Wish

05/12/2025

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Bobbie Ann Mason often expresses in interviews the life she needed to escape, without at all claiming that the one she wished to live needn’t reflect on those that other people have chosen. “I didn’t see women doing much of anything in my region except having babies and slaving away on the farm. They might work in stores or factories or teach school, but none of that was for me.” (Missouri Review) Yet she also adds, “My ambitions were fed mostly by illusions and lack of information. I had little to go on except the movies and songs on the radio. I often dwell on that impossible question—what would my life have been like if I had had more advantages? Or what if I’d had fewer; what if I had lived in my grandmother’s time?” (Missouri Review) To feel oneself from a working-class background who escapes those limitations is one thing. But a writer concerned with characters and the specifics of their predicaments needs also to see that this wilfulness contains within it social circumstances that, no matter one’s intentions, often require a broader social milieu that isn’t completely antithetical to them. When Mason resists the term K-Mart realism, or says her characters watch TV because it gives them pleasure, she shows that people can seem small and shrunken. But she sees, too, that they are also potentially happy, even if they are socially limited far beyond the individual’s capacity to do much about it. 

  In Wish, Mason shows us an elderly brother and sister. They are still close, church regulars and living rurally. One day, they start talking about Damson when she was young and how much in love she was with the boy Lyle. Her father disapproved. “Lyle was a drunk and Pap didn’t trust him no further than he could throw him,” her brother Sam says, recalling a time more than sixty years earlier. He appears to be the voice of common sense and historical perspective, determined to see Lyle’s death as an accident, while Damson wishes to see it as a suicide. He loved her so much, she believed, that he took his life. Sam reckons he fell over a plank and shot himself; Damson reckons it was a declaration of love in the face of her father’s disapproval. After Lyle's death, Damson “lay there, all the next day, screaming and beating her heavy work shoes against the floor, and people had to step around her.” Sam recalls that the “women fussed over her, but none of the men could do anything.” Speaking to Damson, he offers the practical but, thinking to himself, he seems more considerate: “Sam had never forgotten Damson on the living room, bawling.” Damson married a man, she says, out of spite, and never did care for him, but the story initially impresses upon us a dutiful man and a wayward woman, as if Damson conformed more than she would have liked, and Sam did so because that is the way things happen to be. 

   However, by the end of the story we discover that Sam’s yearning was as great as Damson’s; that while she married a man called Porter (“you know good and well I never cared a thing about him”), he married a woman called Nova, someone now dead and whom he seems to resent because she forced them to move to a place nearer the town when he was in his late sixties, and that she passed away about six years after they moved in. He was so reluctant to leave the old home that “on the day they moved to the new house, Sam stayed in bed with the covers pulled up around him and refused to budge.” This is a family tale that his sister, his brother and her husband Cecil well know, just as Damson’s story is a family tragedy that became much bigger than her own sorrow, with Damson discussing it now as though she has often talked about it in the past, and that it has become part of family lore. 

    An important claim made about the minimalist fiction Mason would appear to write is that it subsumes the dramatic in the mundane. Zoltan Abadi-Nagy says that “this is realism in minimalist fiction since no rendering of everydayness and quotidian existence would be authentic if it were full of intensified dramatic events.” (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies) Others, like Madison Smartt Bell, inverted the notion that less means more when applied to Minimalism by suggesting instead that ‘less means less’.” ('What We’ve Got') However, if we differentiate Joyce’s epiphany from Beckett’s futility, Minimalist writers sometimes draw from Beckett, others, at other times, draw from Joyce. In one, the past is stronger than the present; in the other, the present becomes so all-encompassing that the past becomes vague and only mildly pertinent, or a place to be avoided. Joyce’s 'The Dead' becomes epiphanically revealing through the wife’s memories of a dead young man, while in Beckett's The Expelled the central character notes that “I became sour and mistrustful, a little before my time, in love with hiding and the prone position.” (The Expelled) In Joyce, 'The Dead' opens up into realisation; in Beckett, it contracts into purposelessness. A Carver story like 'Preservation' is quite Beckettian as the unemployed man can hardly lift himself off the sofa, but Mason is much more drawn to the older Irishman, saying, “I think my aesthetic principles derive from James Joyce…” (Missouri Review) That seems about right, despite the interviewer saying “you mention Joyce as an influence, but you generally eschew the Joycean epiphany as a way of ending a short story.” However, Mason seems here to combine elements of the Joycean with the minimalist features Abadi-Nagy invokes. 

