Reviewed by Kate
The Grafting
Reviewed by Kate
The Grafting is a very dense story, and a plot summary won't tell you much about it. Briefly, however, Katherine's mother is dead, and her father, Frank, has married Mable, who went to high school with Katherine. Katherine and Mable both have sons around the same age, and their sons become friends, despite their mothers' prickly relationship.
Someone in the guestbook recently started the question: what is literature? Since Larry already knows my take on this story, I'll tackle that question, if you'll all bear with me... Larry's story reads with no self-consciousness. The voice speaking is uniformly that of the narrator, and while the reader may be struck by the aptness of some descriptions, there will be no "flowery phrases", just clarity and even tone. Literature loses the author, and becomes a dialogue between reader and character. Literature also shuns easy answers. Nowhere in this story will Katherine say: I hated/resented/disliked Mable because:" Larry just explains events, and lets the reader fill in the gaps. As with the passages on grafting. These passages explain what the characters are doing in a physical sense, but they also link and underscore the tensions between people forced into relationships with each other. Looking for the connections is the reader's job. The Grafting combiness a wealth of understated detail and a carefully crafted set of characters. And it's a good story, too. (A footnote, of course, always the qualifiers: I'm not saying that any other genre can't be literature. I'm not saying that literature must be this way just because I say so. Literature is a bit like cooking, many dishes are delicious despite having different ingredients, and many works are literature despite having different qualities. It's a backwards thing: literature can be identified, if you will, but not always specifically defined.)
Reviewed by © Kate
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