What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

Reading a story called “False Spring” by Ben Lerner in Paris Review #205, I came across this sentence:

Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather of increasing severity—whenever I looked at Lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to be one of the artists who momentarily transformed bad forms of collectivity into negative figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.

 I was floored. At that moment I realized I had no idea what his story was about.

This revelation sent me into a hallucinatory moment. I could see myself in front of a college classroom, “Contemporary Literature” perhaps, even though teaching is one job I have studiously avoided all these years. “Today we are discussing ‘False Spring.’ Does anyone want to start by telling us what this story is about?” Some smart-alecky kid (myself, in college) would have an answer.

                Up until that stupendous sentence, this particular story had been a fairly straightforward tale, told in the first person, apparently about a guy in New York post 9/11 (in the same paragraph, there is a reference to “the present absence of the towers.”) who is wrestling with the concept of fatherhood brought on by being asked to be a sperm donor.  He takes some swipes at hipster Brooklyn. There is a story within a story about a woman who finds out that the man she thought was her father wasn’t, negating her cultural and personal identification. These details of plot are what a story is about in some sense. They might make up the first paragraph of the publisher’s blurb or a review in a popular magazine. It wouldn’t do for my mythical English class though. We would be more interested in the sudden appearance of Whitman, and that wonder word “proprioceptive.” It gets harder and harder to know what a story is truly about the more you think about it.

                In most non-imaginary English classes, the topic of what a story is actually about is not open to discussion. Or maybe that opinion is the product of one bad experience I had in college. I got an “F” on a paper about Margaret Atwood’s first novel Surfacing. It was the only thing on our reading list that hadn’t been discussed in class, so I had no idea of the professor’s interpretation. Apparently, we did not agree. I never took another lit class. I gave up on the idea of talking about books in public at all.  It seemed such a challenge to try and say what any book was truly about much less what it meant to me.

                And yet literature still had its formative grip on me. I read everywhere, everything. My worldview was formed by the authors I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere—Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Lawrence Durrell, and then there are the classics like Pride and Prejudice and the contemporary scene, where I am guided by my daughter. Yet I never gained the confidence to be outspoken about my devotion, in fact, I avoid it. What’s going on? Working in bookstores has taught me that everyone has their opinions, and it’s a good thing, too, or the last few bookstores would be gone. The bookseller‘s skill is not necessarily knowing what someone should have read in the past, but to know what they should read next. It is our constant search for surprising sentences.