John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” opens with a flowing description of alcohol and its effect on those whose Sunday mornings are particularly trying because of it:

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vesitarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’”^[1]

This one paragraph—this one innocent paragraph describing something we have all most likely been subject to—sets up the short story perfectly. Because not even a mere paragraph later, the story’s main character, Neddy Merrill, has decided in his drunken haze to swim to his house via all of the swimming pools that lie in between where he is currently at, the Westerhazy’s, and his home roughly eight miles away. He even decides to name this route he is about to follow the Lucinda River, named for his wife.

After planning for the best path to take (“The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups [...]“), Neddy embarks on his new man-made journey back to his house. When he arrives at some pools there is a party in full swing, whereas other pools are either empty or are in poor condition because the homeowners have moved away. As the story progresses Neddy finds that the weather has gotten colder, that he has become weaker to the point of having trouble just getting out of the last few pools, and that the trees have lost their leaves. When Neddy finally arrives at his house he finds that it is empty and has been sold.

While “The Swimmer” is founded firmly in surrealism (even Mickey Mantle in his drunken prime on a summer day would have made it to his home eight miles away before Autumn set in) it is a surrealism that is identifiable. You may not have yet met someone like Neddy Merrill—a man who overindulges in alcohol, holds social rank as an important virtue, and has had an affair with a younger woman—but it is very easy to picture him as a real person if only in segments. For instance, Neddy arrives at the Biswanger’s house (the third to last pool on his route) while a party is in full swing and he walks over to the bar, completely unaware of the gravity of Grace Biswanger calling him a gate crasher as well as being unable to decipher why the bartender at this party gives him condescending glares. It is quite simple to think of this scene and assimilate it to someone we know, or to a friend or relative of a friend.

As for the story in a contextual whole, is the life of Neddy Merrill ultimately one worth reading about? Is there any redemption to his story? What is the message of the story? At nine pages in length, “The Swimmer” primarily exists as a story that provides a shard of a man’s life. And while there is no redemption here per se, “The Swimmer” acts a well-crafted metaphor and cautionary tale about how quickly one’s life can be derailed by their own doing.

We are not given the full background of Neddy’s life leading up to the days of his “swimming” odyssey (as opposed to, say, how Willy Loman is rendered for us) but the story is nonetheless tragic in its short portrayal of a man who is completely unaware of the insulated world he has created around him. He mentions his daughters but he never speaks to them in the story. He is completely unaware that at least two different people have told him that they will not loan him any money as soon as they see him.

“The Swimmer” is an excellent foray into one of the greatest faults that can plague and consume anyone—fooling yourself into a series of bad choices and not even being consciously aware that everything has fallen apart around you.

[1] For what it’s worth, this opening passage reminded me immediately of the lines in “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground that go “Sunday morning/And I’m falling/I’ve got a feeling I don’t want to know.”

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of nine short stories that Flannery O’Connor wrote before she died in 1964 and was released posthumously a year later. In some way each story deals with themes of race, religion, and morality amongst tragically flawed characters inside of combustible settings. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is a short story (alongside two others in the collection) that ends with a character being killed.  It is also a story that best exemplifies the way in which O’Connor forces an uneasiness on the reader: we know that everything is going to end very badly early on, while one of the main characters—the father—is absolutely clueless as to all the negative warning signs.

The story follows a father, Sheppard, and his son Norton.  Sheppard’s official title is City Recreational Director, but on Saturdays he works pro bono as a counselor at a reformatory.  His wife recently passed away.

At the reformatory he meets a club-footed teenage black boy named Rufus Johnson.  Sheppard is taken back by Rufus’ intelligence and personal history, which includes physical abuse at the hands of his grandfather.  And so Sheppard—a man who not only has not gotten over the death of his wife, but who also has a young son who has never experienced any of the hardships that Rufus has been through (“Do you have any idea what it means to share?” he asks his only son)—not only gives Rufus a key to their house to come and go as he pleases, but also tries at every turn to lavish praise and education on Rufus over Norton.

However, it turns out that Rufus is an extremely bad kid.  While he and Norton are home alone he bosses Norton around with relish, and eventually goes through Norton’s mother’s things (clothes, a comb, a brush) even as Norton yells at him not to.  From here, the story becomes a bit predictable in terms of how it logically unfolds (Sheppard continues to want to help Rufus while pushing Norton away, Rufus refuses the special shoe Sheppard wants to buy for him, Rufus continues to get in trouble with the police but Sheppard always vouches for him) but O’Connor was a master architect of constructing stories that seemed to follow a certain blueprint, only to have scenes of tragic gravity arise unexpectedly as if to make you forget to look for a whiff of foreshadowing.

