000-couple wedding just a few months ago; many of the couples were marriaged via simulatenous broadcast).
Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.
The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:
In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.
Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.
The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:
"I never think about the future."
"You come from the future," [Bill] said quietly.But if the book is trying to make some kind of point about the place of cults in the world's future, it's a bit lost on me. The world-events juxtaposition is between the Moonies and the war in Beirut (though what the purpose of this juxtaposition is eludes me). The war is a big feature of the book, and especially a terrorist group that operates from Beirut. There's a recurring mention of Bill's theory that terrorism has made writing irrelevant. Writing used to be the act that shaped culture, but now terror is. The theory is not given a lot of credence by the other characters, but it might be a kind of central theme for the book. I guess.
In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Descriptiveness
I've just finished reading a lovely story on the New Yorker online by Yiyun Li, called "Alone". It's bleak and seems like it's going to be a depressing story but then it isn't, it's just full of emotional content, which is the best thing for a short story to be, in my opinion.
It did, however, have a quality that a lot of short stories that I've read recently (I've been reading a lot of them (mostly in Canadian lit quarterlies, but also in collections and online). It's something I might not have noticed if I weren't also writing fiction in an active way at the moment, which makes me read with a detective's eye in addition to my usual desire to appreciate.
Some of it gets much much more distracting, like this passage in an excerpt from the memoir Happy, by Alex Lemon, published in a recent issue of Tin House (vol. 11 number 1 to be exact), wherein the protagonist teenage boy's brain surgery, for which his family has had to travel to Miami by plane, might be canceled because of a hurricane:
As I'm thinking about this I'm more and more thinking almost everyone would disagree with me (at least on the theory, if not on the coke can). Maybe it's a weakness in me. I skipped the descriptive passages in my first reading of The Hobbit (I was seven; I think I also skipped most of the songs). Incidentally, my dislike of Tolkien's mountain descriptions made me love The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I haven't read or even seen a copy of this book since I was maybe twelve so I'm not sure I should vouch for it this long after (I'm so often disappointed when I go back and read things I loved fifteen years ago), but at the time I thought it had a perfect way of dealing with descriptions - they're edited out of the new version of an older volume (which at the time I thought was real but have since decided was fictional; I'd really like to re-read that book).
It did, however, have a quality that a lot of short stories that I've read recently (I've been reading a lot of them (mostly in Canadian lit quarterlies, but also in collections and online). It's something I might not have noticed if I weren't also writing fiction in an active way at the moment, which makes me read with a detective's eye in addition to my usual desire to appreciate.
Walter took her to a café at the back of a gift shop. Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and model fish aged unwanted on the shelves. At the back of the shop, dim but for a single lamp hanging from the ceiling, there were a few unvarnished wooden tables. An old man at the counter nodded in greeting when he saw Walter. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the best time for those in the mountains to revel in the joys of hiking and fishing before the sunshine thinned to dusk, but in the shop time seemed to be stranded, day taking forever to turn into night. The browser picked up a snow globe and shook it; when his cell phone beeped he perked up and left abruptly.It's well enough written and it's in keeping thematically - there's a lot of water in the story. But while the rest of the piece is gripping and unique, this whole paragraph seems meandering and also dull. The store isn't important enough to warrant this much attention. Even the caf/ is not particulary important. And that would be fine if the description was amazing and gave you not only a feeling of context but also that you were reading something that made you visualize in a way that you don't often, but the carved boats and model fish don't do that for me at all. I'm getting worked up about it not because I mind an average-quality paragraph in a great short story, but because I feel like the reason it's there is that there's an unnecessary emphasis in establishment short-story writing on lengthy description of surroundings. I'm guessing I'm in a minority in disliking this descriptiveness in itself, but I can't help it.
Some of it gets much much more distracting, like this passage in an excerpt from the memoir Happy, by Alex Lemon, published in a recent issue of Tin House (vol. 11 number 1 to be exact), wherein the protagonist teenage boy's brain surgery, for which his family has had to travel to Miami by plane, might be canceled because of a hurricane:
Ma and I walk the vacant streets. Yoo-hoo-colored water fills the ditches, and trash grips the fences. An empty Coca-Cola can tinkles across the sidewalk.Independently, nothing is wrong with these sentences. But now I'm thinking about bottled beverages. Is that what we want? It can't be unintentional, can it? It really bugs me. The Yoo-hoo is fine, that actually is kind of a useful description, but then the coke can is in there just to be descriptively thorough, and isn't in any way helpful to me in creating the image, and, more importantly, totally jarred me out of my reading flow.
As I'm thinking about this I'm more and more thinking almost everyone would disagree with me (at least on the theory, if not on the coke can). Maybe it's a weakness in me. I skipped the descriptive passages in my first reading of The Hobbit (I was seven; I think I also skipped most of the songs). Incidentally, my dislike of Tolkien's mountain descriptions made me love The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I haven't read or even seen a copy of this book since I was maybe twelve so I'm not sure I should vouch for it this long after (I'm so often disappointed when I go back and read things I loved fifteen years ago), but at the time I thought it had a perfect way of dealing with descriptions - they're edited out of the new version of an older volume (which at the time I thought was real but have since decided was fictional; I'd really like to re-read that book).
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