(The short story “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara” by Junot Diaz appeared in the November 6th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photograph by Paul Thulin-Jimenez for The New Yorker
I had a professor in college who taught a playwrighting class, who likened writers to jazz musicians. This professor believed, and taught, that both types of artists have to be comfortable with “noodling” around on their instrument or medium – trying out ideas to see how they play and work together. Only through this form of experimenting is how stories, or songs, begin to come together, take shape to reveal their themes and tone. (This professor was a huge Miles Davis fan, if that’s any help.) Not sure I agree with this theory, but it is an idea that has stuck in the back of my head; a writer “noodling” out ideas. Sure, you could call that rewriting, but that sounds so functional, while “noodling” has an air of playfulness to it.
“The Ghosts of Gloria Lara” by Junot Diaz struck me as a “noodling” experimentation of a story. I found it to be an enjoyable read, but the story never felt complete to me. The more that I thought about this “incomplete” feeling, the more I came to believe that it was done on purpose. I could be very disrespectful of the piece and describe it as the story of a Dominican immigrant mother as told by her youngest son. I don’t want to be disrespectful of this story. There is a lot going on in this thing; background information, asides, tangents, etc.… It’s all needed, and impossible to condense into a quick description. You should just read the story, and you’ll understand.
“The Ghosts of Gloria Lara” also reminded me of the movie “Adaptation,” in the sense that “Adaptation” was about many things, but one of the themes of the movie was breaking all the “rules” to movie storytelling, to, in a sense, prove that you could tell a story that way. I felt that Diaz was also trying to do that with this story. The piece begins with a great deal of backstory for the main character of the mother. In another part, the narrator tells us, by making a Chekhov joke, that a gun mentioned will come into play later. And a few times, the narrator also tells that a brief aside in the story will be explained later. All of this done as if the narrator knows that we are also aware of what “rules” of short story telling are. Sure, it has a “wink-wink” “sorry/not sorry” attitude, but the narrator isn’t being disrespectful or condescending to us. It’s played light.
But the one moment that I found most puzzling, and I had to believe it was purposefully done, was at the very end of the story. As the piece is concluding, the narrator and the mother are asking each other about their former neighbor, Mr. Wilson. The mother asks the narrator if he remembers what Mr. Wilson looked like, which the narrator says he does. Then immediately, the narrator confesses that actually doesn’t remember, and that there are no photographs of him, nor is there anyone left in the neighborhood who would remember him. But, earlier in the story, the narrator spends a whole paragraph describing what Mr. Wilson looked like. So… What’s going on here? Is the narrator an unreliable source? Is everything we just read a lie, or did the narrator embellish for dramatic effect? Is it possible that Diaz made a huge gaff in his own story?
I’m going to land on the side of the writer, and believe this was done on purpose. After all, the story is called, “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara.” What we are being told is a memory, and those feeling, thoughts, and ideas don’t fall and form in a clear narrative sense. Maybe the narrator did remember what Mr. Wilson looked like as he tells us this story, but when he spoke to his mother, he didn’t at that time. These memories, like apparitions, come and go, sometimes in detail, but other times vague and transparent. In this way, the story is like trying to grasp fog – you can feel it but you can’t hold it. What I was left feeling was a story that was coming in and going out, seeing what will fit together.
Matthew Groff 