George, I feel for you taking care of an old dog. We're doing that here, too. And, apropos of the opening of this post, Ilya Kaminsky tweeted this morning:
"Me, writing to an older friend in Odessa: how can I help, please let me know I really want help
He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.
It was very heartening, especially since Ilya Kaminsky got attacked idiotically on Twitter this week for a thoughtful anti-war poem he wrote a decade ago. It was good to see him share this.
I left a link to the poem above (somewhere). Hard to navigate this forest. You can't see the trees for the other trees. Yes, the twitter thing was idiotic, but I never got to the bottom of where it started.
i'm struck by the absence of Nora in both this story and your analysis, g. Nora is the first member of the family to definitively reject Arnold by refusing to hand him the milk, and placing her hands in her lap. another gun shot. in doing so, she splits the family.
remember, both parents are making tentative bids to Arnold but, by her action, Nora secures a position for herself as the "good child" and for Arnold as "the bad child". it's over.
In an earlier thread, https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-3/comments?s=r#comment-5243548 Paul, Gini and I were also talking about the role of Nora. It's interesting that Berriault chose to make the middle child a girl. Why was this choice made? We circled around this thought - If the middle child had been a boy, then perhaps the death of the eldest boy, the almost-man, would not have been felt so keenly within this family? So perhaps Nora ramps up the crushing pressure on Arnold as the only other son / next-in-line male, a role that he is utterly incapable of meeting, given his age.
Nora is just a kid. Kids see things in black and white unless they are abnormally emotionally gifted. It's not that her actions aren't hurtful to Arnold. But we adult readers should forgive her even if he can't. She's no more ready to process this than he is.
In grief, since it is such a strange land for them, kids mirror the adults. I saw Nora as trying on what she saw as her parents'/communities' response to Arnold. And I thought it was really subtle on the writer's part, that little action, shocking the father so that he changed course. It was a hopeful moment in an unrelenting story.
This makes much sense. Nora is a child too of course. We don't know as much about her relationship to Arnold (the way we do about the connection between the two brothers), but it's reasonable to assume she's observing the wider social response to the accident. Great stuff here!
I thought more of Nora's rejection of Arnold than Andy's. We don't know much about her either, but that's his sister that he has to live with for the next little while, who treats him with disdain.
Yes, and come to think of it, she's the one person in the family who shows no sign of moving toward Arnold...
One of the interesting things about this story is the way that we begin looking to other people in Arnold's circle to see what we should be thinking of him. And, as you and Rea are pointing out, when we look to Nora, we don't see someone pre-inclined to think well of Arnold.
I thought when the father handed Arnold the pitcher when Nora wouldn't, that this was a moment when the father was showing Nora the right way to behave: a moment of thaw, in this painful to and fro of who is capable of reaching out when ... which seems such a piercingly deft way of capturing how even when we might share an experience like grief, we aren't always at the same point of being able to articulate it... Thank you for this post, George: I read the story to my 12 year old last night and it was a fantastic one to talk over with him. I'll be reading your commentary to him too - he was shocked by Arnold, then confused, but we talked about how that last line was potentially hopeful and self-reflective....
Yes, these small acts of reaching out by both parents are reasons to hope that the family can reconcile after they have time to grieve a devastating tragedy. (Nora, yes, but a kid, showing sibling rivalry, besides grief, and not mature enough to understand how deeply hurtful her action is.) If the family can't reconcile it will probably hurt Arnold the most, but it will hurt all of them. I didn't see them as a cold lonely family to begin the story, but if they can't, ultimately, reconcile and comfort each other, they will end up so.
PS. I feel for George and the others. I am also caring for an old, increasingly frail, loved dog.
Thank you. We all feel deeply for Ukraine and its brave leaders. But I've long admired beautiful New Zealand and its leadership headed by a strong young woman.
But wait. We get a sense for the mother and Nora's unease/concern before they parents go to find Eugene's body. "'Where's Eugene?" his mother asked scoldingly. She wanted, Arnold knew, to see his eyes …" This raised the question for me as to whether or not Arnold might have had a pattern of behaving coldly that his mother, as the person who likely knew him best, could see in Arnold's eyes. Continuing: "…and when he glanced at her she put the bowl and spoon down on the stove and walked past him. …Nora followed them with little skipping steps, as if afraid to be left behind." Why was Nora afraid, especially if this accident were completely out of the blue? Was Nora afraid of being alone with Arnold in particular? Was that typical or was it a shock-induced reaction? It seems that Berriault plants these questions in her readers, at least readers like me, a mother in a man's world who can see the possibilities, both good and bad, in our own children. If only our world was more populated with more men like George Saunders and fewer men like Andy, the sheriff, and Vladimir Putin.
I read that as the mother would know, upon seeing Arnold's eyes, "the truth," like my mom seemed to when I was a kid. She just look at me and somehow know what I was up to, or so it seemed. I did not read it as anything more than a mother who knows that her son can get up to mischief, "as boys are wont to do" but no in a sinister way, although now....
It's Nora's "little skipping steps" that I think say so much. She senses Arnold is in trouble and perhaps, as a rival sibling, wants to pile on, but she is not yet aware of just how serious it is. She's not much older than Arnold, if I am reading it right? Perhaps not wanting to pass the milk is as much about her own shame as rejecting Arnold, but perhaps that is a stretch.
In any case, the function that Nora fulfill is powerful, for me. And, I dare say, necessary, as perhaps the anchor of to Arnold's rejection.
I totally missed Nora's "little skipping steps"...thank you, Chris...and now I see her behavior as whistling past the graveyard...her needing to distance herself from the dark and widening hole that Arnold is in.
I agree. I wondered if in this family (and at this time) the boys got the attention and with this shift in family dynamics, Nora sees an opportunity to 'get ahead' of Arnold. Boys tease their sisters (in my experience) and sisters find ways to 'get back' at the boys. I believe she understood that Arnold was out of favour, but not the harm that she was doing him through her refusal to pass the milk.
Yes, I found myself wondering what the relationship between Nora and Arnold had been before the shooting. Had he shown signs of coldness or cruelty towards her or other family members? Is she justified—at least in her mind—to shun him, now that this unthinkable tragedy has occurred? Does Nora have reason to suspect Arnold may have done it intentionally? The sheriff didn't live with Arnold, so it was easier for me to believe his judgment to be rash and unqualified, but Nora has been growing up with Arnold—they have a daily relationship. Her reaction feels extremely important to the story.
Her character does a good job of highlighting the places where the parents do and do not act by intention in the family dynamics, but I did not previously pay enough attention to her. Now, I recognize how much can be accomplished with each minor character saying more through our choices of their involvements (strong inclinations, function-fulfillment) than we want to lay down in wordy excess. I keep coming back to the careful craftsmanship of this story and am dually inspired and intimidated.
Yes, good. I wondered about Nora, too, Rea. In fact, at one point, I wondered why Berriault even wrote her in. Her role is small, and she doesn't have too much interaction with Arnold, though the one scene in which she doesn't pass him the milk is powerful. Your analysis makes much sense and sheds light on her literary purpose.
Excellent observation, Rea. I was thinking about Nora as well. How little she is in the story but how strongly that moment impacted me as a reader. I felt too that she was sealing Arnold's fate while selfishly securing her own. It stung deeply and yet as piece of writing technique I found it exquisite.
I didn't find what Nora did selfish. Some families are all about survival, and I'm pretty sure she was in survival mode at that moment--she was still in shock and full of grief. Adults hardly know how to respond to tragedy. She really had no tools to do so on her own.
It is all but impossible right now to do much but worry; thank you for the gift of acknowledging this, and thank you for the gift of showing us how to forge over to thinking that is filled with heart, empathy, and meaning. If only everyone probed their hearts this way - but I would like to think many people are doing so already, and even more so now.
Years ago I was in a car accident; the driver took a curve too fast and she just missed a telephone pole. I got out of the car and kept walking up and down the country road, looking for my $1.00 sunglasses. I do think he was in shock and that was also why it took him so long to pick the peas.
Thank your for this perspective. I interpreted his response also as a form of confusion--but i think the basis of his confusion was the fact that he was in shock over the accident. I know that there have been times in my life when I have responded inappropriately due to a kind of short-circuiting of my emotional wiring. For instance, there have been times when I have felt my lips move into a smiling position, when I have meant to cry. I used to find this very disturbing when it happened because my face/actions said the opposite of what I was feeling. Or, at times, i wasn't sure how to feel. Not to bang on here incessantly, but I know also that I am the type who freezes in bad situations when action is called for. Our emotions! We can be so messed up when we don't want to be! So confused. And I think that is Arnold, who may be on the spectrum himself. Identifying how we feel can be a field of landmines sometimes. I get Arnold, I think.
I remember when my beloved grandmother died, I had no idea how to feel. I felt like a robot, cut off and stony. (Maybe this is another level of meaning in The Stone Boy.) At her funeral, I felt encased in this numbness. I was about 12/13/14. It was alarming to me that I was so closed off. Part of the numbness was that my parents took up so much of the emotional airspace with their own problems. I think this is true of Arnold as well. He was frightened of how closed off he was when his mother asked how he was. As an adult with a lot more life experience and lots of therapy, I am quite emotional. It's so wonderful to feel internally alive and responsive to myself and the world around me.
