Guest essay by Andrew Sottile
I was driving away from Boothbay Harbor along
River Road, a windy, crowned cutoff, toward Damariscotta, another small
township off Maine’s coastal Route 1. I’d called the bookstore there, which had the text I was after, a history of Maine’s lobster fishing culture, an
acclaimed nonfiction narrative. Maine’s answer to
The Perfect Storm, I figured
. Or better yet, something like
Into
the Wild. I was going to be an adventure writer. This is what I’d told
myself. The next Junger, a younger Krakauer, the reviewers would say. I’d been working on a magazine feature, a profile of Boothbay’s lobster industry. I
conducted interviews, poured over library books and microfiches, even arranged
myself a lobster boat ride on which I nearly fell asleep on my feet from the
dreaded side effects of Dramamine. I had hours of voice recordings—the thick
drawls of lobster fishermen and quantitative theories of marine biologists—but
no real story of substance.
In the front lobby of the Damariscotta
bookshop—Maine Coast Books, it’s called— a whiteboard sign read,
Richard Ford, Tonight at Skidompha Library. Taped
to the sign was a photograph of this Ford character, a black and white author
shot. Gray eyes. Gleaming forehead. And next to the sign were stacks of books.
The Sportswriter I’d heard of.
Independence Day, too. They were about
New Jersey, a place I’d never been and whose residents I resented for staking
summer claim on this beloved northern New England coast. I picked up a
yellow-spined copy of
Rock Springs, its
cover showing a lone mailbox and a vast expanse of prairie—I’d never seen
this one before—and flipped to the first page and read the title story’s first lines:
“Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I
still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn’t turn me in to the
police.” Then I thumbed forward: “This is not a happy story. I warn you.” I sat in a vinyl-cushioned chair by the window—arrested by the voice, the
frankness, how
real these stories
seemed. I read on. An hour passed. Then another. By now it was nearly seven
o’clock. I purchased the collection with a swamp-ass-soaked twenty, and made my
way to the library next door, where Ford spoke and read from a work-in-progress
and mentioned his very own Boothbay
home, which gave me a thrill. When he was through I shook his hand, said we had
a place near Boothbay, too, and asked about how he writes short stories. I wanted
to know about his approach. “Oh, just write them,” he said. “That’s all you can
do. Just write them.”
I finished
Rock Springs a day later. And if you’d asked me why those stories
made my face feel numb, what about the first-person voices captured me, or how
the narrative structures made them seem truer than any fiction I’d read before,
I couldn’t have told you. All that needed time to steep.
Ford’s short story “Optimists” opens with this sentence: “All
of this that I’m about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in
1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man
and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my
age to fool the Army, and then did not come back.” Ford gives his plot
away and reveals what is presumably all the story’s incidents.
His new novel
Canada opens similarly: “First, I’ll tell about the
robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my
sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make
complete sense without that being told first.” These openings,
as Ford has said, “spill the
beans.” He even
told an interviewer he found
Canada’s opening “an irresistible hook.” But
there’s more at work here, something more covert. Ford doesn’t just give away his
story arc; he also creates temporal texture. Both voices establish themselves
as distanced from the stories’ events, which is to say that the passage of time
is obvious in the narrative. Because Ford’s narrator says, “when I was only
fifteen,” the reader understands this story happened long before the actual
telling takes place. And in
Canada, by
referring to lives and “the courses they eventually followed,” Ford implies
that those paths, courses and lives have changed and passed and are now
someplace else, a place different from the story’s setting—in both time and
place.
Ford takes a risk, giving away these climactic
events so early on, yet his stories remain tension-packed. In
Rock Springs’ “Optimists,” for
example, he sets the eventual murder scene with this foreboding sentence: “It
was on a night that Penny and Boyd Mitchell were in our house that trouble came
about.” The line serves as a reminder that the narrator, Frank, has lived
through the story’s events. Then the in-scene story begins. When his
father gets home from work, the narrator says, “I have never seen a look on a man’s
face that was like the look on my father’s face at the moment. He looked wild.
