Tournament of Books discussion

Booth commentary will be posted here on May 12th.

LYDIA: Good morning, everyone! Welcome to the end of quarterfinals. NATALIE is a veteran of the booth already, so I guess I'm the one who needs to introduce herself. I'm LYDIA, and I teach Latin and Greek in Los Angeles (and on Zoom, these days). In the interests of full disclosure, Natalie and I have been friends since the second or third day of high school, when we cemented a vague acquaintance by discovering that we liked the same series of fantasy novels. So what did you think of these two stories?

NATALIE: I had fallen behind in this tournament, so I read "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," "Signs and Symbols," and "Referential" all in one fell swoop. I started with "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" because I imagined that it would have something to do with a mermaid, and I am always here for a mermaid story. I was disappointed by the story's lack of mermaids, but I was even more disappointed by what it had instead. I am basically never here for a story about a deeply unpleasant man whining about the lack of magic in his life. Maybe he'd find more magic if he ever stopped to think about someone other than himself or was, you know, nice to someone (anyone! just pick literally one person!) once in a while. There were a very few moments that I found funny--such as when Whit suddenly realizes he doesn't know whether he's speaking to his first wife Ginny or his second wife Jenny--but otherwise, I found the narrator and his story excruciatingly boring and painful.

For me, "Referential" met the very low bar of not being "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," so it would have been my pick to move forward. I must admit that I have been trying my very best to avoid all of Lorrie Moore's work since about 2009, when I picked up Self Help on a whim and felt completely wrecked by her story "Go Like This," which is about a woman diagnosed with cancer who decides to kill herself before the disease can kill her. I found "Referential" a much less shattering reading experience, but I think that's because I didn't find very much in it. I appreciated Lorrie Moore's attempt to bring some depth to the very cipher-like characters in "Signs and Symbols," and I thought she treated the character with mental illness more compassionately than Nabokov did, but mostly, I just wanted her protagonist to dump Pete already. It sort of felt like she was dating Whit from "Sea Maiden" under a false name, and I had no idea why. Was she just too tired to imagine anything (or anyone) better?

LYDIA: I realized, reading these two stories, that I've fallen into a bit of an ultra-presentist rut when it comes to short stories, lately, with Mimi Lok’s collection Last of Her Name (2019) and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife (2020). But The New Yorker (where both of our stories were published, "Largesse" in 2014 and "Referential" in 2012) has been one of THE names for contemporary-to-the-minute fiction since the 1920s. "Referential" is itself a rewrite of a story published more than 50 years previously in The New Yorker, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1948). My grandfather had some collections of New Yorker stories by decade: the 20s and 30s I think. I remember flipping through them some years ago and the majority of the stories were not good at all! Yes, some classic names and surprising gems that had stood the test of time, but not very many.

2012 and 2014 aren't very far away at all, in one sense (although my 18 year old students were only 10 in 2012). But in another way, these stories both seemed very dated, to me: an ad-man musing on the minutiae of dinner parties and all the alcohol consumed therein, while gradually revealing more and more wives in his past (but not in a fairy-tale Bluebeard way); a widow whose a mentally-ill son (conveniently precocious and yet childlike) comes between her and her unofficial partner, exposing the fault lines in their fragmentary facsimile of a nuclear family. These just seem tired and profoundly uninteresting takes on middle age and parenthood, and the anxieties of achieving (or not) the white picket fence American middle class life. "Signs and Symbols" is still assigned pretty regularly in high school and college classes. Do you think either of these will be in 50 years?

NATALIE: I could see them being assigned in some kind of Banal Existential Anxiety in Middle-Class White America Pre-COVID-19 college seminar, maybe? But that seems like such a painful class (both to teach and to take!) that I'm hoping not. I agree with you that they both feel very dated and insular in their outlook, and I'm honestly not sure what study value they'd have in 50 years beyond being historical curiosities. Aside from slightly preferring Lorrie Moore's initial description of mental illness, I found "Signs and Symbols" much more worthy of study--especially now that I've realized I missed a jump cut and thus the entire second half of the story during my first read! While my first impression was that Moore added some depth, now that I know she didn't invent the ending out of whole cloth, I feel much less positive about "Referential." How do you think these stories stacked up to Nabokov's?