I don't know that we have enough information to conclude that he is 'on the spectrum'. But we do have enough to conclude that he has been struck an overwhelming psychic blow - one that would be unsettling for almost anyone.
I read it not as autism, but as deep shock, nurtured by a community of people who do not show feelings or know them in themselves, even as they question him on that very point (one of the delicious ironies in the story). My mother died when I was 15. It was the major loss of my life, since my father had abandoned our family during her illness and all the love I knew was from her. I am still recovering from the shock of losing someone I had a primary attachment to. Guilt, sadness, loss, they all stayed way down there like lava in a volcano gone inactive. Did I hasten my mother's death, did I collaborate with the cancer in killing her, whenever I got into trouble and caused her greater heartache? I was that kind of kid who got into trouble, a screw-up and ne'er-do-well. I kidded around the day of the funeral and a few friends let me have it, saying I didn't care about my own mother's death. It took decades of therapy for me, group, classic analysis, you name it, and the ongoing self-therapy. I still carry her in my heart and think of her every day. Also, stories are on a spectrum, somewhere between a clear lesson we can easily summarize, and a faint smoke that goes to the heart of the human condition and does not give us any easy answers, a mist rising from the text that never comes clear. I think The Stone Boy and many Berriault stories live on the misty side of the spectrum, along with Alyosha the Pot and many others from writers willing to risk not knowing.
I wondered if Arnold might be on the spectrum. I got the sense that he was considered strange even before the accident, and then the accident allows people to believe the worst of what they had wondered about him.
I am still not sure what to make of Arnold's thoughts about his brother's hips/buttocks.
Hard to tell if the thoughts about Eugie's body are the narrator's or Arnold's. I think it's the narrator commenting on the fact that Eugie has the body of a young man, while Arnold is still a child.
Mary, thanks for that. I keep forgetting to remember the POV. I suspect there's something there around the metaphor of nakedness but can't grasp it yet. I think it's meant to be restrained and perhaps slightly uncomfortable for us to consider, but I don't see it as sexual unless symbolic of childhood/adulthood. Your take works for me.
I think nakedness increases physicality, sensuality, and vulnerability in stories, particularly among two brothers or two people of the same sex. I recall in Hemingway's IN OUR TIME, in the story, "Big Two-hearted River," I believe, where two men are hunting and sitting around the campfire. Nick hands his friend a log (or vice versa?) and there is a pause, it almost seems sensual. Almost, but not quite registering in the conscious mind--on the surface an ordinary moment. There is no male-male sexuality being suggested, just an author willing to go to a place, a physical description that steps out of bounds, out of the ordinary, middle-class, safe images we often see in that kind of scene. It gives an undercurrent of transgressive feeling. I think that's what happens in the "Stone Boy" scene also. You won't see that looking for theme only. I look for the feeling, associative elements in scenes also, and you can find a lot there.
This is an interesting angle, Ron. I'll consider this with greater awareness going forward, what I'm feeling while reading as able to be fully separate from what I'm thinking or analyzing. Thank you for that. Because of the later scene with his mother, where he becomes aware of his own nakedness, I am leaning on that biblical usage of implied meaning, but you're right to remind me: I did feel a fascinating mix of things in that bedroom moment and I remember trying to move away from them too quickly. Potent.
Yes, there was a brotherly sensuality in that scene! We have to be aware of the difference between sensuality and sexuality. And if we avoid sensuality for fear of interpretation as sexuality, we lose some of our power as writers.
I took this as, the family/parents glory in (fetishize?) Eugie as their big hope for the future, and the hips comment indicates a hint of erotic feeling in that enthusiasm for Eugie. Not in an incestuous way, but maybe sometimes Eugie's awesomeness causes the parents to get hot for each other, and since Arnie lives in close quarters with that energy, he senses the erotic element is there.
Maybe it's hard for Arnie to differentiate between others' feelings and his own. That heightens the stakes about what the sheriff, family, and town think of Arnie - because he doesn't yet have the capacity to form his own feelings about himself.
He only knows what he's worth from details like getting the gun "no one else was using." He picked peas before telling about the death, but that's just a reflection of the parents' priorities; they asked about peas before asking about Eugie.
The mother's uncombed hair was a detail that made me wonder if we're seeing autism spectrum in her, in multiple generations, and all the parlor storytelling about Eugie's verbal awesomeness made me wonder if Eugie was neurotypical, and that could be a piece of why the parents revered and hoped in him.
I wondered the same and posted my thoughts on why I came to that conclusion. I'm with you on Arnold's thoughts about his brother's hips/buttocks – I can't work that out either.
That was also my interpretation on first reading. (On the spectrum.) I have been puzzled when people used the word 'sociopath'...that's not the same thing, is it, as being abnormal in ways of seeing and processing the world? (I'm not sure of the definition of sociopath?)
That sentence about the mountains making the sun climb high...and other small indications that Arnold's ideas of motivation/ cause and effect are unusual. And then the sheriff's use of 'reasonable '. Doesn't that really mean 'rational '? Over rational? Thinking through a particular established logic without taking account of changing circumstances?
Yeah, in my notes after reading the story the first time, I wondered if part of Arnold's confused and confusing response could have been partly a result of his being neuroatypical. But then the accidental killing of his brother is not something where I feel like I can say what the "normal" reaction should be. The sheriff and Uncle Andy think they do know, but of course they don't either.
I think literature also helps us face our own prejudices, not head on, kind of from around the corner, in a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down kind of way. When I first heard about A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I didn’t want to read it, because the stories were Russian and I didn’t like Russians. I have no excuse for this, I could blame society or the media but I don’t even really know what that means. In any case, my prejudice is egregious on multiple levels. First, because I’m Muslim and I know what immediate distrust feels like on account of that. Second, I’m a plaintiff’s employment lawyer—all day long I write mediation briefs championing people who’ve been fired from their jobs because of their race, gender, religion, nationality, and other protected reasons.
But there it was, when I realized why I was resisting reading A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, my prejudice sort of slapped me in the face. I don’t think I’ve ever acted on it but then again I’m sure I probably have. In any case, the book was by George Saunders and I remember loving that Escape From Spiderhead story so I said to myself, don’t be racist, Shaiza, read the book. And immediately, I was taken in. Marya lives within me now, just like Lily Bart and Lizzie Bennett and that sweetheart murderer from Escape From Spiderhead. Yet even while reading Master And Man I felt upset and annoyed in the middle, thinking ugh, this guy is going to die and his servant too and probably the poor horse because it’s a Russian story and so that must be what happens, how depressing. So the ending felt like a goddamn miracle, honestly. First, because Tolstoy managed this impossible seeming feat in such a natural seeming way. And second, because I saw my dad in Vasily, including what he did at the end. So how can I not like Russians when a Russian opened my eyes to that?
Anyway, after A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I tore through a bunch of Chekhov stories and it felt like no one needed to write anything again ever because Chekhov seemed to have lived every life, and expressed the essence of all of them. It was very enlightening, to say the least. So now, now that the crisis in Ukraine is back in the news in an even more terrible way than before (I’m remembering 2014), my reaction is not ugh these asshole Russians are at it again, it’s hang on, maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, like before. Speaking of which, I found this 2015 lecture from Professor John J Mearsheimer at the University Of Chicago super prescient and really helpful in trying to digest everything that’s happening right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
All that to say, as a person who is not always gentle, or inclined to care, literature has helped me be more like that.
I especially liked your comment because it shows we can grow and move beyond our past, especially with literature's assistance. I have always been thankful for literature as it shows me a deeper view of life and helps me understand so much more than I otherwise would have.
It may sound silly, but I picture our stone boy going to the library and reading about children; their lives and their problems. This and other encounters with a neighbor or a dog or a kind and understanding employer help him bit by bit sort out his sadness. I picture his family coming around to realize this kid was the same kid they had before his brother's death and while they are late in realizing his need for help and while much damage was done, they do try to overcome their mistakes. Their lives are not static. Thank you for your comment.
I just read this comment again. Now it’s mar 21. Thank you Shazam for your thoughtful comments here. I plan to watch this lecture to learn about Ukraine.
I can't agree. It's a tragically sad story...but the author( born in 1924) was a daughter of Russian immigrants who escaped sometime close to or shortly after WWI, extreme poverty, Russian upheaval, and came to farm in California at the beginning of the Great Depression and cusp of WWII. The accident...tragic.Parents, uncle, community....the key for me was the uncle saying Arnold picked the peas...he did what was "reasonable"....For those people, it was more important to survive, to learn hard lessons and the sooner the better for males. Only Nora, the sister could harbor horror/resentment...but dad steps in to stop that at the breakfast table. It's only been in the last generation or so that we've taught "real men cry." It's a brutally sad story....but I think brutally true of past generations. I wanted to cry...for my older brother...my uncles....and obviously, for Arnold. (How do any of us know how we'll respond to a shocking incident? When my 15 year old daughter feel down a flight of stairs -- face first -- onto the tile floor below...I cleaned the bathroom while I waited for an ambulance. I'm sure anybody nearby thought I'd lost my mind....maybe I had?! To this day, I can't possibly give a logical explanation.)
