First story: "The Lady with the Dog," Anton Chekhov.

This story follows a weirdly misogynistic character named Gurov as he has a short-lived affair with a much younger woman, then finds himself in obsession and finally ends up seeing her again. Um, I have to say, this kind of our-lives-are-horrible-look-how-terrible-it-all-is thing just doesn't really do it for me. He hates his wife, he hates his life; he's been having affairs and finally he has one that doesn't end, and he gets .... dependent? .... on her. Not really what I care to read about.

There were elements of the story I really liked--frex, the fact that he sits back and thinks about how he's not really a catch himself, and while she's younger she's also not anything truly special, but somehow together they work. That was a good moment, I thought, and it seemed more true to me than this sad little man having an affair without apparent consideration for anybody else.

Also, the woman he was having an affair with was rather ineffectual. She reminded me of a lot of female protagonists from that era: just sits around reacting to things, calling herself dirty for having this affair but still doing it, acting as nothing but a focus for Gurov's desires.

According to this photocopy, this story (paired with the next) was an example of Plot, and that highlights the difference in reading plot-centered sf stories and plot-centered mimetic fiction. Sf plots are often either full of action or full of intrigue, but this story was a couple of bland characters stumbling on a not very interesting path. To me, anyway.

The second story, its pair, was Joyce Carol Oates' "The Lady with the Pet Dog." It's the same story, told from the woman's point of view, and a lot of it is the same sort of static feel: not much changes for these characters, and I'm not sure what we're supposed to feel as readers. I did find it fascinating that in this case only the woman is named, none of the other characters; and she is not named until her lover says it, a third of the way through the story. Anna changed by the end, but I wasn't sure how. This is a problem I've had with Oates before--I can tell she's going for some kind of emotional mood, but I just can't get there myself. Obviously it works for other people though. Hm.

The woman's husband was a real character here, more defined even than the lover, and I appreciated that. Oates' version actually deals a bit with how the two lives contrast, rather than treating one as the interesting point and the other as backstory to create conflict. I'm still not sure what was going on with the repeated "Did I hurt you?" after they'd had sex. Well, of course, it shows that the two of them don't work together well, shows how disconnected they are; I get the metaphor, I guess, but not the reality of it; does anyone actually say that? More to the point, would he worry about it every time?

It's hard for me to tell which of the two I liked better. I didn't like either of them very much, really. I "got" the Chekhov piece a little better, but his sentence-level stuff irritated me; Oates writes lovely prose, I just flow with her sentences, but I can never make a whole out of them. I'm guessing this is because the stories are plot-driven. I've been told I'm excellent at writing characters but it's a blind spot for me--I can't tell that I'm doing it, I don't notice it in others--but I guess, after reading this piece, that this is because it's something so basic to me that I don't even recognize I'm doing it. (Rather like teaching a friend to play euchre last night--we totally forgot to mention that we were playing with partners! Whoops.) So stories like these two, which put the sequence of events first and create characters to follow it, to change because of it, don't really work for me.

But of course this means I loved the other two stories that much more: they were both about character.

The first was Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." It's about a working-class Pittsburgh boy who feels like he really belongs among the elite--beyond what most people dream. He doesn't feel alive unless he's surrounded by the rich or the artistic. He ushers at Carnegie Hall and hangs out with a local theatre group. He acts the part of one who considers himself above those around him--believing it on a certain level, and on another level not even believing he is there himself. He's consumed by his need to be somewhere else, somewhere where he can be surrounded by color and music all the time. Even on his working-class street, the only thing that gives him any pleasure is his neighbors' stories of the iron magnates they work for. When he at last gets away (by stealing money from his job and living for eight days as one of the rich in New York City), he files away every moment, every experience--and when it's going to come to an end, he kills himself by jumping in front of a train.

What makes this story especially poignant is the fact that his home life is not that bad. It's working-class, sure, or maybe a little higher, but his family truly cares about him; the people who do not like him feel that way because he's deliberately alienated them. It is his own mindset that makes the world so oppressive--he can't deal with anything except exactly what he wants.

Also, most stories would end with his jump. This one's notable, first because he decides not to shoot himself and we think he's been saved; second because it actually follows him as he dies, describes what he might be feeling at impact.

I also wonder what it means that he goes back towards Pennsylvania to kill himself.

The final story is "Among the Mourners," by Ellen Gilchrist. It's about a thirteen-year-old girl whose father is head of the English department at an Arkansas university; one of the poets whom her father knew kills himself, and they have the wake and funeral at her house. Normally I prefer some sort of character change, but this is just a vignette following a precocious girl as she deals with Weirdness. Coming from an academic setting, I could sympathize with a lot of what was going on in the story. She's dating a boy--at first it's good that he's short (so she doesn't have to cheer for him at football games), later, after they've broken up, this is a detriment--but seems to adore his mother even more than him. They share a brief awkward groping session, and split up afterwards--Aurora remains unsure why.

The best thing about this story, for me, was the voice--very distinctive, very no-nonsense. I'm not sure it felt entirely 13-year-old-girlish to me, but I enjoyed it. She uses "to tell the truth" a lot, just often enough that it sounds like a real quirk of speech and not like a handle for the author to pound home I Am Writing In Somebody Else's Voice. At one point, as her boyfriend requests that she spend the night in the guest room at his house so she can sleep (the mourners in the house have been impeding that), Aurora says, "I'm an insomniac anyway...but that's okay, I can take it another night." Later, after her parents decide to let Aurora's sister repeat first grade rather than forcing her to take summer school, Aurora comments, "This is very advanced behavior for academics and everyone was congratulating them on it when they were getting in their cars and leaving." Hysterical.

So all in all I enjoyed the Gilchrist story but I think "Paul's Case" was better--and the one I'd be most likely to reread. But I enjoyed both of these fields more than I did the two Lady&Dog stories.