In Paul Clayton’s collection of short stories, “Seeing Sunny Again,” we meet Carl Melcher. It’s the early 1960s, and Carl, who will enter high school in a week or so, has spent the summer hanging out on a beach longing without success to find a girlfriend. On this particular evening, he decides to try his luck at Luigi’s, a pizza parlor.

In Luigi’s, six girls who are about his age are sitting around a table in the back. Carl notices the redhead who seems to be the group’s ringleader, but it’s the girl beside her who attracts his attention. Too intimidated to approach them, he’s eating his pizza when the redhead appears and encourages him to ask the other girl out. With the other girls all giggling, Carl invites Janet for ice cream. She agrees, then reaches for a pair of crutches and stands. It’s then that Carl sees “the smooth, pinkish stump below her knee where one of her legs should have been.”

Overwhelmed with shock, Carl blindly escorts Janet to an ice cream parlor, aware now that the girls have pulled a trick on him, for reasons he can’t decipher. He wonders whether Janet is in on the trick or is an unwilling participant. “He felt for her too, really bad,” but that doesn’t stop Carl from abruptly bolting away from Janet. “He knew it was wrong,” but he dashes down the boardwalk, cuts between two parked cars, and is knocked to the pavement by a car carrying Frank Sinatra. After making sure Carl’s unhurt, Sinatra slips some money into the boy’s shirt pocket, tells him to go see a movie, and leaves.

At the story’s end, Carl has resumed running, feeling shame now for having abandoned Janet. “From deep inside the thought kept coming up. He shouldn’t have done that to Janet. It wasn’t fair.”

Stylistically, this story echoes Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, while Janet recalls Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People” and the woman with the wooden leg.

But there my comparisons end. The conclusion of Carl’s story made little sense to me, as if I’d been tricked. I was Carl’s age in that time when John F. Kennedy was president, and I can’t imagine a single male friend or relative doing what Carl did to Janet. Not one.

Moreover, that last sentence, “It wasn’t fair,” struck me as weak. What does “fair” mean? And why would Janet go along with the scheme of the redhead and the other girls? She’s presented as sweet, so would she really toy with another human being this way? And why introduce Sinatra? Was it to contrast his sophistication with Carl’s strange and callow behavior?

Two of the other stories in this collection – I’ve read several – also left me in foreign territory. Though supposedly written about middle-class boys, they were again unlike anyone I knew.

On the other hand, these stories did make me think. All too often, late 20th century literary fiction fed readers a diet of despair, characters who lacked character, stories and novels that offered little hope, and protagonists who were broken or otherwise moral failures. With exceptions, like the Mark Helprin novels “The Oceans and the Stars” and “Elegy in Blue,” the 21st century has followed suit.

Television offers the same. Last fall, for instance, I spent some time with a friend recovering from surgery. I worked while he binge-watched a popular series called “Ozark.” He’d already seen the show, and invited me to watch the first episode. I did, and came away baffled. Why would anyone spend hours watching a show where not one character was admirable, where everyone was morally corrupt in one way or the other? And yet, “Ozark” drew huge numbers of viewers.

If we step out from there and consider American mainstream culture in this first quarter of a new century, we find the arts, from music to cinema, from painting to literature, in sad decline. Odds are that few Americans today can name a living painter or poet. Fewer people – teens and adults – are reading books. Many are familiar with performance celebrities like actors and musicians whose art allows the occupation of a greater share of the public space, but many would also argue that these performers don’t hold a candle to their counterparts from 50 years ago.

In essence, the culture we create in turn creates us, and we create the culture. And just like our politics, that culture is splintered and often incoherent.

In his 1983 Templeton Prize Address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously began with this thought on Bolshevism, “Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”

Is it possible the same formula accounts for the infirm condition of our arts today?

—

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Public Domain Pictures