July 16, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
“Cardboard Graceland” evidences many of the problems found in trendy short fiction. It’s replete with pop culture references and has an aimless plot that owes as much to its form as it does to its unclear direction and lack of narrative drive. Even the story’s first line isn’t all that appealing or interesting. Yes, it creates a problem for the character, but the conflict is buried, lost under the wave of description. Furthermore, Fogarty doesn’t use the basement in any meaningful way. He could let it serve double-duty to make the setting an extension of the character, to represent something about the narrator, but the prose is so flat and lifeless that any metaphorical parallels can’t be drawn by the reader. Just look at the following lines, where he writes: “I found a can of gold paint on sale and took it to a couple of the walls. Tacked up some of my old records and my velvet Elvis. Made it feel like home.” Moreover, the use of fragments here serves no discernible purpose. Why that over a comma? Maybe that last sentence could stand as is to emphasize the narrator’s “home,” but tacking up records does not require careful scrutiny on the part of the reader. It is a careless and unnecessary choice that seems thoughtless at best.
The narrator then tells us his proudest accomplishment: He found a bunch of cardboard boxes outside a mall and turned them into Graceland. This reeks of the typical quirk wedged into bad fiction. The reason why it doesn’t work is because it doesn’t have any baring on the narrative or the theme (whatever that may be). When you look at examples of absurd quests, in the Pynchon sense of the phrase, the author typically uses the absurdity in a way that demonstrate the futility of the the protagonist’s, and by extension our, goals. Here, instead, it serves only as useless exposition, which the author can’t seem to give enough of. This seems to be a constant throughout the story too.
It isn’t until paragraph nine that we actually get a sense of plot, something besides the expositional onslaught. In paragraph ten, we get a real scene, but this seems rushed rather than the dramatic crux of everything we’ve read so far:
So this afternoon I trimmed my burns and pulled on the jumpsuit and I went to the Boardwalk. It’d been raining. The air was hot and humid and I was sweating and the wet shorted one of my amps, cut out the sound halfway through my entrance music. I tried to do my big karate kick, but the seams on my suit split under the arms and I had to stop. There weren’t many people out except for some teenagers, surf kids probably, and they stopped whatever they were doing to watch and laugh. I’ve got a wireless mic that lets me roam a bit and work the crowd and since they were my only crowd I tried to banter. Asked where they were from. They laughed and one of them called me a fat old loser and another one called me the worst Elvis he’d ever seen. Tall blonde kid with a backwards baseball cap said I was a faggot with bitch tits.
Forgarty shows his narrator failing, which I will say we would expect at this point considering what we’ve heard prior, but there’s no real weight to it because we’ve never seen the narrator try before. We’re told that his “Hound Dog” is better than Elvis’s, but we aren’t shown it. Wouldn’t it have been better to start with his “success,” even a glimpse of it, so when the fall comes, we can be a bit more empathetic?
By the story’s end, the narrator “dies” just like Elvis, but there’s no sense of closure or finality to it. It feels as though the story just stops, and the writer is unsure why. Furthermore, what feeling should the reader walk away with? Is this a genius who the world doesn’t appreciate or a washed-up never-was? The narrator certainly doesn’t give us any indication of what he is. And I don’t think that enhances the story either. Sure, we could debate what the narrator was or was not, but without some direction from the narrative, we’re left to wonder if the problem is with the world or with the narrator.
One last thing, “Cardboard Graceland” has a structure that is unusual—to be polite about it. It’s a series of descriptions that leads to a climax and resolution, but the rest of its building blocks are largely absent. What events led to the narrator’s final performance? We know he’s a fat Elvis now, but we don’t know what makes him decide to give it one last go. We need some kind of inciting incident to chart his course. In short, there’s a lack of causality that makes the story as a whole seem frustrating rather than enlightening. So really, why should a reader spend his or her time on this story when there are so many more out there?
July 14, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Nick Gregorio’s “Goings-Ons and Happenstance” really shouldn’t be as good as it is. A story like this, with an opening like that, could have quickly veered into Lifetime territory. That’s not to say that the first line isn’t a good hook—it introduces the conflict, gives the protagonist a problem, and pulls in the reader, so it is—but how many terrible stories open with such a situation? But fortunately, Gregorio’s care and grace as a writer shines through his prose and avoids any sense of trite sentimentality. It’s obvious in the way he melds memories of the incident into memories of the nameless protagonist’s life, slyly introducing exposition without dumping on the reader. He writes:
[S]he couldn’t remember if she’d ever noticed how pock-marked those flat cheeks of his were. Craggy and white, it reminded her of when she was a teenager, of what her own bare ass must have looked like pressed against the passenger window as she and her friends drove past movie theater marquees
The use of juxtaposition here, to contrast what she thought she knew with what she does know, creates an aura of uncertainty, a feeling of conflict even when doing something as simple as giving backstory to the reader. It’s the hallmark of genuine talent. Most writers fail to recognize that exposition is boring. It should parceled out and delivered naturally, typically with something else that pushes the narrative forward.
Even Gregorio’s use of summary is thoughtful. Instead of simply telling us that the protagonist is in a bad place or that she feels lost, he shows us with a meaningful string of snapshots:
She said, “Never thought of it that way,” sitting at the dinner table, staring at the food she hadn’t touched, at the phone that was spinning on its own axis as it vibrated from the calls she wasn’t picking up. The sound it made on the table reminded her of the garage door opening, of his coming home from work. But the front door never opened. And she sat there until she went and curled herself up on the couch.
