When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “610 North, 610 West” by Bryan Washington, (published online in LitHub; first published in Tin House [RIP]), we meet a young man who is coming to terms with the disruption of his family caused by his father stepping out on his mother with a new woman. The father leaves, then returns for a bit, then slowly fades away for good, taking bits and pieces of the family with him as he goes. And through it all, the children plod forward, making minor adjustments to their baseline as the father continues to roil the family. In the climax, the father brings our narrator to meet the other woman, and we see that the father has been ingratiating himself in her life just as he’s been sliding out of the narrator’s mother’s, as evidenced by a picture of the narrator that has lifted from his house and found its way to this woman’s. As they leave her house, his father tells the narrator, “Either way, it’s all right,” and leaves it there, nothing more to be said. They return home, and that is the one and only time the narrator sees the woman.
The Basics
This story is written in first-person point of view, from the perspective of a peripheral character observing the large events of the story (as opposed to a classic protagonist), utilizing a narrator reflecting back upon the age he was in the story. First reflective is a malleable POV, in that it allows a narrator to exist almost in two places at once: They are both the older self looking back and the child experiencing the situation. Our narrator is unnamed, biracial, and eventually we learn that he is gay, and that’s about as far as we get into character detail—everything else we learn about our narrator is through the necessities of situation. On the plot level, we’re treading familiar ground: The cheating father and the mother who stays too long seen through the lens of the son stepping into adulthood is a common enough conceit. Where this ultimately lands is intentionally a bit uncertain: The dad “was packing himself from our lives,” and eventually it “was finally just Ma and me,” but in regards to the woman, “I would not see her again and my father would not go back.” The timeline is similarly spartanly opaque: We start with “For a while,” move to “Nowadays,” discuss “Most weekends,” as the openings to our first three sections. At some point, a month passes, but a month from no specified starting point. We’re in this slippery sort of always-and-never time throughout the entirety of the piece, anchored in a past that isn’t defined, looking at a slice of life for which we don’t know the parameters, seen from a distanced point of view on which we can put no clear certainty.
All told, then, this is a story that is spare in its build of character and plot, that is almost freewheeling in its use of POV and time. All of these technical choices contribute to a fascinating conundrum that exists within much of Washington’s work, and certainly within this piece: The slippery use of technique invites the reader to immerse themselves into the narrator while at the same time the specificity of place and voice and language holds tightly to the distinctiveness of these same characters. How does he pull that off?
A lived-in world
First and foremost, this world feels immediately lived-in, and there’s a good reason for that. Both of the essential levels of settings are introduced to the story immediately: Geographically, the Heights, a Houston neighborhood, is namedropped in the opening sentence, and scene details from the family restaurant take up much of the second paragraph. Though they’re introduced early, Washington doesn’t actually state either place for a few more paragraphs (because the narrator knows the Heights is in Houston, and that they’re in a restaurant). When Houston shows up, it is known organically, and fully: “Ma and I rode through East End, past Wayside, over Main, until we hit 610 headed straight toward Airline.” This continues throughout the story, streets and highways and neighbors mentioned anytime the characters are moving through space. And the restaurant is used similarly, as we get occasional references to things like the fan they’re moving around once the AC goes out, or to sitting at the register—these aren’t pages of description of either type of place (geographical place, like Houston, or physical space, like the restaurant), but quick mentions of clear specifics that denote the places. Young writers, take note. Use this. If you’re writing a story in a specific place, make sure to utilize the markers of that place; if you’re writing a story in a made-up place, make up those types of signifiers in the same way to bring whatever town, country, world you’re writing to life. Occasionally, we overwrite place, get lost in our worldbuilding rules or the exact square footage of a bedroom; too often, we leave these out entirely and construct our stories in blank space.
Washington further fills the space around his characters with tangible details of multiple facets of their lives. Sure, there’s the restaurant, there’s the streets and neighborhoods through which they pass, but there’s also references to food—a Bryan Washington necessity!—and a never-ending stream of language: coarse, or casual, or slang, even untranslated Spanish. The key to all of these details being presented is that the story doesn’t stop to explain them. Catch up, reader, if you can; this is the narrator’s space, and if you don’t know what ackee is—I didn’t—or have to fumble to sound out “pero no tienen lo que estoy buscando”—and just because you can eventually sound it out doesn’t mean you can translate it—well, that’s exactly the point.
