Story: "Reunion" by John Cheever

Story: "Reunion" by John Cheever

This is a very short story - only about 1,000 words - but it does so much in such a short space that it threatens to make longer stories seem desperate for attention. In summary, the story concerns a last meeting between an estranged adult son and his father. Two passages resonated with me above the rest, and I'll provide a brief comment on each here.

The first is a luminous sensory description of the father by his son: "He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together." So loaded. I've rarely read such an intimate description by one male toward another, let alone one by a son to a father. The narrator loves his father completely, unashamedly - he even wants someone to see it.

But wait - then I explore the substance of their meeting (or, at least what I can from what the son reveals of it). He has not seen his father for three years and in their extended dinner together, he all but fades away while his father drinks and bosses waiters - does everything to impress his son, and all his son can do is follow him along. I couldn't help getting a suppressed "better them than me" feeling from the narrator.

Which leads to the second passage that struck me: "I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations." So sad. He went into the meeting with the knowledge that he could not rise above his father. And, throughout the course of the story, he does not seem to. In the end, he actually escapes through the back door; he addresses his father as "Daddy," again and again. A grown man calling his father "Daddy"like that hits my ear wrong - its syrupy and sycophantic. There's probably some love in there, but a kind of sad acceptance seems to loom over it. By the third time the narrator calls his father "Daddy," as he says goodbye, perhaps he hears himself saying it and sees the oppressive stasis that he's in. There's no mention of why that meeting was the last time the narrator saw his father, but I like to think that, in their last moment together, the decision approached the narrator to end that kind of relationship the only way he knew how: abruptly, physically, completely. His father was not a man for discussion. I then leave the story with a mixed feeling of hope and doubt: will this man repeat the same pattern, as he sentenced himself at the story's opening? Or will he perhaps see this parting as a chance to realign himself with himself?

Story: "The Harvest" by Amy Hempel

Story: "The Harvest" by Amy Hempel

Apparently this is a big story with creative writing courses. From what I understand, Hempel employs the minimalist style also shaped by writers like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and the polarizing writer/editor Gordon Lish. I've read some Carver as well, and overall the style engages me like a branding iron: quick, intense, bold, its presentation of pain upfront and stark.

I'm sure my soul hasn't ripened enough to appreciate all of what this style offers, but, with this story, I find myself reaching for the significance in lines that seem to insist upon it. The often mentioned, "I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence," reads like a koan to me. I can't get inside it. I try. "That's the point," says the hipster to this and anything I claim not to understand. What is the context? The protagonist is in the hospital, recovering from a car accident, denying the doctor's encouraging prognosis. "I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life," she says. "... a severed head that finishes a sentence" strikes me as so shocking, clever, and sexy that I cannot reach it. It slaps me back.

For some reason, the line that most struck me was this: "In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind." The rhythmic echo of the final piece is so haunting: "... and left what was left behind." It also drapes a sad irony over the straight mention of harvesting (organs), and even the protagonist's quip, "Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?" Even the sharks harvest the abalone hunters harvesting abalone. Jim Jones harvesting souls. What harvested this man's face? And in the protagonist's retellings and revisions, he is not mentioned. It is the story's dark point, which seems to make all the rest seem hopeful, brighter. In another sad or grisly moment, at least there is purpose, or the protagonist can manufacture one; she can correct, adjust, retell - play. "... and left what was left behind" just gives up. It's the feeling of the walking dead that she herself flirts with - "As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it" - but that has no equal. "The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes." I can't bear this man. Can't handle him. His story is too sincere, tight against the rules that the protagonist draws out for her storytelling.

"I moved through the days..." speaks of someone bored and poised and granted the luxury of cleverness. "In my neighborhood..." is a reality check, a sacrifice that enables the rest of the story to stretch out and discover itself.

Story: "A Protest Against the Sun" by Steven Millhauser

Story: "A Protest Against the Sun" by Steven Millhauser

I had a powerful reaction to this story, which only intensified as I read it again and again. In a sentence, this story is about a girl, Elizabeth, who spends a "nice" day at the beach with her parents, Dr. and Mrs, Halstrom, the niceness of which is threatened by an angry, hoodied teen boy who stomps across the sand.

For me, this is one of those stories that portrays a hapless child trapped within the psychic clutches of a controlling parent. Dr. Halstrom is a grade A jackass who demands total respect from and control over his codependent wife and daughter. Every exchange of dialogue reveals another brick in the prison that he has built for Elizabeth, and that she is now unknowingly continuing to build herself. He brings far too much reading to the beach, so that the books stack up like a pile of peacock feathers boasting his supposed education. Mrs. Halstrom and Elizabeth mirror this habit, while at the same time staying well below his number themselves. A book to be read and a book to show off to others that they are reading. Or that they could read if they wanted to. A felt preoccupation with that kind of an image: "well, I'm not doing that at the moment, but I have it here, and I could do that at any moment, which is just as good as doing it."

Elizabeth is reading "Dune." Dr. Halstrom teases her about this, which seems innocent at first, but the teasing takes on a sad tone when Elizabeth begins to tease herself the same way just to get a laugh from her father. Of course, she wouldn't dare tease him. She comes to the edge of distressing feelings just as she walks along the edge of the water, the itch of reality that the day may not be so nice for her as her father paints it to be and demands she parrot back to him. Her mother's soul-starved enabling predicts Elizabeth's sad future, if  she continues to indulge her father's everything-is-in-its-right-place-and-I'm-on-top-of-the-world behavior by sacrificing her awareness of her own feelings.

Enter the rebel youth tearing across the strand in a storm cloud of adolescence. He stomps the sand, wears a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled down tight over his head, and peers out at the world that has shit on enough of what it had promised him in childhood. The beach goers gawk and pity and shake their heads. He looks at Elizabeth and, for a moment, ignites all the rage and fearful uncertainty with the world that her father has tried so hard to hide. Dr. Halstrom stews in a black rage, ignoring the boy and claiming that is only trying to get attention. All I could think of was how brutally he must have neglected his own daughter's cries of distress, which he still does, but she has lost so much of herself by this point that he doesn't need to do much to keep her eye away from herself. From earlier in the story: "'It sounds a little sad.' She felt sad. The poor child!" "Not at all, [said Dr. Halstrom]. It was a generous, noble, and beautiful thing to have done." Just stop it old man. No sympathy.

Elizabeth feels a surge within herself from seeing that boy, even if she does not see it, for just that moment: a way out. But how terrible it feels. How unpleasant, a feeling no doubt doubled by her father's enraged reaction. She might have turned to him, that hardness now in her eye, and said, "I see you!  I see all these fucking books and your 'nice' fucking day! You make me walk on eggshells, you mock me, you keep me on a thread. Knock it off!" Of course, this doesn't happen. Instead, she asks him for help with a favorite memory of hers: "Oh Daddy...do you know I can't even remember what kind of bread it was? Isn't that awful?" "'Silvercup,' said Dr. Halstrom decisively." I wish that kid came up to him and kicked sand on his books.

This story reminded me of the 2005 film, "The Squid and the Whale," where Jeff Daniels plays an insufferable novelist and professor whose narcissistic detachment infects his son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) to such an extent that Walt performs Pink Floyd's "Hey You" at a school talent show and claims it as an original work. He justifies this claim (and, sadly, seems to believe himself) by saying that he "could have" wrote it. "I know," his father says.