#18 A Vermont Tale (1977) Mark Helprin
I’m having an increasingly hard time enjoying this style of
writing. The stories I’ve been reading
by Helprin all come from his collection Ellis Island, which won or was
nominated for all sorts of literary awards.
I’m not saying they're not good enough to win awards, I’m saying that I,
myself have no idea what makes these stories good enough to win awards. I fully open the door for people to criticize
my opinion on this.
Besides the first story Schreuderspitze, I find the writing
mechanical and detached. It’s like a
professor showing you step by step how to write a good short story. Here is Element A, followed by Element B…now
if you add a little Element C you will have a good story. It looks like he’s trying to write emotion. The plot certainly hints that emotion is there, but I just don’t feel it
myself. Clearly this is not the common
response to Helprin, so I’ll admit that I’m probably wrong about them. However, I will not pretend to like them so…
This story, as do the others, drowns on the weight of too
much simile. Simile is everywhere and I
find myself often taking issue with them.
They’re either untrue, unfair, unwarranted or straight-up forced, clunky
descriptions that go on for days. Take
this gem:
“We sensed as well that warmth in the train and its bright
lights were not natural but, rather, like the balancing of a sword at the tip
of a magician’s finger—an achieved state, from which an overconfident
calculation, a graceless move, an accident of steel might hurl us into the
numbing water of one of the many rivers over which the conductor had passed so
often that he gave it no thought.”
Whoa there! First is
it really a revelation that light and heat on a train is unnatural, so much
that “sensing” it is worthy of mention? Second this lofty thought comes from a
child who on the same page naively thinks snowshoes are shoes made out of snow.
Which brings up my next issue. While trying to describe the thoughts of an
untraveled child, Helprin clumsily baffles between stark naiveté and improbable
self-awareness. And as someone growing
up in the Hudson Valley, I find it hard to believe that a child growing up in
Putnam would be so startled by the winter in Vermont that he had never before
heard of snowshoes or seen ice formations on windows. Up until this story, I found Helprin’s writing to be very
clean at least. Here I thought it was sloppy, and clumsy.
One final annoyance (and this one is just
personal) came at the beginning where he describes the columns of light shining
through the huge windows of Grand Central as “sad light.” Normally I would say things like descriptions
of light are subjective, but really, unless the character seeing them was
connecting it to a sad memory (which he wasn’t) that famous image, replicated
in many photos and works of art, is anything but sad. Ominous maybe, cold
(given the topic of this story would have been understandable). But sad? Sorry…nope!
Oh, the story: Two
children are shipped to their grandparent’s house while their parents work out
a divorce. The Grandfather tells them a
Vermont Tale about two arctic loons that separate and then later find each
other. It’s a story about the grandparents and one meant to make the children
feel optimistic about their parent's separation.
Done, sorry for the negativity. I’ve been trying to be both
fair and positive with my reading, but I did not like this one much. Perhaps I will put down this collection
before I finish.
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