In the morning, Friday, she counted Jim’s missed calls. She waited until lunch to listen to his voicemails. They were composed at first, almost professional.
Gregorio’s style here is also important to note. Rarely is there a wasted word. There are some occasions were the language could be a better little, like when he writes “Before then she’d never seen what his ass looked like in that set of circumstances,” which probably could have been shortened to just “in that circumstance,” but overall, his minimalism, both in language and in scene, is one of his strengths as a writer. He uses understatement effectively as well, with lines like, “she’d watched for a minute. Not because she was turned on, that would’ve been ridiculous.” The writer clearly has a sense of humor. Even his use of fragments is careful and considerate. A lot of writers litter the page with fragments because they think it creates a certain “flow,” but often times, it makes the writing monotonous and stale. They aren’t giving enough attention to why, but Gregorio uses his fragments judiciously, punctuating certain lines to highlight something important. (Besides, if a writer uses the same effect over and over, that effect will eventually lose its significance through overuse alone.) When he writes, “Then she remembered having his hand down her pants in that lot. Years ago,” the fragment emphasizes that lost past, drawing a line between the then and the now. We as readers understand the protagonist’s trajectory in the scene before it even happens. We recognize, through style, that this won’t be a friendly meaning. She’s not going to embrace Jim with open arms, and all of that is communicated with the smart use of a period.
Typically, a story like this, one that opens with the affair in progress, sets up a journey, and in the Lifetime movie-of-the-week, the scorned wife would go on a journey of discovery and get her groove back. But Gregorio does well to avoid that. He subverts our expectations and establishes a greater sense of realism. After she shits on Jim, our protagonist tries to create a new, unmarried identity. She chooses a variety of names for her online dating profiles, Meredith, Laurel, and Ellie. Each name comes attached with its own personality, something for our protagonist to try on. It is her first attempt at becoming a person without Jim, an sense of selfdom that is not defined by marriage. She’s taking steps towards an identity of her own. Notice that this is a conscious choice of the author. Since his protagonist doesn’t have a name throughout the story, he makes that choice more meaningful by introducing this opportunity to her. Furthermore, the symbolism here is subtle and powerful, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t paying close attention. It’s implicit, visibly invisible. We feel it: We don’t see it.
The story’s midpoint is particularly engaging, Meredith’s date with David. This is the protagonist’s highest high since the inciting incident, and it’s one that comes across in a natural and realistic manner. She flirts with him and quickly takes him home. She engages in hot, aggressive sex that makes David slightly uncomfortable. But it’s also a form of punishment, one that the protagonist thinks she needs. Gregorio uses the protagonist’s desire for pain as penance for “cheating.” Even though she wants to escape that identity she shares with Jim, she is bound to it more than she knows. This, of course, sets the stage for the story’s lowest low.
Because of her guilt, she gets back together with Jim, thinking that the two of them are now even. Things seem to be on the rebound with the two them however, and maybe there’s a chance at a happy ending after all. The story, at this point, has completely divorced itself from the cliché. We don’t expect the protagonist to go back to her husband. He’s a piece of shit. But she does, because she thinks she must. And it’s all set up in the prior scene. Even though it’s not what we want for her, her choice makes sense based on the events with David. It’s the only logical choice, which leads to the third-act twist, showdown, and resolution.
When David finally arrives at the house, he’s confronted by Jim. The protagonist doesn’t even have the courage to go to the door. She can only observe as David pleads to speak with her. And due to her use of a pseudonym, one that just happened to be on the couple’s list of baby names, this creates some confusion for David and Jim.
David said, “There is no Meredith. Is there?”
Her husband answered his question, said, “Not that I know of. I suppose there won’t ever be, now.”
The use of dialogue here is brilliant, symbolic as it is realistic. It’s just a simple conversation, one that clears up a misunderstanding, but it also serves another, actually two more, purposes. One, it highlights that our protagonist will never find that new identity, never know who she is without Jim, and two, that this couple will never have a baby. That’s pretty good for two lines.
The story ends with the protagonist’s sexual epiphany:
They fumbled with each other’s clothes. She thought it felt like the first time she’d ever been undressed by another person. Awkward and strange. And alien. So they took off their own clothes, folded them, placed them into piles next to the bed on their respective sides.
She laid on her back while he propped himself up over her. He did his routine. Her mouth, her neck, her nipples. Then his face was between her legs.
And it stayed there.
She felt nothing.
She said, “This isn’t working.”
He stood up. She saw that nothing was happening for him either. He said, “Want me to use my fingers?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Naked, staring at the ceiling, they laid next to each other until he answered a phone call from work, said he had to write an email.
She got up, dressed herself, and went to the kitchen to clean up the mess they left from dinner.
In this final scene, Jim is completely oblivious, and the protagonist recognizes that she is doomed. They’re not the people they thought they were—aliens, as Gregorio puts it. But we’re left with a feeling that the protagonist is trapped now. She like Eveline, had an opportunity for escape, but since she is so fettered to tradition, that escape will never come. She knows and we know what is right for her, that she needs to be that independent person she was trying to be, but being that independent person is harder than it seems. It’s not about logic: It’s a matter of feeling. And that’s a Joycean touch that more writers should aspire to.