“One Sun Only”
by Camille Bordas
from the March 7, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Camille Bordas has been one of the more regular contributors to The New Yorker in the past five years. I’ve enjoyed her stories, and I’m always all the more impressed when I remember that she used to write in her native French before starting to write these in English. I’m not one of those who could tell these weren’t written by someone who knew English front to back. And she’s got a great way of controlling the tone of her pieces. This one starts with some awful things, but ultimately the tone is much more pleasant:
This is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
“I hope there’s no afterlife,” he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. “I hope he’s not watching over me.”
I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn’t think it could be the dog.
That’s a great start! I am anxious to finish the story and to hear what you all think.
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It’s becoming more common for a woman to write with a man’s voice – something in my youth no-one would attempt. I like the very subtle way the dad’s lack of empathy is conveyed through his deadpan observations of his small son’s lack of empathy. What would be normal in a seven year old boy is deplorable in a grown man. I think this story is about the tendency to self-absorbed obliviousness commonly found in men.
I agree with Senior history fan that One Sun Only is about the self-absorbed obliviousness of men. But it is also a good dissection of patriarcal family dysfunction. Father is overly worried and critical of his children. Children or male children become overly critical of practically everything. There’s a dichotomy of sister hopeful, brother disinterested. Wife optimistic, husband sad is not a good match so they detach from one another. Then sad husband feels detached from his daughter as she seen a little capable of feeling hope or feeling at all. This as his son seems to turn nihilistic or existential. There is no origin or true origin is uncertain so no connection or continuity. Great observation on truly fictional characters in fully fictional stories or novels not selling. And father writes fictional stories because anything real is too sad. But ironically too sad, too brutal (Jack Reacher) series, sells best. Ironically the father’s awareness is highest for petty details and sensibility for something more complex and not too complicated seem impossible for him to understand. This story seems to be about no hope, no redemption, no saving grace whatever because not even one sun can be drawn by the son. Nada. Zero. No hope. Not even one. The original worthy patriarchal goals or purposes self destruct in the successive generation except concerning the daughter. But who will ever be able to relate to how she feels or what she perceives. She will probably detach from general society and go it alone. Never marry or form close attachments, maybe like Jack Reacher. A person has to forget or purge from memory anything that was good if it dies or disappears. Sort of negate anything they felt good about or experienced in their life. This is a good fictional snapshot of what is going wrong in family life. But oh so sad.
I think there’s an interesting parallel between the narrator and his daughter with respect to stagnancy. In losing her tooth, Sally “had lost something that had been dead inside her for a long time.” The narrator had (past tense) a strained relationship with an emotionally distant father. His son Ernest tells him that he’s been sad since Grandpa died, but we see that this night is the first time since his father died that he wished he could talk to him. It’s not absurd to suggest that his relationship with his father as he held within himself had already died long before his actual father did.
I’m not sure what a suitable parallel would be toward Ernest. Perhaps as others have alluded to it would necessarily implicate the weight of generational trauma through patriarchal lines. Is the narrator long since dead to his son? The prophesized gravestone seems relevant here.
I love the short stories of Camille Bordas, and I thought this was another good one. The theme that spoke to me was one of worth and worthiness, right to the last line where Ernest asks what Sally’s tooth is worth. Hovering over the story is the dead grandfather, maybe watching over them and maybe not, who demanded to examine what each of them had produced and meted out judgment. (Later, Henry, the successful author, flies through the air above them.) Although the narrator says he loved his father’s honesty, it seemed to me he was trying to convince himself, trying to give value to the perceived lesson: “…that one slept alone and didn’t complain.” Since the that is his current fate, he decides to embrace it.
Sally is the valued one in the family, so why would would the narrator, who could never live up to his father’s expectations, not feel some disconnection and resentment? He hates reliving his childhood through his children and can’t wait for them to grow up. At the same time, he feels sympathy and concern for Ernest, who is apparently sadder about the (less valued but less judgmental) janitor’s death as he was about his grandfather’ s. The idea of forgetting whatever is sad or frightening comes up in the burning of the nightmare pictures, Ernest wanting to forget his grandfather, and the way the narrator’s father distracted him with a trip to Italy the week after his mother died. It worked, the narrator says, but what happened to the discarded feelings? He, however, gives his son the most valuable gift a parent can give their child: attention, without judgment. In a story about grief and worthlessness, there is this 1 AM space of unconditional worth and a hope that one can tolerate one’s pain, and even value it.