When I went to graduate school in the seventies, there was a benign, laissez-faire attitude in the culture. The sixties were over. The Vietnam war had been brought to a close, and by the end of the seventies, a farmer from Georgia who was not only a pacifist, but a forward-looking thinker, occupied the White House. For a progressive, there was not much in the public life of the nation to inspire outrage. Carter instituted energy saving initiatives that made everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, in 1978, acknowledge that fossil fuels were limited and conservation was necessary. The speed limit was set at 55; thermostats were lowered to 68. We liked peanuts because that was what our president grew on his farm, and at least in my circles, we also liked small cars, down-filled vests to wear in our cooler houses, and meals featuring tofu. I was twenty-six and married, and just before I sent in my applications for graduate school, I hesitated: maybe I should dedicate my life to the soybean?

We are cautious about our present, uneasy about our future, and it makes sense that in the stories we read and publish in journals and magazines, narratives, overall, have condensed.

In those days there were many people who believed that this organic, low-on-the- food-chain, inexpensive, high quality protein was the answer to everything that was still wrong in the world, and I dutifully report that I shared that pastoral vision. But after working in a tofu factory for a short while, I realized that I was not suited for life in the world of reason. I needed a career that would exercise the run-away imagination I am always at the mercy of, and so I chose the life I have now, a writer and teacher of fiction, an occupation that places me not on the plateau of social advancement, but more happily, in the mud of human designs and desires.

At graduate school, the stories we discussed in workshop were printed with purple ink on smooth white paper that had the distinctive smell of the mimeograph machine. “I want to know more.” That’s what we said, over and over. For the author who had imagined a character bingeing on candy after dumping her long-term boyfriend, or the author who had imagined elephants walking down a city street, we always wanted to know more about the characters, the setting, the event. We were so greedy for background, the emphasis was always on expansion because new writers often don’t reveal enough; also, the adage show, don’t tell, was our mantra, and we heaped scene upon scene upon scene It was an expansive time in the culture: we were at peace, the economy was healthy, and the general outlook, from our mostly vegetarian kitchens, was optimistic. So perhaps it is not surprising that our fiction was expansive too.

I left graduate school with the words, “I want to know more,” echoing in my brain and setting out to be a writer and a mother, both at the same time, I continued to work in an expansive way. Assuming that my readers were devoted and patient, I moved my characters through meaningful moments with what I thought was beautiful phrasing. They meandered from one interesting cul-de-sac to another in several unpublished novels, and though my readers were too kind to say it, soporific was probably the overall effect.

Now, thirty years beyond those graduate school workshops, I work in a subtractive way and often ask myself “Is it necessary?” when revising. The stories I admire now are taut and purposeful. And the longer novels and novellas that enter my life in the fortuitous way that one’s favorite work does, are long not because of a relaxing of the narrative line, but because of deepening complexity. Clearly, my own tastes have changed from those early days, but so have the needs of the culture. Even with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars drawing down, tensions are high in trouble spots around the world. Economies are fragile, and the effects of global climate change greet us with each unusual weather event. There is much that is urgent in our present, and yet domestic and international action is stymied by a U.S. more bitterly divided than ever. We are cautious about our present, uneasy about our future, and it makes sense that in the stories we read and publish in journals and magazines, narratives, overall, have condensed.

Readers, too, have changed in some basic ways. As we are surrounded with, and interrupted by more and more digital messaging, our day-to-day existence is converted into meaning even as we are experiencing it. Think of the instant reporting that facebook allows. Think of major political and cultural events and how commentators interpret them before they are even over. The rough, multi-faceted edge of experience is smoothed continuously, a process that replaces complexity with one-liners. They hound us with a persistence that is possible simply because our iPhones, iPads, and laptops allow it.

Fiction is one of the few places where complexity still reigns, where questions endure, and the unknown is acknowledged. But how do we keep a reader engaged in this denser, more slow-moving medium? With the new texting distractions of the last few years, it seems to me that now it is even more important for the fiction writer to endow narrative with a strong and compelling momentum. But how? Over the years, this has been a driving question as I have searched for ways to develop an imagined world that has a level of complexity similar to my own, and still create a narrative through-line that instills urgency. How can I achieve the density that allows for richness without choking momentum?

