Postmodern Carnival

Page 21 January–February 2008 Carmody continued from previous page somewhere between childhood and eternity, between one death and another. “There was no such thing as before and after. There was no such thing as a whole new life.” And there is no such thing as the obvious opening and the predictable conclusion in Wycoff’s stories. For while she uses the conventions of realist fiction as formal narrative container, she fills them with such emotional complexity and nuanced perspective that the artificiality of the form increases the materiality of the material. Like steel becomes steel in a minimalist sculpture, Wycoff’s stories are narrative realism becoming narrative realism. But unlike the minimalists, Wycoff writes characters (things) in their maximum relations, as much as in their diffuse elements, with the kind of contemplated emotion that enters your breath and makes you cry. Wycoff’s stories remind us of what’s great, and deeply upsetting, about excellent realist fiction: it can make us feel the social realities of others with such urgency and depth, we may actually shift our perception, we may actually change our way of being in the world. And where does that get us but a real place to call home. In O Street, almost every story’s main plot is saddled with side-situations. The capital-M-meaning of the story occurs within almost every one of these situations, nesting, like so many Russian dolls, inside the main plot, also infested with the capital-Mmeaning of things.There’s no subplot, or subtext, just text, in all its bare eloquence. In “Where We’re Going ThisTime,” fifth-grader Beth and her mother,Angela, are moving to a seaside motel, off-season because it’s cheap, with Beth’s mother crying, “‘Beth! Just look around you! This is piney country! This is where people marry their first cousins and keep chickens in their backyards.’”At the hotel, Beth’s mother begins what we now know is her all-too-familiar process of heroin withdrawal, while Beth meets the old man living next door, who teaches her to curtsy like they do in show business, and to say “Okay,” so she can “‘be cute and happy. That’s what they want!’” Who is “they”? What do they want?And where, if anywhere, are they going? In the end, Beth’s mother needs Beth to assure her that everything will be okay, even as she tells Beth to “‘Stop saying okay all the time. It makes you sound like an idiot.’” In “The Shell Game,” the adult Beth is living in Chicago, en route to give her mother the money Beth should be using for rent. On the train, Beth watches an older woman lose money in a game dealt by “[a]nother ragged passenger,” a man hiding marbles beneath bottle caps. The woman begs Beth to help her win back her money; Beth doesn’t try, but a young, clean-cut man does, losing bill after bill until he, in a final gesture of kindness, gives his last ten to the older woman, because she said, “‘I got kids…It was all I had.’” When Beth later realizes the raggedy man and the older woman were working together, she doesn’t get angry at them or feel the young man’s humiliation. Instead, she has a small epiphany: “cashing in on other people’s sympathy. It was a new twist to Beth…. It was a good way to earn some cash, really…. They should have kept playing.” We’re all suckers, and sometimes that’s enough to pass for hope. Like steel becomes steel in a minimalist sculpture, Wycoff’s stories are narrative realism becoming narrative realism. Beth’s reaction is a rare, and some might say, foolish response. But it’s also emblematic of the shifting perspective within the stories—not shifting points of view, though there is that, a story through the mother’s perspective, the daughter’s, a girlfriend’s, a classmate’s, each of these bringing another dimension of Beth’s life into focus, for she is the through line, the representation of us. But more, it’s a shifting perspective of unsettled judgment and...