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Calamity and Other Stories: Daphine Kalotay
Kalotay, Daphine.
Calamity and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday. 193 pages. Postmodern
storytelling (perhaps an oxymoron) has led to the rise of The Lack of
Resolution: since there is no resolved truth, nothing is ever
“finished.” Recently, I viewed
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
a movie that succeeds in its own deconstructed way until the ending,
which seemed contrived, out of character in every way, with a sense
that “time is up.” Here, the resolution didn’t jibe because we know
that these characters’ conflicts are hardly ‘over’ and need mutual
caretaking—community—to be resolved. A lack of sufficient character development also attenuates Daphine Kalotay’s well-regarded
Calamity and Other Stories,
a collection of contemporary tales that seem affected by media
storytelling, both structurally and thematically. Strong in plot and
weak in resolution, Kalotay’s stories feature characters who flit in
and out, either featured or ‘along for the ride.’ Kalotay possesses a
sufficient knowledge of the characters’ world to present a
sophisticated point of view and an authentic voice. However, unlike the
movie and its forced resolution, her tales lack any sense of actual
resolution, and she writes a few of the stories as if she were feeding
off of others’ circular, ‘out-of-the-blue’ development in a writing
group exercise, even if we have been introduced to the characters
previously. While a kind of dignity exists where the
author allows her characters to secretly possess the meaning of an
experience, if the reader isn’t in cahoots with the author, or if
enough ‘clues’ aren’t given, then a story fends better being placed
online where someone can invent the ending of choice, a sort of
Wikaliteraria. In addition, the stories reflect current
media aphorisms, such as the outcast is the wisest of all and the world
is defined and salvaged by women. Reading
Calamity, the
overwhelming feeling I had was that two kinds of people in these
stories possessed understanding that was implied or supposed, and I
wasn’t to be privy to it. Those people were: male outcasts sympathetic
to women, and women. The implication, to me, is clear: I won’t
understand because I am (a) not an outcast and (b) not a woman. Unlike
the movie, which plainly wants the viewer to put the puzzle of the
alleged plot together, these fictional renditions seemed to create an
uneasy distance between author and reader, with the author drawing a
gender-determined, epistemological line to step over. One could suggest
that the overall theme reflects a broad, self-centered existence
characteristic of modern young professionals; however, the book’s
double-barreled iconoclasm involving older women and isolated males
suggests otherwise. While this approach invites
psychoanalytic reading, it fizzles because the point of view changes
from one narcissistic angle to another, where emotional connections
between people are as fleeting and temporal as the weather. With the
exception of loners whose worth is determined by sympathetic women, men
don’t fare well in these stories, another particular convention of
modern media that surfaces time and again in current literary and
performance art: a feeling that guys are, ultimately,
testosterone-driven, stupid, or lame. Unless, of course, the woman can
tolerate or valuate them. Right off, in “Seranade,”
Kalotay corrals a desperate housewife, her husband, a group of friends,
and a solitary piano teacher into a disenchanted social gathering that
leads to a drunken buss between two women—and the musician’s total
understanding of its “beauty”—as the two younger girls, Rhea and
Callie, watch. While it is proper for Kalotay to grant the title of
avatar to whomever she pleases, in this case, as well as others, her
iconoclastic choice is the improbable facet, a feature good enough to
invite rave review. However, upon further reading, what is ironic
becomes implausible and renders an existential sterility to possibly
intriguing, naturalistic, circumstances. Two early
stories in particular suffer from this elemental malaise. In “A Brand
New You,” a woman reunites with a former husband, who is apparently
comfortable with bedding his once-wife. An almost stereotypical irony
occurs; she finds him interesting again, merely because the distance of
time and space has briefly negated the fatal realities of their
marriage outside of their coupling, which was the only thing worth
remembering. He has no plans to stay; in the end, the woman decides to
“create a memory” based on her seemingly revelatory idea that he,
indeed, will continue to be far away. No other obvious reason exists,
unless one is supposed to lean on a populist theory that women just
can’t make up their minds about men. And then in “All Life’s Grandeur,”
an adolescent boy’s introduction to unexpected sophistication by a
spindly 11-year-old girl (foreshadowed by a reading of Robert Lowell
poetry) is a bit too obvious a play on our modern notion of
boy-meets-girl and feeds a faux-feminist perception that runs rampant
throughout the book, a kind of Sympathy for the Outcast that emerges,
depending on one’s viewpoint, either as a virtue of the author or a
misguided romanticism. In “Prom Season,” a French
teacher who is respected for her ability to not teach French is able to
command young men to invite young ladies to the prom as a “duty.” The
young people feel respected “as adults” because their natural feelings
about (not) learning are requited by the teacher’s lack of academic
resolve—she’s more into the “person” than the “student.” She’s cool, so
cool that she is able to place in front of her Fourth Year French class
the collective guilt of having to care about the school’s Official
Loser, who had ‘mistakenly’ asked several very worthy young ladies to
the prom, only to face certain doom. The story’s protagonist, a bright
but lazy senior, discovers that the ultimate answer to the manufactured
dilemma was unexpectedly attached to his ego. That’s fair enough, but
the story evolves into another, now conventional ending, where the
outcast is happier and wiser than the protagonist and the woman rises
above all. Both of those themes occur simultaneously in
the title story, where Rhea, now a nihilistic English professor in her
30’s, is forced to share a troubled flight to Boston with an older,
larger woman who is presented in stereotype, without any apparent
nuances—just the way the author intends to separate old from young. The
younger woman hates herself for her professional decisions, her failed
engagement, and her pessimistic inclination to rationalize questionable
actions because of “the threat of calamity.” But, in the vain manner of
the narcissistic, she throws that self-hate upon the unfortunate woman,
Gaylord, whose only vice is age and of whom the younger Rhea knows
better: Young people pretended
that the world was better than it had once been, because that was what
should be true. Older women could state the actual reality—the
limitations and injustices that prevailed—because they had grown up in
a world where these things were said outright. (166-167) As
the troubled plane heads toward a planned emergency landing, Rhea opens
up to the other woman, whose own untold stories possess more heft but
have left less psychic residue than Rhea’s self-inflicted stories of
angst. Afterward: Rhea opened her little notebook again and wrote, “Old women are good for the facts.” (167) But
does Rhea actually appreciate the difference between her experience and
Gaylord’s? “Calamity” closes with Rhea’s forced loss of her inscribed,
superficial, wisdom that the other woman personifies by merely being
her experienced self. An old-fashioned screenwriter who
is not afraid of resolution, Rod Serling perhaps, would have done
wonders with such a situation, finding a way to provide the younger
woman with an epiphany that would transform her thinking, if not her
life. But Kalotay seems determined to let her characters float in a sea
of ambivalence save for the crucial gender factor that, in her
presentations, lifts even the clueless into a realm of glory. So,
the best I can say about these stories is that Kalotay’s invasions
trump her exit strategies. As Rhea, the protagonist of the title story,
writes in her notebook, “Hypothetical life is always better,”
especially if one is not obligated to resolve anything. |
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| ~ Jeff Cebulski |
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Date of Publication: 20 May 2007 |
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