I've been so entrenched in the avant garde these past 20 years that my knowledge of contemporary mainstream fiction is rather pathetic. When one of the students in my grad fiction workshop suggested we read Jhumpa Lahiri's “Hell-Heaven,” published in the May 24, 2004 New Yorker, I jumped at the chance. Even though there's always a couple of New Yorkers lying on my bathroom floor, I had never read a New Yorker short story. “Hell-Heaven” is not the tight little bon bon of a typical short story. Rather, a troupe of characters is plotted and subplotted across a quarter of a century—hearts are broken, people fall in love then marry then divorce, a new generation emerges, Bengali immigrants cope with deracination, a mother and daughter move into communication, a suicide is averted, and more—all of this is packed into eight three-columned pages. Lahiri's mini-saga of cultural assimilation centers around family life and love triangles, but she doesn't foreground the daily humiliations and degradations of outsiderness. It's clear the arranged marriage of narrator's parents is empty, but we're not shown the specific nuances of that emptiness. The alienated husband and wife eventually learn to love one another, but they do so without warning, in the second to the last column of the story. As an aside, in the middle of reporting a pivotal phone conversation, the narrator informs us,”[I]n an odd way, as my parents approached their old age, she and my father had grown fond of each other, out of habit if nothing else. I believe my absence from the house, once I left for college, had something to do with this, because over the years, when I visited, I noticed a warmth between my parents that had not been there before, a quiet teasing, a solidarity, a concern when one of them fell ill.” That's it. We are given no other details of her parents' newfound compatibility. My parents also grew closer as they got older. My parents were nothing like these people, but I'm tempted to project their relationship onto Lahiri's characters. The very generality of Lahiri's characters makes them easy to relate to. Her middle class Bengalis really aren't that different from her liberal New Yorker audience—except for a sprinkling of colorful foreign words and foods. The narrator's mother's life is so desolate at one point that she nearly commits suicide, but the New Yorker audience in no way is made to feel implicated in her suffering.
Could the speed and narrative shorthand of “Hell-Heaven” be related to the franticness about time I see everywhere around me? When I ran into my friend Glen Helfand the other day he greeted me with a barrage of apologies. “Sorry I haven't called you,” he said, sounding truly desperate, “but I just don't have any time.” I said, “That's okay, I don't have any time either.” And it's so true. It took me a month to write this essay—to do so I skipped yoga for two weeks, lived on take-out, and on my non-writing days critiqued student work until 11:30 at night. I recently impulse-bought a New Age magazine, and half the articles were about time—how to learn to live “in abundance” around time, how to create a more healthy “relationship” with time. I wonder if Lahiri's rapid fire summarizing style isn't the perfect literature for a text messaging generation. I think about this because Tariq Alvi and Niki Kerr, two artists visiting from London, have been trying to explain the appeal of texting to me. They're amazed it's only a kid thing here in the States. In England, everybody does it. Niki pulls out her Nokia and shows me a message from a friend. In the same accent as Bubbles on Absolutely Fabulous, she says this quick little thing will come and it makes her feel good. She jerks up erect in her chair, alert and happy, like she's just been hit by a text message. I say, “But, if it's on a phone, why not just call people?” Tariq and Niki screw up their faces in disdain. Phoning takes too long. Niki puts an imaginary phone to her head and a woebegone look on her face, “Helllooooooooooo, hoooooooowwwwwwwwwww arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre youuuuuuuuuuuuu dooooooooooooooinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg.” She gives me this look of exhaustion, sticks out a limp tongue. “See what I mean?” “You should try text message sex, Dodie,” Tariq adds. He says my name often, with equal accent on both syllables. Doe-Dee. “I've been having text sex for a year, it's really fun, messaging each other constantly.” I open my clamshell Motorola and look its tiny screen, imagine WAN2 FK U L8R QT appearing in squarish digital letters. My fantasy stops dead, I'd never get off on this. I feel old, like Colette's aging courtesan Lea de Lonval, trying to cope with the strange ways of a new century.
The students in my fiction workshop had mixed feelings about Jhumpa Lahiri. Some were profoundly moved by Lahiri, others dismissed her—but all of them hated Alice Munro. We read the first four stories in Munro's latest collection, Runaway. Students and teachers in MFA programs are constantly naming Munro as the greatest living writer. She's known as a writer's writer, not having received the recognition she deserves—though she seems pretty famous to me. I was curious what the fuss was about. In my class I wanted to jump headfirst into middlebrow sanctioned work, and if I was lucky, we'd do a little deconstructing. Reading Munro, I joked, we were entering the heart of whiteness. Munro's style reminds me of “Hell-Heaven.” Munro presents lots of human drama, but in fast forward—romances and tragedies skitter by like pebbles skipping across the surface of a lake. Like Lahiri, she relies heavily on summary to condense a novel's worth of material into a single story. So, according to my students, what did Lahiri have that Munro lacked? Some of them “cared about” Lahiri's characters, but none of them “cared about” Munro's. There's a goat in one Munro story, and many said the goat was the only character they cared about. I had expected everybody to love Munro—but her formal strangeness and kinky subversions of conventional narrative failed to impress my students. They made it clear that they could forgive many of Munro's “misfires” if only she made them care. Craft and plot and dialogue and richness of detail matter, but above all else they value caring. Good old fashioned caring. These students don't need to collage in the emotion, they're all about emotion—in this unexamined, naive way, perhaps, but it's kind of sweet. “That goat in front of the headlights was really great.” Sophistication, I've often thought, is over-rated. Emotions are messy, they bring the reader's body into play. Readers feel angry, excited, frightened, whatever, and heart rates quicken, breathing stops and sputters, glands start squirting hormones, sugar is released into the bloodstream, armpits sweat, pupils dilate, genitals stir, digestion shuts down, mouths go dry, butterflies flutter in stomachs, teeth press into lower lips, faces clench. Deep down Rob Fitterman's collaging poets must feel some of these same urges. Too embarrassed to own emotion, they try on other people's emotions, like little girls dressing up in their mother's clothes—in giant high heels, fur stole, pearls. I used to drape my mother's puffy netted white slip over my head as a wedding veil.
I don't want to idealize my students' need to care because for many of them, caring implies a linear narrative in which, to mirror the words of Joan Retallack, all difficulty has been erased. A number of students' response to David Wojnarowicz's “In the Shadow of the American Dream,” a sprawling chronicle of marginalization, alienation, rage: “I couldn't relate to it because it didn't have a story.” Unlike the breezy summaries of Jhumpa Lahiri, Wojnarowicz's moments are thick. Reading him can be like trudging through angst-ridden mud. He forces us to slow down, way down, until perception fractures. Bodies become intensely eroticized “pieces of anatomy,” the belly of a spider becomes “the magnified abstraction of a shiny black abdomen like a motorcycle gas tank or a mirrored black globe.” Animate and inanimate, inside and outside blur. “There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision,” writes Wojnarowicz. Fantasy shapes our world. Our challenge as writers is to reframe the state-sanctioned fantasy, to work towards a new fantasy where it's not okay to oppress queers, minorities, the ever-widening category of Other. Wojnarowicz's writing is all about discomfort. He isn't trying to make people care, he's trying to scare the shit out of them.
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