From The New Yorker (November 20, 2006 issue):
They were going to boil Dorothy’s blood. Take it out, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knew you were too thick to really understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York. There were statistics, affidavits. There was a four-color brochure from the clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, printed in three languages. As they waited for the train in the Munich station, Helen studied the pamphlet’s fonts and graphics. A frequent dupe of advertising herself—how many depilatories and night creams had she bought over the years, and at what expense?—Helen understood the significance behind the choice of peaceful, healing blue over charged, emotional red, the softening elegance of the italicized quotes from Adèle de Chavigny, a woman from Strasbourg who had not only survived having her blood boiled but had gone on to live a life of graceful transcendence. There were no concrete images of the clinic itself, no pictures of whatever this boiling machine might look like. Helen imagined huge vats like those in a brewery—wide, clear tubes with viscous, viral blood moving sluggishly in one direction, while bright, animated, healthy blood rushed eagerly back toward the patient. On the roof of the brewery, she imagined enormous chimneys expelling the sweet-sour-smelling residue of defeated disease into the air. Poof, poof, the smokestacks would go, and all the German townsfolk (yes, in her fantasy they were wearing lederhosen and small peaked caps) would look up, proud to know that, in their town, death had been conquered.
“Fairy stories,” Dorothy would have said dismissively, had Helen shared such an idea with her, as she had so often as a child, forever irritating Dorothy with her impractical mind. Helen had been careful not to lob Dorothy’s criticism back at her when she’d announced this latest and most ridiculous plan to save her life. But Dorothy’s response to her own illness had been perversely uncharacteristic from the start.
[Read the rest of the story here.]
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5 comments:
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. ;)
I just finished reading it, so it's a bit soon to comment. I like to keep stuff I read at the back of my head for a little while before concluding in any way. Still, here I am commenting... Possibly for fear of all the high-brow comments that'll be rushing in any minute now?!
I quite liked it. That is, I liked the stuff about Nathan, and Helen's music. The more "scenic" descriptions as they moved through Germany, or describing her place in Calif. didn't do anything for me, though.. And I must admit, through most of the story I thought it served Dorothy right, being so sick, when she'd refused traditional medicine... Towards the end I thought I could see why - still wouldn't have cried had she died there and then.
I know, such a hard-hearted mother of five.. Speaking of which, the one thing that really annoyed me was the bit about Nathan's dissing the mother's-milk-against-conjunctivitis approach. Because it works. (Against most things, actually..) And only a nation of too-short-maternity-leave-for-breast-feeding would not know that.
There. I'll get off the soap box now...
Kath, I love you for your being so dependable, lovely, and smart, as always. ;)
Okay, so let's jump in with "Night Train to Frankfurt."
The story is told in seven parts, starring three characters: (1) Dorothy, a pragmatic, perhaps emotionally removed New Yorker and mother of Helen, who is dying of cancer (2) Helen, Dorothy's daughter, who moved away from New York to Los Angeles, a former musician who has regrets about musicianhood, who is dating a guy named Nathan, and has a dying mother, and (3) Nathan, Dorothy's boyfriend of a year or so who was caught cheating, and now continues a tenuous relationship with Helen.
In writing classes I've heard it said that most short stories work best when they deal with no more than three characters, so right away I see Marisa Silver working within that context, regardless if that was a specific decision. (Most likely it was instinctual--she probably felt three characters was all she could chew off in this piece.)
There are two main conflicts I see in the story: (1) the mother and daughter relationship, and in this case, there is a parent/child role reversal when Dorothy begins to age and is dealing with a fatal disease and Helen becomes a caretaker. Therein lies conflict. There's enough as a mother and daughter, and it's heightened with the role reversals. The other main conflict is the boyfriend/girlfriend relationship and dealing iwth a damaged relationship when people are in it for damaged reasons.
Helen and Nathan are in this weird spot in their relationship where Nathan has cheated, Helen has found out, and she has taken him back, but Nathan is in a precarious spot in feeling like he can't quite undo what he's done, and he's paying for it daily by keeping quiet during certain fights and arguments (the idea is that he should do so since he was the one who cheated) and he never quite feels certain of the relationship anymore. Helen, in her own twisted way, is enjoying the relationship post-cheating because she can forever feel superior. After all, Nathan is the one who cheated. He will always be wrong about something, right? Any fight can end with, "Well, yeah, but you cheated." But we still get a glimpse that maybe there's something there between the two of them, like when Helen plays the piano and Nathan comes out to listen and is legitimately loving it and Helen is embarrassed because she's unable to play the piece perfectly. But we come back to an old and difficult question in relationships: When is it bad enough to let go? Marisa Silver, in some ways, begs the question and lets it hang in the air.
