Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays

Maria, yes or no: I see a cock in this inkblot. Maria, yes or no: A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct, I believe my sins are unpardonable, I have been disappointed in love. How could I answer? How could it apply? NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

--Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

The focus is on Maria, who gets the first chapter to introduce herself. It is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, she tells us: "Age, thirty-one. Married. Divorced. One daughter, age four," who is in the hospital with "an aberrant chemical in her brain." And now Maria is in a mental hospital. The next two chapters are narrated by Helene, a friend of Maria's (insofar as she has any), and then Carter, her ex-husband. Helene says that Maria killed BZ, her husband--Carter only refers to "BZ's death."

The remaining chapters--most of them--are third person and the action occurs chronologically before the characters speak in the first three chapters. This narration feels stagnant. Only the bare bones of any situation are given, sometimes the barest I could imagine: Maria writes three letters and tears them up, but what they say or who they're for is left out; Maria tells her lover, Les, that he makes her happy but we never see them together. This skeletal way of storytelling means there's almost nothing to cloud or complicate the primary feelings--Maria's grief over her separation from her daughter, Kate, and over the abortion Carter urged her to have when she became pregnant.

The dialogue is terse and often empty. Something Helene says:

If it's not funny, don't say it, Maria.

Problems are never discussed directly, actions never taken in the open, issues dealt with quickly and discreetly by agents over the telephone. Maria's numbness was my numbness as I read. The sense Maria has of her own lack of agency--I felt it with her. Carter begs Maria to show feeling, to take action, to do something, failing to see that he has stood in the way in the past, as have all of "them," the men who have been in Maria's life.

But Maria is somehow not destroyed by the attempts to take over her life. For most of the book, it seems as though she will be. She allows herself to haunt her apartment all day, smoking pot and taking sedatives and eating nothing, occasionally pulled out by BZ to parties full of people she doesn't care for. But slowly, she reawakens. About two-thirds of the way through the book, something peeks through the third-person narrative in italics and I wondered, was that Maria? Twenty-seven chapters later, sure enough, Maria gets the whole chapter, her voice in italics. Then again in six more chapters, and then every other chapter for the rest of the book. The last words are hers:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never know, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say.

It's impossible, for me at least, to understand what revitalizes her. She is not BZ, who swallows a bottle of sedatives and dies next to Maria. It's true that she has a motivation BZ does not--in the first chapter, discussing the stupid questions they ask her at the mental hospital, she anticipates her readers' reaction: "Why bother, you might ask. I bother for Kate. What I play for here is Kate. Carter put Kate in there and I am going to get her out." Maria pushes through the nothing looking for something, playing to win Kate back. What drags her from the stupor in which she spends most of the book doesn't matter; she gets out and goes.

I don't know if I can tag this one "optimism," though.

Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work.

Mary Robison's Tell Me: 30 Stories

He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

--Mary Robison, "Yours"

Something ridiculous: When I named this blog, I was not consciously thinking of the title of the collection of Mary Robison's thirty best (or most-frequently-published, or favorite, or whatever the deciding factor was) stories, despite the fact that it was the last book I'd read. Of course it permeated my subconscious and now I feel like a silly rip-off. That really, actually happened. But I'm going to keep the name for now, and if I think of a better one I may change it.

Here's what I did at the beginning of the summer: I found interviews with my favorite writer, Amy Hempel, on the Internet. I made a list of the writers she mentioned in the interviews, took it to the library, and took out a few books. I had also heard Mary Robison's name in my favorite class (Form & Theory). And then I heard Hempel was a fan. Look: I really like Amy Hempel. You should go and read her now. (My favorite collection of hers is the most recent, The Dog of the Marriage. See it over there on my favorite books list? At the top?)

Everything suggested that I would love Mary Robison. Here's a breakdown of my impression of the stories, to give you an idea of how I liked the collection overall and to give you some direction if you'd like to read her but aren't interested in all thirty stories.

Love/like a lot [10]: “The Help,” “I Get By,” “Daughters,”* “Father, Grandfather,” “I Am Twenty-One,” “For Real,” “Your Errant Mom,” “The Wellman Twins,” “Smart,” “Yours”

Like [7]: “Coach,” “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night,” “Kite and Paint,” “Happy Boy, Allen,” “Care,” “What I Hear,” “Likely Lake”

Indifferent to [9]: “In the Woods,” “Seizing Control,” “While Home,” “In Jewel,” “Independence Day,” “Apostasy,” “Mirror,” “Doctor’s Sons,” “Sisters”

Dislike [4]: “Smoke,” “Trying,” “Pretty Ice,” “May Queen”

Now, this only reflects my opinions. A big part of my reaction to each story has to do with how it moved me emotionally. Of COURSE technique and things figure into my evaluation, but I trust my literary eye enough now that if I'm moved by something, that generally means it's technically sound as well. Beyond that, its emotional punch is a large part of what makes a story good--after all, I'm not interested in wowing readers with my technical ability so much as I am reaching something inside of them--after I've mastered the technical side. I guess that's something to keep in mind. Most of these stories are excellent technically, and so I'm sure some of the stories I didn't like, you'd love. And the other way around.