For example, the way that O’Connor writes into the story that Norton has a telescope in the attic of the home.  So that when Sheppard takes Rufus upstairs and shows him the instrument and uses it as a means to try to convey to Rufus that we’re living in the space age now and that anything is possible; that this instrument—the telescope—is a physical manifestation of man’s triumph over his existence and that you, Rufus, should see this as a metaphor for how to overcome your own situation because, well, you are so smart and can do anything…  This, combined with Rufus’ caustic appeasement of Norton’s naïveté towards space, heaven, and his mother’s death—

“When I’m dead will I go to hell or where she is?” Norton asked.
“Right now you’d go where she is,” Johnson said, “but if you live long enough, you’ll go to hell.”

—lead to Norton’s tragic decision at the end of the story, which heartbreakingly coincides almost exactly with Sheppard’s moment of clarity in which he finally realizes his unconditional love for his son.

“The Lame Shall Enter First” is most certainly not an uplifting story.  But as a vehicle in which to explore religion, race, and the desire to selfishly help others in the supposed name of unselfishness, it is an astonishingly lucid portrait.  To some, this may not be a good thing but as far as short fiction writing goes you would be hard-pressed to find fault in this exploration.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

Before I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club’s critique of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” a few weeks back, the only thing I knew about Flannery O’Connor was that Jacob was reading All That Rises Must Converge while John Locke was being thrown out the window by his father in the two-part finale of the last season of Lost. Truth be told, I just assumed that, with a name like Flannery O’Connor, that O’Connor was, like James Joyce, an Irish writer. Instead, O’Connor was a woman who lived in the Deep South who wrote two novels and thirty two short stories that primarily revolved around grotesque characters that projected O’Connor’s own battles with her faith, and asked the reader to deal with situations that were fraught with moral and ethical imbalances. Basically, I could not have been more wrong in my assumption of who the writer was.

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the first short story of the collection that bears its eponymous name. It is about a family that goes on a road trip from their home in Georgia to Florida for a vacation. The family consists of the grandmother (whose name is never mentioned), her son Bailey and his wife (who is also not named), and their kids–John Wesley, June Star, and a newborn baby (again, not named). The grandmother shows Bailey a story in the paper about a killer named The Misfit who has escaped from a federal prison in Florida; this, combined with the fact that she grew up in east Tennessee, the grandmother tries to convince the family to go there instead of Florida but her lobbying falls on deaf ears and the family departs south. Along the way they stop at The Tower for lunch and the grandmother winds up talking to the proprietor, Red Sammy, and they both lament about how nowadays there are no good men around (Red Sammy tells the story of how he was recently ripped off by some young men that he thought he could trust).

When the family is back on the road the grandmother asks Bailey if he would pull off course for a quick spell so that she could look at an old plantation house that she loved to see when she was younger. She is able to get the kids to go for it as well by saying that the house has all sorts of treasures stored away inside of it. On their way to this house they get into an accident and are ultimately found by The Misfit and his two accomplices. The two other men first kill Bailey and John Wesley, then the mother, June Star, and the baby by walking them into a nearby forest and shooting them. The grandmother and The Misfit talk for a little while before he kills her.

That is the nutshell version of the story but it is so much more complex, especially with regards to the grandmother. For one thing, it is very subtly implied that she may have been senile and that she is ultimately the reason why they were all killed. The obvious example of this is that in the aftermath of the accident she realizes that the plantation house that she had Bailey drive around and look for was actually in Tennessee and nowhere near where they were. But during the first reading of the story you could chalk that up to the shock of the crash itself–maybe she is still coming around and this is just the first thing comes across her mind as she attempts re-align herself. But tucked away and subtly dropped in on the second page of the story are the following lines between the grandmother and the kids:

The fact that June Star tells the grandmother that her hair is naturally curly has a weight to it that is really easy to overlook on first read. The same goes for how June Star says the grandmother “wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks” and how she’d be “afraid she’d miss something” if she was not with the family. O’Connor very subtly renders the grandmother as someone who is both bossy and forgetful, an extremely dangerous combination that foreshadows the fate of the family.

Another facet of the grandmother is her antiquated worldview, the stereotypical Deep South outlook. Because the grandmother is really the only member of the family who speaks throughout the story, she is the only person with whom we are allowed any insight into. So that when she is confronted by The Misfit all of her thoughts and reasonings are so vapid and pointless that everything leading up to her murder is tragic and frightening.

The Misfit and his two accomplices, Hiram and Bobby Lee, are nearby and see the accident occur when the family is on its way to the plantation house (the one that doesn’t exist where they are at). The grandmother recognizes The Misfit from his picture in the paper. His two accomplices take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods and kill them, followed by inducing the same fate on the mother, June Star, and the baby. During this whole time the grandmother and The Misfit talk and she pleas to him that he is good man and that he shouldn’t be doing this (“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”) and that he should find Jesus. The Misfit calmly and coldly replies to everything she has to say, and some of his replies are simply chilling and haunting. For example: when the grandmother tells him that she will give him all the money she has, he says,

“Lady, there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip.”

