Introducing Names in Fiction

pic by Giant Ginkgo

My name is Myrtle McGherkinsquirt and I’m going to tell you about my life.

I’ve seen blog posts from editors who hate stories that open like that, as if the character is giving a self-introduction to a room full of readers. Can’t say I’m a big fan of it myself. Characters in fiction are more often introduced something like this:

Myrtle McGherkinsquirt was a buxom brunette, fifty in the shade, who was actually one of those women – oft spoke of in car dealerships – who took her mini out of the garage once a week to do the shopping.

ie. Character name, followed by some broad strokes of physical details and something more specific or unique.

Then you get real masters of writing, who have discovered other ways of introducing their fictional characters.

Some do it without any ceremony whatsoever:

She could barely throw out a twisted paper clip or a fridge magnet that had lost its attraction, let alone the dish of Irish coins that she and Rich had brought home from a trip fifteen years ago. Everything seemed to have acquired its own peculiar heft and strangeness.

Carol or Virgie phoned every day, usually toward supper time, when they must have thought her solitude might be at least bearable.

- Alice Munro, from Free Radicals.

In this story the protagonist’s children — Carol and Virgie — are introduced partway through the story, and the reader is to assume the relationship. We already know that the protagonist is an older woman whose husband has just died, so it comes as no surprise that she has grown children. I suppose that’s why there was no need to explain who they were and how they are related.

It’s also a fairly middle-aged woman thing to do — just throwing names of extended relatives and friends into a conversation. It engenders a sense of familiarity between speaker and listener, because the listener is being drawn into the speaker’s home circle.

At other times, an author offers a portrait of the character, then inserts the name into the next paragraph:

In history class she sat next to an intriguing girl in the back of the room… She wore no makeup other than a set of obviously false eyelashes. She sat with her body twisted dramatically sideways, her long black-stockinged legs crossed once at the knee and again at the ankle, a Chinese puzzle of tension and beauty, while her torso leaned over the desk with exaggerated indifference. She was sketching on a sketch pad. Was she an artist? Justine noticed a huge book open in her lap, for the moment ignored. She was an intellectual! Her strange, temperate gray eyes met Justine’s. “Hi,” she said.

Within a week Justine was walking home from school with Watley Goode.

- Mary Gaitskill, from Two Girls, Fat And Thin

As for minor characters, must we name them at all?

“I beg your pardon?” said the library woman who had passed out the three sheets of paper. Her name was something or other.

- Daniel Handler, wrongly

*

On that point, I have a bad habit of failing to name characters in short stories. Sometimes I’d just prefer to call someone The Man or The Child or The Backpacker.

Eleanor Catton does this too in her novel The Rehearsal:

“Is he in prison already?” says first alto.

“Probably under house arrest,” says double bass.

This is probably because these are characters in a play, and because reading the novel is sort of like watching a rehearsal of that play. The decision to call characters by their parts helps the reader to sink into this atmosphere. I suppose if  you’re going to avoid naming characters, you have to have a good reason for it. (ie. Not just because you can’t think of a good name.)

I’ve talked to readers who feel it’s almost an insult for the writer not to name a character. Others find it annoying. Some think it’s an artificial attempt at sounding literary or abstract.

I’m in two minds about it.

THE ADVANTAGES OF NAMInG CHARACTERS

Well, it’s convention. I’ve never had anyone say, ‘Why did you need to name that character?’ (Though I will now, to be sure.)

Assigning characters names is all part of the ‘be specific’ thing. If writers are specific in fiction, readers can pretend the world really exists. If characters are named, we can imagine they really live. Verisimilitude.

DISADVANTAGES OF NAMING CHARACTERS

Names themselves have connotations, and not always the same connotations for different readers. I love the name Hannah because of the Hannahs I know, but you may feel differently about this name. I’ve had beta readers tell me that a certain name doesn’t suit the character, when to me, it fit perfectly. Neither of us is right or wrong, of course. Such is the nature of names.

Depending on HOW we introduce a name, readers will think they need to remember this character for later. If you’ve already expected the reader to remember other names, it may not be worth asking them to take in the names of minor characters too. Too many names is confusing, especially in a short story.