I agree, trauma can make a person behave in ways that are misunderstood. The kid in the story is only nine, he's had this horror, loss, confusion. How many of us have seen a person die in this way, much less a loved one? Many traumatized people and children cannot speak, faces frozen, they can't discuss the horrible event––either witnessed or experienced, and that reaction might be wrongly judged by others as coldness.
Yes, I just now made a similar comment to this. Your comment brings to mind that woman whose baby was taken by a dingo. Do you remember that trial? The mother was wrongly imprisoned for murder because of her inability to show the kind of emotion the jury thought she should be showing. It was such a tragedy. (She was later exonerated.)
Shirley, what a frightening experience with your daughter! Your comment reminded me of the surprise I felt when Arnold first entered the house after returning from the sheriff's. ("He saw the jars of peas standing in rows on the workbench, a reproach to him.") I thought, wait, what? She canned the peas?! But it rang true to me, that people don't always act the way we think they will in a crisis. It's haunting to me, to think of her home in the kitchen canning those peas, having just lost her son, while the men are at the sheriff with Arnold. It's even more haunting to think of some future meal where those peas will be served.
Wow, this seems so obvious now, but I hadn't seen it before. She canned the peas. This is like Arnold's picking peas, or cleaning up blood off the floor when your daughter has fallen down. I see it as that "creating order out of chaos" theme, combined with being in abject shock. We go to auto-pilot mode in such situations in life, while we're trying to process what has just happened. What an important insight. Thanks, Melissa.
I really appreciate this historical context about the author - observing a family in a time that is different from now. I was also struck how Arnold might think picking the peas at the right time might be his redemption - an expectation to get on with tasks for family survival
I found it brilliant and sad. The sheriff making snap decisions about a child based on his patterns of recognizing guilty adults, is so familiar in this world. We need to take time to see what is in front of us, a unique experience, a unique human being, a child of the Universe. I am so grateful to have been turned on to this amazing story. And this 'club,' another word that makes me wonder. A truncheon for beating down hesitation, fear, ignorance? Loving it!
It makes perfect sense to me that you were cleaning the floor, or creating some kind of order out of chaos. And you were in shock, which is a weird frame of mind that most can't wrap their minds around unless they have really been there.
Thankyou for showing up on time, it was a relief to turn away from the news on Ukraine. Liked your remarks about role of literature when there are imminent problems in the world and that it Literature only affects those who are gentle and so inclined. Half of fiction's "job" I think is to make the unseeable seen. Darknes-, our minds fight to shut it down and we want to look away. Fictionalized happy endings serve as the balm on the pain of looking at reality. Why do we need this? It irritates me that we do. Why is there a time lag between bad things happening and the appropriate counter action to it? And yet non fiction is mostly boring and unreadable, inconclusive and unbelievable. Is the driving force in reading fiction like seeking a soothing medication? Or is it providing us the ability to see reality in small doses? Why is good slow and stupid and evil fast and clever? These are the questions in my mind today.
I don't know if others feel this way but, while I do find balm in happy endings -- I can be kind of a sucker for them sometimes even -- I prefer what is, for lack of better phrasing, an unhappy ending. Or a sad ending. Or a bad ending.
Actually, I have been trying to NOT think of endings neither happy nor unhappy, but simply as the stopping point. For now. I like to imagine beyond the ending at times. Not as a balm but as a thought\imagination exercise. During covid/lockdown, spending so much time in isolation, I a little learning about Daoism (sp), initially from The Tao of Pooh. In any case, the notion that things/events/people are neither good nor bad but just as they are has settled into my mind. Like how often, later, we see that thing A, which seemed bad, had to happen, so that thing B and perhaps even C etc could happen. A simple hindsight is 20/20 exercise perhaps but it has helped my writing. I don't think about my characters doing bad or good, just that they do something. If that makes sense.
I'm with you on this Chris. I know that the boy's life can head off a cliff from here, but I can hope that the mother, or father, might try again, deal with their grief and find a way to help that sole surviving son. Any of that is after the story, but it's what I hold on to.
Yes, agree. Stopping at some logical point feels good, Chekovian, because the real story already happened. We often hear a seeking for a transformation/growth/resolution/insight not necessarily happy, but logical. Otherwise story feels unfinished. Sometimes in real life stories do not finish until 50 years have passed or a few generations..... a whole revolution or movement. Seeing that is satisfying. Perhaps this Ukraine thing is now shifting things in a direction that we dont yet understand. That fog is un nerving....... Thanks for your comment.
Great questions, thank you. I think maybe evil starts out fast and clever because it is usually ruthlessly single-minded. The good is startled, but just needs time to catch up.
I read George's post on returning from a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Some protesters there were British like me, but the majority Ukrainian or otherwise Eastern European. Having spent the last three days also feeling sad and ineffective, it was extraordinary to hear the Ukrainian speakers expressing neither of those feelings. Desperation, yes, but to a much greater degree pride, courage, defiance and disgust for Putin. Their determination to fight back is incredible. I was thinking how, a week ago, I was asking naive questions about what 'out of season' meant in the context of The Stone Boy, and reflecting that I have literally never seen a gun, except on film or in 'museum conditions'. I wouldn't even know how to clean or load one, let alone shoot with it. And now Ukrainians as young as 14 are learning how to use them. This brought up number of conflicted feelings.
Also, was anyone else struck by the fact that when we were thinking about the escalation exercise a while back, (escalation in the sense of Rising Action, which we want to master,) another undesirable kind of escalation was going on in the world?
Thank you, Rachel. Yes, to a number of conflicting thoughts and feelings! I normally find myself in the corner of nonviolence, but the ways in which the people of Ukraine are defying this murderous transgression is heartening. (If I remember rightly, I think the Finns fought back similarly against Stalin's shenanigans around the beginning of the Second World War. And then there were the Warsaw uprisings...) I keep wondering about Vladimir Putin. It seems that the hunger for power is just like any other addiction, you always have to up the ante until you destroy yourself, unfortunately taking quite a few others down with you.
As a father of an impulsive and curious 13-year-old boy - prone to some disobedience and boundary pushing - this story leaves much to digest and reflect upon. I am quick to scold, to remember, to knit past misdemeanors into a quilt of being that casts doubt on his character... this story reminded me of who he needs and what my role is. No doubt, in our childhood, we have all encountered adults who planted seeds of self-loathing or doubt in our developing souls; I was most shocked not by the sheriff or by Andy, who are these recognisable entities, but by the devastating silence and corroboration of Arnold's dad, albeit temporary. May I never be silent when my son most needs me; as tough as it is sometimes to push the anger or disappointment aside, God willing, help me be the bigger person and remind him of his magnificent light when all seems dark.
George, thank you. One thing I appreciate in your post is how you have pulled out something I was only dimly aware but gives the story its force: the discordant 'arc' of each characters' response to what happened. Considering the story again, I can see it sort of musically, in a sense they are all out of rhythym (and there is clearly a power differential at play too), with a terrible result (the isolation and shaming of a young child). Sort of reminds me of collage, how the pattern is fractured, or no pattern at all. The writer was very insightful, how a family, or a community, can be a collection of energies each spinning at their own pace.
Thanks, Fraser, for your comments connecting music and the collage to this piece of literature. Humans seem to desire a neat ending to a story, a harmonious composition, a pastoral painting. But in the Arts it’s often the discordant, the destructive, the chaos that makes us come alive as readers and viewers. We are forced to face the uncomfortable, the uncertainty, and the darkness of life. It is the unanswered questions that have kept the story knocking around in my head for two weeks. And, George, thank you for connecting the invasion of Ukraine with the questions many of us do not want to ask. What is power, what is ambition, what is evil?
First of all, Ukraine. By the time I write this, who knows what will have happened? The sadness is overwhelming. But I am struck by the way regular people can rise up to be heroes, as the president of that country is currently doing. His moral core is so very strong. In the face of what could very well be his own destruction, he stands up for what is right. A Jew whose family somehow remained in the area despite all odds (and long after my own Jewish grandparents, aunts and uncles fled in 1922 from this same part of the world), and a man called to act in face of evil, I feel very connected to this human--which is, I think, the purpose of being here on earth. We are all One. All strength to the people of Ukraine.
But as for Arnold. His fate, I think, was sealed the day he was born into this dysfunctional family. Whether or not he survives and goes on to live a life of peace is less of a question than the question of how he became who he is. We are all products of the home we grew up in. That his parents react as they do in the moment of this story is very telling. It's not like they have changed and suddenly become people who treat Arnold poorly. I have to believe that they, at their core, have always been lacking in their love and understanding of this particular child. And that is the story's real sadness for me. I think Arnold probably already felt a void inside of him before the accidental shooting of his brother. Now, the actions of this day cement it for him. If we are not loved properly as children, we are damaged, possibly forever. But his parents are also the product of their own parents. And so it goes, generation after generation--people who have not learned to love or to show their love. People who look outside of their own hearts for an indication of how to act. It's heartbreaking.
Thank you for all of that, Mary. Our families of origin are also long and narrow like a coffin, and difficult to extricate ourselves from without a ton of help.
But Zelensky! What a hero! In a time when we thought heroes had ditched us for good!
