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Essay by Rose Smith •

One of Marisa Silver’s goals as a fiction writer is to “change the angle of vision, both for the characters and the reader, just enough that some little aperture of awareness opens up to reveal a wider view of the world.” To that end, she says she always starts with the very, very specific. She’s not really compelled by “drama writ large, but rather the interstitial drama of behavior.” Her eighth book, At Last, may just be her best one yet. In it, Silver tells the story of Helene and Evelyn over the course of their entire lives, from their individual childhoods to the moment they are thrown together in midlife by their children’s wedding. When the women become grandmothers, an intensely competitive bond develops between Helene and Evelyn that finally, and begrudgingly, gives way to a kind of friendship. It’s a book about the ways in which we elide ourselves about our most demoralizing secrets, how we build a persona that keeps us defended, and about how the world will always undermine and break down those defenses. The novel has an episodic and fragmentary structure, gracefully unfolding a chronicle of two ordinary lives, filled with everyday longings and regrets, in prose that is filled with clear-eyed sympathy for these women, even as their inner lives provide a potent hum of unease for the reader.  

Marisa Silver was my supervisor during my MFA, and while studying stories we both love, she pointed out that many of them share an ethos. They are stories that veer off course: they swerve just slightly away from what is expected and offer us some new understanding, not only about the characters in the story, but about the complicated world. She laughed when I referred to “the swerve” as a technical craft term that she invented. “I don’t think I made it up, but that is how I think of it—a swerve. William Trevor is to me the great practitioner of this idea. He creates stories in which a character has a shred of new knowledge by the end that somehow reverberates for the reader. It has a ripple effect and suddenly a whole new set of ideas about life open up. I mean, I get a shiver just even thinking about it.”

When I finished At Last, I was struck, particularly, by a shift that occurs midway through the book in a chapter aptly called “Other People.” I’m interested in how Silver uses craft choices to bring about an unexpected “swerve” in the narrative. I’ll take a close look at how the writer’s decisions around perspective and word choice reveal the dawning of a deeper awareness, specifically in the character of Helene. She is a deeply defended woman with strong opinions and a carefully crafted persona, but throughout the narrative, a sequence of events unfold that eventually dismantle her protective shell. In the aftermath, she finds herself opened up to a growing sympathetic awareness of other people in the world.

At Last opens with Helene’s trip to buy flowers for her son’s wedding to Ruth. Narrated in close third, Silver makes good use of free indirect discourse so that we are privy to Helene’s perceptions, and suspicions:

“You have such good taste,” Ruth had said. This might have been a compliment or not. It was hard to tell with the girl, who always seemed to be saying one thing and meaning the very opposite. Whenever Tom brought her to the house, she wandered through the rooms, complimenting the decorative bowls on the coffee table or the silver vases on the dining room sideboard, but Helene knew the girl was judging her, one object at a time. 

Most of Helene’s perceptions, even the ones ostensibly about other people, are utterly self-reflective. She can only see Ruth’s actions as reflecting negatively on her; even a compliment is perceived by Helene as a judgment. Silver opts not to tag every thought and feeling belonging to Helene with a “she thought—,” or a “she felt—,” infusing the narrative with Helene’s limited worldview. As readers, we accept that the compliments are suspect,. But Silver does offer us some peripheral vision around Helene’s judgments with “but Helene knew.” She opens up the aperture, just slightly. She doesn’t call Helene’s judgments into question directly, but she does remind us that we are inside Helene’s mind, even though we’re still in third person. 

As the novel progresses, Silver employs a series of specific provocations that challenge Helene’s carefully constructed sense of self. One of the most potent occurs very soon after her husband dies, when Helene discovers a secret bundle of letters in his desk. These letters serve as a prompt to Helene to recall the truth about her marriage. For most of her adult life she presented herself as the submissive wife of a successful doctor, but the truth is more complicated: any wealth they enjoyed was entirely hers, from the inheritance she received from her mother; any gift she “received” from her husband was always bought and wrapped by Helene. Silver offers an especially poignant detail: for her birthday, she buys herself a cake with “Dear Mother and Wife” written on the icing, as though it were a present from her husband. “She had been so successful in inventing the stories that defined her life that she’d come to believe in them.”

By the time Helene is seventy, her protective shell is really starting to crack. She’s overwhelmed by loneliness and a lack of purpose. She’s having panic attacks at night. In an act of desperation, she signs up for a self-improvement class at the local library. Once she is in the class, Helene maintains her defensive posture, passing her customary judgment on the other members. Silver’s choice of perspective hues close to Helene’s point of view in the narration, again dipping into free indirect discourse: “That she has nothing in common with these people is as plain as their clothing.” Not only does she disdain their “wrinkled work clothes,” she disdains their sordid problems: an extramarital affair, a drug addicted son.