Fact is, we don’t always know people’s names in real life. We walk past many people each week whose names we don’t know – office block cleaners, the woman at number 12, the delivery man, the butcher. If the characters in fiction are unlikely to know the names of other characters, and if writing from tight third person point of view – it makes no sense to name them in fiction either. That takes us out into omniscient point of view. (Which is fine, if that’s the POV you’re writing in. I don’t share the widespread modern contempt for omniscient narration.)

Sometimes, stereotypes are useful. If I describe ‘the butcher’ you probably have an image in your mind. Your butcher might be called ‘Kevin’ and I wouldn’t want to interfere with that. I might not want to go messing with your image by calling the butcher ‘Sheila’.

Sometimes, an unnamed character stands for The Everyman. That’s why I quite like writing with ‘The Man’ or ‘The Backpacker’. Alternatively, there are certain names that stand in for certain tropes: Marjorie (a conservative middle-aged woman), Nigel (a… well, a ‘Nigel’), Mary-Sue, Billy Joe Jim Bob Earl Jr., Mr Joe Bloggs, Lolita… You get what I mean. These names tend to be utilised when a writer wants readers to accept a stereotype so the story can progress. In this way, reliance upon an ‘allegorical name’ is similar to not naming a character at all.

Related Link: Two Notes On Names from Keli Gwyn’s blog.

Thumbnail Character Sketches

WEARY KINGDOM  BY JOHN IRVING (SHORT STORy)

Minna Barrett, fifty-five, looks precisely as old as she is, and her figure suggests nothing of what she might have looked like ‘in her time’. One would only assume that always she looked this way, slightly oblong, gently rounded, not puritanical but almost asexual. A pleasant old maid since grammar school, neat and silent; a not overly stern face, a not overly harsh mouth, but a total composure which now, at fifty-five, reflects the history of her many indifferences and the conservative going of her own way.

This is the very opening paragraph. Old maids are a stock character in fiction, and perhaps in real life too, so the author doesn’t have to do too much before the reader gets a feel for what sort of life she leads. This expectation may or may not be fulfilled, however.

THE PENSION GRILLPARZER BY JOHN IRVING (SHORT STORY)

A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.

‘Pardon me?’ said Grandmother.

‘I said that I tell dreams,’ the man informed her.

I particularly like the way the grandmother said ‘pardon me’, because like us, she was too busy noticing this man’s dishevelled clothing to absorb anything of what he’d been saying. It’s also a way of giving the scene verisimilitude, because in real life, far more than in fiction, people need to repeat what they have said.

THE REHEARsAL BY ELEANOR CATTON (NOVEL)

This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part, but this girl is pale and stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don’t quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterises her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to be somebody else.

The clever structure of this novel means that the characters can be described via analogies with the characters they play.

Julia’s feet are always scuffing, and she has a scab around her mouth.

Here, two details are picked about this girl. That’s all readers need by way of a character sketch for now. The trick is in picking relevant details.

The Men’s room by ann oakley (novel)

Rather than give us a rundown on height, build and eye-colour, I like that Oakley homes in on one feature and elaborates:

There was something odd about the parting in Swinhoe’s hair; quite a lot of it started off in one direction, and then changed its mind and went the other way. Charity would have liked to give him some advice on how to improve the situation, and so would many of the people with whom he came into contact*, but nobody manged to, because no one was sufficiently intimate with him.

*Note that because Oakley writes with an omniscient narrator, such observations are possible. That’s the beauty of omniscient narration. Such a shame it’s seems to be going out of fashion.

IN OLDEN TIMES BY PENELOPE LIVELY (short story)

Doesn’t everyone know a woman like this?

She lived by the clock. Her days were apportioned, hour by hour, parcelled up into time at work, time for sleeping, time for house cleaning, for shopping, time for the chidlren. An hour, a half-hour, ten minutes. Time for love-making; time for ironing, for cooking, for taking a bath. A crisis meant time borrowed from one sector and forever owed — the entire week flung out of order by an emergency visit to the surgery, or a faulty washing-machine or car that would not start.