I have an alternate theory about the title, in that it could very well refer to Eugie, who is now forever cast in stone as a young man who others adored. His flaws and faults will not survive; he will be remembered as the "good" one. But Arnold still has a chance to break the stone mold. I want to be an optimist about him, difficult as that is with the evidence we've been given. Still, a glimmer of hope, I think, exists in the story.
Interesting that Eugene could be the stone boy. Both are, in some ways. We can think past the ending in various ways . It’s only the day after the death, time would soften the parents. But is it that the short story form can present an event, a response, and to leave things unexplained? To make us think, to wonder?
Whenever a person has in some way participated in a death, the questions, from within and without, swirl forever. People can tell you, "You didn't do it," or "you didn't mean to do it," or "don't be so hard on yourself." But inside, most of us are hard on ourselves. Until or unless we harden our hearts so we can go on, survive. My father committed suicide when he was 61 and I was 27. I was far away, he had remarried after my mother's death, a troubled marriage. How could I have been responsible, even a little bit? Well, I was his only child and we had been at odds for many years. I didn't do with my life what he wanted me to. Oh, and he died on Father's Day, before he got a letter I'd sent saying I was sorry for being a bad daughter . . . 50 years later, I still wake up, thinking, "What if. . ." And don't let Uncle Andy off as an aberration. One of my aunts said openly that my father died "because he couldn't live without YOU!" My heart aches for all the "wrong ones," that is, for us all, on some level or another. Arnold's story is one I will never forget.
Thank you, Sallie, for your openness about this. It resonates so much. No matter how much we try to intellectualize our way out of it, we continue to wish we could go back in time and try to change something that might have made a difference. It feels crazy, but maybe it's a form of love trying to percolate up and out.
And thank you, David, for your response. I think this is something that happens to almost all of us in some way - a family death, in war, an abortion, a car accident, someone dies when you're not thinking of them, maybe they needed your help. So human. And we all have to carve ways to deal with this. A form of love. . .
Thank you. One of the ways I try to deal with this is to pull some of my attention away from the dead, whom I cannot help, to the living, whom I can. (At least I hope that I can.)
But the dead stay with me, and I try to keep learning from them.
This is a strange thing to talk about, but I am grateful that we are!
As I said to my son, who was very young and confused when his grandfather died, Anything can be said. Even the darkest things.
Perhaps they have to be. I hope that Arnold found someone somewhere who would hold him and talk to him. But I doubt it. That story is a picture of one of the hells we make for one another.
Thank you again. It’s a fantastic short story about so many unhelpful (even poisonous) ways to react. Much to be learned, in addition to the poignant and lovely writing.
Now that I have a child of my own I feel that I have a better understanding of how stressed out my parents were. (And how bereft they were of modern psychological conceptions.) I find myself in some weird kind of communion with their long-departed selves, grateful for the things I have learned from them, which in large measure is how to not treat my son. Which is not a small package of grace. I am glad to be a part of breaking the negative cycle in every possible way, large or small.
to misquote the robbers in the chicken coop, "there's no one here but us wrong ones."
Ain't nothing different you could have done. You know your dad was so overwhelmed by his own pain that he was not capable of thinking of you. But what a good laugh you would have with him if you could show him his oopsie of not waiting for your letter. You two would just hug and laugh about that I bet. I'm so sorry for your loss.
I don't quite accept that "No story is changing anything now." I have a friend, a fiction writer, who's been in Kyiv teaching the past year. Last week she told me that she hasn't been able to read anything lately, can't focus, can't get words to make sense -- except for one thing: Carolyn Forche's memoir What You Have Heard is True. She said Forche's story of the confusing build up to a confusing war was like a life jacket right now.
We have no idea how many specific stories are consoling or giving courage to or providing tenacious companionship for countless individuals at this very moment. And while that may not change Russian politics, it might well be making an even more essential difference.
Thank you for talking about Ukraine before carrying on with "The Stone Boy". Your words resonated with me.
What also resonated was describing the tragedy of the story being one of timing. Stories that are satisfying for me are often where the mistiming - the missed opportunities for connection and understanding - are believable and leave you asking the "if only so and so had only said such and such at the right time" kind of questions, and the thoughts of "Imagine if this character was a different kind of person."
And these questions are maybe answered because the characters cannot do what you the reader want them to do to avoid pain because they are who they are. And that's the beauty and the tragedy of it.
For some reason while thinking about this I keep going back to what the writer Rob Bass said about his screenplay for Rain Man. It was something along the lines of how he discovered that the movie was about the human need to connect and how difficult and yet how vital that is. I feel that about "The Stone Boy".
Hi Paul: This is a big leap from "The Stone Boy," but I have always been haunted by Kenzu Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day." How the protagonist, Mr. Stevens, has the chance, finally - after so many missed chances - to tell Miss Kenton how he feels/he is in love with her. And in their final meeting (spoiler alert), he can't do it, and how she now knows he will never be capable of saying it. This is the "missed opportunities for connection and understanding" you mention, which echoes EM Forster's "only connect". Arnold is starved from the absence of connection, from anyone - and especially, perhaps, his mother - to be connected to him. Stevens and Miss Kenton will never connect. In both stories we see the missed connections - due to fear, due to timing, due to inattention. One character looks outward for connection; the other misses the signs or remains closed. Of course Stevens/Miss Kenton is a wildly different situation from a boy and his family/mother, but your post really made me think about stories that affect me most, and maybe this is what they have at their core, this yearning: All we want in this world is to be connected. Not to be alone.
Yes - "The Remains of the Day" is a great example of this! Thanks for suggesting it. Something I'm excited to learn is how to write so that these missed connections are believable. They also seem to possibly be a useful tool in providing a level of tension and interest that can carry the story through the middle part of a novel.
Thanks, Paul. At another SC member’s suggestion I read another of Gina Berriault’s stories, “Who Can Tell Me Who I Am?” Wow! It’s about human connection, and, as you say, how fragile, how difficult and how vital.
I appreciate the suggestion that some characters, the "function fulfillers," don't need full backstories, credible motivations, etc.--this is honestly liberating and feels true. (At a minimum it saves the writer from having to gin up dime-store insights to cover the entire cast of characters: he kicked the puppy because his mother didn't love him; she drove recklessly because she'd been neglected, etc.) The challenge is to know--or realize--where the focus should be...but I do love the acknowledgement that some actions and developments can left alone. Lots to ponder; thank you!
One of the things I’ve realized about functional characters is that IRL we very rarely get to hear strangers’ backstories.
For example, in the early days of the pandemic, I was out for a jog with a mask around my neck. If I came close to people, I slipped it on and gave them a wide berth. I was lucky to live in an area where most of the people I saw took masking seriously, but there were occasional people who didn’t. I didn’t think much about them. Until one day, someone saw me mask up while jogging, locked eyes with me, and started coughing in my direction. As I went around him, turned around to keep coughing on me. I never saw him again. We’ve never spoken so much as a word to each other. But it was a moment I kept thinking about as the pandemic deepened and other people started to have reactions to it and each other’s reactions. Maybe he thought I thought he was gross and germy, or maybe he just had a coughing fit and was staring at a booger on my mask or something, and the timing of everything just lent to my negative impression of him. IDK, but I doubt it.
But in the story of my life, he’s a functional character, in that he changed what I believed about people and what they would do in times of global trouble. Maybe I should have known better—global warming, etc—but having it happen so directly was different than reading about it.
Me too, Kristin. There is something very satisfying and right and "true", not to go too Hemingway, in a character that fulfulls a function with little, if any, backstory, and yet the reader buys, feels like they get that character, as is the case, for me anyway, with Andy and Nora.
I recall an Alice Munro story in which a character dies a horrible death in a saw mill, I think, and the only comment the father makes is something like, He shoulda watched was he was doing, shouldn't he have? For me, it said everything about the father.
Yes, as you and Erin point out--it's a true fact that IRL we encounter people with unknown motives all day long.... (And we ourselves have unknown motives!)
George, I feel for you taking care of an old dog. We're doing that here, too. And, apropos of the opening of this post, Ilya Kaminsky tweeted this morning:
"Me, writing to an older friend in Odessa: how can I help, please let me know I really want help
He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.
And, that is in the middle of war. Imagine."
This is beautiful. And I'll cast my old dog in with the group's. We need to send poems, stories, to our fellow human beings in Ukraine.
Yes. I love this idea. Feeling helpless, it something one can do. And I certainly feel helpless.
Thank you for this insight. I was feeling rather useless.
It was very heartening, especially since Ilya Kaminsky got attacked idiotically on Twitter this week for a thoughtful anti-war poem he wrote a decade ago. It was good to see him share this.
I left a link to the poem above (somewhere). Hard to navigate this forest. You can't see the trees for the other trees. Yes, the twitter thing was idiotic, but I never got to the bottom of where it started.
Thank you, Emily. That's perfect.
Happy to share @ilya_poet's words.
William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Thank you, Ron...may what is found there sustain us all.