LYDIA: Both “Largesse” and “Referential” seem to me to be written in "writer's workshop style": straightforward prose that reveals something more than the narrator is willing or capable to say. The declarative sentences are sort of like the slats in a ladder, and you have to look between them. Otherwise you just have a tedious string of statements. Since we've got the Nabokov story in play, I should say that in "Signs and Symbols" this style works really well for me. It may be that whatever is in between those sentence is fleeting and hard (impossible?) to pin down, but when I read it, I'm convinced there's something there that is worth trying to see.

By contrast, neither "Referential" nor "Largesse" convinced me that there was a there there. But “Referential” suffers, to me, because it asks you to compare it to “Signs and Symbols.” In retrospect, “Largesse” comes off a bit better to me, because I’m not stacking it against a story that I thought was really good. And it had some memorable set-pieces: the wealthy host shoving his painting in the fireplace, because his friends are too drunk to go through the charade of talking him down, for example. And there was one really weird thing: the section called "Accomplices" starts with a long meditation on the new wall phone with caller ID, on which the narrator's first (or maybe second) wife calls him. And it's described like a bizarre alien invention from the future:

Elaine got a wall phone for the kitchen, a sleek blue one that wears its receiver like a hat, with a caller-I.D. readout on its face just below the keypad. While I eyeballed this instrument, having just come in from my visit with the chiropractor, a brisk, modest tone began, and the tiny screen showed ten digits I didn’t recognize. My inclination was to scorn it, like any other unknown. But this was the first call, the inaugural message.

But then, at the end of that section, he casually mentions that he calls Elaine on her cell phone. Now, of course, Elaine could be a really early adopter, but it just seemed so weird to have all this song and dance about Caller ID -- which was ubiquitous in the US in the in the early 90s, and so casual about a cell phone, which was a much more unusual piece of technology at the time when Caller ID was new! What do you think, is this an intentional inconcinnity? A sign and/or symbol? Or was Johnson just phoning it in? 


NATALIE: I see what you did there! I somehow just breezed right past the cell phone in my first reading, but you're right that it's definitely an odd detail. I'd think that if Whit makes such a big deal about Caller ID, he'd make an even bigger deal about Elaine's cell phone. I wonder if maybe we're supposed to read him as out of touch and a bit oblivious, not just about the people around him but about the passing of time itself. His famous ad aired during the twenty-second Super Bowl, which was in 1987, and we learn in the "Casanova" section that it's been 30 years since some of his New York memories, so I think the story is set closer to its publication date. So, instead of Elaine being an early adopter of cell phones, maybe she's a late adopter of home phones with Caller ID, and Whit is marveling over old technology while appearing to find genuine meaning in his work writing printed travel brochures that are well on their way to being obsolete. He wanders his neighborhood wishing that he'd find something magical, while completely missing everything happening right under his nose--the communications technology revolution, the internet, Tony's friendship, whatever his two supposedly "not beautiful or clever" daughters are up to. He's a small man who has made his world small too, and now he's complaining that the world owed him something bigger and better.

"Referential" also makes a big deal out of Caller ID, though at least not about its novelty. It also makes a point of emphasizing that Pete is the one who has chosen the jams that are not allowed into the facility, leaving the son without a birthday gift until their next visit. In "Signs and Symbols," the parents carefully choose their gift together; in "Referential," the narrator seems to have left the gift-choosing to her increasingly uninvolved boyfriend who breezily announces that he forgot the rules. Do you think there's any meaning to be found there? Or is Moore just changing details for the sake of changing them?


