TS deHaviland: The Cranky Critic
At one time, the worst one could accuse The Iowa Review of being was occasionally boring. But the Winter 2008/2009 issue commits the literary crime of publishing a piece that’s downright bad, sloppy and wrong.
Worse yet, they gave Andrew Mortazavi’s “Stop Six, Ft. Worth” the annual Iowa Review prize for fiction. Judge Ethan Canin might simply have been having a bad day, or he might simply be clueless, but Mortazavi’s short story barely rises to the level of what one might expect in an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop.
I first became alerted that something was amiss when I ran across a glaring usage error. Mortazavi’s narrator, Jeremy, refers to the rear lights on his older brother’s Cavalier as being “break” lights when they should, by all accounts, be brake lights. Now, I’ve selected a few imperfect manuscripts for publication, but that was based on the overall quality of the work. After that, I made sure the minor errors got sorted out before the piece went to press. You’d expect a story entered into a contest to be a bit more polished from the get-go.
The narrator is also utterly unconvincing. How Jeremy can simultaneously pull off being a 13 year old, a near drop-out, and someone who prefers to sit at home all day and read is beyond me. I’m sure there are a few people out there like that, but I’ve never met them. The 13 year old dropouts I knew read comic books if they read at all, but mostly they just played video games and got high. The readers were all in class, probably because they were not intimidated by the classroom, were rewarded because of their linguistic acuity, and admired educated people. Even in the inner-city setting Mortazavi tries to explore, the intellectually curious are welcome in school and tend to advance.
Mortazavi, no doubt, posits this nearly impossible narrator in order to give himself the excuse to write lines like this one: “Pale blue lights shined from both ends of her swimming pool, the surface undulating in the night breeze, casting the backyard and the brick house in an eerie incandescence easier felt than seen.” That’s a lovely line, poetic, even. But no 13 year old male would ever think like that, no matter how precocious. He’d be too embarrassed, to begin with, too interested in posing and narrowing his thoughts into some media-driven notion of cool. Problematically, Jeremy actually does a bit of the cool-posing at another point in the story, which comes off as an inconsistency rather than an enrichment of characterization.
Creating an unrealistically literary character is the sort of move that probably resulted from a creative writing workshop, and it has become so common as to be a cliché: need to fit in all of your darling lines but still appear gritty and real? Have your hitman/barkeeper/bouncer/steel mill worker be a former (or budding) English major! Or, worse yet, make your short story/novel/novella about an English professor! I’ve been around a few of the latter, and I can tell you that, with a few exceptions, they’re extraordinarily dull people who lead remarkably boring lives. English majors become writers because they express themselves better in writing, so they’re really not all that much fun to hang out with, but they’re grand fun in correspondence. Not surprisingly, stories about their lives are either unrealistic or just plain tedious.
I suspect in Mortazavi’s case, though, he simply doesn’t know well enough how an inner city kid would talk and thus can’t really sustain the voice of a 13 year old ghetto kid over the course of a 14 page story. So he finds an excuse to make the kid use a voice very much like his own, in this case making Jeremy actually a middle-class white kid whose broken family falls on hard times and has to go live in a bad neighborhood.
But even that fictional kid would never utter a line like the one above. If anything, he’d be even more sullen and disaffected than a 13 year old bookish black kid who has lived in the ‘hood his whole life.
Since the story is past tense, one could argue that Mortazavi’s narrator is a literate adult simply reminiscing about an important event of his adolescence. Fair enough. But that would mean that Jeremy-the-near-dropout eventually does turn his life around and become successful, and then what’s the point of looking back at this particular time? There’s no question of the narrator’s fate, and there’s no suspense and little to think about. If this interpretation holds, the story falls thematically flat. So perhaps it’s really about the other elements in the story: the death of two black twin girls and the cops’ indifference to it, the depressing ironies of an inner-city drug trade fueled by the habits of spoiled suburban white kids, the vagaries of economic decline. But if so, then wouldn’t it have been more productive to have written the story from the point of view of Jeremy’s older, drug-dealing brother, Stanton? Stanton’s connection and the father of the dead girls? The father’s daughter and the dead girls’ older sister, Ciara? The middle-class druggies Kyle and Chelsea? If these are the themes Mortazavi wishes to explore, using Jeremy as a narrator just complicates things and gets in the way of saying anything definitive or even exploring interesting questions about these matters.
But again, none of the other characters would have been capable of noting so wistfully “I now longed for that kind of bland uniformity, a return to safety and assuredness . . . .” And if these other characters had been the focus, Mortazavi would not have had the chance to show off his awesome wordsmithing.
