Litwitlou wrote:While I can't believe that tales told of Robin Hood or King Arthur and the Holy Grail, are true, I still find it possible to enjoy them because they're wonderful stories that appeal to what I might term "the romantic" in me. This is the way I see "The Hunter's Wife."

Yes, wonderful stories: stories that awaken wonder. Of course, the last time I dipped into King Arthur, so much of it was about hewing and striking a mighty blow that I might have been reading Bronze Age stuff. But it has the payoff bits, and modern writers like T.H. White, whose work inspired "Camelot", have appropriated it and made it meaningful all over again. (In fact I have a private theory that "The Once and Future King" belongs in the genre of literature that reacts against World War I, like "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and the poetry of Wilfred Owen and e. e. cummings.)

Litwitlou wrote:While in a literal sense the faults you find in the story are there, I believe they may be expected in certain types of fiction and viewed as devices used to set mood and theme. For example, when Doerr writes about the weather in Idaho, I don't worry about it being factually true, or even plausibly true. I roll with it and try to feel the cold in the way Doerr is trying to have me feel it.

I like the way you put that: set mood and theme. Both worked for me in that winter: her near-catatonic inwardness was a reaction partly to the winter but the winter was partly a symbol of her bleak inner wilderness, where she did not know what to make of her strange encounters. And the hunter's dogged determination felt positively mythical (Sisyphus, for my money) in its inability to engage with what was going on for her.

Litwitlou wrote:I hope it wasn't wrong of me to jump into your conversation with Mr. Marks.

Mr. Marks is quite happy to have people jump in and offer some alternate perspectives. People are wonderful, if you ask me. And I doubt seriously if DWill minds either.

I think there is a continuum for people's reactions to "signs of unrealism". I am actually fairly easily triggered by, for example, movie science fiction that gets the science all wrong. What was that silly movie about falling through a black hole and, intact on the other side, being able to communicate with the past? Unh-unh. Not buying it. Well, I was kind of intrigued by the cute little tie-backs to the stuff from earlier in the movie. A variation on what makes "The Sting" such a fun movie. But the conceit in Doerr's story didn't set off those buzzers for me. More of that in a minute.

Both you and Litwitlou showed a certain flexibility in appreciating the story, making allowances for its stretches because you found other aspects compensating--or maybe the stretches were actually part of the story's effectiveness, I don't know. I didn't show this flexibility, and your mention of triggering tells me why. When I encountered the "tall tale" elements, as well as the central conceit of the story, I shut down. It's sort of similar to my not going to any superhero movies. I can't get past the lack of real suspense conferred by superpowers, and then I get totally bored with the action parts. (I think I did appreciate the original "Superman," though, so campy and kind of charming with the more primitive special effects.) My older daughter is way smarter than I but loves most of these superhero movies. I remain adamant against them. A part of that animus is simply feeling the need to have some restrictions--makes life simpler. It's also why I don't want to become knowledgeable about something like wine or expand into some new hobby. I feel too spread out as it is and don't need to be even more of a dilettante.

But back to this story, I'm thinking of what a more critical reading would have been on my part. By 'critical' I of course mean a balanced view showing openness to whatever it might contain. I'm wondering whether the the lack of verisimilitude could itself have led me to consider other possibilities, such as that Doerr didn't intend for us to accept the events at face value. Take the completely bizarre final scene where we realize the college president has assembled people for a formal dinner and has brought the coffins of his wife and children so that the unnamed wife can work her healing magic. Doerr must be intentionally pushing the bounds of realism, for what purpose I don't have a good idea, but he had to have known that the reader would find this assembly very strange and spookifying. It's a horror story in reverse.

Some people are more la-di-da than I am in being able to appreciate something about nearly everything they read. I suppose I'm more irritable when the writer isn't hitting my sweet spot (or it might be wanting to avoid work!). Although I can report that aging has delivered the benefit at least of opening me to more kinds of writing, especially the "slow" stuff by certain masters that I used to lack the patience for. I'm not sure how far I'll get in this catholicity movement.

Imagine your favorite auto mechanic, pragmatic to the bone and having lots of good jokes to tell, but never giving a fig for music, and his wife the cellist whom he has been unable to make sense of for decades invites him to see her in a concert. And then he gets it: he still doesn't know a thing about counterpoint or chord changes, but he hears her passion, and sees her connection with the audience, and suddenly it isn't just a performance but an engagement with what life is about. Before that, he didn't really have any concept that life might be "about" anything, but his wife did, and he wanted to give it a chance.

Nice. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this story. I recall seeing an interview with the late poet James
Dickey, who in some of his later work had gone down some fantastic avenues. His reaction to critics who said, "Oh, come off it!" was, "No, I want to GO WITH it!"

DWill wrote:
Other complaints: the hunter stalks his 15-year-old for three years before whisking her off to his cabin, she having reached the age of consent (mildly unsettling).


Yeah, I found her age unnecessarily twisted and still can't understand what role it played, unless it was to give an excuse for him to be so patient and persistent without them actually getting hitched.

I think the age is the mechanism for showing the depth of his love(?) for her. He was willing to wait the three years necessary to legally be with her. Otherwise why would he have just waited for her to come back every hear if she was 25 or 30, and why would she still have been available? Of course, he was a single guy almost 40, so he was either pretty comfortable being single, or he was not living in a place with an abundance of girlfriend material, or...

DWill, I looked up Alice Munro and read a couple of her stories, which are very good. I read "Amundson" and "The View From Castle Rock" by her. There is a link to several of her stories here:
nothingintherulebook.com/2016/12/08/16- ... right-now/

What are some of your favorites by her? I am excited to find a whole new treasure trove of short stories!

