Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« "It takes a village—University... | Me And Everyone I Know At The ... »

Thursday, March 2, 2006

“The Bone Game” Game

Posted by on March 2 at 12:50 PM

Speaking of my column, that Charles D’Ambrosio short story can be found online here.

Seattlest did a post about D’Ambrosio earlier this week, and when I checked on it again today I was thrilled to see it had 13 comments. (All these people! Reading fiction! And posting their thoughts about it online!) Then I read the comments. (Scroll down.) Turns out they’re all surrounding the thoughts of one guy who’s posted to say he prefers reading his iBook and RSS Reader to reading a physical magazine. (To which I say: what a jackass.)

So… howzabout you smart slog readers read D’Ambrosio’s story and actually post your thoughts about it here in the comments field of this post. Loved it/hated it is fine, more in-depth critique is great, being daring is encouraged, disagreeing with me is most certainly welcome. Show off your writing chops. I’m always in the market for new book reviewers.


CommentsRSS icon

As the author of that post (and a participant in that thread), I must tell you I wept for poor Mr. D'Ambrosio that his achievements in fiction were overshadowed by someone making stupid criticisms of the New Yorker.

Charles D'Ambrosio, I salute your achievement and look forward to reading your book.

Now, Christopher. I believe the jackass is a fan of the Stranger.

And James would like that book reviewing gig you mention. Virginia Woolf used to review books, James. Cautionary tale.

So . . . regarding the story . . . are we really caught up that much in the echoes of past glory out here in the West? What a sobering thought.

Well, I went and read the story. It was okay. It sounded like many other stories I've read in many glossy and/or literary magazines over the last ten years or so. It was extraordinarily well wrought, I'll give you that, and I had a little bit of an authentic emotional response about the middle of the last paragraph.

Here's the problem I ultimately have with this story and others like it. It's written with a higher-level symbolic and stylistic lexicon that's been in use in American literature for some time--grandparents, alcohol, road trip, search for meaning, vague sex, nature experience, the West, etc. But in the context of this story, for me, those symbols are flat. Not because I think they're actually burned-out in a global way, but because they're not grounded anywhere in this specific story. They evoke nothing for me except a recollection of other contexts in which I've read them. So I'm left with the impression that I've read something very elegant and subtle, but something that managed to get at me only superficially.

Okay, that's my insta-take, now someone smarter than I am please go ahead and trash me.

I think, in part, D'Ambrosio is trying to take the metaphor of moving out West--the great new fronteir--and turn it on its head. Hence the man who moved from Brooklyn. All of the allusions to great people and things from the past--Kype's grandfather, Nella's ancestors, the reservation itself. Now they people are gone, either dead or transformed into sickly salmon, and the reservation is a resting ground for old, beat-up cars. And Kype still has these ideals stuck in his head. He's going to find the perfect spot to release the ashes. He describes everything in completely picturesque languge, and it's the human, often base desires of D'Angelo and Nella that bring him down from his cloud. (Kype's tendency to idealize is part of the reason for the high language.)

I was just talking about this story to someone in the office who doesn't usually go for stories set in nature that involve fish, etc. -- fair enough -- and mentioned D'Ambrosio's story a while back called "Screenwriter," the one set in a mental hospital, with a ballerina who gets set on fire...

Anyway, this person I was talking to hadn't read it, and said she wanted to, and I said I'd look and see if it's online, and lo and behold it is online. Here's a link:

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?031208fi_fiction

What do you say of that one, Pliny? Has nothing to do with the West.

I like that one much better, thanks. Oddly, I buy these two totally whacked out characters more than I do the relatively ordinary characters in The Bone Game. If Charles D'Ambrosio were my writing slave I would still demand that he take out a few of the descriptive passages and refocus on that bath. Seriously, in a universe just one step away from this one, that bath could blow your mind. Without most of the dialogue. I felt mine start to blow a little bit, but then I got it under control.