Penelope Lively takes this fairly common character attribute one step further for her character:

And each day was punctuated by the rigorous, inescapable blasts of the whistle: 7:30 (evening) — leave for work; 8:45 (morning) — arrive home from work; 8:50 — Tim leaves for work.

There’s a fine line between realism and parody once a writer decides to take a trait to its extreme, but it’s an effective technique because I’m fascinated by its consequences and want to read on. (Who knows? I might well know someone who actually blows whistles at home. We never know people’s private foibles, which is partly why we read.)

FREE RADICALS BY ALICE MUNRO (short story)

It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man — not really old, maybe in his sixties — and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A very large women was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to one end of the couch and a little in front of it. The old man was heavy and grey-haired, with eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, as if he might suffer some chest wheezing, but he was smiling as well as he could. The old woman was much smaller, with dark dyed hair and lipstick, wearing what used to be called a peasant blouse, with little red bows at the wrists and neck. She smiled determinedly, even a bit frantically, lips stretched over perhaps bad teeth.

Here the narrator goes one step further than describing physical appearance; she (it’s a feminine voice) makes assumptions about the people in the photograph (emboldened). The narrator’s voice is similar to the protagonist’s voice, because it’s really the protagonist making these assumptions, so they’re the sort of thing an older woman might think. I’m sure a different character looking at that same photograph would not make exactly those assumptions.

Using this technique in the thumbnail character sketches, Munro manages to tell us a lot about her protagonist, not just about the people in the photo.

TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN BY MARY GAITSKILL

The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick.

The first person narrator is also an unhappy person, which is probably why she sees it in other characters.

I stood and watched the sweating exercisers… There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts dropping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop.

Many of Mary Gaitskill’s thumbnail character sketches do go much further than simple observation; there tends to be metaphorical/symbolic/psychological observation to follow physical appearance:

Next to them was a table of boys with long hair tied back off their faces, a jumble of cups, dishes and glasses before them on the table. Their profiles, alternately stiff, gentle or fluid were finely chiseled in the sharp relief of the sunlight, like boys who had just moments before been statues sculptured in honor of youth.

The final line of this character sketch is a lovely observation:

Her father had grown full and hale during the Action years. He presented himself with his chest pushed out, his eyes vibrant with outgoing energy that allowed nothing in. He came into rooms and clapped his hard little hands together and said, “Well!” His silences were imperious excretions that nobly enshrouded him as he read The New York Times. When they went to eat at restaurants, he gave loud speeches at the table. When they rented a cottage in the Upper Peninsula, he stood calf-deep in the waters of Lake Michigan in his bathing trunks and pretneded he was conducting an orchestra while his wife and daughter lolled on the beach. Justine watched him jerking his arms above the waves and wondered why he didn’t look ridiculous.

And at the end of this character sketch (of a group of girls, not just one), followed by the best description of leery old men I have seen. Again, this sketch is followed a brilliant piece of unexpected dialogue:

In mid-August the Shades joined the Glade of Dreams country club, and Justine briefly encountered her peers. They were older than she and tall, with round, buttery muscles, modulated voices, and oval nails with neat cuticles. They had none of the raw toughness of her friends from Action, and Justine, while not afraid of them, did not quite know how to approach them. She stalked around the pool in her tiny black two-piece, gloating when the older men looked at her. The men were fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their saggy-bottomed hips and their wide-legged stance as they stood staring, their thick pink lips smiling at thirteen year old Justine, as if they could know every single thing about her merely by looking at her in her swimsuit while they, on the contrary, remained sweating, lotion-oily sphinxes, about whom she could comprehend nothing, revelling in their complex ugly humanity. She looked at them with dumb, shielded eyes, an imitation of wide-eyed young girlhood she had seen in magazines. They were from the world of the evening news, like her father, part of the apparatus controlling even the little lapping lakes. They were hideous, she wanted nothing to do with them, yet she was happy to intersect with them in that way, playing a magazine girl, a creature they viewed with pleasure and relief. “You flirt well, Justine,” remarked her mother.

