students reading
My students believe
the story we’ve read about
a woman giving birth in prison
convicted of burning her best friend,
her lover’s wife, and her children to ashes,
from a neighborhood renowned for its social misfits,
is more reality than fantasy
that could easily happen
in Thailand.
My students thought
the story difficult to understand
because the writer
used pronouns rather than names
in too many places,
as if the writer’s job
were to placate readers’ expectations
rather than to create
a compelling
experience
an experience that might
include confusion.
My students found
the end of the story to be
unsatisfying
because we don’t know
what will happen
to the mother, to the baby,
except for one girl
who claimed the opposite—
that stories which resolve too neatly
fail to satisfy.
treacly
Peter Ferry was one of Dave Eggers high school teachers and this book bears a strong family resemblance (even though they’re not related). It is essentially a very sentimental and melodramatic story that tries to make those things palatable through a number of rhetorical and narrative trick. Its form is a metafictional fake memoir. Its voice is ironic, cynical, and knowing. It blurs the line between reality and fiction. Its focus is the power and importance of storytelling. With enough of this, even the thickest treacle can slide down smooth.
That said, the book is fun and freewheeling, entirely sincere and heartfelt, and a quick enjoyable read. Art it isn’t. Worth reading if you have a long lazy afternoon to kill, it is.