When she implores him to pray to Jesus and spare her life, he gives her this speech [the misspellings are verbatim],

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can–by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”

By this point in the story, The Misfit is wearing Bailey’s shirt–it being removed from him before he was killed. As the two continue to talk about Jesus raising the dead, the grandmother suddenly says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” and reaches out and touches his shoulder. The Misfit springs back (“as if bitten by a snake”) at her touch and shoots her three times. This is where I think the grandmother’s senility comes full circle as I interpreted this scene as being that she thought she was looking at Bailey–completely forgetting who was wearing the shirt.

The story ends with the following exchange between the three criminals:

“‘She was a talker, wasn’t she?’ Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’
‘Some fun!’ Bobby Lee said.
‘Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. ‘It’s no real pleasure in life.’”

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the short story that put Flannery O’Connor on the literary map. It is dark, it is tragic, and, like a lot of her other works, revolves around the struggle to uphold faith in a chaotic world in which causeless murder occurs, and remorseless con men prey on people. This should be required reading at the high school level if for no other reason than to illustrate that a deeply complex and chilling story can be written in under twenty five pages.

“I see it all now as I couldn’t when I was young.”

The Country of the Pointed Firs was first serialized in 1896 in The Atlantic Monthly and made a name of Sarah Orne Jewett, though her name was mostly relegated to literary and local (i.e.-New England) circles. Jewett’s writing method was that of the local color style–stories that directly reflected the manners, dialect, and overall sentimentality of the region in which the author lived and/or grew up in. Jewett’s ability to write in local color had such a profound impact on Willa Cather that Cather could not begin to write the stories that would ultimately become O Pioneers! and My Ántonia until she had met Jewett. (Cather and Jewett would meet and become friends until Jewett’s death in 1909.)

Pointed Firs, the first story of this collection and Jewett’s proclaimed masterpiece, takes place in the fictional Maine town of Dunnet Landing. The story revolves around the narrator, an unnamed woman who is not married, staying in Dunnet Landing for a summer so that she may have the necessary solitude required to finish her writing. The narrator lodges with Mrs. Almira Todd, a local woman whose expertise with gardening and herbal knowledge is practically unchallenged by anyone. From the outset of the story, the narrator is somewhat irritable towards the interruptions by Almira and the lack of solitude that was desired, yet, the narrator also acknowledges that she has missed seeing Dunnet Landing (“After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs..”) and eventually admits to herself that Almira and the surrounding distractions are, in fact, most welcome. This is the essence of the story: youth and age and its inertia within life set against the beautifully described Maine coast.

The theme of youth and age are grounded in pretty realistic tones. The narrator, who is young, wants to be left alone to work; the town’s inhabitants who surround her, who are all considerably older, want to be left alone or, at the very least, follow the same scripted interaction between one another (for instance, you get the feeling that Almira has the same conversations with the doctor and her mother whenever they meet). Yet, when the narrator meets and talks to everyone, an invisible door is opened. The older folks open up and tell old stories, whether it be about other people or places they have seen or been to. Pointed Firs and the short stories that accompany it are not naturally fascinating stories; you have to look a little beyond the actual words to find the heart of them.

Like Edward Hopper’s paintings that focused on Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett lays before us something we can either take to be literal (stories and sketches about people interacting in a rural, coastal shore) or as something personal, complete with our own additions and subtractions (putting ourselves in the shoes of the narrator–someone who would be annoyed by elderly locals but then succumbing to our natural curiosities and affections towards them). Edward Hopper, more than anything else, is probably the best barometer as to whether you will like this collection of short stories. If you look at a picture like this, do you see just a lighthouse and house near the ocean? Or, do you look at it and think, “How do those people live there?” “What work does the father do?” “Is it a local family that lives there, or a transplant from New York?” or do you look at it as being an almost mathematically precise picture (the distant ocean line is almost the exact horizontal midpoint of the painting, and the lighthouse is almost the exact vertical midpoint, etc.)? Additionally, you can look at this painting as a good litmus test as well because it probably will not take your mind long before wondering if the two subjects are falling out of love or just entrenched in their own separate worlds.

Jewett balances the visual surroundings like the first painting with the human element of the second painting and the result is a bit of a catch-22. If you like delving into stories with a tone of isolation and a touch of emotional repression these will all fall into line quite nicely for you. If not, these stories are probably better suited for you when you are older and the referenced quote below the picture of the cover will hold more gravity. Personally, I found Jewett’s writing style to be pleasing but the stories to be work to get through and I ultimately took a pass on reading most of the other short stories.

I guess what I am trying to say is that if you are looking for character sketches about life in Maine, look up Edward Hopper’s work instead.