Chris:

I did not know you'd shared the experience of walking into a cloud of human outside B-W. I also found D'Ambrosio's piece wonderful (as I do expect). I posted about this to my blog and was quite taken aback when I recieved a note of thanks from Mr. D'Ambrosio himself.

I realize these slogs are ephemeral and so won't try to address each response in depth and hog up way too much space but:

JAMES: some people don't care for the NY'er and then some people feel the extra need for a strict policy against it. Myself, I'd never read an issue until I had a story in it. I had no real reason to dislike the mag but I was born and raised in Seattle and New York just seemed very far away. Still, in the world of short stories, Cheever is probably my favorite writer, and almost every word he ever wrote was published in the NY'er.

JESSICA: I think we are caught up in the great grand bogus past of the West. We're presently conducting a cowboy war under the guidance of a guy whose sense of martial glory probably owes everything to the myths and mores of Texas and the movies. But that's not even the half of it.

PLINY: you're doing a lot of posing in your post (and trading in dreary cliches to level your complaints) but I'll just skip over that and get right to your point, which is an interesting one. In fact, just yesterday I was wondering the same thing, whether or not my attempt to use exhausted symbols --boozy road trip, the West, cowboys, Indians, salmon, rivers, disposing of the ashes, the Book of Revelation, Ecclesiastes, etc etc-- and join them to characters who figure in the story as types was a big mistake. I went for epic sweep but the cost might have been a failure to evoke a resonant world for the characters and, consequently, the readers. I may have blown it. It bugs me. You make a million choices in writing a story and I maybe made a bad one that locked me into a narrative that would inevitably render the round world flat.

On the other hand, maybe the story is trying to do something you're not getting. I do think those symbols are burned out in a global way, and yet we still live by them, and repeat ourselves endlessly --the dead or dying salmon runs in the Northwest aren't much or any different than the massacre of buffalo over a century ago. I see Kype as a man who has inherited everything, and yet the legacy has left him impoverished. Our national rhetoric won't find completion in his soul, I guess. But I don't want to go on, trying to justify my story --fiction isn't a place of argument for me. And I do think your instinct about the story is keen; and while I think another reading is possible, we share misgivings about the work.

JESSICA (post #2): I think you're right, though I hadn't thought about the story in exactly those terms --but Kype is stuck with an idealized language, a dreamy world of bygone myth and privilege, while D'Angelo and Nell bring him down --D'Angelo by embodying the darker side of the myth (violence, say) and Nell because as an Indian she's been left holding the bag.

PLINY (post #2): again, I find myself in sympathy with your comment, so far as I understand it --though not sure about all the stuff after 'writing slave' because the sentences themselves are somewhat confused and confusing. And you're still posing a little bit. You don't need to protect yourself quite so much --you're opinions are interesting.

MIKE: hello again!

Christopher, thanks for getting the ball rolling. And thanks all for reading and taking the time to post.

oops --Pliny, I mean your opinions are interesting. Or you're interesting. But my fingers screwed up.

Hey, it's Charlie D'Ambrosio! Thanks for joining the party! I agree re: Pliny, although "I felt mine start to blow a little bit" is kinda great. If confused.

Well, I don't know how many people are still reading this thread, but I wanted to add that I don't think symbols ever get globally burned out. I do think that the symbols we're discussing here can no longer draw much power from the, I don't know what you call it, ambient culture. Instead I think they have to be redifined in the context of a specific story. That's all.

Symbols don't burn out --you mean like Christ on the Cross, for instance? I don't know. Maybe they don't and instead by some law of thermodynamics they symbols simply transmute so that we can discover them, resurrected, somewhere down the road. You might be right; I'll have to think on it --it's a big old can of worms though, and I think this thread has probably served its purpose. I appreciate the discussion, though.

ah, so lovely! Charlie, ever write for the Stranger? Bet they'd love to have you.

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).