Big Time Sensuality
Sometimes I read the advice column Dear Prudence and see someone have an existential crisis about how to end a friendly, yet emotionally distant conversation with an acquaintance and I wonder if years of middlebrow novels in which a character quietly dies inside because someone says "Not now, Lois" as they are going through a deep depression got so many of us to this point.
I like big emotions in fiction, something that I used to be embarrassed by, something I am still self conscious about. Somewhere along the way, I internalized the message that big, deep emotion was for melodrama and melodrama was for dummies. That emotional intelligence was measured by how deeply you were affected by the placement of a supper dish on a table.
I was very lucky to go to a high school that still taught Close Reading. I don’t think this method is currently in style with whatever monsters write high school textbooks at the moment, but I am thankful to have gotten my education when it was fashionable. I remember a whole English class when all we talked about for fifty five minutes was the hair ribbon placement in James Joyce’s “Araby”. Small, delicate emotions meant big brains and small, delicate bodies and paleness and just general sensitivity. The most touching stories contained emotions that no one ever voiced out loud, usually around a tragic misunderstanding when no one was really mad at each other to begin with.
But my heart wanted big things. My heart wanted fights. My heart wanted ghosts and banshees and blood. My heart wanted all the things that I was learning were childish in fiction. This caused me to doubt what my heart wanted for a long time, to assume I was the dumbest in the room. It is only recently that I have realized that all of that sensibility could just be…wrong.
Right now, I am trying not to go on Twitter at night so I’m re-reading Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children. I wish I had read nothing but this book for the past 15 years. I would be a better writer, for sure. In a story like Old Boys, Old Girls characters misdirect information and key pieces of a life are left off the page but those omissions matter because the stakes of the story—the life of a man in prison for five years and his life after; his attempt to reconnect with his family and his sighting of a lost love who no longer recognizes him—are so much greater.
This has nothing to do with what I was saying above but Jones has an amazing line in this story. A character says, “You can always trust unhappiness...His face never changes. But happiness is slick, can't be trusted. It has a thousand faces...all. of them just ready to. re-form into unhappiness once it has you in its clutches."