Lydia Peelle, Caught Up in “The Long Rain”

When I got the news about this year’s “5 Under 35” selections from the National Book Foundation, I was delighted to see Lydia Peelle on the list. I’ve been enjoying her debut short story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing not just for her ability to depict characters who are learning to recognize the pivotal life moments they’re passing through (or, in some cases, passed through years ago), but also for stories like “Phantom Pain” which show the effects of a rumor rippling through a community, brushing up against the other emotional burrs with which people are coping. It looks like New York literati will get a chance to hear Peelle for herself when she comes to the 5 Under 35 celebration in November; until then, this rising writer has graciously shared some thoughts about a short story that moved her in her not-so-distant youth.

I was lucky enough to encounter brilliant English teachers during that tumultuous time of life that is junior high school—and it was with the most brilliant of them all, near-sighted and perspicacious Mr. Hopkins, with his Coke-bottle glasses and rarefied philosophical ramblings (well over our heads, but I’d like to think some of it percolated through), that I first read Ray Bradbury. How grateful I am that I was introduced to this master’s work so early, at such an impressionable time, and by such a wonderful teacher. The book was The Illustrated Man, it was the last semester of 8th grade, and despite the burgeoning distractions of spring, my friends and I feel deeply in love with all things Bradbury.

Though we had read plenty of short stories through the school years, I think The Illustrated Man must have been the first story collection I ever read. For me it opened up an enormous realm of potential. I became aware of the alchemy that exists in great short story collections: how they are greater than the sum of their parts, and how, within their pages, an entire world can be assembled (or, in Bradbury’s case, an entire universe—literally).

The book’s framing premise—that each story is depicted in a tattoo (drawn years ago by a time-traveling witch) on a wandering man’s body and that anyone who looks long enough will eventually see his own death—was just the stuff to capture our attention and imagination. We were just as taken with this framing as we were with the individual stories (all of them still so clearly in my mind to this day, with their chilling and often accurate views of the future as foretold by Bradbury in the middle of the 20th century: “The Veldt,” “The Rocket Man, “Marionettes, Inc.”) and we used to pass notes—in math class or science class, of course, never during English—decorated with our own “illustrated men,” crude blank bodies hastily drawn and filled in with pictures that depicted the drama of our days: this boy, or that teacher, or one of the lunch-hour adventures we were always scheming.

Suffice to say, these stories lodged deeply in my mind and memory, in the way only things one reads when very young do. There is one story in particular that has stayed with me, in high resolution: “The Long Rain,” a deceptively simple story with so much in it from which to learn.

The plot: a rocket from earth crashes on Venus, where it is always raining. Its small crew is roaming the planet, searching in vain to find one of the Sun Domes, futuristic rest areas built by Congress and containing artificial suns, scattered over the planet to provide earthlings respite from the ceaseless rain. That’s it—it’s a story about trying to get in out of the rain. But its genius lies therein. Bradbury’s masterful description of the maddening rain triggers one of the most basic and ancient animal instincts: the desire to get out of the weather. He handles the rain with precision: never overdoing but perfectly describing it and its relentlessness, resulting in a nearly visceral reaction to the characters’ plight. The reader comes out at the end of this story feeling drenched to the bone, with a glimpse of the insanity to which the characters have been driven. In description, in restraint, in timing, the story is a lesson in what we as writers can achieve—can hope to achieve—given these feeble tools we have to work with.

Though Mr. Hopkins often expounded on the book’s wider themes (which with not a small note of sarcasm he always referred to as the DHM: Deep Hidden Meaning), it wasn’t until much later that I fully realized the deeper lesson in much of Bradbury’s work. By so vividly picturing the loneliness and inhospitableness of the rock-strewn universe, he is subtly drawing attention to the fact that we cannot take this planet—our home—nor its delicately balanced systems for granted. And by showing us an future controlled and corrupted by artificial intelligence, he reminds us what it is that makes us human—and how urgent the need to hold on to it.

To Ray Bradbury, then—and to teachers who put great literature in the hands of young people, trusting that, if we don’t altogether understand it, it will shape the landscape of our minds for a lifetime—I raise a glass.

13 October 2009 | selling shorts |