Attraction by David Long, 1991
The magic trick:
Telling a character’s story over a fairly long period of time
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I really love this story. It tells us all about Marly Wilcox, from the age of 15 up through maybe 25 or 30, I’m not sure. She lives with her mother in an old house in Montana. The story, crucially, covers a long period of time. This isn’t the kind of biopic that isolates one event or one year as being representative of the character’s larger story. This is a pretty long story that covers a lot of ground, chronologically, in Marly’s life. It’s fun as a reader to settle in and spend that kind of extended time with a character.
And that’s quite a trick on Long’s part.
The selection:
Her own house was an embarrassment: squat and shingled, peeling turquoise, with a glaring tin roof. One winter, an accumulation of cottonwood leaves and fallen-in chimney bricks plugged the heater vent, so that Marly and Jeanette both got dangerous, woozy headaches from the fumes. The landlord was ancient—he appeared every August in the fair parade, a spindly old farmer piloting a goat cart. Jeanette couldn’t stand the sight of him. “We’re absolutely not spending another month in this hellhole,” she told Manly periodically. Yet they never moved.
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