Here, in This Sun

A woman waits in an auto repair shop while her car is serviced. While waiting she is distracted by the glare of sunlight through the shop's windows, to the point where she envies the blind man waiting across from her, with his "deep black sunglass lenses." She goes on to ruminate about the lack of blind women in the town, at least in public places, and concludes that "even with a German Shepherd's protection" such women would be vulnerable to muggers and rapists. Odd thoughts for a woman to be harboring on an otherwise ordinary day at the auto shop. But then Anna—that's her name—is hot and tired ("She had often felt tired lately"), and even a little dizzy, and these oddly cynical thoughts might be ascribed at least in part to her exhaustion.

Then the litany of odd thoughts resumes with Anna concluding that "everyone in the [auto repair shop] waiting room" is vulnerable, at the mercy of mechanics "with their greasy fingers and wrenches clinking under their car hoods." She's convinced that the mechanics are out to rip her off, and furthermore that she deserves it for "sitting helplessly [at home] in her vinyl seat, watching Jeopardy" instead of teaching herself mechanics (one wonders if at the dentist's office she berates herself for not having gone to dental school). One begins to suspect that these aren't merely the ruminations of an exhausted and wary woman, but the warped notions of a paranoid. At the very least Anna is deeply depressed.

The world as interpreted by a mind slightly off its tether is the subject of this opening, one that makes for a good if disturbing read. I for one want to know more about this character who feels so undone by the rays of sunlight through a window that she wishes herself blind, and compares spare car parts to human organs "in nests of shredded packing paper."

In first-person fiction we call such a character "unreliable." What makes a narrative unreliable isn't usually that we're given the wrong facts, but that the world is presented through the distorting filter or tinted lens of a psyche that has lost its grasp on the objective world: i.e., that may see things very clearly, but doesn't see them as you and I would see them. Unreliable narratives are either void of perspective, or offer us perspectives that are warped.

A good example of this is the narrator of John Cheever's masterpiece "Goodbye, My Brother," who tells us up front that his family "has always been very close in spirit," then goes on to eviscerate said family and especially his brother, who by the story's end has been attacked not only verbally but physically, laid flat on his back with a saltwater-logged root. From the narrator's perspective this may pass for filial devotion, but Cheever's readers are bound to see things differently, as he meant us to.

Another prime example of an unreliable protagonist is the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, a man rendered so emotionally comatose by his inured sense of propriety that when given his once real chance at love he botches it. It's a terribly sad story, rendered sadder for being told by its victim who doesn't even see how sad it is, or even that he's the victim.

But the woman in the work presented here has more in common with Chief Broom, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a native American inmate at a mental hospital in the Pacific Northwest, for whom events unfold through a thick, hallucinatory fog as he pushes his broom back and forth down the hospital's corridors. Though his view of things is distorted, still, for Kesey's novel about a belligerent individualist who fakes his way into the looney bin to avoid prison time Chief Broom is the perfect narrator, since he's been faking his own mental illness. Only after Kesey concocted Chief Broom (which event, we're told, occurred during one of the fledgling author's many drugged interludes), was he able to successfully write his novel.

Don't get out the peyote just yet. Unreliable narratives are rare and tricky birds, and should only be ventured into with the sure understanding that an unreliable narrative is intended, since the ultimate subject of an unreliable narrative is always the protagonist's unreliability. Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting readers not with an unreliable character, but with an unreliable author, for which there can be no excuse. If there's nothing wrong with Anna; if her bizarre, unbridled perceptions turn out to be nothing more than the writer flexing his or her descriptive muscles, being clever or cute for cuteness or cleverness sake, then this opening fails for making promises it has no intention to deliver on.

I suspect this author won't let us down; that these perceptions of Anna's are there for a good reason, to introduce us to the psyche of a woman on the verge of mental breakdown. I suspect, too, that as the story progresses her problems—along with her perceptions—will only get worse.

Clinic Caper

This scene of marital bliss set in the confines of a dermatologist's examination room feels more like something complete in and of itself than the opening of a longer work. If there's any doubt, the title of the piece seals it.

Not that there's anything wrong with telling a story in a page or two. In fact, anyone who can do so has my unqualified admiration. The trick, though, is to tell a story and not just relay an amusing anecdote.

An anecdote is a short narrative constructed around a unique, curious, and often provocative incident, one that typically reveals character through extreme circumstances and almost always with humor as its end. The term comes from the Greek word anekdota, meaning "unpublished"—an indeed, most anecdotes are relayed orally and not intended for nor worthy of the printed page except as illustrations serving some larger purpose—evoking, for instance, some facet of a character or characters. Served a la carte, anecdotes tend to be as ephemeral as they are amusing. They are garnishes or appetizers, not the main course.

Though quite nicely written, the opening scene here feels more anecdotal than it might were the emphasis less on the singular, curious, and provocative event in the clinic, and more on the two principle characters, Jim and his narrating wife. As it stands, I can imagine such a tale being told at a dinner party (a popular venue for anecdotes). The guests, who know this couple well—and who've also had their share of cocktails—are extremely amused, weeping with laughter. Their host is on a roll. When she gets to the part about the dermatologist's fiendish chair launching her husband through the stucco wall, I see them all doing spit takes with their wine into their Roquefort pear salads.

But literature isn't a dinner party, and the "guests" (unfamiliar readers) need something more than cocktails to wet their appetite for anecdotes. They need context. They need some sense of who these two are when not goofing around at the dermatological clinic. That sense—the very little of it that we get—is tucked into one sentence in the opening paragraph ("at the age of sixty-six and forty-one years of marital bliss, we saw no reason to occupy separate rooms"). We're told that they are an older, happily married couple, a statement the anecdote goes on to confirm. It does so charmingly and (except for the mishandling of internal quotation marks) with skill. It meets our expectations; nothing more. It neither suggests nor reveals anything more or less about the characters, who they are, or why we should care about them enough to want to keep reading.

And since the scene merely confirms what we've already been told—without a hint of irony or paradox or a shadow of doubt, I'm left unsatisfied. Again, at a dinner party I would be content to know that my hostess and her husband are lovely, happily married people: sure, it's probably not the whole story; in fact it may well be a total illusion. And yet what are dinner parties for if not to parade ourselves in front of our guests in our favorite masks?

If literature serves a purpose it's to tear those masks off--or at least let us peek through them and see the real lives underneath. Here, with this opening, I'm shown only the mask: a bright, smiling, charming one.

Supposing the shenanigans in the examination room were underscored by something grave? Supposing this routine visit to the dermatologist turned out to be anything but routine, that "everything" was not "all right"? The small blotchy growth on his shoulder? A stage-3 melanoma. Then this would be no mere anecdote, but revelatory of a devoted wife's courageous humor in the face of terror and tragedy.

The underscoring item needn't be something as grave as cancer, but it should carry us beyond anecdote.