The Point and Other Stories
By Charles D’Ambrosio
Back Bay Books
1995 (paperback edition)
Condition: Excellent; annotated text; signed by author; additional inscription reads: “Madison, WI Nov. 3, 2004.”
Why I keep it: intellectual, personal [*]
In 2004, during my first semester as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writer Charles D’Ambrosio served as the fiction writer-in-residence. This consisted of a four-day campus visit in which he spent some time with us, the eager young fiction darlings of the department and in which he came into our fiction workshop, taught by his friend and our professor, Lorrie Moore, and expounded on writing short stories.
Some of my classmates were familiar with D’Ambrosio’s work, but somehow I had managed to make it to age 34 without reading a single one of his stories. I’m certain had I read one of them in The New Yorker or Story Magazine, I would have remembered because D’Ambrosio’s stories are nothing if not memorable.
Moore assigned “The Point and Other Stories.” We were to read the collection and come to class with questions for the author. Around mid-September, I bustled over to the University Bookstore and purchased my copy, and then I let it sit. And sit. And sit some more on my messy desk in the graduate student office. I let that sucker sit until the week before D’Ambrosio was to arrive, and then I cracked it open and read it in one long afternoon.
I won’t say this about very many short story collections, but it’s entirely possible to overindulge in D’Ambrosio’s particular brand of wicked poison. He possesses a biting wit and a dark vision, one populated by young men floundering and failing, trying desperately to achieve the trappings of adulthood but falling far short of the goal. In fact, D’Ambrosio seems to question whether those goals are worth pursuing at all.
The author writes in an updated version of the dirty realism that Richard Ford and his peers made so popular. As Meghan O’Rourke writes in The New York Times:
Indeed, in the last few years, writers in this book review have lamented the decline of slice-of-life realism, pronouncing it dead at least once. But pronouncing things dead is the job of critics, and the truth is that understated realism remains a robust tradition, as evidenced by the work of, among others, Charles D’Ambrosio, whose stories frequently appear in The New Yorker. Eleven years after the publication of his first book, “The Point,” and one year after his book of essays, “Orphans,” along comes “The Dead Fish Museum,” which largely traverses the same Carveresque territory staked out in his debut: the charged relationships between fathers and sons, drifters and workers, in the outskirts of the American Northwest.[1]
The two stories that made the strongest impression on me were the title story, “The Point,” and “American Bullfrog.”
“The Point” has appeared in Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. In it, the narrator recalls a moment from his teenage years when his mother asks him to escort a drunk woman home from a party at his house. As the woman becomes increasingly irrational and hysterical, the boy is forced to draw closer and closer to the tragedy that has shaped his life, his father’s suicide. D’Ambrosio’s handles his characters with care. In a particularly moving passage, when Mrs. Gurney strips down on the beach and asks the narrator if she’s beautiful, the narrator says:
“This really isn’t a question of beauty or not beauty, Mrs. Gurney.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “I know your husband doesn’t love you, Mrs. Gurney. That’s the problem here.”
“Beauty,” she sang.
“No. Like they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You don’t have a beholder anymore, Mrs. Gurney.”
A charged sexual moment that follows between these two damaged people leads to the ending, which, though violent, has a tender edge of redemption to it.
In “American Bullfrog,” on the other hand, D’Ambrosio showcases some of his rawest writing. The narrator in this story, another teenaged boy of the same age, believes his parents have been “cooking up a little fantasy of their own, namely, that I was not their son,” a problem made worse by the narrator’s decision “that the only life for me was the life of an outlaw.”
D’Ambrosio takes the classic “who is my teenager” trope and turns it upside down. In “American Bullfrog,” the teenager wonders who his parents have become, particularly since he has “lived in the same house with them for thirteen years–more than ample time to get to know a person.”
In a particularly hilarious passage, the narrator describes how he stops using the front door, preferring instead to climb out the window and climb down a tree to exit or enter the house which leads his parents to begin discussing him in the third person and him to begin monitoring their intake of alcohol.
The story maintains this wry edge throughout, but what makes it unforgettable is the sex scene between the narrator and a girl named Diane at a party in an abandoned house. Almost immediately, the narrator determines:
“we weren’t made for each other. The way she rocked and squirmed around, I was afraid I’d fall off, and decided that it was necessary to grab onto her head. I held onto her head with both hands, just above the ears, as if to the handle of a pogo stick.”
And on it goes. Whole books have been devoted to the topic of writing sex scenes, but I’m pretty sure the sex scene D’Ambrosio writes–that raw, fumbling, uncomfortable teenage experimentation–wasn’t what the authors of these writing guides had in mind when they sat down to impart their guidelines.
I rarely have the occasion to use the words “horrifying” and “sex scene” together, unless I’m referring to a scene that’s nonconsensual, but the first time I read this story, I was utterly horrified. It was hard to see around that one scene to the story beneath it, and had I started reading the book sooner, I would have had time to digest the story, to come back to it (as one might a bad car wreck), to look at it from a different angle.
I’ve since re-read “American Bullfrog,” and it’s a brilliant short story, one that holds up under multiple readings. In fact, the entire collection should be required reading for parents with teenage boys. D’Ambrosio understands the beast within each of his characters, and he illuminates it tenderly and carefully. These boys may be ghastly right now, but the author cautions us, they will become the men with whom we live and work.
By the time I came to class to discuss this book, my brain felt bloated and over-full. I wanted to let out my belt a notch or two, but I couldn’t. Had I begun reading the collection back in September, I could have read the stories in snippets, imbibing in them only until I felt Je n’ai plus faim (”I have no more hunger”), not until I was overstuffed.
Thus, I keep this book because it’s good, but also because it serves as a reminder that the digestion of excellent fiction cannot be rushed. Epicurus wrote that we must “be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance,” and so it goes with fiction.
Tomorrow’s delivery: “Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother” by Beth Ann Fennelly
Further reading:
Stray Questions for: Charles D’Ambrosio (PaperCuts, NY Times, Sept. 19, 2008)
The Quarterly Conversation: The Charles D’Ambrosio Interview
Powell’s Books interview
Fourfold: Charles D’Ambrosio Q & A
Story in Literary Fiction: Charles D’Ambrosio Interview
Willow Spring interview
1 The Man’s Guide to Fishing and Hunting. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/21orourke.html?_r=1 Accessed Feb. 28, 2010.