The short story has been a neglected writing style in my reading. This summer, I made a point of addressing it when I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s excellent collection, Homesick For Another World. After I finished, I vowed to read more similar collections.
A perk of working with high school-age youth is having the chance to revisit writers and writing that you were equally clueless about when you were the same age as these young charges assigned to you.
Of course, being a tutor, sometimes you must scramble in reacquainting yourself with said writing from the past. A few of those writers? Try James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson. Orwell and Salinger haven’t been tough. I read The Catcher in the Rye last year and have read it several times over the last decade. Ditto for Orwell, and in fact, I made a habit of annually rereading 1984 during the 2000s and the Bush presidency. Thurber and Jackson are less familiar.
A week ago, I was time-traveling back to Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat,” and dull little (or so we think!) Mr. Martin. Admittedly, I have never loved Thurber like some literary types have.
On Sunday, I was co-reading Shirley Jackson’s short story, “Charles,” and helping a student craft a paragraph about parents not recognizing flaws in a child. The discussion that ensued was meaningful to me on several levels.
Shirley Jackson, American writer (seen in this April 16, 1951 AP photo)
Save for “The Lottery,” few people who travel in non-literary circles know Jackson’s work. This New Yorker article is worth reading if you’d like to know more about a wonderfully (weird) and “haunted” writer.
“Charles” wasn’t particularly strange or odd. It was a story that had humor and was what might be called an “unsentimental” look at life as a mother during a particular time in America. In Jackson’s case, this would be the 1940s, a very different time period than our own. As a writer, Jackson shaped it with sly parental incredulity and humor, too.
Apparently, the story was published in Mademoiselle and later, was included in her collection, The Lottery/The Adventures of James Harris.
It begins thus:
The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me. . . .
Like the parents Jackson is writing about, most think their child is the best. Love compels you to want to feel this way. This also opens the door to the possibility that you’ll overreach and have unrealistic expectations, too.
Of course, it’s special when parents of a child get to witness an adult who validates the faith they had in him or her.