BEASTS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

When sketching the character of Dorcas – which happens quite a while after we have first met her, by the way – she tells us about her personality before telling us anything about how she looks. This is appropriate, since Dorcas herself doesn’t consider her own physicality the most important thing about her.

Clearly she aroused their interest, their disapproval, their resentment, possibly their admiration. They would figure her as a hippie — an “artist-type.” For Dorcas didn’t offer herself passively to be judged, like most women. She wasn’t one to shrink from the rude stares of men; scarcely would she acknowledge their presence. She was a woman in her late thirties of ample proportions who exulted in her body, believing herself beautiful and desirable even if, in ignorant eyes, she might be repellent.

Likewise, we know quite a bit about Andre Harrow (aka The Object of Narrator’s Affection) before we know what he looks like. I suspect this is because Oates wants to make the reader wonder what he looks like before offering up a description. (That’s always best, in learning as well as in reading.)

Ups And Downs by Alan Bennett

Dad was shy and undemonstrative so that, whatever the gift, the actual giving of it was sure to put him off: he could never simulate the sort of surprise and gratitude such occasions required. His coolest reception was for a coffee percolator, a present which ignored the fact they had never drunk fresh coffee in their lives and weren’t going to start now. Dad rightly detected a hint of social aspiration in the gift, the message being that it might be nice if we were the kind of family that did drink fresh-brewed coffee. Dad would have none of it. ‘Faffing article’ was his way of describing it and in due course the jug part ended up in the cupboard under the sink where it came in handy when washing his hair.

I now have a very good sense of Alan Bennett’s father. This is not fiction, but even in fiction, it’s can be telling to take an item associated with that character and explain the object’s relationship to its owner. Objects sometimes become a symbol or motif. Alan Bennett used the coffee percolator to tell us his father’s disposition, his social class and his relationship to his sons.

At what point is it best to introduce a thumbnail character sketch?

Once I waited until near the end of a short story before mentioning that my character had a beard. One reader told me I should place that nugget of information much earlier, rather than ‘springing it’ on the reader. That amused me (because I imagined a beard springing off someone’s face), but made me think about reader expectations.

WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS AS READER?

• How much do you like to know about what a character looks like?
• Do you want to know as soon as the character is introduced, or are you happy to told later, perfectly capable of recalibrating your mental image? In real life we hear about many people before finally meeting them, and they’re often quite different in person. Yet as soon as we’ve met them, we erase any mental image we’d concocted prior. Is it possible to do this with a character in fiction, or are you stuck with the original image?
• Do you have clear images of characters? Would you be able to draw a picture of the character in the novel you are reading right now? If not, does it even matter?
• Does it annoy you when you’re not given a character description?
• Would it annoy you if you weren’t given a description until long after that character had been introduced?

Every reader is slightly different in this regard. I hate too much attention to physicality in books, especially when the author foists his or her own subjective tastes upon the reader. (Perhaps this is why I can’t get into romance.) We live in an image saturated world, and it’s nice if the one last bastion, where looks don’t really matter, might be in novels. Instead, we’ve entered an age where every second book seems to have a picture of a woman on the front.

So much for that.

Related Link: Describing appearances: Moving Beyond Hair and Eye Colour.

Here is an infograph from Hint.fm showing the incidence of mentions of various body parts in different musical genres. Eyes feature heavily in some, while bums come first in hip-hop. I’d like to see a similar datavis for literary genres.

Spelling and Hyphenation

They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road — having turned off a decent unpaved country road — and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

CAUTION: DEEP-HOLES.

Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?

- from Deep-Holes, by Alice Munro

pic by goron

Some people can spell.

Some people just can’t. The ability to spell — from what I can see — is similar to a sense of direction or a loathing of blood.

1. You can’t do a helluva lot about it. Rote memorisation of spelling lists isn’t of much help due to the sheer number of words in English, and because — well — if poor spellers were any good at remembering spellings simply by exposure, they wouldn’t be poor spellers in the first place. All of us in Western culture are surrounded by many, many words every single day of our lives, whether we read books or not.

