Here's the first sentence from this collection:
Sarah or Anya or Max is five foot ten, five foot nine, or five foot eight, but never shorter, and she's naturally thin.
The sentence has the zip to get you into the first story, but it also has that playful experimentalism -- a fascination with the present tense, and the immediate relationship between writer and reader. "The Archetype's Girlfriend" forces the reader to accept the story as progressively in-progress: with each sentence, you get more possibilities, and since each receives but a moment of your time, you hardly can imagine the world from Crane's words. You just know she's writing, and you're reading, and she's on crack. Her narratives are so fast, she's gotta be on crack.
The pace seldom changes in these short stories, so it's hard not to read Crane into her characters. She must be a rapid-fire, quick-witted lady, and this is usually to her credit, as her writing can recall both Anne Tyler or Lorrie Moore. You will enjoy her women; they're fun types you'd like to meet in a bar -- women who are perky but who also like the Cure. More often than not, they wield their humor so much that the jokes define the characters. Alice, the girl without a drinking problem who thinks she might be an alcoholic, never has a thought that doesn't add color to her personality:
...I had no inclination to sample the crack, as I had preferred a more relaxing type of altered consciousness in my drinking days, but it wasn't a good sign, even though he said he never bought it himself and that I should I understand I guess he only used crack socially. (179-180)
Whenever a woman sees her boyfriend smoke crack, and thinks, "This is not a good sign", damned if I don't want to see the woman every week on her own TV show. Crane's wacky, Phoebe-like self works best when her characters' jokes spin out from the unique events into which the story has thrust them. This happens when the story has a little heft, and when it poses questions -- Is Mother dead, or at the bus stop? -- that are distinctly Crane's own.
If the story runs less than five pages, though, that's scarcely enough time for Crane's leading ladies to finish their first riff. As Crane gives most of her characters identifiable traits of "people we might also know", her shorter stories -- especially the two-pagers -- may not be enough for the character to even show her individuality.
"Good for You!", the shortest story in the lot, doesn't work because the set-up (in which a woman sends out a Christmas card that might embarrass her) and its primary joke ("I looked at the card again to see if I was exposed in some way") will make you remember a Seinfeld episode. There is a value to the character revealing that concern, as we do indeed quote from TV shows in our day-to-day lives, but the story's only a page long. It's supposed to close out the collection with a certain pride and independence ("I emailed her back again, and said that I am not most people"), but the reader never has the time within the story to erase Elaine's nipples from his consciousness.
Readers who are weary of the cute and perky hate Anne Tyler too, and I'm sure Crane and her publishers know this. More sadness in the stories might have given the book a better balance -- one that reflects life more realistically than a sitcom. Still, look at the way Crane constructs her jokes. In "You Take Naps", an older woman notes the differences between she and her current, much younger love:
He thinks five hundred dollars is a lot of money.
You think five hundred dollars is a beaded handbag with a picture of a pug embroidered on it. (61)
This sort of note-taking goes on and on, but then she pulls a surprise:
You have experience.
He has hope.
You have hope too.
But you hate a cheesy ending. So you amend that; you have hope too, but maybe not for the same things. You want the ending to be neither cheesy or gloomy. You want the ending to be open. (62)
Crane ends "You Take Naps" by noting the differing perceptions between the young and less-young, and, more importantly, by bringing this story back to the first story, wherein readers are basically given multiple choices of how they want the story to progress. "You Take Naps" becomes not only about the character, and showing what she's about, but about the reader, the writer, and the person scribbling down this sentence.
Like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Crane interconnects her stories to the point where they almost all seem about the same person, and she never writes the writerly aspect out of them. Please don't mistake When the Messenger is Hot for metafiction -- this won't explicitly tell you how a story should be written -- but any aspiring young writer will want to treat this as a book to be broken down, analyzed and learned from. Crane's failings never lie in her story- and sentence-making, just in her balance of happiness and grief.
To her eternal shame, she may not be sad enough yet. And to her eternal credit, there wasn't one opening sentence that didn't pull me into its ensuing story. I admired Crane's ability to make both minor and major characters enjoyable, and her willingness to not only take a few chances, but force the readers be accept them from the get-go. This book is new, or almost-new, or now in paperback, and it will be bought up by a movie studio, or by God, and you'll hear about Crane again. There's no way I will be her only diehard fan.
-- Theodore Defosse
· · · · · · ·
About the Publisher:
Little, Brown and Co., once known for the Little Brown Handbook, are an arm of the Time-Warner publishing family, and currently serve as home to many of the best voices in postmodernist fiction, including John Barth.
|
