{"id":168040,"date":"2024-07-12T10:30:36","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T14:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168040"},"modified":"2024-07-15T11:43:15","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T15:43:15","slug":"sad-people-who-smoke-on-mary-robison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/07\/12\/sad-people-who-smoke-on-mary-robison\/","title":{"rendered":"Sad People Who Smoke: On Mary Robison"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

ROBISON, HER DOG, AND, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT, HER BROTHERS, LOUIS, TOMMY, MICHAEL, DONALD, AND ARTHUR, 1982. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEAN MOSS-WEINTRAUB, COURTESY OF MURRAY MOSS, FRANKLIN GETCHELL, AND ESQUIRE<\/em> MAGAZINE.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mary Robison was interviewed<\/a> by Rebecca Bengal for the new Summer issue of<\/em> The Paris Review.<\/p>\n

I am reading Mary Robison and thinking about smoking. Specifically, I\u2019m rereading Robison\u2019s 1979 debut, Days<\/em>, a collection of short stories about sad people who smoke. There\u2019s Charlie Nunn, the retired teacher who smokes while supine on the rug, letting ash accumulate on his unshaven chin. There\u2019s Guidry, the alcoholic who rests the day\u2019s first cigarette on his sink\u2019s soap caddy as he shaves. There\u2019s Gail, the bride whose father strikes a match on his trouser fly to offer her a light. These characters don\u2019t smoke because they\u2019re sad; they smoke because it\u2019s the seventies. Still, I\u2019m tempted to read all the smoking as symptomatic of a condition that afflicts characters across Robison\u2019s oeuvre: a near pathological refusal to consider any moment but the present one.<\/p>\n

When I first read Robison, I was also a sad person who smoked. That was seventeen years ago. I was an M.F.A. student living in my first New York apartment, a sixth-floor junior one bedroom ($1,300 a month!) just south of 125th Street on Manhattan\u2019s West Side. I\u2019d take my Camel Lights onto the fire escape, which offered a view of the shimmering Hudson. Unlike the characters in Robison\u2019s stories, whose default mode is passive resignation, I was romantic; sadness and smoking were aspects of the \u201cyoung writer\u201d persona I hoped to cultivate. I\u2019m embarrassed to admit that I once defended my habit to a girlfriend by explaining that cigarettes were my friends before she was around and that they\u2019d comfort me after our inevitable breakup. All this is not to say that I wasn\u2019t<\/em> sad, or that I didn\u2019t<\/em> love smoking, but that both were integral to my conception of self.<\/p>\n

Robison\u2019s 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever<\/em>, also became integral. On its surface, the story of Money Breton, a Hollywood script doctor and mother of adult children who takes Ritalin and drives around the American South, had little in common with either my life or the autobiographical first novel I was writing. But Money\u2019s narration\u2014pithy, sardonic, and unsentimental, but also stealthily poetic and fundamentally humane\u2014struck a tonal balance I\u2019d been struggling to achieve in my own work.<\/p>\n

Why Did I Ever <\/em>is structured as 536 chapters, some as brief as a sentence. These chapters are numbered except when they\u2019re titled, creating the impression of a woman desperate to organize her shambolic life. It\u2019s very funny, though the ADHD-afflicted Money resembles a comedian who gets lost in the setup and forgets to drop the punch line. A chapter titled \u201cGet the Bugs off Me\u201d reads in its entirety:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhere was I?\u201d I ask myself, just out of bed in the morning.<\/p>\n

I say, \u201cThree clues. Not at Pizza Hut, not in outer space, not in New Jersey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat still doesn\u2019t tell me, though,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The book I was writing when I began to read Why Did I Ever<\/em>, a \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d about a guy taking bong hits in his mom\u2019s suburban basement, had grown unwieldy. The feedback I got in workshop was that excess backstory was slowing the book\u2019s pacing, but I couldn\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n

Why Did I Ever <\/em>offered a different model for the comic novel. Instead of correcting for plot deficiencies by dazzling the reader with digressive feats of intellect, Robison builds momentum by careening between chapters with chaotic torque. Further, as the novel progresses, its white space between becomes weighted with what Money\u2019s avoiding: two loser boyfriends, a drug-addicted daughter, and the Bigfoot<\/em> script she\u2019s been hired to rewrite as a rom-com. Her son, Paulie, is gearing up to testify against the man who raped him. The structural genius of Why Did I Ever<\/em> is how Money continues to treat her life as comic fodder, but the reader\u2019s view of it changes as we get a fuller picture of the pain her joking conceals.<\/p>\n

Beginning with Days<\/em>, I trawled Robison\u2019s catalog for further inspiration. I was disappointed with what I found. Why Did I Ever <\/em>is a speedy book about a person on speed. Days <\/em>felt comparatively static. Though Robison was in her twenties when she wrote the earliest of its spare, elliptical stories\u2014many of which first appeared in The New Yorker<\/em>\u2014they are snapshots of middle-class, middle-aged people enduring mundane lives in the Midwest. Most are narrated in a free indirect style I found sharp but mannered.<\/em> My initial impression was of a young writer trying to seem beyond her years.<\/p>\n

