Tag: Michiko Kakutani

Things Not Seen and Other Stories, by Lynna Williams – 1992 [Raul Colon]

This post, which first appeared in early 2018, has been updated to include Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times July 17, 1992 book review of Things Not Seen.  While the “initial” version of the post included the review as a scan, this revision includes the review as full text, followed by a close-up of Raoul Colon’s cover art.

I’ve also (October, 2019) updated the post to include a brief excerpt from the story “Last Shift at The Mine”.

Scroll down just a little…

Contents

Afghanistan

The Sisters of Desire

Personal Testimony

Sole Custody

A Morning in the Late Cretaceous Period

Last Shift at the Mine

Rescue the Perishing

Legacy

Things Not Seen

________________________________________

Books of The Times

A Thousand Tiny Heartbreaks

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Things Not Seen

And Other Stories
By Lynna Williams
213 pages. Little, Brown & Company.
$18.95.

The New York Times
July 17, 1992

The characters in these fine new stories by Lynna Williams are outsiders, people excluded from the safe, warm circle of familial affection.

In “The Sisters of Desire,” a young woman named Chris is recovering from a nervous breakdown.  Chris takes a job baby-sitting for an 11-year-old girl named Rachel, who proposes that they form a fan club for her stepfather, Tom.  It’s not long before Chris realizes that she has actually fallen in love with Tom, that she wants to replace his wife and take her place beside him as Rachel’s mother.  As the impossibility of this fantasy sinks in, Chris sees again “how separate she was, and would always be, from them, through history and circumstance, through all the things she felt but could not say.”

It’s a feeling shared by Ellen Whitmore, a preacher’s daughter who narrates two stories in this volume (“Personal Testimony” and “Rescue the Perishing”).  At the age of 9, Ellen learned that she was adopted, and this knowledge warps her subsequent relationship with her father.  On one hand, she wants to hurt and embarrass him by ghostwriting phony testimonies for the other children at Bible camp; on the other, she tries to earn back his love by trying to introduce an ill-tempered neighbor, who had supposedly been a Nazi, to Christ.

Looking at her father, she thinks, “I was sure that what I wanted most in the world was for him to love me back, not in the ‘Ellen is my daughter and I have to prove it’ way that was familiar to us both by then, but in the old way, when he looked for me in any room he went into.”

Ms. Williams’s other characters also ostensibly belong to families, but they, too, suffer from feelings of exclusion and alienation.  In the title story, a woman named Jenny begins to recover memories of being abused as a child, and these memories, accelerated by therapy, begin to contaminate her marriage.  She grows nervous, paranoid and defensive.  Her husband, David, soon catches her sense of peril; he begins to distance himself from her and question his own impulses toward their daughter.  He tells Jenny he wants “this to be over”; he wants “things to be the way they were.”  “What if I’m O.K.,” she responds, “and things still aren’t the same?  What if they never are?”  In relating such stories, Ms. Williams demonstrates an uncanny ability to write scenes that effectively dramatize her characters’ emotional dilemmas without ever seeming stagey or didactic.  Emily, the heroine of “A Morning in the Late Cretaceous Period,” realizes, while wandering through a dinosaur exhibit at the local museum, that memories of her former husband have come between her and her new husband, Tom.  “She stops speaking to him halfway through the Triassic period,” Ms. Williams writes, “feigning desperate interest in the museum dioramas of earth 225 million years before.”  Moments later, “they enter the Cretaceous period,” she writes.  “All around them, the known world is splitting into separate continents, and Emily pushes ahead, until she’s standing alone somewhere on the edge of North America.”  She feels stranded and alone, and when she gives Tom a quick, desperate shove she feels “she has moved her marriage toward extinction with an act she can’t explain and can’t take back.”

Anna, the heroine of “Sole Custody,” who lost her child, Katie, to cancer several years ago, experiences a similar epiphanic moment, when she peers in a window of the house belonging to her ex-husband, Jay.  Everything she sees inside – pictures of Katie, along with furniture, knickknacks and toys that attest to Jay’s new life with his new wife and new baby – makes her realize how much she has lost, how much she remains in thrall to the past.

Cancer, unemployment and divorce – these sad, ordinary facts of life, rather than the melodramatic sort mentioned on the evening news (“drunk drivers, or snipers at the mall, or boulders pushed at cars from freeway overpasses”) – are the ones that haunt Ms. Williams’s characters.  In many cases, the mere fear or premonition of such “things not seen” is enough to drive these people to the brink of emotional despair.  By dwelling on bad memories or intimations of some unnamed future disaster, they court misunderstanding and bad luck.

