wildcat

Daniel S. Libman's "In the Belly of the Cat" is an interesting story which I think dodges some of the cliches it was prone to; the story of an old man who prepares an elaborate dinner with this sense of foreboding over him, a peculiar awareness of imminent death. He hires a prostitute to come up and eat with him. It deftly avoids the repetitive idea of the "whore with a heart of gold," because Monique is a more complicated creature than that, and also avoids the simple cliche of having a character hire a prostitute for something other than sex because the old man gets that from her as well, even if the whole tryst is only a small segment - perhaps a few paragraphs - of the whole story. Libman's attention to detail and character building is commendable, and I find that he did a good job making the sex inconsequential without making it a story about bad sex with a prostitute. The dinner is the unfufilling event, it almost replaces the sex and you get a strong sense that the whole event reflects most of the main character's life at this point. The ending felt a bit telegraphed, it felt a little too obvious, but there's that fine line between surprise and something coming out of nowhere without any build-up.

That build-up is one of the things I'm working on with the Valentino story, and I find the rewrite is giving me more freedom to build a route to the ending. The character in question gets the right kind of development, I hope, from the beginning. I'm also enjoying the opportunity to play around with point of view more, something which has interested me because a roving point of view and omniscient narrator are evident in both Bel Canto and the Shipping News. It some ways it works with my style of writing, although I don't want to overuse it or push it to far. I deleted the story's tendency to dip into a weird second person because that seemed to be something people couldn't quite grip onto. Although-- maybe I'll try it again during another rewrite. Who knows.

Going through all my burned CDs. Veruca Salt right now, one of those weird little gems of my childhood. Oh, no, wait. A rabbit in the moon remix of Sarah McLachlan's "Possession." This is from back when I was a raver.