I recently finished reading Kristen Iversen’s book, Full Body Burden, and —even as a person familiar with the toxic secrets of government and industry— found the details of the Rocky Flats environmental legacy to be shocking.  Shocking, perhaps, because Iversen’s details are delivered so personally: her seemingly perfect hometown with room for children and horses to run and explore tainted by the invisible emissions of a secret nuclear weapons plant, rumors of covered-up contamination, and the cancer clusters to fuel them.  Woven into Iversen’s account of Rocky Flats is her own parallel tale of family erosion from her father’s alcoholism, shrouded in the stoicism of the family’s Norwegian heritage.  The dual narratives are powerful, delivering with unrelenting honesty the anxiety of knowing something deeply unsettling about your home, yet lacking the will or means to leave.

I do not personally know Kristen Iversen, but years ago, I worked with her sister, Karma, at the New Mexico Environment Department.  Our department was responsible for issuing wastewater discharge permits for all types of facilities: municipal wastewater treatment plants, dairies and food processing facilities, mining operations and other industrial facilities, including, among others, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL).

Neither Karma nor I oversaw any permits for LANL — she was a soil scientist who specialized in agricultural wastewater permits, and I was fresh out of graduate school, just getting my feet wet with permitting municipal and small-scale industrial wastewater discharges.  But I can recall the frustration of our more-senior colleagues who did manage permits for the Federal facilities, the secrecy shrouding activities at LANL and Sandia National Labs.  And I can remember talking with Karma about the rumors that floated around those sites: elevated rates of thyroid cancers, stories about dogs developing cancerous growths on their paws from their frolics in the adjacent canyons.

As a new State government employee, I was careful not to be blindly swayed by the hysteria of misguided risk perception.  There were always people with “too much time on their hands,” quick to bundle anecdotal tidbits with partial information to formulate wildly speculative conclusions about the dangers of site X or the devious intentions of company Y.  But after a few years of seasoning and a broadened portfolio of sites, I began to understand the paranoia.  I can recall thinking of more than a few of my sites that I could never live near there.  I could never live with the anxiety.  You know what they say about the restaurant business — once you know what goes on in the kitchen, you’ll be reluctant to eat out again.

My foray into the history of Rocky Flats via Iversen’s Full Body Burden prompted me to revisit Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz and her anxiety of place.In The Last Cheater’s Waltz, Meloy is wrought with the guilt and paranoia of inhabiting and loving a place as beautiful as the redrock canyon country of southeastern Utah, and knowing its role in the widespread violence of nuclear weapons development and testing in the American Southwest.  Like a betrayed lover, Meloy traces the path of uranium mined from her Moab-area home to the weapons development facility in Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear weapons test site in New Mexico, seeking some kind of — what?  Understanding? Redemption for choosing to live there despite its tainted past?

Meloy’s journey is an attempted exorcism of the anxiety of place — a theme most intriguing to those of us with academic inclinations, but imagine what that must feel like in the first person.  Imagine what it feels like to live in a place, or be from somewhere where you have a high probability of developing some condition, some malaise, just because you call that place home.  Love Canal.  Rocky Flats.  Fukashima.  Or imagine what it must be like to love a landscape with a hidden history as as cursed with death as  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These are no ordinary betrayals.  To most of us, these are abstract places, places to consider in the large-scale debate about environmental degradation.  But to some of us, these places are home.

The post The Anxiety of Place appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Born and raised the Bronx, Gornick grew up in a tight-knit community of socialist Jewish immigrants, and spent most of her formative years in the company of the women in her tenement.  Her story is framed through her recollection of, and interactions with these characters, the bulk of which are devoted to her dominating mother and the alluring widow, Nettie Levine, who lived across the hall.  When she was thirteen, Gornick’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, plunging her household into the abyss of her mother’s grief, and setting the stage for the conflict that would occur between the opposing forces to Gornick’s developing feminine ideals.  This, in essence, is the Fierce Attachments story.

Though Gornick’s mother is the leading antagonist to her narrator, the character of Nettie Levine plays an important supporting role in the evolution of Gornick’s identity.  Indeed, the two characters — Nettie and Gornick’s mother — come to represent the opposing feminine ideals that act upon the narrator, maintaining tension throughout the book.  This literary craft blog post examines Gornick’s description and portrayal of these two specific characters, and how she uses them to represent broader issues of the contradictory feminine self.

