by Dan Chaon
Yet I wondered. I used to think of him, in his friend Sully’s car, listening to his buddies laughing, making dumb jokes, running red lights. It might have been sometime around then, I thought. Time seemed to slow down. He would sense a long, billowing delay in the spaces between words; the laughing faces of the girls in a passing car would seem to pull by forever, their expressions frozen.
Or I thought about his driving home. I could see the heavy, foglike darkness of those country roads, the shadows of weeds springing up when the headlights touched them, I could imagine the halt and sputter of the old pickup as the gas ran out, that moment when you can feel the power lift up out of the machine like a spirit. It’s vivid enough in my mind that it’s almost as if I were with him as the pickup rolled lifelessly on—slowing, then stopping at last on the shoulder where it would be found the next day, the emergency lights still blinking dimly. He and I stepped out into the thick night air, seeing the shape of the elevator in the distance, above the tall sunflowers and pigweed. And though we knew we were outdoors, it felt like we were inside something. The sky seemed to close down on us like the lid of a box.
No one in my family ever used the word suicide. When we referred to Del’s death, if we referred to it, we spoke of “the accident.” To the best of our knowledge, that’s what it was.
There was a time, right before I left for college, when I woke from a dream to the low wail of a passing train. I could see it when I sat up in bed; through the branches of trees outside my window I could see the boxcars shuffling through flashes of heat lightning, trailing past the elevator and into the distance, rattling, rattling.
And there was another time, my senior year in college, when I saw a kid who looked like Del coming out of a bar, a boy melting into the crowded, carnival atmosphere of this particular strip of saloons and dance clubs where all the students went on a Saturday night. I followed this person a few blocks before I lost sight of him. All those cheerful, drunken faces seemed to loom as I passed by them, blurring together like an expressionist painting. I leaned against a wall, breathing.
And there was that night when we came to Pyramid with my infant son, the night my father and I stayed up talking. I sat there in the dark, long after he’d gone to bed, finishing another beer. I remember looking up to see my mother moving through the kitchen; at first only clearly seeing the billowy whiteness of her nightgown hovering in the dark, a shape floating slowly through the kitchen toward me. I had a moment of fear before I realized it was her. She did not know I was there. She walked slowly, delicately, thinking herself alone in this room at night. I would have had to touch her to let her know that I was there, and that would probably have startled her badly. So I didn’t move. I watched as she lit a cigarette and sat down at the kitchen table, her head turned toward the window, where the snow was still falling. She watched it drift down. I heard her breathe smoke, exhaling in a long, thoughtful sigh. She was remembering something, I thought.
It was at these moments that everything seemed clear to me. I felt that I could take all the loose ends of my life and fit them together perfectly, as easily as a writer could write a spooky story, where all the details add up and you know the end even before the last sentence. This would make a good ending, you think at such moments. You’ll go on living, of course. But at the same time you recognize, in that brief flash of clarity and closure, you realize that everything is summed up. It’s not really worth becoming what there is left for you to become.
Fitting Ends
DAN CHAON
A Reader’s Guide
Q: Fitting Ends was first published in 1996 by a small press, and is now being reissued by Ballantine in a revised edition. Was it strange to return to these stories, and to re-edit the book after all this time?
A: It was strange, but not in a bad way. I suppose like everybody, I’ve always fantasized about being able to go back in time and alter things a little, and so there was an almost illicit thrill to it. It felt a little like cheating, since, of course, most times you get only one chance—once a book is published, usually that’s it.
It was also odd to go over these stories once again. Many of them I hadn’t read for years, and in some cases it was almost like they’d been written by a different person. The stories in Fitting Ends were written when I was in my twenties (the earliest one, “Accidents,” was written when I was a senior in college). Looking back at myself from a very different point in my writing career was instructive, sometimes awkward, but mostly fun. I felt a little like the narrator watching the videotape in the story “My Sister’s Honeymoon.” It was like being a ghost hanging over my younger self.
Ultimately, I found that I didn’t really change many things. There were some embarrassing lines and a few personal tics that I noticed more now, which I took out, and a few additions and streamlining here and there, but mostly I left them alone, even when, in some cases, I might have made different choices in plot and so on, now that I am older. Flannery O’Connor rewrote one of her earliest stories, “The Geranium,” toward the end of her life, and a radically changed version became one of her last stories, “Revelation.” Maybe I’ll eventually do that with some of these.
But in the case of this particular reissue, the biggest changes had to do with reorganization. Working with my Ballantine editor, Dan Smetanka, I rearranged the order of the stories in the collection. We took out two pieces from the first edition, and added two—“Thirteen Windows” and “Presentiment,” both of which were written in-between the time that I finished Fitting Ends and before I started working on my next collection, Among the Missing. I wrote the two stories a bit too late for them to make the final cut of the first edition of Fitting Ends, but I’ve always felt that they belonged in that collection.
Q: How do you decide that a group of short stories “belong together,” that they represent a “book”? How do you go about putting a collection together?
