{"id":184,"date":"2009-08-23T15:48:10","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T15:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.wordpress.com\/?p=184"},"modified":"2009-08-23T15:48:10","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T15:48:10","slug":"on-cormac-mccarthys-the-road-per-pettersons-out-stealing-horses-and-vladimir-nabokovs-laughter-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/08\/23\/on-cormac-mccarthys-the-road-per-pettersons-out-stealing-horses-and-vladimir-nabokovs-laughter-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"On Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses," and Vladimir Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark""},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote the following as a request for a former student, to be posted on the Southeast Review’s webpage:
\nMystery in Storytelling
\nOne of the tricks in story telling\u2014and believe me, there\u2019s a hundred tricks that the best writers use unconsciously, subconsciously, accidentally, purposefully, or not\u2014lies in how to keep you interested, keep you turning the pages. As a young writer it was my good fortune to study with Donald Barthelme (whose Sixty Stories<\/em> is only of the best book o\u2019 stories ever) and Edward Albee (the Broadway boy wonder who was kind and generous as a professor, whom I saw direct a knockout performance of Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/em>, only one of the best American plays ever), and both of them said, \u201cSurprise the reader.\u201d Yet a basic problem arises with the element of surprise: how to keep it from being corny or forced. That\u2019s where it\u2019s useful to have some idea of the greater notion of Mystery.
\nFirst off, let me dispense with the notion of Mystery as some trump card that\u2019s played at the end of a mystery novel\u2014murder with an icicle, where the weapon melts away, as in Sherlock Holmes and later, Alice Sebold\u2019s The Lovely Bones <\/em>(2002), as the way the murderer\/rapist is ultimately dispatched by a hand from heaven. That\u2019s all fine and dandy, but not what I mean by Mystery. It\u2019s part of it, no doubt, but not the whole enchilada. The best sense of Mystery is almost indefinable, ineffable\u2014a sense that things aren\u2019t what they seem (in Life as in Fiction, they rarely are), that something is wrong here but you can\u2019t put your finger on it, that there is something interesting just behind that door, lurking in the shadows, in the odd expression that woman at the dentist\u2019s office just gave you, in the foreboding you feel as you hear the telephone ring in the dark of night.
\nOne of the best novels of our fresh-faced 21st<\/sup> century is Out Stealing Horses<\/em> (2006) by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson.\u00a0 From the get-go you know that something\u2019s amiss: An aging man retires to the countryside to live in peace and harmony, after some implied calamity in his life, and meets an old acquaintance on the road of his remote neighborhood. Not to spoil too much\u2014if you haven\u2019t read this novel, you should\u2014this brief meeting with an old acquaintance stirs to the surface a childhood tale of accidental death, unhappy marriage, and heroism during World War II. What I find remarkable about Horses<\/em> is that all of the people are essentially good, decent, honorable human beings, although things go terribly awry by the end. There are no villains, but there are mistakes, misdeeds, cruelty and heartbreak. Even the Nazis seem like decent human beings, and you feel sympathy and compassion for them.
\nHere\u2019s the trick, and I don\u2019t feel any guilt here, as magicians do in giving up the illusion\u2014Mystery lies in what is left unsaid. What is hidden. Held back. Until that perfect moment for it to be revealed, whatever it<\/em> happens to be.\u00a0 In Per Petterson\u2019s Out Stealing Horses<\/em> (a gorgeous title, isn\u2019t it?), which is arguably one of the best novels of its time, he holds back a stunner about the narrator\u2019s dignified, beloved father until the very end. At that moment, all the mysteries and quizzical, emotionally charged moments come into sharp relief, and it delivers a kick to the gut that is the mark of a terrific novel. Which is what we all want to write, isn\u2019t it?
\nThe only recent novel that outshines Out Stealing Horses<\/em> in its darkest-of-the-dark way is Cormac McCarthy\u2019s end-of-the-world howl to the human condition, The Road<\/em> (2006). We all have our little special moments in our little careers and grab bag of Hopes & Dreams, and two of mine have involved somehow brushing shoulders with the greatness of McCarthy: once he won a literary book award the same year I won an award for a story, and we were listed side-by-side (he got more money, natch), and the second occurred at the release of my last novel, Goodnight, Texas<\/em>, which was reviewed in one magazine side-by-side with The Road<\/em>. A friend of mine criticized The Road<\/em>\u2019s plot because, \u201cI could guess what would happen from the beginning.\u201d As in that the father would die, the son would live on. I agree. That\u2019s not hard to figure out. But then again, that\u2019s not the Mystery.
\nIn one of Vladmir Nabokov\u2019s wickedly good novels of the 1930s, Laughter in the Dark <\/em>(1938), he sums up the plot at the outset: \u201cOnce upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man\u2019s life, detail is always welcome.\u201d
\nMystery often lies in the details, what makes up the meat and bones of our lives. In The<\/em> Road,<\/em> the scene where the father and son open the trapdoor to discover the huddled slaves of the cannibal-clan is one of the creepiest, most horrific images I\u2019ve ever read. The scene where the father\/son stumble upon a cache of food just as they are about to starve to death creates a feeling of joy and exultation. That\u2019s not a trick. It\u2019s natural and true to the heart.
\nPart of the Mystery of The Road<\/em> rests in what will become of the human race: Is the boy a savior? Will they\/we all perish? It closes with one of the best endings in contemporary literature, and in that coda, McCarthy suggests a time when all that we know and care about will be gone and forgotten: \u201cOnce there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.\u201d
\nI can\u2019t top that. The Mystery of the world. That\u2019s what makes us gasp and glow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote the following as a request for a former student, to be posted on the Southeast Review’s webpage: Mystery in Storytelling One of the tricks in story telling\u2014and believe me, there\u2019s a hundred tricks that the best writers use … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}