A Good Story Discomfits You

Still reading Rivecca's collection, which is blowing me away. Yesterday I spent time in a friend's backyard reading "Very Special Victims" (while my dog sniffed around, barked at stray cats, and then, reluctantly, curled up under the steps where I was sitting). After I finished, I put the book down for a long while. 

I read an interview with her while on break this afternoon. Her feelings about the function of short stories reflect how I felt last night when I set her collection on the grated steps next to me and stared out at the broken chain link fencing and spring-green trees surrounding Heewa's yard:

"There’s still a Puritanism in U.S. culture that dictates that art has to be “useful” in some way, instructive or inspiring in a very moralistic, triumph-of-the-human-spirit way. And stories very rarely give that kind of warm & fuzzy inspiration. The inspiration they provide–for me, anyway–is more rigorous and challenging. A good story discomfits you, forces you to question things, to turn the lens on yourself. It leaves you with an unsettled feeling that’s almost indescribable. And in contemporary culture, there’s a reluctance to sit with that kind of unnameable sensation."

It's strange to feel so deeply recognized by a piece of writing, although of course that's why many of us read. But still, when it happens, it feels like standing in front of a mirror while touching your face – that's you there, isn't it? And as Rivecca said, it's unsettling and nearly indescribable. 

I underlined this paragraph from "Very Special Victims": 

"She had never hated him before; she did now. She scrutinized him for a trace of the taut, hunted shiftiness men's faces assumed when they were driven to be with her and didn't know why. It was never sweet. They were never besotted, just stiffly, sullenly advancing as though shoved toward her from behind. Sometimes they looked at her like an animal eyeing an untrustworthy trainer; other times in a gauging, measuring way, like she was an obstruction they needed to lift and move to get what they wanted."