   By the end of the tale, we come to understand that Sam may have had a love equal to Damson's, one that could have caused him to resent his wife far more than the commonly accepted problem of getting dragged from his home. Sam remembers the night he first made love to a girl, with Mason ending the story as the 83-year-old Sam recalls that memorable evening. We might assume he has recalled it to himself many times before, perhaps as often as Damson thinks of Lyle. Sure, the story tells us that this particular night he couldn’t get to sleep, and we are inclined to believe the memory is cause and effectual as well as affective: that Damson talking of Lyle leads Sam to think of his youthful love affair with Nettie Slade. A little earlier in the story, as Sam first tries to get to sleep, the narrator says he thought “about the times he wanted to leave home. The time he went to a lawyer to inquire about a divorce.” Sam and his wife stayed together: the divorce would have been too expensive, and his parents would never have forgiven him. 

     What Mason makes clear is that small country lives contain no less large emotions than those living urban ones, but in 'Wish' they are constrained or contained: that Damson doesn’t get to marry the man she loves under parental restriction; Sam will stay with his wife because he feels the weight of obligation. While many in the previous generation of writers (Updike, Roth, Bellow) fussed over protracted and tortuous divorces, casual affairs and needless lusts, Mason can seem a writer from an earlier period still. But she is chiefly exploring those experiences often missed by more urban figures. One way of looking at Minimalism is to see the writers filling spaces on the literary map that have been missed, so that a writer can seem less modern than one who comes before them because the place itself can appear less contemporary. Mason might, in this story from her 1989 collection, Love Life, be focusing on characters who would have been born near the beginning of the 20th century, but there is little sense that much has changed. Sam would probably expect others now to make the sacrifices he made then. When he looks at a photograph from the time before Lyle died, he sees a big family, and though he glares at this photo now, he might have one a lot like it with his own big family. “All Sam’s kids and grandkids were scattered around”, but there is the suggestion he has plenty of them, and a sense too that Sam’s small town world may have expanded genetically but not especially opened his mind. “His grandson Bobby had arrived from Arizona last year with an Italian woman who spoke in a sharp accent. Sam had to keep himself stiff to keep from laughing.” He is also a churchgoer who speaks with primitive grammar: “You ain’t even knowed me that long,” he says to his brother. Cecil says he is a man who likes to growl and has been doing it all his life. 

   The strength of a story like 'Wish' is that it doesn’t impose the contemporary on the archaic. It wishes to understand the feelings of those who have traditional lives and those who may have escaped them. Sam tells his sister after she talks of Pap ruining her life over Lyle that, “if you could do it over, you’d do it different, but it might not be no better.” It is evident in many other Mason stories, where the younger characters escape marriages, but often find themselves in messier entanglements, echoing Roth, Updike and Bellow. But in Mason's work, there is a greater sense of restriction and judgement, as though in the urban writers they gain experience, however clumsily and hurtfully; in Mason's stories, though, little will change, and chiefly sadness will accrue. This is what Sam conveys when saying you might do it differently, but would the result be more successful?  

  While we know, like Sam, Damson, and Sam's sister, Hortense, have kids and grandkids, we know Damson married Porter, but not much else. When Damson says to Sam “you just see what you want to see. You’re like Pap, just as hard and plain”, Sam replies, “That ain’t the whole truth,” and the narrator tells us he felt a mist of tears come. It isn’t until the end of the story that we understand the reason for those tears, and it won’t be over his wife’s death a few years before, but possibly a missed life as great as Damson’s. Yet he has also built an existence that has produced children and grandchildren, as though the emotional and the social are often separate things, and he understands this as well as Damson, even if nobody forced him to make this choice. 

    Perhaps Sam understands the needs of the family just as Damson comprehends the needs of the individual. Sam knows what obligation is, while Damson comprehends oppression. The conclusion might be the same, but the affective reality quite distinct. Their father would have wanted them to conform to society’s expectations and imposed them directly upon Damson, while Sam accepted them. Damson might not realise that Sam may be carrying sorrow that could be equal to hers, and that this mournfulness is there for both of them: neither married the person they loved. However, by implication, Sam’s has been a full choice with compromise, not error, while Damson was forced to avoid error and married out of anger, perhaps creating a greater error as a consequence. 

