Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p

Art of Literature
Eng 262
Karlis
Paper # 1
Paper #1
Juxtaposing Short Stories
Due Date: Sunday, March 7th
Length: 5-6 pages
Format: Format: Double-spaced, 1-inch margins, numbered
pages, 12-point (Times
New Roman, Arial, or Garamond) font.
Header with the following information:
name, course #, my name, date- double spaced
Title centered over text PLEASE REFER to GENERAL PAPER
GUIDELINES
included in WEEK 4

Texts: Two short stories from the syllabus (see paper topics
below).
Topics: Juxtaposition: What do these stories have in common?
How are they different?
Analyze these similarities and differences and consider how
each author uses/takes
advantage of literary elements to meet their intent and goals.
Also, you should
consider how the texts you’ve chosen to work with “speak” to
each other in a way
that will help you explore and develop the key concepts in your
essay. Be sure to
use textual evidence to support your ideas, and avoid simple
summarization of
each text.
Choose 1 topic:
1. Both The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and
Fiesta are stories
dealing with cultural influences. These influences can be seen
as either
empowering or constraining, depending upon the situation.
Each protagonist is
seen both in and out of their respective “familiar”
environments. How do

Alexie and Díaz use the narrative technique of dialogue to
reflect each
protagonist’s anxiety and/or internal conflict? In addition to
each writer’s use
of dialogue, how do other formal literary elements (setting,
tone, exposition
and so on) evident in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven and Fiesta
tell the reader about what it means to be part of another culture
in America?
2. William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Flannery
O’Connor’s A Good Man is
Hard to Find are examples of the Southern Gothic genre, and
can be viewed as
traditional classic tragedy- i.e. an unavoidable fall in the
protagonist’s fortunes.
Juxtaposing these two stories, offer an exploration of each
story’s tragedy:
consider the plot structure of each and, then, each writer’s
artistic intent.
Identify additional formal literary elements that Faulkner and
O’Connor use to
suleumit
Cross-Out

supplement both their respective plot structures and the classic
tragic theme.
For example, you may want to consider character as a key
concept. How do
Faulkner and O’Connor flesh-out and make their characters real,
and how do
these characters inform each tragedy? Are these characters
misunderstood and
stereotyped, or do they have a larger, perhaps ironic
significance?
3. Dennis Lehane, when speaking about the writing of Until
Gwen, has stated
I realized that the big question for me was: Why was I writing
in the second
person, which is a very strange point of view to do? Gradually,
I realized
that the story was about a guy's search for his own identity, so
the second
person was a wonderful way to keep his name off the page—
because he
doesn't really know his name. We don't learn his name until he
remembers
Gwen saying it, in the past.
Do you agree that it is the appropriate point of view for this

story?
Choose another short story that we have read, identify from
what point of view
it is being told, and state whether or not you think it is the
“appropriate” voice
for the story.
In this way, you can compare and contrast the literary device of
point of view
with respect to how each writer has used it to reflect the
protagonist’s conflict.
In addition to each writer’s use of point of view, what other
formal literary
elements (plot ordering, setting, tone, dialogue, exposition and
so on) are
necessary to the story, and do some of these elements seem
particularly
important of effective with a particular point of view (i.e. 1st or
3rd person)?
4. Analyze Sammy’s character from John Updike’s A&P.
Consider his
background, his attitudes, his values, and his interactions with
the

customers and the girls. Compare and contrast his character
with that of the
narrator in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
For example, we
know about the tastes and backgrounds of both of these
characters; how is this
information vital to each story’s development?
Art of Literature
Eng 262
Karlis
Paper # 1
Paper #1
Juxtaposing Short Stories
Due Date: Sunday, March 7th
Length: 5-6 pages
Format: Format: Double-spaced, 1-inch margins, numbered
pages, 12-point (Times

New Roman, Arial, or Garamond) font.
Header with the following information:
name, course #, my name, date- double spaced
Title centered over text PLEASE REFER to GENERAL PAPER
GUIDELINES
included in WEEK 4
Texts: Two short stories from the syllabus (see paper topics
below).
Topics: Juxtaposition: What do these stories have in common?
How are they different?
Analyze these similarities and differences and consider how
each author uses/takes
advantage of literary elements to meet their intent and goals.
Also, you should
consider how the texts you’ve chosen to work with “speak” to
each other in a way
that will help you explore and develop the key concepts in your
essay. Be sure to
use textual evidence to support your ideas, and avoid si mple
summarization of
each text.

Choose 1 topic:
1. Both The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and
Fiesta are stories
dealing with cultural influences. These influences can be seen
as either
empowering or constraining, depending upon the situation.
Each protagonist is
seen both in and out of their respective “familiar”
environments. How do
Alexie and Díaz use the narrative technique of dialogue to
reflect each
protagonist’s anxiety and/or internal conflict? In addition to
each writer’s use
of dialogue, how do other formal literary elements (setting,
tone, exposition
and so on) evident in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven and Fiesta
tell the reader about what it means to be part of another culture
in America?
2. William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Flannery
O’Connor’s A Good Man is
Hard to Find are examples of the Southern Gothic genre, and
can be viewed as
traditional classic tragedy- i.e. an unavoidable fall in the
protagonist’s fortunes.

Juxtaposing these two stories, offer an exploration of each
story’s tragedy:
consider the plot structure of each and, then, each writer’s
artistic intent.
Identify additional formal literary elements that Faulkner and
O’Connor use to
supplement both their respective plot structures and the classic
tragic theme.
For example, you may want to consider character as a key
concept. How do
Faulkner and O’Connor flesh-out and make their characters real,
and how do
these characters inform each tragedy? Are these characters
misunderstood and
stereotyped, or do they have a larger, perhaps ironic
significance?
3. Dennis Lehane, when speaking about the writing of Until
Gwen, has stated
I realized that the big question for me was: Why was I writing
in the second
person, which is a very strange point of view to do? Gradually,
I realized
that the story was about a guy's search for his own identity, so
the second

person was a wonderful way to keep his name off the page—
because he
doesn't really know his name. We don't learn his name until he
remembers
Gwen saying it, in the past.
Do you agree that it is the appropriate point of view for this
story?
Choose another short story that we have read, identify from
what point of view
it is being told, and state whether or not you think it is the
“appropriate” voice
for the story.
In this way, you can compare and contrast the literary device of
point of view
with respect to how each writer has used it to reflect the
protagonist’s conflict.
In addition to each writer’s use of point of view, what other
formal literary
elements (plot ordering, setting, tone, dialogue, exposition and
so on) are
necessary to the story, and do some of these elements seem
particularly

important of effective with a particular point of view (i.e. 1st or
3rd person)?
4. Analyze Sammy’s character from John Updike’s A&P.
Consider his
background, his attitudes, his values, and his interactions with
the
customers and the girls. Compare and contrast his character
with that of the
narrator in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
For example, we
know about the tastes and backgrounds of both of these
characters; how is this
information vital to each story’s development?
General Guidelines
Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard,

white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
Double-space the text of your paper, and use a legible font (e.g.
Times New Roman). Whatever
font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics
type styles contrast enough that
they are recognizable one from another. The font size should be
12 pt.
Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks
(unless otherwise instructed by
your instructor).
Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.
Indent the first line of paragraphs one half-inch from the left
margin. MLA recommends that you
use the Tab key as opposed to pushing the Space Bar five times.
Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the
upper right-hand corner, one-half
inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your
instructor may ask that you omit
the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's
guidelines.)
Use italics throughout your essay for the titles of longer works
and, only when absolutely
necessary, providing emphasis.

