Fun With A Stranger by Richard Yates, 1952
The magic trick:
A story that suggests a redemption, epiphany arc but rejects it
It’s back to school season, so we’ll celebrate here with a weekly double of “school days” stories from Richard Yates.
We start with “Fun With A Stranger,” a classic tale about the worst teacher in the world. Well, not really. Miss Snell isn’t that bad. But in an elementary school where the third grade is split into two classrooms, she’s the teacher the students dread.
Miss Cleary – the school’s other (much younger) third-grade teacher – is all holiday parties and pretty dresses. Miss Snell is boring and strict, so much so that her students are downright embarrassed to be in her class.
So that is the general state of affairs at the start of and throughout the middle of the story. As a reader, we are conditioned to expect change, growth, and resolution. That’s how short stories work, right? But guess what? Sorry to spoil the drama here, but this story comes and goes, and Miss Snell is still pretty much mostly dour, and the students haven’t changed their mind about her at all.
What a letdown! We thought this was going to be a rich, layered story. Instead, all we get is a barely a sketch of a fairly nondescript mean old teacher.
But hold on a second. That doesn’t make much sense. If this is supposed to be a mere sketch, it’s a pretty strange character sketch. We barely get to know Miss Snell at all. We never get her interior point of view or any backstory about who she is. So how is that even a sketch? What’s going on here?
Maybe, just maybe, the story is as rich and layered as we’d hoped for from the start. Maybe we were just looking for the wrong things in the wrong places. Maybe the lack of change throughout the plot should tip us off that something else is afoot here. Maybe the story isn’t about the teacher. Maybe it’s a story about the kids; the way the kids relate to each other at that age; the way they compete with one another over strange things, and the way those competitions skew their perceptions of the people and the world around them.
We have been fooled by this story, I think. The center of the story was always the weird shapes and colors out of focus in the background of the picture. And that’s quite a trick on Yates’s part.
The selection:
All that summer the children who were due to start third grade under Miss Snell had been warned about her. “Boy, you’re gonna get it,” the older children would say, distorting their faces with a wicked pleasure. “You’re really gonna get it. Mrs. Cleary’s all right” (Mrs. Cleary taught the other, luckier half of third grade)” – she’s fine, but boy, that Snell – you better watch out.” So it happened that the morale of Miss Snell’s class was low even before school opened in September, and she did little in the first few weeks to improve it.
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