'Dark Meadow' by Adam Johnson: The Dark Abyss of Childhood Trauma

It's time for a review of 'Dark Meadow', one of my favorite new stories in Adam Johnson's collection 'Fortune Smiles' which recently won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015. Are you paying attention? Adam Johnson won a national book award, arguably the highest honor our society bestows on writers other than the Pulitzer Prize. So should you read 'Fortune Smiles'? Well that question has already been answered by people much smarter than you or me.

Johnson does two things really well in 'Dark Meadow'. One, he crafts a legitimately interesting plot about a line of code that could be used to find all the child porn viewers in Los Angeles. This storyline is interesting enough by itself to warrant an entire novel. But that's not enough for Johnson because the protagonist of 'Dark Meadow' is a computer repairman who just so happens to be a pedophile. He's not just any pedophile though. He is a round character. He reads National Geographic, grows roses in his yard and was a member of the Marine Scouts. You shouldn't root for this character because he is a total creep. But is this guy really so different from you or me?

There are so many sources of tension in this story. You never know what Mr. Roses A.K.A. Dark Meadow is going to do. His saving grace is self-awareness. His understanding of his own trauma allows him to control his perverse behaviors. He wants to break the cycle of pedophiles constantly creating other pedophiles. The more one thinks about this story, the more one realizes how devastating it is. It's definitely one to seek out if you have the chance.

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Related Posts:

• 'Nirvana' by Adam Johnson

Does Anyone care about Fiction?

I have been wondering for a while what to do with this blog.

I started writing on here in college. I wanted an outlet to write about all the amazing stories I read in class. It seemed there was a new incredible story every week and I had to share the experience. I also entertained the notion of becoming a fiction writer and blogging about short stories was one way to improve my skill. I wanted to learn from the best.

My favorite writers at the time were George Saunders, Raymond Carver and Anthony Doerr. I consumed every word written by these writers to gain their powers and I wrote summaries and commentaries on their works. I had no idea there would be an audience for my writings. At this time of writing, my post on George Saunders' story Puppy has 21,000 views over three years. This averages out to almost 20 views per day.


Lately I have been posting more on this blog, but I am struggling with thoughts of doubt. Reading works of fiction is hard enough without having to summarize them. Short story blogs are not cash cows. If I wanted to make money, I would blog about technology or dieting.

I would not be who I am today without short stories. This may sound corny but short stories have taught me things that I otherwise would not have learned. From Saunders I learned about the double-edged sword of judgement. From Carver I learned about the importance of honest communication. I hope that I can overcome my own weaknesses and continue reading short stories and learning from them. Truthfully this is one of my favorite things.

To anyone who reads this, what were you searching for and did you find it? How can I improve my writing?

Lydia Davis - "Five Signs of Disturbance"

"Five Signs of Disturbance is the final "story" in Davis's collection "Break it Down". Similar to other stories in the collection, there is an unnamed narrator and the only character is a "she". Here the "she" is another eccentric type who is easily entranced by inanimate objects. The following is my commentary on Davis's "Five Signs of Disturbance".

I have come to understand that Davis's stories rarely possess a plot. The focus, more often than not, is on character psychology. The narrator usually has unfettered access to characters' minds and uses this power without limit. Language is another central concern of Davis. She likes experimenting with language, testing the meanings of words and creating humorous moments. While I believe it is still somewhat valuable, focusing on narrative in Davis's works misses the point that Davis is more concerned with other things.

In "Five Signs of Disturbance", the main character "she" is sensitive and analytical. Because she is isolated, every little stimuli has a disproportionate effect on her. For example ads involving old people or children tend to make her cry. She is unable to compartmentalize. However I am going to assume that "she" is a very intelligent person or at least very self-aware. At one point the narrator even says that her smartness has counted less and less over the years. This thought belongs to the character and is presented as an objective thought.

There are images in the story alternating with the internal and external descriptions of the character. These images are sometimes separate from the character's experience and sometimes they are part of it. The title of the story refers to five specific stimuli that "she" identifies as particularly disturbing. This speaks to the character's analytical personality. With all the sources of meaning in her life, she still feels compelled to mark some as uniquely disturbing. Perhaps this character was an accountant or a lawyer in a previous life.

If I were to associate this story with one specific idea, I would choose the human tendency to create meaning everywhere. It's human nature to attach meaning to objects based on all sorts of criteria. Often this behavior is more problematic than useful. The characters in Davis's stories can attest to this. The more I read Davis, the more I think of her as a philosopher parading as a fiction writer.

Check out my other posts on the stories "Therapy" and "Break it Down". I am too far down the Lydia Davis rabbit hole to spot now so expect posts on her later works in the future. 

