David Long’s story “Oubliette” appears in the current issue of the New Yorker. His prose style is so lucid, so devoid of vernacular cant and style that screams style that’s it’s a pleasure to read. After a few paragraphs, I started to relax into a mode of disinterested contemplation, the ideal state in which to appreciate a work of art. It didn’t last. I went all class war. But that’s just how I took it. Your own reading, which I would strongly encourage, would yield a different reading, a different story.
This is an only child story where the child, Nathalie, is forced to choose which parent she is going to back. That’s my way of putting it. From the perspective of the Chilcott family, it looks like Nathalie has no choice. There’s always a choice. But you can understand that a child might not realize that. I speak from experience.
David Long makes it obvious from the start that Nathalie only belongs to one parent, Peter, her father. She strongly resembles him, with stone gray eyes protruding. I felt a chill at those stone gray eyes. How can a mother cope with a husband and a daughter whose eyes are compared to stone?
Peter even tells his daughter: “You’re like me.” If you ever hear that expression addressed to yourself, watch out. Peter is a distinguished documentary filmmaker. He’s won an Oscar and an Emmy and has been compared favorably to Frederick Wiseman. I loved that touch, DL comparing his fictional film artist to a real master filmmaker. Nathalie also thinks in film terms. When her mother locks her in the attic, instead of imagining she’s a victim, she tries to visualize the film she would make out of the incident. Truly her father’s daughter!
Having established that Nathalie is daddy’s little girl, our shrewd writer then seems to counter this conception with evidence that Nathalie has had an ideal early childhood with her mother. Hadn’t she…this is an almost Wallace Stevens’ turn of rhetoric…hadn’t she done thus and so: a great idyllic set piece follows with mother scooping her daughter up for the beach, going out for treats and enjoying being home alone with mom. Long even throws in a reference to animal crackers, which is divine.
This is just a feint. We segue to her mother telling Nathalie about bolting from the foster homes she had been raised in. We’ve also had the observation that Nathalie would never possess her mother’s dark talents. What are these? Blatant prettiness, thirst for glamour, for self-decoration and paranoia applied to her girlfriends.
The disapprobation of Nathalie’s mother is relentless. Peter met his wife when she was a waitress in a chowder house that he frequented. Peter says she used her “wiles” on him. She put her “whammy” on him. Why can’t he just say he loved her? Can’t guys do that?
She may have taken him for her ticket into blue-blood New England. It’s put that way in the story. She has vulgarian girl friends who smoke incessantly and plop down for extended stays. And the Chilcot’s don’t have any friends as a couple. They each keep to their own.
It turns out that Nathalie’s mother has Huntington’s, a degenerative disease that helps to explain her increasingly boorish behavior. But Huntington’s is a genetic defect. You can’t catch it, it’s inherited. So, even in this case, it all comes down to a question of lineage.
David Long does a superb job of pacing out his story, as if he were conveying the sense that gold dust was pouring through an hourglass. We are left to wonder what Nathalie is going to remember about her mother as time goes on, the remembrance of parents being a very important question. I felt a sort of quiet terror that Nathalie and her father would conspire to nullify their working class family member out of existence. But perhaps not.
The New England place settings for Oubliette are secure to the point of being reassuring. It’s as if New England were like a comfortable pair of old slippers that you loved to put on. The word Oubliette derives from old middle French for forgetting, which is an apt reference. But that’s not what the word means now.
sounds like the reviewer read a different story than i did– he’s touchy about the daughter favoring one parent– most children do have a favorite, even later. he seems to have wanted david long to have written a different story, with faultless characters who were perfectly rational, saw no class distinctions– but there’s no story there. myself, especially with huntingtons disease in my family and knowing how one’s relative gradually becomes someone else, someone whose personality changes as the disease invades their very being, i thought the story very successfully showed how she only had memories of when her mother was very good to her, had a contentious relationship with her as she became more ill, and later on, after her demise, was left with mixed feelings, like we all are. why shouldn’t peter, her father, say the mother put her ‘wiles’ on him– we’re not trying to create a perfect person here, we’re talking about a person in a story– a human being, with all the foibles. silly review, more a reflection of the reviewer’s own agenda and issues, than anything else. good characters in this story, well drawn, an evocative mood, nicely paced.
Did I want a story with faultless characters? Of course not, that would be no story at all. You seem to feel defensive about my observations of any of the characters. But it’s what I noticed that makes them characters at all.
So I saw a story where you didn’t see a story and vice versa. I find that very interesting.
I have a close family member who died after a horrific struggle with cancer. The despair and tragedy of that situation is not possible for me to express. But I think we would disagree about what form an interesting story about that experience would take.
To me the story was about the mother who didn’t fit into this family, and that alienation was present before any pathology was evident. The appearance of Huntington’s only intensified and symbolized the emotional and spiritual isolation that was already there. A passage I didn’t sight in my review said that the daughter and mother pretended to love each other, that it was a social performance. But that’s not a fault of the story. That’s a virtue of the story as a story. It helps make it interesting.
But I agree that your comments were thoughtful and stimulating and I greatly appreciate them. Please come back to the blog sometime. It’s “Three” Guys so you don’t have to read my stuff if you don’t like it.
I’m late to this review and to the comments, but I just want to add that DH’s review was thoughtful and ultimately a tribute to the story and its author. Different readings, responses and interpretations speak to the complexity of the story.
I just want to add that I read the daughter as coming to the realization (after her mother’s death) that she always loved her mother and vice versa; and that the daughter would now be devoted to the profundity of their relationship–probably in an artistic way–as a result, through her allegiance to memory.