Shivers
Thank you, Ron. That goes straight to the heart.
i'm struck by the absence of Nora in both this story and your analysis, g. Nora is the first member of the family to definitively reject Arnold by refusing to hand him the milk, and placing her hands in her lap. another gun shot. in doing so, she splits the family.
remember, both parents are making tentative bids to Arnold but, by her action, Nora secures a position for herself as the "good child" and for Arnold as "the bad child". it's over.
Good point, yes.
In an earlier thread, https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-3/comments?s=r#comment-5243548 Paul, Gini and I were also talking about the role of Nora. It's interesting that Berriault chose to make the middle child a girl. Why was this choice made? We circled around this thought - If the middle child had been a boy, then perhaps the death of the eldest boy, the almost-man, would not have been felt so keenly within this family? So perhaps Nora ramps up the crushing pressure on Arnold as the only other son / next-in-line male, a role that he is utterly incapable of meeting, given his age.
Nora is just a kid. Kids see things in black and white unless they are abnormally emotionally gifted. It's not that her actions aren't hurtful to Arnold. But we adult readers should forgive her even if he can't. She's no more ready to process this than he is.
In grief, since it is such a strange land for them, kids mirror the adults. I saw Nora as trying on what she saw as her parents'/communities' response to Arnold. And I thought it was really subtle on the writer's part, that little action, shocking the father so that he changed course. It was a hopeful moment in an unrelenting story.
This makes much sense. Nora is a child too of course. We don't know as much about her relationship to Arnold (the way we do about the connection between the two brothers), but it's reasonable to assume she's observing the wider social response to the accident. Great stuff here!
I thought more of Nora's rejection of Arnold than Andy's. We don't know much about her either, but that's his sister that he has to live with for the next little while, who treats him with disdain.
Yes, and come to think of it, she's the one person in the family who shows no sign of moving toward Arnold...
One of the interesting things about this story is the way that we begin looking to other people in Arnold's circle to see what we should be thinking of him. And, as you and Rea are pointing out, when we look to Nora, we don't see someone pre-inclined to think well of Arnold.
I thought when the father handed Arnold the pitcher when Nora wouldn't, that this was a moment when the father was showing Nora the right way to behave: a moment of thaw, in this painful to and fro of who is capable of reaching out when ... which seems such a piercingly deft way of capturing how even when we might share an experience like grief, we aren't always at the same point of being able to articulate it... Thank you for this post, George: I read the story to my 12 year old last night and it was a fantastic one to talk over with him. I'll be reading your commentary to him too - he was shocked by Arnold, then confused, but we talked about how that last line was potentially hopeful and self-reflective....
Yes, these small acts of reaching out by both parents are reasons to hope that the family can reconcile after they have time to grieve a devastating tragedy. (Nora, yes, but a kid, showing sibling rivalry, besides grief, and not mature enough to understand how deeply hurtful her action is.) If the family can't reconcile it will probably hurt Arnold the most, but it will hurt all of them. I didn't see them as a cold lonely family to begin the story, but if they can't, ultimately, reconcile and comfort each other, they will end up so.
PS. I feel for George and the others. I am also caring for an old, increasingly frail, loved dog.
For some reason, my 'like' of this comment won't show up - so here it is in words!
Thank you. We all feel deeply for Ukraine and its brave leaders. But I've long admired beautiful New Zealand and its leadership headed by a strong young woman.
But wait. We get a sense for the mother and Nora's unease/concern before they parents go to find Eugene's body. "'Where's Eugene?" his mother asked scoldingly. She wanted, Arnold knew, to see his eyes …" This raised the question for me as to whether or not Arnold might have had a pattern of behaving coldly that his mother, as the person who likely knew him best, could see in Arnold's eyes. Continuing: "…and when he glanced at her she put the bowl and spoon down on the stove and walked past him. …Nora followed them with little skipping steps, as if afraid to be left behind." Why was Nora afraid, especially if this accident were completely out of the blue? Was Nora afraid of being alone with Arnold in particular? Was that typical or was it a shock-induced reaction? It seems that Berriault plants these questions in her readers, at least readers like me, a mother in a man's world who can see the possibilities, both good and bad, in our own children. If only our world was more populated with more men like George Saunders and fewer men like Andy, the sheriff, and Vladimir Putin.
I read that as the mother would know, upon seeing Arnold's eyes, "the truth," like my mom seemed to when I was a kid. She just look at me and somehow know what I was up to, or so it seemed. I did not read it as anything more than a mother who knows that her son can get up to mischief, "as boys are wont to do" but no in a sinister way, although now....
It's Nora's "little skipping steps" that I think say so much. She senses Arnold is in trouble and perhaps, as a rival sibling, wants to pile on, but she is not yet aware of just how serious it is. She's not much older than Arnold, if I am reading it right? Perhaps not wanting to pass the milk is as much about her own shame as rejecting Arnold, but perhaps that is a stretch.
In any case, the function that Nora fulfill is powerful, for me. And, I dare say, necessary, as perhaps the anchor of to Arnold's rejection.
I totally missed Nora's "little skipping steps"...thank you, Chris...and now I see her behavior as whistling past the graveyard...her needing to distance herself from the dark and widening hole that Arnold is in.
I agree. I wondered if in this family (and at this time) the boys got the attention and with this shift in family dynamics, Nora sees an opportunity to 'get ahead' of Arnold. Boys tease their sisters (in my experience) and sisters find ways to 'get back' at the boys. I believe she understood that Arnold was out of favour, but not the harm that she was doing him through her refusal to pass the milk.
Good points. Thx.
Yes, I found myself wondering what the relationship between Nora and Arnold had been before the shooting. Had he shown signs of coldness or cruelty towards her or other family members? Is she justified—at least in her mind—to shun him, now that this unthinkable tragedy has occurred? Does Nora have reason to suspect Arnold may have done it intentionally? The sheriff didn't live with Arnold, so it was easier for me to believe his judgment to be rash and unqualified, but Nora has been growing up with Arnold—they have a daily relationship. Her reaction feels extremely important to the story.
And she's what, twelve maybe, no skippingly innocent kid but a pubescent creature more destined to show up in a Stephen King story than Arnold.
Her character does a good job of highlighting the places where the parents do and do not act by intention in the family dynamics, but I did not previously pay enough attention to her. Now, I recognize how much can be accomplished with each minor character saying more through our choices of their involvements (strong inclinations, function-fulfillment) than we want to lay down in wordy excess. I keep coming back to the careful craftsmanship of this story and am dually inspired and intimidated.
Yes, good. I wondered about Nora, too, Rea. In fact, at one point, I wondered why Berriault even wrote her in. Her role is small, and she doesn't have too much interaction with Arnold, though the one scene in which she doesn't pass him the milk is powerful. Your analysis makes much sense and sheds light on her literary purpose.
Excellent observation, Rea. I was thinking about Nora as well. How little she is in the story but how strongly that moment impacted me as a reader. I felt too that she was sealing Arnold's fate while selfishly securing her own. It stung deeply and yet as piece of writing technique I found it exquisite.
I didn't find what Nora did selfish. Some families are all about survival, and I'm pretty sure she was in survival mode at that moment--she was still in shock and full of grief. Adults hardly know how to respond to tragedy. She really had no tools to do so on her own.
It is all but impossible right now to do much but worry; thank you for the gift of acknowledging this, and thank you for the gift of showing us how to forge over to thinking that is filled with heart, empathy, and meaning. If only everyone probed their hearts this way - but I would like to think many people are doing so already, and even more so now.
Life has a way of forcing us to do that probing. Thank you!
Being 'on the spectrum, I interpreted his response as confusion.
Yes - I am using the word "shock" probably a bit incorrectly - I guess I mean that he is not himself. Likewise with mom and dad...
Trauma is a grenade, whose metal ricochets off the walls and repeatedly re-injures everyone sitting near. No-one in this family can escape.
Yes, like a grenade. There's fallout that reaches far beyond the intended target/s and continues to reverberate through time.
Years ago I was in a car accident; the driver took a curve too fast and she just missed a telephone pole. I got out of the car and kept walking up and down the country road, looking for my $1.00 sunglasses. I do think he was in shock and that was also why it took him so long to pick the peas.
Thank your for this perspective. I interpreted his response also as a form of confusion--but i think the basis of his confusion was the fact that he was in shock over the accident. I know that there have been times in my life when I have responded inappropriately due to a kind of short-circuiting of my emotional wiring. For instance, there have been times when I have felt my lips move into a smiling position, when I have meant to cry. I used to find this very disturbing when it happened because my face/actions said the opposite of what I was feeling. Or, at times, i wasn't sure how to feel. Not to bang on here incessantly, but I know also that I am the type who freezes in bad situations when action is called for. Our emotions! We can be so messed up when we don't want to be! So confused. And I think that is Arnold, who may be on the spectrum himself. Identifying how we feel can be a field of landmines sometimes. I get Arnold, I think.
I remember when my beloved grandmother died, I had no idea how to feel. I felt like a robot, cut off and stony. (Maybe this is another level of meaning in The Stone Boy.) At her funeral, I felt encased in this numbness. I was about 12/13/14. It was alarming to me that I was so closed off. Part of the numbness was that my parents took up so much of the emotional airspace with their own problems. I think this is true of Arnold as well. He was frightened of how closed off he was when his mother asked how he was. As an adult with a lot more life experience and lots of therapy, I am quite emotional. It's so wonderful to feel internally alive and responsive to myself and the world around me.
