Reading is Writing #4: Daddy, The Hours

Short essays on defeat and imitating style.

You ever lose so hard your house gets turned into a museum?

Below you will find a critical work on a single moment of defeat in Emma Cline’s collection Daddy, and a short discussion of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a novel written in direct response to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

I believe defeat is one of the most interesting themes of literature. This is partly because I once lost a baseball game 44 to 4.

And it is partly because all great ventures end in defeat. All victories are temporary. You feel in your arm that you’ll never have a 99mph fastball. The organic composition of capital increases. Your body gives out. The rate of profit falls. The struggle goes on.

To digress about that struggle for a couple grafs: Lately I have found myself at odds with short fiction. In the three years before I went to Bennington I reliably wrote about one (good) short story every nine months. These were mostly drawn from some moment of unresolved emotion, and I hold these stories close to my heart. I was a partisan of William Gibson’s statement that a short story is to a novel what a bonsai is to a tree; they take the same amount of time.

But as I was applying to Bennington, and especially these last couple months, I’ve been trying to write faster. Part of this is a simple logic. Ray Bradbury once said it was a good exercise to write a short story every week for a year, it being quite difficult to write 52 bad short stories in a row. I am not matching that pace, but I am writing many more short stories, about one every two weeks.

Yet I feel the limits of the form. My plots are contrived, my endings unearned, my characters wan outlines of upper middle class anxieties. I can’t help but feel that this arises from a lack of ambition on my part. I am writing stories, but writing them within the confines of my old method. I am metabolizing some undigested but powerful experience and re-presenting it in altered form as fiction. But art is as much about form and content as it is about inspiration and intent. To get better I have to get faster. I have to play more with tense and POV. I have to be ambitious in the formal choices I make, and less reliant on stock dramatic devices. This has been the primary lesson of my first two months of school and of the first 10 editions of this blog. This is a defeat of sorts.

Defeat and failure, more than death, more than love, are the ordering principles of human life. It is what we remember in the good times, and it is what we face always, the constant inability to live up to our ideals, the painful inferiority that spurs on. The quiet beside the deathbed. The hesitation of love. The inadequacy of speech.

I think this blog will eventually become a catalog of literary defeat. So, let’s talk about losing.

Daddy by Emma Cline

Emma Cline’s 2021 collection Daddy is a series of thematically related stories, mostly concerned with falls from grace. “Marion,” one of the later stories in the collection, follows a friendship between an 11 year-old girl and Marion, her slightly older friend. The story takes place in the foothills of a mountain chain in California between the legalization of medical marijuana and the proliferation of smartphones.

Marion lives on a farm in the hills where the narrator joins her for stretches at a time because her own mother is frequently absent. Marion’s parents, Dinah and Bobby, are paranoiac post-hippie types. Two other adults, Jack and Grady, stay in a barn on the property.

Marion uses new age magic to try to attract Jack’s sexual attention. Both Jack and Bobby are vaguely sexually threatening towards the girls, who playact aspects of adult sexuality with each other. Eventually this culminates in Marion asking the narrator to knock out one of her adult teeth so she can use it in a devotional offering she thinks will attract Jack. Marion and the narrator kiss, the narrator strikes her with a rock. Marion runs off and the narrator is expelled from the farm by Dinah and Bobby.

Many of Cline’s stories end with this sort of defeat. Desires are acknowledged and then deflected, or power is inverted. This disturbs the order of the story-world. The narrator is cast out or judged unworthy, or they become aware of their own failure—similar structures recur throughout Daddy with important variations, “Northeast Regional” is a nice twist on this structure for instance.

But in “Marion,” there’s additional symbolic resonance. Marion and the narrator act like sisters at times. But they are competing for the same resources. When the narrator strikes her with the stone, Marion effectively vanishes from the story and the narrator is marked, ultimately, for ejection. It’s a Cain and Abel play. But the narrator’s failure as her sister’s keeper is not that she was jealous, but that she fed into Marion’s fantasies and developed a forbidden, quasi-sexual connection with her.

This is primarily a coming-of-age story about complicated sexual desires. The narrator and Marion take erotic pictures of each other, they share the same bed. This is entangled with a fantasy (or replay) of male violence: “[Marion] threw her arms around my neck, loose like a child, and kissed me with her eyes open. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Pretend I’m Jack. Look sleepy. Look sexy. Try to look like I do.’” (Cline, 207).

