Endings and Openings

Here Ed and I pick back up in our conversation of Falco's short stories, talking about the endings of his stories and the openings of them, particularly the very first sentences.

Scott: Another thing that I like about Falco is his skill in just plain storytelling. He really knows how to work a plot and, maybe most importantly, his endings are usually very satisfying.

Ed: I agree. We discussed "The Revenant" earlier and that ending really worked for me. My feeling about an ending of a story is that it should finalize what has been developed along the way but that it should also raise some kind of question. That's an interesting thing about short stories, you have a character that's going to exist for maybe 10-30 pages and if the character's to have any kind of dimension or life, I think that what happens after the story is as important as what happens during the story. What do you think?

Scott: Yeah, I agree. The ending is a big challenge. A lot of writers, they write a real nice story where the characters are interesting and the plot is nice and everything's working, and then the ending is like this chance for them, like you got me this far, now make the story your own. And that's hard, especially if, like Falco, you're working in realism, it's hard to keep finding interesting plots and new ways to finish them. I think in this collection, Falco is working some territory that's been worked before, but I think he's finding fresh ways to approach the material.

Speaking of endings, one of the stories I enjoyed was "Smugglers," and I bring it up in the context of endings because this story sort of doesn't have one. To summarize, it's these two young adult kids and they're off in England. So there's a young man who's the protagonist and he's with his girlfriend in this motel-type place, and basically they're going to swallow some condoms filled with cocaine and smuggle it into France. It's the girlfriend's idea, she's done this many times before, and you get a sense that the protagonist feels like he needs to do this in order to impress her, but also to prove something to himself as well. So the meat of the story is really him making this decision to smuggle the drugs. And the thing is that even though the story makes the trip to France sound very dangerous--the condom could rip in his stomach and kill him, they might get stopped at the border--even though this sounds like a very tense situation, and you really want to know if they're going to make it, we never actually see it. Falco ends the story before they even board the plane.

Ed: Right, like a lot of the other stories, for instance, "Instruments of Piece" that we were discussing earlier, it's about the decision.

Scott: Exactly. Despite the fact that this part of the plot doesn't come through, it's really about the decision, and so the story works, it's satisfying.

Ed: I think Falco works best when he's exposing these dilemmas, these levels of choices. He goes ahead and leads you along and sets up the atmosphere and then about three pages in he starts to kick in what the characters need and the motivation. Very often he sets the scene first and it's a very vivid depiction. It's something that's interesting, that he's as concerned about the atmosphere as he is about the characters and plotting.

Scott: That's a good point. He does like to throw you into a very real environment right at the beginning. When I interviewed him he as talking about this Frank O'Connor short story that he really likes, and he said that no matter how many times he's read it--and he's read it a lot--he's never failed to be taken in by the plot. And that's something about Falco's stories, they really grab you and get you ensnared in the world and the plot. Damned if he doesn't have everything set right in the first paragraph, which is something that's hard to do, but he does it well.

Ed: There's something that's very blunt about his first sentences that's very interesting. Like in "Tulsa Snow: he writes "She said you have no character, I see right through you." The early beginnings of these stories really jab you in.

Scott: Yeah, it's something that's very bold. He's not afraid to be blunt, he's not afraid to toss you right in. I like it, especially because there are a lot of authors that I think would consider that sort of vulgar, to be so concerned with plot and grabbing you from that first instant. They would think it's below them to be so concerned with these things. But Falco recognizes that importance of these strong openings and what they can do for a story. And it works. When I read it, I don't feel like Falco is straining.

Ed: It's an interesting combination, because these openings can be blunt, but there it coexists with this Cheeveresque very classy kind of stylistic kind of language. For example, here's the opening of "Radon." "In the summer of 1988, when my older sister turned 16 and started dating a 34-year-old Amway salesman, my father discovered we had unacceptable levels of radon trapped in our house." This sentence just sort of takes me back to those great short stories of the 1930s and '40s, but you don't see it so much today. And then right after a very mannered sentence like that, he'll hit you with something blunt that just sends the thing another way.

Scott: Right, and just look how good that sentence was at setting up the situation. You have the year and the season, you know that this character is young with a sister who's getting in over her head with a creepy guy, you have some intimations about the father, and then there's this bit about the radon that you're not quite sure where it's going, but it seems like a major plot point to watch and like something that's going to have some metaphorical resonance at the story goes on. All that in a very succinct, elegant first sentence. It's going to get you involved, get you asking questions right away.

Ed: That's the thing. They read as very mannered, but the level of information is very large, and I'm suggesting that a lot of short story writers working today, there's some kind of stigma against this. Not that there's not value in more convoluted stories--we're big fans of people like David Foster Wallace--but Falco is certainly making the other kind of narrative look very good.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

I think you two had a great freaking conversation last week. You hit on many aspects of Falco's writing that didn't allow me much time in between readings of the seperate stories in this collection: great first sentences, or opening paragraphs to suck you in; good, solid, if not even better, finishes, making me want to move on to the next story; and the idea that Falco is mining territory that has already given up quite a bit of coal, yet finds ways to keep the reader interested.

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Nice dialogue you two had! I got overwhelmed after reading it;)
Nice, very nice!