L. DeBard And Aliette by Lauren Groff, 2006
The magic trick:
Tremendous narrative momentum needed to cover so much ground in a short story
This may be the great lost episode of The Memory Palace, for those who are familiar with the great Nate DiMeo podcast. Groff takes us to early 20th century New York just as the influenza pandemic is kicking up.
It’s difficult for me to pinpoint the magic here – it’s such a sweeping epic of a story. I have often written on this site of such stories that there is a novel’s worth of material compressed into 30 pages. And I’ll admit that was my thought again with this story. It was published very early in Groff’s career, so I figured, “Wow, with a little more experience, there’s no way she wouldn’t hold this back as material for one of her novels nowadays.”
Which might be true, sure. But let’s flip that logic on its head. Perhaps this material works best as a short story. For someone who loves the short story form so much, why am I always giving it short shrift?
This story, as it is, covers decades. It takes our two main characters through a remarkable set of changes. To do so, it must move quickly. The plot is thick and quick. Perhaps it loses that momentum if elongated to novel form. So let’s not marvel that it could’ve been a novel. Let’s celebrate it as a short story!
And that’s quite a trick on Groff’s part.
The selection:
The girl’s name is Aliette Huber. She is sixteen, and she is a schoolgirl, or was before her illness. She won her school’s honors for French, Composition, Rhetoric, and Recitation for three years in a row. She can read a poem once and recite it perfectly from memory years later. Before the polio, she was a fine horsewoman, a beautiful archer, the lightest dancer of any of the girls at the Children’s Balls society had delighted in staging in the heady days before the war. Her mother died when she was three, and her father is distantly doting.
She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she read when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels she knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.
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