      Nevertheless, we might think that Sam’s regret is greater than Damson’s, with regret a personal emotion, while despair in this sense is impersonal. Sam thinks she had “the hope knocked out of her years ago”, and Damson can still be angry with her father all these decades later. Sam could only be angry with himself, but between the pair of them, they seem to see that rural life makes demands that aren’t easy to resist. They talk about Sam’s grandson Bobby, who appears to have broken up with the Italian woman, as Sam wonders why Damson never left her husband if she didn't love him. But they give the impression that this is what other people do elsewhere, especially if one happens to be a foreigner. It wouldn't quite be what they would do.

      Damson and Sam share a sense of resignation, a rural mindset that proposes things are as they are and there isn’t much they can do to change them. Yet Mason proposes, while the surface of their reality might be made up of conventional demands and expectations, Damson and Sam's affective lives may be as complex as the urbanite, and ostensibly no less sophisticated. When Mason gets asked, “you write about people, places, and subjects that others might tend to dismiss as not very 'literary.' Do you see yourself as reclaiming materials that otherwise would be lost or ignored?”, Mason replies: “It's somewhat natural for me to feel that way. I have my material, what's been allotted to me. And along with that comes a Southern defensive posture and a desire to reclaim a measure of pride and identity for my people.” (Contemporary Literature) 

    The final sorrow of the story rests on an awareness that the collateral damage of societal expectation appears to have ruined not only one life but two. Yet if it were only about ruin, the story would have merely arrived at anger, when instead it arrives at a deeper and more reflective emotion. One that suggests society has its demands and the individual has their yearnings and, somewhere in between, time works on people in such a way that a man approaching his mid-eighties can go to bed thinking of the young Nettie, and not of his children and grandchildren, just as Damson can say, speaking of children who never recover from abusive childhoods, ''nowadays they know about that….they never knowed how something when you’re young can hurt you so long.” Damson and Sam, in their different ways, have been hurting for a very long time indeed, and perhaps, unlike many an Urbanite character, they wouldn’t need a fancy psychologist to tell them so.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Wish

Bobbie Ann Mason often expresses in interviews the life she needed to escape, without at all claiming that the one she wished to live needn’t reflect on those that other people have chosen. “I didn’t see women doing much of anything in my region except having babies and slaving away on the farm. They might work in stores or factories or teach school, but none of that was for me.” (Missouri Review) Yet she also adds, “My ambitions were fed mostly by illusions and lack of information. I had little to go on except the movies and songs on the radio. I often dwell on that impossible question—what would my life have been like if I had had more advantages? Or what if I’d had fewer; what if I had lived in my grandmother’s time?” (Missouri Review) To feel oneself from a working-class background who escapes those limitations is one thing. But a writer concerned with characters and the specifics of their predicaments needs also to see that this wilfulness contains within it social circumstances that, no matter one’s intentions, often require a broader social milieu that isn’t completely antithetical to them. When Mason resists the term K-Mart realism, or says her characters watch TV because it gives them pleasure, she shows that people can seem small and shrunken. But she sees, too, that they are also potentially happy, even if they are socially limited far beyond the individual’s capacity to do much about it. 

  In Wish, Mason shows us an elderly brother and sister. They are still close, church regulars and living rurally. One day, they start talking about Damson when she was young and how much in love she was with the boy Lyle. Her father disapproved. “Lyle was a drunk and Pap didn’t trust him no further than he could throw him,” her brother Sam says, recalling a time more than sixty years earlier. He appears to be the voice of common sense and historical perspective, determined to see Lyle’s death as an accident, while Damson wishes to see it as a suicide. He loved her so much, she believed, that he took his life. Sam reckons he fell over a plank and shot himself; Damson reckons it was a declaration of love in the face of her father’s disapproval. After Lyle's death, Damson “lay there, all the next day, screaming and beating her heavy work shoes against the floor, and people had to step around her.” Sam recalls that the “women fussed over her, but none of the men could do anything.” Speaking to Damson, he offers the practical but, thinking to himself, he seems more considerate: “Sam had never forgotten Damson on the living room, bawling.” Damson married a man, she says, out of spite, and never did care for him, but the story initially impresses upon us a dutiful man and a wayward woman, as if Damson conformed more than she would have liked, and Sam did so because that is the way things happen to be. 

