I first read Charles D’Ambrosio’s short story, “The Point,” a few months ago, and I was moved by its beauty and genius. D’Ambrosio was my teacher for two fiction workshops at the Summer Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was intimidatingly smart but also humble. While our class was discussing a story, he would sit at the far end of the table, head tilted to the side, listening intently. At first he didn’t say much, other than to pose an occasional question that would turn the conversation in a different direction. Eventually, as our discussion waned, dying for lack of resolution, he would start talking, and talking, explaining the concepts we were leaning toward but failing to grasp. As he talked he would read quotes from an eclectic variety of thinkers—John Gardner, Flannery O’Connor, Augustine, Henry James, a famous boxer whose name I forget. We would listen in silence, captivated. When the class reached the end of its three-hour allotment and we still had more to discuss, he would ask if we minded staying longer. None of us minded, and we sometimes stayed until late in the evening. After class I would drive back to my home in Dubuque, rolling along over darkened hills, my mind spinning with the ideas I had absorbed. At the time I didn’t fully grasp how much those ideas would influence my development as a writer and reader of fiction, but I had the vague sense that I’d hit the jackpot, career-wise. I was learning from a master.
Based on this experience, it would be easy for me to view D’Ambrosio’s work with bias, to gush excessively over his fiction. But after letting his story “The Point” sit for some time—it is in the middle of a collection, Best American Short Stories of 1991, that I have been working through slowly—and having read it again, I can say without hesitation that I was not letting my admiration of a former teacher affect my judgment. The story really is that good, and part of its brilliance stems from its richness in literary overtones, a concept I’ve been musing over recently.
In the literal sense, the term overtone relates to music and sound. When a violinist draws her bow across a string, it produces a single note, the fundamental pitch that we hear. But this bowing motion also produces a series of higher frequencies called overtones. Most people do not actually hear the overtones as distinct pitches, but they are somehow present, giving the sound its distinct quality, its timbre. Well-trained musicians playing good instruments produce the best complement of overtones and thus the best sounds. That is why a Stradivarius in the hands of a virtuoso produces a sound that captivates us with its beauty and richness, while a cheap student violin produces an underwhelming tone.
I don’t pretend to understand this phenomenon. How is it that we don’t hear overtones, but they affect the quality and character of the sound? I don’t know. But I would argue the same sort of magic occurs in literature. When we read, we perceive the words on the page, but when the writing is of genuine literary value, we experience impressions that hover above those words, things we don’t perceive consciously but that affect the quality of what we are reading.
The opening paragraph of Charles D’Ambrosio’s story, “The Point,” (The New Yorker, October 1991) illustrates this phenomenon very well:
I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at a circus. I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it. After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar out in the living room. Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright blinded me. The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in heaven–some kind of heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit. Everything was hysterical out there–the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking. A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me. It was Mother. She was backlit, a vague, looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic. When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.
The opening establishes the scene and characters with remarkable efficiency. It places us in a darkened room of a house where a party is going on late at night. The sand in the sheets tells us we are at the beach, or near one. The narrator is a boy, perhaps a young teen, and his mother, we learn, has been drinking in the wake of her husband’s suicide, having “really let herself go.” In just a few sentences, we gain a grasp of the who, what, and where of the story.
But in addition to establishing the necessary elements of scene and character, this paragraph produces literary overtones that give the opening more depth and meaning. The nightmare described in the beginning doesn’t seem nightmarish: a circus, two helium balloons, one getting lost. It feels whimsical and odd in a dreamlike way. The narrator’s referring to it as a nightmare creates an impression, an overtone, of something ominous and dark. The sense of foreboding reaches fruition at the end of the paragraph, when we learn of the father’s suicide. The reappearance of this father in a dream would be a painful, frightening experience for the boy. And the father’s action in the dream—tying a balloon to a bean, then losing it—echos the action of suicide: a man ties his life to something insubstantial and as a result, loses it. So while a balloon escaping into the atmosphere is not a nightmare in ordinary circumstances, in the context of this character’s life, it echoes a larger, more tragic loss. And though the significance of this loss isn’t stated directly, it is present and perceptible, hovering above our heads as a literary overtone.
Another striking feature of this first paragraph is the economy and potency of detail. In a few short sentences, D’Ambrosio creates a scene that hits all five senses: touch (sand in the sheets), sight (the silvery smoke), sound (women shrieking), smell (lily of the valley, rotting fruit), and taste (the lemon rind at the bottom of the vodka tonic). These sensory details draw us into the physical reality of the story, allowing us to experience what the narrator is experiencing, but they also expose undercurrents of death and loss. This is not to say, though, that the tone is oppressively dark. There is something funny about the narrator’s description of the party, a “heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit.” In the narrator’s voice we perceive a quirky adolescent energy. But surrounding this youthful voice is the overwhelming presence of death.
This structure—a light, quirky voice surrounded by something heavy and ominous—reminds me of Vaughn Williams’ The Lark Ascending, a romance for orchestra and solo violin. The violin melody is lyrical, joyful, eminently bird-like, but it is enveloped in lush symphonic chords that sometimes take on a darker turn, evoking (for me, at least) a feeling of stark loneliness. When I listen to this piece I can imagine the lark flying over the British countryside, but I can also see gravestones in the rain. Some critics have suggested that this heaviness in Vaughn William’s The Lark Ascending is a result of the composer’s experience in World War I. His music expresses a yearning for a time of greater innocence and pastoral beauty, a time that existed before the war but has since slipped away.
Great compositions like The Lark Ascending and great stories like D’Ambrosio’s “The Point” illustrate an important shared feature of two art forms: Good literature, like good music, has the power to affect us in ways that surpass our understanding. We can talk about what they mean, and we can analyze various features and try to get at how they work, but in the end, perfect understanding eludes us. We are forced to sit, absorb, and contemplate the beauty of these masterpieces while a constellation of overtones shimmers above our heads, beyond our grasp.
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