Edwidge Danticat opens “Without Inspection,” for which I must thank a text-featuring e-mail from the trusty New Yorker, by introducing a character who is plunging to his death. The author then proceeds to elaborate on the character’s mindset, with little anecdotes like Arnold’s (the main character’s) aversion to having too many material possessions, things which would prevent someone from feeling “free.”
In what I found to be a curious passage, then, Danticat specifies that such a freedom is “As free as this fall, which he had neither intended nor chosen,” a fall which at the start of the story we learn involved taking “six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.”
In general, Danticat’s technique in “Without Inspection” is one of shock and awe, complete with his enumeration of mental images in the Arnold’s mind during this brief fall (his son, his wife trying on dresses, the elementary school graduation ceremony), but the “neither intended nor chosen” line reveals something darker stirring the lurid underbelly of Danticat’s message. This is the increasing extent to which the presence of suicidal thoughts is a foregone conclusion in all who create or handle literature in the 21st century.
A couple of months ago I received a rejection notice from a flash fiction contest and got a free viewing of the winning story (the maximum word count was 800, that the only guideline of the short stories). It was for the Ginosko Literary Journal and the winner was “Sparks” by Chris Connolly, in which the main narrator witnesses a drowning victim and the last sentence of the piece is “You might say she was my first one.”
Somehow, in other words, this garish presence of an almost juvenile infatuation with death and suicide has fully saturated our literature of the world today. I read all of “Without Inspection,” not even so much because I was enjoying it, but because I knew Danticat was just so crowd-pleasing that his story here would end up benchmarking what we’d come to think of as literary “normalcy” within the next couple years or decade. Sure enough, he does things in trend and by the book: much of the prominently featured imagery is urban and cosmopolitan (“a guava pastry and a cup of coffee from the Lopez brothers’ food truck”) and the characters at the stories forefront are even immigrants sodden with a checkered travel back story, hence theoretically making it easier for us to sympathize with them.
But all this, unfortunately, is because we no longer sympathize with the American everyman, and nothing in life, anymore, is magical: he**, it takes a droll underdog noble savage minority to even garner sympathy during a fatal fall.