I put an asterisk next to "Daughters" because it was more compelling to me than it was likable. There was a tension throughout the whole thing that was never addressed and never played itself out. There is one moment at which a character has an outburst, but although the character's partner replies, the situation is diffused more quickly than was satisfying:

Nicholas stayed behind the wheel. "First of all, Pierce, I'm in no mood for a drink," he said. "You shouldn't be either, at five o' clock. We were going to the racetrack tonight, remember? Plus I'd like to get the books finished, if nobody minds." He looked straight ahead as he spoke.

Pierce, Nicholas's partner, tells him to calm down, and that there's time for a drink, and Nicholas merely replies that he's going to take the boxes in the car home and leaves. It felt to me as though it should be a bigger moment, possibly because the anger comes out of nearly nowhere--and because there is no follow-up to this moment that seems so huge. When Pierce tells Dell that he and Nicholas are talking about getting a divorce, it is offhandedly. I was left wondering about the continuation of this tension between Pierce and Nicholas, but Robison never provides it.

And I had a similar feeling later in the story when three adult characters, Dell, Pierce, and Gene, are chastising Dell's child, Charlotte, for stealing Gene's watch. There are obvious issues--about differences in child-rearing, for instance--that one can see MIGHT be a problem, but these issues never come out. It isn't that I would expect Robison to bring them out overtly; they are subtle in a way that extends beyond normal contemporary-lit subtlety, somehow. This unwillingness (not Robison's, of course, but I guess the story's? The characters'?) to drag out issues even in an under-the-surface way creates a serious tension that I can't imagine replicating but that I think was a really interesting choice on Robison's part.

Although her style remains fairly consistent (in this sort of best-of collection), with the inexplicable exception of the maybe-postmodern "Apostasy," Robison plays with individual elements like the tension of "Daughters" in several stories. I felt rather indifferent about "Independence Day," a story about a woman living with her sister and father after separating from her husband. Looking back, it occurred to me that the central character, too, seems indifferent to her story--and maybe that wasn't a mistake. Another compelling story was "I Am Twenty-One," really more a character sketch that involves practically no characters outside the speaker. It couldn't be longer than it is and maintain that isolation. As it is, it packs a punch in the three pages it takes up; it's a great examination of an obsessive personality and self-inflicted isolation.

Robison's fiction carries a heavy undercurrent of quiet sadness, sometimes grief, that's present in most of my favorite contemporary fiction. Still, she gives readers a reprieve occasionally, as is the case with several of my favorite stories like "I Get By," "Father, Grandfather," and "Smart," which offer small bits of optimism that you can hold onto like hell if you want to.

I would sleep on my stomach now, without a pillow, and with no sustained thoughts. I wanted what I wanted. Before bed, I had read stories with I-narrators who could've been me.

--Mary Robison, "Your Errant Mom"

Soon, I promise

I know, I know. I haven't written a useful post yet. It's coming, really, I just had a busy day and now I'm too tired to think about Mary Robison. BUT--this blog is about to get much more exciting, because tomorrow morning I'm going to 1. post something substantial and 2. fix this place up a bit. Stay tuned.

The Whys

Told myself I was going to be serious about my reading (of contemporary literature, particularly short stories) and writing this summer. I have to start thinking now about my fast-approaching thesis project, which will be a collection of short stories accompanied by analysis. My reading's been semi-successful and I'd rather not think about my writing just now. I need something to motivate me to talk and write and think about what I'm taking in because I can't seem to do it when I'm my only audience. Here I am. I'll be surprised if this ends up at all useful for anyone else, but maybe one of you will find a good book to read on here or it'll motivate someone else to read or write or think more. We'll see. Anyway, it'll motivate me if I get some followers, so if you wanna click that little button over to the right there and then ignore my posts entirely I won't be offended.

Intro post. For-real literary post later tonight. [EDIT: Okay, maybe tomorrow.]

Oh, and also--please tell me exactly how over-the-top this layout is. I didn't really want it to look like I was trying this hard, but these Blogger templates don't give me a lot to work with and my HTML knowledge only goes so far. I'll have to look into getting this ridiculous background color gradation taken care of STAT. If you have skills in that area I'd appreciate some help.