Analysis
Mary Robison’s early stories deal with the recurrent theme of the spiritual torpor at the center of a materialistic American society that is shallow, banal, boring, and bored. Her stories can be read as variations on the theme of stasis and, as such, resemble James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) as much as the work of Carver or Beattie. Novelist David Leavitt accurately analyzes the common dilemmas of many of her characters as their inability to move “because they’re terrified of what will happen to them if they try to change.” Waiting and fear of change characterize a number of her early stories, but the waiting and fear eventually create a prevailing sense of lassitude and ennui, the desperation of a Sunday afternoon in November.
Barth describes her style as “hard-edged, fine-tooled, enigmatic super-realism,” phrases that could as well describe the early Joyce. Robison, however, differs from early Joyce principally because much of her work, in spite of presenting bleak lives, is extremely comical, a quality that some overly serious critics usually miss. She is a comic writer even in the dark world of her first collection, Days, a pun that immediately establishes the malady of the quotidian as a major theme but also describes the “dazed” condition that many of her characters inhabit.
The gnomic titles of many of her stories are quite humorous, and when they are not ironic, they mix humor with sadness. They are, however, unerring objective correlatives, which permit plot, character, theme, and tone to coalesce comfortably. Her stories are extremely difficult to analyze with the usual literary methods because she rarely begins them at the beginning; she opens in medias res—that is, in the middle of things. Indeed, her stories are not stories in a narrative sense but rather parables of emptiness or scenes resembling the kind that the composer Robert Schumann evokes in his heartrending Kinderszenen (1838). In spite of the sorrow depicted in much of her work, however, Robison consistently creates stories whose titles and proper nouns can evoke comic responses: Bluey and Greer Wellman of “The Wellman Twins,” Dieter and Boffo of “For Real,” Sherry, Harry, and Daphne Noonan of “Coach,” Ohio congressman Mel Physell, who writes poems on prosecutorial immunity, and a Great Dane named Lola from “Apostasy.”
“Kite and Paint”
The opening of the first story in Days, entitled “Kite and Paint,” illustrates clearly the theme of waiting, which recurs frequently throughout Robison’s fiction: “It was the last day of August in Ocean City, and everybody was waiting for Hurricane Carla.” Two men in their sixties, Charlie and Don, have been living together for some time. Don is not in good health but continues to care for his rose garden. He is a painter but seems to have lost interest in his craft; Charlie chides him for his unwillingness to paint anything. It is not clear whether they are lovers, though Don’s former wife, Holly, has come to warn them that Hurricane Carla is imminent. The hurricane has temporarily given both men first a focus, then a purpose for action since neither seems frightened of it. It is as though they have been waiting for a disaster such as this all their lives.
The stasis in the story has been broken, and the artist, Don, spent the previous night drawing geometric figures on six kites and naming them with titles such as “Comet,” “Whale,” “My Beauty,” and “Reddish Egret.” The hurricane has mysteriously revived Don’s imagination after a long hiatus and, more importantly, he decides to fly the kites as the hurricane arrives. “It’d be fun to waste them...
(This entire section contains 3433 words.)
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in the blow,” Don declares. Robison fuses the joy of reawakened creativity with a vague death wish as the couple decides to confront “Carla,” which is the feminine form of the proper name “Charles,” the name itself meaning “man.” By matching two important proper names, “Carla” and “Charlie,” Robison also invites a humorous Freudian interpretation to the possible final hours of a nearly dried-up painter and a retired junior high school shop teacher.
“Pretty Ice”
Most of the characters in Robison’s fiction live their lives unaware of their deepest motivations and remain ignorant of the power of the unconscious. One of the sources of the sardonic tone in much of Robison’s fiction is observing so many characters blind to their self-destructive impulses; they literally do not know what they are doing. The perennial graduate student in plant taxonomy, Will, in the story “Pretty Ice,” is a case in point of someone whose scientific mind-set has cut him off from the potential joys of impulse and prevents him from viewing the aesthetic side of an ice storm in Columbus, Ohio. His fiancé, Belle, who holds a Ph.D. in musicology, decides at the story’s conclusion that she cannot marry someone who is unable to share her and her mother’s view that “an ice storm is a beautiful thing. Let’s enjoy it. It’s twinkling like a stage set.” The literal-minded taxonomist, Will, responds: “It’ll make a bad-looking spring. A lot of shrubs get damaged and turn brown, and trees don’t blossom right.” His inability to permit his imagination to make something “pretty” becomes the final blow to a seven-year relationship that was over some time before. His icy response puts his fiancé in touch, finally, with her real unconscious feelings.