One way is to ground the character in the primary place of his or her quotidian life, so that when something happens to destabilize it, I can call in the other place, the place where mystery reigns. This other place will change what the reader knows and therefore assumes about the character. It will stretch a line of tension, a buzzing high voltage wire, between the primary place, the place of safety and familiars, and the other place, the place of risk and desire the character must get to.

The Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,”^[1] illustrates this type of narrative movement. A poor miller brags to the king, “I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold.” Although it is hard to imagine a father who would make such a preposterous boast, fairy tales, like dreams, put us into the world of metaphor where such a claim has psychological appropriateness. Clearly, the father wants the king to know that his daughter is no ordinary woman and by extension, that he is no ordinary guy. His desire catapults the young girl out of her ordinary life and puts her in a state of suspension that destroys her quotidian existence. The king is skeptical. But he is also greedy, so he decides to test the miller’s claim. He locks the poor girl into a room that contains nothing but a mound of straw, a reel, and a spinning wheel and tells her that if the straw isn’t spun into gold by the next morning, she will be killed. Imagine her desperation. There she is, alone with three things she knows, but has never considered using together to create anything, much less, a precious metal. What is she to do? Late in the night, a little man appears before her and promises to spin all of the straw into gold in exchange for a payment. The first time he saves her, she gives him her necklace. The second time, she gives him her ring. The third time, she has nothing to give him. But now the stakes are higher. Now, if she spins straw into gold, the king will make her his queen. So the strange little man promises to spin the straw once again, but only if she will pay him with her first child. The girl has no other choice. She knows that soon she will be in a position of power, so she decides that when she’s queen, she’ll be able to weasel out of the debt easily. Queens can do anything, can’t they? Yet on the eve of the birth of her first child, with guards at every entrance to the castle, the little man appears for his payment. The queen is distraught. She cries and pleads and finally, he relents and proposes a contest. She has three days to guess his name correctly, and if she does, he will let her keep her child.

It seems easy enough. If there is one thing a queen has in abundance, it is people to do her bidding. She sends messengers “far and wide” to discover the little man’s identity. But none of the names they bring back to her are correct. On the third day, a messenger comes to her and reports,

Today I bake, tomorrow brew,
The next I’ll have the young Queen’s child.
Ha! Glad am I that no one knew
That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.^[2]

Right away, the queen knows that this is the answer. When the little man appears to collect her child, she tells him the correct name, and he gets angry and stamps his foot so hard into the earth he can’t get it out again. The story ends with him tearing himself in two as he tries to free his leg.

So what has occurred on the narrative line? The destablizer, the miller, upsets his daughter’s life. She is placed into a room with ordinary things, straw, a reel, and a spinning wheel, objects with which she’s very familiar. But she is asked to do an impossible thing with them and she succeeds only because she reaches such a level of desperation she cries for help from the depths of her being. That call brings in a representative from the other place. As soon as he appears, the primary place of the story is changed. In the room where the miller’s daughter is imprisoned, the reasonable, the idea that straw cannot be spun into gold, is suddenly pressured by the extraordinary.

It is important to note that the primary place and the other place are not abstractions. They are actual sites. The primary place is the room with the spinning wheel and the other place is the clearing at the end of the forest. We see a small house, a burning fire, and we know we are beyond civilization because we are in a territory where the animals are in charge, where “the fox and the hare bid each other goodnight.” It is no longer the world of order and reason. The Queen’s messenger is the conduit between these two worlds. As such, he provides a way for her to gain her rightful place as a mother.

Something is missing and it is our human desire, our need to create order, to finish the unfinished, to find out what happened, that draws us into these improbable events…

There are many moments in this story when we are asked to suspend disbelief and we do so willingly. Why? The narrative gap. Something is missing and it is our human desire, our need to create order, to finish the unfinished, to find out what happened, that draws us into these improbable events and keeps us there till we are satisfied. The narrative gap is the supporting information we never get. We never know how Rumpelstiltskin hears the miller’s daughter’s cry for help or indeed, how he is able to spin the straw into gold. We never find out what caused the messenger to follow the path to the end of the forest. We know only the outcomes, but how these major events came about, the story does not bother to tell us. After all, it is a fairy tale and it is repetition that creates credulity. My mother read it to me out of an edition of Grimm’s that she had as a child and I read it to my children from the same book. Right there — three generations learning to accept what is not being explained, to respect the irrational.

