The weather here is static: cold, cold, cold.  I haven’t seen the sun in days, although there’s actually blue in the sky this morning.  It’s been a perpetual white ceiling of clouds, smog, sagging precipitation.  The white fog puts a drag on the day, gives an inevitable feel to wakefulness and sleepfulness; days, evenings, and nights tick away in an unconsequential fashion, but definitively (if blandly) nonetheless. The opening story of Tin House #30, Stuart Dybek’s “The Start of Something,” is both playful and sombre in its mood to capture this ticking and churning of time.  It’s a beautiful little piece trying to hone out the beginnings and ends of things; it might be a short short, only about 3 full pages. Also in this issue is an essay by Anthony Doerr titled “We are Mapmakers,” Time and space are no obstacle: around the earth with the stories of Alice Munro. I’m looking forward to it; I love Munro, and time and space are indeed two of the first concepts (second and third to humanity) that I think of when I think of Munro. Most of the issue looks really good, but I spotted on item that made me say, eh, really? Steve Almond has a piece in this issue called “Condifreaks Speak: A Hate Mail Colloquy.” Now, I love Steve Almond’s work, and he seems like a pretty cool guy. But this piece is him replying to hate mail he received after publicly resigning from Boston College when Condoleeza Rice was invited to be the commencement speaker. I just thought I’d never have to hear about the Boston College thing again. I mean, really. It was a public gesture that made a bit of a splash, but hasn’t the water stilled? Anyway, it looks like a good issuse of Tin House.

First, let me say I loved The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides). I did.  The characters, the setting, the innovations in the narration, all impressed and moved me.  I could go on and on about the narrative techniques–the collective retrospective point of view, the compiling of exhibits and interviews, the foregrounding of the inevitability of the plot–but, praise is less interesting than highlighting the negative; just kidding (but it probably is true)…

Maybe I’ve been reading too much theory, but I’d argue that Eugenides moves from having the narrator simply explore ontological questions in light of the Lisbon tragedy to having the narrator actually make an ontological determination about the nature of the being of the sisters, the nature of the being of suicide.  This change in authority, this brandishing of absolutism, comes at the beginning of the last paragraph. The last one:

But this is all chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.  The girls took into their hands decisions better left to God.

What a stupid thing to say. It’s hard to explain how pissed off I was after reading those three sentences. Obviously I was invested greatly up until that point.

It’s possible this is the determination these men must make (the collective pov) to heal themselves, to get over their adolescence, but despite the position of the narrator(s) (procurers of all things Lisbon, interviewers, observers, etc.), the narrator hasn’t earned the right to make that claim–it doesn’t fit the book, and the book doesn’t ask for an answer, demand it. Sure, questions of being can be directly raised throughout the story, but the blanket determination doesn’t fit and isn’t necessary for the closure of the narrative. I was in love with this story until that last paragraph, when I was booted out of the narrative.

In this instance, the collective narrator oversteps its abilities with this claim; also, it is a selfish claim in itself, formulated to help the obsessed, injured, and seeking feel better. Perhaps these grown men, the mysterious “us” and “we,” do come to this conclusion. Well, it’s lame. Traditionally, it’s human nature to crave a narrative with moral authority, to desire that events ultimately be assessed for moral meaning. And here, the moral meaning emerges as demeaning to that which is assessed. I don’t think this assessment can be so simple, so blindly certain.