I would just leave comments in the Word document and then send that back to you, but we are cheap and don't have Microsoft Word on our computer. So I will leave my comments here.
Party Planning
Should I know what a Moynihan is? I'll wait and see. :)
Oh, I see now. It's important to know she is a Moynihan because her brothers have disappeared.
Yesss. Enter Ringo Starr.
"He has seen that I don’t want to talk about it anymore. But as I lie there in the dark my mind is laboring hard to churn out the final word. I can feel the time passing, the moment slipping away, after which it will be too unnaturally late to say anything else on the subject." I do this with Daniel all the time. It's amazing how you are able to capture the intensity of that tiny moment in time. especially in the dynamics of a couple relationship.
I'm at the end now. Woah! Riveting. I'm still trying to figure out what it is about. Her relationship with her parents? Her relationship with her husband to be? Class differences? Her parent's relationship with each other? The fact that she and her mother have moved on and her dad hasn't? The moral wrestling Harrison subjects her too when he questions her moving on? The many things in life that don't resolve but we each deal with in a different way? For example, her brothers' disappearance is not resolved and each family member deals with that in a different way. She and her mother move on, her dad continues obsessively looking for them. Her parents have an unresolved disagreement about how to deal with the disappearance but both seem to exist in each others' presence well enough. How do humans do that? Her mom drives him to dialysis. Her dad seems to accept that his wife has given up. These are both pretty big sacrifices to make for one another, and they are able to do both of them despite their fundamental disagreement on the purpose of the rest of their lives.
It is interesting that this story is centered around a party celebrating another year of life for her father? To me this provides a stark contrast to the ghost status of her brothers. Also, her father is on dialysis. He soon will fade away. Death for her parents seems very distinct especially because her father appears to be terminally ill. Her mother states at one point, "Someday we are going to be dead, and you're going to have to sell this house...." The author confirms "few things she could say would have been truer." But it is so uncertain whether her brothers are dead or not, that this statement seems ironic when you go back and read it. And with the death of her dad dies the search for her brothers.
Also, how did you know my grandpa and his brother were named Peter and Ollie? Did you scour the Johnston history books for those names?
For having such a highly unusual event occur in this story, you introduce it very convincingly. I feel like this type of gut-wrenching event could happen to everyone. By the time the fire rolls around I don't bat an eye. Yes, naturally, the house was consumed by a fire and they never found remains. Factually it makes it even more unlikely that her brothers were kidnapped, because the whole kidnapping plot seems elaborate at this point. Why light a house on fire to kidnap two boys? But as a reader you don't think that, you just take this as another element to the story which as already unfolded before you. I think the flash back structure of this story helps with that. Maybe I'm just super creepy, but I was on a kidnapping Wikipedia kick the other month and I happened upon this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodder_children_disappearance. Did this inspire your story? The reason for my kick was because I watched the movie Room. Have you seen it? Really good, depressing, and hopeful all at once.
After writing this commentary, it seems strange to me that Harrison is so classy and a concert violinist. This story has so much going on that the class distinction between her and Harrison seems more of a distraction than an addition to this story. I know Harrison has to do something for a living, but I honestly thought he was an athlete or management consultant of some sort because of the allusion to traveling all the time. The leap to violinist seems too far.
House Shopping
"Levi
suggested they come back home, where they could be lost again in
middle America just like they had been at the start of it all, and
Levi’s parents could watch the children days." Do you mean to say watch the children during the day?
When I sat down to write my thoughts on this story I was feeling a little dissatisfied. I had the feeling you have when you might have said something mean to someone and you are waiting to see how they took it. You are uncertain of their feelings and how your next interaction with them will turn out. That's how I feel about this story. I feel like I don't really know how the marriage between Levi and Celia is and I don't know how they are both dealing with the blowout of his plagiarism. Do they still like each other or have they just settled into a rhythm of married life? It appears that before the plagiarism was exposed they both just orbited in their own worlds. Levi knew nothing of Celia's yoga and she knew nothing about his struggles with writing. Now I wonder if their worlds are overlapping a bit more because they have to push and pull for one another in their current situation or if the utter but brief penance of Levi was not enough to bring them permanently closer. And why is Celia not worried about Levi having an affair still? I left this story with lots of questions. Gossipy questions, haha.
One thing that really struck me about this story is how much Celia's voice is coming through. I can really envision Celia. I can guess how she would react in certain situations and I am looking at the world through her eyes. Then I realized the reason I am probably confused about Levi and Celia's relationship is probably because Celia is confused about it as well. She doesn't know exactly where they stand, or where they are going. She seems to have lost her ability to meaningfully communicate with Levi, as evidenced by her explanation of yoga and why she likes it. I see the situation through her hazy lens and that is probably why the relationship dynamic seems confused. You've really stayed true to the narrator's point of view. But I think if Celia were a rational person she should still be concerned about Levi having affairs. Obviously it was on her mind a lot in the past since her first gut reaction when she sees her husband and the realtor is "Oh no! He seduced her," but then the doubt of Levi's fidelity completely vanishes when his plagiarism is revealed. If I were Celia I would still be obsessing about my husband's possible philandering behavior. Maybe she is not worried about it anymore because she knows he feels really sorry about his plagiarism and would never have an affair after the news broke because he already has hurt her enough.