Formatting the First Page of Your Paper
Do not make a title page for your paper unless specifically
requested.
In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name,
your instructor's name, the course,
and the date. Again, be sure to use double-spaced text.
Double space again and center the title. Do not underline,
italicize, or place your title in
quotation marks; write the title in Title Case (standard
capitalization), not in all capital letters.
Use quotation marks and/or italics when referring to other
works in your title, just as you would
in your text: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as Morality Play;
Human Weariness in "After
Apple Picking"
Double space between the title and the first line of the text.
Create a header in the upper right-hand corner that includes
your last name, followed by a space
with a page number; number all pages consecutively with
Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), one-
half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note:
Your instructor or other readers

may ask that you omit last name/page number header on your
first page. Always follow
instructor guidelines.)
A thesis statement:
ells the reader how you will interpret what is significant
about the subject you are discussing
subject itself. The subject, or
topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis
must then offer a way to
understand the war or the novel.
explain
t
paragraph that presents your argument to

the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers
and organizes evidence that
will persuade the reader of the grounds of your interpretation.
How to approach formulating a thesis for a juxtaposition
exercise
Formulating a thesis is not the first
thing you do after reading an essay assignment.
collect and organize
evidence, look for possible relationships between stories (such
as surprising contrasts or
similarities), and think about the significance of these
relationships.
thesis,” a basic or main
idea, an argument that you think you can support with evidence
but that may need
adjustment along the way.
Is my thesis strong?
When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask
yourself the following:

-reading the question prompt
after constructing a working
thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the
question.
oppose? If your thesis simply
states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s
possible that you are
simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
strong argument. If your thesis
contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be
more specific: why is
something “good”; what specifically makes something
“successful”?
response is, “So what?” then
you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a
larger issue.
wandering? If your thesis and
the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them
has to change. It’s o.k. to

change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured
out in the course of writing
your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing
as necessary
first response is “how?” or
“why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance
for the reader. See what
you can add to give the reader a better take on your position
right from the beginning.
EXAMPLES
Suppose you are taking a course on 19th-century America, and
the instructor hands out the
following essay assignment: Compare and contrast the reasons
why the North and South fought
the Civil War. You turn on the computer and type out the
following:
The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons,
some of which were the same and
some different.
This weak thesis restates the question without providing any
additional information. You will

expand on this new information in the body of the essay, but it
is important that the reader know
where you are heading. A reader of this weak thesis might
think, “What reasons? How are they
the same? How are they different?” Ask yourself these same
questions and begin to compare
Northern and Southern attitudes (perhaps you first think, “The
South believed slavery was right,
and the North thought slavery was wrong”). Now, push your
comparison toward an
interpretation—why did one side think slavery was right and the
other side think it was wrong?
You look again at the evidence, and you decide that you are
going to argue that the North
believed slavery was immoral while the South believed it
upheld the Southern way of life. You
write:
While both sides fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery,
the North fought for moral
reasons while the South fought to preserve its own institutions.
Now you have a working thesis! Included in this working thesis
is a reason for the war and some
idea of how the two sides disagreed over this reason. As you

write the essay, you will probably
begin to characterize these differences more precisely, and your
working thesis may start to seem
too vague. Maybe you decide that both sides fought for moral
reasons, and that they just focused
on different moral issues. You end up revising the working
thesis into a final thesis that really
captures the argument in your paper:
While both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought
against tyranny and oppression,
Northerners focused on the oppression of slaves while
Southerners defended their own right to
self-government.
Compare this to the original weak thesis. This final thesis
presents a way
of interpreting evidence that illuminates the significance of the
question. Keep in mind that this
is one of many possible interpretations of the Civil War —it is
not the one and only right
answer to the question. There isn’t one right answer; there are
only strong and weak thesis
statements and strong and weak uses of evidence.
Let’s look at another example: Write an analysis of some aspect

of Mark Twain’s novel
Huckleberry Finn. You really liked Huckleberry Finn, so write:
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.
Why is this thesis weak? Think about what the reader would
expect from the essay that follows:
you will most likely provide a general, appreciative summary of
Twain’s novel. The question did
not ask you to summarize; it asked you to analyze. You need to
think about why it’s such a great
novel—what do Huck’s adventures tell us about life, about
America, about coming of age, about
race relations, etc.? First, the question asks you to pick an
aspect of the novel that you think is
important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of
storytelling, the contrasting
scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships
between adults and children. Now
you write:
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between
life on the river and life on the
shore.

Here’s a working thesis with potential: you have highlighted an
important aspect of the novel for
investigation; however, it’s still not clear what your analysis
will reveal. Your reader is intrigued,
but is still thinking, “So what? What’s the point of this
contrast? What does it signify?” Perhaps
you are not sure yet, either. That’s fine—begin to work on
comparing scenes from the book and
see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s
actions and reactions. Eventually
you will be able to clarify for yourself, and then for the reader,
why this contrast matters. After
examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you
write:
Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find
the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must
leave “civilized” society and go
back to nature.
This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a
literary work based on an analysis of its
content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you
must now present evidence from the
novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Interview excerpts with Dennis Lehane, 2004 with Jessica
Murphy
From the first sentence of your new story "Until Gwen" we are
back on your familiar turf
of ex-cons and past crimes. What is it that attracts you to these
types of characters and to
crime writing in general?
I'm attracted to crime writing because I've always written about
violence. I think I have an
obsession with violence—why we commit violent acts, what it
is in our nature that makes us do
it. I think that's partly what drew me to the noir genre. I also
think I'm inclined toward fiction as
both a reader and a writer. It doesn't have to be crime fiction,
just "fiction of mortal event," as
Cormac McCarthy called it once. I think that's a good term. I
like fiction where things happen.
We also know from that first line that we're going to be reading

about a somewhat
untraditional father-son relationship. Were you at all tempted to
pursue this relationship in
greater depth than either the mystery genre or the short-story
form would allow?
Actually, no. The story was originally conceived as a sort of
practice-what-you-preach lesson for
my students. I spend a lot of time talking about Aristotelian
theories of character—that the
character is action—and the idea that the strongest characters
are always revealed through their
actions. It has nothing to do with what they think or what they
say or what other people say about
them. It's really just what they do. So I said to myself, "I think
it's time you put up or shut up.
Write a story in which the character reveals himself exclusively
by what he does." That was the
challenge with "Until Gwen." I couldn't have gone any further
into the relationship between the
narrator and his father.
At the beginning of the story we know that the narrator is
getting out of prison, but we

don't know why he was there in the first place. The rest of the
story slowly reveals that
why, with strategically placed details and backstory. While the
revealing detail is important
in all fiction, I would think that divulging that crucial detail —a
new lead for the detective,
or, in this story, a new piece in the puzzle of the narrator's
past—must be perfectly timed
in crime writing. How do you decide when to disclose what?
I wish I could give you a great answer for that, but I can't. You
just write along and see what
happens. When I started the story I just had that first sentence. I
had no idea why the
narrator was in prison, and I had no idea what the hell happened
to Gwen. You don't know. You
just begin to write your way into the story. Gradually, I realized
that the big question for me was:
Why was I writing in the second person, which is a very strange
point of view to do? Gradually,
I realized that the story was about a guy's search for his own
identity, so the second person was a
wonderful way to keep his name off the page—because he
doesn't really know his name. We

don't learn his name until he remembers Gwen saying it, in the
past.
In "Until Gwen" the distribution of the clues is really a product
of the story's structure. The
actual timeframe of the story is about six hours, it's just that
day. The characters walk into town,
and they're looking for something. Gradually, through the
looping back of the structure, and the
idea of past being present, we get the crucial revelation. But the
narrator knew it all along. That
was the idea of character revealed purely through action. If I
started having him think on the
page for you, and telling you the story in a conventional way,
then he would have had to reveal
his suspicions about Gwen on page two. By revealing him
purely through what he does, I was
allowed to play around with withholding a major piece of
information.
******

