The ballad of the Lazy Susan
Dear reader,
Here’s a sentence:
But that tiny spot—like any season, or moon, or theater set; like a cake in a rotary display—invariably spun out of reach and view, and the quarreling would resume and she would have to wait a long time for the cake to come round again.
This sentence comes from Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, which I started reading because of Steve Almond’s insightful craft book, Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow. In it, Almond describes how Birds was like his scripture, he read it over and over when he was learning to write. I picked it up out of a small sense of spite (how good could it be?) and then read and reread it and may never stop.
This sentence describes happiness in the main character’s marriage, a marriage described in the previous paragraph as “a wedding of emotionally handicapped parking spaces, an arduously tatted lace of property and irritation”.
But notice how the sentence breaks rules—generally speaking, a parenthetical like the one inside the em-dashes shouldn’t break with a semi-colon. Why not just include “cake” within that first set, eg: “like any season, or moon, or theater set, or cake on a rotary display”? But that’s a magic trick in itself, the introduction of the second metaphor in its fullness whisks the first set of metaphors out of the way—in exactly the way that it describes.
There’s other tricks here (notice the reoccurring regularity of the ‘R’ sound: rotary, reach, resume and round) but there’s also a second rule broken: usually a sentence that uses a parenthetical should be readable without what was inside it. That the “cake” broke a rule, and should maybe not exist, all of that underlines the meaning, that it is as nebulous as the happiness in this marriage.
Writerly news:
A wild thing that happened to me this week is that one of my stories was translated into Estonian! Thanks to Kristjan Sander, one of the editors at Algernon.
I’m aware that there’s a backlog of things to read since you haven’t heard from me for a while, so I’ll drip feed them here: my story “Whalesong” was published earlier this year in Deadlands, and is about going through something difficult and coming out the other side.
Spinning in hope,
Guan
p.s. Sorry if you tried to reply to my last email. My reply-to email was broken on the last email - it works now! (Thanks to Kathleen for the tip, whose book Honeyeater is out now!)