A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.In his Introduction, Jeffrey Eugenides provides the above definition for what he was looking for when he set out to collect his favourite love stories of the preceding 120 years. As a result, this anthology contains tales at once more bleak and more revelatory than one would expect to find in the Romance section of the local bookshop, and that was apparently Eugenides' goal: these are not romances, not happily-ever-after fairytales, not likely to make one gasp with empathetic tears. As the great preponderance of the twenty-seven stories were written by white men – as was the ancient Latin poem from which Eugenides took the anthology's title – My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead offers a narrow slice of the experience of love (presumably that with which Eugenides himself could identify); yet as this narrow slice is likely underrepresented in the Romance section of the local bookshop, it's as valid a focus as any for a collection of short stories. As with any anthology, I had an uneven reading experience – some stories I loved, others bored me; some authors were excitingly new to me, others were cosily familiar – and I was happy to slog through the dross to find the gold.
By focussing on the experiences of the white male, predictable themes emerge: the desperation of the unconsummated teenage relationship; the businesslike approach to choosing a suitable wife; the emotional trap of extramarital affairs. I was surprised, however, how many stories revealed the violence that male characters are suppressing as they attempt to possess and control their women. James Joyce springs it on us in The Dead, as does Milan Kundera in his outstanding The Hitchhiking Game. In The Bad Thing by David Gates, when a pregnant woman gets drunk, and as a result her husband calls her a whore before threatening to strike her, she is at first confused:
I wasn't angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, only hurting himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn't understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.I was immediately struck by the inventiveness of the writing in Innocence by Harold Brodkey. Describing the inherent inequality displayed by one young woman's beauty, he writes, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” (Loved that line.) After four years of college, the narrator is finally able to bed the beautiful Orra (Wiley is self-aware that he is conquest-driven), and when he discovers that she's never had an orgasm, protests that she isn't interested in having one, he still makes it his mission to bring her there. And again, this is about control. Although Orra continues to protest, twenty of the thirty-six pages of this short story involve the details of one later lovemaking session, and although I might have balked at the ambiguity of her frequent protests – Is a woman still in control if her lover knowingly makes her lose control? What does this mean in a “No means no” world? – Wiley is constantly evaluating Orra's responses and considering the effects of stopping or continuing at every point. So, despite him patronisingly acting like only he knows what's best for Orra, I was forced to accept this as a considered male perspective and not be offended on her behalf. And then the writing as Wiley watches her growing and unfurling wings:
It was as if something unbelievably strange and fierce – like the holy temper – lifted her to where she could not breathe or walk: she choked in the ether, a scrambling seraph, tumbling and aflame and alien, powerful beyond belief, hideous and frightening and beautiful beyond the reach of the human. A screaming child, an angel howling in the Godly sphere: she churned without delicacy, as wild as an angel bearing threats; her body lifted from the sheets, fell back, lifted again; her hands beat on the bed; she made very loud hoarse tearing noises – I was frightened for her: this was her first time after six years of playing around with her body. It hurt her; her face looked like something made of stone, a monstrous carving; only her body was alive; her arms and legs were outspread and tensed and they beat or they were weak and fluttering. She was an angel as brilliant as a beautiful insect infinitely enlarged and irrevocably foreign: she was unlike me: she was a girl making rattling, astonished, uncontrolled, unhappy noises, a girl looking shocked and intent and harassed by the variety and viciousness of the sensations, including relief, that attacked her.In the end, I couldn't think of that as violence, and as I flipped back to see who the author was, that's when I realised that Eugenides had started the collection with another of Brodkey's stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, and then I had even more respect for the author: in this story about a teenage boy being raised in a family with a single mother and an older sister, Brodkey totally captured a credible feminine atmosphere of love and longing. (And when I later read that the Orra character features in several of Brodkey's stories, and that she's based on his first wife, the lovemaking seemed like more of a partnership than a subjugation in retrospect.)