Your fiction often includes a character who is haunted by a
dark, traumatic event from the
past. In Mystic River the three main characters are haunted, into
adulthood, by Dave's
abduction. In Shutter Island one of the U.S. Marshals cannot
free his mind from thoughts
of his dead wife. In "Until Gwen" the narrator slowly reveals
the full story behind what
haunts him.
I think the past certainly haunts all of my characters. Carrying
around a nice big wound is just
dramatically interesting.
But I'm really working on that—on trying to get backstory out
of my work as much as I can.
When I teach fiction I tell my students to read poets for
language and to read playwrights for
plot, to just learn how to get the story moving. It doesn't mean
that it has to take off like a bullet,
or you have to have a flying car or a shootout or anything, but
just tell the damn story.
Playwrights know that better than anybody. You've got a bare
stage, somebody walks out, and

stuff better start happening or the audience is going to leave. I
teach a lot of David Mamet's
theories. He's got a book, Three Uses of the Knife, that's
absolutely wonderful. One of the things
Mamet says is: no backstory. Playwrights hardly ever have
backstory.
I would guess—and correct me if I'm wrong—that when you
were getting your M.F.A. at
the Florida International University, your classes focused on
authors like Raymond
Carver, Flannery O'Connor, and Chekhov, and that you probably
weren't taking classes
on the crime writing of Raymond Chandler or Patricia
Highsmith. Am I right?
Right.
So how did you come out of an M.F.A. program with a detective
novel?
In the early nineties there was a sort of backlash against the
direction fiction was going. Not all
fiction, but a majority of what I considered bad fiction had
become choir preaching, esoteric

fiction written by academics for academics. Every novel was
about a forty-two-year-old
professor having an affair with a student and going through a
midlife crisis. Story had
disappeared. One of the most explosive publishing events when
I was in graduate school was The
Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. There's nothing about Thom
Jones that's absolutely spectacular
or innovative. He just brought story back. Denis Johnson's
Jesus's Son was another book about
which we said, "Oh my God, this is fiction that's about
something, the blood and guts of it. It's
life going on here."
I think that was the moment when I turned toward noir. A lot of
us who are considered the new
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=037570423X/theatla
nticmonthA/ref=nosim
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0316473049/theatla
renaissance writers of noir believed that's where the social
novel was going. We wanted to write

about the people nobody was writing about. I've always said
that the best novel hands down of
the 1990s was Clockers. It never got the respect it deserved.
This was what was going on in the
early nineties in America, but nobody was writing about it.
Nobody would touch it with a ten
foot pole because they were writing about thinly disguised
versions of Princeton. Who cares.
This guy was writing about crack. It was America. He was
writing about race. I think that's how I
ended up drifting into this genre—the desire to write about
social issues. So my first novel was
about racism.
*******
"Until Gwen" takes place in West Virginia, but, I have to admit,
I did begin with the
preconceived notion that the story was taking place in Boston.
Do you plan to move away
from becoming a "regional writer?" Do you see yourself—like,
say, a Richard Ford or an
Annie Proulx—picking up and moving to a new area and
infiltrating it until you can sense

how the people tick?
That's not my gift.
Is Boston too much in your blood? Is this where most of your
fiction will continue to
reside?
I think most of my fiction will reside in Boston. There might be
exceptions. In my new book, the
ending is not in Boston. It's not finished yet, but I know the last
third of the book will be in
Oklahoma—but that's because of history. The finale of the new
book is the Tulsa race riot of
1921. But it starts in Boston and the meat of the book is the
Boston police strike of 1919.
I love Boston. My books will always be set primarily in Boston
because there's so much to say
about it. My short stories, on the other hand, are usually set in
the South, because I lived there for
eight years and I like to go down there and play with it. Short
stories for me are the one realm
where pleasing the audience is not a consideration.

What do you mean?
The late Andre Dubus, who was a friend of mine, wrote a great
article about how he got paid so
little for short stories that he wouldn't change a line on anyone
else's account. If an editor asked
him, he'd simply say, "No, thank you, I'll take the story back."
His theory was that they don't pay
you enough, so you're not in it for the money. You're in it for
the piece and the piece alone, so
you can take it and sell it someplace else.
Might not be quite that easy for people who aren't Andre Dubus.
Exactly. I get that. But with me, it's the same thing. I have no
monetary reason to write short
stories, so I write them for the love of it. I wrote "Until Gwen"
to do that thing with character in
action and to play with second person. I've written stories set in
South Carolina, in Florida. I go
all over the map.

Do you write a lot of short stories?
No. Probably one a year. But I love the form. I think ultimately
I'm a novelist, but I trained as a
short-story writer for seven years.
How do you translate training in short stories into structuring a
novel and taking on a
much larger endeavor?
That's a tough one. What I discovered was that I was banging
my head against a wall as a short-
story writer. What I only gradually realized, once I had a few
novels under my belt, was that the
novel is just a bigger form, and I do bigger better. I wish I
could do smaller, and I am in awe of
the people who can. I am in awe of the great short-story writers
because I can't do that, except
occasionally, and I don't do it naturally. Whereas a novel, with
its gradual unfurling, its building
up to an epic kind of feel—that's something that comes
naturally to me, so I took to it. I wrote

the first draft of my first novel faster than I'd ever written a
short story. The entire novel. I just
blasted through it. It was an awful, awful draft, but it was done,
it was out, and I could play with
it. I think that was a big wake-up moment. Then I went to grad
school, and I went back to writing
short stories, and everybody kept saying, "What are you doing
with that novel?" And I was
saying, "I don't know." Just as I was finishing grad school it
was accepted for publication.
Does being defined as a "regional writer" come with
limitations?
I write about Boston because I love to write about Boston.
Anywhere else I'd be somewhat of a
tourist. I think you can get away with that for thirty pages, but
otherwise I think I'd feel like I'd
get caught at it. I understand Boston instinctively, and I write
about it at novel length because
that's where I'm comfortable.
I also believe in what Bogart said: All you owe them is a great
performance. That's what I owe
the audience. I don't get hung up on what their expectations are,

because I think that's silly and
disingenuous. What makes the librarian from Waltham happy is
not going to make the pipe-fitter
from Southie happy. So who's my audience? I just go where the
material takes me, and with my
new book the material's taking me to Tulsa. And I'm not
thinking, Oh dear, will the reader
follow me? Either he will or he won't.
East Buckingham, the fictional city in Mystic River, is clearly
Boston—from comments
about the Sox to Dunkin' Donuts to road rage. What made you
decide to use a fictional
name for the city? And what advantages are there to creating a
city—even one so clearly
pinned to a real area?
It was a decision that accompanied the shift from a first-person
series to a third-person novel.
Once I knew I was going to paint whatever I wanted on my
canvas, then I said, well why not
create a whole place. I control where the post office is and I
don't have to receive silly letters that
say, actually, that street doesn't go that far. We seem to have

entered this boring, hyper-realistic
age where people are saying, I don't know if it would happen
that way. Who cares?
With East Buckingham, I had this idea about a park, and I
wanted to put a drive-in screen there. I
actually took two parks—a park where I walk my dogs in
Brighton and what was once the old
Neponset drive-in in Dorchester—and I merged them. From that
moment on I said, I'm going all
the way. I took four neighborhoods—Charlestown, Southie,
Brighton, and Dorchester—and
that's East Buckingham.
Mystic River is so much about gentrification, and if I had set it
in an actual town, what if it didn't
gentrify? Or what if it gentrified faster than I thought, and the
book comes out and it looks
stupid? For example, I got the idea for the book when I was
living in Charlestown. But by the
time the book came out, Charlestown had become completely
gentrified. So I was also playing
around with Southie, which was gentrifying too. I stole a lot of

the street names from Brighton,
because that's where I lived later on, and some of the other
street names came from Dorchester.
*******
Jessica Murphy grew up in the Boston area. She received her
MFA in fiction from Emerson
College, and teaches essay writing at Boston University.
Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights
reserved.
http://www.theatlantic.com/about/legal.htm
Interview excerpts with Dennis Lehane, 2004 with Jessica
Murphy
From the first sentence of your new story "Until Gwen" we are
back on your familiar turf
of ex-cons and past crimes. What is it that attracts you to these
types of characters and to
crime writing in general?
I'm attracted to crime writing because I've always written about

violence. I think I have an
obsession with violence—why we commit violent acts, what it
is in our nature that makes us do
it. I think that's partly what drew me to the noir genre. I also
think I'm inclined toward fiction as
both a reader and a writer. It doesn't have to be crime fiction,
just "fiction of mortal event," as
Cormac McCarthy called it once. I think that's a good term. I
like fiction where things happen.
We also know from that first line that we're going to be reading
about a somewhat
untraditional father-son relationship. Were you at all tempted to
pursue this relationship in
greater depth than either the mystery genre or the short-story
form would allow?
Actually, no. The story was originally conceived as a sort of
practice-what-you-preach lesson for
my students. I spend a lot of time talking about Aristotelian
theories of character—that the
character is action—and the idea that the strongest characters
are always revealed through their
actions. It has nothing to do with what they think or what they
say or what other people say about

