Pornography is ubiquitous and prostitution is legal or semi-legal in Atwood’s ugly future; the presence of porn and prostitution allows Atwood to develop themes surrounding the roles of women in culture and society, but her feminism is subtle and sophisticated, especially in The Year of the Flood. For Atwood, a feminist perspective is not an add-on, but a fundamental assumption about the world. It’s in her artistic DNA and is particularly striking in the way she develops the female characters in this second novel. The Year of the Flood is not a sequel in the sense that it’s action follows that of Oryx & Crake; the action of the two stories take place during the same time frame, though in proximate locales separated by the infrastructureal and technological occasioned by a world-wide plague. Several of the characters believe — at least for part of the narrative — that they are the only survivors on the planet.

Atwood is a realist in the tradition of 19th novelists like George Elliot and Thomas Hardy; modernist stylistic innovations have affected her work very little. Atwood’s novels tend to focus on characters and situations and social / political contexts, which is quite enough to fully engage her imagination — and ours. [Useful hints and gists regarding realism from this Washington St. Univ. American Lit. website.] Atwood’s realism can have a satirical edge — she is tough on scientists despite coming from a family of scientists — but her main interest is in the way characters react to circumstances both personal and political. In both of these novels, all the central characters must come to terms with the end of Western, scientific, capitalist civilization as currently constituted; the various ways in which the characters react to the cataclysm in which they are caught up is the main subject of both books. These are novels about human agency.

Human agency, of course, cuts both ways. It does not imply human morality, a point that Oryx & Crake makes very powerfully. The Year of the Flood is concerned with how we poor humans might learn to join our human agency to morality, which is also human and therefore frail. To this end, Atwood invents a Luddite / Green religion that names itself The Gardeners. The Gardeners accept science, including evolution, but they believe that God doesn’t want people messing around with the genomes of his creations, so they have withdrawn from the mainstream of society, living in abandoned buildings in the pleeblands, where they grow rooftop gardens and create caches of food called Ararats in preparation for what their founder Adam One calls “the waterless flood.” (The leaders of the group all take then name Adam or Eve, affixing a number that represents the order seniority.) They conceive of themselves as preparing for a new Eden when the old society is swept away, which in fact it is, the waterless flood being a bioengineered plague developed by a renegade scientist working under the umbrella of one of the corporations. The Gardeners are vegetarians and don’t believe in writing things down. Their children use slates in school, which can be wiped clean. The Gardeners’ scriptures consist of orally transmitted stories and hymns and they have many saints: St. Farley Mowat, St. Dian Fossey, St. Peter Matthiessen, St. David Suzuki, and so on.

The action of both novels spans the period before and after the release of the plague. In the pre-plague chapters of both stories, Atwood focuses on the causes — cultural, technological, and economic — that lead inevitably toward catastrophe. Both novels move around in time, shifting back and forth between the pre-plague and post-plague worlds and, interestingly, it is only after the plague that her protagonists come into their own. This is particularly true of Toby in the second novel. Because Oryx & Crake is organized around the character of Jimmy / Snowman (his before and after the plague names), it moves easily back and forth in time and holds together structurally. The Year of the Flood presents more problems in this regard. In the second novel, Atwood introduces a number of characters and presents them at different points along the same arc of time that is covered by Oryx & Crake. Initially, this is somewhat confusing and until Toby and Ren are brought together in a Gardeners community, the story seems diffuse. For a reader of the first novel, it’s clear that Atwood is constructing a machine that will bring these characters together with Snowman by tale’s end. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Toby’s chapters are narrated in the third person and Ren’s in the first person.  I found all this authorial maneuvering somewhat offputting, but about a third of the way through the novel, the pieces fall together and the parts work more effectively together.

Why, though, have Ren narrate her own story while the rest of the book is written in the neutral voice of a mostly objective narrator? There are enough loose ends left untied at the end of The Year of the Flood to make me suspect there will be a third novel in the series, perhaps in Ren’s voice. That story will almost certainly move forward in time as the survivors begin to create a new life for themselves. And Ren and Jimmy will almost certainly wind up together. After all, they are both incurable romantics — and they dated in high school. It will be interesting, if I am right, to see how Atwood constructs her new society — how she balances the good and evil powers of human agency.

The Story Behind the Story – Andrea Barrett & Peter Turchi: This is a good anthology of short stories by many of the usual suspects in many of the usual modes. It includes fairly brief statements by each author describing the genesis of the story. These statements tend toward the personal rather than the technical, so, while they are interesting, they remain idiosyncratic and not terribly useful to the student, except insofar as a student needs to see what sorts of  experiences (ulikely or ordinary) can generate a story. (Judith Grossman’s brief explanation of her story, “I’m Not Through” goes right to the heart of the fiction writer’s problem, however.)

