A Celebration of the Power of Literature
“A Society” is about a Society of women prompted by an unusual circumstance visited upon one of them which results in her coming to hate reading because it seems all books were written by men. The women of the Society are delineated as properly respectful and loving of men and cannot believe that they would be responsible for writing some of the things so described and so they make a pact to go out into the world and discover things for themselves. The narrative ends up exposing the power of literature to form conventions and opinions as the norm. “An Unwritten Novel” starts with a description of a stranger sitting across from the narrator in a train and proceeds to become a fictional biography of the woman as constructed by the narrator. The process of lending the woman a fictional life becomes a revelation of the processes of writing when the narrator is forced to edit on the fly as her narrative flies down dead ends and is confronted with contradictions to be worked out.
A Celebration of Experimental Fiction
None of the stories in this collection fit into the standard template of writing fiction taught in schools. Almost all the characterizations are thin, none feature an actual plot and one in particular stands out as violating all conventions of narrative composition. Experimentation starts out softly with “A Haunted House” in which the house is not really haunted and its ghosts are not scary. By the title story, any pretense toward fulfilling short story expectations are nearly gone as the six short paragraphs (the last just one single line) comprising the narrative is devoid of any element upon which the reader can cling to feel comfortable enough to confidently describe what it’s about. Even so, “Monday or Tuesday” seems like a kiddie story in comparison to the two-part structure of “Blue and Green” in which each color gets its own paragraph filled with lots of metaphor, lots of imagery and absolutely nothing to denote its status as a short story in any traditional sense of the term.
A Condemnation of the Patriarchy
Men get clobbered pretty hard in these stories. The father who demands that his daughter read all the books in the London Library before she can claim her inheritance is actually one of the better representations of his sex! (Not really.) “The Mark on the Wall” purports to be about a woman trying to figure out what the mark is, but in reality is a well-considered questioning of how men ever got to a point where they want they say has been naturalized into the only possible way of doing things. As previously indicated, the Society of readers in “A Society” are horrified to learn that the high regard they express toward man is not warranted based upon all that the would-be heiress has learned through her experience in going through the library’s collection. It is perhaps most notable that the only male character in these stories (keeping in mind that three of the eight selections feature no real characterization of either men or women in the usual sense) who can be considered genuinely admirable in way is the ghost of the dead husband in “A Haunted House.”