them. It's really just what they do. So I said to myself, "I think
it's time you put up or shut up.
Write a story in which the character reveals himself exclusively
by what he does." That was the
challenge with "Until Gwen." I couldn't have gone any further
into the relationship between the
narrator and his father.
At the beginning of the story we know that the narrator is
getting out of prison, but we
don't know why he was there in the first place. The rest of the
story slowly reveals that
why, with strategically placed details and backstory. While the
revealing detail is important
in all fiction, I would think that divulging that crucial detail—a
new lead for the detective,
or, in this story, a new piece in the puzzle of the narrator's
past—must be perfectly timed
in crime writing. How do you decide when to disclose what?
I wish I could give you a great answer for that, but I can't. You
just write along and see what
happens. When I started the story I just had that first sentence. I
had no idea why the

narrator was in prison, and I had no idea what the hell happened
to Gwen. You don't know. You
just begin to write your way into the story. Gradually, I realized
that the big question for me was:
Why was I writing in the second person, which is a very strange
point of view to do? Gradually,
I realized that the story was about a guy's search for his own
identity, so the second person was a
wonderful way to keep his name off the page—because he
doesn't really know his name. We
don't learn his name until he remembers Gwen saying it, in the
past.
In "Until Gwen" the distribution of the clues is really a product
of the story's structure. The
actual timeframe of the story is about six hours, it's just that
day. The characters walk into town,
and they're looking for something. Gradually, through the
looping back of the structure, and the
idea of past being present, we get the crucial revelation. But the
narrator knew it all along. That
was the idea of character revealed purely through action. If I
started having him think on the

page for you, and telling you the story in a conventional way,
then he would have had to reveal
his suspicions about Gwen on page two. By revealing him
purely through what he does, I was
allowed to play around with withholding a major piece of
information.
******
Your fiction often includes a character who is haunte d by a
dark, traumatic event from the
past. In Mystic River the three main characters are haunted, into
adulthood, by Dave's
abduction. In Shutter Island one of the U.S. Marshals cannot
free his mind from thoughts
of his dead wife. In "Until Gwen" the narrator slowly reveals
the full story behind what
haunts him.
I think the past certainly haunts all of my characters. Carrying
around a nice big wound is just
dramatically interesting.

But I'm really working on that—on trying to get backstory out
of my work as much as I can.
When I teach fiction I tell my students to read poets for
language and to read playwrights for
plot, to just learn how to get the story moving. It doesn't mean
that it has to take off like a bullet,
or you have to have a flying car or a shootout or anything, but
just tell the damn story.
Playwrights know that better than anybody. You've got a bare
stage, somebody walks out, and
stuff better start happening or the audience is going to leave. I
teach a lot of David Mamet's
theories. He's got a book, Three Uses of the Knife, that's
absolutely wonderful. One of the things
Mamet says is: no backstory. Playwrights hardly ever have
backstory.
I would guess—and correct me if I'm wrong—that when you
were getting your M.F.A. at
the Florida International University, your classes focused on
authors like Raymond
Carver, Flannery O'Connor, and Chekhov, and that you probably
weren't taking classes
on the crime writing of Raymond Chandler or Patricia

Highsmith. Am I right?
Right.
So how did you come out of an M.F.A. program with a detective
novel?
In the early nineties there was a sort of backlash against the
direction fiction was going. Not all
fiction, but a majority of what I considered bad fiction had
become choir preaching, esoteric
fiction written by academics for academics. Every novel was
about a forty-two-year-old
professor having an affair with a student and going through a
midlife crisis. Story had
disappeared. One of the most explosive publishing events when
I was in graduate school was The
Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. There's nothing about Thom
Jones that's absolutely spectacular
or innovative. He just brought story back. Denis Johnson's
Jesus's Son was another book about
which we said, "Oh my God, this is fiction that's about
something, the blood and guts of it. It's
life going on here."

I think that was the moment when I turned toward noir. A lot of
us who are considered the new
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=037570423X/theatla
renaissance writers of noir believed that's where the social
novel was going. We wanted to write
about the people nobody was writing about. I've always said
that the best novel hands down of
the 1990s was Clockers. It never got the respect it deserved.
This was what was going on in the
early nineties in America, but nobody was writing about it.
Nobody would touch it with a ten
foot pole because they were writing about thinly disguised
versions of Princeton. Who cares.
This guy was writing about crack. It was America. He was
writing about race. I think that's how I
ended up drifting into this genre—the desire to write about
social issues. So my first novel was
about racism.

*******
"Until Gwen" takes place in West Virginia, but, I have to admit,
I did begin with the
preconceived notion that the story was taking place in Boston.
Do you plan to move away
from becoming a "regional writer?" Do you see yourself—like,
say, a Richard Ford or an
Annie Proulx—picking up and moving to a new area and
infiltrating it until you can sense
how the people tick?
That's not my gift.
Is Boston too much in your blood? Is this where most of your
fiction will continue to
reside?
I think most of my fiction will reside in Boston. There might be
exceptions. In my new book, the
ending is not in Boston. It's not finished yet, but I know the last
third of the book will be in
Oklahoma—but that's because of history. The finale of the new
book is the Tulsa race riot of

1921. But it starts in Boston and the meat of the book is the
Boston police strike of 1919.
I love Boston. My books will always be set primarily in Boston
because there's so much to say
about it. My short stories, on the other hand, are usually set in
the South, because I lived there for
eight years and I like to go down there and play with it. Short
stories for me are the one realm
where pleasing the audience is not a consideration.
What do you mean?
The late Andre Dubus, who was a friend of mine, wrote a great
article about how he got paid so
little for short stories that he wouldn't change a line on anyone
else's account. If an editor asked
him, he'd simply say, "No, thank you, I'll take the story back."
His theory was that they don't pay
you enough, so you're not in it for the money. You're in it for
the piece and the piece alone, so
you can take it and sell it someplace else.
Might not be quite that easy for people who aren't Andre Dubus.

Exactly. I get that. But with me, it's the same thing. I have no
monetary reason to write short
stories, so I write them for the love of it. I wrote "Until Gwen"
to do that thing with character in
action and to play with second person. I've written stories set in
South Carolina, in Florida. I go
all over the map.
Do you write a lot of short stories?
No. Probably one a year. But I love the form. I think ultimately
I'm a novelist, but I trained as a
short-story writer for seven years.
How do you translate training in short stories into structuring a
novel and taking on a
much larger endeavor?
That's a tough one. What I discovered was that I was banging
my head against a wall as a short-

story writer. What I only gradually realized, once I had a few
novels under my belt, was that the
novel is just a bigger form, and I do bigger better. I wish I
could do smaller, and I am in awe of
the people who can. I am in awe of the great short-story writers
because I can't do that, except
occasionally, and I don't do it naturally. Whereas a novel, with
its gradual unfurling, its building
up to an epic kind of feel—that's something that comes
naturally to me, so I took to it. I wrote
the first draft of my first novel faster than I'd ever written a
short story. The entire novel. I just
blasted through it. It was an awful, awful draft, but it was done,
it was out, and I could play with
it. I think that was a big wake-up moment. Then I went to grad
school, and I went back to writing
short stories, and everybody kept saying, "What are you doing
with that novel?" And I was
saying, "I don't know." Just as I was finishing grad school it
was accepted for publication.
Does being defined as a "regional writer" come with
limitations?