DWill wrote: It's sort of similar to my not going to any superhero movies. I can't get past the lack of real suspense conferred by superpowers, and then I get totally bored with the action parts.

I am returning to this because it touches on some of the material in "Job" that I am working on. I actually agree with you 100 percent here. I was never very interested in working out what the "superpowers" made possible or not. I was a comic fan, but I strongly preferred Batman to Superman, and Spiderman or Daredevil to Thor or Hulk. And I think that kind of preference has something to do with literature and how it works. (Sorry for the effrontery of comparing Spiderman to literature - I do know better.)

Long ago in a high school Literary Humanities we were meant to write about the Homeric Hero, and I was intrigued to find a source arguing that such a hero must be Noble, Exemplary and Flawed. (I think this comes from Aristotle, but have always been too lazy to look it up). Exemplary and Flawed makes a great contrast. Nice tension. The invulnerability of, say, Superman is completely boring - that's why they invented kryptonite. But what is Noble doing in there?

It's a problem I chewed on for decades. The answer I sort of settled on (the most common one, I believe) is that the Noble families are unconstrained. They are in the best position to make actual decisions, which are the most meaningful parts of literature. One can dispute the idea that Oedipus, for example, is about choices in the sense that the noble leaders made them, but the choice to investigate his own past is arguably crucial.

This is an extension of the argument sometimes made that, before the industrial revolution one had to rule over others in order to be actually free from the compulsions of using time for material needs.

It's difficult to sell that kind of requirement these days. Most people make many genuine choices. We are all Noble now. But a person with "special powers" gives an unusual take on how choices are made. The Hunter's Wife has a certain compulsion to know what is going on with her visions, and then (shades of Joseph Campbell) a certain compulsion to use it for other people's release from the misery of loss. (And does the compulsion mirror the Hunter's pursuit of her and his "forced moves" to confront nature? I rather think so.)

But for these special situations to resonate for us, of course, we have to be able to find the choices meaningful. So my linkage to the writer's craft (and I am pretty sure, after reading "All the Light We Cannot See," that it was intentional) gave me a way to reflect on it, query it, and see what I thought about the result.

I'm afraid "Who would win, Superman or Thor?" has no such suspense, and no way to connect with and identify with their exalted natures.

DWill wrote:Take the completely bizarre final scene where we realize the college president has assembled people for a formal dinner and has brought the coffins of his wife and children so that the unnamed wife can work her healing magic. Doerr must be intentionally pushing the bounds of realism, for what purpose I don't have a good idea, but he had to have known that the reader would find this assembly very strange and spookifying. It's a horror story in reverse.

I pulled this out as well because I thought it was a good observation about Doerr's atmospherics. He pushes right up to the limits of willingness to suspend disbelief, which is maybe a reflection of the requirements of writing in a less conflictive mode.

I suspect Doerr had a particularly poignant point to illustrate in using a college president (a "Noble" in today's world). He has ascended to the heights of his culture's respect (unless his college has a competitive football team, but we won't go into that) and is ready to throw them aside for his intimate relationships. The atmospherics emphasize, I think, that his position with its robes and ceremonies can as easily hearken to the shamanic otherworldliness of a Wise Man as to the representations of splendor by which the old potentates held the peasants in awe. It raises questions about what impresses us, and whether we should be looking behind the curtain.

Lots to discuss about this work. Very honest writing, which I appreciate. And the imagery is stunning. Doerr has a way of taking us as readers right into the story so that we experience it rather than see it unfold.

The hunter found himself in love with a 16 year old, a mere girl, when he was a grown 30 year old man. She was like a small doe in the beginning, a frail, feminine object of his desire, all clad in a sparkling red dress with the slit running up the thigh. He liked the simple little girl who loved rhubarb pie. He loved her wilderness initially, when it was all for himself to share with her, before she shared it with the world. He had been accepting of her gift then. But. As soon as she began to find her own, to grow from girl to true woman who had purpose and wanted to share it with the world, it was too much for him to handle. He viewed himself a simple mountain man, set in his ways, comfortable in his little world. And she grew to be so much more, slipping like water between his fingers no matter how tightly he tried to keep them locked tight to cup her, to keep all of her in. I imagine it feels like trying to bottle in a wind from the north, trying to capture something so wild and big, and when failing, arriving at a humbling reminder of one's limitations as a mere human. He wanted to keep her all to himself, and that's what drove her away in the end.

It must have been beautiful yet terrible from her perspective as well, more so reflecting back than in the moment. A hunter, a predator, taking advantage of a then foolish (or at least, naive) 16 year old orphan with no parents to guide and protect her; taking her to his remote cabins to be snowed in with this total stranger. And yet finding herself loving him. How frustrating, though, that she could feel everything, understand him more than he did himself, but he could not return the favor. Imagine having all the empathy in the world, and your partner unable to understand you on a fundamental level, or rather, unwilling to. Perhaps if he had admitted to himself that yes, her abilities are real, it would have been admitting that he wasn't enough, not anymore at least. That he couldn't keep up with her. Even the imagery of her has changed. From sweet girl in the red dress to a woman in a sleek and chic black pantsuit.

A part of me wonders what would have happened if he has pursued someone who'd already grown into themselves, already established their identity; that in their firmly rooted identity, and yet they are silly and simple and sweet and love rhubarb pie and wouldn't change, at least not as much, as a young girl undergoing the metamorphosis into Woman.

The story is about the hunter's wife, yes, but it is narrated through the hunter's eyes, from his perspective alone. If it had been through her eyes, the work might have been titled differently. Maybe something like "The Mystic" or "The Seer" or "The Visionary" etc. Maybe it would have been to much, too overwhelming, to have seen it all through her lens.