March 26th, 2018 - The State

Dear TNY,

I didn’t hate “The State.”  I also didn’t particularly like it.  If you were to press me, which you won’t because you don’t read these letters nor would you respond if you did, I’d say that I was disappointed.  Here are some reasons.

Perspective:  Second person perspective is so hard to do convincingly.  The emotional distance created by both first and thrid person hold the reader at arm’s length in a way that is keeps empathy accessible.  The reader doesn’t have to commit to thoughts or actions of the characters in a first or third story as they have the "that's not me" out, but the empathetic response can still be engaged. Yes, I understand first is “I” but when read it’s like reading someone else’s “I” and not your own. Second person, on the other hand, is like the writer telling you who you are and what to do.  Most people reject being told what to do and who they are on principle, so the story had best be dialed tight in order to keep them from falling out of the pocket. I say all this to color the below comments; you, TNY, should have considered that the bar (keeping the reader in the pocket) is much higher in second person perspective and any authorial wavering is likely to eject reader empathy faster than usual.

Narrative Trajectory:  I fretted over the initial paragraph of this story because I felt like “Before you were born...” carried on too long.  Even so, I was ultimately left with a sense of wonder after the introduction.  This is an accomplishment. I’m an asshole reader, as you know. But that sense of wonder was keyed to the narrative trajectory the first paragraph established, which was not maintained throughout the story.  The clear origin story in the beginning starts to meander through the main character’s life instead of preserving that B-line drive. By (my) page six, I had already lost any care for the story because of this unraveling.  And the eponymous "State" was rendered so thin by appearing too late and having near-zero weight that it contributed to my apathy instead of bolstering the story.

Voice Shift:  This for me was the largest disappointment.  I was convinced in that first paragraph that we were getting some fresh eruption of language.  I was hoping for something fast. Loose. Confident in its abstractness. Some Barthelme.  Coover.  Powell ("Not Much is Known").  But that freshness in the voice grew staler with each charge.  This curtailed the voice and diminished the luster of this piece. In fact, I’d like to describe what I thought the fulfillment of that introduction would be.  I assumed the story would continue to rise into a crazy crescendo of language and explode off the page. Like this example by Ginsberg below:

We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Instead, after the introduction, I got a traditional MFA workshop voice that had been gutted and deboned.  What I expected you to do, TNY, was to edit.  I guess this is no longer the function of the editor, to become the verb of their title.  The title should, then, change, possibly?  How about Chief of Not Giving a Shit About Literature?

Until next week, yours in the belief that one great short story can save us all,

Nick