The Mother
From the beginning, Gornick’s mother is introduced as a bold woman, unabashed in her quick judgment and open criticism of others.  To the neighbor waiting outside her apartment while her husband showers and readies himself for sex, Gornick’s mother utters to the woman, “Drucker, you’re a whore,” equating the woman’s obligatory sex with a husband she doesn’t love with the sexual transactions between a man and a prostitute (p. 3).  In this single introductory paragraph, Gornick has shown us, through scene and dialogue, not only her mother’s sharp edge, but the elitist attitude she carries concerning marriage and authentic love.  Gornick also captures her mother’s intellectual snobbishness with brief sound-bites of dialogue:

My mother was distinguished in the building by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner… Her manner… was that of a superior person embarrassed by the childlike behavior of her inferiors. “Such foolishness,” Or, “That’s ridiculous,” she would rap out sharply when a tale she considered base or ignorant was repeated to her. She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was “developed” — a person of higher thought and feeling — so what was there to think about?  “Developed” was one of her favorite words. If Mrs. Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning,… inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, “An undeveloped woman.”  If someone make a crack about the schvartzes, my mother would carefully explain to me that such sentiments were “undeveloped.” (p. 11-12)

Gornick further describes her mother as a woman displaced, a woman with the skill and inner drive to work outside the home and contribute to a larger cause, but whose education and situation condemned her to domesticity:

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did.  She would become angry of the “emptiness of a woman’s life.” (p. 16)

Gornick’s words fully illustrate the paradox of her mother’s married life: a woman capable of so much more than domestic work, yet dutifully performing the tasks beneath her with precision and with skill.

It is this sense of duty that defines Gornick’s mother for the reader — a sense of marital duty that eclipses one’s personal intellectual ambition.  The marriage between Gornick’s parents is a happy one, its tranquility placed upon a pedestal for all the other women to see; yet Gornick notices — in comparison between her parents and other seemingly less functional couples — that this compatibility is more emotional than physical.  Upon an accidental glimpse of a friend’s parents having sex, Gornick observes: “So there were the Kerners, riddled with hate, secretly locked together in sexual spasm, and there were my parents, loving each other, while their bed rode chastely about in open space.” (p. 30)

Such are the feminine standards represented in the mother character: intellectual superiority, self-reliance, and dutiful service — but only in the face of true, emotional love.  Succumbing to one’s passions — whether physical or intellectual — at the expense of one’s familial duties, would be considerably “undeveloped.”

Nettie Levine
By sharp contrast, Nettie Levine, the Gentile woman living across the hall and recently widowed by her Jewish husband, is a sensual, alluring individual, whose domestic ineptitude and exclusion from the Jewish tenement cliques is tempered by her calculating sexual energy.  Unlike Gornick’s mother, whose character is largely defined by dialogue, Nettie is presented to the reader as a visual image, her physical beauty a defining element of her persona.  Gornick writes of her first encounter with Nettie, upon accidentally running into her in the hallway:

I bent, blushing, to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders.  Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim.  She reminded me of the pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman. (p. 34)

And while Gornick’s mother is distinguished by smart tongue and superior capabilities, Nettie is alternatively defined by her relative silence and all that she can’t do:

A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, [Nettie] seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd.  She praised by mother lavishly for her housewifely skills — her ability to makes small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home — as though these skills were a treasure, a precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. (p. 36)

This defining feature became especially apparent after Nettie becomes a mother.  Gornick writes:

Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering… Nettie had been trained to attract, not to domesticate, and was at a permanent loss.  She could not master the art of mashed-up food, boiled diapers, baths in the kitchen sink…

… I have this memory of [the baby] in Nettie’s right arm, his diaper full of shit, his face smeared with the remnants of the last two meals, his tiny fingers clutching a strand of red hair, holding on for dear life while she whirls about in silent alarm. (p. 49)

Again, Gornick’s presentation of Nettie’s character is dominated by visual images of her physical beauty and domestic failures.  Yet, despite her intellectual emptiness, Nettie is equipped with a sexual power that permeates the room, and unsurprisingly, comes to rely on this power to survive her “outsider” status.  Here, Gornick employs gesture to develop this particular aspect of Nettie’s character:

It’s not what she wears, one would say, it’s the way she wears it. It’s not what she says so much, it’s the way she says it…

She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old.  She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood… Her walk was slow and deliberate… Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street.  Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.” There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. (p. 98-99)

Indeed, Nettie’s ability to harness her sexual power and turn it into a commodity is the underlying premise of the feminine ideal her character represents.  With visual images and gestures, Gornick establishes through Nettie’s persona, the contrasting feminine standards to Gornick’s intellectual, dutiful mother.  Nettie’s feminine ideal emphasizes beauty over intellect, attraction over self-reliance, impulse over duty, and — above all — sex over love.

