The Artist's Grace: Necessity and craft in Gabriel Axel's 'Babette's Feast'

By Krista Zobel

The 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast” is set in a bleak coastal village in mid -19th century Denmark. The story revolves around two spinster sisters, daughters of a Puritan pastor now long deceased. The village is populated by the elderly devout remnant of the pastor’s dwindling flock. Their lives are as austere as the setting — grey, bleak, cold, devoid of anything to tempt the senses. As the years pass, the villagers become more cantankerous, constantly recalling each other’s small offenses, keeping petty grudges alive.

One day, a small boat comes to shore with a woman bearing a letter of introduction to the two sisters from an acquaintance of decades past. The woman, Babette, is a refugee fleeing the violence of the counter-revolution in Paris. She needs a place to stay. Buried in the text of the lengthy letter is this simple sentence:

Babette can cook.

The sisters can’t pay her, but they allow her to stay with them in exchange for her assuming basic housekeeping and cooking duties. Babette cooks their simple meals for the next fourteen years, exactly as they like to be fed. Nourishment for the body with nothing sensuous to interfere with the soul.

Then, one day, Babette gets a letter from Paris. A friend has been buying her a lottery ticket every year for fifteen years, and she has won 10,000 francs. It is a fortune – enough for her to return to Paris and resume her life there. The sisters are sad to think of her leaving but are also happy for her good fortune.

Babette asks one favor of them: Would they allow her to cook them one real French meal before she goes? They exchange nervous glances and reluctantly agree.

On the evening of the feast, a dozen guests assemble, one of whom is a French general visiting his ancient aunt who is a member of the parish. The meal is brought out, course by course, wine by wine, dish by elegant dish. The parishioners have made a pact to say nothing about the food. They are going to eat it out of politeness, but not enjoy it. They quote Scripture to each other to bolster their resolve as they devour a feast fit for royalty: “Take no thought for yourselves, what you shall eat, what you shall drink…”

The French general is the only one not in on the pact. He is not one of them. He is an outsider and has the capacity to appreciate what is passing his lips. He informs the others of the pricelessness and rarity of each type of wine, each delicacy. The villagers reply with comments on the weather, meanwhile their mouths full of Babette’s succulent masterpieces.

By the end of the meal, the general has realized who the invisible chef in the kitchen must be. He had heard years ago of a woman, the most famous and sought-after chef in Paris, who had fled during the uprising. He said her food was legendary. “It is said when one eats her food, there is no difference between body and spirit. Both are ministered to.”

At the end of the meal, the general stands to his feet, overcome, and makes a speech about grace. He says, “Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude... Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!” 

The villagers file out when the meal is over, pausing in the square to join hands in a smiling circle of friendship and sing a hymn together before parting ways and returning to their homes.

It is then that the sisters find out Babette is not leaving them. She has spent the entire 10,000 francs on that feast. She has no money and nowhere to go. Horrified, one of the sisters says, “You shouldn’t have given all you own for us.”

Babette answers, “It was not only for you.”

 

The first time I saw this movie, years ago, I saw that the feast was a metaphor for grace. Babette, at great cost to herself, was lavishing something undeserved and unappreciated upon those who had no capacity to recognize or receive it, purely out of love. But this time, years later, watching the movie again, I saw different things. I saw that Babette needed to cook that feast for herself as much as for the villagers. Her soul was languishing as much as theirs were, just in a different way, for different reasons. She needed to create.

The movie demonstrates the plight of the artist in our world as one who simultaneously occupies two realms. The artist lives both in the unbounded realm of possibility and in the much more limiting realm of pragmatism. There is a frustrating divide between what the artist has to offer to the world and what the world wants or expects to receive from the artist. This was Babette’s burden. For fourteen years, she hid away her extraordinary gift until she could bear it no longer. Babette tells the sisters, “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.” 

The movie also illuminates the burden the artist carries. The language of the film is heavy with spiritual undertones. The Frenchman describes eating Babette’s feasts as an experience akin to worship. It is transcendent. Completely sensual, yet always much more than that. Babette as an artist is something of an evangelist. With her extraordinary gift came a calling to bring both truth and beauty to the world. The truth she preaches with her cooking is that the body is not the enemy of the soul. The beauty in which she wraps this truth can be seen in the meticulous presentation of each dish in the meal. Too long have the villagers lived in the shadow of the lie that pleasure is sin and beauty is suspect. She knows the healing effect that the senses can have on the soul, and she knows how badly the villagers needed to be healed. The artist’s mission is to wed truth to beauty. That is the artist’s grace.

The movie makes it clear that the artist creates both for herself and for others -- never just one or the other. Because of the urgency of the calling to share truth through beauty, the artist cannot be content without both an outlet for her expression and an audience for her art. Given these two things, the artist needs nothing else. Given these, in the words of Babette, “The artist is never poor.”

Matrescence

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By Erikka Durdle

My son listens to waves crashing against far off shorelines. It quiets him, lulls his curious mind to sleep. They say it’s nostalgia, the memory of the womb that soothes the newborn. I think it’s the cadence of the moon’s greeting to the coast, each tide a breath mirroring its promise of inhales and exhales. 

Before my son was born, I’d planned on having a vaginal birth, no intervention. I wanted to be fully present for the moment my son entered this world. I spent hours practicing meditation, hypnobirthing, and labor breathing. My birth plan was detailed, but flexible, just like the childbirth educators from all three of the classes I took recommended. I’d taken three breastfeeding courses, too, and trained as a postpartum doula so I could be ready for life after birth. Motherhood meant being prepared for motherhood. 

But my son almost died during his transition from womb to world anyway. Nothing went as planned. There was something wrong; they needed to induce. I got an epidural. My son’s vitals tanked with the increased pitocin. Labor would not progress. I was failing at this one thing all my prenatal books said was the most natural thing in the world. Birth. Motherhood. 

During an emergency operation, my son was born, his cord wrapped around his face. I didn’t watch him leave my body; the blue surgical curtain separated me from seeing my intestines on the wrong side of skin. Entangled, he breathed in sticky meconium that he’d released too soon. He did not cry. 

I was quaking from the drugs they’d given to numb me, each cell a tectonic plate quivering, succumbing to violence. I stared at the blue curtain. I wanted to see my son.

I begged someone to tell me why he wasn’t crying, but the surgeons and nurses turned away from me. The only doctor still by my side was the anesthesiologist, and what he said was, “Happy Birthday.”

