by Bret Lott
RHRC: Do you have a list of favorite stories? If so, can we get a glimpse of it, and can you tell us why these are your favorites?
BL: In fact I do. Sort of like my fantasy football team. And though I have read and appreciated hundreds of stories, these stories are my favorites simply because they are about things that happen to people the authors have made me care about. For that reason, I want to make certain no one misunderstands the summary statements I’m giving for each one as being the only reason to read them. Every one of these has manifold reasons to be read, chief among them the joy of reading. They’re in alphabetical order, too, lest anyone think I’m putting one above another!
“Kiss Away” by Charles Baxter
The quality of Baxter’s prose—its subtlety and rock-solid strength—is what I most enjoy about this story. And of course there’s also the mystery of who this boyfriend is and whether or not he can be trusted, giving us the sense of “mystery” every good story has to have.
“1/3, 1/3, 1/3” by Richard Brautigan
I teach this on the first day of every course as a means to remind students of the playfulness of story and to show the quality of description I want them to learn: it’s not just what something looks like, but also the spirit of the thing described that is at stake.
“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver
Carver is my favorite writer, period, and with this story we see all the virtues of his writing: the precision of his sentences, the quality of his details, a moving plot, and, towering above these, his compassion for his characters, from the grieving mother to the bewildered baker simply trying to make sense of his own lost life.
“Rock Springs” by Richard Ford
This story seems to be about a “bad” character, but he is, finally, a nice guy. The magic to this story is Ford’s ability to make us care about this man and to see, finally, ourselves in someone we would most likely dismiss.
“Redemption” by John Gardner
There are two grieving points of view here, but the point of view of the father, once he has reckoned with his grief, disappears, leaving Jack Hawthorne alone to wrestle with the death of his brother. This story is a tour de force, and it breaks my heart every single time I read it.
“Water Liars” by Barry Hannah
This is one of the funniest and most poignant stories I have ever read, and the turnabout here—telling the truth is the most damning thing anyone out at Farte Cove can do—makes the story one of the few that can successfully sneak up and bushwhack you. And the dialect is pitch-perfect.
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
This story illustrates the importance of detail, and the miraculous way in which details can forward a plot, develop characters, and create setting all at once.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
This begins as a kind of sitcom, only to end up one of the most brutal stories of all time, and is one of the great examples in literature of how the best stories set up expectations and then reverse them altogether.
RHRC: Finally, in a time when it seems fewer and fewer people are reading, why does literature matter?
BL: Because we are in a world that is swamped with itself, and with people whispering and shouting in our ears about what is happening this very moment everywhere in the world, whether it be what the celebrity du jour wore or didn’t wear last night, or the specter of global annihilation. Literature allows us time to think, to contemplate, to be quiet, and to breathe deeply. That’s why it matters.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The title story gives no real answer to what the difference between women and men really is. What, then, may be truly at stake for the wife in this story, now that she has decided not to listen when her “strange and loud” husband tries to explain to her that difference? What may be the significance of the armoire itself and its contents, and the fact that she can lift it now with “a miraculous ease”?
2. Throughout the collection, there are instances of what may be termed “magical suburban realism” (the armoire and its seeming weightlessness in the title story, the children residing inside an Igloo cooler in “Family,” the husband slowly becoming invisible in “A Way Through This”). What was your reaction as a reader when you encountered these strange elements of the stories? How might this alternate world, in which the unbelievable is a part of everyday life, allow the characters involved to understand more deeply their own situations?
3. In “An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse,” a man encounters every worst-case scenario one can imagine, from losing his job to having his home repossessed to his wife’s infidelity. And yet, at the story’s end, he finds himself absolutely content with his life, but only once that life has been restored intact (and in some ways improved upon). How does this speak to the tenuous nature of our lives as consumers, as parents, as husbands and wives? What do you fear most when you consider the possibility of losing the routine of your everyday life? What do you value most about that routine, and why?
4. Read the classic short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. (This is his most famous short story, and you can find it in almost any anthology of American short stories, as well as in the Vintage paperback edition of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner.) How does Bret Lott’s Miss Emily in “Rose” compare to Miss Emily as understood by the townspeople in Faulkner’s story? What is the significance of the child being buried beneath the floorboards in Bret Lott’s version?