Revisiting Days <\/em>now, I\u2019m struck by how unconventional its stories are, particularly in their approach to narrative. If the jokes in Why Did I Ever<\/em> lack punchlines, then the stories in Days<\/em> lack endings. They often close with a line of dialogue at just the moment a traditional story would climax and arc into denouement. In \u201cWeekday,\u201d Guidry\u2019s ex-wife, Christine, arrives at his house in the morning unannounced. She chugs breakfast vodka, gives Guidry a haircut, and drops the bombshell that she\u2019s getting remarried to a gay man. The reader is poised for a blowout fight. Instead, Guidry examines himself in the mirror and asks Christine to look at what she did to his hair. She says, \u201cYou made me nervous.\u201d The story ends there.<\/p>\n

Robison\u2019s editor on Days<\/em> was Gordon Lish, the man who can either be thanked or blamed for his cut-and-paste work on Raymond Carver\u2019s short stories. (I thank him.) Roger Angell had already edited many of Robison\u2019s stories at The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>, but Lish reworked them for the collection. <\/em>Like Carver, Robison would later complain about Lish, suggesting he made her stories less funny and ruined their endings. She restored much of her early work to its previous New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>form in Tell Me<\/em>, a 2002 compendium of new and selected stories. The restorations are revealing. Where there are obvious differences between Carver\u2019s lengthy originals and the abbreviated Lish versions, the restored Robison stories hardly vary from the ones that appeared in Days<\/em>. In \u201cKite and Paint,\u201d for example, \u201cThe fan quit by itself, in mid-swing\u201d becomes \u201cThe fan quit by itself, in midglance.\u201d Aside from a couple of other micro-edits, the story remains unchanged. Robison hated the term minimalist<\/em>, preferring her own coinage, subtractionist<\/em>. I\u2019d call her a precisionist, a writer so concerned with exactitude that \u201cmid-swing\u201d must have nagged at her for years.<\/p>\n

Robison followed\u00a0Days\u00a0<\/em>with a novel,\u00a0Oh!\u00a0<\/em>(1981), which I\u00a0remembered nothing about, and which I’ve always thought was unrecognizably adapted into the nineties film\u00a0Twister<\/em>, which I don\u2019t remember either beyond an image of Helen Hunt chasing a tornado from a speeding car while \u201cBroken\u201d by Belly plays on the soundtrack. (In fact, Oh! <\/i>was adapted into a different\u00a0Twister <\/i>entirely.)\u00a0Revisiting it now, Oh!<\/em> reads like an early experiment in how Robison\u2019s sensibility might translate to the long form. It follows the Clevelands, an eccentric family who may in fact live in Cleveland, though it\u2019s never specified. Oh! <\/em>is funny and episodic, but its ensemble cast can\u2019t generate the intimacy or the urgency of the first-person narration in the novels that followed.<\/p>\n

Two more story collections, An Amateur\u2019s Guide to the Night <\/em>(1983) and Believe Them <\/em>(1988), round out Robison\u2019s work in the eighties. They are similar to Days <\/em>in that their stories explore middle-American lives. But these collections\u2019 strongest moments take fresh angles of approach. \u201cYours\u201d is only four pages long, but it moves. <\/em>It begins from the perspective of thirty-five-year-old Allison, whose husband, Clark, is seventy-eight. It is autumn in Virginia, and they are carving jack-o\u2019-lanterns on their porch. Clark is a retired doctor who dabbles as a \u201cSunday watercolorist.\u201d He tells Allison her jack-o\u2019-lanterns are better than his. She doesn\u2019t believe him. They get into bed. After a section break, we learn that Allison \u201cbegan to die\u201d later that night. The implication of a previously mentioned \u201cnatural-hair wig\u201d suddenly becomes clear. Allison tells Clark not to look if the wig comes off. She kicks away the covers. Robison shifts into Clark\u2019s POV:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Prior to publishing Subtraction <\/em>(1991), Robison had \u201cfired\u201d Lish, and the novel is colored by his absence. It follows the poet and Harvard professor Paige Deveaux from Cambridge to Houston as she searches for her husband, Raf, who\u2019s disappeared on a bender. Paige\u2019s narration is looser and less fussy than anything in Robison\u2019s earlier books. Lish had discouraged Robison from writing in the first person, and Subtraction<\/em>\u2019s lengthy sentences and meandering plot express an almost giddy sense of freedom at being out from under his dictatorship. Robison would refine that first-person style in the novels that followed\u2014 Why Did I Ever<\/em> and One D.O.A., One on the Way<\/em>\u2014which paradoxically manage to be both tighter and more delightfully unhinged than Subtraction. <\/em><\/p>\n

