A Natural Girl by Richard Yates, 1981
The magic trick:
A story structure that plays a joke on the characters
Some story structure feels like the author looking for a kind of elegant design.
Other story structure is pure device to convey or accentuate theme.
The story structure in today’s story, I swear, feels like it’s there to mock the characters. It really does.
“A Natural Girl” tells the story of Susan Andrews over a long period of her life. But truthfully, she’s mostly in the story to reflect the experience of two men: her father and then her husband. The structure bookends the story of her marriage with two scenes of conversations she has with her father.
And, sure, the structure is clean. And no doubt it’s effective in highlighting the comparative relationships.
But truly it’s all a big joke. Look at these idiot men. Decades pass, they miss the point every time.
And that’s quite a trick on Yates’s part.
The selection:
“I don’t like Alice in Wonderland,” she had told him once when she was eight.
“You don’t? Why?”
“Because it’s like a fever dream.”
And he had never been again been able to read a page of either of those books, or to look at the famous Tenniel illustrations, without seeing what she meant and agreeing with her.
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