Sad People Who Smoke: On Mary Robison

Mary Robison is interviewed by Rebecca Bengal in the new Summer issue of The Paris Review.

I am reading Mary Robison and thinking about smoking. Specifically, I’m rereading Robison’s 1979 debut, Days, a collection of short stories about sad people who smoke. There’s Charlie Nunn, the retired teacher who smokes while supine on the rug, letting ash accumulate on his unshaven chin. There’s Guidry, the alcoholic who rests the day’s first cigarette on his sink’s soap caddy as he shaves. There’s Gail, the bride whose father strikes a match on his trouser fly to offer her a light. These characters don’t smoke because they’re sad; they smoke because it’s the seventies. Still, I’m tempted to read all the smoking as symptomatic of a condition that afflicts characters across Robison’s oeuvre: a near pathological refusal to consider any moment but the present one.

When I first read Robison, I was also a sad person who smoked. That was seventeen years ago. I was an M.F.A. student living in my first New York apartment, a sixth-floor junior one bedroom ($1,300 a month!) just south of 125th Street on Manhattan’s West Side. I’d take my Camel Lights onto the fire escape, which offered a view of the shimmering Hudson. Unlike the characters in Robison’s stories, whose default mode is passive resignation, I was romantic; sadness and smoking were aspects of the “young writer” persona I hoped to cultivate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once defended my habit to a girlfriend by explaining that cigarettes were my friends before she was around and that they’d comfort me after our inevitable breakup. All this is not to say that I wasn’t sad, or that I didn’t love smoking, but that both were integral to my conception of self.

Robison’s 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever, also became integral. On its surface, the story of Money Breton, a Hollywood script doctor and mother of adult children who takes Ritalin and drives around the American South, had little in common with either my life or the autobiographical first novel I was writing. But Money’s narration—pithy, sardonic, and unsentimental, but also stealthily poetic and fundamentally humane—struck a tonal balance I’d been struggling to achieve in my own work.

Why Did I Ever is structured as 536 chapters, some as brief as a sentence. These chapters are numbered except when they’re titled, creating the impression of a woman desperate to organize her shambolic life. It’s very funny, though the ADHD-afflicted Money resembles a comedian who gets lost in the setup and forgets to drop the punch line. A chapter titled “Get the Bugs off Me” reads in its entirety:

“Where was I?” I ask myself, just out of bed in the morning.

I say, “Three clues. Not at Pizza Hut, not in outer space, not in New Jersey.”

“That still doesn’t tell me, though,” I say.

The book I was writing when I began to read Why Did I Ever, a “novel of ideas” about a guy taking bong hits in his mom’s suburban basement, had grown unwieldy. The feedback I got in workshop was that excess backstory was slowing the book’s pacing, but I couldn’t see it.

Why Did I Ever offered a different model for the comic novel. Instead of correcting for plot deficiencies by dazzling the reader with digressive feats of intellect, Robison builds momentum by careening between chapters with chaotic torque. Further, as the novel progresses, its white space between becomes weighted with what Money’s avoiding: two loser boyfriends, a drug-addicted daughter, and the Bigfoot script she’s been hired to rewrite as a rom-com. Her son, Paulie, is gearing up to testify against the man who raped him. The structural genius of Why Did I Ever is how Money continues to treat her life as comic fodder, but the reader’s view of it changes as we get a fuller picture of the pain her joking conceals.

Beginning with Days, I trawled Robison’s catalog for further inspiration. I was disappointed with what I found. Why Did I Ever is a speedy book about a person on speed. Days felt comparatively static. Though Robison was in her twenties when she wrote the earliest of its spare, elliptical stories—many of which first appeared in The New Yorker—they are snapshots of middle-class, middle-aged people enduring mundane lives in the Midwest. Most are narrated in a free indirect style I found sharp but mannered. My initial impression was of a young writer trying to seem beyond her years.

