I Want to Live! by Thom Jones: Mrs. Wilson is a grandmother with cancer. The narrator stays right in her thoughts, and we follow her sharp-witted battle against despair. She roils with the agonies and indignities of the sick body, then develops something resembling a religious conversion upon dipping into Schopenhauer. Family appears in a succession of walk-on roles, and a childhood memory of a rambunctious rooster arises from the swamp of memory to serve as her final vision of the life force doing its thing in the teeth of death's increasingly immanent inevitability.
All this might sound like a dreadful slog, but the struggle between Mrs. Wilson's failing body and unfailing mind provides a literary liveliness. It reminds me of a discussion an old friend and I had about the contrast between reggae's upbeat music and often acerbic lyrics; my first awareness that the manner and the matter of a work of art could contrast in a way that makes engagement with that matter aesthetically invigorating.
In the Gloaming by Alice Elliot Dark: A handsome young man named Laird is dying of an unspecified ailment (apparently the TV movie adaptation names the culprit: AIDS) and living in his parents' comfy house, lovingly tended by his lonely mom and entirely avoided by his workaholic, emotionally sealed father. The story is told from the perspective of Janet, the mother, as she comes to realize that Laird is the true love of her life. The two develop a warm, cheerful, communicative closeness that blossoms in the evening, in the gloaming.
As his condition declines, these conversational sessions fade, to Janet's despair. Memories of Laird seem to become piquant post-mortem memorials even while he's still alive. After the young man's death, an emotional fault line cracks open; devastating.
Dark tells the story plainly, with thoughtful, humorous but unshowy dialogue, and maintains a tone like a pellucid evening.
From Plays in One Act:
Heatstroke by James Purdy:
In a tropical setting, a woman named Lily turns to eccentric Doctor Douglas for help with her chronic pain. His advice is startlingly impertinent, but she stays with him, because they have a common bond; they are both murderers, on the lam for their crimes of passion in the States. His prescription offers at least short-term respite for both of them.
If you think the trouble with Tennessee Williams is that he didn't go bonkers enough, James Purdy is here to help. Intense passions and barmy dialogue coruscate like lightning across the stage. Pain and shame alchemically transmuted into camp gold.
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Part II by Jonathan Reynolds. Australia, 1938: Lord and Lady Murdoch hope to win a spot for one of their sons at Eton or Harrow. Miss Fairchilderdern will evaluate the boys for admission, but it doesn't look good; she hates Australians. Two of the three sons shine at poetic recitation and interpretation, but little Rupert is a complete wash. Then, in a sudden, mystical overflow of theatrical magic, little Rupert's true talents emerge; talent for vicious, filthy, contemptuous bile with a lot of razzle-dazzle and populist appeal.
Since we can't put Rupert Murdoch in the stocks and pelt him with feces until he looks like a cheap, wailing candy bar, we'll have to mount productions of this play, instead, as the next best way to express the salvageable populace's loathing for him and his ilk.
From Interzone:
On the Deck of the Flying Bomb by David Redd: An enormous flying military vessel heads toward its target, for the vehicle is a bomb, and will explode upon arrival. The captain is merely a figurehead, with no authority whatsoever. Strict discipline and incompetence coexist, as no one aboard questions the nature of the assignment--after all, the ship is loaded with lifeboats--and no one has any true responsibility. But inside one of the lifeboats, a stowaway hides. His purpose is obscure, but he isn't a saboteur or enemy agent; he just wants to understand what's happening, and plans to escape in the lifeboat at an opportune time.
In the curt, unstressed finale, our protagonist discovers that the lifeboats don't work, were never intended to work, and everyone on both sides will die in the ashes of this suicide mission. The parallels to nuclear armament are never less than clear.