In the book, the tension between these opposing feminine forces is played out in the narrator’s mind, in her heart, in her decisions.  The reader sees her struggle with the virtues and risks of both ideals as she matures into a young woman.  But the conflict comes to a head when Nettie’s promiscuous behavior with men finally draws criticism from Gornick’s sharp-tongued mother.  “You know what they say about you on the street?” she taunts one day in the kitchen.  Nettie gets up to leave, and Gornick is compelled to stand and defend her.  In an apologetic gesture, Gornick’s mother places her hands on Nettie, when:

… Nettie brushed the fingers from her arm and with one hand on the doorknob, she hissed, “You know he always liked me.”

For a moment that lasted a hundred years we remained as we were, the three of us, grouped in the tiny foyer. No one moved. My mouth opened and stayed open.  Nettie’s hand remained on the doorknob. Mama’s fingers touched the air. The afternoon light, filled with threat and anxiety, fell on us from the distant kitchen window.

She slept with my father, I thought, and an immense excitement swept my body.

“You whore,” my mother whispered. “You filthy whore. Get out of this house.”

Nettie slammed out the door and Mama ran through the apartment. She flung herself down on the couch and wept hard, broken tears. Torn between pity and fascination, I watched her as long as she lay there. She cried for hours. (p. 119-120)

In that moment, the reader sees that everything Gornick’s mother stood for — her worship of romantic love and marriage — was not only abandoned by her husband’s early death, but was knowingly betrayed by Nettie and all she represented: meaningless sexual impulse. 

The dramatic conflict between these two characters symbolizes the ongoing tension within Gornick’s own mind, between their respective feminine ideals.  As she matures into adulthood, Gornick continues to wrestle the opposing standards of Nettie and her mother.  She is both and insider and an outsider, and intellectual and a dreamer, a believer of romantic love and an impulsive sexual creature.  She is ultimately a product of both influential women.  Gornick’s skill in uniquely developing each character (i.e., defining her intellectual mother through her sharp-witted dialogue, and crafting Nettie through images and gestures) enables the reader to fully appreciate the opposing forces acting upon the narrator, and feel the battle raging within herself as she seeks to understand her own paradoxical identity.

The post Vivian Gornick’s Use of Character in Fierce Attachments appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Williams’ account is carefully braided, the rise of the Great Salt Lake and its threat to the bird refuge skillfully juxtaposed against the rise of a deadly cancerous tumor in her mother’s abdomen.  With each rising lake interval, Williams parallels her mother’s peril with that of every species threatened by the flood.  This metaphor is carried throughout the book, as she weaves fragmented strands of the two narratives together to contemplate natural cycles, the inevitability of death, and the unnatural systems our culture employs to prevent them both.  We experience first hand the anxiety and heartbreak of every threatened bird, every stage of her mother’s disease, and are left with the intimate knowledge of mourning the loss of wildlife and place intertwined with the loss of one’s mother.  Williams’ emotional journey illustrates both our reluctance to accept even the most natural of changes, and the lengths to which we go to resist them.

Refuge is a lyric work, a contemporary form published nearly a decade before the lyric essay’s widespread recognition.  And perhaps that’s what made it so successful — it was prose poetry before its time, structured in a way that enabled history, biology, and geography to enhance a personal narrative.  This literary craft blog post explores how Williams skillfully transitions from one story strand to another, using white space, common words, images, and ideas as points of contact for effectively weaving one section into another.

Williams introduces the metaphor between the flooding of the bird refuge and her mother’s death from cancer in the Prologue of the book:

Most of the women in my family are dead.  Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.  The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family.  When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn further into its essence.  In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay. (p. 4)

The early establishment of this metaphor provides the well from which Williams will draw to nourish the connective tissue binding her scientific and observation-based sections on the bird refuge and the Great Salt Lake with her more candid personal reflections on family, illness, and death.  For instance, in her second chapter, after having introduced the reader to the Great Salt Lake and the connection that she and the lake have to the refuge, Williams is able to seamlessly transition into the discovery of her mother’s illness:

… The long-legged birds with their eyes focused down transform a seemingly sterile world into a fecund one.  It is here in the marshes that I seal my relationship to Great Salt Lake.