12 Short Stories and their Making — Paul Mandelbaum: This anthology is similar in conception to the Barrett & Turchi book above, except that each author is interviewed by the editor and the interview appears after the story. Because Mandelbaum is interested in technical as well as personal matters, he pushes the writers to explain their methods, which the attentive student will find useful. Because Mandelbaum asks his various authors similar kinds of questions (while allowing the interview to find its own shape), there is much more consistency of response than in The Story Behind the Story.

Narrative Design – Madison Smart Bell: This is the most theoretical and narrowly focused of the books under discussion here, with the fewest stories. Bell divides narrative structures into “linear” and “modular” and provides several examples of each, with extensive analysis that includes an almost line by line set of notes for each story. His general discussion of each story is clear and useful; personally, I get bogged down in the detail of the notes, but others may find these useful. Again speaking personally, I liked the “linear” stories Bell selected much more than the “modular” ones, with the exception of a piece by Miriam Kuznets, “Signs of Life.”

The Half-known World: On Writing Fiction – Robert Boswell: This is a collection of essays dealing with specific issues and drawing on particular works of fiction with which the reader will need to be familiar. Not really a beginner’s book, it’s probably going to be most useful to those who have read a good deal and already written some fiction. One of the most useful things Boswell emphasizes is that in literary fiction, the writer only knows the half of things, that his / her characters and plot emerge from the unknown and must remain partly mysterious even for the reader. This was a great relief to me as a beginner, since that is how I find things in my stories.

Modern Library Writer’s Workshop – Stephen Koch: This book takes the attitude of a coach, addressing specific problems the writer will face in trying to get a story on the page. It covers the basics in a friendly and direct way, referring to many works of (mostly short) fiction to illustrate its points. It also quotes many writers — too many, sometimes — on various subjects related to the craft of fiction. Along with LaPlante’s book (see my earlier post), this is a sensible and encouraging guide.

Technically, the stories are so limpid that I never notice how they are put together. As someone trying to teach myself about writing fiction, I have to consciously backtrack over the texts and ask myself, “No, how the hell did she do that?”

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Note: Good essay here by Jonathan Yardly about one of Stafford’s novels, The Mountain Lion, which I have not yet read.

“The Hoaxer” — Walter Kirn: A razor-sharp portrait of a certain kind of American failure. The story is told from the point of view of the hoaxer’s son Travis, who is just entering adolescence when he discovers that his father is in the habit of creating crop circles, Bigfoot sightings, UFO scares & the like, as a hobby. The father, an autodidact (though of limited interests) who never finished his engineering degree, drags his wife & son from one city to another, where he takes low-level computer programming jobs so as to pursue his real passion, creating hoaxes. Told by the son, the story presents a father filled with resentments. [From 12  Short Stories and their Making.]

“Upon the Sweeping Flood” — Joyce Carol Oates: Motivation is a problem at the end of this story. It’s easy enough to imagine why the main character decides to drive into danger instead of away from it, but the murder he commits at the end of the story seems insufficiently motivated. A buttoned down businessman spends the night with a brother and sister surviving an horrific flood that, apparently, washes civilization clean out of him. If the point is that our civilized behavior is but a thin veneer, then the story is banal.

“Sacha’s Dog” — Karen Brennan: A effective story that, while it does not technically take the dog’s point of view, presents the world as a dog might experience it. Which means pretty much unrelenting cruelty & indifference — toward dogs & other humans — on the part of the characters. [From The Story Behind the Story.]

“Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” — Jean Stafford: An early story about a young American woman whose fluent French deserts her as soon as she sets foot on French soil. The story takes place over the ocurse of an afternoon & evening in which she endures a snobbish outing to a country estate, at which she is the only American, followed by a dinner with American friends. [From The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.] Note: I’ll be reading the whole book in the coming weeks and posting more on Stafford, whose work I find very useful to my own writing.

“The Interior Castle” — Jean Stafford: A study of surviving physical pain. Stafford herself was in an automobile accident that disfigured her face, though the circumstances a different form those of the main character, Pansy, in this story. The entire story takes place as Pansy recovers from a skull fracture and badly broken nose & details the ways in which she goes inside herself, into her “interior castle,” which is how she imagines her injured brain. The story is clinical & the narrator dispassionate, rendering the pain in excruciating detail. [From The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.]