2. So spelling prowess is not related to how much you read.

3. Nor is it related to intelligence (however that happens to be measured). I’ve known avid readers who can’t spell for nuts. I know very good spellers who don’t read much at all.

I’m a pretty good speller, through no special effort on my part. There are certain words I just can’t remember (broccoli springs to mind), but the thing is:

I usually know to look at a word when I have spelt it wrong.

I figure this is something non-spellers (shall we say?) just don’t have. For whatever reason. Like me and my non-sense of direction.

Besides, autocorrect is a marvellous thing, especially for those of us who can basically spell. (Hopeless — and dangerous — if you’re nowhere near.)

But I do have sympathy for those who can’t spell, because when it comes to HYPHENATION, I’m equally stuffed.

THE HYPHEN RANT

I can’t remember for the life of me which compounds are meant to take a hyphen or not. I’m not even sure there are rules. Except a conscientious comb-through with MS Word’s grammar checker will always throw up a number of words which should have been hyphenated rather than bunged together as one. Unfortunately, MS Word is rubbish at the reverse job: ie. Telling me which words should not be hyphenated.

So I usually end up with far more hyphens than necessary. I’m one of those people who has to go back and edit OUT the hyphens.

Hate is a strong word, I know. But hyphens are a pain in the butt. It doesn’t matter how long I stare at a pair of closely related words, I could not say, for love nor money, whether there’s meant to be a hyphen in there somewhere. I’m still not sure if there are any universal conventions regarding hyphenation in English, and I tend to run with that thought, slapping them in willy-nilly (see?), just in case. I still hate them.

I have an alternative.

How about we all just start making use of camelCase, otherwise known as medial capitals? Let’s leave hyphens for linebreaks that occur midword. (See, the red squiggly line here at WordPress tells me ‘linebreaks’ is not a word. Nor is ‘midword’.)

I love camelCase.

It’s spaceEfficient, modern, and computerProgrammers make use of it all the time, so it must be logical. If writers made use of camelCase in every instance of ambiguity, the (my?) world would be a happier place.

Related Link: What kind of speller are you?

The Gates of Literature

She doesn’t even know if she will read the book. She has a couple of good biographies on the go at the moment that she is sure are more to her taste than this will be.

How Are We to Live is the book’s title. A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

- excerpt from Alice Munro’s short story: Fiction, Too Much Happiness.from

I’m sure Alice Munro herself must feel somewhat embraced by the literary world, but I wonder how she really feels about being a short story writer. Is it not enough for an author to keep writing short stories? Must an author write novels in order to be taken seriously? Or to feel that they are being taken seriously?

Fiction as ‘Escape’

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

- Alice Munro, from Free Radicals

Reading As A Barometer Of Life Balance

She sat in the chair surrounded by her books without opening one of them. She had always been such a reader — that was one reason Rich said she was the right woman for him, she could sit and read and let him alone — and now she couldn’t stick it for even half a page.

- Alice Munro, from Free Radicals

There are many advantages to being a reader.

1. Reading is cheap, as far as hobbies go.
2. Long journeys on public transport pass by more quickly.
3. There are always other readers around, who stick together like enthusiastic gardeners swapping books instead of cuttings, and who always have something to recommend.
4. Keen readers tend to be very nice people.
5. Keen readers will never run out of books.
6. Even the worst kind of loneliness can be staved off by a book.

But not always.

Keen readers have another advantage:

They know that when they go off reading, and when they can’t concentrate on even their favourite novels, that something is not right in their world.

Non-readers have their own barometers, like irritable bowel syndrome and unprovoked outbursts of rage etc. These are also useful gauges, and keen readers are not exempt from these symptoms either, but I know that if I don’t have time for reading and writing in my life, that I have entered the first stage of a downward slope. I can usually put things right before the other signs of stress kick in. It starts with making time, and ends with a good book.

On Coffee

She sits in  her ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea that is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practises through the procession of hours, or of days.

- Alice Munro, from Free Radicals.

Coffee: generally quite boring as a topic of conversation.