I write about Boston because I love to write about Boston.
Anywhere else I'd be somewhat of a
tourist. I think you can get away with that for thirty pages, but
otherwise I think I'd feel like I'd
get caught at it. I understand Boston instinctively, and I write
about it at novel length because
that's where I'm comfortable.
I also believe in what Bogart said: All you owe them is a great
performance. That's what I owe
the audience. I don't get hung up on what their expectations are,
because I think that's silly and
disingenuous. What makes the librarian from Waltham happy is
not going to make the pipe-fitter
from Southie happy. So who's my audience? I just go where the
material takes me, and with my
new book the material's taking me to Tulsa. And I'm not
thinking, Oh dear, will the reader
follow me? Either he will or he won't.
East Buckingham, the fictional city in Mystic River, is clearly
Boston—from comments
about the Sox to Dunkin' Donuts to road rage. What made you
decide to use a fictional

name for the city? And what advantages are there to creating a
city—even one so clearly
pinned to a real area?
It was a decision that accompanied the shift from a first-person
series to a third-person novel.
Once I knew I was going to paint whatever I wanted on my
canvas, then I said, well why not
create a whole place. I control where the post office is and I
don't have to receive silly letters that
say, actually, that street doesn't go that far. We seem to have
entered this boring, hyper-realistic
age where people are saying, I don't know if it would happen
that way. Who cares?
With East Buckingham, I had this idea about a park, and I
wanted to put a drive-in screen there. I
actually took two parks—a park where I walk my dogs in
Brighton and what was once the old
Neponset drive-in in Dorchester—and I merged them. From that
moment on I said, I'm going all
the way. I took four neighborhoods—Charlestown, Southie,
Brighton, and Dorchester—and

that's East Buckingham.
Mystic River is so much about gentrification, and if I had set it
in an actual town, what if it didn't
gentrify? Or what if it gentrified faster than I thought, and the
book comes out and it looks
stupid? For example, I got the idea for the book when I was
living in Charlestown. But by the
time the book came out, Charlestown had become completely
gentrified. So I was also playing
around with Southie, which was gentrifying too. I stole a lot of
the street names from Brighton,
because that's where I lived later on, and some of the other
street names came from Dorchester.
*******
Jessica Murphy grew up in the Boston area. She received her
MFA in fiction from Emerson
College, and teaches essay writing at Boston University.
Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights
reserved.
http://www.theatlantic.com/about/legal.htm

Notes on A & P and Until Gwen:
The theme of A & P by John Updike is centered around the idea
of a gesture, one which
is done at some personal cost. What further complicates this
story is the question of if this is
ultimately an empty gesture, or one which is, in the end,
worthwhile. However, with this larger
theme, other important issues are suggested as well- social
positions; “de-humanizing” effects of
businesses, with constricting rules; attitudes towards women.
Also, as you read this, don’t forget
that Sammy is still a young man, emphasized by the way Updike
begins with the somewhat
colloquial style of expressing himself, “In walks these three
girls…” Sammy’s sense of his own
identity is somewhat unformed as well, and Updike uses
specific details (presumably from
Sammy’s own point of view) to show that Sammy is aware of
social tastes and positions. For
example, when “Queenie” is picking up pickled herring for her
mother, he pictures a very
sophisticated garden party with the men in “ice cream” colored
suits, in comparison to his own

family’s “Schlitz” beer glasses (the PBR of the 1960s!) Do you
think his perceptions and actions
show his lack of identity, or a sense of finding it?
In Until Gwen Lehane’s narrator is something of a mystery with
the effect heightened by
the use of second person point of view turning the reader into a
sort of dual narrator. This is a
young man without a name, without a history beyond the failed
robbery that led to his
imprisonment. He doesn’t know where he was born, what his
date of birth is, doesn’t have a
social security number. What he does know is that he loves a
woman, Gwen, who was with him
the night of the robbery. What Gwen gives him, ultimately, is
his identity; for it is only through
her that he (and we, the readers, being the “you”) hears his
name. How do you think his
(Bobby’s) father’s deliberate sense of withholding the truth
about his son’s identity allowed him
to control Bobby? Think about the fact that Bobby has no photo
of his mother or Gwen; that his
father changes his stories and lies at will whenever he (his

father) feels threatened; and that
ultimately Bobby even outsmarts his father. Do you think his
perceptions and actions show his
lack of identity, or a sense of finding it?
FICTIONJUNE 2004; THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Until Gwen
DENNIS LEHANE
Tweet
Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon,
with an 8-ball of coke in
the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back
seat. Two minutes into
the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy
tells you that she only
hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial
for an independent video
chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW.
But she feels her calling—
her true calling in life—is to write.
You go, "Books?"
"Books." She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line
off your fist and up her
left nostril. "Screenplays!" She shouts it at the dome light for

some reason. "You know—
movies."
"Tell him the one about the psycho saint guy." Your father
winks at you in the rearview,
like he's driving the two of you to the prom. "Go ahead. Tell
him."
"Okay, okay." She turns on the seat to face you, and your knees
touch, and you think of
Gwen, a look she gave you once, nothing special, just looking
back at you as she stood at
the front door, asking if you'd seen her keys. A forgettable
moment if ever there was one,
but you spent four years in prison remembering it.
"... so at his canonization," Mandy is saying, "something, like,
happens? And his spirit
comes back and goes into the body of this priest. But, like, the
priest? He has a brain
tumor. He doesn't know it or nothing, but hedoes, and it's
fucking up his, um—"
"Brain?" you try.
"Thoughts," Mandy says. "So he gets this saint in him and that
does it, because, like,
even though the guy was a saint, his spirit has become evil,
because his soul is gone. So
this priest? He spends the rest of the movie trying to kill the
Pope."
"Why?"
"Just listen," your father says. "It gets good."

You look out the window. A car sits empty along the shoulder.
It's beige, and someone
has painted gold wings on the sides, fanning out from the front
bumper and across the
doors. A sign is affixed to the roof with some words on it, but
you've passed it by the
time you think to wonder what it says.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2004/06/
http://www.theatlantic.com/dennis-lehane/
https://twitter.com/share
"See, there's this secret group that works for the Vatican?
They're like a, like a ..."
"A hit squad," your father says.
"Exactly," Mandy says, and presses her finger to your nose.
"And the lead guy, the, like,
head agent? He's the hero. He lost his wife and daughter in a
terrorist attack on the
Vatican a few years back, so he's a little fucked up, but—"
You say, "Terrorists attacked the Vatican?"
"Huh?"
You look at her, waiting. She has a small face, eyes too close to
her nose.
"In the movie," Mandy says. "Not in real life."
"Oh. I just—you know, four years inside, you assume you
missed a couple of headlines,
but ..."

"Right." Her face is dark and squally now. "Can I finish?"
"I'm just saying," you say and snort another line off your fist,
"even the guys on death
row would have heard about that one."
"Just go with it," your father says. "It's not, like, real li fe."
You look out the window, see a guy in a chicken suit carrying a
can of gas in the
breakdown lane, think how real life isn't like real life. Probably
more like this poor dumb
bastard running out of gas in a car with wings painted on it.
Wondering how the hell he
ever got here. Wondering who he'd pissed off in that previous
real life.
Your father has rented two rooms at an Econo Lodge so that you
and Mandy can have
some privacy, but you send Mandy home after she twice
interrupts the sex to pontificate
on the merits of Michael Bay films.
You sit in the blue-wash flicker of ESPN and eat peanuts from a
plastic bag you got out
of a vending machine and drink plastic cupfuls of Jim Beam
from a bottle your father
presented when you reached the motel parking lot. You think of
the time you've lost, and
how nice it is to sit alone on a double bed and watch TV, and
you think of Gwen, can
taste her tongue for just a moment, and you think about the road
that's led you here to
this motel room on this night after forty-seven months in prison,
and how a lot of people

would say it was a twisted road, a weird one, filled with curves,
but you just think of it as
a road like any other. You drive down it on faith, or because
you have no other choice,
and you find out what it's like by the driving of it, find out what
the end looks like only
by reaching it.
Late the next morning your father wakes you, tells you he drove
Mandy home and you've
got things to do, people to see.
Here's what you know about your father above all else: people
have a way of vanishing in
his company.
He's a professional thief, a consummate con man, an expert in
his field—and yet
something far beyond professionalism is at his core, something
unreasonably arbitrary.
Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once,
laughed at maybe, yet
swore never to repeat.
"She was with you last night?" you say.
"You didn't want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up.
Poor girl like that."
"But you drove her home," you say.
"I'm speaking Czech?"
You hold his eyes for a bit. They're big and bland, with the

heartless innocence of a
newborn's. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a
while you say, "Let me
take a shower."
"Fuck the shower," he says. "Throw on a baseball cap and let's
get."
You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those
things you would have
realized you'd miss if you'd given it any thought ahead of
time—standing under the
spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as
you want it, shampoo
that doesn't smell like factory smoke.
Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old
man flicking through
channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds:
Home Shopping
Network—zap. Springer—zap. Oprah—zap. Soap-opera voices,
soap-opera music—zap.
Monster-truck show—pause. Commercial—zap, zap, zap.
You come back into the room, steam trailing you, pick your
jeans up off the bed, and put
them on.
The old man says, "Afraid you'd drowned. Worried I'd have to
take a plunger to the
drain, suck you back up."
You say, "Where we going?"
"Take a drive." Your father shrugs, flicking past a cartoon.