“The North Shore, 1958″ — Ward Just: A long, sprawling, inelegant, but very effective story about a particular slice of American cultural history. I like Ward Just because he finds ways to get, not just politics, but the arts, too, into his stories as motivating presences. In this case, some Edward Hopper paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Just’s characters sometimes tend to be types rather than individuals — saved because they are interesting types. [From The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert.]

“A Wife of Nashville” — Peter Taylor: Beautifully stylish story with a structure that parcels out the plot according to the timeline of a family’s hired help. A series of maids define the southern, middle-class Depression-era life of the story’s point of view character. How the spirit is made and destroyed. Makes me want to read more Taylor. [From Narrative Design.]

“Depth Charge” — Craig Bernardini: I found the management of detail and action in this story confusing, though once the reader understands the situation & setting, the final action is powerful. This story suffers from a common problem in contemporary fiction, unclear motivation. Or merely mystifying motivation.  [From Narrative Design.]

“Daisy’s Valentine” — Mary Gaitskill: Well, it’s a story about a bunch of losers in the city & it generates no sympathy for any of them, which is a problem for me. (In my own attempts at fiction, I am probably too sympathetic toward my characters.) The scenes are drawn very clearly & the pieces of the story — especially images — go together in ways that suggest (without hammering on) thematic concerns. [From Narrative Design.]

“Strike Anywhere” — Antonya Nelson: More of a series of scenes implying a story than an actual story. Seems not to take responsibility for formal completion. [From The Story Behind the Story.]

A month or so into this reading, I began toying with an idea for a story, taking notes and turning it over in my mind, and was on the verge of sitting down to write when another idea struck me — an image, really, & then an event. Over the next couple of weeks I wrote that story straight through and then did a quick revision. It ran to 5000 words, much longer than I had expected when I began. I sent that story, called “Bye Bye Blackbird” (after the Mel Tormé song that figures in the plot) to my mentor & to another fiction writer I know, neither of whom dismissed it as worthless. In fact, both were encouraging & very kind to my initial effort.I made some revisions & sent the piece off to a magazine that has previously published my poetry & as of this writing I await their response.

That first story concerns a boy, age 9, told in the third person; I began another story about the same boy about a dozen years later, also in third person point of view, but got hung up about half-way through the arc of the plot. (In both stories, I knew in general what was going to happen, but I didn’t know until I was actually writing how it was going to happen.) I set the half-finished story aside & focused on reading as many stories as I could.

In the meantime, I saw an ad in one of the writer’s magazines for a “short-short” story competition: under 1000 words. I had been taking notes for stories and characters in my notebook for several weeks & thought it would be a good exercise to try something very short. Most of the story ideas I had jotted down had something to do with the later life of the boy in the first story & this short-short turned out to be in the voice of his friend, a few years older, when they are both in their twenties. The friend is a bartender and speaks in the first person about a seemingly trivial  incident that occurred in the bar where he was working, but that has stuck with him — he is looking back on the experience several years later. What I didn’t expect is that this same character had another, longer story to tell, in which the boy from the first story is a college student.

On autobiography: I would be lying if I claimed that the central character of the first story was not “me” in some sense, but the events in the story did not happen to the actual me when I was a child. Actually, I took more of the setting than the action from my own experience. The same goes for the later stories — the boy is certainly some version of myself, but combined with aspects of people I knew or know, but the actual events did not happen to me & are in that sense entirely fictional. The very short story, titled “Faith,” doesn’t not feature the boy at all, the speaker being a combination of three different people I knew when I was young; the second bartender story, titled “Charity,” is told from the point of view of the boy’s friend and thus gives an external view of his character.

I have now returned to the story I’d gotten stuck on, moving it slowly forward — in all these pieces I have written straight through, not composing in pieces the way I do with poetry, & only making a few notes about pieces of specific language that I think will be needed later in the piece. This working straight through keeps me in suspense & keeps the action open. As I said, I know in general where the story is headed, but I don’t know how it is going to arrive there, which path will rise from the details to create a structure.

In both of the longer third person stories about the boy, first as a child then as a young man, I am including bits and pieces of actual times & places — in the first, some details about pop music and JFK, in the second, news reports of the fall of Saigon occur at intervals throughout the story. I am attracted to this sort of nailing down the narrative to historical facts & cultural details, which I guess makes me some kind of later day realist. In any case, that’s where I am now, feeling excited & happy about this new direction my work has taken. I was feeling as if my poetry had become narrower & narrower in its concerns & techniques & for whatever reason was no longer an appropriate place to deal with certain psychological states; but I feel free in fiction to play with a whole new set of ideas & techniques. I haven’t felt this engaged in my own creative work for several years — I only hope the results, the stories themselves, are as worthwhile as the experience of producing them.