5. In “The Train, the Lake, the Bridge,” why does the fact that there are no ghosts involved in this “ghost story” make this a story they tell one another only on those nights when they know they cannot dig out from the snow? Why is it easier for them to tell ghost stories than it is to tell the truth of what happened that night of the storm?
6. “Everything Cut Will Come Back” seems to be about the narrator’s brother trying to tend to his neighbor’s yard after the death of his neighbor’s wife. But the story turns, finally, to the brothers themselves, and their shared sense of loss at the death of their parents many years before. Why does the work Timmy performs on the yard signal the narrator that indeed the two brothers are talking about their own loss? How is it that the narrator, who feels that his words of comfort to his brother about his work on the yard are meaningless, knows exactly what Timmy means when he says, “I miss them”?
7. One of the shortest stories in the collection, “History” seems almost a fragment. But how does this momentary snapshot of an anonymous traveler illuminate the narrator’s life? Is there in this instant of recognition and memory a sense of grief, or is there a sense of fulfillment?
8. “Nostalgia” differs from nearly every other work in the collection in that it tells the story of two children, and does so from a point of view that does not place itself as an adult looking back on his life (as with the narrator in “The Train, the Lake, the Bridge”). Yet the word nostalgia itself means a sense of longing or a mixture of happiness and sadness when recalling the past. Given the brutal facts of the story—pelting the babysitter into submission with tomatoes, the horrific death of the babysitter’s brother, and the insensitivity of the children toward that tragedy—why might this indeed be an appropriate title for the story?
9. The last story in the collection, “Postscript” employs by far the greatest role of “magical suburban realism” in the book: here a lifetime passes by, the family moves to other homes, their children grow up and have their own children, all in the span of a single day, and all while the main character, a writer, tries to put words in an order that will tell a story all by themselves. What is the irony of his trying so desperately to tell a story while his life passes him by? And why is the story a fitting close to this collection?
FROM THE AUTHOR OF
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
WOMEN AND MEN
ANCIENT HIGHWAY
A NOVEL
AVAILABLE SUMMER 2008 FROM RANDOM HOUSE<
br />
TO PREVIEW ANCIENT HIGHWAY,
TURN THE PAGE….
Earl
1
He’d heard it already, the cold and steady promise way off, building and building but still way off, not yet even to the trestle over Rogers Creek. But coming.
He pulled closed the door off the kitchen quiet as he could, his hand on the knob and twisting it so as to ease the latch with no noise at all, and it seemed a kind of good luck sign to him, that no-sound to help him on his way.
He had his good clothes in the pillowcase, the white shirt and stiff denim dungarees and the yellow tie he’d taken from Frank’s things the day after he passed, and though he’d never worn the tie, only kept it like a secret fact out of Frank’s life that no one else would ever know, he was sure he’d look good in it when he went for his first screen test.
That’s what they called them, he’d seen in the magazines he’d read. A screen test, and his blood quickened at the thought of that, a test to see if you could be on the screen. A test he was certain he would pass, knew he would pass.
He had a few copies of the magazines in the pillowcase, too—two Photoplays, one Motion Picture—he’d somehow managed to keep as secret as Frank’s tie, and there were sandwiches in there, wrapped in wax paper and made not but a minute ago. He’d tiptoed his way to the kitchen in the dark, sliced off thick hanks of bread on the butcher block, then found in the icebox a couple leftover slices of ham, slathered the bread with butter from the crock inside the icebox too, then got the wax paper from the drawer beside the stove. And he had two dollars in his pocket, maybe enough for whatever other food he’d need for the three or four days he figured it would take to get to California.
He was ready.
He was going.
He heard the promise out there build, knew the train was just past the creek now, but before he ran he stepped off the porch, looked at the house like it might say good-bye itself, like it might ask for his autograph before anything ever began. But it was only a house, he saw, one he had already left with this closing of a kitchen door.
And then he looked up at the stars out here, and how sharp they were, how eager and close and true they were, and he thought of how many nights he’d sat in his bed and looked out at them all, waiting for this night when they’d accompany him on his way, and he thought too of that word itself, stars, and about Hollywood, USA, and why it was the perfect word to call those folks out there, because of how they shone against the wall in the dark of the Rose.
