French postcard, c. 1910

The other night I was doing what I do all too often after a long day: watching crime shows on TV. My tastes run fairly low. CSI, Criminal Minds, NCSI, and, my personal favorite, Special Victims Unit. I am capable of marathoning any of these shows, but that night was the nadir. On Wednesdays my husband works late, and there’s no one to stop me. I’d already spent two or three hours watching heinous crimes depicting women in various states of torment and decay. My excuse to myself was that I was mulling something over—something that disturbed me more than threats of bondage and mutilation.

That afternoon I’d been working on a short story that I was enjoying, but it contained a problem. It was loosely based on an argument I’d had with a neighbor regarding the pruning of our backyard tree. It seems that I had miscalculated what his share should be in terms of caring for the ancient oak tree whose branches and shade we both enjoyed. I’d proposed an even three-way split that included the family in whose yard the tree actually sits. The wife in that family was ill and so I’d taken this financial task upon myself. And then I received the email.

I liked this neighbor and was stunned when he sent me a three paragraph harangue for setting a precedent regarding the oak as communal property that required equal fiscal responsibility. It seemed that I had assumed powers that were not mine to assume. He’s an accountant and I’m not. Enough said. Why not pick up the phone? Or talk to me in person? Instead he’d thrown the book at me. After my initial shock, I did what I normally do when someone sends me something of this nature. I filed it away. I have a special folder for such matters. It’s called “MISC IDEAS.”

Now, I was faced with a moral dilemma. This neighbor, with whom I’ve gone holiday caroling, voted for the same political candidates, swapped recipes, and become Facebook friends, had inadvertently given me the germ of a story and, the closer I got to feeling good about the story, the worse I felt about writing it. How could I draw from what had transpired between us—even if it really wasn’t about us anymore at all, but merely a springboard to say something about love and loss, mortality and the human condition? I tried changing tree pruning into sidewalk repair or loud music, but the impact just wasn’t the same. It had to be a tree. And the accountant really couldn’t become a dentist, could he?

The previous Sunday, I’d voiced my concern about the story with another neighbor, a good friend who also happens to be a reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper. I’d already shown him the angry email. Over brunch I told him that I was going to write a thinly veiled story based on the incident. “Oh, no,” he said. “You can’t do that. You’ll have to move away.”

That Wednesday evening, guilt and fear were getting the better of me. I lay on my couch, paralyzed, watching body after body being sliced and diced and reassembled on a coroner’s metal table.  I was pondering my dilemma as Detectives Stabler and Benson collared a rape suspect and Stabler read him his Miranda rights.

You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you say can, and will, be used against you.

This time those words struck a chord. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. This is what I needed to explain to my neighbor in a language he’d understand.

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Juan Cárdenas.

In Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, the city has no name. It could be here, or anywhere. Its location in time isn’t specified either. There’s a faintly futuristic overlay, but the narrator’s diction swings between antiquated formality and present-day slang, and, among other anachronistic details, there are both spider monkeys and henchmen on the security team. Characters, too, are referenced only by generic designation. “My wife,” “the directors,” “the taxi driver,” “the architect.” Even descriptive nouns of that kind are withheld from the study participants, who have volunteered for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. They’re granted only numbers.

The choice to leave those coordinates unfixed suggests universality, as if this same story might have played out (might be playing out) in any number of labs, in any number of cities. But it also enacts the social and political repression of a certain kind of anonymity. “A city can’t be talked about without names, it’s impossible,” number 4 says. “It’s all been worked out so the story stays neatly inside the mute numbers.” How, Ornamental asks, do the nameless—disembodied voices, unattributed speech, figures “emancipated from any arithmetic”—participate in meaningful discourse, find a place among others, work toward common interest, tell their stories? And when do we encounter those stories, as readers who live in named cities and bear names ourselves? Read More

Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

Like her good friend the writer Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins was an excellent observer of others. Like Lucia, too, she was wise and damn funny. Her stories are vitamin-packed, full of her own specific and inimitable possibilities of voice. Or maybe we should say voices, or voicings, because the singular doesn’t quite do it justice. Her voice could take on multiple angles and colors, depending on the setting and time of day, the interlocutor, or, more accurately, the listener, and the number. It wasn’t unusual to hear her with a Texas drawl in the morning in her garden (this voice said “honey” a fair amount, and unfurled like a smoked tumbleweed just rolling out of the fire), a soft New Mexican clipping of word endings in the afternoon, and a British tilt at a party in the evening. Her voice could even take on several aspects at once, especially when she was giving a reading. Voicing was important enough to Bobbie that she offered classes on how to talk (and not talk) into a mic. Don’t pop those p’s! Make sure you cut the mic! No heavy breathing between words!

And while the novella One Small Saga is not as voicey as some of her other work, her marvelous capacity to listen and deftly mimic is acutely on display. She speedily gets her world and her characters “in,” as E. M. Forster, a writer whose prose she admired, put it. Consider one quick sentence early on, the short passage that takes place in Mr. Collins’s sitting room. Bobbie builds this Englishman’s whole character out of just a handful of syllables. The narrator has just noticed the wall hangings, “patterned blue and white cotton to match the drawn drapes … ‘Nigerian,’ Mr. Collins told me, seeing me looking, ‘handwoven native.’ ” In three tight-lipped words we get the tone of the whole of the British empire circa 1950, from the mouth of one of its servants.

Still, in this autobiographical work (Bobbie claimed not to have done any other kind), what’s mainly going on is an attempt at taking the measure of the life the narrator wants to live. She starts that process by recounting a mistake that isn’t a mistake at all. She does something stupid (marries Axel) to get to the next thing (the story of her life). How else would a ferociously observant, intelligent, original young woman born into poverty in the thirties get out of the fix she is in? She has plans, inchoate as they are, and takes the ship that will get her started, pointed firmly in the direction of elsewhere. That the ship she travels on has a “green marble swimming pool” hidden in its depths, which she soon finds herself plunging into daily, seems emblematic. Like Bobbie, the narrator of One Small Saga has an unerring ability to sniff out the unlooked-for and the exceptional. Read More