Prior to this exchange, the text suggests that Jack and Bobby are lechers to the girls. Bobby kisses them goodnight on the mouth, he goes around naked at times, and the other girls from Marion’s grade aren’t allowed to visit the house. Jack tells them “There are no rules,” (200) and lets them search around the barn; Marion steals some of Grady’s underwear. Jack tells them about Roman Polanski, though the reader doesn’t get any commentary on what he told them. The narrator and Marion metabolize Polanski’s story as romantic: “We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law.” (201-202). The narrator sees Jack watching Marion’s legs.

It seems obvious that Jack and Bobby are grooming the girls or, in the most charitable interpretation, behaving with a very creepy lack of boundaries around them. Yet it is the acknowledgement of Marion/the narrator’s homosexual bond and of Marion’s desire for Jack, rather than Jack’s interest in her, that upsets Bobby and Dinah. Marion, off-page, gives Dinah and Grady the erotic photographs after the narrator knocks out her tooth, Dinah confronts the narrator with them: “I covered my mouth with my hands, but Dinah had seen me smile. She shoved her face hard against mine, so her mouth was in my hair. “I know,” she said, into my ear. “Don’t think I don’t know who this was for.” (210). Dinah is choosing to side with the adult men who have been toying with her daughter and her daughter’s best friend.

On the drive away from the farm, Bobby continues his inappropriate conduct with the narrator: “He put his hand on my back and rubbed my bare skin up and down.” (211). And later on the same page, “he told me then how the symbols were gathering around him, how it had to do with me coming into their lives.” (211). In the final note of the story:

“He told me I shouldn’t worry, that I was a light-holder and that things would be fine and that I would have to stay away for a little while. Marion would call me soon, he said. We could be friends again, but I knew it wasn’t true.

“‘You’re a sweet girl,’ he said, his hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re better than all of them.’” (211-212).

I quote these passages at length because they show the logic of defeat in this story. The series of confrontations from 207-212 make the unspoken desires of the narrator and Marion explicit. They get what they want in a roundabout way: direct attention, treatment as adults, people see them as beings with desires. They even have a quasi-erotic encounter with each other. It’s a clear rupture with the almost playful tone of the prior portions of the story. But bringing these desires into the open results in the narrator’s banishment and Marion’s isolation on a farm with two men who seem very likely to mistreat her, if they have not already. The position of both characters has deteriorated considerably.

What makes this story compelling is the dangerous play between the commonplace elements, like half-acknowledged sexual tension between adolescent friends, and its specific setting on a remote farm operated by post-hippie drug traffickers with no sense of boundaries. In that isolation, adolescent sexual tension between friends of the same-sex destabilizes everything and costs them both their friendship.

The end of the story is sad and fraught and subtly horrible. But it is also, for the narrator at least, freeing. She gets out. She gets out without being assaulted by Jack or Bobby. She loses her friend, her first best friend, but gains her freedom.

I think Cline’s decision to end many of her stories with characters getting a twisted version of what they want, and thereby destroying their lives, is aesthetically interesting. It’s much more interesting than the narrator making a clean getaway, or than Jack and Bobby making real the (nightmare) fantasies both girls toy with.

Added to this is the narrator’s awareness that Bobby’s palliative insistence that she and Marion can return to their friendship is false. It’s not the first moment in which the narrator exhibits an adult honesty and cynicism, but it is the most significant marks her coming of age and the collapse of her previous relationships.

Emotional defeat is interesting because it both severs characters from their past desires and makes those desires more significant. The unacknowledged wish can fade, but the open wish must be dealt with through fulfillment or disappointment. And disappointment is, to me, the more interesting process, because we so rarely get what we want, and so when we get it we find it worse than we could have imagined. The tawdry, the plain, the sordid reassert themselves and after: “we [drive] along winding coastal roads, through shantytowns and orchards that drooped in the heat, past dry hills and that distant purple ridge, the cows standing motionless in the middle of a field.” (197).

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Cunningham’s book is impressive, moving and unsettling. The novel consists of three interwoven plots, each taking place over one day. It is a response to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and plays with the same tools, namely a close, but shifting, third-person perspective.

In one plotline, Cunningham’s Virginia Woolf persuades her husband to move back to London. In the second, Laura Brown, a housewife in 1940s LA, prepares her husband’s birthday party, tries to read Mrs. Dalloway, and realizes she’s depressed and trapped by domesticity. In 1999, Clarissa Vaughan (called Dalloway by one character) prepares a party in honor of Richard Brown, the AIDS-stricken son of the LA housewife.