In “Afghanistan,” a man named Hopkins tries to decipher a note left by his wife: “Have gone to Afghanistan.  Tess at Scotts’ overnight.  Food in fridge.”  The second half of the note is clear and accurate: his daughter, Tess, is indeed at a neighbor’s house for the evening, and there is a casserole with stuffed pasta shells in the refrigerator.  The first sentence is more perplexing: since his wife is a linguist, Hopkins tells himself, Afghanistan must be a kind of code for something else.  After reading a newspaper story with a headline that says, “Afghan Left Feels Betrayed by Russians,” he decides that “Afghanistan” must symbolize “betrayal” to his wife, although he’s unsure whether she means her betrayal of him, or his betrayal of her.

In each of these stories, Ms. Williams writes with quiet assurance, delineating her characters’ psyches with the same authority she brings to her descriptions of their day-to-day routines.  The writing is limpid, almost translucent, allowing the reader almost complete access to these people’s inner lives.  One is left with both an appreciation of the resilience of love and an understanding of its frightening limitations: its failure in the face of illness, grief and existential fear.

____________________

– Lynna Williams –

____________________

We’ve known for months we couldn’t stay unless Mark could find permanent work. 
We’d talk about it sometimes late at night,
but then it would be another day and we’d be doing anything we could to stay. 
I could write a book about that – about all the things we never thought could happen to us. 
Like going on welfare this winter, when Mark couldn’t find any work at all for six weeks. 
On my going to work at the Traveler’s Motel three days a week, cleaning rooms. 
Two and a half years ago, when Mark got laid off again,
we would have fought about my working at any job, much less as a maid. 
But not anymore. 
I know he’d do it instead if he could. 
When I come home on those days, he and Molly make me sit at the table
while they bring me dinner like it’s a hotel. 
“Madame, perhaps desires the macaroni?” Mark will say,
and Molly, who’s started to swallow the beginnings of words,
will punch me on the arm with her little fist and say, “Caroni, Dame?” 
I am never sorry about anything when they’re carrying on like that. 
And as long as Mark is talking, I know we’re all right. 
So we’ve been doing whatever we’ve had to – until two weeks ago. 
That was when Mr. Peterson told me there’s not enough business at the motel
and they don’t need me anymore. 
We’ve been using that money, and whatever we can earn doing odd jobs, to eat,
and drawing out what little savings we have left to pay the utilities. 
My parents made the June house payment. 
We let them because it looked like there might be a buyer if we could just hang on. 
There are some older people up here looking for retirement homes. 
But nothing’s happened, and we can’t wait anymore.  (“Last Shift at The Mine”, pp. 145-146)

The Year Of The Zinc Penny, by Rick DeMarinis – 1989 [Anne Bascove]

This post, which first appeared in mid-2018, has been updated to include Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times October 1989 book review of The Year of the Zinc Penny.  The “initial” version of the post included the review as a scan, but this revision includes the review in full text, followed by a close-up of Anne Bascove’s cover art, which is as evocative as it is stylistically distinctive.

Scroll down, and enjoy…

She understood me, though. 
Not my words but my acquiescence. 
I relaxed back into the pillow and stared at the white ceiling. 
She began to sing again as she dipped the washcloth into the pan of warm water. 
“When the lights go on again, all over the world,”
she sang, her voice plaintive and sad. 
Her melancholy tone made me think
that she had a boyfriend or husband overseas.
I imagined him an airman, a fighter pilot stationed in London. 
He flew P-51 Mustangs and had shot down twelve Messerschmitt Me-109s
before getting shot down himself. 
He was lying, helpless, in a hospital on the outskirts of London. 
He couldn’t remember his name of where he came from,
and no one had told him just yet that his legs had been amputated. 
He could remember his girlfriend or wife,
but only her pretty face and mournful singing voice,
not her name. 
“Jenny,” he’d cry out in his delirium. 
Then he’d sink back into his confused gloom. 
“No, not Jenny,” he’d mumble. 
(105)

I had discovered something about myself. 
I knew that I was now capable of mustering any necessary lie at will. 
I could say “Dad” and not mean it
and I could accept being called “son” by someone who did not mean it. 
It was like discovering an unsuspected talent. 
William and Betty didn’t have this talent,
and I was dimly aware that it was a deficiency that would cost them dearly. 
I was also dimly aware that if this talent could be used without shame,
its power would be awesome.

And dangerous. 
As dangerous as the one who used it as leukemia. 
Because necessary lies trick the liar himself. 
He wants to believe them. 
Then he does.

“Stay clear of it,” Aunt Ginger had said.
Her words repeated themselves in my mind, gathering meaning. 
(130-131)

____________________

Books of The Times

World War II Los Angeles, as a Boy Sees It

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Year of the Zinc Penny
By Rick DeMarinis
174 pages. W.W. Norton & Company.
$17.95.

