Response: "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

Response to “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #40”

Great opening. Very succinct (four words total if count “it’s” as two). It’s small but I also liked the sub-heading (the interview number, city, date, etc.). It made it feel like some kind of file. The other small detail I liked was the author’s decision to use a capital “Q” to stand in for the questions by the interviewer. It’s enough to remind us that it’s an interview and the discussion is being led, but it doesn’t pull focus from the speaker by adding another character to dissect.
The author’s done also done a great job giving the character a very distinctive voice. While I’m reading it I can see a person in my mind’s eye saying the words and posturing, and shifting and hear him change his inflections, etc. All this without making the piece cumbersome or incoherent or confusing. I can read through it, picturing the speaker, while also getting a good image of the story he’s telling, all without having to go back over what I’ve read to try and sort out what he’s said.
That’s also impressive considering that the words themselves on the page aren’t all that organized. Each question is it’s own paragraph. Some running just a sentence, others spanning more than a page. Obviously, the writer’s trying to convey the freewheeling nature of the speaker, and also that the writing is spoken and not an organized narrative. It does just that, and it also nudges you to read it faster, as your eye wants to get to some kind of place marker to anchor it on the page.
This makes a great study for writing dialogue and characterization.

Critical Response #1

Kelly Hanken

Critical Response #1

“Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid, was a good read. I say that honestly, because it reads like a mix between stream-of-consciousness and a list, and you can practically hear the tired, exasperated, needling voice of the mother-figure the story is about. It’s all one huge run-on sentence, but it fits with what the story’s trying to convey about the relationship between a mother and a daughter.

You can feel the mother’s insistence of “this is how we do things around here” in every line. It’s something most any girl can relate to with an older mother, because they tend to insist on doing things the old-fashioned way and slight anything that might be less than traditional. This is really obvious in all the mentions of the daughter being a “slut” – it isn’t that the daughter actually is, but that she’s doing things that would have gotten her labeled as such when the mother was her age.

I really liked how the story moved from these things about how to wash clothes to mentions of the daughter singing, then saying “don’t sing” even though the daughter doesn’t. It’s an obvious miscommunication between the two characters. The occasional references to the daughter’s “sluttiness” just add build up to the last line, where the mother asks the daughter what kind of woman she’s going to be, if “the baker won’t let near the bread.” It’s all her way of turning the conversation around to “prove” to them both that the daughter isn’t going to be a reputable woman, and it’s done brilliantly with lots of circular logic.