“Bud Parrot”
The long story “Bud Parrot” illustrates, if the reader observes closely, an unspoken sexual subtext upon which the narrative rests. The occasion is a wedding in Ohio, of Bud Parrot’s closest friend and longtime roommate, Dean Blaines, to Gail Redding. Both men are in their middle thirties, and Bud Parrot is there to try, somehow, to win Dean back. They have probably been lovers. The tension rises as Bud, accompanied by Gail’s sister, Evaline, whose constant knowing wink alerts the reader to the “real” story, impulsively surprises the newlyweds in their honeymoon suite at the Columbus Hilton. Evaline and Bud have just come from a visit to the Columbus Zoo. They find little evidence that anything sexual has occurred between husband and wife, but Dean assures Bud and Evaline that the “real” honeymoon will take place in Madrid. The tense scene ends with Bud Parrot excoriating Spain, chomping on an apple, and acting as a tempter as Dean rubs Gail’s back while she glares knowingly at the handsome Bud Parrot. Once again, Robison, who trusts her reader completely, does not need to explain that some of the wedding guests probably know about the true nature of the lengthy relationship between Bud and Dean; she invites the reader to compare the “zoo” in the Honeymoon Suite at the Columbus Hilton to life in the actual Columbus zoo.
“May Queen”
Mary Robison can move from the sexual desperation and commercial surrealism of expensive Ohio weddings to, in “May Queen,” an unconscious reenactment of human sacrifice in Indianapolis with consummate ease and assurance. Mickey and Denise observe with horror as their May queen daughter, Riva, catches fire from holy candles in St. Rose of Lima church on a glorious spring day. The choice of the name of the parish, St. Rose of Lima, adds to the irony of the story since Saint Rose was renowned for the severity of the penitential sufferings that she inflicted upon herself. The story ends with Riva’s father trying to relieve his daughter’s pain with promises of vacations on the shores of Lake Erie, “where we can lie around and bake in the sun all day and you’ll be eighteen then. You’ll be able to drink, if you want to.”
“Heart”
Not all Robison’s stories document lives of quiet desperation so blatantly. “Heart” records the life of a lonely, aging man, Roy, who lives his life vicariously by starting conversations with teenagers at the local roller skating rink and with the friendly paperboy, whose line “Pretty soon, a new guy will be collecting” records another loss for a solitary person such as Roy. The story is an American version of British writer Katherine Mansfield’s classic “Miss Brill,” but without its sentimental ending. “Heart” concludes with Roy exhorting a local dog to “Wake up and live. Count the Fords that pass” and telling Mrs. Kenny, who lives on the other side of Roy’s duplex, that Mickey Rooney was in town with major advice: “He says you’ve got to have your heart in it. Every minute. The dog knows.” Robison’s sharp ear picks up the pathetic locker-room Boosterisms that many Americans exchange on empty Sunday afternoons. Mrs. Kenny notices that Roy’s hands are trembling, and when she asks him why, he says he cannot sleep. She blames him for listening to the radio all night and for not trying hard enough to sleep. “Oh,” he says, “that’s probably it. I don’t try.”
Few writers capture the cruelty of the Protestant work ethic as it systematically justifies everything bad that happens to people as really being their own fault. Roy, like many lonely people, takes refuge in late-night radio to comfort him in his solitude. That sad attempt turns into proof that he does not possess the “heart” that Mickey Rooney promotes. His inability to sleep, then, becomes proof that he has not tried hard enough. Few writers are able to delineate the Calvinist circle of self-blame with the subtle but savage accuracy of Robison.
“The Nature of Almost Everything”
The stories in Robison’s next collection, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, are less bitter and dark principally because the humor focuses more on the absurdities of a specifically American system of values, or lack thereof. There is also a growing ability of some characters to laugh at themselves in a healthier way; the humor has become less self-deprecatory. The opening line of one of the finest stories in the book, “The Nature of Almost Everything,” establishes the tone of the collection: “Tell you, at thirty-six, my goals are to stay sober and pay off my MasterCard bill.” Crises are labeled clearly and dealt with directly. People have become more honest with themselves and can live vivid lives even when they must watch loved ones around them falling apart.