So excuse me for contradicting myself completely by composing an entire blog post about the stuff.

photo by Wiedmaier

Maybe it’s Facebook. Maybe it’s Twitter. Maybe it’s just life being… well, pretty damn boring 99% of the time. Everyone’s talking about coffee. How much they’ve had, how much they haven’t had, how much they need some… That’s not the individual’s fault. It’s because most people do boring jobs, and boring jobs need doing. When I did a boring job I remember a lot of my mental energy was spent counting down minutes until my next break. Breaks included coffee.

It pays not to be a connoisseur. Not of coffee, not of anything. The more you know about wine/beef steaks/cheesy wotsits the more of a pain in the backside you are to feed.

Same with coffee. There are some people in this world I don’t want to make coffee for. These people include, but are not limited to:

1. Those who insist on one and a half teaspoons of sugar. (You ask for one and a half, you’re getting two. I’ve had no complaints so far.)

2. Those who take their coffee different every time I see them. (You can’t keep changing the rules of a game.)

3. Those who regularly hang out at coffee establishments (my home brew can’t compete with that) and wax lyrical about “Enjoying a Latté from Giraffe at T5. Great coffee you know!”

Some more coffee chestnuts:

1. Oh my god, it’s too early. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee. (Don’t blame the coffee. I’m a grumpy mare in the mornings but coffee ain’t nothing to do with that.)

2. Oh my god, I’ve gone a whole day without coffee. ”i seriously need to cut back 10 cups of coffee a day at a minimum is NOT healthy!” Or, I’ve got such a rotten, stinking headache, or “Pretty sure I’ll get the caffeine shakes in a minute.” (Time you cut back, then. Or had another cup of coffee.)

3. I just can’t stand [insert brand] coffee. How can anyone drink that? It tastes of rat poison. (This is Calvin Klein and Reebok, applied to coffee.) I agree there is such a thing as bad coffee, but there are also bad apples and you don’t hear people moaning about that all the livelong day. If you don’t like a certain brand of coffee, don’t drink it.

4. Websites with a pretend coffee stain in the header. It used to be cool. Now it’s Done-Before.

5. Documents that come back to you with coffee stains on them. (You can never be sure it’s coffee. Just because it’s brown doesn’t mean it’s safe. Quite the contrary.) Please, people, don’t put a coffee mark on it just to show how overworked you are. You don’t need to scent-mark my documents just to show you did actually read it. That proves nothing. Go piss on a tree.

Other Annoying Things Involving Coffee

1. Coffee breath

2. Coffee turds (Yes, well, I may not have conducted a scientific experiment but you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed toilet cubicles recently vacated by the heaviest consumers of coffee in your office.)

3. Unfair trade prices for coffee growers.

4. Noisy bloody coffee machines in small cafes with no soft-furnishings and wonderful acoustics, in which require patrons are required to yell at each other from either side of one small table, or to talk into each other’s ear as if whispering. With coffee breath.

5. When you order your coffee in a cafe, it takes the barista way longer to make the coffee than to dish up your food. By the time you get your coffee, you’ve already wolfed down your cake, and would like to get out of there already.

6. Coffee mugs with lipstick stains on them.

7. Coffee, like smoking, is socially divisive.

“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.”

- Earl Wilson

There are those ‘In-the-coffee-pool’ and those out of it. Coffee drinkers are loyal to their beans as sports lovers are loyal to their teams.

8. Prancing round the office with a mug of coffee does not achieve the look you’re hoping for i.e. productive but relaxed. It makes you look like a slacker.

9. Bad jokes. “I like my women like I like I like my coffee: Puerto Rican.”

10. A real-life example of a boring conversation involving coffee:

Him: “You know the problem with coffee is um, ah, um, ah…”

Me: “It’s addictive.”

Him: “No. Well, it’s that too. But it’s um, ah, um, ah…”

Me: “A diuretic.”

Him: “No. Well, it’s that too. But it’s um, ah, um, ah…”

Me: “A stimulant.”

Him: “No. Well, it’s that too. But it’s um, ah, um, ah…”

Me: “An irritant.”

Him: “Yes.”

*

For the record, I’m not a coffee tee-totaler myself. I drink coffee most days, with the odd few weeks of abstinence. (I hate to be addicted to stuff, even if it is just caffeine.)

