Wow -- I just read the story and am blown away (and, er, glad that I didn't read it when it was posted, no offense!). I understand your concerns, though I think you do a better job of handling these issues than you give yourself credit for, truly. (Remember that study that showed, iirc, that people who are mediocre at things tend to think they're really good at them, while people who are really good tend to think they're mediocre?)
I came away from it with the feeling (which I'm pretty sure you intended) that each of the three men is experiencing what's going on in a way that is intensely private, that can't be shared or perhaps even understood by the others; your stories often seem to argue that full communication is impossible, that we can only ever approach one another -- and sometimes come very close indeed, as witness Kowalski and Fraser in the bed together -- but never touch; or if we do touch, we can't maintain the contact for long. Even that scene of them in the bed, we experience it through Vecchio, who is isolated from it, alien to it: "he was on the outside, just hearing the sounds," which aren't even language at all, to him. He sees them as together, "one single big lump," but we don't know whether Kowalski and Fraser themselves feel that way, in that moment.
I'm not sure how to interpret Vecchio's realization at the end, that he'd carried an imagined Fraser in his head all those years and will continue to do so through all the years to come, in the light of the passage early on in which he realizes that the imagined Kowalski he'd similarly carried around was ludicrously wrong, inaccurate. Can his Fraser-construct be truer, can it have been truer, than his Kowalski-construct? If it is helpful, leading him "to his beautiful wife and his clean white house on the water and his good life," does its truth or falsity matter? And since he'll probably never see either Fraser or Kowalski again, he'll never even know if his imaginings are true or false.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-18 05:38 pm (UTC)I came away from it with the feeling (which I'm pretty sure you intended) that each of the three men is experiencing what's going on in a way that is intensely private, that can't be shared or perhaps even understood by the others; your stories often seem to argue that full communication is impossible, that we can only ever approach one another -- and sometimes come very close indeed, as witness Kowalski and Fraser in the bed together -- but never touch; or if we do touch, we can't maintain the contact for long. Even that scene of them in the bed, we experience it through Vecchio, who is isolated from it, alien to it: "he was on the outside, just hearing the sounds," which aren't even language at all, to him. He sees them as together, "one single big lump," but we don't know whether Kowalski and Fraser themselves feel that way, in that moment.
I'm not sure how to interpret Vecchio's realization at the end, that he'd carried an imagined Fraser in his head all those years and will continue to do so through all the years to come, in the light of the passage early on in which he realizes that the imagined Kowalski he'd similarly carried around was ludicrously wrong, inaccurate. Can his Fraser-construct be truer, can it have been truer, than his Kowalski-construct? If it is helpful, leading him "to his beautiful wife and his clean white house on the water and his good life," does its truth or falsity matter? And since he'll probably never see either Fraser or Kowalski again, he'll never even know if his imaginings are true or false.