A: I hope that this doesn’t sound too “un-literary,” but I’ve always thought that a collection of short stories should have the cohesion of a great record album (I mean, um, CD. I’m showing my age). Do you know what I mean? Some albums are just collections of singles, while others seem like the songs really belong together, in a particular order, so that they move through themes and motifs and moods in a way that creates a coherent, resonant soundscape for the listener. I feel like that’s what I want a collection of stories to do. Even if the characters aren’t all connected, I want the experience of reading the book of short stories to have a sense of wholeness that is not unlike the experience of reading a novel. For me, it’s not just a bunch of different stories tossed together.
Of course, I know that a lot of readers will approach a short-story collection like a box of chocolates. They’ll sample here and there—and maybe even take a bite out of one and then put it back. But for me, ideally, a book of stories is read from beginning to end just like a novel, and I spend a lot of time trying to make the stories work together and bounce off one another in interesting ways.
Q: What made you decide to become a writer? What were some of your influences?
A: I guess my becoming a writer was an accident. I grew up in a very tiny rural community in western Nebraska, and my background wasn’t literary at all. Instead, it was, I guess, what you would call working class—my father was a construction worker and my mom was a housewife, neither one had graduated high school. Growing up, I didn’t know any adults who read books for pleasure.
On the other hand, I was not discouraged from becoming an avid reader myself, though I think it was considered a little strange. Actually, I think that I was a fairly strange child—I was a sleepwalker, I talked to myself, I spent a lot of time involved in elaborate imaginary games that were more than occasionally mortifying to my parents (such as the time when I pretended for several days to be blind). In short, if my parents had been more well-to-do, I would have spent a lot of my childhood in therapy.
I wonder what a therapist would have done with me
, because the truth is that I spent my childhood with a fairly tenuous sense of reality. My earliest memory is of being about two years old, in a department store with my mother during the Christmas season, and climbing into the center of a circular rack of shirts. I believed that I was lost—it seemed to me that there wasn’t just one layer of shirts around me, but a whole forest of them that went on endlessly, and I didn’t know how to get out. I don’t remember hearing anyone calling for me—only that when I was finally found, my mother was very angry, and the store itself was empty and closed. The strange thing about this memory is that I remember being discovered by my mother and a man who was dressed in a bright red jacket with gold buttons, wearing a tall black hat, like a Nut-cracker soldier. I know that there couldn’t have been such a man, though I remember him vividly. My mother claimed that this event didn’t happen at all—I never got lost in a store, she said. It occurs to me now that there simply weren’t department stores like the one in my memory anywhere near the rural area where I grew up. Ultimately, I have no idea whether this very specific remembrance has any basis whatsoever.
I was extremely lucky, though, in that as I was in the process of turning from a strange child into an even stranger adolescent, I encountered a really wonderful teacher, my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Christy. We were given creative-writing assignments in his class, and we could read any book we wanted for extra credit. I began to write a lot, and then another important thing happened. In the middle of the school year, Mr. Christy gave an assignment for us to write letters to our favorite author. Mine was Ray Bradbury, and once I’d written the letter I went a little further than the other kids and actually found his address in a directory and sent it off to him, along with some stories I had written, which were pretty slavish imitations of Bradbury’s own work. The amazing thing was that Bradbury actually wrote back to me, praising the stories and offering a critique. Bradbury was full of kindness and hyperbole, and told me that he thought I would soon be published. I was around thirteen, and this is when I decided that I was going to be a writer. I began sending stories out to magazines, being basically too ignorant to know any better, and not quite realizing that the rejection slips I was getting were form letters. By the time I went away to college (at Northwestern University), writing was a habit that I’d gotten into, and I was encouraged by my teachers there as well—including one of my lifelong mentors, Reginald Gibbons, who published the first edition of Fitting Ends and Other Stories, at Northwestern University Press.
I recognize now that I was extremely fortunate. I had parents who, however puzzled they were by my weirdness, were tolerant, and loving; I stumbled upon encouraging teachers at just the right time in my youth and college years; and, finally, I happened upon a particularly generous spirit in Ray Bradbury, whose kindness put me on a track I might not have had the confidence to pursue otherwise.
Q: Fitting Ends was your first book, and you followed it, a few years later, with another book of short stories, Among the Missing. What particularly attracts you to the short story as a form?
A: Well, for one thing, I grew up thinking about storytelling in ways that are more suited to short stories than to other forms. The things that caught my attention were the anecdotes, bits of gossip, jokes, the times when someone would come in and say, “The weirdest thing just happened to me!”