I quite enjoy a cup of tea, me. Yes, I even bought a teapot, after observing that other people’s tea tasted much better than my own dunk-a-bag-in-a-cup jobbies. Those people tended to own such things as ‘teapots’.

Soon as I get a teapot and a box of leaves, a friend says I’ve turned into a classic ‘tea snob’.

I got rid of the teapot.

Semi-Not-Really-Related Links: Caffeine Makes You Crazy In The Ears; You Should Also Feel Bad About The Coffee You Drink.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

This is the title of a short story, and also the title of an anthology of eleven Alice Munro stories published 2001.

The title story is exquisite. I’m going to trawl through it, as usual, looking for specific wonderfulness.

PLOT

Two mischievous girls in smalltown Ontario decide to play a trick on a housekeeper. They write fake love letters from Sabitha’s father with little thought of consequences. They don’t expect the housekeeper to take leave of her position, move in with the father, get married and have a baby. The girls are never found out, but even after Sabitha has grown out of playing dirty tricks, she feels her own trick backfired somewhat. She never meant a bit of fun to result in the existence of a half-brother.

STRUCTURE

The viewpoint character changes with the scenes, not easy to achieve in a short story, though it can be argued that Munro’s short stories are something more akin to novellas.

1. The station agent has a terse exchange with a plain looking woman with bunched up teeth that look ready for an argument.

2. The woman is Johanna. We follow her now, as she goes, reluctantly, to buy an expensive dress suit. ‘”It’s likely what I’ll be married in,” said Johanna.’

3. We continue to follow Johanna as she leaves the dress shop and sees Mr McCauley across the street. At this point we are told how Johanna is the housekeeper for the McCauleys, and chief caregiver of his grand-daughter, Sabitha. Sabitha’s mother died a few years back.

4. Mr McCauley finds the note left by Johanna, informing him of her resignation and reasons for taking some of his furniture with her on the train. He visits the shoe shop, where he gets talking to the shoemaker and the daughter, Edith.

5. Turns out Edith is a friend of Sabitha. Now we’re at Edith’s house where we learn a little more about Edith.

6. Backstory turns to Sabitha now, and the mischief she and Edith have been up to: The pair have written fake letters to Johanna from Sabitha’s father. Johanna is led to believe that this is the beginning of a love affair. The reader knows that Johanna has given up her job, is poorly-educated, plain, and will soon be in great trouble when she gets to her destination and all is revealed.

7. A series of letters – some made up by the girls, some genuine, from Johanna. Just enough of the letters are included in the story to set up the unfortunate situation – or perhaps this was all of them. The reader doesn’t know. These letters are interspersed with details about Edith and Sabitha – two smalltown girls who are heading for trouble and who have not learnt to care about other people’s feelings.

8. ‘When Johanna got off the train there was nobody there to meet her.’ But she goes to Sabitha’s father’s anyhow. The father has by now been portrayed as an unreliable sort, reliant upon his father-in-law for money. Johanna finds the man very sick in bed, so she tends to him. She is a useful person, well-adjusted to this sort of care.

7. Eventually, POV switches to the sick father (Ken Boudreau) as he regains consciousness. He wonders what this woman is doing in his house, but doesn’t question the matter. He is glad to have the help.

8. Back story about Ken, about how he may be useless with money, but he is a generous sort. He lends money to friends, which is how he often finds himself short. By this point, both Johanna and Ken have been redeemed somewhat in the reader’s eyes.

9. Viewpoint shifts between Ken and Johanna and we see that they are a very good match. Johanna likes to sort people out, and Ken likes a good woman to sort him out. We also see why neither of them mentions the non-existent letters crafted by Ken’s daughter and friend.

10. ‘Mr McCauley died about two years after Johanna’s departure.’ With this sentence, we’ve been catapulted forward two years. This event provides a very good event around which to base a kind of epilogue: Johanna and Ken are married now, and have had a baby called Omar. At the funeral, we see that Sabitha and Edith have grown apart, have changed in appearance as well as in attitude, and neither of them can work out how their mischievous ways went undiscovered. ‘For where, in the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person called Omar?’

