Tillie Olsen's Tell Me A Riddle (and An Explanation)

So, it's been a while. But no, I haven't taken a month-long hiatus from reading or anything silly like that. The problem is I didn't want to blog about anything new before I blogged about the last book I read, and quite frankly I just don't think that will ever happen--but the reason for that might be worth talking about.

I picked up Tell Me A Riddle, written in the 1950s, because Amy Hempel, the literary love of my life (as anyone I've talked with about literature in the past six months or so knows), mentioned that she teaches Olsen's story "I Stand Here Ironing." She said that it "is not only a brilliant story but one that a writer can learn from." If it wasn't the case already, after reading Olsen my desire to work with Hempel in grad school is nearly all-consuming--not because I think Olsen is brilliant, but because I cannot for the life of me tap into her fiction emotionally or technically and would love to know what about it is valuable to a beginning writer.

All of the stories, I have to say, are interesting on the most basic level. Each one plops the reader into the life of its characters abruptly and shoves them into messy interpersonal relationships. "I Stand Here Ironing" is a mother's re-hashing of her strained, distant relationship with her oldest daughter; in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" an alcoholic sailor returns to a family--not his own--that wavers between compassion for their crumbling friend and exhaustion with their sense of responsibility to him; "O Yes" explores the deleterious effects of quiet racism on a friendship between two girls; and the final, titular story takes on the painful corners of a long, unhappy marriage as one partner is slowly dying.

So, depressing, but potentially very interesting, right? And I never really felt as though it wasn't. And I have no identifiable problems with Olsen's writing style. But for some reason, it was about as difficult for me to reach the end of the book as it is to watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy, or to remember to floss. I just never got around to picking it up; nothing pulled me back to it. I have no criticisms of the book because, quite frankly, I have no real feelings about it.

I hope my opinion changes and I can someday see what I have to learn from Olsen (other than how messy relationships can be). But for now, I am reminded of my twelfth grade English teacher, who told us that the worst literature isn't what disgusts, horrifies, or repulses us, but the stuff that makes us feel nothing at all. If we feel nothing, a writer has failed. For now I am reserving judgment. I'm far from claiming to be an authority on what's good and bad, but this experience has made me feel so strongly that my main objective needs to be to make my audience undergo my stories. I like to be subtle, but I don't want to be so subtle that my audience gets up in the middle of my story to clean out the gutters for a change of pace. In that capacity, at least, I took something away from the book.

I'm currently reading Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah. Stay tuned; it's fairly long, so I think I'll post about it in several parts.