His eyes were wild.” Most important here is that the in-scene character
does not know
why the father is
wild-eyed; neither does the reader. It eventually becomes clear that the father
“saw a man be killed tonight” And when houseguest Boyd Mitchell hostilely
suggests that the father “should’ve put tourniquets on” the dying man, the
reader begins to understand this scene will not end well. Boyd Mitchell will,
of course, lose his life by the hand of the narrator’s father. And while the
narrator ultimately knows this outcome, his in-scene character lacks privilege,
obviously doesn’t know the consequences of the events, or even the events
themselves as they are about to take place. Ford plays with classical dramatic
irony—that is, the discrepancy between what readers know and what characters
know. His readers become more informed, more privileged than the characters
themselves. As Ford
puts it, “I didn't think giving the events away was a risk, but created
its own suspense.” We feel the tension mostly because Ford frontloads
his opening lines.
Many years later, in
Canada, Ford uses charged details to
achieve similar narrative tension. After his parents commit a bank robbery, for
example, the narrator, Dell Parsons, and his sister, Berner, take a ride around
town with their father. Dell finds a packet of money in between the cushions in
the backseat. This detail obviously carries its own feeling of mystery, but
because Ford has already mentioned the robbery, we understand that it did, in
fact, take place at the “
Agricultural
National Bank, Creekmore, North Dakota,” as the money packet indicates.
Now the robbery, and all its baggage, has come back to Great Falls.
Dell’s discovery opens up a whole world of tension in the short car ride. The
reader knows more than Dell does. “I was astounded,” Dell narrates. “I said
‘Oh,’ loud enough to make my father instantly look at me in the driver’s
mirror… ‘Did you see the goddamn cops?’ my father said.” The anxious mood
in the car and the emotions of its characters become obvious—Dell’s fear and
confusion, the father’s paranoia.
Later (and more simply crafted) on their
drive, they pass “the back of the Cascade County jail.” When reading that
line, knowing with certainty the car’s driver, the narrator’s father, will soon
be a resident there, I can’t help but imagine the inside, the gray cells, the
stale light, the cold bars. But here, in this scene, those details are implied
as part of the subtext; the actual jail doesn’t appear until much later—when,
of course, Dell’s parents end up there.
When Gustav Freytag published
Technik des Dramas in 1863, he gave
language to an ancient plot structure, which stems back to the Greeks, on
through Shakespeare and into modern tragedy. In Freytag’s pyramid-based
dramatic model, the climax does not, as one might expect, occur near the end of
a story. Instead this “crisis” typically occurs during the third act of a five-act
play—about midway through a story. Dr. Kip Wheeler of Carson Newman College
calls the moments after the climax the “reversal…[a time] in which the protagonist's
fortunes change irrecoverably for the worse.” And while such a structure
appears less frequently in contemporary fiction, Richard Ford uses the early
reversal and climax as many classicists did; he emphasizes the consequences of
the events he gives away in his first lines. But Ford takes this mode a bit further
and constructs recurring scenes, what I will refer to as
mirrored scenes, in which he shows a scene before the drama, before
Freytag’s pinnacle, and then the same scene again during the reversal, after
the bomb has gone off and the dust has settled at the onset of the falling
action. Ford shows us how quickly (or in some cases how profoundly, after time)
things can change.
The first time I read “Optimists”—that
night when I returned to Boothbay—I flipped ahead upon reaching the page break
after the murder. I remember
wondering where Ford was headed now. These mirrored scenes are an essential
element to the structural success of that story. Before his father comes home, Frank
tells us of a nearly jovial scene. “I was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich…and
my mother was in the living room playing cards with Penny and Boyd Mitchell.
They were drinking vodka and eating the other sandwiches my mother had made.”
But notice how the initial scene is told; it lacks finite images. Ford
leaves the shown details for a later scene, after
the narrator and his mother have bailed the father out of prison:
Inside our house, all the lights were
burning when we got back. It was one o’clock. There were still lights in some
neighbors’ houses. I could see a man at the window across the street, both his
hands to the glass, watching out, watching us…My father stood in the middle of
the living room and looked around, looking at the chairs, at the card table
with cards still on it, at the open doorways to the other rooms. It was as if
he’d forgotten his own house and now saw it again and didn’t like it.
There’s
so much implied, so much subtext when Ford slows down and
shows us the scene. The lights and neighbors, how the family has
become exposed, the cards and card table, how earlier people had been enjoying
this house now laced with violence, the open doors, the father looking around,
how he might’ve taken a different path. Ford patiently skates over the details early,
allowing their meanings and consequences to surface now.