I loved the frequent ironic asides that the narrator makes to the reader in Gilbert Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight, and thought this a fitting conclusion after the protagonist sees his first love again after a decade apart:
You are perfectly justified in scoffing at the outrageous transparency of it if I tell you that his wife said that he was so pale that he looked as if he had seen a ghost, but that is, indeed, what she said. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.And I found Lorrie Moore to be frequently, heart-breakingly, funny in How to Be an Other Woman:
When you were young you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but it essentially means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.I was blown away by the gritty realism in Dirty Wedding by Denis Johnson, Something That Needs Nothing by Miranda July, and Fireworks by Richard Ford; I had never before read Johnson or July and enjoyed their styles so much that I have already ordered books by them both (as well as a memoir of Harold Brodkey's dying days). Jon by George Saunders was as futuristic-weird as any of his other stories I've read, and there are, naturally, stories in this anthology that I have read and enjoyed before: Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Chechov's The Lady With the Little Dog, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . And yet, although new to me and seemingly universally praised, neither Faulkner's A Rose for Emily nor Nabokov's Spring in Fialta really touched me.
Like I said, anthologies are usually uneven reading experiences; I'm pretty sure each of us would have a different list of the love stories that we admire. And a note: despite my rambling, I haven't referenced all the stories in this collection; but uncited doesn't necessarily mean unenjoyed. Even the stories that did bore me gave me something to think about, so this was never a waste of time. And insofar as I discovered some new voices, it was time well spent.
I was talking to my little brother, Kyler, years ago, and I don't remember what prompted it, but he started talking about his friend, Hoss. Kye said:
You know that Tragically Hip song, "Thirty -six years old, never kissed a girl..."? Well, that's Hoss. I'm serious. Thirty-six and never been kissed. Sweet guy, makes money, but he's, like, three hundred pounds and shy around women, and unless he's paid for it, he has never so much as kissed a woman. And I look at him and I wonder what it's like to be in Hoss' mind, you know? Like the violence that must be in there every time he sees a girl. Because this is what you'll never know: Me? I'm happily married, I will never cheat on my wife -- that's something I know because that's something I can control -- but when I see a really good-looking woman walking around with an average-looking guy, it makes me mad. Like, why is she with him and not with me? So when I think of Hoss, just what's it like when he sees that woman with that average guy? If I'm mad, how does he feel? And, in a way, it makes me understand why there is violence against women. Like, you can't understand the control it takes not to act on these feelings.I was, naturally, shocked by this monologue; assumed this isn't how all men think; surely this isn't how my husband thinks? So it was kind of doubly shocking to see this theme -- this repression of violence even by otherwise loving partners -- being written about over and over. And why don't I think I've read this before? (Kyler also once said to me, "Here's something you don't know: over every urinal in every bar, there's a collection of boogers from guys who pick their noses while pissing and who then smear it on the wall in front of them. You look at a guy while he's doing that and he doesn't even care, it's just automatic, his face almost bored." I don't need to know everything about the male experience. Let's preserve some mystery, Kye.)
And another, unrelated, note: After reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I looked it up on the internet; mostly to confirm which character it was that Michael Keaton's character was playing in the play-within-the-movie in Birdman. SparkNotes told me that Raymond Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, revealed after the author's death, "that he edited Carver’s work so heavily that he should be considered a coauthor of the stories", and then I read this article in Forbes, that explains how Birdman "betrayed" the spirit of Carver's story. And then I read Carver's original story in The New Yorker (released after Carver's death by his wife to protest Lish's meddling), and couldn't believe how different it was from the version included in the book -- and have to concede that Lish's editing made the story much tighter and more meaningful than Carver had originally set out. As that Forbes article laments that Birdman doesn't adhere to Carver's intent, yet is referring to the version of the story that Carver's wife said didn't adhere to Carver's original intent, I wonder if Eugenides ever had a moment of conflict, wondering which version to include in his anthology?