The Dorothy/Helen relationship and dealing with a parent's death made me think of my own mother's struggle in taking care of her ailing father who died a few years ago, and also a dear person in my life's struggle to care for his mother when she had cancer, though it was not terminal. I mention those stories not to air the private lives of people in my life, but instead to say that those bits of background experience came to the page with me when I read the story. Right away it was easier for me to relate to the story. Silver very effectively painted Helen as wanting to have emotional connection before her mother's demise, and allowed Dorothy to continue being her somewhat aloof self.
What I've always admired in good fiction writers is the ability to write about flawed characters, but to still write them in such a way that makes us care about them. It's so easy when writing to try and create an ideal world, or write about "nice" things. It's harder to examine the darker, harder, more complicated things--the "ugly stuff" most of us hide as best we can--and do it all, most importantly, with honesty. It's fascinating that honesty is so important in fiction because, um, fiction is by necessity a made up story. But the truth in what the characters experience must be there. There has to be a certain honesty. I think Silver did that in this story, and it's one of the things that makes the story successful.
Let me talk about a few issues I had with the story. First, like Scholiast (aka Kath) I wondered why Dorothy didn't seek conventional treatment for her cancer. She was described as a sort of logical, pragmatic woman, and I would imagine her going through the motions of standard cancer treatment, not engaging every alternative medicine practice she can find. I know Silver tried to answer that in the final section of the story, but I didn't quite buy it. I don't know. Maybe I missed something? Anybody have insight on that?
Also, at the very end of the sixth of the seven chunks, I took issue with these two lines:
"It's too much, Mom. It's just too much," Helen said.
"No," Dorothy whispered, her voice barely audible above the sound of the train. "It's just enough."
I felt like this was maybe reaching a bit. A more vicious critic might call the moment "too precious." I felt like Silver rode a careful line of not going overboard for most of the piece, but I felt like those two lines were a bit too much, perhaps. (But not so much that I wasn't able to enjoy the rest of the piece.)
The ending also didn't seem to provide quite enough of a resolution for me, but our non-American friends might remind me that it's a very American thing to want everything tied up at the end. Touche, I get it. But at the same time maybe it's not that I wanted all the end tied up with a bow on it, but that I wanted more clarity from the last paragraph in which Dorothy straightens up and walks into the clinic in Germany with Helen. Is Dorothy meant to be exuding that she's regained her confidence, or is she signaling one more time her emotional restraint in dealings with her daughter? Hmmm.
One favorite moment: I loved the story of Helen going to Dorothy's apartment--flying across the nation to get there--after Helen found out Nathan was cheating on her. I enjoyed the detail of Dorothy's mother insisting that they "Google 'Nathan's girl'" and then Dorothy's derisive comments about "the other woman." It lets us know, as readers, that there is a loving mom in there, even if she shows it by making fun of her daughter's boyfriend's other woman in an internet picture. It's a loving moment, I think. It's a small moment, a detail, that gives us useful information. (English teachers call this a "telling detail", right?)
What are my overall feelings about the story? I liked it enough. It was good. There were a few things that didn't work for me (those two lines and wondering what Dorothy was feeling at the very end), but I felt it was certainly worth reading.
What about the rest of you guys? What did you think?
Okay, I fully realize that I wrote too much. I had so much I wanted to say, but I didn't mean to write 1,070 words. Oops! Next time I promise to write far less. :)
I think this is an excellent story. I was especially struck by the tension of Helen finding herself caught between Nathan's traditional medical view and Dorothy's decision to try alternative medicine, and how that brought into focus Helen's various difficulties in both relationships.
I actually wasn't surprised by Dorothy's choice. To me, there's evidence that she always was a pragmatist (no sentimentality about her dead husband) balanced against an idealist (demonstrating in protests when she was younger). I think she's a realist who doesn't feel like conventional medicine is any less of a fairy tale than alternative medicine. I also think she has a strong will to live, as Helen discovers.
Neither of Helen's relationships is easy. I hesitate to call them emotionally charged battlefields, because I think Helen has her own problems with passion (for example, with her music). She's a bit dead herself, satisfied with a muted romantic relationship, muffled career, and a quiet relationship at any cost with her mother.
I also really liked the relationship Dorothy has with her doctor. I find him to be the "other kind" of doctor from Nathan. Nathan would be the doctor who would say, "Your body is failing you and needs..." as if he is treating something disconnected from the person. Whereas Dorothy's older doctor sees Dorothy as more than her disease and steps back, letting her decide what she wants to do.
I wasn't bothered by the travel descriptions. What they added to the story for me was that Helen was always stepping back, always seeing herself, or her with her mother, in the context of place. I was constantly reminded that Helen is no amateur at finding ways to distance herself from the people in her life (she even says this at one point).
I found this a very real mother/daughter relationship--angry and loving and forgiving and accusing and supportive and cruel and compassionate all at once.
Those are just some random thoughts off the top of my head.
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