"Inheritance" by Andrew Zhou
1.14.22
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Tomorrow we are reading “The School” by Donald Barthelme. A legend, y’all. So make sure to read it. It’s not a long one, but you will have feelings and thoughts. Sunday’s story is Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph.” These are both required reading!
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I’m grateful to report that I am starting to feel better and my covid tests have all been negative. I’ve been watching The Great on Hulu, which is, well, great, though I liked last season better (maybe because it was new). I love Elle Fanning, and she is wonderful in this one. I also recently watched The Lost Daughter. Y’all, it was so good. I don’t know Dakota Johnson from 50 Shades because I’m not really into that franchise but she was in A Bigger Splash which I enjoyed immensely. She was so good in this. Like, basically unrecognizable. Everyone was good. It was all good. But it was also excruciating to watch. I had to pause several times and come back because there was so much tension.
The ways that we frame motherhood in the United States (and beyond, as this was based on a novel by Elena Ferrante) are toxic. The binary of “good” and “bad” mother fits no one. As someone who was raised by a single mother who was abusive, I know she wasn’t all bad. I know there were good intentions, even if she couldn’t necessarily deliver on those intentions. Even if she hurt me, or damaged me. The ways in which I was damaged as a child stop being her responsibility after a while. And my father, who was practically absent, escapes all the blame, both culturally and within my little world. That’s deeply unfair.
“Inheritance” is a story written by a man which assumes the first-person (close) perspective of a mother. I’m not sure if I liked it. When I finished it, I read it again, and came away with the same feeling. It felt, to me, underdeveloped. Sparse, but also incomplete. This story was suggested by someone on Twitter and I’m glad I included it because I think there’s a lot to be learned here.
I also want to acknowledge that Zhou doesn’t appear to be a professional writer and if he comes across this not be be dismayed by my opinions. Keep writing. The story is good.
There were things I liked about the story. I loved the weaving of themes (hair, horse, parents). Maybe it’s that I wasn’t expecting a story of child abuse, which is what the story was to me. Both from the mother and father. I found myself wanting to reach around the narrow, self-involved POV and into the POV of the child, who clearly knew everything. If this was the effect the writer was hoping to have, it worked.
The language itself is passive. Hands and inanimate objects have agency. The narrator is passive, but not. She steals hair from dead bodies yet is unable to move when her husband forces their child to touch his father’s corpse in an open casket. And there’s no reflection on this, only a sense of aggression the reader can glean from the narrator’s actions. The narrator reflects on so many other things, but not on what it felt like to see that? Instead, she takes her daughter to a park and plays hide-and-seek. Her daughter is scared, but the reader can only guess why. She’s dragging her daughter, and again, we’re not quite sure why. The reader can only guess at what is happening. This is how a lot of short stories end, but here it feels like an easy way out, because it’s incongruent with the rest of the text.
Why, in the last scene, have we lost the previously established interiority? Because what the narrator is doing doesn’t make sense. Her character has shifted throughout the story without explanation, and the writer hasn’t made space for that, so in the last scene there must be silence. Our characters don’t always know what they’re doing, but a writer must always know why a character is doing what they’re doing. In this instance, it feels like the writer doesn’t know, and therefore zips their lips and hopes it will be good enough. I only know this because as a writer I have done this.
Every story gives us the gift of learning more about stories, and I am grateful for this one for that reason. I also always want to make this clear: my opinions are just opinions. They’re not facts. As we all know.
What did you think?