July 9th & 16th - Under the Wave

Dear TNY,

Well color me shocked because I just read “Under the Wave” and I don’t hate it.  Not only do I not hate it, I think it’s pretty fucking exceptional. Let’s get started.

Language.  I’d like to submit this paragraph as evidence of fantastic phrasing, syntax, and word choice:

Images accumulated. A woman in filthy panties limping down a road with a bone knuckling out of her arm. A mass of faceless people huddled around a fire. The gray vinyl of a bus seat, scored like aged skin, and the strange flat brown landscape passing dreamily by the window.

I love this.  I loved the craft in this.  So so good.

Next, let’s talk editing.  This thing was trimmed of nearly all of its fat.  I found a few places where I would have cut for brevity.  But, TNY, this piece did not ramble like your usual bullshittery.  This thing was an unstoppable freight train.  There’s this great scene in Beavis and Butthead where they are in the trunk of a moving vehicle and discussing how to exit.  One convinces the other that if you just run really fast in the air, when you hit you’ll be fine.  Then disaster, obviously.  This story, it felt like jumping out of a car at full speed in the very best way.

Now some negatives.  I don’t like that it shifted into the child’s head.  It was jarring the first time, and then it kept happening.  Although I felt like this was a narrated by a definite separate voice from these characters, I felt like the focus was so intensely on the woman for so long that the late switch didn’t work for me.  And then each time it did it became more annoying.  Still, I enjoyed the story.  The above two elements drove this fucker forward in such a way that made the faulty psychic/POV shifting negligible.

Finally, I wasn’t moved.  Question mark?  While I dug nearly every aspect of this story, it did not move me like “Stay Down and Take it”.  I can’t seem to pinpoint why, either.  But, what I can say is that the author crafted a fucking grand story.  It was such a nice surprise from your rag.  But the story didn’t break my heart.  If I had to hang that on something, I would say that we didn’t have the right details about the child to make her abandoning her family for this strange woman heartbreaking.  As endings go, this was inevitable.  It was not surprisingly inevitable, which I think is crux in being broken as the reader.

Even still, TNY, thank you for putting this on your pages.  More like this.  No more, ever again, like “Cat Person” or “Ladies Lunch” (not hyperlinked because they are trash).

Later,

Nick