"Last time you said that, I got shot twice."
Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and
soft. "Wasn't the car that
shot you, was it?"
You go out to Gwen's place, but she isn't there anymore. A
couple of black kids are
playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch
to look at the strange
car idling in front of her house.
"You didn't leave it here?" your father says.
"Not that I recall."
"Think."
"I'm thinking."
"So you didn't?"
"I told you—not that I recall."
"So you're sure."
"Pretty much."
"You had a bullet in your head."
"Two."
"I thought one glanced off."

You say, "Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don't
get hung up on the
particulars."
"That how it works?" Your father pulls away from the curb as
the woman comes down
the steps.
The first shot came through the back window, and Gentleman
Pete flinched. He jammed
the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the
highway exit barrier, air bags
exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of
your head exploding, glass
pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, "What happened? Jesus.
What happened?"
You pulled her with you out the back door—Gwen, your
Gwen—and you crossed the exit
ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there
but you kept going, not
sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your
head on fire, burning so
bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.
"And you don't remember nothing else?" your father says.
You've driven all over town,
every street, every dirt road, every hollow you can stumble
across in Sumner, West
Virginia.
"Not till she dropped me off at the hospital."
"Dumb goddamn move if ever there was one."

"I seem to remember I was puking blood by that point, talking
all funny."
"Oh, you remember that. Sure."
"You're telling me in all this time you never talked to Gwen?"
"Like I told you three years back, that girl got gone."
You know Gwen. You love Gwen. This part of it is hard to take.
You remember Gwen in
your car and Gwen in the cornstalks and Gwen in her mother's
bed in the hour just
before noon, naked and soft. You watched a drop of sweat
appear from her hairline and
slide down the side of her neck as she snored against your
shoulder blade, and the arch
of her foot was pressed over the top of yours, and you watched
her sleep, and you were
so awake.
"So it's with her," you say.
"No," the old man says, a bit of anger creeping into his puppy-
fur voice. "You called me.
That night."
"I did?"
"Shit, boy. You called me from the pay phone outside the
hospital."
"What'd I say?"
"You said, 'I hid it. It's safe. No one knows where but me.'"

"Wow," you say. "I said all that? Then what'd I say?"
The old man shakes his head. "Cops were pulling up by then,
calling you 'motherfucker,'
telling you to drop the phone. You hung up."
The old man pulls up outside a low red-brick building behind a
tire dealership on Oak
Street. He kills the engine and gets out of the car, and you
follow. The building is two
stories. Facing the street are the office of a bail bondsman, a
hardware store, a Chinese
takeout place with greasy walls the color of an old dog's teeth,
and a hair salon called
Girlfriend Hooked Me Up that's filled with black women.
Around the back, past the
whitewashed windows of what was once a dry cleaner, is a
small black door with the
words TRUE-LINE EFFICIENCY EXPERTS CORP. stenciled
on the frosted glass.
The old man unlocks the door and leads you into a ten-by-ten
room that smells of roast
chicken and varnish. He pulls the string of a bare light bulb, and
you look around at a
floor strewn with envelopes and paper, the only piece of
furniture a broken-down desk
probably left behind by the previous tenant.
Your father crab-walks across the floor, picking up envelopes
that have come through
the mail slot, kicking his way through the paper. You pick up

one of the pieces of paper
and read it.
Dear Sirs,
Please find enclosed my check for $50. I look forward to
receiving the information
packet we discussed as well as the sample test. I have enclosed
a SASE to help facilitate
this process. I hope to see you someday at the airport!
Sincerely,
Jackson A. Willis
You let it drop to the floor and pick up another one.
To Whom It May Concern:
Two months ago, I sent a money order in the amount of fifty
dollars to your company in
order that I may receive an information packet and sample test
so that I could take the
US government test and become a security handler and fulfill
my patriotic duty against
the al Qadas. I have not received my information packet as yet
and no one answers when
I call your phone. Please send me that information packet so I
can get that job.
Yours truly,
Edwin Voeguarde
12 Hinckley Street
Youngstown, OH 44502

You drop this one to the floor too, and watch your father sit on
the corner of the desk
and open his fresh pile of envelopes with a penknife. He reads
some, pauses only long
enough with others to shake the checks free and drop the rest to
the floor.
You let yourself out, go to the Chinese place and buy a cup of
Coke, go into the hardware
store and buy a knife and a couple of tubes of Krazy Glue, stop
at the car for a minute,
and then go back into your father's office.
"What're you selling this time?" you say.
"Airport security jobs," he says, still opening envelopes. "It's a
booming market.
Everyone wants in. Stop them bad guys before they get on the
plane, make the papers,
serve your country, and maybe be lucky enough to get posted
near one of them
Starbucks kiosks. Hell."
"How much you made?"
Your father shrugs, though you're certain he knows the figure
right down to the last
penny.
"I've done all right. Hell else am I going to do, back in this shit
town for three months,
waiting on you? 'Bout time to shut this down, though." He holds
up a stack of about
sixty checks. "Deposit these and cash out the account. First two

months, though? I was
getting a thousand, fifteen hundred checks a week. Thank the
good Lord for being
selective with the brain tissue, you know?"
"Why?" you say.
"Why what?"
"Why you been hanging around for three months?"
Your father looks up from the stack of checks, squints. "To
prepare a proper welcome for
you."
"A bottle of whiskey and a hooker who gives lousy head? That
took you three months?"
Your father squints a little more, and you see a shaft of gray
between the two of you, not
quite what you'd call light, just a shaft of air or atmosphere or
something, swimming
with motes, your father on the other side of it looking at you
like he can't quite believe
you're related.
After a minute or so your father says, "Yeah."
Your father told you once you'd been born in New Jersey.
Another time he said New
Mexico. Then Idaho. Drunk as a skunk a few months before you
got shot, he said, "No,
no. I'll tell you the truth. You were born in Las Vegas. That's in
Nevada."
You went on the Internet to look yourself up but never did find

anything.
Your mother died when you were seven. You've sat up at night
occasionally and tried to
picture her face. Some nights you can't see her at all. Some
nights you'll get a quick
glimpse of her eyes or her jawline, see her standing by the foot
of her bed, rolling her
stockings on, and suddenly she'll appear whole cloth, whole
human, and you can smell
her.
Most times, though, it's somewhere in between. You see a smile
she gave you, and then
she'll vanish. See a spatula she held turning pancakes, her eyes
burning for some reason,
her mouth an O, and then her face is gone and all you can see is
the wallpaper. And the
spatula.
You asked your father once why he had no pictures of her. Why
hadn't he taken a picture
of her? Just one lousy picture?
He said, "You think it'd bring her back? No, I mean, do you?
Wow," he said, and rubbed
his chin. "Wouldn't that be cool."
You said, "Forget it."
"Maybe if we had a whole album of pictures?" your father said.
"She'd, like, pop out from
time to time, make us breakfast."