I guess one of the things that interests me the most is the small pieces of the world; the small pieces of our lives that are significant yet mysterious and unexplainable. I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the Big Picture, the idea that you can summarize and encapsulate someone’s life, the idea that we’re all living a larger narrative. I don’t even really believe that we are basically the same person our whole lives. It seems to me that there are moments throughout our lives when the Big Picture collapses. We come to these little crossroads all the time, and we make one choice or another, and each crossroads changes us a little bit, so that we are always in the process of becoming a different person. I’m most interested in those little crossroads, the decisions we don’t even necessarily mean to make, that we haven’t planned for, but that still nudge us gently yet permanently through the membrane of one self and into the next one. Those small choices can end up being huge, and that’s the stuff that I like to write about the most.
Q: The story “Fitting Ends” appeared in Best American Short Stories, 1996 , and in the appendix to that volume you wrote a short description of how the story came to be written:
Writing stories, for me, is something like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I write hundreds of pages of fragments every year and put them in folders together, hoping they will mate. But in general, it’s a long process, and this story was no exception. I had a folder, three inches thick, full of jottings on the quarreling brothers Del and Stewart, which I thought might be a novel. In another folder I had descriptions of “Pyramid,” a dream version of the village I grew up in. . . . In yet another, I had a junked-up ghost story, a mock of the True Ghost Stories I loved as a child. During my first year of teaching composition, a student wrote an essay about the Outward Bound program, which moved me, and which helped me to understand the character of Del in a way I hadn’t before.
Is this your usual method of writing?
A: For better or worse, this tends to be my main way of working. I begin with fragments: anecdotes that friends or family tell me, a bit of gossip, or something in the local news, something seen from a passing car, an image. Often the beginnings of a story will come to me like a dream. I will picture some image, or my mind will give me a glimpse of some scene. These will take hold of me, and I will begin to figure out where the image or scene is leading me. Who are the characters? What is happening to them in their lives? A small window opens for me, and I am able to imagine a scene, or a memory of the character’s past.
Eventually I’ll try to fit those pieces and fragments together in various configurations, trying to find the “real story” that exists in the littler parts. For me, putting a story together is sort of like stitching together a quilt of different elements, trying different pieces to see how they work, revising and rethinking and revising again. Sometimes an idea that seems like a whole story will eventually get reduced to a few paragraphs once a story is finished. For example, in Fitting Ends, a small subplot has to do with the relationship of the narrator to his deaf mother. Once upon a time, I thought that was a completely separate story, and I wrote almost an entire story just on that subject before it got folded into “Fitting Ends.” Sometimes, looking back at the stories, I feel like I am a very wasteful writer—dozens of pages of a first draft often end up getting reduced to a paragraph, and my closet is stuffed with grocery bags full of these fragmented beginnings of stories that I’ve never been able to use. I’m working toward a point where every single word that comes out of me will be brilliant and useful, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet.
Q: As a writer, how do you know when a story has reached its conclusion? Do you have a specific ending in mind from the beginning?
A: It’s very rare for me to know what the ending of a story is going to be when I start out writing, though sometimes I have an image in mind. For example, the story “Going Out” started with the image of the kid at the edge of the pasture’s fence, kneeling in front of the lowing cattle, and I knew that that was where the story ended—though I had no idea how to get there! A lot of the time, I’m sort of like my characters, groping blindly forward. I guess I’m looking for the place where the character has reached a certain hot zone, where their life has to inevitably change.
Most of the time, for me the ending comes when a character reaches a certain border. I remember, back in junior high, reading the old story by Frank R. Stockton called “The Lady or the Tiger?” You know that one: A king discovers that his daughter is having an affair with a young man who is not of royal blood. The young man is arrested, and his punishment is to be decided by the daughter herself. The young man stands in an arena, and the daught
er must choose between two doors—behind one is a tiger that will tear her lover to shreds; behind the other is one of the daughter’s rivals, whom the youth would then immediately marry. The princess gestures toward one of the doors, and the youth goes to open it. Frank R. Stockton says: “And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of that opened door—the lady, or the tiger?”
I still think of that ending a lot, and I feel like it has influenced my sense of closure. I tend to think of those doors, unopened, waiting for my character to turn the knob.
Q: Where does your subject matter come from? How much were you drawing from your own life experiences when you wrote this book?
A: This is always an awkward question for a fiction writer—obviously, one of the reasons to write fiction is so that you can pretend to be different people; to live through the eyes of people who are on a different path than you are.
Of course, I can’t pretend that I don’t share some personal history with many of my characters. Like many of my characters, I grew up in Nebraska. That landscape is very important to me. Like many of my characters, I moved from a rural to an urban area as a young man.
But I don’t think any of the stories have much truly autobiographical material. There are versions of people I might have become, if I had made different choices. There are versions of people I love, but they are radically altered from the real-life versions. There are definitely versions of places that I know well, like Chicago and small-town Nebraska. But none of the stories are representative of my actual life. For me, one of the fun things is taking a little kernel of the world that I know well—an image, a landscape, a personality quirk, or a telling bit of dialogue—and using it to build an entirely different world.
Q: One last question. How is your name pronounced?
A: It’s easier than it looks. It’s like “Shawn.” The name is apparently Old French/Gallic.