In contemporary fiction, narrative gaps work the same way. They present something in an incomplete fashion, and that invites us to enter into the story to complete it. However, in fiction that attempts to create an illusion of reality, the narrative gaps can’t be quite so large. But interestingly, as we will see in the next examples, the other place the story takes us to can be just as removed from the rational world as it is in Rumpelstiltskin. In fact, I am going to posit that for it to function as a true other place, that is, a place that exerts pressure on the quotidian, it must have a quality of the strange, the unknown, the unfamiliar.

This is what the other place provides. If the final other place in our lives is death, then perhaps the other places we encounter on the way to that eventuality prepare us for it. They can include sexual passion, childbirth, illness, art, literature, music, and the world of our dreams. It is the place where the assymetrical, the unreasonable, the chaotic are in power.

I first noticed the other place when I was reading Edward P. Jones’ masterful work, The Known World.^[3] It has a densely woven narrative fabric with a fluid story line that jumps effortlessly from one time period to another. Its focus is a group of people living in the 1850’s on a Virginia plantation owned by Henry Townsend, a slave owner who is himself the son of slaves who purchased their freedom. The Townsend plantation is the primary place and the people living there are the primary characters, but as the narrative moves from one person to another, and forward and backward through time, it introduces us to many different people, of different races. Yet within this ranging, as the various strands are woven into the curious story of an educated, slave-owning black man, there is a burr in the cloth, an other place that doesn’t fit in. It stays with us and continues to tease even after closing the book.

This other place appeared in the sub-story of Counsel Skiffington, a white plantation owner who lost his entire family and all of his slaves to small pox. Deranged by grief, he mounted his horse and rode away from his ruined plantation. After months of wandering, he came to a clearing where there was a house and a barn. The narrator sets the scene: “The land seemed incapable of growing anything but sorrow, yet, as Counsel looked about, he could see that some effort had been made to farm. And in a few spots he saw some success, though he did not make out what was growing. The crops were about three feet high.” ^[4]

This is curious. Back in those agrarian times, how could a man who once grew crops himself in a similar climate, come across a mature plant he did not recognize? Things get stranger: The house is one large room inhabited by a family, a boy about twelve, and the parents, but the boy is clearly the one in charge. After Counsel steps in, the boy tells his mother “to close the damn door.” The father offers him a chair at the table, but it has “one leg shorter than the others and Counsel found it necessary to balance himself the whole time.” The mother gives him a plate of stew but “Counsel was too hungry to ask what the meat was,” and the reader remembers the animal pelts drying on the porch that Counsel didn’t recognize. “Biscuits too,” the boy says. “Don’t forget the goddamn biscuits.”^[5]

Everything appears to be turned around. The house is bigger inside than it is from the outside and the son, not the father, is the one giving orders. Counsel is given a bed in the barn and in the middle of the night, the wife comes to him. In the morning, Counsel goes back to the house, noticing, once again, that the outside dimensions do not match the inside space. They offer him breakfast, but this time there is a gun on the table and the conversation is loaded with threats and innuendos that make Counsel realize the boy and the father know where the woman spent the night. He says his thanks and walks out backwards because he is afraid of what will happen if he turns around. And then, as he rides off, he realizes that there had been milk and eggs on the table, but no sign of a cow or chickens anywhere.

What is the purpose of an event that gets folded into the other dramas but is never sufficiently explained? I believe that it is there as a marker of the other place. Its essential difference from the primary place adds tension and provides momentum because we want to understand it.

What are we to make of this? The house and the family never appear again and Counsel too recedes into the background as the narrator brings other characters forward. But the burr continues to prick. What is the purpose of an event that gets folded into the other dramas but is never sufficiently explained? I believe that it is there as a marker of the other place. Its essential difference from the primary place adds tension and provides momentum because we want to understand it. We want to know what it means. And because Edwards chooses not to supply any answers, we continue to wonder about it even after we finish the novel. That household that both was and wasn’t hospitable, that both did and didn’t offer nourishment, shelter, and human companionship was an unusual experience for a white man, particularly one of Cousnel’s standing in the world, but as I thought about it I realized that the trickery Counsel was exposed to was the common experience of disenfranchised people. First, he is stripped of family and livelihood. Next, his hosts in the other place tease him with food and companionship that he might partake in, but can’t assume is freely offered. He is trapped by people who can, at any moment, turn on him. Small pox did to Counsel what the institution of slavery did to the African American, and the strange house is what allows us to see that. But we see it only upon reflection. It is not immediately evident and this is what gives it its power.