Revisiting Days now, I’m struck by how unconventional its stories are, particularly in their approach to narrative. If the jokes in Why Did I Ever lack punchlines, then the stories in Days lack endings. They often close with a line of dialogue at just the moment a traditional story would climax and arc into denouement. In “Weekday,” Guidry’s ex-wife, Christine, arrives at his house in the morning unannounced. She chugs breakfast vodka, gives Guidry a haircut, and drops the bombshell that she’s getting remarried to a gay man. The reader is poised for a blowout fight. Instead, Guidry examines himself in the mirror and asks Christine to look at what she did to his hair. She says, “You made me nervous.” The story ends there.

Robison’s editor on Days was Gordon Lish, the man who can either be thanked or blamed for his cut-and-paste work on Raymond Carver’s short stories. (I thank him.) Roger Angell had already edited many of Robison’s stories at The New Yorker, but Lish reworked them for the collection. Like Carver, Robison would later complain about Lish, suggesting he made her stories less funny and ruined their endings. She restored much of her early work to its previous New Yorker form in Tell Me, a 2002 compendium of new and selected stories. The restorations are revealing. Where there are obvious differences between Carver’s lengthy originals and the abbreviated Lish versions, the restored Robison stories hardly vary from the ones that appeared in Days. In “Kite and Paint,” for example, “The fan quit by itself, in mid-swing” becomes “The fan quit by itself, in midglance.” Aside from a couple of other micro-edits, the story remains unchanged. Robison hated the term minimalist, preferring her own coinage, subtractionist. I’d call her a precisionist, a writer so concerned with exactitude that “mid-swing” must have nagged at her for years.

Robison followed Days with a novel, Oh! (1981), which I’ll admit to remembering nothing about beyond that it was unrecognizably adapted into the nineties film Twister, which I don’t remember either beyond an image of Helen Hunt chasing a tornado from a speeding Jeep Wrangler while “Broken” by Belly plays on the soundtrack. (In fact, the car was not even a Wrangler.) Revisiting it now, Oh! reads like an early experiment in how Robison’s sensibility might translate to the long form. It follows the Clevelands, an eccentric family who may in fact live in Cleveland, though it’s never specified. Oh! is funny and episodic, but its ensemble cast can’t generate the intimacy or the urgency of the first-person narration in the novels that followed.

Two more story collections, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night (1983) and Believe Them (1988), round out Robison’s work in the eighties. They are similar to Days in that their stories explore middle-American lives. But these collections’ strongest moments take fresh angles of approach. “Yours” is only four pages long, but it moves. It begins from the perspective of thirty-five-year-old Allison, whose husband, Clark, is seventy-eight. It is autumn in Virginia, and they are carving jack-o’-lanterns on their porch. Clark is a retired doctor who dabbles as a “Sunday watercolorist.” He tells Allison her jack-o’-lanterns are better than his. She doesn’t believe him. They get into bed. After a section break, we learn that Allison “began to die” later that night. The implication of a previously mentioned “natural-hair wig” suddenly becomes clear. Allison tells Clark not to look if the wig comes off. She kicks away the covers. Robison shifts into Clark’s POV:

He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

Prior to publishing Subtraction (1991), Robison had “fired” Lish, and the novel is colored by his absence. It follows the poet and Harvard professor Paige Deveaux from Cambridge to Houston as she searches for her husband, Raf, who’s disappeared on a bender. Paige’s narration is looser and less fussy than anything in Robison’s earlier books. Lish had discouraged Robison from writing in the first person, and Subtraction’s lengthy sentences and meandering plot express an almost giddy sense of freedom at being out from under his dictatorship. Robison would refine that first-person style in the novels that followed— Why Did I Ever and One D.O.A., One on the Way—which paradoxically manage to be both tighter and more delightfully unhinged than Subtraction.