From Calling the Wind:
Top of the Game by John McCluskey, Jr.: Clarence "Thunderin'" Hurd, a professional basketball player, is about to break the late Alvin Tolbert's record as all-time American Basketball Federation scorer, but Hurd has the jitters and in game after game, he can't... quite... make... those crucial final shots. But this isn't his story; we only meet him in passing. It's the story of Roberta and Alvin Jr., the wife and son of the Alvin Tolbert, as they get escorted to game after game, and interviewed for various sports shows and segments. They hope that this pageant will end soon so they can go back to their regular lives. They're running out of patience with these proceedings, but the league implores them to keep showing up and doing interviews, so...
Their memories of the husband and father who set the record are centered less on sports than on who he was in their lives. One overfamiliar version of this story would rip the lid off of what a scumbag the beloved athlete was, and play with the contrast between the man in public and the man at home, but McCluskey isn't writing prestige-cable melodrama. The family's high estimation of Tolbert has little to do with his accomplishment in the court, and much to do with his excellence as a family man.
The tensions in the story aren't about anyone being a villain; everyone is friendly and good-hearted, but mother and son don't relish the obligation to go to game after game, interspersed with the interview circuit. They want to get back to their ordinary lives. Excellent quarantine reading.
Going to Meet Aaron by Richard Perry: A disillusioned young man decides that peaceful protest isn't enough after living through the Mississippi Burning murders, and decides that terrorism is called for; strike back, make the white supremacist establishment afraid. He heads to a meeting with his co-conspirator, and remembers fragmentary events that have helped lead him here.
Our protagonist lives in an uneasy balance. He's devoted to the cause of civil rights; but he's also motivated by regret over an interracial romance he bungled. He knows his plan (blow up a bank) won't accomplish anything for the cause; it's an immoral moral act, but having committed to it, he won't back out. On his way to the deed, he buys a frozen treat from an older black man, who lays out a challenge to the very idea that meaningful change is possible. Tangled convictions collide with the futility of human endeavor.
From Outlaw Bible of American Fiction:
The Way It Has to Be by Breece D'J Pancake: A scruffy young couple is in conflict, because the guy wants to go murder another guy, because revenge. She would prefer he didn't. One of the many problems with revenge is that people who want it are insufferable and inconsiderate. Everybody suffers because this guy can't let things lie. Dusty small town roadside America is the setting, and Pancake captures it like a polaroid. Will our heroine break away from this useless man or will he shoot her for even considering it? Westerns and noir all distill down to a few taut, rich pages..
American Skin by Don De Grazia: Three disgruntled military recruits discuss the possibility of going permanently AWOL. Two of them are skinheads, and one is a libertarian college boy who dropped out and enlisted as a whimsical prank, and now wants to split just as soon as he browbeats the other guys into being Objectivists. They resist, correctly, and one of them notices a picture in a student newspaper from the college boy's former Alma Mater. It's a picture of a pretty girl, and suddenly our observant hero knows exactly why he's going AWOL; to find that girl.
This story captures the dissolute, improvisational combativeness of young male bull sessions; with freeze-dried talking points hastily thawed out, and ad-libbed retorts that may or may not force one's adversary to rethink their assumptions. But some people respond more to beauty than ideas.
The Ceremony by Weldon Kees: Some workers are digging a foundation when they discover that they're digging in a First Nation burial ground, so they stop, appalled at the thought o violating these ancient graves. The supervisor yells at them until they do exactly what they didn't want to, and they make a joke of it; a self-aware, ironical joke which reveals just how easily they sacrifice their qualms, and their respect for their predecessors, to the contrived urgencies of capitalism. It's a valid point, but this satirical setup/punchline won't entice me back for a second reading.
Terminal Lounge by John Sayles: We spend a little time in the bar at a train station, listening to the regulars describing their lives of quiet desperation. A womanizer breaks it off with one of his squeezes on the grounds that he's getting married. A struggling salesman ruminates on the injustice of trying to make a living and a legacy when one is judged, not by one's life, but by one's most recent profits. Demotic barroom philosophizing that never seems bored or listless; powerful urgencies fuel the discourse.