With a narrative gap, we do not know the true state of things. Is the house small or is it large? Did the wife come to Counsel’s bed out of her own volition or was she a pawn of the man and the boy? Nothing makes sense here in a rational way, but there is a psychological appropriateness that allows us to willingly suspend disbelief.

The Beginning of Spring^[6] by Penelope Fitzgerald is a taut, humorous, and enormously compelling short novel. It is set in Moscow in 1913, when the first signs of the coming war and revolution are apparent. The novel follows Frank Reid, an Englishman who runs a printing business and maintains a British household within Russian traditions. The novel begins with the mysterious departure of Frank’s English wife and ends with her just as sudden return. Her departure upsets the life Frank has designed for himself, where his duties as father, husband, and foreign industrialist are finely balanced. If he is to function, he must first find a nanny for his children, a necessity that brings him into contact with a strangely aloof and resourceful young Russian woman, and necessity gradually shifts to romantic interest. Though these events are compressed into one month, we watch Frank Reid’s life change irrevocably as he discovers the mysteries and passions he’s excluded from it.

The primary place is his Moscow household, a tightly organized English oasis, and the other place is the dacha, an old and decrepit country house that sits in the middle of a birch forest, far from civilized society. The children used to visit the dacha with their mother, and the reader understands that it is everything the Moscow house and Frank Reid himself, is not. Even though we do not go to the dacha until close to the novel’s end, it is the holder of all the reader encounters that is not English and orderly. That is, the dacha represents the other side of life that, from the beginning, exerts its pull on the characters in various ways. By the end of the novel it has become the place the children and their nanny must escape to. They know, in an inexplicable way, that it contains a link to their mother.

On the first night at the dacha, Dolly, the oldest child, wakes up because she hears the front door open. She tiptoes down the stairs and follows Lisa, their nanny, through the dark forest. “Dolly began to see on each side of her, among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness. […] Dolly saw that by every birch tree, close against the trunk, stood a man or a woman. They stood separately pressing themselves each to their own tree.”^[7] Dolly never asks Lisa to explain what she sees that night in the forest and the strange tree people haunt the ending of the novel, surrounding the resolution of human events with questions. Nature, passion, mystery: these qualities are everywhere at the dacha. They were what Frank Reid’s wife was searching for when she left her comfortable existence, and will be what Dolly will grow up knowing is important.

The Slaves of Solitude^[8], by Patrick Hamilton is a novel set in Great Britain during the war when many Londoners abandoned their homes to wait out the bombing in country towns. We meet Miss Roach, a Londoner who has taken up residence in a small provincial rooming house where she is bullied by a fellow lodger, an eloquent and narcissistic man who pries into the most vulnerable spots of her fragile existence to ridicule her in front of others. Finally, when he drives her to desperate measures, she returns to London despite the danger and there we watch her discover her other place. It is a London Theatre at midday filled with children who are besides themselves with laughter as they watch the antics of a comedian on stage. We understand that laughter is what the war has stolen from Miss Roach. The children have abandoned themselves to it and nothing else exists for them except for the bumbling comedian on the stage.

“[T]here was no sign of any abatement in the excitement of the small mad people, the children, and towards the end a sort of frenzy and agony of laughter and hysterics came upon them.”^[9] This “agony of laughter” is so intense and extreme, so different from everything Miss Roach has lived through previously, that every drop of the healing madness must be wrung out of it so that the scene in the theatre, tucked into the end of the novel, becomes the other place she has, without knowing it, been trying to get to all along.

As deeply as the reader is involved in the everyday life of the characters, the other place provides a location for the narrative to get to, and once there, it explodes everything we’ve come to accept about the characters.

In all three novels, the other place establishes contrast. As deeply as the reader is involved in the everyday life of the characters, the other place provides a location for the narrative to get to, and once there, it explodes everything we’ve come to accept about the characters. It shows their other side. In The Known World, we see what must happen to a white man before he can experience the life of an ordinary slave. In The Beginning of Spring we understand that if Frank Reid is to get his wife back he must shed his habitual reserve, and invite passion into his life; in The Slaves of Solitude we see how the war has pulled joy out of the adults’ pale and barely breathing lives. But for the other place to fulfill this role, it must not simply be an abstract idea. It must be specific and concrete, though not fully disclosed. While the primary place is fully known and familiar, the other place is only sketched in. We are aware of something confusing or unresolved about it and understand that it has its own rules.