It is, at the sentence level and the chapter level, a very good book. But I do not think it is a great book, and Cunningham’s decision to crib a third of it from real life (the Woolf sections) is dicey.

First the good. I found Laura Brown a compelling character. Los Angeles has occupied much of my thoughts of late—as that land of dreams runs against the hard nightmares underpinning it. But before the terraformed disaster of the present, there was the suburban dream of California. This country is built in the image of that dream California, with its permanent war between urban dynamism and suburban domesticity. I think this is one of the reasons why Noir is the only organic American genre other than the Western to never die. Noir shows the inability of the American city to cohere, while the Western imagines the frontier as all-consuming, yet doomed. And here we get a portrait of the LA dreamworld at its inception, a fusion of frontier and city, of bourgeois Love with individual freedom (for male desires). Brown’s wish to escape from that synthesis is a horror that is, literally, unspeakable. Who could be so monstrous as to reject Love?

But to take the central metaphor of suburbanization seriously, all nuclei—atomic or familial—are unstable. All particles move subtly. Eventually one will work its way loose, the only question is when. So Laura Brown, smarter than her husband, more driven, more ambitious, is starting to work herself out of the nuclear family.

The Clarissa Vaughan sections, which focus substantially on Richard Brown, are also largely good. Richard and Clarissa live in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, and while these sections are about that, they’re also about the end of youthful dreams. Richard and Clarissa were lovers once, quite long ago, and the heart of their relationship is love complicated by impossibility. They mean more to each other than anyone else—though Clarissa lives with a woman in a pre-Obergefell domestic arrangement—but that meaning is fraught and unclear and changes minute-to-minute. Cunningham gets at a beautiful type of half-requited love and the long, delicate tail such feelings have.

But Cunningham sails too close to the wind in imitating Woolf’s POV tools. The shifts in perspective are not particularly deft and do not last long enough to serve as more than temporary disruptions. For the most part, they give us other characters’ perspectives of Clarissa, who generally anticipates these observations in a way that undercuts their usefulness for illuminating her. She comes off as too self-aware. This spills the wind from Cunningham’s sails and leaves the prose listless and becalmed despite the sound of things happening on the page. During a conversation between Clarissa and a feminist scholar Mary Krull we get the following:

“Fool, Mary thinks, though she struggles to remain charitable or, at least, serene. No, screw charity. Anything’s better than queers of the old school, dressed to pass, bourgeois to the bone, living like husband and wife. Better to be a frank and open asshole, better to be John fucking Wayne, than a well-dressed dyke with a respectable job.

Fraud, Clarissa thinks. You’ve fooled my daughter, but you don’t fool me. I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn’t hard.” (160)

Cunningham fails to give Mary a convincing internal voice, at least in comparison with his treatment of Laura and Clarissa. She comes off as shallow, insipid, a caricature of radicalism. I thought reading this of Randy Shilts’ delicate treatment of different activists in And the Band Played On,* how Shilts was able to take the raw material of journalism and make something profound and literary and respectful of, if furious at, so many in the LGBTQ movement. I often find myself thinking of Shilts when reading novels that have AIDS as a central narrative concern—rarely to the benefit of the novelist.

Nowhere does Cunningham suffer more by comparison with Woolf and Shilts than in his treatment of death. I found it more than a little heavy-handed, verging on gauche, to put the words of Woolf’s suicide note in Richard Brown’s mouth as he prepares to jump out a window. It just felt unconvincing. Woolf was so good at getting into Septimus Warren Smith’s head, so good at finding the logic in his window plunge—one of uncountable parallelisms between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway—that it is jarring for Cunningham not to put himself in Brown’s brain, and to have his last words be those of someone else. Cunningham has already written suicide once in the book; the first chapter opens with Woolf drowning herself, and the silence here gives us an uncomplicated view of suicide as the surrender to illness and debility. I don’t find that especially interesting.

Call me a partisan of Ophelia (or that scene in the movie version of Rules of Attraction), but I think suicide can be high-drama, and the understatement here feels like a cop-opt in a book that is so concerned with perspective.

Still, in terms of intertextual novels, novels of shifting perspective and novels of exploratory empathy, you could do a lot worse than Cunningham.

Next week: Gaza, Generative Artificial Intelligence and the (post-)Fascist Imagination. Or maybe something else about Emilia Perez, if the Academy forces my hand on Sunday.

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*Ideologically motivated attacks on public health infrastructure? In my constitutional republic? It’s more likely than you’d think.