At least it's not a LIVE fish museum

I finished The Dead Fish Museum yesterday, on the plane back from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop (which, by the way, was inspiring and encouraging and absolutely worth the money). One of the unexpected things about the book was how it ended up making me an even bigger proponent of re-reading than I already was; I had read two of the stories before (“Screenwriter” and “The Scheme of Things”) and was tempted to skip over them in favor of the ones that were new to me, but I’m very glad I didn’t. Even though I remembered a fair amount of the plot details of each story, the undertones and subtleties they took on this time around were definitely richer than if I had only read them once. Being a fairly impatient person with a better-than-average memory for literature, I always think that I have captured the essence of stories and books the first time through, but this experience was a nice little reminder of how important re-reading can be. Especially when you’re dealing with short stories.

I also didn’t realize until this week how affected I am by actually hearing a writer read his or her own work aloud. There’s something about the spoken voice and the peculiarities of inflection that each person has that, once internalized by a listener, can really enhance the listener’s subsequent reading of the writer’s work. All of a sudden, the words on the page come to life, and you can hear the story the way it most likely sounded in the author’s head. So, hearing Charles D’Ambrosio read this week was really a gift in terms of my reading of The Dead Fish Museum. He read the first half of the title story at Tin House (which I hadn’t yet gotten to at that point in the week), so going back and reading over it later was fascinating. His voice is sort of gravelly and constantly ironic – he actually reminded me (vocally) of Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

But anyway.

I think a lot of the stories are about people who have trouble communicating or connecting with others, and perhaps that’s why he chose the title that he did. “The dead fish museum” is what Rigo’s El Salvadorian wife calls the refrigerator, in her struggle to understand how to use the English language. This is, obviously, a fairly major glitch in communication; however, it ends up sort of communicating more fully the truth of the matter, which is not about a refrigerator at all. It is, instead, a revelation of the isolation and fear and strange un-settledness that lurks within every one of us, and can only really be expressed through a woman who has literally been uprooted and thrown into a brand new world with different rules than she’s ever played by before. People in D’Ambrosio’s stories are always finding themselves strangers in the world, which is perhaps phrased most eloquently by Tony in the story “Blessing.” Looking through old photographs of a father he never really knew, Tony says,

When I look at the photographs – old black-and-whites, with deckle edges and the date printed along the bottom border – I understand that my father was topping off the tank of his car at a filling station (in Tucson, my mother says) and I see that he was, apparently, quite a handsome man. My mother stands beside him, wearing a neat white scarf and squinting into the harsh sun, but other than that, the photo yields nothing in the way of memories, nothing I might attach myself to, and my perspective on the scene, those rare, bemused times when I open the box and linger over its contents, is that of the anonymous young man who, strolling down a sidewalk sometime in AUG 1961, was stopped by a young couple, handed a camera, and asked to press the button – a stranger on his way elsewhere.

Though Tony certainly possesses formidable skills of self-analysis, he seems not to process the fact that this feeling he has of being a stranger to his parents’ marriage and, in a way, to the entire concept of family, goes beyond just his particular relationship with his parents and bleeds into all aspects of his life. In fact, this role of “stranger on the street” is the same exact position he finds himself in at the end of the story, as he takes a Poloroid picture of his wife and her immediate family “singing the words to a song I’d never learned.”

This motif surfaces again and again in D’Ambrosio’s stories, often revolving around the concept of estrangement from a family: I’m thinking specifically of the fatherless boys in “The High Divide” and “The Bone Game,” as well as the practically son-less father in “Drummond & Son.”

There is also a hint throughout of the struggle that many writers face in their profession – the feeling of impotence in the face of dynamic issues occurring off the page, the deep-seated apprehension that perhaps writing is their only way of escaping from the world, that they are writers because they are not strong enough to face certain problems without the mediation of language, the screen of typeset to hide behind. Poor, indifferent Tony acknowledges that he has no ambition, saying

My ideal life is a quiet one. I like to read, to sit still in the same chair, with the lampshade at a certain angle, along, or with Meagan nearby, and now and then, if I’m lucky, I’ll come across a lovely phrase or fine sentiment, look up from my book, and feel the harmony of some notion, the justice of it, and know that everything is there. That’s life to me, those privately discovered moments.

Well, that’s great, Tony, but what happens when things actually occur in the real world? Sitting in your chair and reading something beautiful isn’t going to fix your relationship with your wife’s father, or address the alienation that is eroding your life, just as the flood waters from the river erode the banks near your house. And then there is this delightful gem, from Rigo in “The Dead Fish Museum”:

“You are not at the bar,” he said. Without the past tense he could only protest pointlessly against the present; his eyes shifted, staring into the room.

And by breaking the encounter down into a diagrammed sentence, Ramage himself (the narrator of the story) turns a confrontation of his unreliability and tendency to distance himself from those around him into a grammar lesson – again using language as an avoidance tactic.

I don’t think D’Ambrosio really needs to worry that he himself is falling into that trap, though. If he keeps producing stories as insightful and lovely as these, his words may indeed have currency in the world outside the page.