From the Pen of E.L. Doctorow

We’ve still got some folks weighing in on “Wakefield” a day or two later (I told you it was a long one,) so I thought I’d share a few of the lines that really struck me as I reread the story. These aren’t necessarily beautiful or flowery masterstrokes of style- I don’t think that’s Doctorow’s M.O. (see last paragraph of this article)- but there’s something about his writing that grabs you by the shoulders and makes you look at things from an unexpected angle, something that leaves you convinced that you’ve seen the person or thing exactly how he meant you to. Reminds me a little of Eugenides in that regard:

“That’s what she did when we argued- she used the last name. I wasn’t Howard, I was Wakefield. It was one of her feminist adaptations of the locker room style that I detested.”

“She still moved like the dancer she had been in college, her feet pointed slightly outward, her head high, her walk more a glide than something taken step by step.”

“From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient apple tree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it.”

“All that was wanting now was Diana’s mother, and by noon she was up from the city in her white Escalade- the widow Babs, who had opposed the marriage and was likely now to say so. Babs was what Diana, God help us, might be thirty years hence- high heeled, ceramicized, liposucted, devaricosed, her golden fall of hair as shiny and hard as peanut brittle.”

“I watched in the big mirror as, snip by snip, I travelled back in time. With each falling hank of hair, more and more of the disastrous lineaments of my previous self emerged, until, big naked ears and all, staring back at me was the missing link to Howard Wakefield.”

Short Story Club: "Wakefield" by E.L. Docotorow

Welcome to short story club. It’s good to see you all after so long. Come on in and have a seat. Tucker’s just warming up some pigs-in-a-blanket and Orlando’s on the can. He’ll be out in a minute.

What did everyone think of “Wakefield?” I’ll probably be a little more negative than I typically am, but despite the criticisms that follow I thought it was a pretty compelling read.

The first time I read this story I was infuriated by the ending. I felt like punching Doctorow in the nose. He completely neglected the most interesting part of the story: what the hell would happen when Wakefield walked back through his front door.

But I'll give him credit for keeping me reading. It was a Kafka-esque exploration of an unthinkable "what if" scenario, but he managed to make it plausible. I found that fascinating. But it was the carrot of the ending that kept me going, and when I realized in the last paragraph that there was in fact no carrot... well, I felt used and dirty.

A couple more criticisms:

• his wife never called his cell-phone?
• the whole crux of the story was that he was this lucid, intelligent man, but then we're supposed to believe he survived for months on pristine table scraps from neighborhood garbage cans?
• We're supposed to believe that he did so without being noticed?
• He didn't freeze his butt off until after Thanksgiving? In a New York suburb? In real life he'd be dead by Halloween.
• The secretive aid of the mental patients was kind of hard to believe.
• At one point the mental patients all disappear, then magically reappear to give him a spongebath?
• And his own wife didn't recognize him after an absence of just 6 months or so? Really? Standing eye-to-eye?

I dunno. I'll call it a great story, and it did give me a lot to think about. I'll even say that the ambiguous ending is okay. But I think his editor failed him on a number of simple continuity errors, and I'm afraid they amount to a pretty tall tale when taken altogether.

But yeah, I actually really liked it. What did you think?

Short Story Club Returns

It’s been far too long since our last John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club post, but we’re going to go ahead and rectify that right here. This month’s story is a doozy- you’ve been warned- but I have to admit I was drawn into it completely.

As the autumn weather turns cold and our thoughts turn to the upcoming holidays we’ll be spending with our families, it’s only natural to read a story about a man who  decides, on a whim, to squat secretly in the attic above his own detached garage while his family copes with his supposed disappearance, right? Right.

Here’s the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s short story “Wakefield:”

“People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage.”

Read the rest here.   Then come back tomorrow for the discussion.   It’s on.

Short Story Club: "Walter John Harmon" by E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in, have a seat, and let’s get down to business. Tucker and Orlando are in the kitchen preparing watercress sandwiches. As we announced before, the focus of this month’s discussion is the rather lengthy short story “Walter John Harmon” by E.L Doctorow. It’s a fascinating yarn about life in a religious cult- as told by a believer, who also happens to be the group’s in-house counsel attorney.