I could never have anticipated its rise.

My mother was aware of a rise on the left side of her abdomen.  I was deep in dream.  This particular episode found me hiding beneath my grandmother’s bed as eight black helicopters flew toward the house.  I knew we were in danger. (p. 22)

Here, Williams employs white space and the word rise as the thread that connects these two fragments together — fragments that might otherwise seem disjointed, were it not for her prior establishment of the symbolic relationship between the two.

Williams uses the same technique later in the book to transition from her personal narrative to a section that discusses the history of Mormon religion and its connection to the land.  In this instance, Williams describes a scene in which her family learns that surgery and chemotherapy have failed to eliminate cancer from her mother’s body.  Her mother, originally opposed to undergoing treatment, unleashes anger at Williams and Williams’ father, saying, “I could have handled this, why couldn’t you?”  Williams is heartbroken, crippled with guilt:

… We had wanted a cure for Mother for ourselves, so we could get one with our lives.  What we had forgotten was that she was living hers.

I fled for Bear River, for the birds, wishing someone would rescue me.

The California gulls rescued the Mormons in 1848 from losing their crops to crickets.  The gull has become folklore.  It is a story we know well… (p. 68-9)

Again, the insertion of a little white space, coupled with the use of a common word between the sections (in this case, rescue), enables Williams to gently pivot from an emotionally charged family scene to a relevant historical anecdote about one of the refuge’s resident birds.  The effect is not only an effective transition from one narrative to another; it is a mechanism for the slowing of pace, and the relief of tension in the prose itself.

Williams utilizes white space well in Refuge, the vacancy of words allowing the reader to draw the connections between her fragments for him or herself.  We recognize it as a pattern, the more difficult the circumstances become, the more white space we see.  Toward the middle and end of the book, as the stakes for the refuge rise, along with the tension in her family, Williams’ prose become more fragmented.  The white space increases, and the connective tissue between sections is grounded in images and ideas:

Mother.  She is preoccupied.  Yesterday, on the telephone, she said she didn’t think she could make the family backpacking trip in the Tetons scheduled for summer.

“I think I may have pulled some muscles in my stomach,” she said.

I want to believe her.

It rains and rains.  Great Salt Lake continues to rise.

Eudora Welty, when asked what causes she would support, replied, “Peace, education, conservation, and quiet.”

Mother, Mimi and Jack, and I are seeking quiet in St. George, Utah. (p. 133-4)

As disjointed as these fragments seem, the reader easily follows the prose.  The white spaces, the symbolic rain and rising lake, the need for quiet all paint a larger picture: Williams’ mother is dying, and there is nothing that they can do.  The conclusion, though not spelled out, is easily understood.

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams has masterfully illustrated the potential of the fragmented approach, the importance of finessing transitions, and the beauty of lyric prose.  Her use of white space, common words between sections, and relevant images are an effective mechanism for manipulating pace, conveying emotion, relieving tension, and solidifying theme in the body of her prose.

The post Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: A Lesson in Braided Form appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Kazin’s prose is dense and detailed in its narration, and the meat and bones of its themes — belonging verses finding oneself, preservation of immigrant culture verses assimilating into America — are embellished with specific images, particular characters, and well-placed dialogue.  Indeed, A Walker in the City is a study in the use of details to enhance one’s prose.  This literary craft blog post explores Kazin’s placement of details throughout his text, and how these features support the underlying themes.

One such scene, in which Kazin is describing the buildings and establishments around his old house on the block, is abundant with details:

The shoemaker is still there; the old laundry is now a printing shop.  Next to it is the twin of our old house, connected with ours below the intervening stores by a long common cellar.  As I look at the iron grillwork over the glass door, I think of the dark-faced girl who used to stand on that stoop night after night watching for her Italian boy friend.  Her widowed mother, dressed always in black, a fat meek woman with a clubfoot, was so horrified by the affair that she went to the neighbors for help.  The quarrels of mother and daughter could be heard all over the street.  “How can you go around with an Italian? How can you think of it? You’re unnatural!  You’re draining the blood straight away from my heart!”  Night after night she would sit at her window, watching the girl go off with her Italyéner — ominous word that contained all her fear of the Gentiles — and weep. (p. 80-81)