But it was not my birthday and my son had not yet cried. I was sure he was dead. It was my first taste of that fear that shakes you dumb with rage. I held my breath until I knew my son had found his. He cried, then I wept.

My husband went with my baby to wherever it was the doctors could triage him until the NICU transport team arrived. I was wheeled to a room and left alone, still shivering and weeping, wondering when I’d get to see my son for the first time. I worried he wouldn’t know me. I worried that I would fail him as a mother, that I already had. I worried I wasn’t enough for this perfect little human, this tiny creature with eyes just like mine. 

I always imagined there was a particular kind of clarity that came with a positive pregnancy test. I thought I’d be overjoyed, propelled by some innate sense of purpose. Instead, I felt nothing. Maybe I was happy, or at least, I knew to be happy. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around the implications of pregnancy, the consequences of forming a human in my body. I expressed excitement, but my interior monologue sounded something broken, like a record: I’m not ready. I’m not a mother.

Just before we got pregnant, I’d been in Maine with a friend. We hiked, sailed, surfed in the frigid Atlantic. The ocean had been my respite after a long few month teaching high school English at an under-resourced private school, lost in landlocked Southwest Ohio. I was drowning in lessons and grading for six preps, six different English classes taught to six different levels of students across three grades. And all of this during a pandemic, of course. I became obsessed with escape. I daydreamed about the salty sprays of ocean water settling in the creases of my face. The relief of each caught wave, the release of riding cosmic energy to the shore. That trip, the time spent in and on and around the water, was the last gift I’d give myself before I became someone else, myself but no longer me.

Later, I’d see those waves in my mind as a refuge during every contraction. During pregnancy, I imagined them whenever I felt the overwhelming loss of control that came with every pound gained, every modified yoga pose, every pint of frozen custard I devoured despite my best intentions. I reminded myself that pregnancy was transformation, a birthing process of its own. Losing control was the purpose, grace in the face of that loss the goal. 

But if it took my son only nine months to become a fully-formed human baby, it took me years to become a fully-formed mom. My marriage taught me how to live with another’s happiness and make it as much a priority as my own. We adopted Winnipeg, a precocious beagle mutt who gave me my first taste of sleepless nights, cleaning up soiled sheets, and midnight poops. A few years ago, on vacation in Dublin and over bowls of green and red curry, my husband and I argued quietly about having a child. He did not want one. I wanted the possibility of one—a desire that had found me in my loneliness during the months of my husband’s second deployment down range. In Maine, letting the waves rock me and my board back and forth, I felt, for the first time, brave enough to try. We were pregnant within a week. 

I wish I could say I achieved the goal, the grace in letting go. That completeness in transformation meant perfection. But my vanity and impatience is something I have to contend with every day. I can, at times, be forgetful of who I am now, caught up in the dream of “bouncing back” to whoever I was before. Two months postpartum, I’m only starting to understand what my body was able to do, just now beginning to appreciate its journey. I continue to have concerns about my shape and size, but less so. More important are the concerns I have about my son’s shape and size. His eating, sleeping, and pooping. I have become less of myself to make room for him, and it is a kind of dying that makes me more. More of the goodness I worried I wouldn’t be when I discovered I was pregnant. More selfless. More secure. More sure of my maternity and the instincts it drives. 

In the last weeks before my son’s birth, I began swimming at our local YMCA. Swimming at 5 a.m. with just a teenager watching guard and two white haired women breast stroking up and down their lanes. The first time I did a flip turn, my body punished me for it, so I swam like a novice, pausing and pushing off the wall at the end of each lap. I wanted to swim faster. I swam as long and as hard as I could until one day my body wouldn’t let me—another way the pregnancy enforced its control. What I wanted was for my lungs to burn; what my son needed was for me to rest. 

I slowed each stroke, a reluctant sacrifice. In that quieter tempo, I sensed my baby swimming with me. His turns and flips and kicks. We were swimming together, and for the first time, I felt our connection with the clearness I’d longed for in those pink lines. It’s the same connection I feel now when I tickle his toes that look just like mine, or kiss his chin—it’s my chin, too. 

What the anesthesiologist actually said was, “Happy Birthday, Momma,” and I understand him now. Pregnancy is a period of physical transition, but it takes far more than nine months and a solid labor plan to birth a mother. There are days of regression, just like my son has, when I cry and miss the womb-like security of the life I had before. But then I snuggle my son close to my chest and listen to the sound of waves with him—my Spotify algorithm another reluctant sacrifice of parenthood—watching his little body expand with every inhale. I’m swimming in a sea of diapers and spit-up, finding respite in kissing away his salty tears and the rhythmic yet unpredictable tides of our shared life. One day, I’ll take him to the ocean, but for now, we’ll listen and dream of it together. 

Erikka Durdle is a writer, educator, and baseball enthusiast. She is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview MFA and was the recipient of the program’s Safford Book Prize for best Fiction thesis and the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. Erikka is working on her first novel from the corner of her newborn’s nursery in Southwest Ohio. She dabbles in multi-tasking and burning homemade cookies. You can follow her on twitter @durdlealoha. This was originally posted in November 2021 and we are re-posting to provide readers an opportunity to read “during the pandemic” entries.

Such Great Heights

By Sarah Foil

We arrived at our campsite shortly before the park closed their gates at 10 pm. After an afternoon by the river, drinking beer, eating pizza and enjoying the sun, we were warm and dazed. Daniel helped me set up the tent and air mattress at the campsite, right next to our friends. Once finished, I had assumed we’d spend the evening the way I spent most nights when I camped: drinking wine, roasting marshmallows, and chatting about nothing in particular. Instead, my campmates were packing their backpacks and lacing their boots.

     “You guys ready?” Eric asked. He strapped a headlamp to his forehead. He was a more prepared camper than Daniel and me. He had the gas lamp, multiple flashlights, an overhead tarp for the picnic table, and an air mattress that apparently could inflate on its own in less than a minute. We had brought bathing suits and a cooler filled with boxed wine and Blue Moon.

     “For what?” I asked.

     “Our midnight hike,” Sam said. She’d just taken a shower in the communal bathrooms and smelled like flowers; I’d taken a shower before we’d left home that afternoon and smelled like bug spray.

     “Are we allowed to hike after the park closes?” I asked.

     “Probably not,” Daniel said. “But it sounds like fun."

     “We do this every year,” Eric said. “We’ll hike up to the top the mountain. We’re already halfway up.”

     “But it’s pitch black outside,” I said.

     “It’s totally worth it,” Sam said. “Trust me.”

