Hey, friends —
I’m back after a much-needed hiatus. I made some good progress on my novel, and I’ve got some other new stuff cooking. I have a story in the current issue of Spectrum literary journal called “Heathens.” The print issue should be available for purchase soon, but you can read my story here for free if you’d like. This story is pretty personal, and it has gone through many, many revisions, so I’m grateful it finally found a home. Please support these small magazines if you can!
All right. Back to business.
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Longtime readers know one of my obsessions is what holds a thing together. What’s the glue? What’s the sticky stuff that keeps us reading to the end? What forces culminate to make us pay attention? How do we turn off our analytical, anxious minds and submit to the dream? Is it empathy? A writer’s stylistic flourishes? A character’s relatability? A sense of danger? All readers are lured by different forces, and so, as a writer, I try to pay special attention to those forces if/when I experience them, so if my little stories were to come across someone’s lap whose reading habits are similar to mine, then in the very least I won’t bore them. I personally don’t need a rollicking plot or big twists and turns, but I do need some amount of trouble, some amount of strangeness, some pressure or driving desire. If the sentences are interesting enough, or if the characters are compelling enough, I don’t even need all that.
In Thrill Me, Benjamin Percy talks about the importance of mystery in fiction. One mystery often gives way to another, opening into a deeper, more interesting or layered mystery. “Which means a good story is a turnstile of mysteries. Once one is solved, another ought to swing forcefully into the narrative.” Every mystery has a shelf life, though, he goes on to say, meaning you don’t want to withhold a question of identity or an answer to a wedding proposal for too long, because audiences will grow tired. Ghassan Zeineddine’s “Speedoman,” from his wonderful collection, Dearborn, is a great example of the turnstile.
“Speedoman” tells the story of a group of Lebanese-American couples who become increasingly bewildered by a man who looks like a “‘70s porn star.” Speedoman shows up to the community center pool and waltzes to the head of the lap lane, toting a book and sporting a fluffy pink robe. He “swam laps with the strength and precision of an Olympic swimmer” and then sits at the edge of the pool to read. The husbands and wives take turns narrating—the husbands from the jacuzzi, the wives from the shallow end of the pool—with each group revealing the unreliability of the other. The men claim that, before soaking in the jacuzzi, they engage in “intense cardio followed by weight training,” but the wives say the men stand around someone’s smartphone watching YouTube as they take turns “barely lifting the barbell.”
The story follows a simple pattern: situation (Speedoman swims, sits, reads), escalation (he dons a new Speedo with different Lebanese iconography for every visit), and contemplation (the women lust after him and wonder about his book titles; the men flashback to childhood and think about mortality), repeat.
Speedoman had unlocked something deep inside us. We were reliving our memories, not simply remembering them. We could feel the neckerchiefs around our necks, hear the crackle of pinewood in the bonfire, smell the holy cedars. We felt young and free again.
Nostalgia turns to melancholy. Lust turns to lies. But what holds this together? By my count, Zeineddine studs the story with thirteen mysteries, teasing them out over the course of sixteen pages. The first mystery is the biggest one of all: who is Speedoman? Most of the mysteries that follow—What book is he reading? Why did he come to Dearborn and not LA or New York? What images will the Speedo advertise next time?—work in favor of slowly teasing out the biggest reveal, which, of course, Zeineddine saves for the end. I won’t give it away, but you can read the story here.
But, au contraire, Benjamin Percy, mysteries don’t hold every story together. Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s “The Locksmith,” originally published in The Threepenny Review (and later in this year’s Pushcart Prize anthology), takes no interest in moving beyond fixed action. Freytag’s pyramid calls this the introduction, or exposition, the once-upon-a-time, everything-is-hunky-dory, day-in-the-life stuff.
Here’s the gist: A nameless locksmith completes three jobs. Before the third job, he rescues some baby possums. That’s it.
Job one brings the locksmith to a boy who’s locked himself defiantly inside his mother’s Lexus. The mother is agitated about the situation and pissed off at the boy. While the locksmith works, the boy seems afraid of him, but nothing is said about it. Just as he unlocks the door, the boy shrinks from his mania and is depicted as a wounded animal. The woman softens, saying “my little baby” and embracing the boy.
The locksmith’s second job takes place at a run-down house clotted with diapers, garbage, and ratty furniture. A local realtor bought the house as an investment property, and he can’t get into the basement. When the locksmith finally opens the door, the realtor asks if he wants to see the basement. The locksmith declines and leaves.
A sweet interlude shows the locksmith saving baby possums by the train tracks. He brings them home and gives them food and shelter.
The final job tasks the locksmith with a stuck elevator in an apartment complex. The caretaker bombards him with facts about Houdini. The locksmith fixes the elevator door and picks the operating lock, he rides it up to the rooftop, where he takes in the gray winter day for a moment before riding it back down.
There is no inciting incident, no ticking clock, no turnstile of mysteries—not even a major dramatic question. No quest, no stranger from another dimension, no pressure of any real or consequential variety. If pressure begins in received action and complications ramp up in moving action, then “The Locksmith” stays resolutely situated in fixed action. Everything unfolds plainly, even flatly. A fleeting mention of a brain injury makes it difficult for the locksmith to smile. As a result, he can be intimidating, but he takes his work seriously. “Slice of life” might come close to describing the mode, but usually slice of life stories have more texture, flashback, floral language, kaleidoscopic imagery, and/or flights into the future. And yet, I kept reading. The clipped, declarative sentences feel as menacing as the locksmith’s abusive stepfather (the only real backstory—and a single sentence). Imagine Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men as your locksmith. The mystery isn’t so much implied as it is proposed as a possibility. This possibility creates an atmospheric pressure, and yet, the story never goes to a dark or violent place, thereby—for me, for my reading—turning its gaze back at the reader. What did you expect? Something bad to happen? Maybe the greatest mystery of all is how did we come to expect our stories to enact such violence?
What about you? What keeps you reading? Plot? Character? A mix of both? Neither? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Please spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.