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“Consolation”
by André Alexis
from the May 20, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” text_color=””]I[/fusion_dropcap] haven’t read any of André Alexis’s work, but I do know his name since he won the Giller Prize for his 2015 novel Fifteen Dogs, the second in his Quincunx quintet. As a side note, I have next to know information about the Quincunx quintet, but I have been intrigued since Ring was published in 2021 as the third in the series, though numbers four and five were published in 2016 and 2019 respectively. I’m intrigued.
I’m also intrigued because the opening to this week’s story is quite direct and powerful.
Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before. She was in her early eighties and still driving, and, because I am an inveterate back-seat driver, on one of our outings I suggested that she take a road she did not want to take. She resented it, and I could feel her anger growing.
When we got to her house, she came at me, all hundred and ten pounds of her, flailing, screaming, and cursing. It was like being assaulted by a very short scarecrow. I shouted back at her, pushed her away, and left the house, resolved never to see her again.
Alexis has published in the magazine before, in 2022. That story, “Houyhnhnm,” also starts with a paragraph about the narrator’s parent. I didn’t read this at the time, but I’m going to go back and see what that 2022 story was all about and whether it relates in any way to “Consolation.” Here’s how “Houyhnhnm” starts:
My dad, Robert auf der Horst, died seven years ago. He was a successful doctor, and for most of his life he divided the world into two categories: what he thought useful (science) and what he thought frivolous (almost everything else). It wasn’t that he disdained other things—art, for instance. It was that he couldn’t see the point of pretending that knowledge, the fruit of science, was comparable to entertainment.
Please feel welcome to comment below! I will post my thoughts when I’ve read the story later on in the week.
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As I read the story, I soon felt as if I were reading a non fictional narrative. At some point, it felt more like a story. So it was interesting to read in the post-story author interview that he started it largely autobiographical, but at some point felt the need to diverge. I can’t help wondering what exactly is fiction and non.
Whichever, it’s all fiction, considering the narrator, whether Sam or Andre, is recalling his own possibly flawed perception and recall of his parents and other characters. So the story is about the narrator’s experience.
I won’t go on much further, while others may not yet have read the story. I’ll need to reread it, anyway, as I’m finding it difficult to interpret. Is there much more than the author spells out in the interview? Would we better not have been told it was semi-autobiographical? Or is it better to know?
But close to the beginning we learn that Sam’s experience of his parents was affected by his being separated from them between age 2 and 3½. So was Andre’s.
During a similar period, my grandparents were like parents. My mother taught school some distance away, and I saw her only briefly before bed those days; and sometimes the rural drive was too difficult winter nights, so she stayed away days at a time. Unlike Sam/Andre, the only partial separation intensified my attachment to her, and also to my grandparents.
I plan also to reread the author’s other NYer story, it being similarly semi-autobiographical.
.
I was engaged with this story from the first paragraph, finding both Alexis’s writing and the way he told this strange story of the infidelity of a father gripping and thought provoking. At the same time, I’m also not entirely sure I know all that it is saying, though I’m intrigued by the final few paragraphs when the narrator, Sam, says that he hopes his mom did not forget what his father had promised (a promise he failed to keep) all those years ago. I don’t know what it’s saying, but I’m intrigued enough to think about it further.
I’m also intrigued enough to want to read the rest of Alexis’s work.
I agree mostly with Eddie and felt it was autobiographical without knowing it was. It feels more like a memoir than a short story and has a lot of backstory to deal with. I don’t think there’s much subtext or missing thematic material here. It was just fine, but not much more.
To love and lost is better than not; author explores the complexities and conflicts of trying to hold true to the concept.
The story originally took as its epigraph: “Our almost instinct almost true …” a quote from Philip Larkin’s “Arundel Tomb”, which ends with the line “What will remain of us is love”. The epigraph is meant ironically and somewhat bitterly. But it also points to what is going on in the story: a contemplation of a moment of affection – the statues holding hands in Larkin’s poem, a promise in the memory of the narrator’s mother in “Consolation”.
(The New Yorker does not allow epigraphs, for formatting reasons, but it will be restored in the book of stories in which “Consolation” figures.)
“Consolation” is also, of course, about the unknowing that’s at the heart of one’s relationships with one’s parents. The narrator says, and I believe him, that he feels he knows them better as they fade in memory. A paradox: they seem nearer to him now that they can no longer change or evolve, the father they are from him in time.
The story isn’t a memoir at all. Nor is it autobiography, despite its use of autobiographical elements. It is, as Eddie points out, fiction. It began with grief at the loss of my parents. (I think it was written because I was unable to write an obit for my father, though everyone around me assumed I would, since I’m a writer.) But it is fiction that problematizes memory. Fiction struggling with memory. It is, after all, a story that begins with dementia and ends with what dementia leaves behind: a handful of vivid moments from a long life. (It also describes a town as losing its mind as you drive out of it. As if the town itself had dementia.) Part of its point, I think, is that the narrator is unsure of what really happened. He is telling you something from his life, but he doesn’t quite know what is true, isn’t quite sure who the people are whom he called “his parents.”
A final thing: the narrator hoping that his mother remembers a false promise – a mawkish description of skies and birds and love – is a way of saying that fiction is, at times, in certain circumstances, a form of consolation. I’m not sure whether or not it is better to have love and lost, etc., but I have faith in the consoling power of the un-real.
To that point, ‘Consolation” was inspired by Alice Munro’s “Walker Brother’s Cowboy,” a story that had a deep effect on me. I think of my story as conspicuously munrovian: the secrets children don’t quite get, the rumours, the feel of a small town (I grew up in Petrolia), the whiff of scandal, the mystery of southern Ontario. In my life, fiction has certainly been a consolation.
yrs,
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Mr. Alexis, thanks so much for coming on here and giving us some more insight into this lovely story. I very much look forward to reading the book this is part of when it comes (and I’m still anxious to get back to more of your prior publications).
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andr%C3%A9-alexis-reads-alice-munro/id256945396?i=1000657492637
How awesome for the author to post a comment! More of them should.
When I was reading the story, I was reminded of Alice Munro, how parts of the story are filled in/speculated upon by the narrator eg Friend of my youth. I enjoyed reading this.