     Anxiety twisted in my stomach but Daniel was already padding his pockets with water bottles and snacks. Eric tossed me a headlamp, and we followed him and Sam up to the trail.

     I moseyed in back of the group, focusing on my feet shambling up the uneven rocks, mindful of the long crooked twigs poking up from the bed of leaves. Ahead of me the trail wound, switchback after switchback, as we climbed higher. The moon hid behind the clouds and the towering tree canopy blocked residual light from reaching our trail. Anything past the light of our flashlights was lost in abysmal blackness.

     I’d hiked this trail many times before, but it looked sinister without the sunlight, the crowd of hikers and bird songs.

"It wasn’t gone. I knew that. It was lurking somewhere behind, along with hundreds of his little friends, just waiting to bite."

The first portion of the hike went quickly. We talked and laughed. Soon I forget about the looming nothingness on all sides of me and the scurrying insects and arachnids that would, no doubt, climb up my leg if I slowed my pace.

     Eric was in the middle of telling a story about his parents when an unfamiliar noise interrupted us, almost like a vibration or cicada hum.  Every beam from our headlamps and flashlights swung down to the forest floor. What looked like a shabby piece of dark brown cord slithered around the rocks beneath us.

     Eric yelled, “Rattlesnake!”

     I shrieked and leaped nearly a foot back, then cowered behind Daniel. I could hear my heart thudding in my head. My legs shook.

     The snake jostled its tail a final time before it slid off the trail and out of sight.

     “Can we go? I want to go.” I said to no one in particular.

     “You can go if you want,” Sam said. She looked calm in the flashlight’s glow, but her voice quivered. “I won’t blame you.”

     “That’s never happened before,” Eric said. He gave a dry laugh. “That was crazy.”

     “Do you really want to leave?” Daniel asked me, quietly. “We’re almost there.”

     Sam made a face, which said that that wasn’t completely true.

     “I want to go back,” I said.

     “I’ll go with you if you want, but I really want to get to the top,” Daniel said. “The snake’s gone now, anyway. It’s okay.”

     It wasn’t gone. I knew that. It was lurking somewhere behind, along with hundreds of his little friends, just waiting to bite. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen a live snake but this was the first time I’d seen one outside of a zoo.

     “You should stay,” Sam said. “I’ve never seen a snake on this trail before. It’s just a freak accident.”

     “Really?” I asked.

     “First time,” Eric reassured me.

     “Let’s go,” Daniel said. He rested a hand on my back. “I’ll stay back here with you and hold the light at your feet.”

     I hesitated because I was trying to decide if it would be better to continue up the trail or head back to the camp and sit there all alone. Also, I still couldn’t feel my legs. However, I didn’t want to ruin the fun for everyone else and risk missing out on the rest of the trip, so I’d go on, but it would be slowly. Carefully.

     “If we see another snake, I’m leaving."

     We continued. Step by step. Daniel kept his flashlight trained on my feet, while Sam and Eric attempted to keep the conversation distracting and snake-anecdote free, but I remained on edge. Each twig and stick was now a potential enemy. The spiders and centipedes crawling over my feet weren’t the only concerns anymore.

     Occasionally, Daniel lifted his flashlight to scan the surrounding trees. Each time he did, I panicked and insisted he keep the flashlight pointed at the ground. That’s where the danger slithered from. He huffed in frustration but kept the light low. I’m sure he was looking for coyotes or bears or something more terrifying than a snake, but that didn’t matter to me at the moment.

     We inched up the path, which got steeper and ever more treacherous as we climbed. Time passed and my breathing grew heavy from climbing the cut rock that made up the man-made stairs while I suspiciously eyed any and everything that moved. Eventually, the trees gave way to open air and cold wind. The sky appeared above us from the canopy, although it was still too cloudy to see the stars or moon.

     The old fire watch tower grew up out of the center of the landing, chipping brick and rusting metal. It was a short climb to the top of the tower, but once we conquered the stairs, it felt like we were in another world.

     The mountain pass spread out wide before us. We could follow the lights down roads that led back to our homes almost an hour away. We found the powerplant, the city I worked in, the warehouse by my in-law’s home. In the distance we saw bolts of lightning, which looked more like sparkling splinters than formidable forces of nature.

     In fact, everything was small here. The trees were small. The snakes were small. I was small.

     And just at that moment, standing there amongst friends high atop the mountain, while taking in the view of the sleeping, miniature world below,  I was unafraid.

Sarah Foil is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. You can follow her at www.sarahfoil.com: A Blog for Writers, for Readers, for Dog Lovers, for Coffee Drinkers. This story originally appeared in the 2018 web edition of Assignment Magazine.

‘A willingness to cut or throw out has become a fetish in the MFA world:’ An Interview with Andrew Martin

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By Laura Whitmer

Andrew Martin joined Mountainview’s faculty in the summer of 2021. He is the author of the novel Early Work (2018) and the short story collection Cool for America (2020). He discussed the craft in writing real-life experiences, how to reject the all-or-nothing editing process, and the politics behind point-of-view with Laura Whitmer via video call.

Laura Whitmer: In preparation for our conversation, I read several other interviews you’ve done in the last few years. I was struck by how many people asked you about the role your real-life experiences influence your fiction. I’ve always felt like that’s a reductive question, but I understand people’s impulse to ask it. How do you feel about that question? What does it add to or take away from in a conversation about your work?

Andrew Martin: I think that’s such a good question, the meta version of it. Because to me, the real life is raw material that’s available to you as a writer and it’s kind of irrelevant, from a craft perspective, how much of it is true and based on your life. It’s really about how you use it and what you’re doing with it. If someone I know writes a book, I’m interested on a personal level, how much they’re using from their life, how they’re transforming it, and how they’re thinking about real life material. And I think it’s a valid craft question. How do you transform your life into art? How do you use what you know about the world, relationships, and friendships to make fiction? So, I wish people phrased it more the way you are. I do use biographical elements pretty heavily, at least in my initial setting out. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. My wife was a medical student. I taught in a women’s prison. These things are true, but then from that basis, the perspective [in Early Work], the actual events, the way the character feels about his life, the way he thinks about the world, and the actions he takes based on that initial premise are different. So Early Work has a lot of that “what-if” thinking. What if, in this moment in my experience, this whole different set of elements was added, and this whole different set of thoughts and events came in?

 

LW: Early Work and Cool for America seem to orbit each other, with a handful of characters appearing in both books. What are you working on now, and do those characters inhabit the same universe?

