What We’re Reading: Inappropriate Behavior
Inappropriate Behavior by Murray Farish (Milkweed Editions, 2014)
Consider all the reality shows available on television today, and it’s not difficult to conclude that viewers love people behaving badly. Now bookish sorts can turn off the tube and still get a dose of deviant deeds in Murray Farish’s new collection of short stories, Inappropriate Behavior. From strikingly realistic portraits of people struggling to maintain their sense of self in difficult circumstances to the fractured worlds of people barely holding on to reality, Inappropriate Behavior offers a range of stories that are just as voyeuristic as any reality TV show.
Farish distills the stresses facing many families today and illustrates them with shocking clarity in the title story. “Inappropriate Behavior” follows what could be considered a typical forty-something couple—George has been unemployed for months, Miranda’s struggling to keep the family afloat with her salary, and their son, Archie, has inappropriate behavior neither the school nor medical community can properly diagnose.
The strongest section of the story is a pages-long string of unrelenting questions mimicking the constant loop that must run through the minds of those who have less money coming in than going out.
Why does an American CEO earn 350 times the salary of the average worker? Because that’s what the market will bear? What are we going to do? If my child’s new school doesn’t notice that his classmates have locked him in a broom closet for three hours, does that constitute neglect? Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle? What are the effects of homelessness on children?
You can just hear the voice-over going into commercial: “Will George find a job? Can Miranda hang on to hers? Will the money run out? Will things ever get better? Stay tuned!” “Inappropriate Behavior” could easily be a reality show on the now profoundly misnamed TLC.
In other stories, Farish uses the immediacy of the first-person POV to create the confessional atmosphere so popular on reality TV. “Mayflies” is a particularly poignant story about Ms. Willet, a thirty-seven-year-old woman whose life is filled with heartbreak and shattered dreams. She married her high school boyfriend because she got pregnant and is stuck in the same small-minded small town she grew up in. Her older son shot and killed her younger son before joining the Marines, and her husband is slowly drinking himself to death. She works at a diner with Sandy, a “melodramatic girl who claims to have big dreams,” and Royce, “a twenty-four-year-old child already well past the apex of his powers,” who vaguely reminds her of her husband. Although she distances herself emotionally from everyone now, she still feels protective of Sandy. “I’d like to be able to tell her things. I’d like to tell her to go away, farther than Auburn. Go states away, countries away. Go and don’t come back.”
The story takes place over the course of one night, a summer night in the midst of the annual mayfly spawning season when mayflies fill the air and the surfaces of the town. Ms. Willet is restless, and when she sees Sandy kiss Royce after an apparent date, she uses her car to exact an act of self-redemption and protection for Sandy. She’s caused considerable damage but feels no remorse.
I can think in this moment, but I cannot seem to feel, so I think about what I should feel, and I don’t know. I think I should go get help. I think about the times I let Royce sleep with me. . . . I think about Buck, and how we stayed together all those years even though we only got married because of Ronnie, and then how, years later, here comes little Ford, the boy I wanted, the boy we actually made love to make. I think, Royce is someone’s child too—but she’s dead. I think I know why I did this to him, and I think it’s almost a good enough reason.
I say, “If you don’t die, you’d better by God stay away from that girl.”
But inappropriate behavior isn’t limited to actions. As Farish illustrates in “The Passage,” inaction also qualifies as inappropriate behavior. “The Passage” imagines Joe Bill, a naïve young man, sharing quarters with Lee Harvey Oswald on an ocean voyage in 1959. Joe Bill eventually reads the mysterious journals of his cabin mate and confronts him on the contents. Lee warns him that one day Joe Bill will have to deny knowing him or what was in his journal. After the Kennedy assassination, Joe Bill tells the reporters and investigators what Lee told him to say. But Joe Bill has questions of his own.
And of course, there was the biggest question of all. . . .It’s been with him every day since and will be forever, and it’s the one question he has an answer for: What did you do about it, Joe Bill? And the answer is, nothing.
Farish has a strong debut with Inappropriate Behavior. As with all short story collections, some stories are stronger than others, but even the weaker stories here don’t slow down the momentum. Inappropriate Behavior is an engaging, quick read. It’s summer, folks. Turn off the television, head outside, and sate your own voyeuristic appetite with material that’s just as juicy but much more substantive than the standard reality show fare.
Where do you prefer to get your inappropriate behavior — reality television or books? Does fictionalized inappropriate behavior work better in small doses (short stories) or big doses (novels)?
Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf Press, 2014)
There must be something in that Scandinavian coffee. Perhaps it’s a special dark roast. Because those Scandinavian authors can write some dark stories. The reading masses have already devoured the twisted tales of Stieg Larsson (Sweden), Jo Nesbø (Norway), and Jussi Adler-Olsen (Denmark). Now, thanks to Graywolf Press, readers can get a satisfying taste of another Danish author. Dorthe Nors’ newly translated short story collection, Karate Chop, offers just as much darkness as her fellow Scandinavians but with a bit more subtlety.