LYDIA: I like that reading of “Largesse”! You’re starting to convince me that this is a story that is saying something, even though it’s a something that doesn’t grab me, personally. Whereas “Referential” I get less and less the more I think about it. I know that Nabokov’s story can be read as a puzzlebox story— or is it a parody of puzzlebox stories and a commentary on the nature of meaning? (Discuss: 10 points) But puzzlebox aside, “Signs and Symbols” moved me pretty strongly. The final scene, especially, hit me hard in the feels, so to speak: the husband enjoying the sequences of colors and the sounds of the names of the jams, hopeful with his plan that they can bring their son home, while the telephone rings and maybe it’s the wrong number again, but maybe it’s the news that their son is dead, or maybe something entirely different— we will never know, because the story ends there, with that foreboding cutting across the hope that despite everything you might salvage something and be able to take momentary joy in a small sensory pleasure.

The husband — who is also cut off from the “real world” they live in by his poor English — may be indulging in a delusion that is about to be shattered, like he and his wife’s earlier reluctance to acknowledge the signs of their son’s mental illness. (Like the reluctance of European Jews to see the signs of the coming Holocaust? And in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when all that is left of an entire world are a handful of photographs and memories (signifiers without any of the signifieds), how do you not fall into reflexive over-interpretation and become a “Referential Maniac”? ) But I don’t know how to live without those moments of delusion — reading a really good short story and savoring its sparkling tight sentences even during a pandemic, for example. So I didn’t like the way Moore dismissed those jam jars. Or her ending:


The plastic panel where the number should appear was clouded as if by a scrim, a page of onionskin over the onion—or, rather, a picture of an onion. One depiction on top of another.

“Good evening,” she said loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.

But there was nothing at all.

I think I count three or four really heavy blows of the symbolism hammer, there. And what is the deal with telephones in these stories?

NATALIE: What is the deal, indeed! The telephones certainly emphasize the characters' age to me (I don't think I could name even one fellow millennial with a landline even back in 2012-2014), but in "Referential," it seems like that's about all the phone is doing, for all Moore's heavy-handed attempts to the contrary. I think your analysis of "Signs and Symbols" is spot-on and brilliant, and I'm feeling wistful about an alternate universe where "Signs and Symbols" is going up against "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" today. But alas, that's not our universe, and "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" moves on. After discussing it with you, I think I'm coming around to preferring it to "Referential," but it's still not my cup of tea. I'll join the detestable Whit in asking, "Where's my mermaid story, damn it?"

Thanks for talking about these stories with me! Let's turn it back over to the commentariat.

Thank you Natalie and Lydia! Wow, you gave me a lot to think about.

One thing I liked about "Largesse," albeit in a back-handed way, is that it's so completely representational of a hyper-male, showy piece of writing, of the sort that everyone for a while just decided was the epitome of 'good writing.'

It's so much like Raymond Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," for instance. That's the one where a bunch of men go on a male-bonding fishing trip together, and when they find a woman's body in the river they just keep fishing. "Largesse" gave me exactly the same feeling. And it seemed for a while that every story considered "great" had that same male-chest-poundy feel, and it was almost a way to keep women writers out of the "best" category for a few more exhausting decades.

Excellent commentary here, Natalie and Lydia! I appreciate the digs you took at these stories, because honestly, these were toward the bottom of the heap of our bracket for my taste. I appreciated everything I learned in the Referential vs. Symbols and Signs matchup (and I think I would have also preferred to see S&S move forward from that) but Referential still didn't do as much for me as most of the other stories in the tournament. And the Largesse was probably my least favorite. I was also amused by the Ginny/Jenny confusion, but that was about it.

I see Lark's point above, but I think The Husband Stitch was probably the strongest story to address our "hyper-male" issues here. I hope to see Story of Your Life take down the Largesse in all its mermaid-absent glory tomorrow night, but I am interested in hearing from more participants in why they liked and voted for that one.

I like how time-ambiguous Signs and Symbols and Referential are - either because the characters are just not interested in technology or because it’s purposefully vague. The jam and jelly jars are one of the few items that seemed out of place in both stories - who gives jam jars to an adult “boy?” The funny thing is that I would totally love such a gift, and I brought back a local jam as my primary souvenir when visiting Asia earlier in the year. Perhaps that’s speaking to how much an extension of self these two incurable boys are to the couple and the mother; these stuck, depressed people saw something they like or were drawn to and assumed it would be liked by their son as well - who aside from the descriptions of his illness, really doesn’t get a personality of his own.