AM: I’m working on stories right now. In the similar way that those two books coexist, I’m putting a lot of characters and ideas into a stew and seeing if a novel will emerge from it. None of the characters in the work I’m doing now come from the characters in those books, but the way I work is often that I’m writing scenes and characters and trying to figure out what I’m interested in. Then over time, sifting that into stories, into a novel, taking things out of novels and putting them aside, seeing if they can become stories. I have so much leftover material from the first two books that got shaved off. I think the new work feels like a continuation of the work from those two books, but they’re older versions of those characters, not specifically those characters. In some ways I’m following my own life trajectory, so my characters have gone from being in their mid to late twenties and early thirties into their mid-thirties. Grappling with some slightly more existential questions about what they’re doing with their lives. I’ve thought about calling my next thing “Other People’s Kids.” [Laughs]

 

LW: I think that’s a great title. How do you approach a story—or part of a story—that isn’t working?

AM: Oh gosh. Try everything! I feel like the number one thing that helps is putting it aside. It’s like when you’re working on a knot, and you pick at it and pick at it and you’re like, ‘I cannot look at this thing anymore. There’s no way this is ever going to get fixed.’ So then you just have to put it down. And then you give it a month, you give it a couple months. And you come back to it, and suddenly you can see it clearer, you can see it fresh. That can be really helpful. Or sometimes you can see that it’s not interesting enough or not going to work for you and you can put it aside. For me, dialogue and voice in general is such a huge part of what I do that reading it out loud and playing with the rhythms of it ends up being really helpful. If the story is not interesting for some reason, often the problem is in the prose, the voice, or the sound of it. So, trying to chop it up can help. First paragraphs are often really hard for me. I read a piece when we did our residency, and as I was reading it out loud, I realized the sentence lengths in the first paragraph were not right, and I was like, ‘Aw, shoot.’ [Laughs] Trying to break down the components can be useful. When you feel like, ‘Oh no, this thing is a mess, it’s not working,’ it’s like, okay, what’s not working? Which paragraph doesn’t feel right, and why? Once you find a little thing to work on, then you can start addressing the bigger questions, but you’ve got to take it into its constituent parts, otherwise you’re never going to do it, you know?

 

LW: Yeah. That’s helpful for me to hear, just personally right now as well. I think we all need that reminder.

AM: Yeah. I’m very dramatic, so it can feel very all or nothing. Like, this whole thing needs to go, and I also need a new career. [Laughs] But I think often it’s more like, no, that paragraph sucks, you just have to cut it. You have to be willing to cut. I think a willingness to cut or a willingness to throw out has become sort of a fetish in the MFA world. Like, ‘kill your babies.’ Or, ‘the best sentence in the piece, that’s the one you have to cut.’ But if it’s really good, then probably keep it. If something doesn’t work in the greater whole, if something doesn’t feel right in the context, you have to have that willingness to get rid of stuff, or a whole story, if it doesn’t work.

 

LW: What did you take from your MFA experience that you don’t think you could have gotten anywhere else?

AM: There were a couple of things. The one that truly changed my trajectory as a writer is that I worked with David Gates, who became one of my favorite fiction writers, and he was really the first person I’d ever worked with who brutally line-edited my work. His way of working was, he would hand you back your pages top to bottom covered in pen with the way he would’ve written it. So, it wasn’t like, ‘this is bad, this is wrong, this is whatever;’ it was, ‘if I was writing this story, here’s how I would do it.’ He’d scrawl rewritten versions of the dialogue, he’d cut words out of sentences, he’d cut paragraphs or move them around. He’d be like, cut everything after this line, cut these last two pages. He had an active editing instinct in a way that was really, really helpful because that’s more like how book editors edit and more like how really good magazine editors edit.

As a teacher, I don’t go that hard because I do feel a need to respect my students’ work more. And in that class, some students hated it. It was really a divide. To me, I thought it was life changing because even though I don’t think any of the stories from that first workshop ever saw the light of day, it gave me a template for how much pressure I needed to put on the stories. Not pressure in a bad sense, not anxiety, but physical pressure to make the story tighter, sharper, better.

And the second thing was my peers. I grew up in New Jersey and then was working at a magazine in New York, and so I was very much a part of the east coast literary/publishing world, and then I went to Montana for my MFA and met people from all over the country, a lot of people from the Midwest, from the West, from small towns. I went to an Ivy League school, I was part of a particular set, and I really thought I was such hot shit. [Laughs] It was really, really useful to meet people from all over, all walks of life, different kinds of education and backgrounds, all of whom were really good writers, and I was like, ‘Oh, my very privileged life does not privilege me in this sphere.’ You can be a great writer from all kinds of different places, and I learned so much from writers of different backgrounds and styles and everything else. It seems kind of obvious and almost embarrassing to have to learn that at twenty-five, but it was a wakeup call in a really good way.

 

LW: What has teaching taught you about your own writing?

AM: I’m continually renewed and energized by reading student work. To me, it’s a reminder of the possibilities of what you can do. As a writer, I feel so trapped in my own head a lot of the time. I think that’s one of the professional hazards of the job. So, what’s cool about teaching is that suddenly you’re seeing a student take a whole different path, a whole different approach to writing fiction, and they’re trying things you hadn’t thought of. Also, it’s very hard to take your own medicine, but that’s happened to me a bunch of times, where I’m saying to a student, ‘You need to read it out loud, you need to think it through, you need to take it paragraph by paragraph’ and I’m like, wait a minute, I could do that!

 

LW: You’ve spoken previously about your tendency to write female characters from a close-third POV and male characters from a first-person POV. Do you feel like writing a female character in first-person is inauthentic, or a line you can’t cross, even in fiction?

AM: It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think I’m not crossing that line out of any political reason. I don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of appropriating the perspective because I’m doing that just as much if I’m writing in close-third, really. I’m inhabiting the character’s thoughts. It’s something that I want to figure out how to do. It’s relatively rare. It’s kind of surprising how rare it is to see people writing first person across their gender identity. And I don’t know why. One of the great exceptions is Mating by Norman Rush, which is this amazing, very long first-person female-narrated novel written by a man. But I think there’s something about claiming that ‘I’ and the intimacy of ‘I’ that I find difficult to do if it’s not a character who, forget even the gender part, kind of resembles me specifically. I’ve never written an ‘I’ character who’s twenty years older than me, you know? Whenever I write ‘I,’ it’s a character who’s around my age and perspective. I’ll use close-third for younger versions of myself or projected older versions of a character like me. The female characters I write, I feel very close to and might be almost more autobiographical in a lot of ways. I think the removed aspect of third person helps you be more honest in some ways because you’re not stuck with what would this character literally say, but what’s a slightly deeper level of their consciousness.

