at last, some thoughts on 20 grand, grand, grand

I've been meaning to blog about 20 Grand for a while now. One of the nice things about the way Curtis writes is that it isn’t simply the plot that grabs the reader (though that certainly helps), but the writing itself that pulls you in. Her characters are very well-developed; the reader can relate to these characters--no matter how far their lives are from the reader’s own—precisely because they are so well thought out. The solitude of the main character in “Hungry Self,” for example, is positively crippling, as Curtis describes a loner in her own terms: “I went downstairs to the basement. It was vast and unlit and I liked it, because down there I was just a person in the basement of a Chinese restaurant.” (11) The reader is privy to this solitary narrator’s unsettling thoughts, and empathizes with the vulnerable girl. But Curtis is careful not to play the sympathy card too heavy handedly. At times her description of the girl is poignant, but other times the narrator’s loneliness is described more lightly, to a rather overall tragicomic effect. “I was terribly in love with [Johnny], but we were separated by race and by the fact that he hated me.” (3) The narrator’s own matter-of-fact-life-sucks-confession is so raw and accepted that it is almost funny.

The key to Rebecca’s writing, however, isn’t just the plot, the characters, or the carefully crafted setting Curtis has created, but the very language and form with which she describes them. One of the author’s strongest assets is her use of transitions. Great writing makes every sentence as strong as that first captivating line, and that’s something Curtis certainly pays attention to. From one paragraph to the next, each opening sentence is as strong as the last, creating powerful paragraphs that continually pull the reader into the story. Take, for instance, this sequence from Hungry Self, where the narrator recalls a therapy session gone wrong, and is later snapped back to the present:

Two-sixty, he said. You weigh two-sixty and you think you can tell me what to do, how to discipline my own daughter, how to talk to my own daughter? The lesbian counselor cried pretty soon after that. There might have been more words on my father’s part—“manipulative,” maybe “controlling,” “disappointing,” and “freakish aberration of nature.” These were words that we both liked. We drove home in a happy silence, almost a camaraderie, in which he said, Beautiful day, and How is school, and How is track—a mood which would last approximately until midnight, when I would puke in the kitchen sink and he would walk downstairs from where he had not been sleeping and tell me that I was a shitty little mess who was destroying the family, which was his family, and had I not considered taking myself away to somewhere not this house, because if I did not he surely would take himself away, and how did I imagine my brothers and my mother would feel about that?

My order was up. I got the chicken worbar into its vat and trucked the hot iron plate out and set it down on the prep tray and produced a Sterno can from my pocket. I held the match high for drama before I lit it, and when the Sterno caught the two women clapped. Then I put the can on the plate and poured the chicken from the vat onto the plate, being careful not to pour any into the can itself.

The stark change in time and place makes for a powerful transition, yet the undertones in the two paragraphs speak to more than just a snap back to reality. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and curtis does well in writing it.