Helene continues to attend the class, more out of a fear of being alone, we suspect, than any desire for “self-improvement.” And yet she can’t help but get to know the idiosyncratic characters that comprise this make-shift community. The other members seem to have shown up with real vulnerability and authenticity. And Silver’s gift for specificity really shines here: we have the man who won two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the Ohio state lottery but can’t bring himself to spend even one bit of it. We have the teacher, embroiled in an affair with her principal, who “lost her job because ‘of love.’” The only thing Helene divulges about herself at the beginning of the class is that she was “recently widowed.” But Helene’s husband died fourteen years earlier. The narration dips into Helene’s point of view to provide us a window into her state of mind: “That was as much of her private life that anyone deserved to know.” Silver’s diction (“deserved”) conveys so much tone that every foray into free indirect is clearly marked by Helene’s prickly attitude. Earlier in the novel, Helene often seemed unaware of her dishonesty or reticence. Now, the author is letting us know that Helene is aware that she is withholding, and she is defensive about it. 

 As the other people in the class talk openly about what they desire from life, Helene’s discomfort grows: “Everyone is being humiliatingly honest. Their willingness, their eagerness to expose their emotions, even their most private ones, feels threatening.” Silver’s choices around diction convey all that we need to know about how Helene feels about honesty. “Humiliatingly” and “threatening” are potent words. For Helene, to be honest is to be humiliated; to be vulnerable is threatening. 

Through an accumulation of moments like these, each exerting its own kind of pressure on Helene’s carefully maintained persona, Silver has led us to the point where the narrative is primed for the swerve. On the last evening of the self-improvement course, “Nothing has changed for her. She’s still afraid of her lighted house and her dark house. She still can’t breathe at night. She still doesn’t know what to do with her time so that she feels like she’s alive.” Helene is ready for a change, but her passive attendance in the course did not bring that change about. And so, as everyone is leaving the library, she impulsively invites Neil, a fellow member of the class, and his son, Eddie, to the symphony. At the concert, she surprises us by admitting to Neil, out loud, that she doesn’t know anything about Bach at all: 

“I don’t know why I said that I did,” she says. 

“It was Ms. Flamenco. She could scare a bat out of hell. But we all survived.” 

She’s relieved to have admitted her lie, and she feels something else too. They’ve been through an experience together, she and Neil and the others.

Silver’s word choice here is another provocation for Helene: Neil tells her, “We all survived,” drawing her inside the group, making the threat of vulnerability and thus humiliation one that she did not face alone. This sense of belonging carries Helene right into a remarkable shift in awareness:

Eddie becomes restless and he starts to make small, unhappy sounds. As Neil tries to quiet him, the man on Helene’s right looks over to see what the problem is…. At first, she’s embarrassed by Eddie’s disruption, and the man’s growing impatience and disapproval. But when Eddie makes another noise, and the man glares at Neil, she becomes angry. No, she’s enraged! How dare this man insinuate that Neil and Eddie should not be here? 

Like most of this narrative, the drama does not take place in the action, but rather in the interiority of the character. It is Helene’s perspective that is at stake here. Helene does not say anything out loud, but she does have a revelation: “If she could speak, she’d tell this man that people are people…. Look at them! she’d say to the man. Look at all these people! Look at all these lives!” It’s a surprising turn in the story. And I think it is a clear moment when the narrative veers into unexpected territory. A small aperture of awareness is opened up and Helene is seeing the world outside her own distorting mind for the first time. 

Up until this point, Silver’s use of point of view ensures that everything Helene notices is only perceived insofar as it reflects her own thoughts and feelings. Suddenly, with this swerve, she is violently aware of “other people.” And she is stunned that they all have lives. It’s an emotional moment for the reader, to see this woman, with whom we have spent so much time, become unstuck, to be compassionate, to be suddenly offered a new and larger way to perceive her reality. Silver draws the subtextual concerns of the novel to the surface and allows them to act on the characters, and on us, in a way that widens out our perspective, gives us a chance to contemplate not just the everyday dramas of Helene and all the others, but human nature in general. For just a moment, our world gets a little larger, a little more open, a little more honest. 

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Rose Smith: I would love to hear a little bit about how this book came to you. Did it start with one or the other of the ladies? Or was there some other spark?

Marisa Silver: When I was young, about four years old, my sister and I were sitting in the back of our grandmother’s car. Our parents were out of town and she’d kept us for a few days. Now she was taking us to our other grandmother’s to stay until our parents came home. Before she put the car in gear, she turned around, looked at us, and said, “You love me more than you love your other grandmother, don’t you?”