I don't know that we have enough information to conclude that he is 'on the spectrum'. But we do have enough to conclude that he has been struck an overwhelming psychic blow - one that would be unsettling for almost anyone.
I read it not as autism, but as deep shock, nurtured by a community of people who do not show feelings or know them in themselves, even as they question him on that very point (one of the delicious ironies in the story). My mother died when I was 15. It was the major loss of my life, since my father had abandoned our family during her illness and all the love I knew was from her. I am still recovering from the shock of losing someone I had a primary attachment to. Guilt, sadness, loss, they all stayed way down there like lava in a volcano gone inactive. Did I hasten my mother's death, did I collaborate with the cancer in killing her, whenever I got into trouble and caused her greater heartache? I was that kind of kid who got into trouble, a screw-up and ne'er-do-well. I kidded around the day of the funeral and a few friends let me have it, saying I didn't care about my own mother's death. It took decades of therapy for me, group, classic analysis, you name it, and the ongoing self-therapy. I still carry her in my heart and think of her every day. Also, stories are on a spectrum, somewhere between a clear lesson we can easily summarize, and a faint smoke that goes to the heart of the human condition and does not give us any easy answers, a mist rising from the text that never comes clear. I think The Stone Boy and many Berriault stories live on the misty side of the spectrum, along with Alyosha the Pot and many others from writers willing to risk not knowing.
Robyn Michaels refers to herself as "I" so I think she is on the spectrum.
Robyn may be,, but we are discussing Arnold.
I wondered if Arnold might be on the spectrum. I got the sense that he was considered strange even before the accident, and then the accident allows people to believe the worst of what they had wondered about him.
I am still not sure what to make of Arnold's thoughts about his brother's hips/buttocks.
Hard to tell if the thoughts about Eugie's body are the narrator's or Arnold's. I think it's the narrator commenting on the fact that Eugie has the body of a young man, while Arnold is still a child.
Mary, thanks for that. I keep forgetting to remember the POV. I suspect there's something there around the metaphor of nakedness but can't grasp it yet. I think it's meant to be restrained and perhaps slightly uncomfortable for us to consider, but I don't see it as sexual unless symbolic of childhood/adulthood. Your take works for me.
I think nakedness increases physicality, sensuality, and vulnerability in stories, particularly among two brothers or two people of the same sex. I recall in Hemingway's IN OUR TIME, in the story, "Big Two-hearted River," I believe, where two men are hunting and sitting around the campfire. Nick hands his friend a log (or vice versa?) and there is a pause, it almost seems sensual. Almost, but not quite registering in the conscious mind--on the surface an ordinary moment. There is no male-male sexuality being suggested, just an author willing to go to a place, a physical description that steps out of bounds, out of the ordinary, middle-class, safe images we often see in that kind of scene. It gives an undercurrent of transgressive feeling. I think that's what happens in the "Stone Boy" scene also. You won't see that looking for theme only. I look for the feeling, associative elements in scenes also, and you can find a lot there.
This is an interesting angle, Ron. I'll consider this with greater awareness going forward, what I'm feeling while reading as able to be fully separate from what I'm thinking or analyzing. Thank you for that. Because of the later scene with his mother, where he becomes aware of his own nakedness, I am leaning on that biblical usage of implied meaning, but you're right to remind me: I did feel a fascinating mix of things in that bedroom moment and I remember trying to move away from them too quickly. Potent.
Yes, there was a brotherly sensuality in that scene! We have to be aware of the difference between sensuality and sexuality. And if we avoid sensuality for fear of interpretation as sexuality, we lose some of our power as writers.
I took this as, the family/parents glory in (fetishize?) Eugie as their big hope for the future, and the hips comment indicates a hint of erotic feeling in that enthusiasm for Eugie. Not in an incestuous way, but maybe sometimes Eugie's awesomeness causes the parents to get hot for each other, and since Arnie lives in close quarters with that energy, he senses the erotic element is there.
Maybe it's hard for Arnie to differentiate between others' feelings and his own. That heightens the stakes about what the sheriff, family, and town think of Arnie - because he doesn't yet have the capacity to form his own feelings about himself.
He only knows what he's worth from details like getting the gun "no one else was using." He picked peas before telling about the death, but that's just a reflection of the parents' priorities; they asked about peas before asking about Eugie.
The mother's uncombed hair was a detail that made me wonder if we're seeing autism spectrum in her, in multiple generations, and all the parlor storytelling about Eugie's verbal awesomeness made me wonder if Eugie was neurotypical, and that could be a piece of why the parents revered and hoped in him.
I wondered the same and posted my thoughts on why I came to that conclusion. I'm with you on Arnold's thoughts about his brother's hips/buttocks – I can't work that out either.
I took it as Arnold’s curiosity about the changes bodies do or don’t go through, but I could be wrong.
That was also my interpretation on first reading. (On the spectrum.) I have been puzzled when people used the word 'sociopath'...that's not the same thing, is it, as being abnormal in ways of seeing and processing the world? (I'm not sure of the definition of sociopath?)
That sentence about the mountains making the sun climb high...and other small indications that Arnold's ideas of motivation/ cause and effect are unusual. And then the sheriff's use of 'reasonable '. Doesn't that really mean 'rational '? Over rational? Thinking through a particular established logic without taking account of changing circumstances?
Yeah, in my notes after reading the story the first time, I wondered if part of Arnold's confused and confusing response could have been partly a result of his being neuroatypical. But then the accidental killing of his brother is not something where I feel like I can say what the "normal" reaction should be. The sheriff and Uncle Andy think they do know, but of course they don't either.
That's really interesting. I thought that, too.
I think literature also helps us face our own prejudices, not head on, kind of from around the corner, in a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down kind of way. When I first heard about A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I didn’t want to read it, because the stories were Russian and I didn’t like Russians. I have no excuse for this, I could blame society or the media but I don’t even really know what that means. In any case, my prejudice is egregious on multiple levels. First, because I’m Muslim and I know what immediate distrust feels like on account of that. Second, I’m a plaintiff’s employment lawyer—all day long I write mediation briefs championing people who’ve been fired from their jobs because of their race, gender, religion, nationality, and other protected reasons.
But there it was, when I realized why I was resisting reading A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, my prejudice sort of slapped me in the face. I don’t think I’ve ever acted on it but then again I’m sure I probably have. In any case, the book was by George Saunders and I remember loving that Escape From Spiderhead story so I said to myself, don’t be racist, Shaiza, read the book. And immediately, I was taken in. Marya lives within me now, just like Lily Bart and Lizzie Bennett and that sweetheart murderer from Escape From Spiderhead. Yet even while reading Master And Man I felt upset and annoyed in the middle, thinking ugh, this guy is going to die and his servant too and probably the poor horse because it’s a Russian story and so that must be what happens, how depressing. So the ending felt like a goddamn miracle, honestly. First, because Tolstoy managed this impossible seeming feat in such a natural seeming way. And second, because I saw my dad in Vasily, including what he did at the end. So how can I not like Russians when a Russian opened my eyes to that?
Anyway, after A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, I tore through a bunch of Chekhov stories and it felt like no one needed to write anything again ever because Chekhov seemed to have lived every life, and expressed the essence of all of them. It was very enlightening, to say the least. So now, now that the crisis in Ukraine is back in the news in an even more terrible way than before (I’m remembering 2014), my reaction is not ugh these asshole Russians are at it again, it’s hang on, maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, like before. Speaking of which, I found this 2015 lecture from Professor John J Mearsheimer at the University Of Chicago super prescient and really helpful in trying to digest everything that’s happening right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
All that to say, as a person who is not always gentle, or inclined to care, literature has helped me be more like that.
This was wonderful, Shaiza - you seem both gentle & inclined to care, to be able to express yourself so beautifully.
Thanks, George. That really means a lot.
I especially liked your comment because it shows we can grow and move beyond our past, especially with literature's assistance. I have always been thankful for literature as it shows me a deeper view of life and helps me understand so much more than I otherwise would have.
It may sound silly, but I picture our stone boy going to the library and reading about children; their lives and their problems. This and other encounters with a neighbor or a dog or a kind and understanding employer help him bit by bit sort out his sadness. I picture his family coming around to realize this kid was the same kid they had before his brother's death and while they are late in realizing his need for help and while much damage was done, they do try to overcome their mistakes. Their lives are not static. Thank you for your comment.
I just read this comment again. Now it’s mar 21. Thank you Shazam for your thoughtful comments here. I plan to watch this lecture to learn about Ukraine.
I can't agree. It's a tragically sad story...but the author( born in 1924) was a daughter of Russian immigrants who escaped sometime close to or shortly after WWI, extreme poverty, Russian upheaval, and came to farm in California at the beginning of the Great Depression and cusp of WWII. The accident...tragic.Parents, uncle, community....the key for me was the uncle saying Arnold picked the peas...he did what was "reasonable"....For those people, it was more important to survive, to learn hard lessons and the sooner the better for males. Only Nora, the sister could harbor horror/resentment...but dad steps in to stop that at the breakfast table. It's only been in the last generation or so that we've taught "real men cry." It's a brutally sad story....but I think brutally true of past generations. I wanted to cry...for my older brother...my uncles....and obviously, for Arnold. (How do any of us know how we'll respond to a shocking incident? When my 15 year old daughter feel down a flight of stairs -- face first -- onto the tile floor below...I cleaned the bathroom while I waited for an ambulance. I'm sure anybody nearby thought I'd lost my mind....maybe I had?! To this day, I can't possibly give a logical explanation.)
