Ann Hood’s “Total Cave Darkness” begins in present tense, and in medias res with a dramatic confrontation between a mother and daughter. Martha, a recovering alcoholic is calling her mother from a pay phone while watching her shirtless lover, a minister, stretching out on the hood of their car. They’re on the road, escaping from a backstory that has yet to be revealed, yet we learn just enough about the characters to understand the nature of their current situation:
He calls her Sweetheart, Darling, Honey Pie. Martha calls him Reverend. Even now, as she watches him stretch out on the hood of his car, shirtless, smiling to himself, face turned toward the blistering July sun, Martha thinks: The Reverend is so damned young. The pay phone is hot against her ear and she smells someone else’s bad breath emanating from it. Martha is sweaty from heat and humidity, sore from too much acrobatic sex. And she wants a drink. God help her, she wants a cold beer, a chilled white wine, a vodka and tonic. Anything.
While this introduction gives the reader some initial insight into the characters, it mainly serves to pique the reader’s interest and continue reading. Although this story is written in third-person, Hood places the reader directly into Martha’s experience. The observation of the Reverend, the sensations, are hers.In the very next paragraph, the narrative focus pulls back and physically locates Martha’s mother:
Six hundred miles from this parking lot, Martha’s mother answers the phone with a weary hello. Massachusetts is in the middle of a heat wave too. Martha knows this. In between sex and free HBO she watches the Weather Channel. The whole country is hot.
In this paragraph, the initial part of the conversation is told indirectly rather than directly as quoted text, because there’s nothing dramatic about saying hello.
“It’s me,” Martha says with forced cheerfulness. “I’m about to go into a cave so I figured I should check in, in case you never hear from me again. You know.
Her mother lowers her voice as if the phone could be tapped. “A Cave! Is that all you have to say for yourself?”
Then we are again within Martha’s which again reveal the nature of her relationship with her mother:
Then there is a silence in which Martha hears her mother thinking: You have done crazy things in your day, but running off with a priest tops them all.
The focus then shifts back to the present action in the parking lot that also reveals another piece of critical information:
The Reverend lazily wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He is nine years younger than Martha, with startling green eyes that remind her of her childhood cat Boo and a body that must come from God himself: wide shouldered and strong and golden haired.
In just the opening pages of this story, Hood rapidly shifts the narrative focus and the distance between the narrator and Martha several different times, ensuring that there is engaging action right in front of the reader, while also revealing character. Critically, the story does not begin with an extended exposition of backstory. Only after this scene ends with Martha saying, “He’s saving my life,” does Hood switch to past tense and provide more biographical information about Martha. The reader will have been asking, “How did Martha get this way?”
Back in March, when Martha’s drinking lost her everything—the condo in Marblehead that looked out over the harbor, her job as the restaurant/movie/theater critic for The North Shore Press, her husband—she moved in with her mother so she could drink in peace.
Hood uses the drama of the opening scene to determine which parts of Martha’s backstory are relevant and need to be told and which parts should be left out.
In “The Language of Sorrow,” also opens with a dramatic confrontation that reveals the tension in the current action and provides just an initial insight into the characters. The main character, Dora, meets her teenage grandson, Peter, at the bus station. They have not previously had a relationship, and it’s clear that there’s some tension between them:
But then a boy stepped off. He was not like the tattooed and pierced teenagers who Dora saw on Thayer Street. This disappointed her for reasons she did not white understand. He was more like the private school boys, the ones who dragged lacrosse sticks past her house every afternoon. Except for the dark shadows beneath his eyes and the defeated way in which he slouched off the bus, he could be one of them. Sad and ordinary, those were the words that sprang to Dora’s mind. His hands clutched a piece of bright red America Tourister luggage, the one meant for women to carry their curlers and things. With his fair hair and pale skin, his light blue eyes and perfect pouty lips, he looked exactly like his mother. This disappointed Dora too.
In a way similar to “Total Cave Darkness,” Hood rapidly shifts the focus and distance of the narrator in the opening of this story. Peter is described here as Dora views, and judges, him.
The tension between them is dramatized that triggers in Dora’s mind, more backstory:
He barely looked at her. “I’ve got another bag,” he said, and joined the others waiting, “Let’s go, shall we?” she said though he had already gone to do just that.
The last time she had seen him was five years ago at her son’s funeral, a hot bright sunlit day, even though it was February. That was Houston, she supposed. Relentlessly sunny, even in winter, even at funerals. She had not paid much attention to Peter that day. She’d had enough to deal with. The news of Dan’s death and the way in which he’d died. The flight to Texas in the middle of the night, stopping and changing planes in Newark and then Chicago and then Dallas. Arriving just in time to get to church, unable to even change her clothes. Peter seemed hardly there that day.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
Dora blinked as if he woke her up.
After this initial opening scene that introduces us to the characters and the conflict between them, Hood steps back briefly for some reflection and backstory:
Dora did not see the point of dwelling on her losses. But often, they seized her and shook her awake. Sometimes she found herself groping for Bill on the other side of the bed, reaching and reaching as if her life depended on finding him there until, finally, panting, she had to remind herself that he had died on April 14, 1983, from lung cancer. A picture of him taking those last gasping breaths in a hospital bed would come to her and she would close her eyes and press the lids hard until it vanished.
Hood’s “Dropping Bombs” opens with a scene in present action that also provides initial character introductions and provides an impression of the relationship between the characters. Jim’s mother has come to Los Angeles for a visit that he has meticulously planned:
Jim told his mother everything. He explained every detail, every reason, every step. How Aunt Dodie could drive her to the airport and wait with her while she picked up her ticket. How to pack a small bag that she could take on the plane with her so she wouldn’t have to worry about her things getting lost. How once she boarded, she did not have to worry about anything at all because the pilot would do the rest. “Once you take off,” he told her, “just sit back and relax.” He even sent her some paperbacks and a stack of cooking magazines to read en route.
From this opening, we learn several things. First, Jim is very conscientious and tries very hard to make sure that his mother’s trip goes as smoothly as possible. Second, we know that, at least in Jim’s view, his mother is incapable of dealing with change.
During the course of her visit, Jim is determined to finally come out as a homosexual, but when confronted with his mother’s apparent fragility, decides that it’s never the right time. Again, interspersed with the present action, Hood fills out Jim’s backstory:
Once, she’d said yes, then canceled at the last minute. “There are some things I really don’t want to see,” she’d said. As a way of an explanation. That startled Jim. What exactly had that meant? Even now he wondered if she was trying to tell him something, if maybe she knew somehow already. But that seemed impossible. When he’d lived in Chicago, just an hour from her house in the suburbs, he was still pretending, even to himself. He used to date girls who were pretty, former Homecoming queens, girls who dressed in pale colors, who wore soft fuzzy sweaters and pink lipstick.
In response to his mother telling Jim that he is like his father, a painful memory is triggered:
“I’m not like him,” Jim said. He had not seen his father in over then years. Once, his father had taken him camping. To Jim, that was the last time they were together, although his mother told him he was wrong. Jim had refused to go to the bathroom in the woods and his father had yelled at him, taken him home early. “You disgust me,” his father told him in the car. When they got to his mother’s Jim ran out of the car and up the walk. “You run like a girl,” his father shouted after him.
In spite of her seeming obtuseness, her closed mind, it is his mother who finally broaches the subject with him, just before she leaves to return home.
In each of these three stories, Ann Hood successfully weaves just enough backstory in to provide context from the present action, economically, without losing sight of the action that is driving the story. The opening paragraphs, in particular, are always focused on what currently happening in the story and do not get bogged down background explanations, which come only later, in small portions, and only what is needed.
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