I read the book and enjoyed it, but…. it didn’t change me. Maybe I asked too much.

Found your blog from Color Online, and am very glad I did!

But I wonder about your charge of betrayal. I take this to mean that she waited too long before introducing the older voice, leading you to rely upon the story’s narrative voice being that of of the college girl.

If I interpret you point correctly, then note that there is at least a hint early on that the narrator is looking back from a significant remove in time to tell this story: the first sentence contains, “The cold came late that fall…,” and the story’s fifth sentence (within the first para) begins, “I was a student and needed money, so…” Just a hint, but it is there.

If I were to begin a short story with, “That winter, I was a soldier and needed money, so…” the reader might well suspect that I’m a soldier no longer. She might not be certain, but she might well suspect it.

When I got to the part about collecting Glenn Gould recordings, I was probably too gobsmacked with the exquisite choice of “loopy” (a bulls-eye if I ever read one!) to notice the change in perspective. If I were a more critical (careful) reader I surely would have noticed that change, loopy Glenn Gould recordings or not.

We have, incidentally, Gould’s “Goldberg Variations,” and he accompanies his piano with humming, passim, through the whole thing. Loopy indeed. But great, as well.

Since we all spend so much of our time in transit, the reason for this rule eludes me. Stuff happens on the way, in other words.

Because I was aware of this rule, I noted that it was violated in a novel I had just started (“The Dud Avocado,” by Elaine Dundy) by the character walking on a Paris street in the opening paragraph. The scene worked for me.

I grabbed another book I’d recently been dipping into for re-reads, “The Nick Adams Stories,” and found that in at least two of the stories Hemingway begins with the character in transit; in “Ten Indians,” Nick is riding home in a horse drawn wagon, and in “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick is walking alone down a country road by an apple orchard. In my favorite short story of all time, “The Big Two-Hearted River,” the spirit of the rule is violated by the story’s beginning in which Nick, alone, has just dropped down from a train more or less in the middle of nowhere in Michigan, for a few days of camping and fishing. Ditto in “The Battler,” which starts with Nick picking himself up from a railroad right-of-way after having been knocked off a freight train by a brakeman.

I’m pretty much coming to the conclusion that rules regarding writing fiction send the message “Be careful here” rather than “Don’t do this.”

So many rules have opposing rules; e.g., “You are telling not showing here” vs. “Reduce some of your dialogue to narrative summary.”

Or the opposing workshop-comments on a passage; e.g., “This is a clever bit of foreshadowing” vs. “Delete this. You are broadcasting what is going to happen.”

Often, the issue is a matter of balance and aptness. Such as the long passages of infodump in some successfully written novels, passages that supply info that the reader longs (and deserves) to know.

In sum, for me the rules of writing fiction are more and more becoming amber lights saying Caution, rather than red lights saying Stop.

After all, when does a first-person narrative in past tense not imply a narrator existing in present time?

Is it a big deal if the narrator says, “Back in those days…,” or even “In my youthful naivete…” even though such observations might inform us that the narrator has changed (or collected Glenn Gould recordings) since the time the story elements occurred?

Rather than being two narrators, it seems to me nothing more than an affirmation that the narrator, like the rest of us, had a past life and has a contemporary life.

In first-person, past-tense narrative there is always a “narrative present” (my term), even thought it may be minutes, hours, or years after the events described in the past tense.

BUT, I’m not so sure how I feel about being compared to the character. I’m not Midwestern (or wasn’t) though we did have those German restaurants in the Boro and around. But the character (when she’s not being the old voice) is so…not naive, but unworldly. Maybe these days that’s a good thing to be?

I have concluded that it is a gestalt sort of thing, no particular aspect standing out as determinative. Yet, her similes are, like yours, juicy and apt; her characters (save for the adoption woman) are uneasy in life, as yours sometimes are; and her imagination is, like yours, keener than the average writer’s.

Having used German as a crutch once here, I might as well do it again; you and Moore, in this story, seem to me to share the same weltanschauung, which sort of means world view, but can also include ideas and beliefs about the nature of things.

Think of two Quakers sitting down to write their own version of a short-story plot about killing an elephant. Or two Nazis writing the same plot. I have no label for you and Moore, but that’s as close as I can come to the concept I’m trying to express here.

Incidentally, have you read Orwell’s non-fiction treatment of that plot, “Shooting an Elephant”?