The next chapter of
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is about story structure; here are the three stories at the end of the chapter.
58. “Mud,” Geoffrey Forsyth, 2008
A man suddenly finds his dead father, mother, and wife in his apartment, alive, though covered in mud as though they had dug themselves out of their graves. Story didn’t work for me. Nothing about the characters or their interactions connected for me, except one moment at the very end when the man, who knows his revived wife is in the next room, declines to go and see her because he has a big business meeting. It was a sweet and sad way to show him trying to move on past his grief, but for me, the story wasn’t really worth it for this one moment.
59. “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor, 1956
Like O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” this story presents an amusing caricature of an officious old southern lady, only to smack her (and us) with a terrible tragic death in the end. What I liked most about this story is its astute commentary on the way well-meaning white people interact with Black people—commentary that feels ahead of its time and uncomfortably accurate. The POV character Julian is embarrassed and enraged by his mother’s patronizing racism, by her pride at being descended from slave owners, her belief that Black folks were better off as slaves, and so on. But the way he sucks up to Black people is in its own way just as patronizing and offensive; he doesn’t see them as people, rather as opportunities to prove his difference from his mother and rub it in her face. It’s really a great story. Julian’s mother’s pride reminds me rather a lot of Pearl Tull, the matriarch in Anne Tyler’s
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and I had a head-slapping moment wondering why I had never before noticed what a tremendous influence Flannery O’Connor must have been on Anne Tyler. Two great writers of whom I have read some and will certainly read more.
60. “Escapes,” Joy Williams, 1990
I believe I read a Joy Williams story last year — twice, if I’m remembering right — and could not make a lick of sense out of it. But this one is lovely, a very sad story about a young girl’s relationship with her alcoholic mother.
And a bonus, if I can call it that, a fairly well-known science fiction story (really more of a novella, but I endured it, so I’m going to count it):
61. “Understand,” Ted Chiang, 1991
Ugh, ugh, ugh. RYFW holds me back from saying what I really think about this story, but I can summarize it thus: There is not a single aspect of craft in which this story works for me. It reads to me as flabby and self-indulgent, full of pointless threads that go nowhere.
61/100 read, 24/50 from the last five years.