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"The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier
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I liked the imagery too, and felt that the ceiling coming down was a metaphor for his failing marriage - that the ceiling coming down on his city was really just coming down on his life.
I read "The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier last week. ("I" before "E" except after "C.") Also, for the record, I read "Silver Water" by Amy Bloom around 8 June.
Good, Steve. We need you here. So what did you think about The Ceiling?
I read it this evening. It is puzzling to me; to think of the ceiling as the failed marriage makes sense, but it seems insufficient. The town's residents are all observing and experiencing the effects of this thing.I will continue to think on it, and read it again when I can.
I read it, and thought it was most notable that the ceiling lowering to such an extent was not paid much mind. People just got used to it. Seems to perhaps be symbolic of our planet's environmental degradation.
I thought it was a metaphor for their failing marriage, too. (The town water tower collapsing could be a metaphor for tears.) But it was odd the ceiling came down on the entire town, though.Overall, I think, he did nothing, he felt nothing, until the earth and sky were about to meet—literally. He even acknowledges it, I guess, in the penultimate paragraph: “In a surge of emotion that I barely recognized … I took her hand …”
On my first read, I found it really bizarre that nobody left the town, and I remembered the Luis Buñuel movie, “The Exterminating Angel”—at the end of a dinner party, no one realizes they have to go home, and they just sleep there in the host’s house. And we, or the hosts, get no reason for that.
Lyn wrote: "I read it, and thought it was most notable that the ceiling lowering to such an extent was not paid much mind. People just got used to it. Seems to perhaps be symbolic of our planet's environmental..."I think that’s an indication that this is magical realism, in which characters wouldn’t react to extraordinary events as we expect they would normally. Something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wing.”
https://youtu.be/CVkl8pVrcOQ?feature=...Came across this video that talks about acute and chronic conflicts and uses this story as an example. It was very good!
Wow, Dinesh, that is excellent. I saved it to use for future stories. And I’ve never seen it that approach before though it makes perfect sense.
There is a good biographical summary with the story so I won't add more about Brockmeier.
When I read short stories now, I keep remembering Rosellen Brown's words in the Introduction to this anthology regarding the first paragraph or page. She said that "often it turns out that the most important dynamics of the story are there already." Here, we get all the important characters in the first page and a half. There is the narrator, his wife, their son and the man who we ultimately learn is having an affair with the wife. By the way, I loved the nicknames for the son's best friends, Rich and Strange.
However, we don't get the ceiling until the end of the third page and it feels like a character though I think it is also a metaphor. Now, the question is what is the ceiling a metaphor for? My first thought while reading the story was that it was climate change. However, the story was published in 2002. Was climate change as much of an issue then? I think it was definitely in some people's thoughts then (mine, for sure) but not as many. When I thought of this, the wife's affair just fit as one more disaster. However, when I looked for more information about the story online, I noticed that others thought it was a metaphor for the end of the marriage. That totally fits for me. What do you all think? And, what did you think of the creeping tension of the ceiling slowly descending? I really liked those images.