This moment has stuck with me ever since. What would compel a person to say such a thing? Where does that need for validation come from? What are the deeper implications of that statement? I began to write about two women—not my grandmothers but invented characters—who shared a grandchild and for whom that sense of competition is a prevailing dynamic. And then I just began to explore these women’s lives to find out why.

As I began to hear them and know them, I was interested in the way in which their perceptions of themselves were at odds with their behavior. I often think that we hold certain things about ourselves to be true, and often this is belied by the way we behave. There’s a lot of potential for drama in that differential.

Something that also began to be clear to me, as I put together the novel, was that I wanted to encompass the entire lifetimes of these women. And yet the novel wasn’t going to be, you know, 10,000 pages long, so I thought, how do I do this? 

 

RS: Well, you jumped right into one of the first things I wanted to talk about with this new book. It is such a beautiful example of what I’ve heard you call the Whole Life Narrative, and structurally, we also have fragmented storytelling. We have time shifts and POV shifts. 

The episodic nature of the novel means that there are jumps in time between chapters, so that the scenes depicted become the explicit story and the gaps in time become the implicit story. As you worked, especially in revision, on this book, what was in your mind for the shape or structure you wanted to build?

MS: I began to conceive of it this way: you’re looking through a photograph album and certain photographs tell you particular stories of particular moments in time. I had this image of someone pointing to a particular photo and saying, “Oh, that was the time when…”

I think that the challenge of working in that fragmentary way is also what’s exciting about it and this has to do with how to make what is unsaid, or unwritten, become part of the narrative. A reader gets to imagine into those gaps to some degree. So one of my goals was to create this fragmented narrative while offering the reader enough emotional and practical information that they can sense how a character or a relationship has changed without reading explicitly about that change. I paid a lot of attention to how to tell a story without telling it. If a reader needed to know how a character got from point A to point B, I would try to find a way to sew that information into a later story, so that the reader could then reflect back and fill in that gap.

As a reader, I like the engagement of working to create the story along with the author. That’s an exciting way of reading for me. So for me, the structure of the novel spoke to my own interests as a reader.

 

RS: I was delighted also as a reader to see how you wove together these episodes. There was such wonderful time management and rate of revelation over multiple chapters.

What is the process like for you when you set out to start—and finish—a novel? How much are you thinking about craft choices? Are they really only pertinent later during your revision process? And how do you balance your unconscious impulses with your focus on craft? That’s a magic trick I’m looking for the answer to, by the way!

MS: I’ve been thinking about how to make stories and novels for such a long time. And I’ve thought a lot about different kinds of craft choices, and how they can affect narrative for so many years, that I think that I mostly write intuitively at this point. If something’s not working, I might look at it and ask myself if there are ways that I can manage storytelling strategies to make this work better. Is the tense that I’ve chosen not helping me? Is the point of view or the way I’m structuring this section a problem? But I think that writing is mostly in my muscles. Not that my unconscious choices are foolproof, but I think the process starts with intuition. 

What I strive for in my work is to have a balance between a sense of form and a sense of messiness. Because life is wayward, right? I don’t want my work to feel so put together that what’s on the page doesn’t feel like life. I try to work in a way that the prose doesn’t feel like it’s controlled by “the writer” and that it flows through character and situation.  

 

RS: I think one of the most important things I learned from you is how joyful it can be to cast off the pressure to create a narrative that is all cause and effect, linear storytelling. I agree that stories like that can feel a little airless and canned.

MS: Yeah, because we live in this very psychologically oriented age and we have this knee jerk idea that “she does this because that happened to her.” But I think if you look at the way people behave, it’s just not that reductive. And it’s just not that analyzable. And you know as much as we sit in a therapist’s office, and try to help ourselves through that process, I don’t know that this strategy is useful for fiction, because it doesn’t seem to capture the rawness, the kind of sandpaperiness of being alive.

 

RS: Yes! Yes! You said something earlier that really resonated with me because it’s so much a driver for my own work. Often I write to understand the things that are the most baffling to me. You were describing that memory of your grandmother in the car, asking you and your sister if you love her the most. I think those moments stand out because they’re part of this messy stuff of life that’s so unruly and so chaotic and so happenstance. Yet they stick because they’re baffling.

MS: Yeah. Bafflement is a great idea. So everything I write, every book I’ve ever written, has started with something that baffles me. But what I don’t do is try to clear it up. I don’t try to answer questions. Most of all, I don’t try to suggest meaning. I just explore the bafflement.

