Also in this Issue
- Welcome to Fantasy Island: Population 280 million. On the heels of Harry Potter, young adult books are sweeping the mainland. Why would grownups rather read about sorcery than sex? (Cover Story)
- Road To Baghdad Polemicist Christopher Hitchens follows George Orwell into a political minefield (Books)
- Girl, Interrupted Raving rednecks hijack novel, commit crimes against credibility (Books)
- Postcards From Nirvana (Books)
- Tough Times in Toon Town Reading this comic by Kim Deitch is like stepping into someone else's life--and lordy, is it a strange one. (Books)
- Read, Dammit! Everybody believes that teens should be reading. The kids have other ideas. (Books)
- More articles from this issue...
More Books Articles
- Wrecking Ball Blues Old Minneapolis, from the slave market to the pisshouse (Nov 6, 2002)
- Walking Wounded In 'July, July,' Tim O'Brien bares the scars of the Vietnam generation (Oct 30, 2002)
- A Tribe of One Zadie Smith's Jamaican-British-Chinese-Jewish novel (Oct 16, 2002)
- Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Oct 16, 2002)
- Bilbo at the Bat Michael Chabon throws a curve with a youth baseball fantasy (Sep 25, 2002)
- The Road to Everywhere Aaron Cometbus's 20-year journey into the heart of underground America (Sep 4, 2002)
- Laugh the Beloved Country An African comedy of cattle prophecies and cell-phone chieftains (Aug 14, 2002)
- Paranoid and Proud What do gassy dogs have to do with the secret service? (Aug 7, 2002)
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Everything In Moderation
Tell Me
Counterpoint
A minimalist narrative deserves an equally economical review.
The story begins. A girl is taking a test about the architecture of 13th-century cathedrals. She has finished Essay Question I, but not Essay Question II. First, she hears ringing in her ears. Then the bell rings. She turns in her test. She rides her bike home. She makes tea. The story ends.
By the time we're finished reading these facts in Mary Robison's story, "I Am Twenty-One," we've gathered that: A) The girl pays great attention to detail; B) Her grades are slipping because of it; C) The internal ringing she hears is probably the result of too many diet pills; and D) We still know barely more about her than if we'd never met her.
Whether it's stoicism or boredom that makes the reader act this way is hard to determine. Characters in Tell Me, which collects almost three decades' worth of Robison's short stories, are more inclined to turn on the television, sip their coffee, and watch the minutes pass them by than they are to express their deepest emotions or elicit yours. Refusing to pontificate loftily about their lives, they sit on the porch, dropping subtle hints about their feelings into small-town phrases like "Sure, sure," "No, kiddo," or "Can it."
Like her protagonists, Robison is never wasteful with her words. She encourages her readers to go slowly, paying attention to what may seem like the most anticlimactic moments of our lives. (It's no coincidence that the protagonist of her last novel, Why Did I Ever, is addled by attention deficit disorder.) But perhaps because of the author's extreme moderation, Tell Me never matches the mute power of Raymond Carver's masterful symphonies of the mundane. Creative writing instructors would call this an exercise in restraint. Readers will recognize it as conservatism.
About Melissa Maerz
From the Archive
- Punch-Drunk Love Taking a beating from Black Dice--and loving it (Music - Nov 13, 2002)
- Día de los Muertos Propped against the wall at an awkward angle, an animal-hide satchel holds a tiny plastic skeleton (City Beat - Nov 6, 2002)
- One Foot in the Grave A melancholic Beck waxes fatalistic on 'Sea Change' (Music - Oct 16, 2002)
- I'm Still Standing S.U.S.P.E.C.T.S.: R.I.P. (Fear of Music - Oct 9, 2002)
- Iron and Wine: The Creek Drank the Cradle (CD Review - Oct 2, 2002)
- Cold Cuts Eating dog, serving man: Signal to Trust's northern mythology (Music - Sep 11, 2002)
- The Agony and the Ecstasy Filmmaker Benno Nelson parlays his trippy 'method' into a retrospective (Film - Sep 4, 2002)
- Zen Circus Lard swimming and bear-wrasslin' with the Microphones' Phil Elvrum (Music - Aug 28, 2002)
- More articles from the Melissa Maerz Archive...