I agree, trauma can make a person behave in ways that are misunderstood. The kid in the story is only nine, he's had this horror, loss, confusion. How many of us have seen a person die in this way, much less a loved one? Many traumatized people and children cannot speak, faces frozen, they can't discuss the horrible event––either witnessed or experienced, and that reaction might be wrongly judged by others as coldness.
Yes, I just now made a similar comment to this. Your comment brings to mind that woman whose baby was taken by a dingo. Do you remember that trial? The mother was wrongly imprisoned for murder because of her inability to show the kind of emotion the jury thought she should be showing. It was such a tragedy. (She was later exonerated.)
I think this is closest to the meaning of the story.... at least for me.
Shirley, what a frightening experience with your daughter! Your comment reminded me of the surprise I felt when Arnold first entered the house after returning from the sheriff's. ("He saw the jars of peas standing in rows on the workbench, a reproach to him.") I thought, wait, what? She canned the peas?! But it rang true to me, that people don't always act the way we think they will in a crisis. It's haunting to me, to think of her home in the kitchen canning those peas, having just lost her son, while the men are at the sheriff with Arnold. It's even more haunting to think of some future meal where those peas will be served.
Wow, this seems so obvious now, but I hadn't seen it before. She canned the peas. This is like Arnold's picking peas, or cleaning up blood off the floor when your daughter has fallen down. I see it as that "creating order out of chaos" theme, combined with being in abject shock. We go to auto-pilot mode in such situations in life, while we're trying to process what has just happened. What an important insight. Thanks, Melissa.
Yes! I noticed that too. Also, all the neighbors wait until the end of the work day before coming over.
I really appreciate this historical context about the author - observing a family in a time that is different from now. I was also struck how Arnold might think picking the peas at the right time might be his redemption - an expectation to get on with tasks for family survival
I found it brilliant and sad. The sheriff making snap decisions about a child based on his patterns of recognizing guilty adults, is so familiar in this world. We need to take time to see what is in front of us, a unique experience, a unique human being, a child of the Universe. I am so grateful to have been turned on to this amazing story. And this 'club,' another word that makes me wonder. A truncheon for beating down hesitation, fear, ignorance? Loving it!
It makes perfect sense to me that you were cleaning the floor, or creating some kind of order out of chaos. And you were in shock, which is a weird frame of mind that most can't wrap their minds around unless they have really been there.
Thankyou for showing up on time, it was a relief to turn away from the news on Ukraine. Liked your remarks about role of literature when there are imminent problems in the world and that it Literature only affects those who are gentle and so inclined. Half of fiction's "job" I think is to make the unseeable seen. Darknes-, our minds fight to shut it down and we want to look away. Fictionalized happy endings serve as the balm on the pain of looking at reality. Why do we need this? It irritates me that we do. Why is there a time lag between bad things happening and the appropriate counter action to it? And yet non fiction is mostly boring and unreadable, inconclusive and unbelievable. Is the driving force in reading fiction like seeking a soothing medication? Or is it providing us the ability to see reality in small doses? Why is good slow and stupid and evil fast and clever? These are the questions in my mind today.
I don't know if others feel this way but, while I do find balm in happy endings -- I can be kind of a sucker for them sometimes even -- I prefer what is, for lack of better phrasing, an unhappy ending. Or a sad ending. Or a bad ending.
Actually, I have been trying to NOT think of endings neither happy nor unhappy, but simply as the stopping point. For now. I like to imagine beyond the ending at times. Not as a balm but as a thought\imagination exercise. During covid/lockdown, spending so much time in isolation, I a little learning about Daoism (sp), initially from The Tao of Pooh. In any case, the notion that things/events/people are neither good nor bad but just as they are has settled into my mind. Like how often, later, we see that thing A, which seemed bad, had to happen, so that thing B and perhaps even C etc could happen. A simple hindsight is 20/20 exercise perhaps but it has helped my writing. I don't think about my characters doing bad or good, just that they do something. If that makes sense.
I'm with you on this Chris. I know that the boy's life can head off a cliff from here, but I can hope that the mother, or father, might try again, deal with their grief and find a way to help that sole surviving son. Any of that is after the story, but it's what I hold on to.
Yes, agree. Stopping at some logical point feels good, Chekovian, because the real story already happened. We often hear a seeking for a transformation/growth/resolution/insight not necessarily happy, but logical. Otherwise story feels unfinished. Sometimes in real life stories do not finish until 50 years have passed or a few generations..... a whole revolution or movement. Seeing that is satisfying. Perhaps this Ukraine thing is now shifting things in a direction that we dont yet understand. That fog is un nerving....... Thanks for your comment.
That’s great! Love this post!!
Great questions, thank you. I think maybe evil starts out fast and clever because it is usually ruthlessly single-minded. The good is startled, but just needs time to catch up.
I read George's post on returning from a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Some protesters there were British like me, but the majority Ukrainian or otherwise Eastern European. Having spent the last three days also feeling sad and ineffective, it was extraordinary to hear the Ukrainian speakers expressing neither of those feelings. Desperation, yes, but to a much greater degree pride, courage, defiance and disgust for Putin. Their determination to fight back is incredible. I was thinking how, a week ago, I was asking naive questions about what 'out of season' meant in the context of The Stone Boy, and reflecting that I have literally never seen a gun, except on film or in 'museum conditions'. I wouldn't even know how to clean or load one, let alone shoot with it. And now Ukrainians as young as 14 are learning how to use them. This brought up number of conflicted feelings.
Also, was anyone else struck by the fact that when we were thinking about the escalation exercise a while back, (escalation in the sense of Rising Action, which we want to master,) another undesirable kind of escalation was going on in the world?
Thank you, Rachel. Yes, to a number of conflicting thoughts and feelings! I normally find myself in the corner of nonviolence, but the ways in which the people of Ukraine are defying this murderous transgression is heartening. (If I remember rightly, I think the Finns fought back similarly against Stalin's shenanigans around the beginning of the Second World War. And then there were the Warsaw uprisings...) I keep wondering about Vladimir Putin. It seems that the hunger for power is just like any other addiction, you always have to up the ante until you destroy yourself, unfortunately taking quite a few others down with you.
As a father of an impulsive and curious 13-year-old boy - prone to some disobedience and boundary pushing - this story leaves much to digest and reflect upon. I am quick to scold, to remember, to knit past misdemeanors into a quilt of being that casts doubt on his character... this story reminded me of who he needs and what my role is. No doubt, in our childhood, we have all encountered adults who planted seeds of self-loathing or doubt in our developing souls; I was most shocked not by the sheriff or by Andy, who are these recognisable entities, but by the devastating silence and corroboration of Arnold's dad, albeit temporary. May I never be silent when my son most needs me; as tough as it is sometimes to push the anger or disappointment aside, God willing, help me be the bigger person and remind him of his magnificent light when all seems dark.
George, thank you. One thing I appreciate in your post is how you have pulled out something I was only dimly aware but gives the story its force: the discordant 'arc' of each characters' response to what happened. Considering the story again, I can see it sort of musically, in a sense they are all out of rhythym (and there is clearly a power differential at play too), with a terrible result (the isolation and shaming of a young child). Sort of reminds me of collage, how the pattern is fractured, or no pattern at all. The writer was very insightful, how a family, or a community, can be a collection of energies each spinning at their own pace.
Thanks, Fraser, for your comments connecting music and the collage to this piece of literature. Humans seem to desire a neat ending to a story, a harmonious composition, a pastoral painting. But in the Arts it’s often the discordant, the destructive, the chaos that makes us come alive as readers and viewers. We are forced to face the uncomfortable, the uncertainty, and the darkness of life. It is the unanswered questions that have kept the story knocking around in my head for two weeks. And, George, thank you for connecting the invasion of Ukraine with the questions many of us do not want to ask. What is power, what is ambition, what is evil?
Thank you, Sue. We may not want to ask those questions, but we'll be better off if we do.
First of all, Ukraine. By the time I write this, who knows what will have happened? The sadness is overwhelming. But I am struck by the way regular people can rise up to be heroes, as the president of that country is currently doing. His moral core is so very strong. In the face of what could very well be his own destruction, he stands up for what is right. A Jew whose family somehow remained in the area despite all odds (and long after my own Jewish grandparents, aunts and uncles fled in 1922 from this same part of the world), and a man called to act in face of evil, I feel very connected to this human--which is, I think, the purpose of being here on earth. We are all One. All strength to the people of Ukraine.
