More to Say by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, those times I can get on another writer’s wavelength, I can point to a sentence, or an individual word, and identify the writer’s turning point, say exactly where they decided not to tell the story⁠—to make it one story, versus another. This isn’t a unique skill. Writing an alternate story doesn’t make it better or worse than the one unwritten. But sometimes the writer doesn’t realize that they’re hiding in plain sight, or that they’ve failed to smooth things over enough that they’re entirely convincing; they might be dressed well, but the hem is showing. I feel Freud’s spirit hovering as I say that. It’s also possible that, until it’s pointed out, the writer doesn’t “see” what’s there.

Neither is true of two other writers I want to mention briefly, though both have decided to reveal what’s at stake, or what most matters, early in their stories⁠—not to hide it at all, but to draw attention to it. It’s amazing that when this happens, the reader registers it but keeps on reading⁠—only to find that what was always there returns in an unexpected way, familiar yet different, because of the story that’s developed between its revelation and the story’s end. Russell Banks, in “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” creates a first-person narrator who states an important fact early in the story, though by the time that information reappears, he also reveals that the confession has been a ruse. In Frank Conroy’s “Midair,” an essential traumatic scene is enacted, but the character himself forgets, repressing it. Then, at story’s end, provoked by what were related yet random occurrences, the memory is recovered. The cracks in the sidewalk that were first seen by the young son whose father endangered him (and his sister) by crazily taking them out on a ledge high above the pavement, from which they looked down, are seen again at story’s end, but this time they mean something different (as so many things do that we see in childhood, then later as adults); the cracks now also exist the way cracks do in stories⁠—so that among the ending’s many levels of meaning, it reminds the reader that stories are artifice at the same time they intend to be simultaneously real. In Conroy’s story, tension exists between the readers’ knowledge that leads to their understanding of the character, while the character goes through his life knowing less than we do, existing at a distance from himself. It’s become such a convention for writers to invoke unreliable narrators that the reader can be surprised if the narrator is reliable⁠—but Banks’s story and Conroy’s are doing something different, and in a way, the reader becomes the third side of the triangle, implicated (as we become exiled bystanders in Carver’s story “Neighbors”) but powerless. In “Sarah Cole” and “Midair,” the characters wish to be in control, they pass for being in control; it’s easy to imagine they might answer any question⁠—they might even turn their pockets inside out to show

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