LW: What are you reading right now?

AM: I just read this hilarious and sad novel by the British writer J.R. Ackerley called We Think the World of You. I also just finished a galley of a friend’s book called The Midcoast [Adam White, forthcoming 2022] about crime in small town Maine and it’s really good. I now know a lot more about how to run drugs from Canada than I used to, so I’m guessing that’ll be useful.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

‘I’m drawn to social interactions that nag like a hangnail:’ An Interview with Gemma Sieff

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By Laura Whitmer

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Writer and reviewer Gemma Sieff rejoined the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA’s faculty in the summer of 2021 after completing her own MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa. In a video call with Laura Whitmer, Sieff discussed her writing process, how she found community through teaching, and the persisting sincerity of Justin Bieber.

Laura Whitmer: I want to start with your i-D essay on Justin Bieber. I feel like the piece celebrates him in a way the media, or other commentary I’ve seen about him, doesn’t. Can you talk about the process of writing celebrity into your work?

Gemma Sieff: It’s funny because he’s having such a continued moment now. He’s settled down and seems to be grown up and happy. I mean, who knows, with celebrities you’re always just getting what they project, but I do feel like I saw the good in Justin Bieber. [Laughs] Actually it’s not fair to claim that because he was already getting a lot of attention for his music then, but he was closer to his scandals. I was just taken by his sincerity. I remember that summer, and still today, he writes a lot of God stuff on his Instagram. Like, ‘everything in you, God gave you, so you can handle any challenge.’ It’s sort of relentlessly positive in a way that, for some reason, I find really sincere. Some of that stuff will rub me the wrong way, and I feel like it all sounds like pablum. Maybe it’s just his angelic, sweet voice and horribly good looks or something, but he strikes me as a sincere person.

I can’t remember how they approached me for [the piece]. They wanted to do a style icons thing. You’re looking at me right now, and my look has migrated away from Bieber, but at the time I had spiky blonde hair and I had just gone on this bad Hinge date and [the Bieber comparison] was the highlight of the Hinge date. So he was on my mind, and then I did a deeper internet dive on the latest news about him. The piece turned out funnier than I expected. I expected going into it that I would write it in a more adulatory tone. I wrote the piece at a weird time where I was living at home. My mom was really ill and I hadn’t been writing at all. I remember feeling quite out of practice, and then when I sat down, I just wanted to write something that felt fun, light, not too serious. But I feel like there is something interesting you can do with that in fiction as well. Because these characters do feel almost avatar-like and we project so much onto them. Obviously, anyone writing about a celebrity is mostly writing about themselves.

 

LW: How do you know when an experience is going to turn into something you write about?

GS: I’m drawn to awkwardness, embarrassment, social interactions that nag like a hangnail. I wouldn’t say I try to find the humor in them, but awkwardness and embarrassment is funny. Usually, you have to have a little bit of distance from it and if you’re fictionalizing it, you want to abstract it enough or blur it. I do write from my life experiences, and I’m drawn to experiences that nag at me, where I feel I behaved badly, and/or someone else behaved badly. I think whether it’s personal essay or it’s fiction, that’s the best place to try to explore those things because they’re not think pieces and they’re not non-fiction. They’re ambiguous awkwardness that you want to try to, if not explain, describe as accurately as you can.

 

LW: When did you feel like, “I am a writer”?

GS: I don’t feel like one. I have severe imposter syndrome. I was an editor for nine years in New York City, and I never had any problems saying, “I’m an editor.” Then I was freelance, and even getting to Iowa and being a student again, I felt shy about it. I don’t know why. I suppose maybe it’s because I don’t have a book to my name. But sometimes you hear that from people who have published books, that they suffer from… What is the Simone Biles term? The yips or the twisties. Perhaps I have a bit of imposter syndrome because I haven’t entirely figured out what kind of writer I am. I worked on short stories at Iowa, and fiction felt really new. It was the steepest learning curve. I hadn’t written much fiction in a long time. I came out of those two years feeling like, ‘Oh my god, I know even less than when I went in,’ which I think is sometimes the K-shaped learning curve they talk about with stuff. It was so immersive and so excellent, and the instruction there is amazing, but there’s no paint by numbers for writing of any kind.

 

LW: What made you decide to get your MFA in fiction instead of non-fiction?  

GS: I had been writing some nonfiction that people kept telling me read like fiction. And at the time, I felt a little shy about mining my life for material that I was calling nonfiction. Which isn’t to say that would preclude writing a memoir in the future. Maybe my feelings will change. I had one experience that I wrote as a long nonfiction piece and it nearly went to press, and then for certain legal reasons, it was held. And I came to feel quite relieved that that had happened. Because had that been published as it was, I might have been quite embarrassed to have put that out there just as straight memoir or nonfiction. So, I applied to Iowa with this long piece that I had then fictionalized in various ways. I’m still working on a version of it because I haven’t gotten it right yet, but with that experience, it felt like there could be a way to write more truthfully about it if I could say it was fiction. In some ways I think the burden of truth on fiction is almost steeper. You want the author to invite you in even more because there’s no excuse for the author not to if you’re calling something fiction. I’m not sure if I’ve solved that problem in this particular piece, but that was my initial impulse for applying [in fiction].

 

LW: What influence has teaching had on your own creative practice? 

GS: At Iowa, I taught four semesters, and I really liked the teaching aspect of [the program.] I found it gave my weeks some balance and structure. I taught the required humanities course for non-English majors, and it was great to get a bunch of kids who didn’t necessarily think they liked reading and certainly didn’t want to be reading a syllabus of literature. I did away with everything MLA. I had them write hybrid essays that brought in experiences in their lives. For instance, I taught this book Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which is an unbelievable account of his thirteenth year in England in the early eighties. It’s a masterful document of a very awkward time in life. But it was cool because this was not a landscape my students were familiar with. There’s tons of British slang. It’s a long book, and we read it slowly, but for the most part they found it really rewarding by the end. The emotional payoff was high. Teaching has helped with writing fiction and otherwise because you’re reading really good stuff, and you’re taking it apart, dismantling it, talking about it in the most granular way you can. And at Mountainview, it’s so wonderful to work with so many passionate writers who just love to write and love to read. My students are amazing. Teaching reminds you that you are part of a community. It’s not quite as lonely as you think. Other people are reading things closely and as passionately as you, if not more so.

