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by Kathy Crowley
A few evenings ago, I finished reading Anne Enright’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering – a brutal, beautiful story built around a suicide, a wake, a large Irish family and a narrator who is angry and honest to the point of discomfort. It left me breathless — not in a euphoric way, but instead in that sense of needing to breathe and not, somehow, being able to do so. Although I am happy to report my breathing resumed, I still found myself inarticulate about the book and did what any person with a laptop and wifi does: I googled and read what other (more articulate) people thought.
Which brings me to Mighty Dog.
Once upon a time I was in a writer’s workshop with a young woman named we’ll call Lisa. In addition to the novel which was her major project at the time, Lisa had a lot going on — a day job, a mother who wanted her to hurry up and get married, an ability to keep the rest of us laughing, and a short story named “Mighty Dog”. This was more than a decade ago, so many details are lost, but I do remember the closing scene of this story. The protagonist — a wife whose husband is leaving her for another woman — looms over the couple’s tiny emaciated dog. In tears, alone in her kitchen, she opens can after can of Mighty Dog, scooping and slopping the contents into the dog’s bowl. “Eat!” she screams at the dog. “Eat!”
Great scene, right? You haven’t even read the rest of the story and I’ve already got you. Not surprisingly, everyone in the workshop loved it. Also not surprisingly, the story had flaws, and everyone had ideas about how to tweak this or fix that. It is telling that I remember none of the flaws, just the power of the story and especially of that closing scene.
So Lisa worked on it. She brought it back, and it was still good, but not quite right. She revised again. And again. But by the last time I read it, I could feel the power of it waning. Everyone could feel it, including Lisa, though none of us could put a finger on how or why. Somehow all these minor fixes had resulted in the narrative equivalent of a slow leak, and we could hear the coming rumble of a flat.
At some point, Lisa’s boyfriend (now husband, I think) whisked her away from us, first to Connecticut, then to Ohio (or someplace like that). The spirit of “Mighty Dog” remained, though. We all felt complicit in the damage done to this innocent story, and eventually, “Mighty Dog” became our workshop’s shorthand for killing the spirit of a story. “I think I mighty-dogged it,” someone might say, or “I’m just afraid of mighty-dogging it.”
Back to The Gathering. You may wonder how this angry, exuberant novel of suicide, sex, family and alcohol brought “Mighty Dog” to mind. I read several reviews. For all the praise, there was also plenty of criticism, some of which was harsh. For example:
“Enright is justly celebrated for her distinctive eloquence, her elan and originality – but this eloquence can sometimes take on an edge of exorbitance, an excessive eccentricity. She can get carried away. The Gathering has moments of swagger or splurge.”
“It’s not so much the story that’s the problem as its concentrated Irishness, a state of being that surely doesn’t need more examination.”
“The pattern of overwrought descriptions, especially sexual ones that announce themselves as literary artifacts rather than contribute to the characters, becomes wearisome. At times, I’d enough of the gonads and longed for someone to hold a hairbrush or a doorknob.”
And so on.
And, to be honest, I agreed with many of the comments I read. Yes — a surfeit of penises, “meaty flowers” of female genitalia, the exasperating wilds of the Irish family — drink, drank, drunk.
Here’s where the Irish wake and the dog food come together for me. How much does the power of the story depend on these “flaws”? For example, in a novel where at least one sibling (and also possibly the narrator) has been “interfered with” by a family friend, and where this “interference” might be at the root of the suicide which starts the story, perhaps the narrator’s acute awareness of penises and her angry remove from her own sexuality is not a flaw. And perhaps the sense of there being “too much” also reflects the narrative crawling under our skin, as one reviewer put it, and readies us for the emotional and intellectual pay-off down the road. This is hardly to say that all flaws are equal or that revision is not usually to the good, but only that it must be done very carefully. Because sometimes what may seem wrong in a particular sentence or paragraph may be vital to the story as a whole.
One last note about “Mighty Dog”. Lisa and I reconnected a year or so ago (via Facebook, of course). I asked about the story and she told me that, after not looking at it for some time, she was able to revise and enter it in a contest, where it was selected and published with other winners. “I finally got it to where I liked it. Of course after listening to all the changes I had to put it in a drawer for 5 years and listen to my own voice.”
To which I say, Yes! Eat, Mighty Dog. Eat.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Kathy Crowley’s short stories have appeared in Ontario Review, Fish Stories, The Literary Review, New Millenium Writings and The Marlboro Review. Her stories have been short-listed for Best American Short Stories, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized. In 2006 she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. She is currently finishing revisions to her first novel, ON LOCUST STREET, so that she can send it out to wildly enthusiastic editors in 2010. When she’s not busy preparing for her future literary fame and fortune, she provides care and feeding to her three children and works as a physician at Boston Medical Center. She is a graduate of Brown University and Tufts University School of Medicine.
This post originally appeared on Beyond the Margins...