   However, by the end of the story we discover that Sam’s yearning was as great as Damson’s; that while she married a man called Porter (“you know good and well I never cared a thing about him”), he married a woman called Nova, someone now dead and whom he seems to resent because she forced them to move to a place nearer the town when he was in his late sixties, and that she passed away about six years after they moved in. He was so reluctant to leave the old home that “on the day they moved to the new house, Sam stayed in bed with the covers pulled up around him and refused to budge.” This is a family tale that his sister, his brother and her husband Cecil well know, just as Damson’s story is a family tragedy that became much bigger than her own sorrow, with Damson discussing it now as though she has often talked about it in the past, and that it has become part of family lore. 

    An important claim made about the minimalist fiction Mason would appear to write is that it subsumes the dramatic in the mundane. Zoltan Abadi-Nagy says that “this is realism in minimalist fiction since no rendering of everydayness and quotidian existence would be authentic if it were full of intensified dramatic events.” (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies) Others, like Madison Smartt Bell, inverted the notion that less means more when applied to Minimalism by suggesting instead that ‘less means less’.” ('What We’ve Got') However, if we differentiate Joyce’s epiphany from Beckett’s futility, Minimalist writers sometimes draw from Beckett, others, at other times, draw from Joyce. In one, the past is stronger than the present; in the other, the present becomes so all-encompassing that the past becomes vague and only mildly pertinent, or a place to be avoided. Joyce’s 'The Dead' becomes epiphanically revealing through the wife’s memories of a dead young man, while in Beckett's The Expelled the central character notes that “I became sour and mistrustful, a little before my time, in love with hiding and the prone position.” (The Expelled) In Joyce, 'The Dead' opens up into realisation; in Beckett, it contracts into purposelessness. A Carver story like 'Preservation' is quite Beckettian as the unemployed man can hardly lift himself off the sofa, but Mason is much more drawn to the older Irishman, saying, “I think my aesthetic principles derive from James Joyce…” (Missouri Review) That seems about right, despite the interviewer saying “you mention Joyce as an influence, but you generally eschew the Joycean epiphany as a way of ending a short story.” However, Mason seems here to combine elements of the Joycean with the minimalist features Abadi-Nagy invokes. 

   By the end of the tale, we come to understand that Sam may have had a love equal to Damson's, one that could have caused him to resent his wife far more than the commonly accepted problem of getting dragged from his home. Sam remembers the night he first made love to a girl, with Mason ending the story as the 83-year-old Sam recalls that memorable evening. We might assume he has recalled it to himself many times before, perhaps as often as Damson thinks of Lyle. Sure, the story tells us that this particular night he couldn’t get to sleep, and we are inclined to believe the memory is cause and effectual as well as affective: that Damson talking of Lyle leads Sam to think of his youthful love affair with Nettie Slade. A little earlier in the story, as Sam first tries to get to sleep, the narrator says he thought “about the times he wanted to leave home. The time he went to a lawyer to inquire about a divorce.” Sam and his wife stayed together: the divorce would have been too expensive, and his parents would never have forgiven him. 

     What Mason makes clear is that small country lives contain no less large emotions than those living urban ones, but in 'Wish' they are constrained or contained: that Damson doesn’t get to marry the man she loves under parental restriction; Sam will stay with his wife because he feels the weight of obligation. While many in the previous generation of writers (Updike, Roth, Bellow) fussed over protracted and tortuous divorces, casual affairs and needless lusts, Mason can seem a writer from an earlier period still. But she is chiefly exploring those experiences often missed by more urban figures. One way of looking at Minimalism is to see the writers filling spaces on the literary map that have been missed, so that a writer can seem less modern than one who comes before them because the place itself can appear less contemporary. Mason might, in this story from her 1989 collection, Love Life, be focusing on characters who would have been born near the beginning of the 20th century, but there is little sense that much has changed. Sam would probably expect others now to make the sacrifices he made then. When he looks at a photograph from the time before Lyle died, he sees a big family, and though he glares at this photo now, he might have one a lot like it with his own big family. “All Sam’s kids and grandkids were scattered around”, but there is the suggestion he has plenty of them, and a sense too that Sam’s small town world may have expanded genetically but not especially opened his mind. “His grandson Bobby had arrived from Arizona last year with an Italian woman who spoke in a sharp accent. Sam had to keep himself stiff to keep from laughing.” He is also a churchgoer who speaks with primitive grammar: “You ain’t even knowed me that long,” he says to his brother. Cecil says he is a man who likes to growl and has been doing it all his life. 