Not only does the introduction of a lovesick Jewish girl waiting on the stoop for her forbidden Italian boyfriend make the place seem more authentic, the details about her anxious Jewish mother reveal the very theme of Kazin’s memoir.  The fact that she’s a widow, has a club foot, and is always dressed in black — these details solidify the reader’s image of a traditional Jewish woman.  Taken together with the dialogue (“How can you go around with an Italian?  You’re unnatural!”), the specifics about the Jewish mother underscore the ongoing tension between generations about the boundaries of their community.  The inclusion of these details clearly illustrate for the reader, that Jewish immigrants who settled and raised families in America did so with the hopes of a better life, but dreaded the assimilation of their children and the abandonment of their own true heritage.  To them, Brownsville was Jewish, Brownsville was “us,” and the world beyond it was “them.”  But to Kazin, the girl on the stoop, and all of their peers, the world beyond held their dreams.  The world beyond was America.

The push and pull between Brownsville and Beyond, between Jewish and Gentile, and “us” verses “them” is carried throughout the book, but in no other place is this tension so beautifully illustrated as in Kazin’s discussion of Mrs. Solovey.  Mrs. Solovey is the wife of the pharmacist, a lovely Russian woman whose blonde-ness and dreamy demeanor is drawn in sharp contrast with her bitter and scornful husband.  Kazin is in love with Mrs. Solovey, “her air of not being quite related to anything around her” pleasing him most, as it distinguishes her from the dreariness that Brownsville represents.  Kazin writes, “[Their] store went to pieces, the two little girls in their foreign clothes played jacks all afternoon long on the front steps.  Mr. Solovey denounced us with his eyes, and Mrs. Solovey walked among us in her dream of a better life.” (p. 124).  In these details — Mr. Solovey’s scornful eye, his disregard for the family business, the Solovey girls contentedly playing jacks all day on the steps — Kazin illustrates the defeated nature of Brownsville life, and the way in which Mrs. Solovey is different.

Her differences are further revealed when she comes to Kazin’s home, seeking a new dress from Kazin’s seamstress mother.  As she waits, she notices the young narrator studying French, and begins a conversation with him:

“I suppose you are learning French only to read? The way you do everything! But that is a mistake, I can assure you! It is necessary to speak, to speak!  Think how you would be happy to speak French well!  To speak a foreign language is to depart from yourself.  Do you not think it is tiresome to speak the same language al the time? Their language! To feel that you are in a kind of prison, where the words you speak every day are like the walls of your cell? To know with every word that you are the same, and no other, and that it is difficult to escape? But when I speak French to you I have the sensation that for a moment I have left, and I am happy.” (p. 127)

They continue conversing in French, during which Mrs. Solovey reveals that she is from Odessa, near the Black Sea, and has lived in Russia, France, Italy, and Palestine.  Kazin, surprised by her worldliness, asks, “Why did you come here?”

She looked at me for a moment.  I could not tell what she felt, or how much I had betrayed.  But in some way my question wearied her.  She rose, made a strange stiff little bow, and went out.  (p. 130)

Kazin never spoke with her again, and some time later, learned that she had killed herself with gas from the oven. 

It was raining the day they buried her.  Because she was a suicide, the rabbi was reluctant to say the necessary prayers inside the synagogue.  But they prevailed upon him to come out on the porch, and looking down on the hearse as it waited in the street, he intoned the service over her coffin. It was wrapped in the blue and white flag with a Star of David at the head.  (p. 131)

These passages about Mrs. Solovey employ the most effective use of detail.  Not only is she a character in Kazin’s childhood home, her specific characteristics, and the nature of her death symbolize the issues central to Kazin’s theme.  Mrs. Solovey is an anomaly in Brownsville, a blonde, worldly woman who likens speaking a foreign language to escaping a prison cell.  She, too, feels trapped by her existence in Brownsville, and longs for a better life.  But Brownsville suffocates her, in life and in death.  Suicide by gas, rain at the funeral, the Star of David draped over the head of her coffin — all of these details symbolize the oppression of this place.  And through these specifics, Kazin conveys his need to walk on.

