August 24th, 2020 - Cicadia
Dear TNY,
A good story was needed today and you gave me “Cicadia” and it wasn’t half bad.
I appreciated how clean the writing was. How relatable it was, which I can’t be sure is a cultural thing or a craft thing. Like, was the writing so good that anyone could relate? Like, a female raised in poverty as a farmer in Asia? Or was this relatable to me based on my cultural upbringing? If this were a story about samesaid farmer in Asia and was written to the same level, would I be able to relate to it due to the quality of writing (à la The Good Earth)?
In this case, I think I’ll chalk it up to culture. But I appreciated it nonetheless.
The narrative arc, from a time standpoint, was mostly clean. I like short stories like this, that have little to no forward time progression. This medium, the short story, is far more about a delicious meal than some hamfisted attempt to stuff a novel’s worth of material in a smaller wordcount (as is your typical fare).
Where did it fail? Couple of places. I didn’t like the distance that the narrator was from the story, timewise. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s third person POV. So, someone wrote these words down, or thought them presumably. So we have some voice in the ether assembling them in this way (not the author, mind you, as that is the author’s voice). Now, this POV seems to be able to see only in Max’s head, and only up to the point in which Max knows the information (which matches with the present tense of the narration)? But, if that’s the case, how does the voice know the names of Harold and Cupcake before the man announces their names? What I think this alludes to, as what a lot of the rambling in this story alludes to, is that this piece is some kind of edge-of-existence, Arrival level, getting-glimpses-of-one’s-whole-life type of thing. But it’s fucking messy, if we’re honest. Max finds the weed where he always finds the weed. But, if he did, why wouldn’t his brother kick his ass over it as it has happened before? If they get lost, they’ll just ask the man walking his golden retriever. If that happened before, why wouldn’t they all know each other’s names or recognize each other? Max felt safe going to the party because he knew his brother would arrive with nunchucks meant for Blaine’s coffeetable. Hell, Harold was contemplating the ouroboric nature of the universe. There are a bunch of examples of these silly little plot holes that lead me to believe they aren’t actually plot holes. That the narrator is either watching this in loops, and already knows what’s going to happen beginning to end, or the narrator is watching Max, in his head, and narrating for the first and only time that Max is experiencing this as a loop, as if he’s done it all before, but fails to recognize it fully to himself. Neither of these are fully fleshed to each other, though.
Fine. That’s fine. But, like, clean it up. Pick one thing and run with it. This story could have had a lot more punch if it was third person POV, limited to Max and only Max’s present and past, and there was no fiddling with time-loop reality slips. And if the story ended with Harold getting out of the car. Because the real transcendence that I believe we are supposed to see, and is really there but only weakly because of the issues listed above, is that Max is Harold and Harold is Max. So much of that is lost because it peaks early and because we are told this fact. What happened to the days of Raymond Carver in which the thing the story was about was never written about on the page? The days when we readers didn’t have to be spoonfed? We don’t get to meet Claire or any other girl after Harold leaves and the boys get out of the car. No new revelations are made. And the latecomer, Harold, our deus ex machina, he’s in the fucking wind. Why continue past?
Fuck knows.
Nick