LW: You’ve published a lot of great book reviews. Do you approach a book differently if you know you’re going to review it? What is that process like?

GS: That’s a great question. I typically read it twice and mark it up less analytically than emotionally. If I don’t really believe something the writer has said, if it feels thin, I’ll express my impatience in the margins or vice versa. I remember I reviewed Priestdaddy for the Times, and that book was covered in my handwriting because Patricia Lockwood is just so wonderful. I was so moved and excitedly articulate in the margins of that book. It had a very conversational feel.

LW: What are you working on now?

GS: I’m revising short stories that I worked on at Iowa. It’s not a full-length manuscript, so I need to do some more writing as I continue to revise. I also wrote a television pilot, and I’m heading to L.A. to talk to people about writers’ rooms and TV writing and how to get involved in that. I’m interested in that. I think it would be hard but fun.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

Crackpot Gumbo: A Gourmet Tour of Lee Harvey Oswald’s New Orleans

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By Harry Hantel

“The sandwich and the assassin” - Harry Hantel

“The sandwich and the assassin” - Harry Hantel

I’ve always loved New Orleans. Both my parents are from there, and the city standard for good times and good food has always resonated with me. 

Besides my family connections to the Big Easy, I also appreciate the city’s shadowy connections to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. With that in mind, I set out to make my most recent trip a fact-finding mission of sorts. 

Could I get to the bottom of the end of American Camelot, or would I be too distracted by the bottom of my glass? Would my hunger for the truth outweigh my hunger for fried seafood? 

But why should I have to choose? Consider this a handy guide for anyone who thinks there’s more to life than figuring out who killed JFK; there’s also the meals you eat while you ponder the question.  

Stop 1 - Harrah’s Casino

There’s only one casino at which to legally gamble in New Orleans and that would be Harrah’s. I make a point of always stopping in for a few hands of blackjack and some spins at the slot machines. I rarely win and this time wasn’t much different. Maybe I was distracted since just across the street is a freshly opened Four Seasons. Before it was a Four Seasons, however, Harrah’s neighbor was the International Trade Mart. The Trade Mart was owned by one Clay Shaw AKA Clay Bertrand. Shaw was the only man in history ever formally brought to trial for Kennedy’s murder, as depicted in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Shaw was a known CIA associate and possibly had direct dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald during the latter’s stay in New Orleans in 1963. Sure, we all love to gamble, but is anyone consistently playing with higher stakes than the Central Intelligence Agency? 

Stop 2 - Bar Marilou 

My brother and I made it to Bar Marilou on a Wednesday night. The Central Business District bar is connected to the Ace Hotel down the street. The drinks are fantastic and the scene is hip. The water smelled strange the night of our visit, so we stuck to liquids of the fermented variety. Just a couple blocks away, across Lafayette Square, is 544 Camp Street. The unassuming office building stands on the site of the old Newman Building, home to Guy Banister (Retired FBI agent) and a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Perhaps more delicious than the drinks at Marilou, is the detail that Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pamphlets for his Fair Play For Cuba Committee (he was the only member) that listed 544 Camp Street as his contact address. Maybe it was just the booze, but it didn’t sound like a coincidence. 

Stop 3 - Felix’s Oysters 

I did mention seafood, didn’t I? Don’t let anyone tell you that you should avoid the chain oyster spots in New Orleans. I would never blame anyone for preferring a delicate west coast oyster to the cow tongues of the Gulf, but hot sauce and a buttered saltine closes the gap significantly. Felix’s Oysters in the French Quarter is solid, unassuming, and fair-priced. Oysters Rockefeller—molluscs grilled and topped with garlic, herbs, butter, breadcrumbs still in the shell—always satisfy, though nothing can satisfy the gnawing sense that the government was hiding something even as the Rockefeller Commission claimed otherwise. 

Was Oswald the key? If he was, Felix’s was as good a spot as any to think things over since he was a food runner there that fateful summer of 1963. Thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald’s claim that he was “just a patsy” before his execution on live television, it was too much. One lone nut? Fine. These things happen. But then Jack Ruby came along. So two lone nuts? Technically three if you count Sirhan Sirhan. Suddenly, I lost my appetite. We’d finished the oysters, anyway. 

Coda

I only scratched the surface of New Orleans’ many connections to JFK’s death. The Magic Bullet was fired in Dallas, but the plan was set in motion long before, and Oswald a NOLA resident that summer prior to that fateful autumn. 

I hadn’t made any breakthroughs in the case and I hadn’t made any progress connecting those unconnectable dots. I hadn’t really learned anything new at all. 

What I do know: Oswald and the CIA both had a busy summer in the Big Easy prior to Kennedy’s final motorcade ride,  and even when retracing the steps of 20th century’s greatest supposed assassin, one gets a little hungry along the way. The mystery will still be there after lunch. 

Harry Hantel is a writer living in Los Angeles and a graduate of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction or Non-Fiction.

A Guide in the Jungle: A Writer's Letter to His Young Son

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By Daniel Barrios

Dear Hijo,

It’s been sixteen months since I became your father, though those who aren’t parents might say a year and five months. Before I was a parent, I would have.

I’ve become wiser since your birth, but my wisdom did not fall on my lap. I married your mother just after I graduated college with a bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Yikes. I was twenty-four and my ambition landed me a job in education. So much for the bohemian writer’s life. We welcomed you a week shy of our first wedding anniversary. You weighed in at a healthy six pounds and ten ounces. This was pre-COVID-19, and there were no masks worn, except for the medical professionals. The hospital did not provide me with scrubs. As I watched you being brought into the world in my college sweater and former man-bun, I asked myself two things: How will you look to the world? And how will I look with you to the world?

The first question was gratified the minute you arrived. There was a beautiful pungent scent that filled the delivery room. Unlike anything I’ve smelled before. After that smell, I knew I was your dad. You looked like both of us. Her wide eyes. My round nose. Her soft skin. My devious smile. This was blissful confirmation that you were our baby, and we were your padres. The only issue rested in my second question. How did we look as young parents with a baby boy? Did we look like mature twenty-five-year-old adults who knew what they were doing? Or did we look like another young couple who didn’t use a condom, a couple of sinvergüenzas?

Did I have to look a certain way to be a father? And what way was that? Height? I’m certainly no Tyrion Lannister. I’m also not a six-foot gigante. I’m somewhere in the middle. A place where my own high school students sometimes wondered who the teacher was, but tall enough to reach the high shelves in the kitchen for your mom (yes, on my tiptoes but nonetheless). A blessing and a curse. Did my youthful and stature disqualify me from society’s consensus of what fatherhood should be?