But here was the rumble of the train coming and coming, and he turned and ran through the yard, cut across the Robineauxs’ lot behind their house, and behind the Crosslands’, afraid someone might see him on the street though no lights were on in any of the houses, and now he was out past the Crosslands’ and angled to the right and out onto the street, no more houses on Blackbourn until his daddy’s at the dead end, less than a quarter mile away now, and he ran harder, faster, because here was the train coming up from behind him, here was the train, and he could see in his mind’s eye the train running past Pacific Street now, and now about to cross Beaulah, the sound of that train growing closer though it’d slowed down some like every time for rumbling right through the middle of town just that minute.
He could feel cool night air in his hair as he ran, and felt too the sweat coming up on him for this running, and for this charge through him of the steady and hulking and joyful promise the sound of a train passing through town truly is, and now he was almost to his daddy’s shack at the dead end of Blackbourn, the Texas & Pacific line right out his back door.
He cut into the heavy grass near to knee high between Blackbourn and the railbed, the train coming and coming, and now he saw the headlight of the train casting out into the darkness in front of him, the railbed a good thirty yards or so away, his daddy’s white shack off to his right and dark, no one in the world out here save for an engineer and a brakeman and whatever hoboes he knew would help him up and in when they saw him running alongside this train slowed for the nothing town of Hawkins, Texas, a train ready to pick up speed to take him all the way west, all the way to Hollywood, USA, and as he ran he could feel the wet through his dungarees of this grass out here, he could feel it at his shins and at his knees, proof enough he was really here and doing this, and here, here was the train itself passing him now not ten yards to his left, an awesome and huge and black and hurtling thing with its black wheels and piston rods shoving and shoving and he could see the little cab and the engineer sitting inside lit with the smallest light in the world, an old man with his eyes to the rails, looking west and west and west because maybe he knew what Hollywood and California were like and why it was important to get there even on a night like this one with its stars out and shining down hard.
Now he broke out of the grass and onto the gravel and there was the coal car passing him, and the first and second and third boxcar, all of them sealed shut, and he tried to swallow and couldn’t, because it seemed for just this moment, just this moment here, that the promise had been taken away, the door shut, his life over at age fourteen, Earl Holmes returned to a momma wouldn’t trade the crap out of a goose for him, and a daddy she’d kicked out for no good reason he knew.
That was the life he’d be returned to now, right here, and to all those sisters and brothers, and to the black hole of Frank gone these eight years, and here was yet another boxcar shut tight, and another, and still he ran, a burning down deep in his lungs now that gave his legs to know there wasn’t much more of this he could do, and still he ran, and it seemed even that the train and that engineer had maybe already given it the gun, started the speed-up that made the cold and steady promise of the sound of a train change pitch on its way out of town.
It seemed the train was moving faster now, and faster, and that his life was gone.
But then, then, here was another boxcar, and the gaping black promise of a door open wide, and he saw too a hand, and another, saw them right here, right here, and he ran harder now and harder, and the burn in his lungs and legs melted to pure joy and power and meaning, and he reached, reached and reached, and here, here was his hand in someone’s hand, and another hand on his wrist, calloused hands that pulled at him of a sudden, and he slapped the pillowcase up and into that black promise of an open boxcar door and these angels of mercy inside to help him, and his legs left the ground, him heaved up and onto rough planks and into the hard and welcome jostle and boom of this boxcar banging down the track.
“Welcome aboard, sonny,” he heard out of the dark, the angels and their calloused hands already gone, settled back against the walls in this black before him, a black beyond black, the only light here the light in from stars outside, and he nodded, said too loud, “Thank you for the hand up, gentlemen,” because he knew this was just like a flicker show, just like a flicker, and that he’d better get ready now to act in one every chance he got, whether he was standing on a street corner in downtown Hollywood or in a boxcar headed west.
He heard laughter from both his left and right, laughter thick and hollow at once. But it was laughter, and he stood up straight now, did a bow for them, and heard somebody out in the dark say, “Little Lost John, just sit the hell down ’fore you fall out the door,” and he nodded, took a step and another straight ahead of him, a hand out in front of him until he touched a rough wood wall he couldn’t see, and then he turned, eased his back down the wall until he was sitting, before him now the open boxcar door.
He could see the tree line out there, maybe a hundred yards off, and above it those stars.
Here it was: the world out there, waiting for him, this boxcar a theater, the open door a screen, these rough wood planks red velvet chairs, and the bang and scrape of boxcar to boxcar, wheels to rails, an old woman at a piano and making love to the story of stars and forest and night out there.