When One D.O.A. came out in 2009, I had completed my M.F.A. and was working in a bookstore located in a Brooklyn Heights storefront that has since become a bank. I had started sending my novel to agents. I had started dating the woman I would marry. I had started taking Prozac, which helped with the sadness, which I’d learned to call depression. I still smoked, though my future wife said we wouldn’t have a future unless I quit. I cared enough about that future to cut down—or at least to lie about cutting down. I’d hide single cigarettes on the ledge above her building’s doorway, then smoke them on her stoop in the mornings after she left for work.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, One D.O.A. is more cynical than either Subtraction or Why Did I Ever. Eve, an underemployed and unhappily married location scout, narrates the novel. Hollywood has abandoned New Orleans in the hurricane’s aftermath, and Eve drives around, scouring the city’s ruins for locations for films that will never be made. Partway through the book, her assistant, Lucien, tells her that his name is actually Paul. Eve continues to call him Lucien. Though she’s not exactly “likable,” I found Eve’s commitment to living in a state of sustained self-delusion compelling. Her city is in ruins and so is her marriage, but Eve perseveres by going on as if they aren’t. I made One D.O.A. my staff pick. I hand-sold a copy to a guy who claimed to love Robison’s earlier novels, Gilead and Housekeeping. I did not correct him.

I realize I keep sliding into the past, into a reflective mode that feels wrong for an essay on Robison’s work. I can’t help it. Even when I used to smoke on the fire escape all those years ago, a part of me was framing the moment for future recollection. Robison does the opposite. Though only Why Did I Ever and One D.O.A. employ present-tense narration, her entire oeuvre feels almost Buddhist in its attention to the now. Robison’s short stories begin in medias res with little context, and their characters rarely consider how they got to where they are or where they’re heading to next. It’s not that they don’t have free will so much as that exerting it feels futile; their lives are inescapably circumscribed. This, I think, is the major difference between early Robison and the Carver stories of the same era. Carver’s characters are dreamers, and they fall into despair when their dreams are dashed. Robison’s simply sit there blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Yours” ends on an uncharacteristic moment of reflection, but Clark’s insight is worthless, an impossible fantasy of getting drunk with his dying wife so he can console her with the knowledge that life sucks anyway.

The protagonists of Robison’s later books are less passive. In Subtraction, Paige drives all over Houston in search of her husband. What she doesn’t do is spend much time considering why Raf disappeared in the first place or if it’s a bad idea to sleep with his best friend. In One D.O.A., Eve is so angry about her husband’s terminal hepatitis and its imposition on her life (they have to move in with her in-laws!) that she begins an affair with his alcoholic twin. Again, reflection is not the character’s strong suit. These novels seem to suggest that when the past and the future hold nothing but pain, the present is a refuge.

To paraphrase Amy Hempel, Why should looking back show us more than looking at? In the absence of reflection, Robison’s characters become exceptional observers, human antennae receiving all signals except those sent by their own inner selves. Here’s Eve on what she hears during sex with her brother-in-law:

Not silence. I can still hear the muffled car honks and brakes and tires, the next door neighbor’s cat, and laughter now from some huddle of men, a National Guard helicopter going over, the air fan, the plumbing’s rumble, the bed when we move, a child somewhere having a dream, the high whine of the streetcar, the little voice of a neighbor’s television, freighter horns on the Mississippi, now Saunders’ long breathing against my chest as he’s slipping off into sleep.

I finally quit smoking when I weaned myself off Prozac and went on Wellbutrin. People say you have to want to quit, but it turns out you just have to take a drug that inhibits your nicotine receptors. Still, I figured that two or three times a year I could bum one at a party. The bummed cigarette would be Proustian, conveying me back to every Camel Light I’d ever smoked. But Wellbutrin sucks the pleasure out of smoking. It kills the nicotine buzz and suppresses nostalgia’s warm glow. Occasionally, I bum one anyway. When I take that first drag I’m disappointed to find myself fixed to the present, feeling the smoke burn my unpracticed lungs. One thing I’ve learned from Robison: sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette.

 Adam Wilson is the author of three books, and a recipient of The Paris Review‘s Terry Southern Prize for Humor.