“A Day in the Open” (Jane Bowles) — Reads like Chekhov transported to north Africa. Everything is dramatized. Nothing happens but everything happens; or, things happen but they are presented so neutrally that every event — the important & the unimportant, the dramatic & the prosaic, the significant & the insignificant — all have equal weight. Absolutely no moral judgments are made.

“The Man Who Knew Belle Star” (Richard Bausch) — This is a story about the absence of human feeling. The outlaw’s language is perfectly flat, implacable. The tough guy who picks her up hitchhiking has been in trouble, been in prison, but has not left the human world, which Belle has done, completely. Technically, a slow build, the final violent act taking place beyond the narrated time of the story.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Joyce Carol Oates) — Like “The Man Who Knew Belle Star,” this story builds relentlessly through repetition. In both stories, the dangerous character is presented as having a flat affect, a profound disconnect from ordinary assumptions about good & evil. Again, the final violent act occurs after the narrative time of the story concludes.

“In the Zoo” (Jean Stafford) — I vaguely knew that Jean Stafford had been married to Robert Lowell, but hadn’t read any of her stories until this one, which I found in The Granta Book of the American Short Story. This is a bitter but still comic story of two orphan sisters sent to live with a guardian, Mrs. Placer, in a small town in Colorado. The most audacious thing about the story is that they are not clever girls and they do not succeed, really, until their guardian removes the weight of her presence by dying. There is beautiful and harrowing writing about animals in this story. [Good brief  discussion of the story here.]

“Chan Tha” (Tran Thuy Mai) — I read an interview with Mai several weeks ago in the Vietnam News and asked my friend Ly Lan about her. Turns out Lan & Mai know each other, though they haven’t met for years. Lan sent me a couple of stories, “Chan Tha” being much the stronger of the two, I thought. The problem was that it was badly translated. It is common among Vietnamese intellectuals to deny the well-known bit of translation theory that says the final translation of a story or poem ought to be done by a native speaker of the target language. So I retranslated the story over the last couple of days, brining it into idiomatic English. The story takes place during the Cambodian-Vietnamese war (1975-1989) and involves a love story between a Vietnamese soldier and a Cambodian girl. What makes the story work is the detailed and specific use of incident — a braiding of four meetings between the two characters — that is echoed in a braiding of images throughout the story.

“A Poetics for Bullies” (Stanley Elkin) — Elkin sets himself the task of portraying a bully from the inside & except that the first person narrator seems more literate than he ought to be, succeeds in excruciating detail. And the foil, the good boy, the hero, John Williams, is perhaps too good.

So what is it that Dubus’s stories actually do? Many don’t have conventional plots & you can’t even say that the characters are wiser at the end of the story than they were at the beginning. There is often a Chekhovian sense of incompleteness in the action of a Dubus story. The main character of “The Pitcher” simply drives away from the town where he has been playing minor league ball at the end of the season, leaving his wife behind, who has taken up with a married dentist — “straight through to San Antonio,” the radio playing. He’s lost the final game of the season 1 to 0 because his team couldn’t hit behind him. Still, he’s pretty sure he’s going to make it to the majors, unlike his teammates, or his wife for that matter. The pitcher has lost his wife and lost the final game of the season, but he is moving forward, driving straight through.The story reminds me of Chekhov’s “The House with the Mansard” in its optimism in the face of human unhappiness.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve read most of the way through Dubus’s Selected Stories, reading them for what I can learn from them about writing fiction. A Dubus story dramatizes the inner life of a character and that dramatization becomes something that is stable enough for the reader to hold in mind — not a symbol because not generalized, but operating something like a symbol. Here’s a list of the Dubus stories I’ve read so far, with brief comments, mostly intended to jog my own memory.

• “Miranda Over the Valley” — This story never grabbed me, though it is evocative in its parts — seems amorphous as a whole & in fact that is one of the risks Dubus seems willing to run in his fiction: a looseness that can often be a virtue.

• “The Winter Father” — This one is deftly plotted & hangs together memorably, but lacks the emotional depth of “Miranda.”

• “Waiting” — A very short story, almost a prose poem, about a waitress who is widowed young by the Korean war and who comes to understand, to sense, that she is surrounded by a great and meaningless indifference. As do several of Dubus’s characters, she is an ocean swimmer.

• “Killings” — More a schematic drawing of a story than a story, about the perfect crime. Perfect both morally & technically.

• “The Pretty Girl” — Almost a novella my least favorite piece in the Selected Stories. My own bias prefers short stories at the shorter end of the range, so that my affect my judgment. This has a great fight scene, but too many of the pieces fail to fall together. Unusual for this writer, all the characters are ugly, even the pretty girl of the title.