The post Tracing the DNA of a Story to the Sentence Level: Use of Symbolic Detail in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Much like the title — referencing a name someone had coined for the drinking and story-telling habits of Karr’s father and friends — Karr’s narration is homegrown, her stories woven with funny details, east Texas dialect, and Oh-by-the-way asides.  The entire book reads like its own description of Karr’s daddy telling another tall tale to the boys at the bar, yet the reader can feel the sophistication of her craft.  Karr’s poetic skill is evident in her prose, cutting scenes and images with scalpel-like precision.   But that is the obvious gift.  Even more impressive are the subtle techniques Karr uses to elevate the significance of certain scenes for the reader.  This literary craft blog post explores how Karr purposely employs a shift in verb tense, from past to present, to enhance the dramatic effect, and therefore importance, of some of her most riveting childhood memories.

The first place that Karr changes to the present tense is in Chapter 6, in which Karr’s daddy, Pete, is telling the Liar’s Club a tall tale about how his own father died.  The scene comes alive with this shift, not only allowing the reader to experience first hand the unrefined charisma of Pete Karr, but the profound effect of the subject of death on the young narrator.  Having discovered her grandmother dead after a long struggle with cancer, and knowing her mother is suicidally depressed, death is monumental concept for Karr at this time in her life; reading her reaction to her father’s story in the present tense effectively binds her to the reader.  We can feel her fearing the possibility of her mother’s self-inflicted death:

For a minute, I even think about Mother propped up in her bed night and day… Then it’s her face slack-jawed I see in place of Grandma’s, her arm hanging down that the ants are running on.  I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.  At the same time, I’m more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell the truth. (p. 124)

 Karr shifts from past to present tense about six times throughout the book, most poignantly right before the scenes in which her mother falls into violent psychotic episodes.  For instance, in Karr’s recollection of a particularly bad birthday, she gently changes verb tense to cue the reader for a white-knuckled scene ahead:

Mother was touching the last match to the last candle when I came in… Lecia’s face next to hers was as blank as a shovel. She said, go on and make a wish, you little turd. I squinted my eyes as hard as I could and wished silently to go and live some other where forever, with a brand new family like on Leave It to Beaver. Then I sucked up as much air as I could and blew the whole house dark.

I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City Cafe that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs…I don’t remember how much Mother drank…

My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home.  From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of Daddy’s hatchet-shaped profile — his hawk-beak nose and square jaw. (p. 137)

 From there, Karr shows us her drunken mother’s rage in the car, and how she grabs the steering wheel and attempts to drive the whole family off the edge of the bridge.  In present tense, the scene is raw and terrifying, like in a movie.  If she hadn’t switched from the past tense, Karr’s prose wouldn’t have properly commanded the moment.

Karr also uses this technique before sharing with the reader her sexual assault at age eight:

More nights scrolled past, and days so gray and grainy that not one stands unblurred from any other, till I get sick one day and the grown man who allegedly comes to care for me winds up putting his dick in my eight-year-old mouth.  In fact, the whole blank winter sort of gathers around that incident like a storm cloud getting dense and heavy.

It’s early afternoon.  I’ve stayed home from school, really sick with a fever… (p. 239)

 With this transition, the reader can see what’s coming.  We’re in the moment, and our hearts are beating fast, because we know that Karr is about to show us the scene that her narrator so casually mentions as some man “putting his dick in [her] eight-year-old mouth.”

This particular example illustrates perfectly why Karr’s subtle transition from the past to present tense during critical parts of The Liar’s Club is so effective.  The present tense experience allows the reader to feel what Karr went through during the most traumatic moments of her life; it is the crack in the door that allows us to see beyond the cynical, smart-mouthed voice her narrator uses for defense.  By engaging the reader with the present tense, Karr is effectively showing us in a way that her words could never say, the true pain she felt in living through those events.

The post Shifting Tense for Dramatic Effect in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

From the beginning, Hall’s story is about shame and loss: the loss of a child, the dissolution of a future, the rejection by one’s peers, and loss of unconditional parental love.   Yet despite the odds, Hall cobbles a life for herself, a family of her own, and eventually returns to New England to offer compassion to her aging parents.  Then, twenty-one years after her exile, her lost son finds her.  As they forge a new path together with her two younger sons, the story evolves from one of grief, to one of joy, wisdom, and understanding.

Hall’s prose in Without a Map is beautiful and lyric, evoking a sadness that won’t let go.  Her use of present tense makes the reader live her story, feel the sting of her rejection, and accompany her through the haze of her expulsion.  But her beautiful sentences — the detail, the cadence, the movement of her words — are what pierce the reader’s heart.  This literary craft blog post examines Hall’s sentence structure in certain places of the text, and how she uses repetition, rhythm, and momentum to enhance the emotional impact of her message.

