The author of 'Brokeback Mountain' is still writing stories full of political and social relevance, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.
PETER CAREY says he’s “done writing fiction".
"You have to know when it’s enough.”
At 82, he’s earned that right and good on him for knowing himself well enough to respond to that impulse.
You can probably think of many people who just don’t seem to be able to imagine themselves in a “life after” situation, who keep wanting to have their say — like a retired journalist who keeps proffering comment…
Guilty as charged: books and writing keep popping up to cause that same old whiplash response — I’ve just got to tell people about this, right now.
This week, ironically, it’s a writer almost ten years older than Carey who has ignited that desire yet again. Annie Proulx, author of the magnificent The Shipping News from way back in 1993 (when she was nearly 60), has just published a story called 'The Corn Woman, her Husband and their Child', in the New Yorker, which is where, in 1997, she published the story 'Brokeback Mountain'.
It's stuffed full of relevance, written with competence bordering on magic, funny, poignant, and, at 10,000 or so words, economically attractive at a time when it can seem just too hard to commit to fiction when words have become so volatile. That the New Yorker keeps publishing exceptional stories by writers such as Kiran Desai, Anne Enright, and Mona Awad (to name just the three who preceded Annie Proulx) is a beacon of hope for writing. Maybe, just maybe, there is still a place for these impressive writers in our reading lives.
That Proulx is almost 90 evokes the same ambiguous thoughts and emotions as her writing. How can she still be so up to date with the rushing social, political, interpersonal relationships that underpin, 'The Corn Woman' story? And also: of course, she’s up to date with all that is happening because she’s so experienced at paying attention and selecting with such exactitude the detail that will speak volumes.
Her technique lends itself to relevancy, for she’s never been experimental for the sake of change. Like Jane Austen, she uses dialogue, character point of view, and narratorial omniscience if and when it aids and abets the story’s pull on the reader’s attention.
Here's the opening paragraph:
Jaron and Zilpha Earliwood had put some years into their marriage before their daughter, Goldie, was born. There had been differences between the couple from the beginning, and Jaron flinched every time he watched Zilpha make sandwiches. His mother’s cook had always cut sandwiches with trimmed crusts and an elegant catty-corner slice, but Zilpha left the crusts on and whacked them into rectangles that seemed to him quite — trashy.
How could a woman who made sandwiches like that cherish rare fabrics? Something didn’t fit, and, though Zilpha considered herself as flexible as a silk scarf, Jaron saw her as more of a curtain rod.
That use of the ridiculous magazine-y expression “put some years into their marriage” in the opening sentence is bold, alerting the reader to pay attention and take care. We’re dumped conspiratorially into this place where people with outlandish but ordinary names (which is very Dickens and his delicious inventions of characters with names like Turveydrop and Tulkinghorne) are dealing with social expectations (that a marriage is something you invest in, like shares) and personal differences.
Jaron flinching because Zilpha cuts sandwiches unthinkingly. Did you think, oh, Jaron’s a prig. Or did you think, quite right Jaron, why doesn’t she try a little harder with this simple task? Then, into their thoughts we go, quick smart: 'Trashy', thinks Jaron, and that preceding long dash means we, too, must consider along with Jaron whether the use of this word to describe his wife is evidence of masculine disapproval (i.e. sexism).
Easy reading, a bit of a chuckle, depending on how the words fall on your mind as you settle in to the opening of a story so innocently titled, 'The Corn Woman, her Husband and their Child'. I’ll use the word again, there’s magic in this opening paragraph, it’s a spell. That sandwich, along with the ambiguity of intentions, the ordinary tragedies of misunderstandings and differences, will recur and build like a small disturbance in a scree that results in a dangerous avalanche.
There are one-liners of almost smart-arse slickness throughout.
For example:
"Despite a neophyte’s skill at gaslighting, he was the easy prey of fast-talking service people."
There’s satire worthy of a chortle-seeking newspaper columnist: for example, how Jaron earns big money working for a hedge fund:
Two of his least likely picks had translated into floods of money: the spinach-infused peanut butter in a blue glow-in-the-dark throwaway flashlight tube that was a craze in Australia; and the his-and-hers glove set that was sensitive to the wearers’ chemistry and, when activated, disclosed to what degree two people were simpatico or inimical.
The public immediately called them ‘love mittens’ and they became as necessary to modern life as social media and credit cards.
Subplots – one about a weathervane on the house the Earliwoods buy in the country to escape the city – are used to insert minor characters, providing Proulx with opportunities to do those short, sharp portraits she’s so good at: like the “young uniformed policeman with bad posture and a bristly little chin”.
Then there’s the way she connects history, both natural and social, through to the here and now: a moth called, wonderfully, “psychomorpha epimenis”, with colours that recall to textile-obsessed Zilpha those of “certain woven silk rugs from the Central Asia of the Sasanids”.
But, like everything in an Annie Proulx novel and here, too, in her latest story, how we use history is ambiguous, and dangerous, and so, must be interrogated for misuse.
Using the narratorial voice, she writes:
No one in the Antiquarian Society gazing at a hand-hewn oak hayloft beam accepted that the farmer’s wife had hung herself from that beam the day after it was raised; no one believed the moldy gossip that drunks had once been forced to dig stumps out of roadways, or the whispered tales of ignorant, home-bungled abortions, or accounts of the old grandpa who’d taken his little granddaughters out behind the barn for fondling and penetration.
So, you see, there’s no dodging the hard stuff in a Proulx story. Obliquely, but also straight-on, she demands you notice everything from the piles of dumped clothing in Chile’s Atacama Desert to the way small minds gossip. And I haven’t even mentioned (because I don’t want to spoil your reading the story, if you’re curious enough to do that) how she deals miraculously with the hot-button “issue” of gender-change.
What a writer! Good enough to go back to, or, if you’re fortunate enough (sort of) to have missed The Shipping News or Wyoming Stories or Bird Cloud when they were first published, to discover now. With the characteristic Proulx irony and ambiguity, Jaron in 'The Corn Woman' says to their child, Goldie (wait until you meet Goldie!) that “art is important”:
'Goldie, make a habit of going to galleries and museums. Art can show you depth and sensibility. Without art, people become narrow-minded and prejudiced.'
Art like Proulx’s is a gift, a magic spell against the entropy of prejudice.
Dr Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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