Stories: on tense endings
Two recent stories in The New Yorker got me thinking about tension and story structure. This week's "The Lie" by T. Coraghessan Boyle and "Great Experiment" by Jeffrey Eugenides, published on March 31st. Both stories start with men in ruts: ill-paying jobs and family pressures. Both men end up taking advantage of their jobs: one by embezzling and one by lying about a death in the family to avoid work. As the tension increases you find yourself thinking "this can't end well." And it doesn't. Both stories end with discovery (or the verge of it). Both leave you thinking about what will happen next. Coincidentally both seemed very locale-specific as well. Eugenides picks Chicago, Boyle chooses Los Angeles.
I was struck by both stories because they represent the tension ending I myself never write. I write stories in which some big tense event has just happened. I enjoy exploring the fallout. What happens after a small boy finds a dead body? How does a women react to her husband's leaving her? I could have written them inverse: end on the body floating face-down in the water or the woman's face watching the UHaul pull away. I tend not to because it confounds my admittedly traditionalist take on story narrative.
When I was in middle school we were made to read Guy de Maupassant's "The Lady, or the Tiger." I'll never forget it. At story's end we are asked: what door did the lovely, jealous princess send her lover to: the one with certain, bloody-toothed death or the one with a pretty bride? We aren't told. We're asked. Choose your own adventure books had more resolution. I hated "The Lady, or the Tiger." Supposed to guess the ending? Oh, my sixth grade anguish!
I was used to stories that ended happily ever after or at least ended with a resolution of some sort. Despite having read more widely and having learned that Guy's name is pronounced Gee in his native tongue, I still have to work to bend my mind to stories with less than traditional structures (though ocassionally I fall hard for them. For evidence see my deep admiration for Paul Aster and David Mitchell.)
Did I enjoy the two New Yorker stories? I did. I've been thinking on them long after I finished transcending the arc, and considering what happens next to the narrators. Hell, I even tried to imagine ways by which the embezzler character might escape his inevitable doom. What can I say? I've managed to transcend my sixth grade opinions. Well, some of them.