The New Yorker:

By Rivka Galchen

The structure of “Elephant,” one of Raymond Carver’s last stories, is simple, but the emotional effect is outsized, numinous, convincing, and comic. It opens with the narrator’s brother calling him to ask for money. His mother, “poor and greedy,” also needs some, as does his daughter, who was living in Bellingham with two kids and “a swine who wouldn’t even look for work,” and his son, in college in New Hampshire, who says he will deal drugs or rob a bank if he can’t get money from his dad. That’s the first part of the story. In the next section, the headwinds intensify. The brother’s plans for paying him back have fallen through, the mother says it’s not in the cards for her to save for a rainy day, the daughter’s trailer is robbed, and the son wants help moving to Germany to avoid the materialist society of the U.S., where you can’t even have a conversation, he complains, without money coming up. Then, though the narrator’s situation doesn’t shift—except maybe to get worse—he feels, somehow, different. “I decided to write her a letter that evening and tell her I was rooting for her,” he says of his daughter. “My mother was alive and more or less in good health, and I felt lucky there, too.”

When I wrote “Unreasonable,” I was interested in (among other things) better understanding, artistically and emotionally, what made that change credible. I also wondered how a different sort of narrator would think her way through her own ongoing storm. In my nonfiction writing, I have lengthy conversations with a lot of scientists. One of those scientists recently explained why something was unlikely to happen, “given our current macro-environment”—the cuts in funding that followed the election of Donald Trump. That phrasing stayed with me. I put my character into that “macro-environment,” and also gave her the shifting pressure systems of two children, students, and colleagues. Not long ago, I read scientific research about the varied dialects and disposition of bees—so I realized that my character studied bees. She was someone who could take seriously the mind of a creature smaller than a penny, or someone who, maybe, felt smaller than a penny herself.

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