Plain Folk Tales
Jul. 23rd, 2006 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel16 Jul 06
True Tales of American Life - ed. Paul Auster - Faber and Faber, 2001
* * * *
This is such an obvious idea for a book that it’s amazing that no-one has done it before. The author Paul Auster invited listeners to a radio programme to send in short, true stories - no more than a few hundred words - on any subject they chose. The result is a fascinating insight into the psyche of Middle America, and goes to show that “ordinary people” have stories to tell and can tell them just as interestingly as professional writers.
Auster has loosely and arbitrarily arranged his material into categories (animals, families, objects, love, war, meditations and so on), though many of the tales fall into more than one. There is a pleasing variety of themes - to give a selection taken at random, a family jaguar car causes jealousy at school, a woman fights off a potential mugger with just words, a seven year old gets a lesson in the economics of love, a woman finds the missing parts of her grandmother’s tea set in a flea market, a man buys a python and uses it as therapy for schizophrenics.
What’s so impressive about them is that by focusing on minutiae, huge novelistic themes can be hinted at in subtle and affecting ways. For example, in one story, a chorister at a church notices that there is someone in it late at night, a few days before Christmas. He investigates and finds a barren couple leaving an expensive pile of toys as an anonymous donation to a children’s charity. That little vignette says more about the heartbreak of childlessness (and the positive things you can do about it) than any novel on the subject would have done.
It’s a book to be dipped into - if you read it straight, as I did, the stories come so thick and fast that they overwhelm one another, making them difficult to remember. The one that has most stuck in my mind - and I can only presume it’s because of the bizarreness of the image - is about a “radio gypsy” whose every major decision about his job was associated with an encounter with a rolling tyre on the freeway.
This is an example of the “incredible coincidence” story - there are several along the lines of “I thought of my friend for the first time in many years and learned two days later that he had died at that very moment” - of which there are rather too many for my taste. The constant suggestion by the authors that there was a religious or mystical explanation did become a bit irritating (rationalist that I am, I am more inclined to believe in the dumb power of chance and our tendency to see patterns where they don’t necessarily exist). This may have been due to Auster’s editorial influence, which seems to have been quite heavy judging by the uniformity of style, tone and vocabulary across the different stories. Or it might be due to the greater religious awareness that Americans often have. It would be fascinating to create a similar collection from Europe or Asia and see if a similar theme emerges. How about it, Mr. Auster?
True Tales of American Life - ed. Paul Auster - Faber and Faber, 2001
* * * *
This is such an obvious idea for a book that it’s amazing that no-one has done it before. The author Paul Auster invited listeners to a radio programme to send in short, true stories - no more than a few hundred words - on any subject they chose. The result is a fascinating insight into the psyche of Middle America, and goes to show that “ordinary people” have stories to tell and can tell them just as interestingly as professional writers.
Auster has loosely and arbitrarily arranged his material into categories (animals, families, objects, love, war, meditations and so on), though many of the tales fall into more than one. There is a pleasing variety of themes - to give a selection taken at random, a family jaguar car causes jealousy at school, a woman fights off a potential mugger with just words, a seven year old gets a lesson in the economics of love, a woman finds the missing parts of her grandmother’s tea set in a flea market, a man buys a python and uses it as therapy for schizophrenics.
What’s so impressive about them is that by focusing on minutiae, huge novelistic themes can be hinted at in subtle and affecting ways. For example, in one story, a chorister at a church notices that there is someone in it late at night, a few days before Christmas. He investigates and finds a barren couple leaving an expensive pile of toys as an anonymous donation to a children’s charity. That little vignette says more about the heartbreak of childlessness (and the positive things you can do about it) than any novel on the subject would have done.
It’s a book to be dipped into - if you read it straight, as I did, the stories come so thick and fast that they overwhelm one another, making them difficult to remember. The one that has most stuck in my mind - and I can only presume it’s because of the bizarreness of the image - is about a “radio gypsy” whose every major decision about his job was associated with an encounter with a rolling tyre on the freeway.
This is an example of the “incredible coincidence” story - there are several along the lines of “I thought of my friend for the first time in many years and learned two days later that he had died at that very moment” - of which there are rather too many for my taste. The constant suggestion by the authors that there was a religious or mystical explanation did become a bit irritating (rationalist that I am, I am more inclined to believe in the dumb power of chance and our tendency to see patterns where they don’t necessarily exist). This may have been due to Auster’s editorial influence, which seems to have been quite heavy judging by the uniformity of style, tone and vocabulary across the different stories. Or it might be due to the greater religious awareness that Americans often have. It would be fascinating to create a similar collection from Europe or Asia and see if a similar theme emerges. How about it, Mr. Auster?
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Date: 2006-07-24 06:02 pm (UTC)