The first instance occurs in the prologue of the book, “Shunned.”  Hall has introduced us to the bones of the story: she was once part of a family and a community, and then she got pregnant.  Because of this mistake, she was shunned — ripped away from everything she ever knew and loved.  The pain and shock of her rejection is underscored by its contrast against her life until then.  She had been an insider, a beloved member of a tight-knit group, as evidenced by the intimate details she knows of those who shunned her:

I still can tell you that Larry had a funny, flat head.  That fat Donny surprised us in eighth grade by whipping our a harmonica and playing country ballads.  That he also surprised us that year by flopping on the floor in an epileptic fit.  That Claudia, an only child, lived in a house as orderly and dead as a tomb.  That I coveted her closet full of clothes.  That Patty’s father had to drag out muddy, sagging dog back every few weeks from hunting in the marshes; that he apologized politely every time to my mother, as if is were his fault.  That Jay wanted to marry me in kindergarten, and that I whipped Jay a year or two later with thorny switches his father had trimmed from the hedge separating our yards.  That his father called me Meredy-my-love, and I called him Uncle Leo.  That Heather’s grandmother Mrs. Coombs taught us music once a week, the fat that hung from her arms swinging wildly just off beat as she led each song. (p. xi-xii)

Not only do these details validate her standing in the community, the words create a sort of pattern following the beginning of every sentence with the word That.  “That Patty’s father had to drag… That Jay wanted to marry… That his father called me Meredy-my-love…”  The pattern Hall creates continues for two entire paragraphs — sounding almost like a chant — and produces a rhythm and momentum that carries her readers deeper into her story.  We are invested in her story because we have seen first hand how important she once was, and know that this belonging will soon be stripped away.

Hall uses this specific sentence structure again toward the end of the book, when she has returned to New England to care for her ailing mother.  In this instance, Hall is overcome with the emotion of seeing her mother suffer from advanced multiple sclerosis, and knows that her mother’s illness eclipses her own need to reconcile their past.  For a short time, Hall’s mother improves, and there is a brief window of relief:

Mostly, maybe, of guilt — for my helplessness, for the absolute promise of my own future life, for my desire to turn away from this hideous thing, this wrecker of bodies and lives.  Guilt that I have children to raise in happiness and a living to earn and a house to paint and books to read, that I am stretched too tight and tire and breaking from the sadness of watching my mother suffer.  Guilt that I feel sorry for myself.  Guilt that I cannot fix any part of her rupturing life, that the casseroles I bring and the overnights at my house and the long days at her house with my children are easing and not a cure.  (p. 156)

Again, Hall’s repetition of the words guilt, for, and that create a poetic rhythm to the prose, a succession of melancholy waves, with each instance of the word guilt sounding like the toll of a bell.  The sound and the feeling of the sentences mirror the emotion Hall is conveying with the details of her words: the pang of her guilt that she is okay while her mother is hurting, and the pain of her own exhaustion from caring for her mother under the weight of their past.

Hall also uses this sentence structure in the end of the book, as she describes her last encounter with her aging father.  Having been banned from his house, she no longer knows her father, and recalls him in her childhood memory:

Once, as he sat in the kitchen, my father happily fed toast to our dog, Sam, placing the pieces on the dog’s nose and telling him to wait until he said, “Okay!” Once, my father took us camping at a mountain lake.  I cried when I caught a little perch.  he cooked it in a heavy black pan over the fire, and we pulled the delicate, pure white skeleton, spine and hair ribs, from the hot flesh.  Once, my father hung and skinned a deer he had shot.  We children helped scoop the lungs and liver onto newspapers on the garage floor.  (p. 196)

The sharpness of Hall’s details, in tandem with her repetitive use of the word, once, create for the reader a more vivid experience.  The paragraph reads like a slideshow of intimate family portraits, with the word once triggering each new frame.  The effect is clear: Hall’s memory of her father from childhood is sharply contrasted with a man she no longer knows.  And having just glimpsed at the family photos — the photos in which Hall was still a cherished member of her family, and her father participated in her life — the reader mourns this loss as well.

Meredith Hall’s Without a Map is an example of how sentence structure can enhance the emotional weight of a story, by creating a poetic rhythm that complements the message of its words.  Hall uses this technique to her advantage, making the quality of her prose enrich an already compelling story.

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