Departure by Andrew Porter, 2008
The magic trick:
Skillfully connecting characters and ideas without outright saying it
Another excellent story from Porter’s excellent The Theory Of Light And Matter collection.
This one takes us to Amish country, Pennsylvania. Or at least where Amish country brushes up against mainstream small-town America.
There is a lot going on here, and a lot here to recommend the story.
I’ll focus on one tiny detail.
Our teenage narrator tells us of local boys from his school picking fights with Amish kids at the highway diner. It’s ugly and characterizes the town as rough and ugly and limited and hateful.
Meanwhile, we don’t hear a whole lot about our narrator’s parents. But he does share a thought about a night his parents are hosting a party at their house. He imagines that his father will soon get drunk and challenge guests to wrestling matches on the front yard.
It’s a great way of using a couple sentences in one paragraph to do a ton of narrative work.
Almost instantly, the reader understands that his father is connected to the things about the town that the narrator hates. The father, clearly, can be seen as the adult version of those high school boys picking fights at the diner. This further condemns the town as a place you should want to leave, and further casts our narrator away from his family and on his own to figure things out.
That, my friends, is craft.
And that’s quite a trick on Porter’s part.
The selection:
Our parents were never home that summer. There were cocktail parties and barbecues five or six times a week on our street and it seemed that almost every night the parents in the neighborhood got trashed, never stumbling home before one or two in the morning. Sometimes Tanner and I would show up at a party just to steal beer. We would stick ten or twelve cans into a duffle bag and then go back to my house and drink them on the back porch, and sometimes end up falling asleep in the backyard by accident.
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