To be honest, at first I almost switched to the other Topics in Lit class because I preferred their reading list--for some reason I really didn’t want to read The Secret Life of Bees…I actually enjoyed the book and plan on lending it to my mother. Of all the things in class, I enjoyed the short stories we read in class the most; Ira Sher’s The Man in the Well was my particular favorite. Like we discussed in class the other day, it’s really hard to articulate why something appeals to me; for me, it’s a lot easier for me to say why I dislike something. It was easy for me to choose Sher’s story, because while I was reading it, I kept thinking, “ooo, I want to try and draw that scene” or “I want to send this in my next letter to Whitney[1].”
If I were forced to come up with concrete reasons for liking the story, I’d have to say that the reading experience was completely immersive for me; I wasn’t aware of time passing. A lot of the time, I’m thinking about a lot of other things when I read and find it hard to ignore distractions.
I loved how ambiguous parts of the story were and I like that I can’t decide what the message of the short story is completely. I dislike when I feel like I know what the story is about and why it’s significant…that somehow seems to easy (even if I’m kind of ignorant to the complexity—I don’t think it’s a very good story if I can piece it apart).
I’m curious to see what Ira Sher’s other work feels like. Are they all parablish-little stories? I wonder how he’d handle a novel length story where characters are further developed. One of my favorite parts of Sher’s writing is the mystery he infuses into his settings/characters even though they seem very domestic at first. I wonder how would he sustain that kind of mystery/interest in a longer work.
Although I keep pointing to the ambiguity in his stories, I also feel some kind of undefined connection to his setting/characters/situation. Having grown up in a small bedroom community, I was always teetering between being bored with the regularity of it all, but sometimes feeling a spiritual connection to the landscape in my town—not the people (especially at night when main street is empty and kid’s bikes are left tipped over in the street). I tend to romanticize the that safe suburban setting and Ira Sher’s short story tapped into that pre-existing impulse. Although Ira’s story had universal elements, it also felt very specific; in a way, it felt specific to me. I was a little surprised that a lot of my classmates felt they could identify with the setting so strongly; I thought I was the only one. That ability to connect to the reader on a very personal level while retaining a sense of mystery has to be a special talent of this story/author. I plan to read more of his stuff.
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