“Poetry”
by Greg Jackson
from the April 29, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
A few years ago Greg Jackson’s “Wagner in the Desert” was published in The New Yorker. I really liked it, and that was the common reaction in the comments (you can see our thoughts here). Later Jackson published Prodigals, his debut collection of short stories. I’m afraid that I never followed up on my admiration, and that collection remains unread by me. I’m glad to see Jackson is still writing, and I’m curious what he’s got coming next. From his interview with Deborah Treisman, he makes it clear that he is working on his first novel, but this story is not part of it.
So what do we have in “Poetry”? An insufferable narrator, perhaps? At least, that’s my feeling after reading the first short section:
The volcano sat like a pointed cap at the head of the island. But this we knew only from photos, since, whenever we were near enough to see the volcano, it was covered in mist and clouds. The clouds suggested rain, and rain suggested that Celeste would not enjoy the hike, but so, frankly, did Celeste’s dislike of hikes, and, anyway, I had convinced myself the weather would coöperate.
“Coöperate” is an interesting word in this context, because it implies a natural alignment of interests — mine and the volcano’s — and the history of humans and volcanoes, as I understand it, does not encourage confidence in this direction. But the volcano was there, and so we had to climb it. That was how things shook out for me. Once, Celeste had spent the afternoon in a high-altitude rifugio while I hiked to the top of an Italian mountain in sneakers and shorts, among people with poles and crampons, who looked outfitted, basically, for an expedition to Mars. So maybe Celeste did have a choice. But maybe not. There was the looming question of marriage and children, after all, and of the deeper compatibility of our interests, tendencies, compulsions, and so on.
“James needs harrowing ordeals to prove he’s not already on the long downslope to death,” I once heard her tell an acquaintance at a dinner party.
“Death?” I said. “I’m worried about living. I’m worried about embracing eternity before the time comes.”
Celeste looked at me as though I’d proved her point. And maybe I had.
I do hope that the rhythm, the self-conscious eloquence, the resulting pretentious tone are intended to make us resist the narrator a bit. If so — and I think that is the case, and I like James’ brief willingness to concede at the end of the section — I’m on board to see what happens to James and Celeste as they climb this volcano.
How about the rest of you? How did this story strike you? What’s going on in their ascent? I’d love to hear it. Please feel free to comment and discuss below!
Last week, one of my criticisms of “Cut” was that the husband’s first reaction on learning that his wife had discovered a cut on her body was not “Oh my God! We need to get you to a doctor right away!” Now this week we get a man who, upon discovering that he and his girlfriend just ate something that is deadly, he seems entirely unbothered except in his hope to be able to keep her from knowing about it. In both cases it seems to me that the authors are so lost in the idea that there is some symbolic significance in these events that they completely lose sight of the fact that they make no sense.
.
In the author interview, Jackson even criticizes how having the characters die would somehow be too banal or ordinary. Well, yeah. But you can’t just defy common sense because you hope it will be more interesting, at least not without doing more to establish that there is something not-of-the-real-world going on here. For me, it just made me completely disengage from whatever was supposed to be of interest here. Very disappointing.
I actually had to give up around the middle of the story, because I couldn’t understand what was happening at all
and the imagery evoked made no sense. Since I’ve read nearly all the New Yorker stories over the past ten years, and this is the first time that has happened, I fault the story more than myself as a reader. I didn’t know about the deadly eating because I stopped reading before then. I’m surprised something happened in the story which was actually interesting. If I knew that such an event would happen, I would probably have persevered.
I take this story to be primarily concerned with the narrator’s longing for and attempt to establish meaning and clarity in his life, coupled with how he imposes his own existential journey on his disinterested partner–a journey which turns out to be harmful for her and, at best, ambivalent for him. Sympathetic as I may be to the overall concept of the piece, it really didn’t work for me. My main issue is the writing. It’s pretentious to the point of distraction. Funny enough, I think that’s actually intentional and intended to serve as a kind of commentary on the narrator’s grasping-for-profundity state of mind, yet it takes over the narrative in a pretty tedious way. This was essentially my issue with ‘The Starlet Apartments’ by Lethem; the parallels here are strong. One big gripe with this stylistic approach is that when large parts of a story are self-consciously overwritten to make a point, it becomes almost nearly impossible distinguish between the sections that the author wants to feel overwritten and the ones that they intend to come across as genuinely significant or insightful. A a result, it all starts to feel bloated and contrived, and whatever truths might be buried beneath the overturned prose just don’t feel worth digging out.
As with Lethem before reading his recent piece, I’ve never read Jackson before, but I can’t say this primer has me wanting more.
This is not an encouraging batch of comments!
Trevor, maybe you’ll be the one to convince us that Jackson’s on to something here. I’m holding my breath!
Paul, I agree. It wasn’t you. It was the story that failed you. Reader, once again, I find myself nodding in agreement with everything you said.
.
Trevor, on Sunday, I did skim over the comments here for Jackson’s previous story and was really very encouraged. I was thinking at first, based on this story, that I would not bother reading any more of Jackson’s work (I also found two other stories from his previous collection available for free online). But now I am thinking I really want to check “Wagner in the Desert” to see if this week’s story was a one-off failure or not.
I am so glad to have my thoughts about this story validated. I very rarely don’t finish a story, but I couldn’t take any more of this and I completely agree that while we may be invited to find the narrator pretentious, it doesn’t make the story any more tolerable. I was irritated by this from the first line and gave up 1/2 way.
I thought the story was terrific. Witty. Well crafted. Made me laugh.