The Vandercook

Well, if any of you were to follow me on Twitter, you would already know the dismal state of my marking pile. So, naturally, I'm going to spend some time today blogging instead of doing any of that other stuff.

Which brings us to today's story: The Vandercook by Alice Mattinson

In short, I quite liked it. It's one of those stories that sticks; a few days after reading it I kept thinking back to a few images, or a few lines that somehow resonated, and I think that's a lovely effect for a story to have. Here are a few of those lines and my thoughts on them:

In the dark, I had finally said, "You may not do this," and from her pillow, sounding wide-awake, she'd said, "You may not tell me what I may not do."

In any other story, I think the above exchange would let me feel good about the woman who stands up to her husband in this way; but here, everything Molly says just adds to the growing dread that leads to the story's end. Molly is something, and it's a complicated something. Too complicated for a high school student? No, not depending on context. But maybe there's too much going on in terms of white feminism and US history to cover in a short story unit. I don't know.

He put the palm of his hand on the back of my father's head and pressed Dad's face into his own white shirt, like a parent protecting a child from seeing something terrible.

Oh, this line just breaks my heart. Here is the character with perhaps the least amount of agency and voice in the story acting with the most compassion in the story and oh, it's awful. The comparison there that brings in the parent-child relationship is extra potent because in that very moment, that's almost exactly what the narrator is failing to do. My heart.

I couldn't look at her frightened face. I wanted love to be simple. I wanted to tell her how nimbly our son with his new haircut had darted across the street, how scared he seemed, how hard it was not to run toward him, stretching my arms out wide.

These are the final lines of the story, and they are exactly what the story is: at once disjointed, recursive and tying together multiple levels of family, of obligation and of the impossibility of having to live with the choices of the people we love. Just great.

    

And I didn't even talk about the Vandercook itself, which, especially if you're into printing presses and typography or whatever, provides ample opportunity to engage with symbol and image. 

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I don't know a lot about the author, which is my own failing, as a quick online search showed me that she has published several novels and her work is often included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. This story does not live online, but it while I was looking for it, I instead found this blog, which does what I'm trying to do here but probably a thousand times better. Ah well. 

Anyway, I liked this story a lot. 

Would I teach it: No, I don't know how! I should probably figure that out, hey? The more time I spend thinking about this story, the more I like it. But I don't know how I'd write an essay of character about a story that deliberately lacks a resolution. I mean, I guess there are students who write about Raymond Carver's Cathedral, which is similarly difficult. We'll see. There are a lot of stories left in this book, but if this one continues to echo around in my little brain I may return to this story with a past diploma topic and see what I can come up with.

Where: An advanced class for sure. 20 or 30 AP or IB. Or a dedicated writing class, if there were ever such thing.

Other stuff: Again, because this story is published in the Pen/O. Henry Prize book, there is a very short blurb at the back where Alice Mattinson writes that she began the story with the idea that the people in it "can't solve their problem". Maybe that's part of why this story sticks in my mind so well. It is made up of a number of lovely shaped puzzle pieces, but they can't come together because they were designed not to.