Freerange Nonfiction

Impossible People Are the Only People Worth Loving

A Review of Ben Greenman’s What He’s Poised to Do

(HarperCollins 2010)

by Nicole Miller

In the opening story of Ben Greenman’s new collection What He’s Poised to Do, a man in a hotel writes a postcard to his wife, dissolving their marriage.  For those readers familiar with the breakup text (or the more mercenary breakup Tweet), the breakup postcard might seem like an anachronism.

But the stories in WHPTD don’t allow their characters the instant gratification of these contemporary forms of social media.  The letter writers in these stories – each of which bears a postmark and is concerned, in some way, with correspondence – are constrained by distance: emotional, spatial, temporal.  In “From the Front,” a father writes to his daughter once a year because, he says, “any more would put me in the ground.”  In “Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” letters are exchanged between Earth and the moon.  These are stories about desire deferred.

I recently heard the poet Suzanne Gardinier discuss a painful period in her life, in which she ended one long-term relationship and subsequently fell in love with “someone impossible.”  The characters in these stories frequently find themselves in the same position: denied the thing they want most, they reach for impossible substitutes.  A woman whose husband has left her begins receiving conciliatory letters from her son – olive branches, she believes, from her ex-husband; a widow begins a doomed affair with her step-son; a poor factory worker, having lost both wife and children to another man, writes daily missives to a woman he’s never met.  On practically every page, someone is chasing an impossible love.

Greenman renders their loss and their longing in sharp, aphoristic prose: “These aren’t wartime conditions,” Sophie said.  “And yet we are not at peace,” her mother said, with the mixture of twinkling irony and dead seriousness that Sophie recognized as a sign of pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous – or, as she preferred to call it, of intelligence.

Greenman churns out these finely wrought insights and delivers them with a comic’s timing.   Occasionally, he botches a punch line, as in the fine story “What We Believe but Cannot Praise.”  The story owes its title to an exchange between two lawyers who are discussing a movie with an assassination plot.  One of the lawyers asks, “What do they call the man they’re trying to assassinate?  The assassinee?”  The second lawyer tells him, “He is the assassination.  That’s the noun for the victim as well as the process.”  He goes on: “It’s a fact,” said Schiff, “though not a pretty one.  What we believe but cannot praise.”

I have to admit, I’m not sure I get it.  Within the context of the story, the exchange between the lawyers feels somewhat forced, as though the passage was written in service of the title – not the other way around.

At other times, Greenman’s tendency toward brevity and wit yields stories that feel slight.  In “Country Life is the Only Life Worth Living; Country Love is the Only Love Worth Giving,” the lusty protagonist pens a note to his “dear wife,” recounting a tryst in the country with his mistress.

When his mistress comments that the luggage is heavy, the man responds: “A less trained observer might have read the expression in her eyes as an appeal to me to relieve her of her burden, but I knew it for what it was – a reminder of what would occur later that afternoon, when we had snugged the bags in the corner of our new home.”

We recognize the man’s refined speech and grotesque moral imagination from a Nabokov novel.  This piece, however, lacks the sting of pathos you’d find in the best of Nabokov’s works.  Here, the irony merely titillates.

By contrast, “What We Believe but Cannot Praise,” unravels slowly and feels less mannered, more earnest.  A middle-aged man returns to his suburban hometown in Florida and revisits the site of a college fling: “The building looked exactly as it had then, but because time had passed and, by passing, shifted nearly everything in me, the sameness of the place was more shocking than any change I could have imagined.”

In revisiting that particular summer – and the girl whose young body he’d once used for “disreputable ends” – the man seeks to reclaim not the love he has lost, but the version of himself that lived through that summer and that now seems to elude him.

Similarly, in “To Kill the Pink,” a young African American man living in Harlem in the 1960s writes to the woman he loves to tell her he’s leaving for Malawi.  In the midst of racial tensions and political unrest, he sets off in the direction of the past – Africa, according to his girlfriend, is “where you came from, the place that created both your problems and your promise” – in search of his future: “I want to be able to be the way I need to be for you, to make you laugh and make you want to laugh some more, and I just don’t see that happening if I stay around here too much longer.”  His letter reaches toward the woman he loves as well as toward the person he hopes to become.

Ultimately, these stories aren’t only about the vast distances separating us from friends and lovers, parents and children.  They’re also about the distance that separates us from ourselves.  The young man in Harlem and the middle-aged one in Florida remind us that the impossible someone is often oneself.