"Nirvana" by Adam Johnson

Nirvana by Adam Johnson exemplifies why Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer prize for fiction. The following is my summary and analysis of the opening story of Johnson's collection Fortune smiles.

An unnamed male computer programmer lives with his wife Charlotte who is temporarily paralyzed from the shoulders down. Both the husband and wife are feeling bad and each copes with their feelings in a unique way. While the wife listens to the band Nirvana when she sleeps, the husband talks to a hologram of a recently assassinated president. Speaking with the president helps the husband to keep his morale high. Creating the hologram was possible for the husband because he works at a company called Reputation Curator that threatens people to retract their negative comments about businesses on the internet.

Charlotte wants to have a baby to give her life purpose. The husband and Charlotte have sex but the husband stops because he sees Charlotte crying. Charlotte tells her husband to put her headphones on to listen to Nirvana. This inspires the husband to create a hologram of Kurt Cobain for his wife. Charlotte is awestruck at seeing this and she asks Kurt Cobain not to kill himself. Charlotte's fascination with Cobain has something to do with the mystery surrounding his death. The story ends on this positive note allowing the reader to glimpse Charlotte feeling briefly happy.

"Nirvana" succeeds at being both deep and funny. The interactions between the husband and the president are my favorite moments. The husband's emotional desperation contrasts with the president's robotic political rhetoric. The story exists in a future that seems strange but nothing is overly fantastic. The brilliance of the story is that it uses science-fiction elements that are not too far off from the technology of today. I never felt like the technology was gimmicky. It was instead very carefully used to create humor and explore the characters' emotions. I am curious to know how much time Johnson spent developing this story because it feels like it would be difficult to pull off.

It's rare that a story works as well as "Nirvana" does. Everything is so well executed. I look forward to reading the rest of Johnson's stories in Fortune Smiles.

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"Therapy" by Lydia Davis

A first person narrator states that she moves to the city just before Christmas. The narrator shares that she has a husband who does not live with her. The narrator has no friends. Her days are spent drinking coffee, smoking and occasionally reading. In the middle of summer, the narrator decides to see a doctor. There are several reasons why the narrator does not like her doctor but she continues seeing him once per week. Over time the narrator develops an affinity for her doctor. The narrator feels a constant wall between her and other people but this wall does not exist between her and the doctor.

Late in the fall, the narrator experiences a "slowing down". The narrator's perspective on life is dark and she loses her ability to love. As a result of therapy, some of the narrator's problems go away. The narrator now laughs, reads and talks to people on the street. Although many of her problems persist, the narrator wants to end her therapy. Unfortunately the narrator can not bring herself to end the therapy, therefore therapy does not end. 

Davis's "therapy" presents many questions and few answers. Attempting to analyze this story would be difficult. My favorite thing about "therapy" is the narrator's tone. I would describe it as "matter of fact". But how trustworthy is the narrator? If I met this person on the street, then I would not take them seriously. Plot matters very little in "Therapy". I hope that the more of Davis's fiction I read, the better I will be able to understand her peculiar style.

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"Break it Down" by Lydia Davis

The following is my summary and analysis of Lydia Davis's short story "Break it Down". The story is one of the more memorable pieces in Davis's oeuvre. It is so important that Davis used "Break it Down" as the title for her collection originally published in 1986.

A third person narrator describes a man sitting at a desk trying to break it down. The narration shifts to the first-person voice of the man himself assigning a dollar amount to a love affair. The man concludes that each hour of sex costs him 33 to 50 dollars an hour.

But that barely even begins to cover it all because the man and his lover spent entire days together and every small interaction between them is worth something to the man. It is absurd to think that the man's money should only be allocated to the sex because the sex is influenced by so many other things. It's more than just sex too. It's a complex human relationship.

The man worries that he will forget the moments of his relationship. He thinks back to several meaningful scenes. In one moment he admits that without his lover he would be unable to continue living. In a nutshell, the man is obsessed with the past relationship because it gave him something that he never had before.

Lydia Davis pictured with her only friend.

At this point the obsessive nature of the man's thoughts seem unhealthy. If there is an overarching idea here, then it is the destructive power of love. Perhaps that is where his urge to assign dollar values to his experiences comes from. A dollar value is as concrete and easily understandable as it gets, whereas whatever is going on his head is tough to quantify. The man also remembers many bad experiences with his lover but these moments are few and far between.

The man accepts that pain is a necessary part of the equation. Pain and pleasure are not distinct from each other. The hard part is that the pain lasts much longer than the pleasure. The man understands all of this but he admits that he would still do the same thing over again knowing how bad the pain is. At the end of the day, the only tangible effect of the relationship is an estimated loss of $1,000 and nothing to show for it. Ain't love grand.

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