The Boy Who Wouldn't Die... Amazing piece in SI about Rae Carruth's son

I attended the Mayborn in 2011 for the first time, and I'm never going to miss it again. Great, great stuff from most of the speakers. Really a good weekend.

 

Lake quoted a 17-year-old article and mentioned the writer and paper. That doesn't happen too frequently...
Obviously, he did his Lexis/Nexis research.

There was a story about a decade ago about a mentally handicapped kid who was allowed to score a touchdown in a game. I remember seeing the Posnanski version and then the Reilly version in SI and then way after the fact, I think someone here posted a link to the original, that was done in a very small paper about a week before Posnanski wrote it.

There's nothing wrong with that at all. They're not claiming to be breaking news.

A mentor of mine who used to work at one of the national magazines was working on a profile of a football coach and a week before his was due, one of the other other magazines came out with a cover story on the same guy. I remember asking him, "Are you pissed?" and he said, "No, I just need to make sure mine is better than his..."

 

Reminds me of the big row over the dueling Esquire/GQ Ohio animal stories.

 

Too soon.

 

I think E60 did this story about a year ago but it wasn't as in-depth with the crime scene as Lake.

 

Moving on from the "can this be written again" topic, because obviously it can...

The first line of the story:

"The English language has a million words, but only one for the two kinds of forgiveness."

However pretty that sentence seems rolling off your tongue, it left me, the first time, wondering what the hell the word was, and the second time, wondering why there's only two kinds of forgiveness.

The beginning of the story tries too hard. It does. And I like Lake's work, even here. But in the first five grafs alone, you have a candle flame, a volcano, a shower, a hurricane, a tremor, an earthquake, a river of blood, a lake of blood and valleys of corn and cotton. Was he going for Steinbeck? McCarthy? Moses?

Now, once the story finds a rhythm, it moves right along with Lake's usual undercurrent of humor ("New York weighed 286 pounds and would do anything for money and plenty of things for free") and eye for curious, but appropriate detail.

With the beginning, I suspect he's trying to do some large-scale justice to the strength and integrity of Saundra Adams. But Adams does that in her own words. Does it just fine.

 

I had the exact same reaction. The lede was a stretch. It reminded me of someone trying to imitate Gary Smith. Thomas Lake is better than that, maybe even at this point better than Gary Smith.

 

The older I get, the less patience I have for a writer explicitly trying to do "large scale justice" in the story. That kind of "lyrical" writing is bit like writing a second person story. If done perfectly, it is amazing. But if it is off just a little bit, if it isn't perfect, it grates on and distracts the reader. If the writer has done the necessary reporting, he/she doesn't have to do "large scale justice" or explicitly try to put the story in perspective; a well-written, tightly-constructed story will do the job itself.

I know Jones is a lightning rod for criticism around here, but "The Things That Carried Him" is one of my favorite long-form stories. He took a story that could be maudlin -- and was such an inviting target for overwrought "what it all means" prose -- and wrote a simple, tight story with incredible details. He never told me what to feel or why the story was important; he trusted that the story, if he told it right, it would earn my emotions.

I liked the Van Valkenburg story about the semipro football player, but I will admit that the first time I read it, I stopped a couple paragraphs in because KVV was trying too hard to Make Sense Of It All and Put It In Perspective (with some editing, it could have started at "Tackle football is never going away in this country.") It wasn't until some people I really respect posted about it that I went back and finished it. And I'm glad I did.

 

Here is Charles Pierce's lede paragraph on Wes Welker. This is Exhibit A of why I think that Pierce, not Gary Smith, is Lake's role model in the lede department:

Part of genius is realizing that to look is only to begin to see. Someone looks at a block of marble and sees David. Someone else looks at a river and sees a boy and a man on a raft, one white and one black, floating through the purple twilight in a country facing the bargain that allowed it to grow but betrayed its ideals. Someone else looks at an ocean and sees a continent on the other side, real and solid, even though he has yet to step onto its shores. The eyes are the windows to the soul and all that rot, but they are something else as well. They are the engines of imagination. Geniuses see what isn't there but ought to be, damn well should be, inevitably will be. In this, seeing truly is believing.

 

You reminded me of the only real criticism I had of the bulk of the story: Why didn't Thomas Lake simply use first-person?

 

Someone mentioned Steinbeck. That is exactly who those type of ledes remind me of. Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald to a degree, wrote those kind of beginnings to their books. In "East of Eden," I believe, three pages about the California landscape precede the appearance of a human being. I suspect Lake and some others have read a lot of Steinbeck and other WWI-era American novelists.

 

I would agree with that. When I read CPP, half of the time, I wonder how any human can write so well and want to run my fingers through a garbage disposal. And the other half of the time I feel like I am professor reading a paper by a college freshman who bought a thesaurus and an Encyclopedia Brittanica and wants to show the world how smart he is.

And whenever a writer tries to imitate CPP -- who is truly sui generis -- it feels like the latter.