Now that you've been in prison, you've been documented, but
even they'd had to make it
up, take your name as much on faith as you. You have no Social
Security number or
birth certificate, no passport. You've never held a job.
Gwen said to you once, "You don't have anyone to tell you who
you are, so you
don't need anyone to tell you. You just are who you are. You're
beautiful."
And with Gwen that was usually enough. You didn't need to be
defined —by your father,
your mother, a place of birth, a name on a credit card or a
driver's license or the upper
left corner of a check. As long as her definition of you was
something she could live with,
then you could too.
You find yourself standing in a Nebraska wheat field. You're
seventeen years old. You
learned to drive five years earlier. You were in school once, for
two months when you
were eight, but you read well and you can multiply three-digit
numbers in your head
faster than a calculator, and you've seen the country with the
old man. You've learned
people aren't that smart. You've learned how to pull lottery-
ticket scams and asphalt-
paving scams and get free meals with a slight upturn of your
brown eyes. You've learned
that if you hold ten dollars in front of a stranger, he'll pay
twenty to get his hands on it if
you play him right. You've learned that every good lie is
threaded with truth and every
accepted truth leaks lies.

You're seventeen years old in that wheat field. The night breeze
smells of wood smoke
and feels like dry fingers as it lifts your bangs off your
forehead. You remember
everything about that night because it is the night you met
Gwen. You are two years
away from prison, and you feel like someone has finally given
you permission to live.
This is what few people know about Sumner, West Virginia:
every now and then
someone finds a diamond. Some dealers were in a plane that
went down in a storm in
'51, already blown well off course, flying a crate of Israeli
stones down the Eastern
Seaboard toward Miami. Plane went down near an open
mineshaft, took some swing-
shift miners with it. The government showed up, along with
members of an
international gem consortium, got the bodies out of there, and
went to work looking for
the diamonds. Found most of them, or so they claimed, but for
decades afterward
rumors persisted, occasionally given credence by the sight of a
miner, still grimed brown
by the shafts, tooling around town in an Audi.
You'd been in Sumner peddling hurricane insurance in trailer
parks when word got
around that someone had found a diamond as big as a casino
chip. Miner by the name of
George Brunda, suddenly buying drinks, talking to his travel

agent. You and Gwen shot
pool with him one night, and you could see his dread in the
bulges under his eyes, the
way his laughter exploded too high and too fast.
He didn't have much time, old George, and he knew it, but he
had a mother in a rest
home, and he was making the arrangements to get her
transferred. George was a fleshy
guy, triple-chinned, and dreams he'd probably forgotten he'd
ever had were
rediscovered and weighted in his face, jangling and pulling the
flesh.
"Probably hasn't been laid in twenty years," Gwen said when
George went to the
bathroom. "It's sad. Poor sad George. Never knew love."
Her pool stick pressed against your chest as she kissed you, and
you could taste the
tequila, the salt, and the lime on her tongue.
"Never knew love," she whispered in your ear, an ache in the
whisper.
"What about the fairground?" your father says as you leave the
office of True-Line
Efficiency Experts Corp. "Maybe you hid it there. You always
had a fondness for that
place."
You feel a small hitch. In your leg, let's say. Just a tiny
clutching sensation in the back of
your right calf. But you walk through it, and it goes away.
You say to your father as you reach the car, "You really drive

her home this morning?"
"Who?"
"Mandy?"
"Who's ... ?" Your father opens his door, looks at you over it.
"Oh, the whore?"
"Yeah."
"Did I drive her home?"
"Yeah."
Your father pats the top of the door, the cuff of his deni m jacket
flapping around his
wrist, his eyes on you. You feel, as you always have, reflected
in them, even when you
aren't, couldn't be, wouldn't be.
"Did I drive her home?" A smile bounces in the rubber of your
father's face.
"Did you drive her home?" you say.
That smile's all over the place now —the eyebrows, too. "Define
home."
You say, "I wouldn't know, would I?"
"You're still pissed at me because I killed Fat Boy."
"George."

"What?"
"His name was George."
"He would have ratted."
"To who? It wasn't like he could file a claim. Wasn't a fucking
lottery ticket."
Your father shrugs, looks off down the street.
"I just want to know if you drove her home."
"I drove her home," your father says.
"Yeah?"
"Oh, sure."
"Where'd she live?"
"Home," he says, and gets behind the wheel, starts the ignition.
You never figured George Brunda for smart, and only after a
full day in his house, going
through everything down to the point of removing the drywall
and putting it back,
resealing it, touching up the paint, did Gwen say, "Where's the
mother stay again?"
That took uniforms, Gwen as a nurse, you as an orderly,
Gentleman Pete out in the car
while your father kept watch on George's mine entrance and
monitored police activity
over a scanner.

The old lady said, "You're new here, and quite pretty," as Gwen
shot her up with
phenobarbital and Valium and you went to work on the room.
This was the glitch: You'd watched George drive to work,
watched him enter the mine.
No one saw him come back out again, because no one was
looking on the other side of
the hill, at the exit of a completely different shaft. So while
your father watched the
front, George took off out the back, drove over to check on his
investment, walked into
the room just as you pulled the rock from the back of the
mother's radio, George looking
politely surprised, as if he'd stepped into the wrong room.
He smiled at you and Gwen, held up a hand in apology, and
backed out of the room.
Gwen looked at the door, looked at you.
You looked at Gwen, looked at the window, looked at the rock
filling the center of your
palm, the entire center of your palm. Looked at the door.
Gwen said, "Maybe we—"
And George came through the door again, nothing polite in his
face, a gun in his hand.
And not any regular gun—a motherfucking six-shooter, like
they carried in westerns,
long, thin barrel, a family heirloom maybe, passed down from a
great-great-great-

grandfather, not even a trigger guard, just the trigger, and crazy
fat George the lonely
unloved pulling back on it and squeezing off two rounds, the
first of which went out the
window, the second of which hit metal somewhere in the room
and then bounced off
that. The old lady went "Ooof," even though she was doped up
and passed out, and it
sounded to you like she'd eaten something that didn't agree with
her. You could picture
her sitting in a restaurant, halfway through coffee, placing a
hand to her belly, saying it:
"Ooof." And George would come around to her chair and say,
"Is everything okay,
Mama?"
But he wasn't doing that now, because the old lady went ass-
end-up out of the bed and
hit the floor, and George dropped the gun and stared at her and
said, "You shot my
mother."
And you said, "You shot your mother," your entire body jetting
sweat through the pores
all at once.
"No, you did. No, you did."
You said, "Who was holding the fucking gun?"
But George didn't hear you. George jogged three steps and
dropped to his knees. The old
lady was on her side, and you could see blood staining the back
of her white johnny.
George cradled her face, looked into it, and said, "Mother. Oh,

Mother, oh, Mother, oh,
Mother."
And you and Gwen ran right the fuck out of that room.
In the car Gwen said, "You saw it, right? He shot his own
mother."
"He did?"
"He did," she said. "Baby, she's not going to die from that."
"Maybe. She's old."
"She's old, yeah. The fall from the bed was worse."
"We shot an old lady."
"We didn't shoot her."
"In the ass."
"We didn't shoot anyone. He had the gun."
"That's how it'll play, though. You know that. An old lady.
Christ."
Gwen's eyes were the size of that diamond as she looked at you,
and then she said,
"Ooof."
"Don't start," you said.
"I can't help it, Bobby. Jesus."

She said your name. That's your name—Bobby. You loved
hearing her say it.
Sirens were coming up the road behind you now, and you were
looking at her and
thinking, This isn't funny, it isn't, it's fucking sad, that poor old
lady, and thinking, Okay,
it's sad, but God, Gwen, I will never, ever live without you. I
just can't imagine it
anymore. I want to ... What?
Wind was pouring into the car, and the sirens were growing
louder, an army of them,
and Gwen's face was an inch from yours, her hair falling from
behind her ear and
whipping across her mouth, and she was looking at you, she was
seeing you—
really seeing you. Nobody'd ever done that, nobody. She was
tuned to you like a radio
tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking
red under a dark-blue
sky, and that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for
Christ's sake, her, and she was
laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady
had fallen out of the bed
and it wasn't funny, it wasn't, and you said the first part in your
head, the "I want to"
part, but you said the second part aloud: "Dissolve into you."
And Gentleman Pete, up there at the wheel, on this dark country
road, said, "What?"
But Gwen said, "I know, baby. I know." And her voice broke

around the words, broke in
the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt, and she
took your face in her
hands as Pete drove up on the interstate, and you saw all those
siren lights washing
across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream. Then the
window came down like
yanked netting and chucked glass pebbles into your shirt, and
you felt something in your
head go all shifty and loose and hot as a cigarette coal.
The fairground is empty, and you and your father walk around
for a bit. The tarps over
some of the booths have come undone at the corners, and they
rustle and flap, caught
between the wind and the wood, and your father watches you,
waiting for you to
remember, and you say, "It's coming back to me. A little."
Your father says, "Yeah?"
You hold up your hand, tip it from side to side.
Out behind the cages where, in summer, they set up the dunking
machine and the
bearded lady's chair and the fast-pitch machines, you see a fresh
square of dirt, recently
tilled, and you stand over it until your old man stops beside
you, and you say, "Mandy?"
The old man chuckles softly, scuffs at the dirt with his shoe,
looks off at the horizon.
"I held it in my hand, you know," you say.
"I'd figure," the old man says.

