Angela Pneuman on Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief
/
(Guest post by Angela Pneuman)
Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief is a single, book-length letter addressed to the narrator’s oldest friend from childhood, the rarely named Nina—a heroin addict who had an affair with the narrator’s husband. It’s been nearly a decade since the two women, now in their fifties, have seen each other, and the letter is written on the occasion of the narrator’s husband, Nicolas, asking to return to a shared life with the narrator. As she writes, the narrator considers the offer, discusses it in this long, one-way conversation. There’s nothing in the book outside of the direct address—even the narrator’s life, as she moves in and out of the days it takes her to write the letter, is carefully transcribed. But even though it’s quite literally a one-way conversation, what makes this book so lovely and even dynamic is how the letter writer moves so easily among her current life, remembered events—often revisited and adjusted as memories are—and moments of bold imagination. The imagined moments are what stand out to me—I’m so interested in the technique, which seems especially helpful within the restrictive first-person point of view, and the added restriction of the epistolary form.
In the first paragraph, she spends the night in the specific room of the boarding house where much of the affair between her husband and friend took place. This action (recorded in the letter, like everything else) is the departure point for imagining the intimate scene. Even as she indicates their interior, she remains officially outside, an observer of the externals that suggest the feelings and tensions of these two people she knows better than anyone. Note, too, how the letter writer stays present: there are aspects of this imagined night that I felt I was not making up, and I know this feeling... In this way, throughout the book one begins to wonder, even with the calm, sometimes dispassionate language, about the impulse to write the letter as one of control taking, power exerting, of inserting oneself where one couldn’t possibly have been, or into something from which one has been painfully excluded.
He stands there as if in terror. There are aspects of this imagined night that I felt I was not making up, and this is one of them. I lay in the lamplight and I could see him at the window, unblinking and paralysed by the inevitability of the scene he has set up and which now overwhelms him. I know this feeling, I have had it thigh-deep in the sea as a nine-foot wave rears and thunders in. You lean down into your bag and take out a tin, which contains pre-rolled cigarettes, light one, light another off yours and hold it out to him. You tell him what it is; you have injected your last, now you just have these two left to smoke and that will be that. No more. After tonight you are getting out of this disagreeable habit.
In the second of these two paragraphs she returns to the life she has been imagining for Nina in the desert—a setting based solely on the postmark of a postcard Nina sent to the narrator’s son, years before. I love this moment—which comes towards the end of the book—for the way her dispassionate tone finally recedes, the way the language swells into vengefulness, and the way the narrator amplifies her own presence, her own power as the architect of what she imagines. In the same paragraph she (imagines she) removes from Nina the very same power, that to record her own life:
I have kept you lonely and baffled by the Upanishads. Your vegetables grow and their abundance reminds you of all the people you cannot share them with. I have given you a lake and not let you swim in it. Your video collection is very poor, even by your own standards; the geese fly but they are trapped in the screen and will never be free. Your beauty is for nobody to see. Your forest is nondescript when it comes down to it, just trees, all of them straight and none of them perfectly straight. I have given you food that makes you thinner. I have been untying the ropes on your charpoy one by one so that your sleep gets ever more uncomfortable, until you cannot sleep at all. I have given you one pen, and soon I will take it away. Then you will not even be able to keep a record of your life, and so you will be undone, my friend, you will be undone.
I’ve been interested in this technique for awhile—for how it at once reveals the observing and observed characters, as well as their relationship, and for how it allows a story to operate deeply within a single point of view in order to represent something it isn’t actually privy to; a way to give such a scene dramatically to a reader. In my novel, Lay It on My Heart, the narrator is a thirteen-year-old girl whose father is having a prayerful, psychotic episode in which he tries to cure poison ivy by bathing in bleach and ends up burning himself badly. The girl narrates this as it’s happening, though she isn’t present and won’t know it’s happened until later; the operative phrase in an earlier paragraph is Later I will find out that...:
When Ruthie Pope opens the door, my burned, blistered father can hardly speak. The robe has stuck to his legs and his privates, which are unspeakably raw. When she peels it away, the lower parts of his back and stomach look skinned. Ruthie Pope is a practical woman, and the first thing she does is cover a patch of her wall-to-wall carpet with a sheet so he doesn’t soil it. The second thing she does is grab her cylinder of Crisco and oil my father’s naked body from the waist down while four of her seven children watch, open-mouthed and silent. My father, she will say later, pushes air through his lips with pain. He seems to be talking to himself, and Ruthie reckons he’s delirious. There’s something familiar about him, but she can’t put a name to the gaunt, glassy-eyed, bearded face. And he doesn’t give her his name, or she would find the number for Daze, or Phoebe. The Peakes and the Popes, old Rowland County families both, know of each other, though it is possible they haven’t crossed paths in years. She keeps asking, though. “What’s your name, child? What’s your name?” and when he finally manages a name, she believes she hears him say he is the Apostle Paul.
The character is describing something she can’t see and didn’t directly experience, narrating it as though she had, no doubt inventing where she must. For me, the technique often carries with it the depth of a citational approach found more explicitly in metafiction, a demonstration of what we’re doing anyway, as writers—as people, all the time.
Angela Pneuman is the author of a book of short stories, Home Remedies, and a novel, Lay It on My Heart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories (2012 & 2004), Ploughshares, Los Angeles Review, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Glimmertrain and many other literary magazines. Angela has received the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, the Presidential Fellowship from SUNY Albany, and the inaugural Alice Hoffman Prize for short fiction from Ploughshares.