A Wrestler Of Sharks by Richard Yates, 1956
The magic trick:
Claiming ownership over a character’s story only to lose that role in the story’s coda
Richard Yates Week continues with another gem. “A Wrestler Of Sharks” takes us inside a very small union newspaper in New York City. The story stands out among the Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness collection with its first-person narrator. Most of the rest of the collection is told in third person. So that’s a good clue, as a reader, that something specific might be afoot here with the storytelling perspective.
Our narrator here is staffer on the paper. His story is focused on Leon Sobel, a man who joined the staff shortly after the narrator did. Crucially, the narrator angles the reader in a very particular direction when it comes to the newspaper. His judgments are strong and almost all negative. No one respects the newspaper; the staff has low morale and limited personal hopes; on and on. So when Leon shows up with some degree of ambition and pretension, the narrator portrays it to us as ill-fated and embarrassing almost to the point of making Leon and his doomed story arc cartoonish.
And sure enough that story arc is doomed. It is embarrassing, and maybe even a little cartoonish. The story plays out true to our narrator’s pessimistic tone.
But then a surprising coda.
Our narrator, compelled by guilt or possibly basic human kindness, seeks to help Leon. He calls his home and has a brief conversation with his wife. That brief window into the man’s own world opens something up in the story. This man Leon previously only existed for us within the confines of our narrator’s pessimism. But here is a fairly shocking reminder that he has his own life, his own story that isn’t told as a gloomy cartoon. And it’s not as if anything particular happens or is revealed in the actual phone call between the narrator and Leon’s wife. It’s enough, though, to flip the entire notion of storytelling on its head.
And that’s quite a trick on Yates’s part.
The selection:
That’s the way we’d all been hired, the six or eight of us who frowned under the Leader’s sickly fluorescent lights that winter, and most of us made no secret of our desire for better things. I went to work there a couple of weeks after losing my job on one of the metropolitan dailies, and stayed only until I was rescued the next spring by the big picture magazine that still employs me. The others had other explanations, which, like me, they spent a great deal of time discussing: it was a great place for shrill and redundant hard-luck stories.
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