A boy falls off a dorm balcony.

(from The Sun, March 2006)

After yesterday’s reading, with “writer” in the title, turned out not to be writerly and metafictiontastic, I guess I was fooling myself with this “Story” story. Well, it wasn’t meta, but it was grimly self-aware of writer tricks and purpose. Each segment offers insight into the people who happened to be nearby when the boy died, and hints at those characters’ backstories, then wraps it up with the zinger “but this is not that story.”
So, fine, the author does eventually get to “the” story, then pontificates for a little bit about truth and rumor, and damn if the previously wallpapery narrator (an all-knowing and impossible creature) doesn’t show up for the closing argument in first person. So yeah, this was very writerly.
So, it should have been a cup of tea other than my own. But I liked it. The story achieved its primary purpose, to tell a story, several stories, and to shine light on interesting facets of an incident and of people, saying something larger than its plot. And it stimulated and entertained as it did so. So. Right on.

Here‘s some info on Susan Perabo. She’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Here comes The Sun.