It's quiet, the land flat and metal-blue and empty for miles in
every direction, and you
can hear the rustle of the tarps and nothing else, and you know
that the old man has
brought you here to kill you. Picked you up from prison to kill
you. Brought you into the
world, probably, so eventually he could kill you.
"Covered the center of my palm."
"Big, huh?"
"Big enough."
"Running out of patience, boy," your father says.
You nod. "I'd guess you would be."
"Never my strong suit."
"No."
"This has been nice," your father says, and sniffs the air. "Like
old times, reconnecting
and all that."
"I told her that night to just go, just put as much country as she
could between you and
her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you'd
stay hot on her trail even
when all logic said you'd quit. I told her even if I told you I had
it, you'd have to cover
your bets—you'd have to come looking for her."

Your father looks at his watch, looks off at the sky again.
"I told her if you ever caught up to her, to take you to the
fairground."
"Who's this we're talking about?"
"Gwen." Saying her name to the air, to the flapping tarps, to the
cold.
"You don't say." Your father's gun comes out now. He taps it
against his outer knee.
"Told her to tell you that's all she knew. I'd hid it here.
Somewhere here."
"Lotta ground."
You nod.
Your father turns so you are facing, his hands crossed over his
groin, the gun there,
waiting.
"The kinda money that stone'll bring," your father says, "a man
could retire."
"To what?" you say.
…
A&P
by john updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the
third check-out slot, with my
back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the
bread. The one that caught my eye
first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky
kid, with a good tan and a sweet
broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just
under it, where the sun never seems
to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my
hand on a box of HiHo crackers
trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and
the customer starts giving me hell.
She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty
with rouge on her cheekbones and
no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd
been watching cash registers forty
years and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a
bag -- she gives me a little snort
in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have
burned her over in Salem -- by
the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the
bread and were coming back,

without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle
between the check-outs and the
Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this
chunky one, with the two-piece -- it
was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and
her belly was still pretty pale so I
guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one
of those chubby berry-faces, the
lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall
one, with black hair that hadn't quite
frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the
eyes, and a chin that was too long
-- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking"
and "attractive" but never quite
makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so
much -- and then the third one,
that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led
them, the other two peeking around
and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not
this queen, she just walked
straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She
came down a little hard on her
heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting
down her heels and then letting the

weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor
with every step, putting a little
deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how
girls' minds work (do you really
think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a
glass jar?) but you got the idea she
had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now
she was showing them how to do
it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know --
bathing suit with a little nubble
all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were
off her shoulders looped loose
around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit
had slipped a little on her, so all
around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it
hadn't been there you wouldn't have
known there could have been anything whiter than those
shoulders. With the straps pushed off,
there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her
head except just her, this clean
bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones
like a dented sheet of metal
tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached,
done up in a bun that was
unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P
with your straps down, I suppose it's
the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high
her neck, coming up out o fthose
white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The
longer her neck was, the more
of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my
shoulder Stokesie in the second slot
watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes
moving across the racks, and
stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside
of my apron, and buzzed to the
other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they
all three of them went up the cat-
and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-
seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks-
rackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up
this aisle to the meat counter,
and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of

fumbled with the cookies, but on
second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing
their carts down the aisle -- the
girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have
one-way signs or anything) -- were
pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white
shoulders dawned on them, kind of
jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own
baskets and on they pushed. I
bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people
would by and large keep reaching and
checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there
was a third thing, began with A,
asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do
mutter. But there was no doubt, this
jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked
around after pushing their carts past
to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on
the beach, where what with the
glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another
thing in the cool of the A & P,
under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages,
with her feet paddling along

naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two
babies chalked up on his fuselage
already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's
twenty-two, and I was nineteen this
April.
"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his
voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's
going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's
called the Great Alexandrov and
Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a
big summer colony out on the
Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women
generally put on a shirt or shorts or
something before they get out of the car into the street. And
anyway these are usually women
with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and
nobody, including them, could care
less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you
stand at our front doors you can see

two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper
store and three real-estate offices
and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central
Street because the sewer broke again.
It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and
there's people in this town haven't seen
the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking
McMahon something. He pointed, they
pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet
Delight peaches. All that was
left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and
looking after them sizing up their
joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't
help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family
says it's sad but I don't think it's sad
myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon,
so there was nothing much to do
except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up
again. The whole store was like a
pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out
of. After a while they come

around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at
discount of the Caribbean Six or
Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste
the wax on, sixpacks of candy
bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when
a kid looks at them anyway.
Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a
little gray jar in her hand. Slots
Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her
wondering between Stokes and me, but
Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray
pants who stumbles up with four
giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all
that pineapple juice' I've often
asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the
jar and I take it into my fingers icy
cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢.
Now her hands are empty, not a
ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where
the money's coming from. Still
with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the
hollow at the center of her nubbled
pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that
was so cute.

Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from
haggling with a truck full of
cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked
MANAGER behind which he
hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty
dreary, teaches Sunday school and the
rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says,
"Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I
was noticing for the first time, now
that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of
herring snacks." Her voice kind
of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first,
coming out so flat and dumb yet
kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks."
All of a sudden I slid right down
her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men
were standing around in ice-cream
coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up
herring snacks on toothpicks off a
big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water
with olives and sprigs of mint in
them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade
and if it's a real racy affair

Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons
stenciled on.
"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His
repeating this struck me as funny, as
if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these
years the A & P was a great big
dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling --
-as I say he doesn't miss much --
but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-
superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid,
that I liked better from the back -
- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any
shopping. We just came in for the one
thing."
"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see
from the way his eyes went that he
hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want
you decently dressed when you
come in here."
"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing,
getting sore now that she

remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs
the A & P must look pretty
crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here
with your shoulders covered. It's
our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is
what the kingpins want. What the
others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their
carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a
scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a
paper bag as gently as peeling a
peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence
everybody getting nervous, most of
all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this
purchase?"
I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I
go through the punches, 4, 9,
GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after
you do it often enough, it begins
to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello
(bing) there, you (gung) hap-py
pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease

the bill, tenderly as you may
imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest
scoops of vanilla I had ever known
were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink
palm, and nestle the herrings in a
bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I
say "I quit" to Lengel quick
enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their
unsuspected hero. They keep
right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and
they flicker across the lot to their car,
Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw
material she was so bad), leaving
me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
"Did you say something, Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to embarrass them."
"It was they who were embarrassing us."
I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a
saying of my grand- mother's, and

I know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back
of my apron and start shrugging
it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading
for my slot begin to knock against
each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray.
He's been a friend of my parents
for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and
Dad," he tells me. It's true, I
don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal
not to go through with it. I fold
the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on
the counter, and drop the bow tie
on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered.
"You'll feel this for the rest of your
life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering
how he made that pretty girl
blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and
the machine whirs "pee-pul" and

the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place
in summer, I can follow this up
with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat
and galoshes, I just saunter into
the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the
night before, and the door heaves
itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the
asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There
wasn't anybody but some young
married screaming with her children about some candy they
didn't get by the door of a powder-
blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows,
over the bags of peat moss and
aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see
Lengel in my place in the slot,
checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back
stiff, as if he'd just had an
injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard
the world was going to be to me
hereafter.

Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p

Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p

Similar to Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p (20)

More from AASTHA76

More from AASTHA76 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Art of literature eng 262 karlis paper # 1 p