Ford also uses mirrored scenes in
Canada. The night before Dell’s parents
get carted off to jail, Dell and his father work together on a puzzle. “I found
my father alone at the card table with his Niagara Falls puzzle…All the lights
in the front of the house were on. Niagara Falls was almost complete. Only a
few pale pieces of jagged sky needed setting in.” Ford, unlike his
approach in “Optimists,” gives this scene intense detail. He uses Niagara
Falls, of course, to foreshadow the narrator’s looming fate in Canada (another
example of dramatic irony). The lights suggest exposure and an inability to
hide. And Ford presents detail here because, we eventually learn, this is the
last ordinary conversation Dell will have with his soon-to-be-incarcerated father. Then
Dell’s father “suddenly popped the puzzle piece in his mouth, chewed it and swallowed
in a big gulp.” Dell believes his father has performed a magic trick. But
when Dell insists on knowing the piece’s whereabouts, his father claims to have
eaten it, saying, “It’s not a trick
every
time.” Ford suggests that familiar things can and suddenly will
change.
The next morning, Dell’s mother frantically
packs after announcing an unexpected trip to Seattle (an escape plan, of
course). “We have to go now,” she tells Dell. “Put what you’re taking in this.”
She hands him a “pink pillowcase with white scalloped edges.” Dell
gathers his essentials and joins his doomed family in the living room. When
the police finally knock, Dell’s mother drops a dish on the kitchen floor. “It
broke into bits just as my father was pulling the door back to whatever news
was waiting for us.” Ford slowly paints a portrait of this family before its
Freytagian crisis. Ford gives us details we’ll remember.
Ford revisits those details after the
parents get cuffed and stuffed into a police cruiser:
The Niagara Falls puzzle, all put
together, still lay on the card table, lacking only the piece my father had
eaten. It could never be finished and was useless…I stood alone in the middle
of the living room and looked around, my heart beating fast…There was my
pillowcase with my belongings; my mother’s suitcase…I picked up the pieces of
the broken dish my mother had dropped earlier and put them in the trash.
This
scene works similarly to the one from “Optimists.” Dell examines the room, as
if searching for a different path his life could have taken, and he surveys the
immediate wreckage left by his parents’ actions. Ford seems to have mapped his story
out and selected a climax right in the middle of a single scene. The arrest is
sandwiched between these mirrored images because Ford aims to show how quickly
things can turn for the worst. “Those little calibrations are really little,”
Ford recently
told an interviewer. “And their consequences are really big. The
difference between the normal and the aberrance—I've always had an interest in
that…you make one little mistake, you take one star out of the constellation,
and it suddenly no longer is Orion.” Ford shows such a hiccup in
the “calibrations” of this family. A normal morning turns to one littered only with
shards of a life now gone by.
Charles Baxter, in his essay “Against
Epiphanies,” shows hostility toward moments of realization. He’s sick of epiphanies:
“In most anthologies of short stories published since the 1940s, insight
endings or epiphanic endings account for approximately 50 to 85 percent of all
the climactic moments.”
Baxter goes
on to say, “The logic of unveiling has become a dominant mode in Anglo-American
writing, certainly in fiction…We watch as a hidden presence, some secret logic,
rises to visibility and serves as the climactic revelation.” He believes
the epiphanies he reads are unearned.
But Ford’s protagonists do not come to understand
their lives until long after changes take place. Ford doesn’t give his
characters a “hidden presence” or an in-scene insight.
Instead he uses the aforementioned reflective
narrative voice, the temporal space it allows, and the Freytagian story
structure to flash forward and show the consequences of the stories in the present
day, which for “Optimists” is over twenty years to 1982, and for
Canada is nearly fifty years to 2010.
Ford allows for realizations, but not until his stories’ falling actions and
eventual denouements, long after traumatic actions take place.
He wants “
to see that arc of consequence,” wants to see how hardships can be ultimately overcome,
or at least dealt with reasonably in the future.
