The Sea Latch by Cara Blue Adams, 2013
The magic trick:
Interrupting a scene mid-conversation to provide context or backstory
This will be a particularly granular magic trick, but hopefully it’s all the more interesting and useful for its peek into the weeds.
I love this story and recommend it highly. Kate Bishop – the focal point of Adams’s outstanding You Never Get It Back collection – is on a three-day vacation with her mother and younger sister. Her mother, stricken by anxiety and depression and stubbornness, hasn’t traveled in years. Her sister, now 19 (we see these characters at various ages throughout the collection), is pregnant.
Anyway, I promised granular, so here goes.
I love the way Adams mixes backstory and context with the present action of her scenes. That mixture is pretty much standard issue for any modern short story. But it’s way Adams combines the elements that stands out. Rather than wait for a natural break in the scene to switch to narrative backstory mode, she often will interrupt a scene mid-conversation to provide context.
The effect is that it keeps the reader on their toes. Always a good thing. But what I like even more is the way it makes the context come to life into the scene. Often, a story will struggle to incorporate backstory. It turns into the dreaded info dump, taking the reader away from the plot. But in mixing it into conversations, it almost feels like the characters are responding to the backstory itself. They aren’t, of course. They are responding to the last thing another character just said, but Adams creates several moments (knowingly, surely) where a conversational response could be read two ways – as part of the conversation or, yes, as a response of sorts to the backstory the reader just took in.
It’s not the only reason a story this masterfully executed works, but it’s a really cool technique.
And that’s quite a trick on Adams’s part.
The selection:
“Now how on God’s earth am I supposed to use this thing?” she says in our direction.
My mother tents her book on her stomach. “You’d think an umbrella’d come with a stand,” she offers.
“You would,” the woman agrees.
Her husband has determined that one of the lounge chairs is broken. He tells the girl to go get another. She slouches around the pool and hauls over a new lounger, stepping slowly, as if pulling a huge weight.
“For what those things cost, they should set themselves up,” my mother continues. She is deeply introverted by nature, but she can be voluble with strangers in odd bursts I cannot predict.
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