“An Amateur’s Guide to the Night”
The story “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night” shows how a teenage girl, Lindy, in Terre Haute, Indiana, has worked out successful fictive defenses to help her cope with a mother who refuses to grow up and who takes refuge in pills, horror movies, and pretensions that she and Lindy are really sisters. They double-date and call each other “Sis.” Lindy’s real spiritual center lies in her devotion to the stars and their celestial movements, which she views through her telescope at night.
“Coach”
The story “Coach” shows a good-natured midwestern football coach, Harry Noonan, enjoying early success in his first college job. His artist wife, Sherry, has carved out a life of her own with her printmaking, private studio, and a five-year plan to learn French. Their daughter, Daphne, a sexily attractive high school girl, flirts with as many football hunks as possible. The coach’s unbounded optimism centers the story in an atmosphere reminiscent of a stereotypical 1950’s America. All situations and problems are analyzed and solved in the most cliché-ridden banalities. The emptiness in this story is palpable but oddly comic.
“In Jewel”
The story “In Jewel” is about another female artist, an art teacher educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, who has returned to teach at her old high school in Jewel, West Virginia. Though she is engaged, she takes great consolation in her gifted students and lets them get close to her. She is torn, though, between wanting to leave her hometown and her inability to do so. As she aptly puts it: “So, I like feeling at home. I just wish I didn’t feel it here.” Brad Foley, a student whom she helped through a family crisis and who will probably never escape Jewel, sends her a note congratulating her on her engagement and urging her to move. The final scene records in dismal detail that all she really has is what she sees before her on her desk in her room. Again, stasis wins and the fear of the unknown paralyzes even the ones who previously had an opportunity to escape.
“Yours”
The short-short story “Yours” also deals with art but as a project that a dying, thirty-five-year-old woman named Allison and her seventy-eight-year-old husband, Clark, are pursuing. It is Halloween, and they are carving jack-o’-lanterns ostensibly for the neighborhood children. Robison delicately examines the way the imagination can create what Wallace Stevens called “the violence within that protects us from the violence without”—that is, individuals create images that sum up their lives in somewhat the same way that Don in “Kite and Paint” vivified his final years. The image at the conclusion of this story is one of great iconographic mystery. Clark stares at the eight illuminated faces sitting in the darkness: “He was speaking into the phone now. He watched the jack-o’-lanterns. The jack-o’-lanterns watched him.”
“I Am Twenty-One”
Reassuring images that comfort and enable people to find small satisfactions are also the subject of “I Am Twenty-one.” A grieving college student, whose parents had been killed in a car accident two years earlier, is trying desperately to earn good grades on her test for a course called “The Transition from Romanesque to Gothic,” a phrase that could apply as well to the direction that her life seems to be taking as her isolation deepens. Though she has attempted to create a life of monastic severity and simplicity in her small room, she permits herself one picture that “wasn’t of a Blessed Virgin or a detail from Amiens of the King of Judah holding a rod of the tree of Jesse. Instead, it was an eight-by-ten glossy of Rudy and Leslie, my folks.” Her desire and grief have caused her to create an icon of her own genealogical tree of Jesse (the Blessed Virgin Mary’s family tree): “I kept the picture around because, oddly, putting away the idea of my folks would have been worse than losing the real them.” She has enacted the exact process by which a mere image takes on the numinous quality of an icon and so has unconsciously learned an important lesson in both her academic course and her life.
Believe Them
Robison’s third collection of short fiction is entitled Believe Them, and the mood in these stories is definitely more upbeat than in her previous two. They also generally run longer than her earlier stories. A stronger controlling voice narrates even though the pain of living has changed little within the stories themselves. The humor in the stories is less sardonic and bitter; the characters in some of them are actually enjoying themselves.