In what we hope becomes a tradition, we’ve asked for guest posters to kick off our discussion. And who better to inaugurate the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club, than Mr. John R. Lyman himself. (And no, that’s not him pictured above. That would be Doctorow.) What did you think, Lyman?:

I hadn't thought much about cults lately, which isn't all that easy to do when you share a home state with the Lafferty brothers and Warren Jeffs.  Half the time you're trying to just read an article about last week's football game in the local paper you get smacked in the face with horror stories about child brides and tales of end times. At a certain point you tune them out. After reading "Walter John Harmon" I had a better sense of why: most cult stories are invariably told somewhat uninterestingly by outsiders, because in the most interesting cults members don't do much talking to rest of the world. That type of reporting often leads to a list of weird acts and crimes, but never seems to get to the crux of the cult itself. It's a bit like reading a Woodward and Bernstein article on Watergate without any input from Deepthroat.  

In my mind Doctorow's story, although of course fictional, offers as plausible an account as any "true" story of life in a cult. The feeling of complete inadequacy ("I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification") mixed with the supreme arrogance of knowing you're right about something while the rest of the world is completely wrong ("In the end, no one could withstand the warmth and friendliness of our Embrace."). And, of course, the utter fear of cognitive dissonance, which drives so much of what anyone does but seems to especially affect those in a cult. "Hmm, the prophet ran off with my money and wife -- either I've been a total tool for the last five years of my life or this is all part of the master plan. Let me go talk to a few of the other elders who might have been fooled, too. . . yep, it was all part of the master plan!"

At times the story shows its age. For whatever reason cults were a bigger deal in the late 90s and early 2000s than they are now. Perhaps there was less going on then, or maybe the American public has just come to accept religious wackos now and isn't as interested as reading about them. The passages on the Internet are borderline funny. I had forgotten there was a time -- 2003, apparently -- when people actually used the term "Web log" instead of blog. And if Doctorow wrote the story today he'd either cut the entire descriptive paragraph after "Betty and I learned about Walter John Harmon from the Internet" (really, where else would you learn about a cult?) or replace it with, "Initially we friended Walter on Facebook, which is where all his followers must first declare their loyalty. Then we watched some really funny YouTube videos of him playing with his cats." But the essence is timeless. Life is pretty damn scary for some people and it's nice to have a place to fit in, even at the expense of your wife, livelihood, and rationality.

Thanks, John. What about the rest of you? Do you agree? Disagree? Like the story? Dislike the story? What did you think about the world Doctorow created here? Have at it in the comments!

The JRLMSSC Is Born

Yesterday’s post on short stories was part love song, part lamentation. Today we tell you what we’re going to do about the lamentation part of things.

But first, appropriately, a very short story:

The other day I was included on an email chain between the participants of a once-great book club. As often happens in life, this half dozen men in their early thirties had been spread far and wide by the grad-school/professional diaspora, and now meets only once a year during the holidays. From what I could tell, a few half-hearted emails are occasionally traded to spur or check on progress, and at least one daunting title had been jettisoned midway through the year to stave off a mutiny of the disinterested.

But then something interesting happened. One of them circulated a short story he thought just might intrigue the group. What followed was a flurry of emails and informal reviews that ranged from high praise to “not-that-great,” and from profound and eloquent to downright hilarious. In fact, I’d never seen a group of non-writer thirty-somethings mobilize themselves to a literary discussion quite so quickly before. It spawned an epiphany of sorts:

Short stories are short. People will actually read them. The point of the story can usually be smoked out of its hiding place in very little time, and you can say about it what you want to in the space of a short email or blog comment. They are infinitely better suited to comprehensive club-type discussions than the long works of fiction that three-quarters of the group never likes, and half the group never reads.

And that is why we’re establishing the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. Every month we’ll post the link to a fantastic short story for you to read, and on the appointed day you’ll return to hear some of our thoughts, and to share some more of your own. It will be spectacular.

Now, are we the first short story club in existence? Certainly not. Are we the best short story club in existence? It’s likely. But we know we’re the only one that enjoys the ongoing patronage of Mr. John R. Lyman. So who is this great man, you ask? That’s a great question, and we look forward to all your great questions, comments, complaints and criticisms as we launch the short story club that bears his name.

First up for the JRLMSSC in January? We might as well start with a doozy: “Walter John Harmon” by E.L. Doctorow, published in the New Yorker in 2003, and collected in his 2004 book Sweet Land Stories. Here's the opening:

When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work the Seventh Attainment was still not mine. [Read More]

It is Fascinating. You won't want to miss it. Click the link, read it, mull it over, and come back here to hash it out on Thursday January 19^th.

And don't forget, the first rule of Short Story Club is: you do not talk about Short Story Cl– wait a minute, no… that’s another club. The first rule of Short Story Club is tell everyone about short story club. It’s gonna be off the chain!