The final scene from 1959 in “Optimists”
isn’t the last scene of the story, and doesn’t, as one might expect, possess
any epiphanic qualities. Conversely, the narrator, Frank, and his mother
examine their inability to make sense of his father’s actions. His mother tells
about a duck she once saw frozen into the ice, left helpless as its mates flew
away into the wintertime sky. “It’s wildlife,” the mother laments. “Some always
get left back…Maybe that’s just what this is. Just a coincidence.” With
these lines, Ford acknowledges life’s unknowable things, how we can’t
rationally explain much until later. And, as Charles Baxter says, characters needn’t be
“validated by a conclusive insight or a brilliant, visionary stop-time moment.
Stories can arrive somewhere interesting without claiming any wisdom or
clarification…can be a series of clues but not a solution, an unfolding of a
mystery instead of a revelation.” Ford and Baxter both suggest that
it’s okay to lack a lexicon, to be rendered speechless.
At the onset of the story’s denouement,
Ford finally allows Frank, now a man of forty-three, to make a bit of sense from
the events of years before:
The most important things in your life
can change so suddenly, so irrevocably, that you can forget even the most
important of them and their connectedness, you are so taken up by the
chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next. I
now no longer remember the exact year of my father’s birth, or how old he was
when I last saw him…
The
narrator has nearly come to believe what his mother told him twenty years
before. Even now the “epiphany” is vague and doesn’t give finite meaning to the
murder his father committed and its effect on the family. Ford then moves the
story forward, starts disclosing information about the time that’s passed since
1959; he describes the tangible consequences. Frank has, in a sense, erased his
father from memory, and he presents this material as if he’s not surprised by
the outcome, saying, “When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at
the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so
young.” All this seems natural to think about years after. The narrator
has had plenty of time to wonder about the year when “life changed for all of us and forever.”
Then Ford brings the story present. “A
month ago I saw my mother,” Frank says. After he mentions he’s been through a
divorce, she replies, “You’ll never get anything fixed just right. That’s your
mother’s word. Your father and I had a marriage…A lot of it was just wrong.”
Even years later, Ford alludes to the mysteries of our actions and
decisions. Nothing will ever get “fixed,” or entirely figured out. But the
scene ends with an oddly hopeful moment. The mother says her son reminds her
of his father, calls their family’s time together before the murder “happy
enough times.” The story closes like this: “And she bent down and
kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her
hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned
away, finally, and left me there alone.” Hope can be found in a small
moment years after terrible events. If this story has an epiphany, that’s
it. Horrible things are survivable. Frank’s encounter with his mother presents
the realities of their lives—that they’ve lost touch and will probably never
regain closeness, that a mother can still give her son a wise word and have a tender
moment with him years after their family’s collapse.
Canada ends in similar
fashion. After their parents’ incarceration, Dell’s twin sister Berner flees to
California and Dell is taken across the Canadian border and put in the care of
an American, Arthur Remlinger. Dell digs goose-hunting pits and sets decoys for
tourist hunters. But Remlinger is in exile, running from a crime committed in the
US years before. And by the end of his stay in Saskatchewan
, Dell becomes an accomplice in a double-murder, eventually burying
the bodies in the goose pits he earlier helped dig (another example of a
mirrored scene). After the murders, Ford eases Dell into that temporally
reflective voice, which Ford has dipped into throughout the novel. But even then
Dell does not claim to understand the events of his youth—a time now fifty
years behind him. He says, “Can I even speak of the effect of witnessing the Americans’
killing—the effect on me? I’ll have to make the words up, since the true effect
is silence.” “Events must sink into the ground,” he continues, “and
percolate up naturally again for me to pay them proper heed” Ford, it
would seem, agrees with Baxter, who says, “We can have stories of real consequence in
which no discursive insight appears.” Both writers suggest that a truth-bearing
consequence to a reader is more important than an epiphany is to a fictional
character.
Dell goes on to say that since 1960, he
has tried “to mediate among the good counsels… generosity, longevity,
acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me—and, with these
things, to make a life.” In that life Dell comes to reside in Canada, and,
after several years, when he revisits the site where he buried
the murdered men, Dell still can’t mine meaning from all that’s happened. “I
stood [where I helped bury the men], hands in my trouser pockets, toes in the
dust, and tried to make it all signify, be revelatory, as if I needed that. But
I couldn’t.” Ford turns the expectation of an epiphany on its head and
presents a man who
wants the
epiphany, wants to feel overcome with clarifying emotions; yet Dell is at a
loss.
