Bark canoes, yatto-grams, and firing squads

Angus chews books when he can.

Who’s my favorite narrator? What can I say? For starters, my answer varies from year to year, even day to day (what did I read yesterday? Fave narrator, I’m sure). And I still conflate narrator with storyteller. A few days ago, when I took a moment to think about my response to this blog, I kept thinking about Cindy Sullivan.

She’s a 6-feet tall Navaho from Albuquerque and I met her in Asheville, N.C., through friends. I can’t remember a single story she’d tell, but I remember how she told tall tales with her whole body and her big voice. Cindy spun a good yarn, even when she was simply confessing her mom’s addiction to gambling on the puebloreservations near town. I wanted to be that kind of impromptu storyteller. But when she asked me once to read a story she had written, I had to find polite ways to obfuscate. Her written storytelling was godawful.

Back to the beginning, then, and here’s the thinking today. I wandered over to one of my shelves and started pulling books. All my favorite narrators are first-person (so I thought as I pulled some books down; I was going for the Zen thing, the irrational thought that whatever books I first grabbed, while thinking about “great narrators,”would help me explain who my favorite narrator is). Then I took a picture of the stack, with our dog Angus looking on.

I leafed through the first pages of these books. Yes. Several first-person narrators. The Zen supernatural approach works!

• “Hopping a freight of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara” (Kerouac). 
• “This new world weighs a yatto-gran. … Moss that is concentrating on being green. … My name is Billie Crusoe” (Winterson).
• “My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the maj jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts” (Amy Tan).
• “I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows” (Charles Brocken Brown)
• “Life changes fast. … Those were the first words I wrote after it happened” (Joan Didion)

Funny thing. The rest of my impromptu, book-stack faves are not first-person narrators. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colone Aureliano Buenia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” N. Scott Momaday: “Dypaloh.There was a house made of dawn.” Salman Rushdie: “There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.” And the actual first sentence of The Joy Luck Club is: “The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.”

And what about another of my favorite writers, John McPhee? He tells nonfiction stories in which he is a participating observer, a reporter-like persona who spends time with a quirky character and then tells that character’s story, like going off into the woods to see how one guy still makes bark canoes: “When Henri Vaillancourt goes off to the Maine woods, he does not make extensive plans. Plans annoy him. He just gets out his pack baskets, tosses in some food and gear, takes a canoe, and goes. He makes (in advance) his own beef jerky …”

Beside how this list reveals my nerdiness about opening lines or the quirkiness of my reading, what does it say about narrators and my feelings about them? In all these cases, I argue, the narrator pulls you in, engages you, dear reader, into the “story.” A good narrator invites you to listen—not always with the commanding presence of someone like my old acquaintance, Cindy. Sometimes, I’m drawn into the story because I connect with the narrator. Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinkingas a reflection on the unexpected death of her husband (and her only child died two years later): “John was talking, and then he wasn’t.” Didion’s experience, her quintessentially deadpan but deeply emotional style… these resonated for me (my father had died five years before her book came out). I could relate to Didion’s sense that every time she opened the door to her apartment, her husband might walk through; he wasn’t dead, he was simply delayed somewhere.

There’s something else going on with narrators, though. I have no experience facing a firing squad (Garcia Marquez) or owning “a farm in Africa” (Isak Dinesen), and my only attempt to make my own beef jerky was disastrous. I have no idea what a “yatto-gram” is (Winterson). So the narrator-reader resonance is not simply or necessarily a shared experience or feeling. But something about good narrators (human or not) speaks to us, the readers, the listeners, in the very social, human  act of sharing a story.