When the other place is handled in this manner, it creates these effects: it shows a previously unknown aspect of the character and in this way it gives the reader a glimpse of what that character needs or wants. It opens the story to a more complex reality by creating a contradiction within the character. And just as important, the other place, since it is not fully understood or disclosed, creates a gap in the narrative. This gap builds tension because it puts the reader into the position of a seeker of information. A reader who wants to know more is a reader compelled to keep reading.

Can the other place be an effective structural element in a short story? Let’s look at two short stories that have a number of similarities but use the other place in very different ways. Both “The Flaw in the Design,”^[10] by Deborah Eisenberg and “Give”^[11] by James Salter are first-person stories narrated by a married character who is confessing an extramarital affair. “The Flaw in the Design” opens with the other place. In dreamlike, hallucinatory prose, a woman recounts how she made eye contact with a man she noticed in a subway station and with spontaneous and reckless abandon, spent the afternoon with him in a posh hotel room. The hotel room is her other place and what we know about it we know only through her sensations: “The wall brightens, dims, brightens faintly again — a calm pulse, which mine calms to match, of the pale sun’s beating heart.”^[12] Then, after a double space, when the woman returns to her well-appointed house, we are introduced to the primary place. Through just a few details (roll top desk, crystal tumbler, granite and steel in the kitchen,) we recognize the upper-level status of this family, and it becomes difficult to connect the afternoon pick-up with the mother and wife whom we watch engaging in dinnertime banter with her son and husband. The question at the forefront of our minds is Why? This causes us to be attentive and on the lookout for clues to her behavior.

Because the other place is the first thing we encounter in this story, it functions as the destabilizer. That allows us to see, right away, a more hidden side of her personality. When the narrative takes us to the primary place, we see that all three members of this family struggle with what the college-age son believes is a morally compromised past, and the pick-up starts to seem less arbitrary. By the story’s end, we understand how the woman’s role as accomplice to her husband’s fabrication of the past entraps her and we see that her afternoon impulse is the way she escapes his mistakes, the way she enjoys independence. The other place here, as in the novels discussed, gives the protagonist greater complexity. It creates a contradiction in her behavior and poses the question why that is so essential for keeping a reader engaged.

We lose ourselves there, happily, and in changed form continue on, knowing something more, or perhaps only something different about the basic questions, the whys and hows of our existence.

In “Give” by James Salter the other place is revealed later in the narrative and when we encounter it, it comes as a complete surprise. It, too, is a place of assignation, but it represents a side of the narrator’s life that the reader would never have guessed. And while the hotel room in “Flaw in the Design” is described in disjointed visual details that impart elegance and anonymity, “[f]eather pillows, deep carpet, the mirror a lake of pure light—no imprints, no traces: the room remembers no one but us,” the small city apartment the lovers in “Give” use for their regular and continuous meetings is specific and particular. “There was an apartment on twelfth street that we were able to use, the garden behind it, the dazzling chords of Petroushka — the record happened to be there and we used to play it — chords that would always, as long as I lived, bring me back to it,
his pliancy and slow smile.”^[13] This other place exists only in this one sentence, but the specificity makes it feel established and necessary, whereas, for the woman who narrates “Flaw,” the encounter of her afternoon is meant to be erased and forgotten. Not even the mirror will record their presence. For her, what is important is that she will never go there again. For the narrator of “Give,” the apartment on twelfth street is a place with an identity that occupies a central position in his life. It puts pressure on the primary place, the house the narrator occupies with his wife and son and questions arise. Those questions draw us into the asymetrical arrangement of the narrator’s desires so that we can feel his struggle as he faces the choice he must make.

That is the beauty of an other place. It is concrete and material, with an appeal to our senses that all material things have, and yet, because it is presented in a contracted, sketchy, and incomplete manner, it creates a narrative gap. That narrative gap raises the questions that make us curious and deliver us, expectant, into the central drama. We lose ourselves there, happily, and in changed form continue on, knowing something more, or perhaps only something different about the basic questions, the whys and hows of our existence.