The true consequences of Dell’s
experiences finally surface in
Canada’s
final twenty pages. Berner, whom Dell has seen just a few times since their
separation in 1960, is dying of lymphoma. After hearing the news, Dell muses on
his conduct since his family’s ruinous end. “It made me realize how much I’d
wanted to erase them,” Dell says of his family, “how much my happiness was
pinioned to their being gone.” Now Ford allows Dell a bit of a realization;
it takes place fifty years after the novel’s events. Ford’s novel does not lean
on, as Baxter says, a “hidden presence” or “secret logic.” Instead, it uses the mitigating
effects of the passage of time.
In his final meeting with Berner, Dell
begins to understand that he’ll never really know his sister. As he waits
outside her home, he has a moment with her partner, who “turned and walked in a
stiff, dignified way to the corner of the trailer and was gone…He didn’t want
to meet me. I understood perfectly well. I was late on the scene.” Dell
begins to wrestle with the long-term consequences of his choices—not just on
him but on his sister and the way she views him, at a distance from her failed
life, from a life that took her through “at least three husbands” and several
jobs, including “a waitress in a casino…a waitress in a restaurant…a nurse’s
assistant in a hospice.” Dell wonders if he’s partially to blame—for not
sticking around or tracking her down, for not guiding her toward a successful,
ultimately prosperous life like the one he’s attained as a grown man. Berner is
“bitter about the ‘substitute life’ she’d led instead of the better one she
should’ve led if it had all worked out properly.” And therefore the only
epiphany here, the one that speaks a universal truth, is a simple one: “If you
tolerate loss well,” as Dell says in the final passage of the novel, “manage
not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep
proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves good”—you can ultimately aspire to an all right life after your world gets
rocked by the poor decisions of others. But if you fail to do those things, as
Berner has, you’ll over-think what could have been. This is the real
consequence of the robberies and murders, and Ford’s reflective voice and
Freytagian story arc allow us to go as far into the future as needed to better
understand the meaning of Dell’s story and, most importantly, his
earned revelation, which he’s only come to
understand over the course of fifty years.
Ford follows similar patterns throughout
his body of work. His 1990 novel
Wildlife
opens like this: “In the Fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was
for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in
love with him.” Ford’s novel deals with the violent consequences of
infidelity. During the falling action of his story “Great Falls,”
Ford writes, “Things seldom end in one
event,” thus acknowledging his interest in what happens
after.
Ford goes so far to have a character, in his novella “Jealous,”
another Montana story from his collection
Women with Men, say this: “Of course it’s not what happens, it’s what you do with
what happens.” And even Ford’s
classic Frank Bascombe novels deal with consequence.
The Sportswriter begins with the death of the protagonist’s son and
the end of his marriage.
The Lay of the Land starts with Bascombe recovering from prostate cancer. The list goes on.
In
The Guardian, Ford once called himself “a comer-backer.”
That day I drove back to Boothbay and continued
reading
Rock Springs. That night I
read until I slept. That next morning I drank coffee and read “Communist” and
the collection’s haunting final lines: “My mother and I never talked in that
way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.” I was
spellbound but didn’t know why. Now, years later I see, at least initially, the
stories reminded me of the books that turned me into a teenaged reader, a
wannabe writer, stories like
Into the
Wild and
The Perfect Storm, stories
that deal with real-life truths, books that spill the beans up front and deal
with tragic consequences.
I never finished writing the piece on
Boothbay’s lobstermen. But that day in Damariscotta ultimately turned me toward
contemporary fiction. Ford’s work led me to the rest of the “dirty realists,” Raymond
Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie and others: writers in a tradition that every
day I work to be a part of. Back then I couldn’t have told you I’d care more
about fiction than most anything else, or that I’d enroll in a graduate creative
writing program and send stories to journals and works-in-progress to writers I
deeply admire. It takes time to find a vocabulary for the events that mean the
most, on and off the page. I’m certainly glad I drove River Road and found a
display of Richard Ford’s fiction laid out like a meal before me.
Andrew Sottile lives, writes and teaches in Oregon. An MFA candidate at Pacific University, he is at work on a collection of stories set on the coast of Maine and a novel.
