#64 People Like That are the Only People Here- Lorrie Moore
For the first two months of this project, I’ve used Friday’s
as a showcase for O. Henry. Not wanting to get too repetitive or to use one
author for such a high percentage of my reading, I’d like to change things up a
bit. For the next few months, O. Henry
Friday’s will highlight winners and finalists of the O. Henry Awards, thus
changing up gears a but, but keeping to the spirit of the original idea.
For starters, we have the 1st prize story for the
1998 O. Henry awards, written by American Author, Lorrie Moore. Besides being
one of the best titles for a story I’ve ever seen, this story is a beast. It’s a tough topic, the worst topic
actually—a child with cancer. “Baby and chemo, she thinks: they should never
even appear in the same sentence together, let alone the same life.”
The Mother (Capitalized like you would God) is a writer and
struggles with trying to take notes about this impossible experience to write
pieces to raise money to pay for the treatment. But she’s having trouble
-“This is the Hieronymus Bosch of facts and figures and
blood and graphs. This is a nightmare of narrative slop. This cannot be
designed.”
-“I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.”
-“A Beginning, an end: there seems to be neither. The whole
thing is like a cloud that just lands, and everywhere inside it is full of
rain.”
The whole note-taking adds a Meta-level that increases the
tension of the story. It’s emotional, frantic, ironic, humorous—in the way that
jokes can relieve unbearable tension when things are awful, the kind of jokes
that make you chuckle dryly but never actually laugh. The writing is real and
not at all indulgent or derivative as such stories can often develop.
Notable Passage: “What makes humans human is precisely that
they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things
they do.”
No comments:
Post a Comment