Nors does an amazing amount of writing in such a short space. Only eighty-eight pages long, Karate Chop is full of short stories, each lasting only a few pages each. But what she manages to pack into those pages delivers quite a jolt. It may seem that stories would need more space to develop properly, but Nors quickly and sharply probes her characters and their humanity, leaving the readers to judge their actions or inaction.
Not all stories in Karate Chop are dark. In the four short pages of “The Winter Garden,” Nors perfectly crystallizes a moment everyone faces in their lives—the moment a parent goes from extraordinary to ordinary. A boy goes to live with his father after his mother’s boyfriend and his two daughters move into their house. His father claims the divorce was good for him, and he’s started a hobby of gardening succulents. When his father brings home a woman and starts explaining his garden, the boy notices the woman “looking at the wallpaper in the living room.” When the boy and his father visit the woman’s home, they meet her son, and the boy also meets a stark realization.
He stuck his tongue out at my father when he wasn’t looking. That may seem like a petty thing, but it was only then that I realized that I was the only person who thought my father was someone special. It was only my way of looking at him that stopped him from being just some ordinary guy of no importance. If I didn’t like him he would basically be insignificant, and if he were insignificant, things would look pretty bad for me.
Some stories of Karate Chop also float between reality and the surreal. In stories such as “She Frequented Cemeteries,” readers are left on their own to decide how reliable the narrator is. The woman in this story seems to have finally found love.
What happened wasn’t exactly spectacular. She had met a man. That was all. . . . Her feelings were strong and reciprocated. She sensed it, yet she knew also it would take time before they could be together. He was in mourning for things he’d lost, and his mourning was unhurried.. . .
But there was no way she could explain this to her girlfriends. They demanded evidence. They wanted to know who had died, why he kept crying, and if it really wasn’t just his own fault.
To avoid her friends and the conversations she doesn’t want to have, she walks around cemeteries dreaming of her future.
In the early evening she would pass through the iron gates into Park Cemetery, stroll past the dead painters, the poets, and head for the place where the pink roses were. When she got there she would walk between the graves, and as she went she closed her eyes to the parts of reality the others were keeping a watch on and imagined the man, who could only be with her in spirit, lacing his fingers in hers. They would walk there in various scenarios, sometimes silently, but together. They would be walking there when he said he loved her. Things like that would be said as they walked side by side through the cemeteries in the various stages of their as-yet-uninitiated time together.
Unlike her Scandinavian counterparts, Dorthe Nors offers short, incisive stories that plumb the depths of humanity while offering only glimpses of the darkness that can be found there. Stories such as “The Buddhist,” “Karate Chop,” and “Female Killers” are more in line with the tradition of dark Scandinavian tales. The stories seem to be about ordinary people on the surface, but Nors weaves an undercurrent throughout the stories that leaves readers knowing something is not exactly right with these characters.
Although Karate Chop is Nors’ first English translation, she has five other novels just waiting to be translated for eager audiences. Since you can’t read her novels yet, whet your appetite with Karate Chop. You won’t even need a cup of coffee to keep you awake.
How short can short stories be and still be effective? Can a short story be too short, becoming more of a character study instead of a fully realized story?
What We’re Reading: Someone Else’s Wedding Vows
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone (Tin House Books and Octopus Books, 2014)
Human relationships—from familial and fraternal to romantic and sexual—have always provided material for poets. And there is no better event for observing all types of relationships than at a wedding, a truly literal and figurative joining of two groups of families and friends. In her new collection, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, Bianca Stone offers her creative insights into various relationships.
The title poem, “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows,” was inspired by assisting her sister, a wedding photographer, at a few events. The narrator is a wedding photographer lamenting her own relationships and choices in life as she photographs someone else’s big day.
And it’s true
I spent my whole life in fear of sharing my mind
but with a longing for it to be taken.
Year after year I could not even order myself to be touched.
I became a waitress who looked sad, dropping occasionally
into the bed of a maniac, who looked sadder
and meaner.
In an interview with TellTell Poetry, Stone states that after observing the weddings she realized “[s]omeone else’s vows are meaningless, and yet, they’re all so analogous. It both revolted and excited me.” As “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” comes to a close, the narrator offers her own toast.
And where it’s driest I sit down with my wet drink.
I drink for the incidental. The heart of dust.
For my family and all their uneven moods.
For this audience of discreet psychotics
posing for photographs.
For the living deer ravaging gardens.
For the touch of sub-shrubs: lavender,
periwinkle and thyme—
touching the lingering otherness—
for this not being known,
rarely knowing
and for the ordinary monstrous knowing I love.
Stone’s poems succeed with her use of creatively mundane imagery. She declares, “My name looks good in gangster font” when considering her educational degrees in “The Future is Here.” She laments her flatlining intellect in “Dishes”—“Now my intelligence is a line of hieroglyphs, / a blouse fluttering.”
In the final poem, “Practicing Vigilance,” Stone begins with a startling, yet entirely apt, image.
Every day I try and write down one terrible thing.