• “Graduation” — Dubus has great sympathy for sluts. This seems like a nearly perfect story to me, but then I love redemption in all its aspects.

• “The Pitcher” — A story about doing one’s job, grace under pressure. Redemption doesn’t often take the form we think it should.

• “After the Game” — In the same voice as “The Pitcher,” a brief mediation on how things go wrong even for the gifted & lucky among us.

• “Cadence” — Cutting it & not cutting it in boot camp turns out to be a matter of character rahter than of physical strength. A parable that warns against thinking too highly of one’s self.

• “If they Knew Yvonne” — My favorite story in the book. Structurally all over the place, that looseness I mentioned earlier a virtue. Spans more time than most short stories.

• “The Fat Girl” — Dubus at his compassionate best. The narrative technique here summarizes big stretches of time & only dramatizes occasionally, at the moments of highest intensity. Virtually all the dialogue is indirect.

• “They Now Live in Texas” — Short, mysterious, three strands: A couple comes home from a party drunk, a friend of theirs who has given up drinking, a horror movie the woman watches after her husband has gone to bed. These elements are braided together without comment.

• “Leslie in California” — A young working-class couple moves to California; he’s a fisherman who can’t get a boat, she stays at home; he drinks & on three occasions he strikes her, though he is contrite afterward; finally he gets a chance to go out & earn some money — their electricity has been turned off — but the night before he drinks & hits his wife. In the morning she cooks breakfast for him and he goes. He will be gone several days. What will she do? Chekhov says that it is the writer’s duty to present the problem, not solve it.

• “The Curse” — A bartender blames himself because he fails to prevent a rape that occurs right in front of him, in his own bar. Both he & the girl are overpowered. The beauty of this story emerges in the small relationships between the main character, the bartender, and his family & friends, after the fact.

• “Sorrowful Mysteries” — Dubus is at his best imagining characters unlike his readers that nevertheless draw readers to them. This reader, anyway. Another of Dubus’s loosely jointed stories, its protagonist at first appears too good to be true, but turns out to be just good.

• “Delivering” — A small gem from the point of view of a fifteen year old paperboy, another ocean swimmer. He has listened, the night before, while his parents had a final, drunken fight before his mother leaves for good — listened while his younger brother slept. In the morning, they deliver his papers, swim, eat doughnuts, and return home, where they play catch. An act of betrayal balanced by a series of small acts of mercy.

Her enjoyment of cruelty makes O’Connor an acute observer of hypocrisy, though. I recognize Sheppard in various Sunday School teachers and Youth Pastors I encountered growing up & I certainly wish I had had Rufus Johnson’s wit in order to respond to them, if not his criminality. But I found the reversal of expected belief — Sheppard the atheist, Johnson the believer — implausible. It’s necessary, of course, for the moral reversal the author wants to pull at the end, but it strikes me as forced and hyperbolic. Come to think of it, she also pulls an unbelievable reversal at the end of ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Not that the boy can’t be conflicted & contrary, but that his resistance to his mother throughout the story, until the very end, is ultimately so weak. His weakness makes him less interesting than he might be. Again, there is a remorselessness in this work that repels me. However insightful O’Connor’s imagination, it is insight gained at the cost of moral tunnel vision.

I spent some time yesterday diagramming the scenes in the famous story “Goosberries,” which is structurally a straightforward story within a story. [The link is to an earlier translation than the one I read.] Ivan tells his friends the story of his brother, a government clerk who has scrimped and saved enough to become a landowner in his retirement. In doing so, he has become complacent and self-satisfied. But the setting is everything. Ivan tells this story while sitting in the upstairs room of his friend Alehin, whose farm Ivan and his friend Burkin have stopped at, taking shelter from a rainstorm. The two farmsteads function almost as two additional characters in the story, with Alehin’s productive and in good trim, while I’van’s brother’s farm is described as chaotic and disorganized (though this description is Ivan’s, not the narrator’s). Ivan urges Alehin not to become complacent like his own brother, which is odd since the two characters are about as different as can be imagined — the obsessive brother and Alehin, who is described as a kind of healthy animal.

Well, my intention is not to retell the story. [Here is a pretty good e-notes summary of the story.] What interests me is the way that Chekhov refuses to take sides. The narrator notes that “no one was satisfied” with Ivan’s story (despite the fact that it is told with passion and good will) and the brother’s situation — which the reader gets only through Ivan’s eyes — is not dismissed or belittled despite Ivan’s attempt to use it as a warning. Alehin is presented as self-sufficient, part of the landscape. The problem the story presents is, How is it best to live? It does not provide an answer.