Harper's: "Once an Empire" by Rivka Galchen

I remember the excerpt from Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances that was in The New Yorker awhile ago. It was quirky and interesting, and so that’s what I was expecting from this new story in Harper’s (which you can only read the first paragraph online unless you're a subscriber). I guess that’s what I got. But it’s a tough story to crack. What’s it all about? I struggled to come up with any kind of an interpretation (some of my readers, one in particular, may say that there’s no need to interpret—why can’t it just be what it is?) until I remembered the advice that I give students: sometimes the key is in the title. And surely that’s the case here.

So the story is this: the narrator once lived in a studio apartment in Brooklyn. She came home one evening after seeing a movie and noticed that not only were her windows dark—she always left the lights on—but her possessions were escaping, climbing down the fire escape and running away. Devastated, she moved into a dormitory but kept looking for her possessions, especially her favorite fork? (Fork? I figure Galchen picked that utensil so she could use the line “Oh, fork.”) Eventually she does recover the fork and a quilt, a little worse for the wear.
This narrator is, to say the least, odd. The reader senses that in her voice (“I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.) but also in her relationship with her mother, her lack of relationships with anyone else, and her obsession with the sign that flashes the time and temperature.

Great, but what’s it all mean? The title of the story comes from a paragraph that occurs just after she’s watched her things flee: “Britain, once an empire, now a small island off Europe—that was my thought.” Huh? Okay, so as keys go, this may not be entirely helpful, but it seems to me with this line the story becomes a two-way allegory. The narrator, like Britain, has lost all her possessions. Like Britain, she’s now a shadow of her former self. But her possessions also represent her connection to her past, specifically her mother. The fork is one that her mother bought her on a visit to the Colorado Rockies, and when they are gone her tenuous connection to her past is severed. In the end, she does manage to get the fork back—but in a damaged, diminished state. She’s flailing to connect to her past, but she can’t: “I stepped back out into the salubrious cold. My mom. I knew where she lived. Or used to live. When had we last spoken? Had we argued?” And she thinks she could go stay with her mother for a while. Or not.

Clang. That’s how the story ends, with the kind of resonance that a reader can think about for a long time.

This is my kind of story. I like it a lot.

February: “Once an Empire” by Rivka Galchen

Harper's: "My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain" by T. Coraghessan Boyle

In my discussion of the Boyle story in this week’s New Yorker I commented that it was interesting that the author’s name is T. Coraghessan Boyle in The New Yorker, but T.C. Boyle elsewhere. In the printed Harper’s the short form is used. BUT I just noticed that online they use the long form. I’m sure there’s an explanation, but I can’t tell you what it is.

This story, in my opinion, is the much stronger of the two stories, but in reality they’re the same story. They’re set in closed communities—this one a mountain resort. The narrator this time is a man who behaves badly (he peeps on the widow next door) and gets divorced for his sins. He becomes, at least briefly, something of an outcast in the community, and when he’s beginning to feel better about himself he . . . well, I won’t spoil it for anyone. But I will say that there’s a fistfight at the end, which is exactly how the New Yorker story ends. Is Boyle coming out with a collection of fistfight stories?

I like this story in large measure because of the voice of the narrator, a man who is constantly justifying his actions, even when what he does is inexcusable. The descriptions of what he does are vivid and specific, including this passage about an accident that injured the widow next door:

“The oil melted the skin across half her back down to the panty line and wrapped a big annealed scar around her left shoulder and upper arm and burned what looks like two teardrops into the flesh under her left eye, which the plastic surgeon says he can remove and smooth over just like new once she saves up for the next round of operations, because, of course, Frank, who never even bothered to carry a compass with him out into the doom-haunted woods, didn’t have adequate health coverage from his insurer. Or life insurance, for that matter.”

But besides the voice, I also like the structure. The narrator is pushed toward a decision, which he makes, and which changes his life. Not all stories do that, but it’s classic and it works.

So. I finally found a T.C. Boyle story that I like.

January: “My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain” by T.C. Boyle