Perhaps I shouldn’t care how society views me. Or your mom. Or you. It would be on thing if society was fair and how someone looks didn’t affect how they’re treated. It’s too bad that type of society doesn’t exist. If you believe people don’t judge you based on the way you look, you are as ignorant as the dog who begs for his master’s bones while his own bowl is full of fresh meat.

In a Twitter thread on a goofily masculinized baby “manual” for dads in which infant care is compared to vehicle maintenance from my school peer and Assignment online editor Aaron Calvin, he points out that “the bar for dads is so extremely low, it really sucks.”

I couldn't agree more. Fathers in our society are somehow stigmatized as not being able to care for their newborns the way mothers can. In the manual Calvin references, babies are described like cars so that men can understand how to care for them. It’s silly, but this is a step in the right direction, a great resource.

Que resource?

What about the dads who didn’t receive a baby manual? How are they supposed to navigate the unknown terrain of parenthood? The same way they do anything else: By doing it.

Nothing about being your father has been easy. In graduate school, the workshops don’t teach you how to nurse an overexerted baby on the cusps of turning purple to sleep. They don’t teach you that swaddling and rocking and shushing will not work, as the manual claims, as ways to calm a cranky baby. Babies aren’t one size fits all. Formulas and juices and whole milk won’t work all the time either. You were unpredictable until you weren’t. 

The manual advises to go for walks. The one thing the manual doesn’t say is that if you live in a sketchy neighborhood, you probably don’t want to walk. And if I wasn’t raised in the 10303 zip code, I wouldn’t walk around past 8pm at night either. However, we bundled and shrouded and covered you in your stroller and walked you to sleep every night because there was no other way. The narrow sidewalks and passers-by smoking joints didn't phase me, your mom, or you. After a steady ten-minute loop in the neighborhood, we heard your snores harmonizing with the North Shore’s gusty winds. That’s how we put you to sleep.

Another method the manual suggests is going for a drive. A spectacular idea! What about the parents who do not have enough money for a car and depend on the city bus like your great-grandparents did their entire lives on Staten Island? How do those parents go for a drive when some of them were taking cabs back to public housing from picking up milk and apple juice with limited WIC benefits? Your great-grandparents never owned their own car and did not have the luxury of snoozing your grandfather on the highway when he was a fussy baby. 

“Parenting really just unlocks a whole new level of bizarre interactions with our messed up world,” Calvin said.

I’m starting to understand why your mom and I didn’t get one of those baby manuals. I mean, I don’t want one anyway. I don’t care for cars and see them simply as a way to get from point A to point B. You were born in the same hospital as me. You are Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and American. When you come of age, my only wish is that you become comfortable enough with who you are to accept your role in society. My role will hopefully serve as a guide in the jungle.

As I reflect on my own shortcomings, I know I’m always learning how to live in this society, accepting my role while learning its definitions. A millennial who had to choose between a wedding or a house. Mom and I made photos of the wedding for you. We’ve got uncle Yordan eating everything. Your mom’s parents are singing and dancing. Your dad with a devious smile and a blue suit. We are still saving for our future house, trying to create some semblance of an American Dream.

My russet skin does not dictate who I am or what I will become but our family’s culture does to some extent. As you settle into your own skin, and understand where your father came from, do be consumed with anger at this unjust world as I once was. Instead, Hijo, let’s rejoice. When you were born, I had questions. As we grew older, I began to think less about my questions and more about what your questions will be.

Con amor,

Always and Forever,

Papi

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.

Brief Notes on Failure and Narrative

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By Aaron Calvin

The most enduring image from the 2020 NBA Finals is not one of LeBron James or his younger co-star Anthony Davis as they dominated their way to the victory and basketball supremacy alongside the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers.

It is, instead, a picture of Jimmy Butler, with 16.8 seconds to play in Game 5, a game that he and his Miami Heat team would win. In the indelible image, Butler’s body is bent in exhaustion. He is still standing, but half bowed behind the goalpost where he has just caught himself after being fouled on his way to the basket. He is in this moment grasping at a moment of stillness before moving to shoot two free throws. These free throws will help ensure his team ekes out a win over the dominant Lakers in a series that the Heat will ultimately lose in the next game.

In this image, Butler’s hands droop over the barrier like flowering clematis; his face lies hidden between them. It is an emblem of exhaustion. His posture is reminiscent of so many depictions of Jesus falling beneath the weight of the cross on the road to Golgotha. In the parlance of the sports cliche, Butler “left it all on the floor.” Though he ultimately suffered defeat, his exhaustive and admirable attempt at victory earned him a defeat that was widely lauded as a noble and admirable one. 

This was the narrative that formed around Butler’s defeat. Within the context of his personal career and the over-performance of his underdog team in the vacuum-sealed playoff event amidst the coronavirus pandemic, it was an undeniable triumph. But, as is often the case when it comes to the harsh dichotomy of winning and losing in an athletic setting, Butler may end up among the many world-class athletes to never achieve victory at the highest level. Even if this is the case, he will not be thought of as a “loser” in the traditional sense, but someone who never achieved the pinnacle of success in a team sport that demands more than individual excellence. 

Failure is inextricable from the human experience, but is only made legible by narrative. Placing failure within a context of wider events makes the event of failure, for many, bearable. The easily parsed, distinct relationship between failure and success is part of why sports are conceptually appealing. A wide spectrum of failure is allowed; there are valiant fighters defeated in a team sport despite spectacular individual performances like Butler in the 2020 playoffs or LeBron James through most of the Golden State Warriors dynasty in the mid-twenty teens or any of the all-stars who had the misfortune of playing against Michael Jordan in the nineties; then there are those who just plain blow it, collapse, or even downright choke, ala the New York Knicks’ John Starks in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals or the Houston Rockets’ 27 consecutively missed three-point shots in Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals. 

But there is only one variety of winner: the person who dominates, who performs at a higher level both personally or, in a team sport like basketball, is joined and complemented by other exceptional athletes. They are declared the best, unequivocally. It is the reason why the debate over who claims the title of the Greatest of All Time basketball player endures. There can be no popular acceptance that Wilt Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan or LeBron James played and succeeded in different eras or exhibited different strengths or bested incomparable foes. 