Back to the food mentions quickly. This isn’t as relevant to this story as it is to some of his others, but I am firmly convinced that food is Bryan’s secret weapon, and as simple a technique as it may seem—have your characters cook, then eat what they cooked—every young writer should be incorporating this. His characters always have something to do beyond the contrivances of plot, because they are always cooking or eating, and what they’re cooking is something specific to character identity. This isn’t pouring Corn Flakes in a bowl; rather, there’s the aforementioned ackee, there’s “pots of chicken and chorizo and beans on the burners,” both choices which clearly speak to our narrator’s culture without having to sit and say anything explicitly. It gives incredible dynamism and reality to the piece.
Two other technical choices that contribute to this feeling of a fully lived-in world: the section breaks, and the lack of quotation marks. Washington’s section breaks follow a somewhat unique strategy, employing both numbers in a chapter-like format and also dinkuses within the numbered sections to break into even smaller sections. The numbering process plays into the way this story uses time kaleidoscopically, creating heavier breaks between moments than dinkuses are capable of while simultaneously forcing a pattern, and therefore a structure, onto the reading of the story. There is not an exact structure to the dinkuses within numbered sections, but a close look at them does reveal a bit: One section has multiple subsections (number 8, which is the largest, and most important, moment in the story, where we meet the other woman); six sections use the dinkus-within-numbers strategy exactly once (numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 9); and three sections do not have additional section breaks within them (numbers 4, 5, and 10—10 is the obvious outlier, returning to the meeting with the other woman as the father and son head home immediately after, putting us into something like a denouement. The world has been changed, and we’re seeing the new normal, just a quick glimpse into what the world now is. I’m not sure that I have a thesis yet around the other two sections being on their own).
Okay, I got lost in the section breaks, but yes, also we’re not using quotation marks. While not the most common technique, we’ve certainly seen this a fair amount in modern fiction, and we’ve talked about it in these essays a few times. Taking out the quotes has the effect of bleeding dialogue and POV together; since dialogue is the only moment in a story theoretically not controlled by a first-person narrator (the characters are speaking their actual words, almost always), letting those quotes disappear makes the dialogue feel closer to a narratorial thought than a separation from that thought. It also immerses the reader more fully into the world of the story, both because we’re not being spoon-fed who is speaking and when, and also because we have to be reading closely to make sure we’re catching those lines.
The Unsaid and the Unknown
The story often states things without a full explanation in the moment—the Heights mentioned without labeling them in Houston, for example. This is a clear product of using first-person POV; almost by definition, there are going to be things that readers need to catch up on, because a first-person narrator is telling a story that they already know completely, and in which they are entirely enmeshed. Why would this dude think of any other neighborhood called The Heights? Of course he wouldn’t.
Beyond the necessity of POV, Washington uses this drip release of information as something like a voice or stylistic choice of the narrator. He is constantly giving us information in an offhanded way, as if we already know everything he does. This adds to the lived-in feel of the world, and it also builds voice and narratorial authority. It also has the extreme benefit of freeing us from excessive backstory. And, it prepares us for the major technical aspect of the piece: There is no catharsis, no epiphanical moment, no reflection and discovery, no O. Henry-esque twist coming here. We are given information, expected to keep up, to learn and know these people, and that is as far as the story is willing to handhold.
This story has absolutely no interest in explaining its largest moments to us. Not actively, nor even emotionally—often, the characters themselves don’t know how to feel about the choices they’re making, let alone have any ability to explain them. Why did the mother stay with the father, why did the father cheat? There’s no clear answer, because there’s never a clear, easy answer. But those are large questions, and Washington’s just as careful to let his smaller moments play out in uncertainty. When the father brings his son along to meet the other woman, both of them are stunned by the choice, and there is never a moment where we get anything close to a reason for that decision. It does, however, bring us to the closest thesis-statement moment of the story, given interestingly enough to the woman who is not the narrator’s mother: “It’s just one of those things, she said. You know someone as well as you can. And then they say something that surprises you. It catches you off guard.” Pair that with a quote from the final section: “And I didn’t know what that meant. And I didn’t ask him either.”
Washington’s great gift, among a whole lot of talents we’ve discussed here, is in building characters who are just as dumbfounded by the world, just as confused by the bed they’ve made for themselves, as those of us reading his stories. And he’s confident enough in that roiling confusion to let it sit there, uncomfortably poignant even as it refuses perfect clarity.
by Brandon Williams