I scanned through the contents of the magazine and saw 'Hinges' by Graham Swift published in The New Yorker on November 14, 2022. Passed it over because of the genre, but decided to read it the next day. I do like the author's writing.
Siblings 49-year-old Annie and 51-year-old Ian Holroyd's father Ted died. Their mother is still alive. This story is narrated from Annie's perspective, about how she felt about her father's death. She was suddenly at a loss for words. She didn't want the minister's practiced descriptions and felt angry at them. She wanted something authentic and non-pretentious.
The minister would conduct the funeral and speak all the niceties — drawing up "a sketch of the man himself". Ian would read the eulogy, and Annie was to read a poem at this funeral. She felt anxious at this funeral the same way she remembered feeling anxious as a child.
She remembered many events of the past, names and people, words and incidents. She remembered her Kirby Street childhood. And a carpenter named Joe Short. She was nine, and was peculiarly worried about her home's front door that was creaking badly. Joe was coming to fix it. Her father assured her he would.
But she surely couldn’t have thought, then, what her forty-nine-year-old self could think: that ninety years was the length of a decent human life, though rather longer, as it had proved, than her father’s. And she surely couldn’t have thought then, as she thought now, that there were two things, generally made of wood, specifically designed to accommodate the dimensions of a single human being. Two objects of carpentry. A door and a coffin. It was like the answer to a riddle.
In an interview, the author explained how and why he wrote in the scene of one-sided sexual tension young Annie remembered with Joe the carpenter forty years ago,
The carpenter, though a seemingly minor character, comes to play a significant role—both serious and mischievous—in the story. When Annie has her memory, she is looking at her father’s coffin (with her father inside it). She has the thought that a coffin and a front door are both examples of carpentry, and that they are both “person-size.”
I don’t think I’m alone as a writer in seeing sex and death as a sort of inseparable combo. This is as old as humanity, as old as mythology—“eros and thanatos,” as it can be grandly called. It’s not just that Annie remembers at her father’s funeral that her first sexual feelings occurred in her father’s presence but that this sexual memory, as she looks now at her father’s coffin, is a means of restoring his presence, of bringing him back to life. What’s more, the sexual memory links with a whole set of possible sexual shenanigans (to do with the carpenter) that Annie, as a young girl, was not entirely unaware of. I hope that this brings into a story about death and a funeral a dimension of humor, even comedy. I’d hate to think that any story of mine didn’t have at least a flicker of humor. And sex and humor—another rich combo.
Annie was fidgeting with a loss of words to use when talking about her father. She had all these memories of her father going through her mind during the funeral service. She was to read a poem after Ian delivered the eulogy. She considered ditching that, and to talk about a memory of her father when she was little. In the end, she kept to the script, and read the lovely little poem chosen and printed out in the Order of Service booklets distributed to attendees.
The author wrestled so much with the protagonist's vocal words and inner thoughts because that is a whole process behind a grieving mind. That's how our mind's eye views situations and find links and meaning to the different streams of memories an event might induce. The author said,
As you say, this story has quite a lot of focus on particular words, even a blunt, obvious word like “door.” This is something I like to do generally in my fiction: take particular words or combinations of words, perhaps familiar expressions or clichés, and see them in some new light. Though stories are made with words, they are driven by things beyond and beneath words. For this very reason, stories can prompt us to an awareness of words and our mysterious relationship with them.
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