 

RS: I think you expand on it. You let it expand to the point where we almost reach a kind of levitation. And we can see a pattern from our aerial view, one that doesn’t explain anything, but does, for me, feel satisfying.

MS: Well, good. I’m glad. Yeah, I think the tricky thing for me is to both deliver a sense of wholeness to the narrative and yet not feel like I have to answer every question. In the context of fiction, answers flatten things out. They bring possibility to a close. The perpetual question of why people do what they do is what I write about and I honestly have no answers. I just have more questions.

 

RS: Ah ha! I pulled some quotes from the book about this! These lines are from the last chapter, and I feel like they capture the ethos of your storytelling:

“The neat arithmetic of cause and effect doesn’t make me any more legible to myself.”
“There’s nothing to get, it was just a thing that happened.”  
“Maybe it doesn’t matter what it means,” I say. “Maybe it only matters that she wanted to tell us about it.”  

MS: Yeah, I think maybe I just wrote my own artist statement in that dialogue.

 

RS: I’m reading on, I’m turning the pages, not for some causal arc, but more for this inner sense, like I was talking about, of revelation. This work is way more controlled and organized and shaped than some kind of slice of life narrative, right? But it seems like magic, honestly, because I can feel that it’s a shape that has been built by an author, and yet the unruliness and the bafflement remain. I mean, that’s exciting.

MS: Thank you. When I read a novel or short story that I love, and I have that exciting feeling at the end, it isn’t because something was answered. It’s because something was opened up for me: a way of seeing the world, of thinking about human nature, of opening up the aperture. 

We’ve talked about this before, many times, about trying to get some little aperture of awareness to open up, some slightly wider view. That is what I try to deliver. I try to change the angle of vision both for the characters and the reader just enough that someone feels like they’re seeing more of the world. It hasn’t been reduced. It’s been expanded. My goal is to simply have a reader and a character honestly stand before a certain newness in their awareness or thinking or feeling state. Because it’s exciting when it happens in your life. The world becomes more and more mysterious.

 

RS: How aware are you of craft when you are reading something that you find inspiring?

MS: One hundred percent. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. I find it hard to read and not be thinking a lot about how the thing is put together, and how it’s working. I think it’s a little bit of an occupational hazard. Honestly, you know I would love to be in the place that I was when I was sixteen years old, and reading a book, and having no idea about any of those things, and just being bathed in it. But I don’t know if that’s possible for me anymore.

 

RS: Is it largely because you’re teaching, or do you think you would have that awareness, anyway? Just as a writer.

MS: I think it’s just as a writer, because I’m always curious, if something’s really working for me, I want to know: What is the language doing that’s making this work? How is this structured? That’s so thrilling.

One of the things I love is looking at art, or dance. I love trying to find the analogies between different mediums and thinking about what I can learn from art forms that I don’t know anything about but that are powerful to me. The other thing I really love about exposure to the other arts is that I’m able to just stand before them and receive them and not analyze them in the same way I do literature. I guess this goes back to the whole question of meaning—when I write I’m not trying to make meaning, and I’m not trying to explain things to people. I kind of want people just to be present. And feel what they feel. I think that when somebody says, “what does it mean?” I’m happy to say I don’t know. Any answer I could give would close down an experience that should be open on all sides, if you know what I mean. I don’t know that it’s my role as the writer to know what the things I make mean, or what they might mean to someone else.  

I have a lot of those experiences of just being present and having something happen to me when I’m looking at a certain artwork, or when I’m listening to a chamber piece being played, or when I’m watching a ballet or modern dance where I have no language for how it’s put together. I just allow myself to be present, and that’s kind of the ideal state for me. I mean, just let it happen to you. Let yourself feel instead of trying to analyze it and understand it, and define it. So in as much as I can, I try to be a writer that does that. It goes back to your very first question about how to balance the intuitive and the analytical. It’s really trying to just be present in front of what it is that’s coming out of me.

 

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MARISA SILVER is the author of the novels The Mysteries; Little Nothing; Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone with You, was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She lives in Los Angeles. At Last is her most recent novel. 

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ROSE SMITH’s stories can be found in The Missouri Review, Five Points, and The Swannanoa Review. She was the winner of The Missouri Review’s 27th Annual Editors’ Prize and was named a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2018 Story Contest. As a film producer her work has aired on PBS and Sundance Channel among others, and has screened at various festivals, including Sundance, SXSW, and MoMA Documentary Fortnight. She received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and now teaches workshops and classes at Austin Bat Cave, an independent creative writing center. Rose lives in Austin, Texas. Find her on Instagram @rosesmithwrites.