“Half a Life” is a pretty good story.
Way more worth reading than this lousy blog post, lemme tell you. In fact, you should skip this post and go read it right now. There's a link at the end of the post, so you can find it there.
So I have a book to shill and I wanna quit my day job. Who doesn't?
Anyway, it's a good story. Mostly the reflections and reminiscences of a misanthrope out for a walk. Mixed with a twisted tenderness and perverse pain.
It's difficult to know what to say about this one, because I don't want to spoil it. Writing the thing is so much easier and more interesting than making it sound appealing to anyone else.
Maybe you could call it a story about guilt and lost love. The way we sometimes allow our failures to define us and lock us into patterns of behavior. The way the ambiguity of whether or not we ought to feel guilty can intensify the feeling of guilt and turn it into something haunting. You could call it yet another story about the origin of evil.
There's a certain general pattern in the way people talk about evil. Either you're born evil, and that's why you do these things, or else you suffered some hurt, and evil is fundamentally a matter of chasing revenge. But in this story, in “Half a Life,” things are much more ambiguous, though there's no doubt that the narrator has become quite evil indeed.
The idea of evil as a repetition compulsion, as something like an addiction to a traumatic event. It's almost like the narrator is trying to repeat the same event over and over in order to work out whether it was his fault or not. The implication is that he's piling up real guilt in the attempt to discern whether or not he should feel guilty for the original trauma.
The story begins with the narrator overhearing a couple talking about Jeffrey Dahmer, focusing on how his murders had a compulsive character. Which sets the tone and also ties into some of the narrator's reflections on addictions in other people. He sees people smoking, comments on drinking habits, and wonders about whether we all have our little anesthetics to get us through the day.
There is a certain calming effect in repetition and routine, a certain sense of self-identity that comes through acting out a regular pattern. It's not the only thing that drives compulsive behaviors, but it does contribute. Especially for people with an indefinite, diffuse sense of self, habit can become the strongest means of reinforcing a feeling of identity. Even if this feeling of identity is destructive to self and others.
All of which is at least implicit in “Half a Life.” The narrator is tragically caught in a pattern of compulsion that does no good to himself or anyone else. And all of that is at work in the background of the story.
But don't read it because of my pop psychology musings. Read it because it's a good story.
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The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon.
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