“Back Then”
by Mary Grimm
from the June 24, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
This is the summer of throwbacks or revivals or however you want to put it. I love seeing lesser known authors, who, to me, seemed to disappear, back on the page. This week, new fiction from Mary Grimm. She published her first piece in The New Yorker in 1986. Over the next ten years she published another six stories in the magazine, but this week’s is her first since 1996. I can’t find much more information about Grimm’s work online. It appears she has one collection of short stories and one novel to her name, but I can find only find the stories for sale. It looks like she’s been working on a new novel, but I’m not sure how long that’s been in the works. If any of you have any extra information about her work, I’d love you to share in the comments below.
This story fits nicely in the official cross into summer, particularly my own summer. It’s about a series of summer holidays to the same Lake Erie cottage. Though this story takes place during a series of August Perseid showers, I myself have just returned from such a holiday and so feel this story was published now for me.
After so many years meeting family in the same place away from home, away from the routine, away from normal life, the place can take on a unique quality that mixes time. I’m excited to read this story and see what Grimm is doing here with Kathleen, a young girl growing up over the years. My own four boys are growing up before my eyes on these trips, as they gain experience, seek independence, and start to see a bigger picture. This story is particularly about females, and I’m glad for that as well.
Here is how it starts:
Every year the Perseids came, splashing down from the top of the sky, and every year we begged our parents to let us go down to the lake by ourselves to see them. Every year they said no, and we sat on the narrow beach at the end of the ferry parking lot, our parents, my sister and I, and some of our girl cousins, whichever of them had come with us that year. The lake would be black, and the sky blacker. If there were waves, the curl of the foam was gray. The summer colors of our clothes were bleached out as if we were in an old movie, and we sat there waiting for the next shooting star, the next, the next. We’d read about the Perseids myth in the encyclopedia, but we pretended that they were sisters instead of brothers. The water sucked and slopped against the rocks. Sometimes there was the low rumble of thunder or the hum of a motorboat, its tiny lights crossing far out from west to east. Some years there were only twenty or thirty falling stars for our trouble, but other years they came hard and fast, as if someone were throwing them at the lake like handfuls of pebbles. In our private mythology, this meant that something wonderful was going to happen, that there would be a marvel, if we were ready to see it.
Please let me know what you think below!
The first two words that come to mind when trying to describe this story are “unambitious” and “inoffensive”, which isn’t really praise, but not quite criticism either. The story, insofar as there is a story here at all, is a fairly pleasant, but ordinary piece of nostalgia. Nothing much happens, there are no significant insights on growing up, but there really isn’t anything to dislike either. If Grimm shows up again in the pages of The New Yorker, I won’t mind, but I am not at all moved to check out anything else she has written.
Perhaps what she is doing is a meta-commentary on memoirs? “Look, I’ve made up a near-perfect chapter of a memoir about childhood, but it is all made up!”
Nostalgia? Yes. I guess. But such a beautiful, vibrant picture of innocence, really the wonder and adventure of it all in its simplicity of those summer days idling by the water with family. Speaking personally, these were the days I spent in the summer by the lake with my family, those fleeting, really quite joyful details that now from the lens of fifty years distant have an indelible resonance. I think Mary Grimm nailed it. Sure, we didn’t know it then, “but something was going to happen.”
This story gave me a greater appreciation of Patrick Modiano.
Aside from my delight in the story itself, I laughed at its juxtaposition, a miniature next to the meta-piece on the Masters at the Augusta National. In both reigned the exclusivity, the wonder, the superiority of some, inferiority of others, the rules, the visitors, the insiders, the food, the costumes, curiosity, sexuality (two references to gender question here; Tiger Woods’ extreme vulgarity there) and even the note of competition (Miss America indeed). I can’t imagine either sets of particulars occurring anywhere but in the USA.
OK, that said, I want to say how eagerly I devoured the story – it’s not my story -I never experienced anything like it – but the very close narrative distance took me right there. Mary Grimm’s descriptions elevate the ordinary into intimate space and instant recognition; there’s no sentimentality here, only wonder in both the consciousness of the narrator and the mind of the reader. Of course it’s a story, it’s a mini-bildungsroman – just as on a larger scale Portrait of the Artist is a story even though there is seemingly no ‘plot’. I do not think this is “an ordinary piece of nostalgia,” but a carefully crafted journey lit with sunshine, drenched with lake water, and marked with the small beginnings of doubt and jealousy that come to us on the near margins of growing up. What a wonderful memory it gave me of a place I have never been and an experience I have never had.
Mary Grimm unfolds significant amounts of careful detail effortlessly in “Back Then.” It’s as though she must have really been there and fully absorbed everything that she saw, felt and experienced even if it was many years ago. It seems way too difficult to conjure that much detail out of nowhere.
Summers are a time-out break from the usual intensity of regular life when one still is in childhood but destined for the rude awakenings of adolescence as occur in the first year of high school. There is the innocence of childhood play without having to care about much as one is watched over by one’s mother.
It may seem like not much is happening except by unspoken about contrast. There seems not much danger as today seems all over the place and many years ago parents took a more active role in looking after their children. Today, everything is so much different, there being all sorts of dangers or reactions against dangers. [U.S. Postal Service mail deposit boxes are welded shut. No hinged narrow door to pull down to put God knows what all with the letters. No. 10 letters and page size flats or okay. No oversize please.]
Grimm never notes how different it was other than to say it all happened years ago. When reading “Back Then,” a reader brings a familiarity with how life seems to have become more dangerous and anything good, less certain. Or the bad becomes more interesting, more worshiped and the good becomes dull, stupid and insipid.
Readers fill in stark contrast by wondering if civilization will slip or slip ever closer to dark times when Iran could possibly “lend” a nuclear bomb to the Palestinians to see if they can “mistakenly” wipe out Israel because the Anti-Israel got a little too worked up. Or another reader thinks nostalgia, nice, Pollyanna-ish or Disney-ish as opposed to Fast and Furious clever bad people who do horrible things and are the new heroes and heroines. “So What” they might say, “there is no big moment, so there is no moment because nothing happens.”
The closest one gets to such a contrast is when Grimm writes, “my mother had explained (as mothers do) that bad things happened, and that there were bad people (men).” So does this faintly suggest men as allegedly bad as Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein or all men? The “I” of the story is starting high school the next year. The reader can decide if it is just nostalgia or Eden before the days of Hell.
My thoughts about this story were exactly like David’s when I started reading it–that it was kind of generic, nothing special but certainly inoffensive and then it sort of snuck up on me and the rhythm of the writing sort of became seductive and I became clearer that she was writing about certain shifts in our consciousness/self-awareness/perception. That the character was becoming aware of time, aware of what was possibly coming next etc. In this respect, Grimm has done a fine job. As for the story itself, it’s genericity may almost be the point BUT the author’s perceptions are not so generic.
Mary Grimm’s “Kathleen” would be pleased to know that many a Catawba Islanders got together to establish a Catawba Island History Museum in the 1888 chapel located along her ten minute walk to the “Rocky Beach.” Please come see this ‘bigger picture’ of the ‘little paradise!’