Treelaw by Anna Noyes, 2015
The magic trick:
A sense of rootlessness about our narrator as her memories fill the pages but don’t seem to add up to anything larger
We have a weekly double starting today from Anna Noyes’s debut collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women. These are stories set on coastal Maine. The two this week feel particularly desolate and desperate.
First, we’ll look at “Treelaw.” This one takes us into the mind of a young woman who has a 3-year-old daughter, and, early in the story, she runs into an old friend, Mandy, at the local store. This spirals her through a series of memories and thoughts going back and forth between different points in time, all of them giving us an idea about the woman’s relationship with Mandy. Along the way, we also learn more about her husband, her father, her dead mother, and that 3-year-old child.
These memories include a remarkable set of details You’ve probably heard the writer’s advice to emphasize specificity. I’ve heard it as: “You’re only as good as you are specific.” And I have to think Noyes is a strong believer in such a writing model.
The level of detail here is almost relentless. Our narrator doesn’t just remember escaping home as a teenager with her friends. She remembers seeing a bonfire happening down the street, “sparks hissing off a burning couch.” These anecdotes, presented with such personal and specific detail, absolutely put the reader in the story’s world. But what’s interesting is the narrator does not make much effort to stitch the details together for us in a way that would reveal some larger truth about her life.
They’re kind of just there – presented simply as part of this character’s experience. The result, I think, is an emphasis on our narrator’s essential rootlessness. These anecdotes have happened. But they don’t add up to something bigger. So it’s almost as if every day appears anew and she takes it on with no overarching plan. She’s not dictating the terms. She’s not able to live life in any kind of big-picture way.
I don’t know if that was the author’s intent in producing so many details without overarching themes or outcomes (though one suspects that yes of course that was the author’s intent). The effect is astonishing.
And that’s quite a trick on Noyes’s part.
The selection:
Mandy and I dedicated love songs over the radio to boys from school. My voice, when it played through the speakers, sounded like a stranger’s – husky and shy and older. I wanted to block my ears. We practiced slow dancing with each other.
At night, with Grace, we often walked down the wide, empty road to the lamplight at the end of the pier and watched the water for bloodworms, which Mandy and Grace thought were eels, and I didn’t tell them the difference. My dad called the worms dimes, because they sold at ten cents each, barely worth him bending down for. I pictured the worms as dimes, silver and quick, hard to tell apart from the light of the water.
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