Little Sinners and Other Stories: "Little Sinners"

Karen Brown

Little Sinners and Other Stories

University of Nebraska Press, 2012

Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

I received Little Sinners (2012), Karen Brown’s second collection of short stories, in the mail today.  I’m excited. Ever since reading “Galatea” in the 2008 Best American Short Stories collection, I’ve been awed by her writing.  I enjoyed her previous collection, Pins and Needles (2007) (which includes “Galatea”) so much that I photocopied a couple of the stories and sent them to friends—something I had never done with a story before and haven’t done since.   I’ve been meaning to do some close studies of short stories, and after reading the first, title story of Brown’s second collection, I’ve decided to wait no longer.  I'll probably end up studying two or three stories from Brown's new collection. 

“Little Sinners”

            The basic plot of this piece is two girls, the narrator and her friend Valerie Empson, begin writing love letters to a quirky, lonely girl in the voice of a local farmer boy.  The quirky girl—who is addressed in the second person throughout—writes back.  These letters are traded surreptitiously under a rock.  This is kept up until “you” ask to meet, when the narrator and Valerie decide to end the joke by asking “you” to leave panties under the rock.  “You” leaves the panties.  The whole neighborhood parades them around.  “You” disappears for a night.  She’s found outside, and the whole affair is over.            

            First sentence: “We weren’t bad girls.”  The first paragraph begins to establish a world of middle-class America, and evokes the typical activities and games of girls therein.  “We set up carnivals and lemonade stands, and collected pennies for UNICEF on Halloween” (1).  It also establishes a time period—the Vietnam War—and in so doing the distant tone of reminiscence with a hint of longing if not nostalgia. 

            While the first part of the opening paragraph elaborates on the littleness of the characters, the final sentence of the paragraph introduces the sin.  "We were feral, unequivocally vicious, like girls raised by the mountain lions that occasionally slunk out of the wilderness of Massacoe State Forest, between the swing sets and the lawn furniture, into our tended backyards" (1).  With five clauses, evoking innocence and tranquility (“swing sets and the lawn furniture”) and terror (“mountains lions that slunk… into our tended backyards”), it’s hard to say that Karen Brown is economical.  She’s not.  Instead, she uses a lyrical voice to evoke and mix two moods, and a tone both wistful and detached.  Throughout the rest of the piece she not only maintains these two moods, but develops both of them along with the narrator’s ambivalent tone—by the end of the story it’s unclear whether the story is about the “little sinners” or the adults that they became.

            First sentence of the second paragraph: “It was May when it all started, and the air was still sharp and the forsythia waved its long arms of bright flowers” (1).  This is a great, subtle example of Brown’s stylistic daring.  It would be difficult for another writer to resist the more economical “It was May when it all started.  The air was still sharp….”  Perhaps going so far as breaking up the technical run-on sentence.  This lyrical quality to Brown’s writing emphasizes the blending of time, of the future from which the narrator narrates and the past that she’s telling.  “It was May when it all started,” is a helpful, straightforward statement that the story is starting (in the second paragraph!) but the following clause suggests that it had already started.  In effect, Brown gives us the directness necessary to follow the storyline, and at the same time she undercuts it to focus on establishing the heart of the piece—mood.

            Mood is established in the first sentence of the second paragraph through references to natural imagery, which she maintains throughout the story.  In this paragraph and the following scene the setting is something of a natural paradise, on the one hand, and a post-modern setting of chemicals and disruptive technologies, on the other hand.  Not only are the flowers personified (“forsythia waved its long arms of bright flowers”), but the narrator lives by woods “composed of young growth—birch, maple, and pine saplings, a thicket suitable for cottontails” (2).  However, as soon as the flowers are mentioned, Pall Malls stolen from parents undercut the scene of innocence and introduce a malodorous sensual presence to contest the innocence of young nature.  Furthermore, the brook that runs through the forest is “filled with brownish-looking foam that may have been the result of the DDT misted over us each summer” (2).  The narrator quickly falls into the brook.

            Contrasts between the natural and the artificial, between innocence and criminality, victim and perpetrator, between childhood and adulthood, are evoked throughout the story—along with their similarities.  If I had to say what this story is “about,” then it would be about how these categories always already overlap, that within innocence lurks cruelty, like those lions who slink into manicured backyards.  Nature is always tainted.  The next major section—after several pages in-scene that dramatize the narrator and her friend meeting their victim and the set-up for the ruse that follows (2-5)—declares the universality of the tale with the first sentence: “I don’t have to emphasize how often this happens, how typical of human behavior” (5).  This somewhat cryptic sentence is followed by a series of examples of people indulging by investing belief in frightening, titillating lies: ghosts in mirrors, UFOs, levitation, even the Holy Ghost with its blood for wine.  “You bought it all,” she says to her victim. 

            It’s such a perfect transition paragraph!  In broad swathes, the story opens with a lyrical litany, moves into the first scene (announcing itself as such), goes back to lyrical litany to universalize the moment and remind readers of the narrator’s part-nostalgic, part-detached tone, and then dives back into the plotline with the first sentence of the next paragraph: “That night Valerie and I wrote the first letter” (5). 

