Edward P. Jones, "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons"

microscopic coups & silent dogs

Hi! If by some chance you haven’t heard me rave enough about Alice Munro, then here’s a little guide to her work I wrote for the Times. (If, on the other hand, you’re here because of the Munro guide, welcome!)

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“The shades were down at Miss Jenny’s windows, and he heard no sound, not even the dog’s barking, as he came and went.”

Pure readers — those rare individuals who read books but have no intention of writing them — get to sit through short stories like children at a magic show. They ooh and ahh at the acts of telepathy; they bounce in their seats when the missing card reappears under the volunteer’s watch.

While Edward P. Jones performs “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the pure reader marvels at the ease with which Jones inhabits the irritable, tender consciousness of Betsy Ann, the young girl at the center of the story; the muted elegance with which he fills in the backstory, which could, in unsteadier hands, have become mawkish; the bountiful liveliness of the minor characters (a writer shows his baseline level of attention, the capacity of his observational tank, in his walk-ons); the way that the whole matter of gentrification is presented afresh, so that it seems not so much a familiar social problem as a kind of terrifying, science fiction plague, sweeping across neighborhoods.

But the reader who is also a writer — that poor creature — sits as close to the stage as the ushers will allow, sweating, staring, gnawing his knuckles. What is that behind the magician’s ear? What was that he just did with his right hand? The greatness of a story is for the reader/writer no less impressive — but it is granular, a matter more of microscopic technical coups than of miracles. The feat in Jones’s story that had me shaking my head most enviously was a single, early line involving a dog — or rather the absence of one.

“The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” — the opener in Jones’s 1992 collection, Lost in the City — is what it says on the tin: a story about a girl who raises pigeons. That girl is named Betsy Ann, and she raises her pigeons (they live in a soon-to-be-demolished neighborhood in Northwest D.C.) under the worried eye of her single father, Robert. Robert goes out early each morning to see if any pigeons have died in the night — he hates the thought of Betsy Ann being subjected to further loss.

Because Robert and Betsy Ann have, we learn, suffered a tragedy. When Robert was just nineteen, his wife Clara — pregnant with Betsy Ann — was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Betsy Ann’s birth thus played out as half of a horrible symmetry:

One morning, toward four o’clock, they cut open [Clara’s] stomach and pulled out the child only moments after Clara died, mother and daughter passing each other as if along a corridor, one into death, the other into life.

And so Robert finds himself a single father on the threshold of adulthood. He confesses to Miss Jenny, the lady who lives upstairs, that he doesn’t think he can do this (“‘I never looked down the line and saw bein by myself like this.’”). Miss Jenny gently, sensibly tells him that he can give the baby to the city — the foster system — where she will be brought up well, educated. The possibility dangles before him all but irresistibly. He hardly loves his baby yet; she is as helpless and unknowable as an alien. Giving her to the city seems not merely easier. It seems right.

But first comes one of the crucial moments in the story. Robert is going to take Betsy Ann for her first walk. He loads up the stroller with an inordinate quantity of diapers and formula (is this a sign that he’s walking her to the foster home?) and carries it down the stairs. This walk will, we get the distinct feeling, determine — or reveal — the course of both his and his daughter’s lives.

And Jones, knowing he’s led us to a moment of extraordinary consequence, feels the impulse to slow down. As Dickens is often said to have said (but didn’t): Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait. And how better to slow things down than with a barking dog? A dog barking in the distance ought (as an excellent 2010 Slate article, now vanished from the internet, pointed out) practically to be its own key on the novelist’s keyboard. A character stands at the window contemplating something: a dog barks in the distance. A character breaks out of prison and takes his first nervous steps as a free man: a dog barks in the distance. Novelists love dogs barking in the distance.

But Jones — who is no ordinary novelist — recognizes that the reader’s tolerance for distantly barking dogs has perhaps been exhausted. Just as you can no longer telegraph a child’s preternatural sensitivity by having her stare at floating dust particles in a sunbeam, you can no longer buy yourself a moment with a dog barking in the distance — that area of reality’s carpet has been worn out. So Jones writes this:

The shades were down at Miss Jenny’s windows, and he heard no sound, not even the dog’s barking, as he came and went.

It’s the dog that didn’t bark! And it isn’t just a dog, hauled out of non-existence for the exclusive purpose of punctuating the scene. It’s the dog, who we’ve never heard of to that point but whose presence — and whose habit of barking whenever Robert walks past — we immediately credit. Robert, whose comings and goings are usually closely monitored (he is literally hounded) is on this singular morning unobserved, unbothered. The decision of whether to keep Betsy Ann is entirely, terrifyingly his own. Jones has managed to write into the score a rest that plays louder than the notes.

And almost everyone in the audience brushes past this moment of microscopic perfection unknowingly, as they should. They have bigger narrative fish to fry: they want to get back to the present story, in which Betsy Ann, now an adolescent, learns to care for a flock of pigeons; they’re desperate, within the backstory, to know how and whether Robert will decide to keep the baby. Who has time for a silent dog? Only the poor writer recognizes what Jones has just pulled off (Please stop muttering or we’re going to have to ask you to leave the theater, sir). The trick’s success has been assured long before the final card is turned over.