Three Stars: Passive Characters, Inconsequential Epiphanies.
Over the past fifteen to twenty years I’ve read perhaps a dozen stories by William Trevor published in The New Yorker. And like many, if not most stories published by The New Yorker, I didn’t like them. Some of Trevor’s New Yorker stories spoke to me, were entertaining, enlightening. But most were not.
After reading Trevor’s last story collection, published posthumously, Last Stories, I now understand why I didn’t and still don’t appreciate his stories. Largely they’re written with a passive voice. Some of these stories include nonsensical sentences that appear to be thrown in to create an impression that something profound has been said. The characters have no arc, they don’t change, they don’t learn anything beyond the “epiphany” in the summation that explains that the character understood (or didn’t) what had happened and accepted it, as if they were applying the final clause of the serenity prayer to the preceding events.
For the most part, Trevor’s characters don’t do anything, rather things happen to them. The stories don’t provide insights into their characters specifically or reveal anything about humanity generally. And if that weren’t a sufficient indictment, then consider that the title, Last Stories, is false advertising as Last Stories is a for the most part a collection of anecdotes or incidents rather than stories.
As authority for my last point, that Last Stories is not a collection of stories, I cite one of the foremost books on the craft of creative writing, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, by the late, great Russ Hills, who for decades was the fiction editor of Esquire Magazine. Hills distinguishes an incident or anecdote from a story by observing that in the narrative of a story, there comes a point of no return, where the principal character takes a certain action and is changed by it (character arc) or knowingly doesn’t take a proffered or particular action and is changed by the forbearance. As a consequence of the character’s arc, something about the human condition is revealed, some enlightenment is proffered.
Hills contrasts story with incident by describing the latter to be an event or a series of events that do not lead to any fundamental change. The lives of the characters may be affected by what happens but the character herself is not fundamentally changed. She learns nothing from what happens not because she’s obtuse but because nothing has happened that would change her character, make her a better person, reveal her to be a worse person, provide her with insight into her own existential condition. Hence, like such a character, the reader learns nothing.
Consider the first story in the collection, “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil.” The piano teacher, Miss Nightingale, is a fifty-year-old spinster, who lived with her father—a chocolatier—in the house where she was born until he died and has continued to live there ever since. She had a sixteen-year affair with a married man “she believed would one day free himself from the wife he was indifferent to.” When her lover ends the affair, the piano teacher suffers painful regret but is thankful for the memories.
As for the pupil, at his first lesson, “when his fingers touched the piano keys and when the first notes sounded, Miss Nightingale knew that she was in the presence of genius.” And so it goes with the pupil for a few years. Miss Nightingale is a quintessential passive character. She doesn’t even instruct the student. He doesn’t need lessons, he’s that good. But he does steal from her. After each lesson something, some knickknack or other is taken by the boy. Miss Nightingale never catches him in the act and she is far too passive to confront him. She wonders if her possessions the boy steals are a form of payment for his performances.
The thefts do make Ms. Nightingale wonder if her father had, over the years, bribed her for her company and affection by bringing her samples of his new candy creations. Her father’s only sin appears to be his death, which has left her alone. Miss Nightingale never leaves her home in any scene. The reader never sees her take any action.
After a few years, one day the boy simply doesn’t show up for his scheduled Friday lesson. He’s outgrown them, the narrator tells her readers. He comes back unannounced years later, says nothing, sits at the piano and plays. And what does Miss Nightingale learn? That’s she’s been a victim of her father, a lonely man who’d been calculating by bringing her candy, her lover who belittled their love, and the boy who stole from her. She learns that this is all a mystery that she has no right to understand, no right to understand how human frailty relates to love. In other words, she does nothing (not even teach the boy), she learns nothing, she is unchanged. And so is the reader.
The second story “The Crippled Man” (and so on thereafter) is really no different. There are four interesting human characters and a dilapidated auto that should have been taken off the road at least a decade earlier. Perhaps the auto is an allusion to the crippled man. The four characters are two Corinthian brothers who strike a bargain with the crippled man to paint his house. They’ve never painted a house before, but they need the work and the pay. There is the crippled man, a pensioner, who drinks quite a bit and his caretaker, Martina, upon whom the crippled man is virtually entirely dependent. Martina trades her body to the butcher for cuts of meat and keeps the money the crippled man has given her to purchase the meat.
Because of inclement weather followed by an offer of better paying work, the house painting goes into a hiatus for a few weeks. When the painters return, they see no sight of Martina and don’t see the crippled man in the house, though they peer through the windows. Outside the house they discover a mound of freshly turned earth that could be a grave. That’s the story. The characters are essentially passive, unless one considers burying the crippled man to be something Martina does actively. Martina has a motive to keep the death of the crippled man secret: his pension checks continue to arrive.
Martina does not appear in the story after the death (disappearance) of the crippled man is revealed. So the reader doesn’t know how or if his death has affected her. The reader doesn’t witness the death or internment. So the brothers are left to speculate about it all. “The woman’s history was not theirs to know . . .” nor was it the readers to know. “Tomorrow the woman would pay for the painting of the house. Tomorrow they would travel on.” And so will the reader as no character changed, nothing was illuminated or revealed.
It is said of modern realistic fiction that plot is irrelevant, that the purpose of the narrative is to reveal character. Heraclitus is reputed to have said that character is destiny. Perhaps it could be said of Miss Nightingale that her passive character foretells her perpetually lonely destiny. She appears to recognize this and accept her destiny. But so what? And what do we learn about Martina or more importantly what does she learn about herself? That she will barter her body of meat and that she will steal a pension from the state because of certain poverty if she doesn’t? Or because she’s insufficiently driven to better herself? As the reader is provided no view of her inner life, her deepest fears, and so forth, the reader cannot know the cause of her character. And all that the reader can surmise of her destiny is that she will not change, she will continue to reside in the crippled man’s house and live off his pension for an unknown period of time.
I personally don’t find this type of fiction rewarding.