There are a couple of ways Mortazavi could have gotten around this problem of voice, and only one is significantly fraught with peril. The dangerous way would be to actually spend some time in the inner-city listening to people talk. One could live or work there, volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or even just go hang out in a park or walk the streets to get a feel of the sound and sense, the sight and smell of the rougher parts of town. After awhile, writing like these people think wouldn’t be all that much of a challenge, but the traditionally lovely lines might not so readily come to mind. One might just find the beauty and the grace of the language poor, uneducated people use. But perhaps privileging the real voices of the poor and uneducated is slightly threatening to those editors and contest judges who already think they know what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.
Hanging out in the inner-city might have revealed to Mortazavi that, unlike in “Stop Six,” male drug dealers rarely even know their kids, much less live with them. It’s typically the mothers who feed and clothe and house the children. He might also have observed that those men in the inner-city who do live with their own teenage children don’t give them alcohol, and because they don’t, SRS doesn’t take the kids away. The character in question, Ciara’s father, and father of the twins, must reasonably be in his early thirties at the youngest, even if he started having kids as a teenager himself, in order to have a teenage daughter, Ciara. As a drug dealer, the chances of this character staying alive and out of jail at that advanced age would have mitigated against his allowing a man armed with a sawed-off shotgun to grace his front-yard barbecue, as Mortazavi has him do. Drug dealers who survive past thirty and remain at liberty to cook their own food tend to be low-profile. Maybe this story was so captivating to its judge because it reinforces certain fantasies we have about inner-city life. Perhaps it lets the reader feel “edgy” for reading it, no matter how much it fails to comport with reality.
Another way Mortazavi could have overcome his problem with narrative voice would have been to just make the damn thing third-person. Third person narratives are, as far as I know, still allowed, and then the narrator would not have to have been a realistic character himself and could have waxed as poetic as Mortazavi wished without peaking the ol’ bullshit meter. Granted, such a move might have led to some interesting and possibly unintentional postmodern juxtapositions of tone, but that sure as hell beats a failed attempt at realism. A third-person narrator might also have given Mortazavi the option of not so directly researching his subject. He could have boned up on his reading and relied on Google Earth and still come up with something convincing enough for 14 pages.
One final option would have been to simply write a poem with inner-city Ft. Worth as its subject matter, and the problem of a narrator could have been dispensed with entirely, the lovely lines could have been retained, and a mining of the mundane and even dangerous for its beauty and depth could have happened. That is, after all, what a poet does, and he need not encumber himself with pesky characters and their peculiar voices at all.
There are other problems, like the gratuitously disgusting way Ciara eats her barbecue, which makes one wonder if Mortazavi is just trying to gin up the edginess after it got blunted by all the literary soft-focus. That would make the story border on exploitation: Ciara can’t just be angry and slightly dissolute; she has to be nasty as well.
But none of this bothers me as much as the failure of Ethan Canin as the judge who awarded this dog of a story a winning prize. Mortazavi can be forgiven for writing a clunky, crappy short story; I’ve written a zillion of them myself. But what was Canin thinking even publishing this trash, much less giving it first place? The Iowa Review contest’s second-place short story, Jacob M. Appel’s charming “Helen of Sparta,” presents a pre-teen female narrator who is not only convincing but is at a stage in her life in which the events change her perspective in a more mature direction. The story explores ideas in a way that’s thought-provoking and with characters and situations that are realistic, and it doesn’t feel the need to be edgy in order to do it. “Helen of Sparta,” in its own quiet, petit-bourgeois way, says more about regular people than “Stop Six” manages to say about anything at all.
In the same issue is Ron Carlson’s even better “Victory at Sea” which is not only convincing in its characterization, plot, and setting, it’s also poignant, sweet without being sentimental, and also funny. Those are the sorts of qualities a journal like the Iowa Review ought to prize.
At this point, it would be easy to start making suppositions about how these literary contests are actually run, but I think the larger issue is what the academic paradigm is doing to how we approach good writing. MFA programs in Creative Writing as an academic pursuit already privilege largely white and middle-class voices by being university-housed. But beyond that, they tend to blunt aesthetic experimentation and tend to turn us away from the artistic force of the lives we actually lead, no matter how banal. If Emily Dickinson could write head-removing poems while in self-imposed isolation in her father’s Amherst home imagine what we could do while suffering through death-defying daily commutes, precipitously collapsing economies, and ecosystem-devastating climate change. Granted, we’re not all Emily Dickinson. But we can create writing curricula that enhance our mindfulness and our powers of observation. We can create a literary climate that encourages experimentation and openness to voices not normally heard. We can create, in other words, a literature that hears.
Comments are closed.