Editorial apology: This is a very stream of consciousness post sponsored by the word sensational. What do you want? It's a free blog. And it's not your fault.
[caption id="attachment_1520" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Jonathan Franzen, this season's king of Literary Sensation"]
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With the changing season come the new sensations for fall. The latest literary buzz I've been hearing is the story narrated by a five-year-old boy raised in captivity in a tiny room (The Room, by Emma Donoghue)--and this is battling the mere fact of Jonathan Franzen (oh, oh, oh! Check out this link, shared by good pals K & D --thanks K & D!), whose Freedom was just anointed by Oprah (that's what I call turning a lemon of the past into the lemonade of the future!).
I've been thinking about the sensational as I'm sneaking in time to read Jessica Treadway's gorgeous new collection, Please Come Back to Me. Like another of my favorite writers, William Trevor, Treadway takes on stories that could very well be "ripped from the headlines." We hear of people, for example, who set fires. In Colorado, we've been hearing about fires a lot lately, and the people setting them, intentionally or not, are objects of great universal scorn. I recently spent half a hike with Jenny I. speculating about what might happen to a person's finances, life, and soul if they, through their own carelessness, started a brutal and vengeful fire.
So what if you wrote a story about a fire starter, like Treadway does in "The Nurse and the Black Lagoon," who sets the fire intentionally but doesn't know why? One option would be to go for shock value, to expose coal in the arsonist's heart, or to trace back to some moment of past abuse—say, an uncle who steals away with a 5-year-old and subjects the child to various forms of burn-inspired horror. In this version, you could smell the gasoline, witness the initial spark, feel the racing of the arsonist's heart as he ignites the match. See the explosion of flames, watch the melting (faces, eyeballs, playground equipment, etc.). The interest in this story would be on the sensational elements, in some sort of American Psycho way. But I always think, if you can rip something from the headlines and help me understand how I, the reader, could be the fire starter, the drunk driver, the overcaffeinated killer, etc.--well, then, I'm yours. If you merely try to shock me by the gruesomeness of your tale, the precision of the violence, the cartilage from which the eyeball dangles, I could just turn on the TV for that. And TV makes me grumpy.
[caption id="attachment_1510" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="This year's winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short fiction, Jessica Treadway"]
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So what Treadway does in her story is introduce us to the teenaged fire starter's very "normal" family. What is it they don't want to see about him? About themselves? What are the stories they've mistold themselves for years? Is it a willful or unwitting mistelling? (Importantly, too--is "mistelling" a word? I think not, but I'm lazy.) And what happens when you add a dose of strange into the family therapist--he shuns the hairbrush and could dress more professionally but chooses not to--who comes in to try to turn on the lights?
Well, this isn't meant to be a book review (do get the book--you won't be sorry); I haven't read the entire collection yet. I have read the first four stories and they're phenomenal, and each one, in a different writer's hands, could make aliens out of characters who have prescient dreams, who, by accidents involving hockey, marry the wrong person, who misunderstand the most basic things about themselves. In these first four stories there's a lot of topical stuff: arson, reality TV, abortion, cancer, accidental death, sexual ambivalence, and temporary insanity that could lead to infanticide. Yet what Treadway's fiction does is not focus on the sensational, but on what makes each of her characters human, what makes each of their stories our own.
I'd ask a leading question of our reader(s), like, What have you found sensational lately? But I'd be afraid no one would write back. I haven't, after all, been consistent with my use of the word "sensation" nor have I provided intellectually rigorous transitions. So only post, dear reader, if you exist and have a thought about it. Otherwise, no bigs. It's Monday.
See y'all soon (like Saturday, 7 PM, 910 Arts for the Draft 7.0)! And yes,for those keeping score at home, it took 3 playbacks of "New Sensation" to draft this blog.
--aed