“Seizing Control”
The title of the volume comes from the mouth of the oldest of six children, Hazel, who is retarded and cannot read, but she has memorized the important facts that she needs to know for an orderly life. The first story, “Seizing Control,” records what happens when five children stay up all night while their mother is having her sixth child. Hazel does not tell her parents, when asked later, any of the negative parts of the all-night party but rather lists for them everything she knows that her parents had taught her, from “Don’t pet strange animals” to “Put baking soda on your bee stings” to “Whatever Mother and Father tell you, believe them.”
“For Real”
“For Real” is one of Robison’s strongest stories. It mixes humor and pathos in the life of Boffo, the girl clown who hosts Channel 22’s “Mid-day Matinee,” and her handsome German boyfriend, Dieter, who works at the same television station and is several years her junior. Dieter has been trying to get Boffo to marry him so that he can remain in the United States, but she has resisted his proposals for some time. The story develops when the reader and Boffo realize that Dieter has been to his lawyer and is obviously making other plans to secure citizenship papers. Boffo realizes that she has actually enjoyed his company more than she thought, but the issue of control quickly becomes the focus of the story. As he takes charge of his life and becomes less dependent on Boffo, she sees herself not only as a television clown but also possibly as a clown “For Real.” She also sees clearly, and for the first time, that her clown routine, for better or worse, is her life. Her three-year preoccupation with Dieter has distracted her from becoming the “best” clown she can be, and the story concludes with her realization that if she is a clown, it is worth doing right: “Excuse me, viewers? Ladies and germs? You’ve been being cheated, in all truth. You’ve been seeing a lazy job of Boffo. But stay watching. We’re about to press the pedal to the floor. We’re about to do it right.” Her announcement is to herself as she fully understands the true nature of her life. What may seem like failure has become for her an occasion of genuine illumination, recognized and acknowledged by her fellow workers’ laughter on the set.
“Trying”
The story “Trying” is also about a clown, the class clown, Bridie O’Donnell, who has become the resident 1960’s liberal at the Virginia Benedictine Convent School near Washington, D.C. Her lawyer parents are aging radicals who practice poverty law in a Washington, D.C., storefront office. Bridie spends much of her time and energy in iconoclastic wisecracking, particularly in Sister Elspeth’s history class. Sister Elspeth is a six-foot, eight-inch-tall nun who suffers from giantism. Robison balances Bridie’s stubborn efforts to convince her conservative classmates and teachers of the wisdom of liberal thinking against Sister Elspeth’s conservative proposal of starting a “civics club.” Neither character ever stops trying, though they emerge from opposite political traditions. The moment of revelation comes, however, when they recognize their mutual isolation from the rest of the community; they are grotesques, and they know it and understand each other’s plight with perfect clarity.
“Adore Her”
One of Robison’s bitterest attacks on Yuppies is “Adore Her,” though she has dealt with them before in “Bud Parrot,” “Falling Away,” and “Mirror.” In a story of classic narcissism, Steve spends most of his time fawning over his girlfriend, Chloe, and polishing his Saab in the late afternoon shade. “Adore Her” is one of Robison’s finest parables of emptiness, especially when Chloe explains to Steve the secret of her success: “Appearance is all.” Steve is so bored with his job as a claims investigator for an insurance company that he openly tempts his very serious boss to fire him. A major issue in the story is control, as Steve begins to see himself as a slave to his job, his Yuppie materialism, and to Chloe. He becomes obsessed with finding the owner of a wallet containing many photographs of different women and spends considerable energy trying to track him down. His brief time away from attending to the beautiful but empty Chloe has taught him that he is controlled totally by her. After seducing her into drinking a beer with him even though she has a hangover, he decides to leave her: “He would run from the unalterables: from Chloe, the apartment building, his job at Tidewater Assurance. He’d run from everything he couldn’t change about what he had been calling his life.” Steve is one of the few characters in Robison’s fiction who sees his life paralyzed in the stasis of debilitating boredom yet seems willing to take radical and courageous steps to change the things that he can.
Mary Robison is one of the United States’ most perceptive delineators of the acedia and sterility at the center of American materialism. With flawless lucidity her highly attuned ear can expose it in the voices of the old, the bored, the desperate, and the hopeless. Her stories do not preach and never moralize. Like her teacher John Barth, she presents as accurately as she can. What saves most of her characters, at least those willing to change, is their sense of humor, their lack of self-pity, and their ability to laugh at themselves.