When One D.O.A. <\/em>came out in 2009, I had completed my M.F.A. and was working in a bookstore located in a Brooklyn Heights storefront that has since become a bank. I had started sending my novel to agents. I had started dating the woman I would marry. I had started taking Prozac, which helped with the sadness, which I\u2019d learned to call depression. I still smoked, though my future wife said we wouldn\u2019t have<\/em> a future unless I quit. I cared enough about that future to cut down\u2014or at least to lie about cutting down. I\u2019d hide single cigarettes on the ledge above her building\u2019s doorway, then smoke them on her stoop in the mornings after she left for work.<\/p>\n

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, One D.O.A. <\/em>is more cynical than either Subtraction <\/em>or Why Did I Ever. <\/em>Eve, an underemployed and unhappily married location scout, narrates the novel. Hollywood has abandoned New Orleans in the hurricane\u2019s aftermath, and Eve drives around, scouring the city\u2019s ruins for locations for films that will never be made. Partway through the book, her assistant, Lucien, tells her that his name is actually Paul. Eve continues to call him Lucien. Though she\u2019s not exactly \u201clikable,\u201d I found Eve\u2019s commitment to living in a state of sustained self-delusion compelling. Her city is in ruins and so is her marriage, but Eve perseveres by going on as if they aren\u2019t. I made One D.O.A.<\/em> my staff pick. I hand-sold a copy to a guy who claimed to love Robison\u2019s earlier novels, Gilead<\/em> and Housekeeping<\/em>. I did not correct him.<\/p>\n

I realize I keep sliding into the past, into a reflective mode that feels wrong for an essay on Robison\u2019s work. I can\u2019t help it. Even when I used to smoke on the fire escape all those years ago, a part of me was framing the moment for future recollection. Robison does the opposite. Though only Why Did I Ever <\/em>and One D.O.A. <\/em>employ present-tense narration, her entire oeuvre feels almost Buddhist in its attention to the now. Robison\u2019s short stories begin in medias res with little context, <\/em>and their characters rarely consider how they got to where they are or where they\u2019re heading to next. It\u2019s not that they don\u2019t have free will so much as that exerting it feels futile; their lives are inescapably circumscribed. This, I think, is the major difference between early Robison and the Carver stories of the same era. Carver\u2019s characters are dreamers, and they fall into despair when their dreams are dashed. Robison\u2019s simply sit there blowing smoke at the ceiling. \u201cYours\u201d ends on an uncharacteristic moment of reflection, but Clark\u2019s insight is worthless, an impossible fantasy of getting drunk with his dying wife so he can console her with the knowledge that life sucks anyway.<\/p>\n

The protagonists of Robison\u2019s later books are less passive. In Subtraction<\/em>, Paige drives all over Houston in search of her husband. What she doesn\u2019t do is spend much time considering why Raf disappeared in the first place or if it\u2019s a bad idea to sleep with his best friend. In One D.O.A.<\/em>, Eve is so angry about her husband\u2019s terminal hepatitis and its imposition on her life (they have to move in with her in-laws!) that she begins an affair with his alcoholic twin. Again, reflection is not the character\u2019s strong suit. These novels seem to suggest that when the past and the future hold nothing but pain, the present is a refuge.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Amy Hempel, Why should looking back show us more than looking at<\/em>? In the absence of reflection, Robison\u2019s characters become exceptional observers, human antennae receiving all signals except those sent by their own inner selves. Here\u2019s Eve on what she hears during sex with her brother-in-law:<\/p>\n

\n

Not silence. I can still hear the muffled car honks and brakes and tires, the next door neighbor\u2019s cat, and laughter now from some huddle of men, a National Guard helicopter going over, the air fan, the plumbing\u2019s rumble, the bed when we move, a child somewhere having a dream, the high whine of the streetcar, the little voice of a neighbor\u2019s television, freighter horns on the Mississippi, now Saunders\u2019 long breathing against my chest as he\u2019s slipping off into sleep.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I finally quit smoking when I weaned myself off Prozac and went on Wellbutrin. People say you have to want <\/em>to quit, but it turns out you just have to take a drug that inhibits your nicotine receptors. Still, I figured that two or three times a year I could bum one at a party. The bummed cigarette would be Proustian, conveying me back to every Camel Light I\u2019d ever smoked. But Wellbutrin sucks the pleasure out of smoking. It kills the nicotine buzz and suppresses nostalgia\u2019s warm glow. Occasionally, I bum one anyway. When I take that first drag I\u2019m disappointed to find myself fixed to the present, feeling the smoke burn my unpracticed lungs. One thing I\u2019ve learned from Robison: sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Adam Wilson is the author of three books, and a recipient of<\/em> The Paris Review‘s<\/i>\u00a0Terry Southern Prize for Humor.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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