*

DIALOGUE

Indirect Dialogue

Munro makes use of direct dialogue interspersed with indirect dialogue in order to keep the pace of the story moving along.

The station master often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.

“Furniture?” he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. “Well now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?”

A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.

And again:

“What nationality would that be?”

She said she didn’t know.

It would have been more economical for the woman’s response to be direct dialogue: “I don’t know.” So why does Munro choose indirect dialogue for much of Johanna Parry’s speech in the first scene? Because it’s not yet time to get too close to the woman. Our empathy is supposed to lie with the station master, a kind, familiar character, trying his best to accommodate quite unreasonable demands from this bossy, unpleasant woman. Later, the reader will learn of Johanna Parry’s good points: she is a very good and loyal carer. But for now, it is best to stick to indirect dialogue, as if the station master is recounting this encounter to someone else, which indeed he does, later, when Mr McCauley wonders what’s happened to all the furniture that’s disappeared from his house.

Dialogue Tags

Munro’s dialogue tags focus less on tone of voice and facial expression, more on the impression created. In other words, she does not rely heavily upon cinematic dialogue tags. She interprets for us. This is economical writing, and Munro’s observations are wryly observed. We know exactly what Munro means, because we’ve encountered similar people ourselves.

She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words.

She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket.

The woman monkeyed around til she found the label, then read off a description of the material that Johanna wasn’t really listening to because she had caught at the hem to examine the workmanship.

The phrase ‘monkeyed around’ is particularly apt, because this is Johanna’s observation. She has little time for monkeying around, and is shrewd enough to see straight through a sales pitch. The phrase ostensibly belongs to a narrator, but here Munro achieves ‘deep penetration’ (Orson Scott Card’s words, not mine).

Accent

When a word is pronounced in a specific way and Munro needs us to know about it, this is how she sometimes does it:

Johanna said, “No.”

“Don’t you find it clique-y?”

Cleeky.

“Hard for an outsider to break in, is what I mean.”

*

Characterisation

The apt and economical characterisation lies in well-chosen details.

Johanna: (organised, prepared, practical)

“I might as well go ahead and try it on.”

This was what she’d come prepared for, after all. Clean underwear and fresh talcum powder under her arms.

Mr McCauley: (absent-minded)

She saw Mr McCauley walking in the opposite direction up the other side of the street. That was all right – even if he had met her head-on he would never have noticed the box she carried.

Edith: (sarcastic, old-beyond-her-years)

Mr McCauley said, “Honor thy mother and father, that thy days may be long in the -”

Edith said something not for him to hear. She said, “Shoe Repair Shop.”

See also: The Last Book I Loved (hint: It’s this one) by Emma Borges-Scott at The Rumpus.

Movie: Away From Her

This one’s about one woman’s demise with Alzheimer’s, and her husband’s struggle after putting her in a home. Not uplifting at all, though there is redemption at the end (believe it or not). The husband continues to struggle when the woman falls in love with another Alzheimer’s patient, someone she thinks she knew years and years ago.

This movie is based on a short story by Alice Munro: The Bear Came Over the Mountain. I’m about to add Alice Munro to my reading list.

It’s a little like Iris. (Now I don’t need to see that again.) I loved Iris and I really like this one too, though Away From Her seems to be a smaller release with a lower budget. That doesn’t make much difference to me when it comes to movies because a movie’s worth regards other, more fundamental things like a good storyline. Anyone who loved Iris would enjoy this too, I’d say.

The setting takes you right into the depths of an Ontario winter, where the ground is covered in snow and residents don’t go for walks, they go cross-country skiing. I’d love to live somewhere like that, just for a season. Then I’d probably be sick of shovelling snow.

The soundtrack to Away From Her tells me it was made for an older audience than me. I’m a fan of some older music but this soundtrack really does sound like the music which plays in old people’s homes. Now that’s just a little too authentic for me.

(I have since read the short story which, after watching the movie, you might be tempted to miss, but I would recommend a read of the story to extend enjoyment of the movie.)