In life, of course, failure contains an interminable level of gradation. Even worse, the failure suffered is often contingent upon uncontrollable forces. It is mostly random and indifferent to one’s desires. Success—conceptually, morally, fiscally—is fragile, amorphous, and untenable. Most of lived life exists within the clearing created in the wake of the dueling forces of desire and responsibility, neither of which are generally satisfied by the individual alone. 

Literature, on the other hand, helps to address the incoherent failure of life by giving it a clear narrative framework to exist within. Failure, loss, defeat—this has long been considered necessary for the successful execution of plot. It generally arrives in the second of three acts and often serves to set the table for a satisfying denouement. Particularly in popular media like melodrama or anything involving superheroes, the failure event is often exaggerated so that the victory, in the end, feels all the more triumphant. Failure is made palatable, even acceptable and exciting, by narrative that assures conquest and success. 

This makes a narrative that doesn’t assure or satisfactorily deliver victory and success still remarkable and, in turn, likely less popular. Audiences—consumers of narrative—prefer an uplifting story or, at the very least, a narrative that concludes with some level of satisfaction. Characters may be permanently altered by the events that transpired through their journey from the beginning to the end of the narrative, but not a little broken or unalterably worse or even totally ruined. 

So it still offers a certain kind of thrill when failure is eschewed simply as a device to be used to create tension or further the conflict and made into something more central, when it is made not just as an inconvenience or a hitch, but an integral, unavoidable, and irreversible part of life. There are many works that do this and do this in an array of impressive, engaging styles, but I’ll take a moment here to examine just three of them. 

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one novel consumed with failing. Its protagonist, Ishmael, fails to find satisfaction in normal life on land; he fails to keep the “damp, drizzly November” from his soul. A great deal of the book is spent in the cetology chapters, an initially puzzling through-line of the book in which Ishmael expounds at great length on the anatomy, behavior, and general substance of whales. Most of this information is scientifically inaccurate. Ishmael’s famous line in the chapter “The Prairie”—“I try all things; I achieve what I can” —should be understood in the context that Ismael’s achievements are few and far between. The entire mission that propels Ahab and The Pequod throughout the book is a doomed one. It ends in oblivion, as it was destined to, and as Ahab knew full well it would. Only Ishmael and his imperfect science is left to tell the tale. 

The meta-narrative surrounding Melville’s novel only bolsters its claim to one of history’s great failure narratives. Its current stature in the pantheon of American literature stands in contrast with how poorly the novel was reviewed initially and even mostly ignored. Melville died in such obscurity that the New York Times barely noted his death while misspelling the name of his definitive work. There’s an alluring appeal to this kind of tale, a sort of Van Gogh Effect, where an artist’s genius is so undeniable that—though it was denied them in life—the proper renown, respect, and recognition is eventually bestowed upon the artist and their art in the grander historical narrative. 

Of course, Melville—author of Bartleby, the Scrivener, a novella dedicated completely to the high art of refusal—understood well the usefulness of failure. Typee and Omoo—his early oceanic travelogue novels that were not nearly as allegorical and complex as Moby Dick and a great deal more rollicking and bawdy—were commercial successes. He progressively turned away from the accessible through his career and purposefully produced more challenging works even as he descended into obscurity and poverty. In the final phase of his working life, in the midst of the Civil War, he even got really into writing poetry. 

The idea that Melville was a commercial failure in lifetime but received justice after his death is a simple and compelling one. The truth, that he was a commercial success but produced increasingly challenging work and became unfashionable later in his career before this work was championed by writers and artists after his death, is a bit more complex. It all depends on the narrative framework that gets applied. 

John Williams’ Stoner, another novel somewhat neglected in its time and revived in a Renaissance of sorts (it has become very popular in Europe) a half-century later, dwells in failure. Tim Kreider described the book in a 2013 New Yorker article as the antithesis of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Not a romantic tale of wealth and beauty built on a deceitful façade that all falls apart in the end, but instead an elegiac mining of a somewhat unremarkable middle-American life. “Stoner ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure,” 

Even Cormac McCarthy’s infamously bleak post-apocalyptic father-son novel, The Road, ends on a hopeful note, offering the reader a crumb of solace amidst the dreariness of humanity’s near-end. Stoner is truly an unrelenting bummer. There is, however, such beauty in William Stoner’s struggle, in his pain and suffering, his devotion to language and literature that gives shape to it all. The novel ultimately presents Stoner’s life of quiet desperation with measured acceptance, a life without despair but also absent of any kind of self-justification. 

Failure is transformed in narrative when it is examined with openness and clear-sightedness, often the result of writing that challenges how people are encouraged to think of failure in the broader culture. The systems of capitalism that frame the living, modern world often allow for only certain narratives about failure. Above all things, failure must be useful, these systems demand. Failure is allowed, but only if it’s learned from and pushes you further in pursuit of success (this is also a common cliché found in sports). There’s a pervasive inability to accept the things that failure often is: random, indifferent, constant, meaningless, predictable, and often highly recurrent. 

So when a novel comes along that challenges the popular modes towards failure, it feels unique and even revelatory. The late, great Jade Sharma’s excellent Problems is one such novel. The novel’s narrator, Maya, fails at being all the things you are taught you should want to be. She’s a narcotics addict. She’s cheating on her husband but not for any very good reason. She’s lazy, and often willfully cruel. Her voice electrifies the narrative, her brazen willingness to be all these things unapologetically feels almost decadent, an illicit treat compels the reader to consume more. 

As Lauren Holmes puts it at the beginning of her New York Times review of the book, “a novel about a heroin addict shouldn’t be this much fun to read.” But Problems is even more than that. It epitomizes a certain kind of failure narrative; it is a total, gleeful refusal to value what people are told they should value or feel bad in the ways people are told they should feel bad. 

These three novels, though different in a number of ways, have in common a refusal to narrativize failure in traditionally acceptable frameworks. There’s a shared inability to conform to the mandate that failure must be mitigated by success or, at the very least, some kind of manufactured solace. That inextricably human space between the real and desired is, in many ways, the very essence of what life is and what makes it interesting. This is what makes literature and other forms of narrative art that attempt to consider it without the many impediments and comforts often erected to protect people from their own thoughts and feelings so important. 

Failure will always be more interesting than success and will forever remain essential to narrative. Narrative will also remain an essential tool in making failure both personal and societal understandable, but only in the narratives that challenge accepted depictions of failure does its true nature become fully visible. 

Aaron Calvin is a writer living in Iowa. He is a student in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA for Fiction and Non-Fiction and online editor at Assignment Magazine.