             The following paragraph opens with another example of stylistic daring, functioning similar to the first sentence of the second paragraph, discussed above.  The paragraph starts, “And it was easy because I wanted it myself” (6).  That “And” is brilliant.  That “And” breaks the rules and unites by conjoining what came before with what come after like the run-on sentence discussed above, blurring the line between the “you” and the self, on the one hand, and more immediately between the narrator and her adolescent self.

            After this paragraph of self-reflection, we get back into the main plot for about a page and a half: “We left the note under the stone” (6), it begins.  Throughout this plot-oriented portion, Brown continues to weave in memories associated with the moment.  The girls write the letters in the narrator’s bathroom, where when they were younger they had played.  Furthermore, she continues to weave in scenes of the setting: views from the window, her mother’s voice on the phone, absent fathers, an accident that had happened once while playing outside (7). 

            Then we get the second note, after which the girls go into the field to smoke cigarettes.  Here’s the big shift, the brilliant transgression that makes Brown so exciting to read.  Essentially, she makes those same moves from the present to the past to the future, on the one hand, and from the immediate scene to the iterative litany of scenes, on the other hand, but here she does it all in one breath-taking paragraph.  It is a long paragraph that starts like this (noticeably in-scene): "Val practiced smoke rings.  In a year she would be caught making out…. The news would spread, and she would suddenly become popular in school, and we would no longer be friends.  Neither of us could have known this would happen" (7-8).  After this brilliant moment, the plot takes over for the next six pages or so.  I want to point out that this moment occurs almost exactly half-way through the story (on pages 7-8 of a 15 page story).  It’s stylistically brazen, lyrically beautiful, and thematically it announces the end of the girls’ childhood.

            Although the plot takes over for the next six pages or so, Brown continues to weave in the thematically driven contrasts between a bright world of girlhood (drawings of “swirling paisley, hearts and moons and stars and clusters of grapes” in the letters’ margins [9]) and the natural world.  As if something knocking at the narrative finally broke through after that brilliant passage discussed above, Brown also brings in more of the narrator’s memories from the time after the plotline (having sex as a teenager in a car parked near the stone where they used to leave the letters [8], for example).  And she builds up the contrast between the world the girls belong to and that of their neighboring adults, where women smell like mothballs, and lilac powder “fluffed between … breasts” (8), and who are always depicted with martinis and cigarettes and staying out late.  Also, the narrator continues to identify with the “you” of the story. 

            At the perfect moment, Brown devotes another full paragraph to her own series of exchanged love letters when she was an adult, which “she grew tired of as well” (just like “you” did) (10).  This paragraph starts with the denouement of the plotline: “Finally, it seemed you were tapped” (10).  The two paragraphs almost wholly devoted to the narrator identifying with her victim come just after the beginning of the plotline (top of page 6) and the just before the end (bottom of page 10), they make almost perfectly symmetrical bookends for the plot.  In fact, in terms of plot, they occur almost precisely 4 ½ pages from the beginning, middle, and end.  In other words, roughly 4 ½ pages from the start of the plot, there is a paragraph of identification; then roughly 4 ½ pages later there is another paragraph of identification; then 4 ½ pages later the plot ends.  Brilliant, brilliant composition!

            After the plot is finished, Brown ends her story with two more long paragraphs. The first starts: “You never told.”  In the last line of the preceding paragraph she had already articulated a major theme.  As narrator watched the victim brought home, she writes, “I felt, even then, the widening rift between myself and that world of mown grass and tree canopies, the race of years, their rush to overwhelm me” (14).  We are thrust into the future in the penultimate paragraph, as if rushed ourselves across the rift of years.  The victim’s mother died of breast cancer, possibly caused by the DDT in the water mentioned at the start of the story.  The victim herself died later, too, also of cancer (making the nostalgia of this piece all the more poignant as even the explanation/confession came too late).          

            I consider it a hallmark of Karen Brown’s work in Pins and Needles that she ends many of her stories with something of a moral or anti-moral as the case may be.  The title story of Little Sinners continues this.  She weaves these morals in so seamlessly that they never have the bad taste of truisms, which it’s hard to believe.  In this case, the moral comes as the narrator remembers going back to the scene of the crime as a teenager and looking under the rock where the letters were hidden.  It gives her a chance, reflecting on the stories that the victim told in her letters, to realize that “in all stories are the seeds of what we cannot say out loud—that we are corporeal, left to the mercy of the body’s urges” (14).  If the theme of the plot involved something concerning the awareness of innocence already lost, a rift in identity that ushers in adulthood, then the theme of the story itself lies in the attempt and inability to get to and retrieve that moment and in the beautiful, brutal process of memory itself.  The final two sentences of the story emphasize this point: “We are alone with the stories we have never told, and even now, given your death, there is no real forgiveness.  Just this acknowledgement, whatever it is worth, of all the little deaths that came before it” (15).  I can’t help but point out, once more, the brilliance of Brown’s stylistic choice to break her sentences apart and start the second one with the conjoining, “just.”  Does that “just” not announce the “rift” itself, between all the dichotomies she’s been working with throughout the piece, but also the process of piecing them back together, for whatever it is worth?