We Don't Mean To Suggest That Our Town Is A Sham

Nothing lives forever except maybe the unsolvable mysteries the past creates for us

I was thinking recently about a pair of stories I read in college. My sophomore year—when I was still a Linguistics major, when I still thought I had a bright future as an NSA codebreaker and not as a community college adjunct*—I took a creative fiction course that aimed to teach us to write short stories by reading and analyzing them.

We covered the classics, the canon: “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “The Swimmer” and (as mentioned last week) “Bullet in the Brain.” Among others. But the two that stuck with me are not these, in spite of the difficulties I’ve faced trying to find them since. In fact it’s perhaps because they have eluded me that I find them so captivating still.

(To be clear I could go on you-know-where right this minute and purchase the anthologies they belong to; that’s not really what I mean. They seem to exist nowhere on the internet as stand-alone texts.)

I tried a new tack last week and dug up the external hard drive onto which I had poured every picture and document and mp3 file from my college days once the stolid MacBook I had gotten with a freshman discount in 2008 (plus a rebate for a free printer and iPod!) started showing serious signs of giving up. But amidst the reams of embarrassing PhotoBooth pictures and syllabi and essays straddling the line between talent and bullshit, those two stories were nowhere to be found, even in the folder containing all the other stories I had to read for that class. Nothing lives forever except maybe the unsolvable mysteries the past creates for us.

This says a lot about our society

And why wouldn’t it create them? The past is the past, a country we can never really re-enter. Like Slim Charles said, well, the thing about the old days: they the old days. Plus it’s not like any of us could heed the advice of the future even if we did hear it. I’m trying to imagine what good it would have done for me in 2009 to be told this reading you’re doing for class is going to stick a bug in your brain that will obsessively consume you for a few days 12 years from now. Would I have done anything differently? Probably not!

The stories, by the way: Frederick Busch’s “Ralph the Duck” and Stephen Millhauser’s “A Report on Our Recent Troubles.” I can’t cite the Busch story for you at any length for the aforementioned reasons, although it is clearly a favorite among the writerly set, as I’ve found plenty of writing about it even as its full contents elude me. Like many stories I am drawn to, it is about death, and what we can (and cannot) learn from it. Novelist Celeste Ng had this to say:

I met Frederick Busch just once, shortly before his death, when he was a visiting professor at my MFA program. I asked him if it was a problem that all of my stories seemed to feature missing parents, and he told me that writers always write about what they fear the most. For him—a happily married man with several sons—that meant his stories often dealt with couples divorcing or children in danger. I think of that every time I read “Ralph the Duck”: it’s a story about how pain lives with us, and the ways we strive to make up for the past.

I did, however, manage to get my hands on the Millhauser story shortly before publishing this newsletter. Using a trick I’ve learned from journalists with cushy sinecures known as “asking Twitter to do it for you,” I was offered access to the story from three different people within a few hours.

In this there were lessons, too, beyond the usual stuff about the boundless generosity and resourcefulness of strangers. For example: I read the first few pages and started to wonder What did I even like about this? Without spoiling too much, the basic premise is that a series of horrifying tragedies has befallen a sleepy mid-sized town, and we are reading the brusque first-person-plural report of the committee tasked with investigating the tragedies. What had struck me as brilliant at 19 sort of rankled me at 30. Of course, there’s the lesson: A decade is a long time to expect anything to remain constant, taste in particular. It’s okay to pack up one’s romantic notions from the past as just that, and not expect them, in their dusty boxes, to do anything more than serve as a reference point for who we once were.

Pictured: A time machine

That said, as Millhauser leans further and further into the conceit that drives “A Report,” with his Committee reporting on increasingly horrifying strings of events and prescribing absurdly medieval fixes to them in measured, corporatist tones, the story starts to work. By the end I could see just how and why I was so deeply struck by it in college, itself a deeply confusing and emotional time that lays bare how ill-suited to dealing with one’s messy reality the sterile bureaucratic machinations of an institution can be.

The behavior of our citizens, though far from perfect, is surely no worse than one finds in other suburban towns…How then do we explain this eruption of wished-for death, this plague of self-annihilation?

The answer, we have concluded, lies not in our failure to live up to a high code of conduct—not in the realm of failure at all—but in the very qualities of our town that we think of as deserving praise. By this we don’t mean to suggest that our town is a sham, that beneath our well-groomed surface is a hidden darkness—a rot at the heart of things. Such an explanation we find naïve, even childish. It suggests that by the simple act of tearing off a mask we can expose the hideous truth beneath—a truth that, once revealed, will no longer have the power to harm us. Such an analysis strikes us as banal and consoling. Our town, we maintain, is in fact the excellent place we’ve always found it to be…

Those who admire our town speak of it as pleasant, safe, comfortable, attractive, and friendly. It is all these things. But such qualities, however worthwhile, contain an element of the questionable. At their heart lies an absence. It’s an absence of all that is not pleasant, all that is uncomfortable, dangerous, unknown…Surfeited with contentment, weighed down by happiness, our citizens feel, now and then, a sudden desire: for the unseen, for the forbidden. Beneath or within our town, a counter-town arises—a dark town devoted to the disruption of limits, a town in love with death.

Despite the fact that we aren’t meant to take the Committee all that seriously—especially once they start prescribing public beheadings, child sacrifice, stonings and flayings, etc.—their analysis in the above paragraphs does nibble around the edges of a larger truth that I’ve written about in this space many times. They’re in the right neighborhood but on the wrong street, as I often tell my students as a way to soften the blow of correction. What they describe as a love for death born of its chronic absence seems to me to be more the product of—you guessed it—alienation and atomization. A nagging sense that they have been removed, by all the nice things they claimed to want, from the necessary care for each other that determines our care for ourselves. A total absence of suffering, discomfort, and death, which in turn renders their opposites without meaning.

In this are wrapped up a few larger questions: Is the personal political? Who is to blame for the emotional infancy of suburban adults—their own selfish wants, or the sytem that created those wants? Will we ever abandon our religious attachment to individualism in pursuit of collective liberation? And just who writes a newsletter about two stories he can’t even provide his readers access to?

I, despite my upbringing on the periphery of a well-manicured suburb, don’t have answers to most of those questions. But I know that stories—even and especially fictional ones—provide us a means for asking them, and thinking about them more fully.

Are there stories that do this for you? Make you ponder the mysteries great and small that seem crucial to ponder even if we can never know the answers? I’d love to hear about them; please drop me a comment below.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be.

If you’d like to support Tabs Open, maybe you’d also consider sharing this post or buying a sticker.