I read a short story in The New Yorker recently. Nothing unusual about that. Since its inception in 1925, the magazine has been properly praised for its contemporary fiction, and over the years I’ve read its stories often and usually with admiration. The title of the piece was intriguing: “Barbara, Detroit, 1966.” I didn’t know who this Barbara was, but I certainly know Detroit and 1966.
The story’s author is Peter Orner, a prolific and highly praised writer of short fiction and director of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College. It was tagged by the magazine as Flash Fiction, which these days means a very short story, but at almost 1450 words it turned out to be a little longer than what I would call Flash Fiction. Of course, I’m quibbling here, and as I read the story I continued to quibble. You might call it carp, nitpick or complain, but I’ll stick with quibble, and I’m sorry to report that I’ve been doing a ton of it lately about way too many things.
Frankly, it’s a pain to be so constantly critical. For one thing it makes it so damn difficult to simply sit back and enjoy someone’s careful creation, get pleasantly lost in its intricate design, or just have a good old-fashioned read. For another, it reminds me of what an old fart I’ve become.
In any case, I became seriously irked in reading “Barbara, Detroit, 1966,” so much so that I promptly wrote a critique in a letter to the editor that was more than half as long as the story itself. As I expected, the letter became lost in one of the magazine’s many piles of slush, so I thought I’d make it available here. But first, I would strongly urge you to read the story in The New Yorker by clicking here.
Herewith, I quibble:
Dear Madam/Sir,
I started reading “Barbara, Detroit, 1966” with interest because it centers on an event on which I literally wrote the book, a detailed non-fiction account of the assassination of Rabbi Morris Adler, titled Murder in the Synagogue and published more than 50 years ago. Unfortunately, I found the story both confused and confusing. I certainly may be biased, but here’s how I read it.
The story’s opening device (dropped after a few lines) is a reference to moving pictures in which we are beckoned to find Barbara in one of the back rows of a new synagogue’s sanctuary in suburban Detroit. On Lincoln’s birthday, 1966, the temple is four years old but somehow still has fresh paint that smells like vanilla (one of several odd details). A service is in progress with 700 people present, but Barbara, eight months pregnant and feeling “woozy,” only wants to go home, where she didn’t want to be either. The rabbi is one of the most admired religious writers and speakers in the country, but Barbara is totally disinterested in what he is saying, thinks of his words as exploding little droplets and can’t wait for him to finish. When he finally sits down, Barbara is suddenly so ravishingly hungry that she thinks about actually eating her seatmate’s high heel shoe.
The cantor’s singing she likes and rocks to in her seat, but then she sees a young man get up, approach the bimah and fire a gun into the ceiling. This very dramatic event Barbara only vaguely registers, and the same for the speech the young fellow then delivers in (by all accounts at the time) a calm and direct manner. He is clearly accusing the entire congregation, including Barbara, of being “a travesty and an abomination,” and of “making a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy…” The young man’s completed thought (not included in the story) was “of the beauty and spirit of Judaism.”
Barbara now thinks about licking the ear of the woman in front of her and can’t “make heads or tails” of what the young guy is saying. But she is “entranced” by it because she finds it full of seething anger. And that makes her think of her husband Howard saying nasty, angry things about “the Blacks” over breakfast. She thinks he doesn’t really care, because he won’t even hire them in his business. The difference she finds here in the synagogue is that “this is passion, the genuine article.” So now we can begin to presume that Barbara’s dismal unhappiness is mostly because of her awful marriage to Howard.
At this point on the bimah the young man shoots both the rabbi and himself in the head, and the sanctuary erupts in bedlam, everyone rushing to get out of the temple. But Barbara instead tries to move against the crowd to get herself to the shooter. She hears a call for a doctor’s help, and the quick response from many men in the congregation she thinks are dentists, chiropractors, etc., almost makes her laugh. Barbara never reaches the shooter, is escorted out of the temple and tells people she doesn’t need a ride home because she has her husband’s car. (I guess like everything else in their marriage, including her, Howard owns it, or acts like he thinks he does.)
It turns out that Barbara is the favorite cousin of the narrator’s mother, who thinks she is something of an independent spirit. At a family breakfast some months later, after the newspapers had detailed the carefully planned murder-suicide at the synagogue, she defended the murderer and was roundly shouted down.
Finally, the narrator tells us he had vainly hoped that Barbara might have ended her unhappy marriage in the ensuing years to live on her own terms, but that was not to be, apparently because Howard continued to provide the family with a good living. The narrator says that in the parking lot after the shooting, she had wanted to hold the shooter’s “shattered face in her hands,” had considered him a “martyr” and “half wished” she were carrying his baby.
Really? After we are told that during her whole time in the synagogue Barbara was disoriented, distracted and only vaguely aware of what was being said and done, and that her only firm impression was that of the young shooter’s angry passion, we are supposed to believe that she somehow cared about that deeply distressed and murderous young man?
As I said, to me this portrait of Barbara is mired in confusion. And to graft it onto one of the most disturbing and revealing events of our troubled 1960s seems a rather misguided choice.
Thanks for your consideration.
Tom LoCicero