   The strength of a story like 'Wish' is that it doesn’t impose the contemporary on the archaic. It wishes to understand the feelings of those who have traditional lives and those who may have escaped them. Sam tells his sister after she talks of Pap ruining her life over Lyle that, “if you could do it over, you’d do it different, but it might not be no better.” It is evident in many other Mason stories, where the younger characters escape marriages, but often find themselves in messier entanglements, echoing Roth, Updike and Bellow. But in Mason's work, there is a greater sense of restriction and judgement, as though in the urban writers they gain experience, however clumsily and hurtfully; in Mason's stories, though, little will change, and chiefly sadness will accrue. This is what Sam conveys when saying you might do it differently, but would the result be more successful?  

  While we know, like Sam, Damson, and Sam's sister, Hortense, have kids and grandkids, we know Damson married Porter, but not much else. When Damson says to Sam “you just see what you want to see. You’re like Pap, just as hard and plain”, Sam replies, “That ain’t the whole truth,” and the narrator tells us he felt a mist of tears come. It isn’t until the end of the story that we understand the reason for those tears, and it won’t be over his wife’s death a few years before, but possibly a missed life as great as Damson’s. Yet he has also built an existence that has produced children and grandchildren, as though the emotional and the social are often separate things, and he understands this as well as Damson, even if nobody forced him to make this choice. 

    Perhaps Sam understands the needs of the family just as Damson comprehends the needs of the individual. Sam knows what obligation is, while Damson comprehends oppression. The conclusion might be the same, but the affective reality quite distinct. Their father would have wanted them to conform to society’s expectations and imposed them directly upon Damson, while Sam accepted them. Damson might not realise that Sam may be carrying sorrow that could be equal to hers, and that this mournfulness is there for both of them: neither married the person they loved. However, by implication, Sam’s has been a full choice with compromise, not error, while Damson was forced to avoid error and married out of anger, perhaps creating a greater error as a consequence. 

      Nevertheless, we might think that Sam’s regret is greater than Damson’s, with regret a personal emotion, while despair in this sense is impersonal. Sam thinks she had “the hope knocked out of her years ago”, and Damson can still be angry with her father all these decades later. Sam could only be angry with himself, but between the pair of them, they seem to see that rural life makes demands that aren’t easy to resist. They talk about Sam’s grandson Bobby, who appears to have broken up with the Italian woman, as Sam wonders why Damson never left her husband if she didn't love him. But they give the impression that this is what other people do elsewhere, especially if one happens to be a foreigner. It wouldn't quite be what they would do.

      Damson and Sam share a sense of resignation, a rural mindset that proposes things are as they are and there isn’t much they can do to change them. Yet Mason proposes, while the surface of their reality might be made up of conventional demands and expectations, Damson and Sam's affective lives may be as complex as the urbanite, and ostensibly no less sophisticated. When Mason gets asked, “you write about people, places, and subjects that others might tend to dismiss as not very 'literary.' Do you see yourself as reclaiming materials that otherwise would be lost or ignored?”, Mason replies: “It's somewhat natural for me to feel that way. I have my material, what's been allotted to me. And along with that comes a Southern defensive posture and a desire to reclaim a measure of pride and identity for my people.” (Contemporary Literature) 

    The final sorrow of the story rests on an awareness that the collateral damage of societal expectation appears to have ruined not only one life but two. Yet if it were only about ruin, the story would have merely arrived at anger, when instead it arrives at a deeper and more reflective emotion. One that suggests society has its demands and the individual has their yearnings and, somewhere in between, time works on people in such a way that a man approaching his mid-eighties can go to bed thinking of the young Nettie, and not of his children and grandchildren, just as Damson can say, speaking of children who never recover from abusive childhoods, ''nowadays they know about that….they never knowed how something when you’re young can hurt you so long.” Damson and Sam, in their different ways, have been hurting for a very long time indeed, and perhaps, unlike many an Urbanite character, they wouldn’t need a fancy psychologist to tell them so.  


© Tony McKibbin