But as for Arnold. His fate, I think, was sealed the day he was born into this dysfunctional family. Whether or not he survives and goes on to live a life of peace is less of a question than the question of how he became who he is. We are all products of the home we grew up in. That his parents react as they do in the moment of this story is very telling. It's not like they have changed and suddenly become people who treat Arnold poorly. I have to believe that they, at their core, have always been lacking in their love and understanding of this particular child. And that is the story's real sadness for me. I think Arnold probably already felt a void inside of him before the accidental shooting of his brother. Now, the actions of this day cement it for him. If we are not loved properly as children, we are damaged, possibly forever. But his parents are also the product of their own parents. And so it goes, generation after generation--people who have not learned to love or to show their love. People who look outside of their own hearts for an indication of how to act. It's heartbreaking.
Thank you for all of that, Mary. Our families of origin are also long and narrow like a coffin, and difficult to extricate ourselves from without a ton of help.
But Zelensky! What a hero! In a time when we thought heroes had ditched us for good!
I have an alternate theory about the title, in that it could very well refer to Eugie, who is now forever cast in stone as a young man who others adored. His flaws and faults will not survive; he will be remembered as the "good" one. But Arnold still has a chance to break the stone mold. I want to be an optimist about him, difficult as that is with the evidence we've been given. Still, a glimmer of hope, I think, exists in the story.
Interesting. I like it. And then perhaps, the 'koan', either/or aspect of the title.
You just gave my glimmer of hope a boost. Thanks
Interesting that Eugene could be the stone boy. Both are, in some ways. We can think past the ending in various ways . It’s only the day after the death, time would soften the parents. But is it that the short story form can present an event, a response, and to leave things unexplained? To make us think, to wonder?
Whenever a person has in some way participated in a death, the questions, from within and without, swirl forever. People can tell you, "You didn't do it," or "you didn't mean to do it," or "don't be so hard on yourself." But inside, most of us are hard on ourselves. Until or unless we harden our hearts so we can go on, survive. My father committed suicide when he was 61 and I was 27. I was far away, he had remarried after my mother's death, a troubled marriage. How could I have been responsible, even a little bit? Well, I was his only child and we had been at odds for many years. I didn't do with my life what he wanted me to. Oh, and he died on Father's Day, before he got a letter I'd sent saying I was sorry for being a bad daughter . . . 50 years later, I still wake up, thinking, "What if. . ." And don't let Uncle Andy off as an aberration. One of my aunts said openly that my father died "because he couldn't live without YOU!" My heart aches for all the "wrong ones," that is, for us all, on some level or another. Arnold's story is one I will never forget.
Thank you, Sallie, for your openness about this. It resonates so much. No matter how much we try to intellectualize our way out of it, we continue to wish we could go back in time and try to change something that might have made a difference. It feels crazy, but maybe it's a form of love trying to percolate up and out.
That's it. Love, or the way we grieve at times, wishing we could go back in time and change something.
And thank you, David, for your response. I think this is something that happens to almost all of us in some way - a family death, in war, an abortion, a car accident, someone dies when you're not thinking of them, maybe they needed your help. So human. And we all have to carve ways to deal with this. A form of love. . .
Thank you. One of the ways I try to deal with this is to pull some of my attention away from the dead, whom I cannot help, to the living, whom I can. (At least I hope that I can.)
But the dead stay with me, and I try to keep learning from them.
This is a strange thing to talk about, but I am grateful that we are!
As I said to my son, who was very young and confused when his grandfather died, Anything can be said. Even the darkest things.
Perhaps they have to be. I hope that Arnold found someone somewhere who would hold him and talk to him. But I doubt it. That story is a picture of one of the hells we make for one another.
Thank you again. It’s a fantastic short story about so many unhelpful (even poisonous) ways to react. Much to be learned, in addition to the poignant and lovely writing.
Now that I have a child of my own I feel that I have a better understanding of how stressed out my parents were. (And how bereft they were of modern psychological conceptions.) I find myself in some weird kind of communion with their long-departed selves, grateful for the things I have learned from them, which in large measure is how to not treat my son. Which is not a small package of grace. I am glad to be a part of breaking the negative cycle in every possible way, large or small.
Yes.
to misquote the robbers in the chicken coop, "there's no one here but us wrong ones."
Ain't nothing different you could have done. You know your dad was so overwhelmed by his own pain that he was not capable of thinking of you. But what a good laugh you would have with him if you could show him his oopsie of not waiting for your letter. You two would just hug and laugh about that I bet. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Long time ago. We live through many an oopsie. A laugh every now and then is good!
I don't quite accept that "No story is changing anything now." I have a friend, a fiction writer, who's been in Kyiv teaching the past year. Last week she told me that she hasn't been able to read anything lately, can't focus, can't get words to make sense -- except for one thing: Carolyn Forche's memoir What You Have Heard is True. She said Forche's story of the confusing build up to a confusing war was like a life jacket right now.
We have no idea how many specific stories are consoling or giving courage to or providing tenacious companionship for countless individuals at this very moment. And while that may not change Russian politics, it might well be making an even more essential difference.
I take that one back! I was feeling down. :)
We know. Buck up, George! We’re here for you.
Thank you for talking about Ukraine before carrying on with "The Stone Boy". Your words resonated with me.
What also resonated was describing the tragedy of the story being one of timing. Stories that are satisfying for me are often where the mistiming - the missed opportunities for connection and understanding - are believable and leave you asking the "if only so and so had only said such and such at the right time" kind of questions, and the thoughts of "Imagine if this character was a different kind of person."
And these questions are maybe answered because the characters cannot do what you the reader want them to do to avoid pain because they are who they are. And that's the beauty and the tragedy of it.
For some reason while thinking about this I keep going back to what the writer Rob Bass said about his screenplay for Rain Man. It was something along the lines of how he discovered that the movie was about the human need to connect and how difficult and yet how vital that is. I feel that about "The Stone Boy".
Thanks for this, Paul.
Hi Paul: This is a big leap from "The Stone Boy," but I have always been haunted by Kenzu Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day." How the protagonist, Mr. Stevens, has the chance, finally - after so many missed chances - to tell Miss Kenton how he feels/he is in love with her. And in their final meeting (spoiler alert), he can't do it, and how she now knows he will never be capable of saying it. This is the "missed opportunities for connection and understanding" you mention, which echoes EM Forster's "only connect". Arnold is starved from the absence of connection, from anyone - and especially, perhaps, his mother - to be connected to him. Stevens and Miss Kenton will never connect. In both stories we see the missed connections - due to fear, due to timing, due to inattention. One character looks outward for connection; the other misses the signs or remains closed. Of course Stevens/Miss Kenton is a wildly different situation from a boy and his family/mother, but your post really made me think about stories that affect me most, and maybe this is what they have at their core, this yearning: All we want in this world is to be connected. Not to be alone.
Yes - "The Remains of the Day" is a great example of this! Thanks for suggesting it. Something I'm excited to learn is how to write so that these missed connections are believable. They also seem to possibly be a useful tool in providing a level of tension and interest that can carry the story through the middle part of a novel.
It has all the elements of greek tragedy
Thanks, Paul. At another SC member’s suggestion I read another of Gina Berriault’s stories, “Who Can Tell Me Who I Am?” Wow! It’s about human connection, and, as you say, how fragile, how difficult and how vital.
Thank you, Sue. I have her "Women in Their Beds" collection out from the library and will pursue this one.
Thanks Sue. Will add that to my reading list.
I appreciate the suggestion that some characters, the "function fulfillers," don't need full backstories, credible motivations, etc.--this is honestly liberating and feels true. (At a minimum it saves the writer from having to gin up dime-store insights to cover the entire cast of characters: he kicked the puppy because his mother didn't love him; she drove recklessly because she'd been neglected, etc.) The challenge is to know--or realize--where the focus should be...but I do love the acknowledgement that some actions and developments can left alone. Lots to ponder; thank you!
One of the things I’ve realized about functional characters is that IRL we very rarely get to hear strangers’ backstories.
For example, in the early days of the pandemic, I was out for a jog with a mask around my neck. If I came close to people, I slipped it on and gave them a wide berth. I was lucky to live in an area where most of the people I saw took masking seriously, but there were occasional people who didn’t. I didn’t think much about them. Until one day, someone saw me mask up while jogging, locked eyes with me, and started coughing in my direction. As I went around him, turned around to keep coughing on me. I never saw him again. We’ve never spoken so much as a word to each other. But it was a moment I kept thinking about as the pandemic deepened and other people started to have reactions to it and each other’s reactions. Maybe he thought I thought he was gross and germy, or maybe he just had a coughing fit and was staring at a booger on my mask or something, and the timing of everything just lent to my negative impression of him. IDK, but I doubt it.
But in the story of my life, he’s a functional character, in that he changed what I believed about people and what they would do in times of global trouble. Maybe I should have known better—global warming, etc—but having it happen so directly was different than reading about it.
Me too, Kristin. There is something very satisfying and right and "true", not to go too Hemingway, in a character that fulfulls a function with little, if any, backstory, and yet the reader buys, feels like they get that character, as is the case, for me anyway, with Andy and Nora.
I recall an Alice Munro story in which a character dies a horrible death in a saw mill, I think, and the only comment the father makes is something like, He shoulda watched was he was doing, shouldn't he have? For me, it said everything about the father.
Yes, as you and Erin point out--it's a true fact that IRL we encounter people with unknown motives all day long.... (And we ourselves have unknown motives!)