Girls with Insurance

Hemingway said a short story should be like the tip of an iceberg, with the great expanse and weight below only felt or hinted at, but still filling the story with significance and holding it up, thrusting it up. When Bukowski writes about sitting at a table at a café, watching a girl in a green dress walk by, he says it feels good “After all the rest”, meaning when the struggle and cold and hunger and ugliness have relented. The battle one has passed through makes the café, the table, the girl, the green dress so much more, their value and beauty are brought into relief, into contrast. But so many writers only want to step from their mother’s doorway to that café table. After they complain to the waitress that the table has not been cleaned properly, they order a to-be-nursed wine or a microbeer and then sit and soak in the preordained admiration. They finger their hair to make sure it is falling just right over their forehead, always ready for that spontaneous flip phone photo. They sit scribbling words that are nothing but fuzzy ducklings quacking away and swimming in circles: tiny rippled “V”s that barely tickle the water and disappear in an internet-minute. There is no weight below them, behind them or within them. They are light as air! They are supremely insouciant! There is no iceberg, only a tip that breaks off like a feather point. If there is anger in their words, it is a petty anger, a put-on anger, a child’s anger. And if there is peace in their words it has not been earned, it is a dull, meaningless peace because it is all they have ever known. Not to blame them, it is not their fault, but it makes for dull writing and they don’t seem to know why. They don’t know who they are: they are sunbathers. At most they play with their words like a shell game. You can feel the lack of depth, emotion and force in every sentence. And of course, you can feel the trickery. A solitary man fishing in a river will make your heart swell if he has just come home from war, but what if he has just come from a picnic with his pretty, sensible, well-educated girlfriend? Many modern writers are very nice people, but they are too warm and comfortable, and they know nothing of icebergs.

Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2010, 128pp/$15).