The New York Times
October 3, 1989

The year is 1943, when the war effort required that pennies be manufactured of zinc instead of precious copper; and Trygve Napoli, the narrator of Rick DeMarinis’s new novel, is 10 years old.  His story of that year is, at once, a portrait of a vanished era, and an old-fashioned coming-of-age tale, showing one boy’s initiation into the solemnities of the adult world.  If the novel’s material sometimes feels derivative – there are echoes throughout the narrative of the movies “Radio Days,” “Hope and Glory” and “Empire of the Sun” – Mr. DeMarinis’s voice remains distinctively his own, by turns comic and melancholy, lyrical and street smart.

Writing in brisk, observant prose, Mr. DeMarinis quickly immerses us in the staccato rhythms of life in wartime Los Angeles: rowdy sailors on leave, showing off their war wounds and tattoos; war widows working in aircraft factories, riveting wings and tails; children searching the skies above the city with their tin binoculars, on the lookout for enemy planes.  A huge camouflage net spans one boulevard, covering the Douglas aircraft plant, and Tryg and his friends notice that it has been painted – surreally – to look like an ordinary farmland scene with houses, barns, and herds of dairy cows.  The Japanese will never fall for it, says his friend William, noting that a Midwestern farm scene looks incongruously out of place in downtown Los Angeles.  “The nut who designed it must have been from Iowa.”

When Tryg isn’t at the movies watching Ronald Colman, Claudette Colbert and Franchot Tone, he’s home listening to the radio, tuning in the Lone Ranger or whatever foreign station he can locate on his shortwave machine.  With the help of his uncle, he builds a huge antenna on the top of his parents’ apartment building – an antenna that enables him to listen to the likes of Tokyo Rose, as he sits in the living room playing Parcheesi or concocting secret codes.

Tryg’s favorite pastime, however, is fantasizing about the war.  Sometimes, he is an anonymous figure like Kilroy – someone who is everywhere and nowhere, partly hidden, in disguise.  Other times, he is a brave fighter pilot named Charlie Jones or Bill Tucker, Jerry Granger or Buddy Thompson – someone without an awkward foreign name.  He shoots down enemy pilots, dive-bombs strategic targets, and after his plane crashes, dies a heroic death in the arms of a beautiful girl.

“I loved the pose,” Tryg recalls.  “I loved being someone everyone could like.  To encourage this view of myself, I had to make it real.  To make it real required a strong and unwavering imaginative act.  I had to elaborate the details of my coming death in combat.  This was important.  I had to work at it.  I couldn’t afford to be slack on the details.”

Though these fantasies earn Tryg a reputation as an oddball – “Monk, the Nut,” who’s constantly spacing out and mumbling to himself – they also provide a necessary respite from the boring rigors of school and the tensions of his squabbling family.

Tryg’s mother, who left his father for a smirking would-be actor named Mitchell, is a disturbingly cold woman, possessed of “a Norwegian fatalism.”  When he was an infant, she abandoned him for four years, leaving him with her autocratic father; and now that she has retrieved him, she seems quite indifferent to his happiness or welfare.  Mitchell, on his part, is a vain, selfish man, obsessed with parlaying his job as a Hollywood milkman into a movie career.  He is completely cynical about the war – it doesn’t much matter, he says, which side ends up winning.

Filling out the Napoli household are Ginger, Tryg’s neurotic aunt, who acts like a California version of Blanche DuBois, and her violent husband, Gerald, who’s constantly getting into drunken brawls.  Their son, William, a sullen, chain-smoking teen-ager, becomes Tryg’s mentor and surrogate brother.  And William’s girlfriend, Betty, becomes a symbol to Tryg of the mysteries of sex that await him in adolescence.

Although these characters are all drawn in broad, colorful strokes, they never become generic cartoons, so deft is Mr. DeMarinis in portraying Tryg’s mixed feelings toward them of love and resentment, sympathy and irritation.  In the course of the year, we watch him exchange needy loneliness for a more melancholy detachment, and we see him attempt to use the clear-sighted logic of childhood to solve the mysteries of love and death.  By the end of the book, he is old beyond his years – initiated, by the war and assorted family tragedies, into the sadnesses of grown-up life.

“I had discovered something about myself,” Tryg says, recalling an exchange with his stepfather, who has just been drafted.  “I knew that I was now capable of mustering any necessary lie at will.  I could say ‘Dad’ and not mean it and I could accept being called ‘son’ by someone who did not mean it.  It was like discovering an unsuspected talent.”

Without ever resorting to easy nostalgia or cheap sentimentality, Mr. DeMarinis gives us both a picture of the eternal realities of childhood – the humiliations of playground gamesmanship, the cruelties of puppy love – and a tactile portrait of life in the wartime 40s.  In that sense, “The Year of the Zinc Penny” is like one of Proust’s madeleines: for those old enough to remember, it captures a receding past; for those too young to recall, it conjures up a vanished era.

____________________

– Rick DeMarinis –

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