“Dybek, Minimalist Fiction and Turkeys
review by Alissa Nielsen
The Coast of Chicago
Stuart Dybek
Picador, 1981
“I never give any of them names. We don't know an animal's name.
A name's what we use instead of smelling.”
-from Strays by Stuart Dybek
My Mom never let me say the name of the turkey we'd caught. Every time I acted as if I might say its name aloud she'd cover my mouth and say, “Hush”. Later, in High School, I wrote down this quote from Sartre, “To speak is to act, and everything we name loses its innocence becoming part of the world we live in.”
I think most people would agree that all really good stories aren't read, they're felt. Special attention needs to be given to making the story real, but the most powerful point in a story must not be written or the story dies. Like naming a turkey on Thanksgiving day, if a writer gives name to the underlining purpose of the story it becomes part of our too-real world. It loses its magic.
The reason I adore Stuart Dybek's short stories (particularly his short, short stories) is because he has such a keen understanding of tone, lyricism and wit. But most importantly, he knows how to hint really well, framing the empty space enough to give the reader a faint understanding of something deeper.
In the story “Farwell,” the protagonist is reminiscing about his old friend, Babo. The tone of this story starts out somber, “Tonight, a steady drizzle, streetlights smoldering in fog like funnels of light collecting rain”(3). Though the story is mostly about Babo, it tells more about the narrator than his friend. The narrator is someone who is excited by new people, is sad when his friend leaves and wonders if he himself will ever manage to leave the city. He is drawn to Babo because Babo is different. “He'd lived in England, Canada and said he never knew where else was next, but that sooner or later staying in one place reminded him that where he belonged no longer existed”(6). But despite their differences, they both connect because of loneliness, which is the underlying emotion of this piece, though it's never stated. The emptiness and sadness of the main character comes out in the last paragraph, “I reached the building where I lived, the hallways quiet, supper smoke still ringing the light bulbs. In the dark, my room with its windows raised smelled of wet screens and tangerines”(6). The smoke at the end echoes the fog at the beginning in a sad, ghostly way, a reminder of the rut this character is stuck in.
In the two page story “Outtakes” an usher in a movie theater is teaching himself to become invisible. Again a tone is set immediately, along with spare word and poetic language.“The usher scans the credits for his name. His profession is a hush.” The trouble is stated in the second paragraph where the usher daydreams (or perhaps plots?) out how he will burn down a building so his story can become legend. Where the usher in this story becomes invisible, so too are the words about his loneliness invisible, but still very present. This story almost seems like a commentary to minimalist fiction, especially in the last lines, “but like outtakes remained part of the movie” (73).
Dybek cuts out all unnecessary information in his short fiction down to a sliver of detail that implies emotion. In the story “Lost,” where the protagonist reminisces about an old radio show where kids called in with their lost object or pets, the reader infers that the narrator is missing something very important. It's not quite understood what is missing, but the emotion is felt strongly at the end where the character admits recalling, “if it would work to phone in and report something I'd always wanted as missing. For it seemed to me then that something one always wanted, but never had, was his all the same, and wasn't it lost?” (166).
The shorter the story the more each word counts. Each word becomes a repressed or compressed emotion resounding just below the surface. As Amy Hempel says, “A lot of times what's not reported in your work is more important than what actually appears on the page. Frequently the emotional focus of the story is some underlying event that may not be described or even referred to in the story.””