One terrible thing—I’m filled with them,
carry each one
like an organ locked in a Coleman cooler.
The terrible things in your life, whether they’re things you’ve done or thought or had done to you, can be as simultaneously revolting and awe-inspiring as the organ in the cooler, and like the organ, sometimes you need those terrible things to survive. Because they are, and always will be, a part of you.
But by the end of the poem, Stone succinctly gets to the heart of all human relationships.
I’m coaxing the black bull out of my mouth
with a red flag and a beer. I’m constructing
out of my faulty genes,
my last sentence, my last thing
which addresses the dilemma obliquely:
we will perceive our own pain in others.
And we will know if we are capable of loving them.
We aren’t alone in suffering terrible things in our lives. Everyone has their own set of terrible things. It’s only a matter of finding a set of organ coolers we are willing and able to love.
Stone uses her worthy insights to deconstruct and analyze human relationships in the poems of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, but she is also an accomplished visual artist, having created ink-and-watercolor comics and videos using her poems. Although there are no illustrations in Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, parts of some poems have been previously illustrated and can be viewed on her website. She described her use of illustration in a 2012 interview with The Comics Journal, “In my work I prefer to have the images move away from literal illustration of what the text is saying. I want to use the image as another element of form in poetry—to have the image offer more space for the reader to interpret and create meaning on their own.” Perhaps in her first full-length collection, Stone wanted the poetry to stand on its own. Speaking with Poetry Foundation, Stone admits, “I don’t want to tell anybody how to interpret a poetic line. It’s not good for the poem.” Stone did the cover illustration for Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, but I do wish more of her art had been included. The poetry, while strong on its own, is a whole new experience with the visuals (view her video for “Elegy with Judy Garland & Refrigerator” here).
Do illustrations enhance or diminish poetry? If combined with other media, does a poem become something other than a poem?
What We’re Reading: Let the Dark Flower Blossom
Let the Dark Flower Blossom by Norah Labiner (Coffee House Press, 2013)
A murder. Twins. A desolate island. Lies. These were all of the things that intrigued me about Let the Dark Flower Blossom by Norah Labiner. And it delivered. Murder? Possibly several. Twins? Yep. A desolate island? Check. Lies? Too many to count.
It may sound unprofessional, but Let the Dark Flower Blossom is perhaps the postmodern-est, metafiction-iest book I’ve read. But that’s all my brain has left after finishing the book. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I’m glad I experienced it. But it also brought back every insecurity I had in my college contemporary literature class. A book like Let the Dark Flower Blossom, with all of its twists, turns, lies, half-truths, and perhaps truths, leaves me utterly unsure of my abilities as a reader. What am I missing that all the intelligent readers are “getting”? For all of my marginalia crowding the book, I’m still not sure I fully understand what I just experienced. Let me try to work through it for you.
Twins Sheldon and Eloise Schell meet Roman Stone in college. Sheldon and Roman are roommates and writers, and Roman falls for Eloise. Roman becomes a successful writer, while Sheldon becomes just a writer. Eloise marries a lawyer who specializes in getting victims of crimes to question their memories of events. Roman is murdered, and no one knows who did it. Eloise and Sheldon must dredge up a past they’d rather forget in order to get the answers they need now.
Sheldon claims he only shares his true story with his neighbor, whose memory is failing.
Each night the doctor forgot the story that I had told him the night before. He forgot that I told him about Father and Mother. He forgot what I told him about Eloise. He forgot that I told him about Pru. He forgot that I told him about the woods.
This was the nature of Dr. Lemon’s disease.
He forgot.
And I confessed again.
I remembered.
This was the nature of my punishment.
I could not forget.
Labiner has many beautiful passages in the book, but she also makes sure the reader doesn’t forget. Taking into account the number of characters recalling the past and the number of times and various ways they do it, bits of stories and phrases are excessively repeated, and the reader almost wishes they were allowed the luxury of forgetting.
I love books that twist and turn and have big blindsiding reveals in the end, but Let the Dark Flower Blossom gives the reader very little, if anything, to hold on to. As the past actions of Roman and Sheldon come to light, they are told and retold several times, in several variations, by several characters. Which version is the reader to trust? I’m not sure the reader can trust anyone. At least I didn’t. And that’s what makes the book so frustrating. The rug can be pulled out from under a reader only so many times before they decide they don’t want to get up again.
But Labiner’s command of language is impressive, and the reader continues on to witness her skillful manipulation of her craft.
Somewhere between ink and ether.
Between shoe and sock.
And tock and tick.
And scissors and rock.
Between either and or—
The coffee drip by drop fell into the pot.
Lovely passages like this are the impetus for the reader to forge ahead with the decidedly murky story. Let the Dark Flower Blossom is not an easy book. I’m not even sure I can say it’s satisfying. But, it’s an experience. And Labiner’s writing can be exquisite, painful, and enlightening, sometimes all at once. That’s why I’ll gladly seek out her other books. After an appropriate rest period, of course.
What types of books bring out your insecurities as a reader? Do you shy away from those books or try to face those insecurities down?
