Critique #29: Don Oestreicher
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 8th, 2006
Silently I watch.
Cassie’s tan legs tease the surf. Like the sandpipers, they wait for the last moment to sprint beyond the foamy green waves. Rosarito Beach sparkles as the morning sun peeks over the bluff extending Cassie’s long shadow into the pacific ocean. The broad white beach is deserted except for a few clusters of fishermen, their poles planted in the sand like small stands of saplings. Thin black lines unfurl from the tops reaching far beyond the turbulent shoreline.Â
Between breakers, Cassie talks to the fishermen. She moves close enough for her California tan to pale in contrast to their weathered chests and faces. The old men do not look at her blond hair and blue eyes, but watch her toes digging for crabs between waves. She must be telling them a story for I see her tongue dancing between her white teeth. Arms wave and point and the men laugh, old men laughs, experienced and exuberant.
I scream, “Get away from her,†but no sound penetrates the silence. In the moment she glances towards me, I see the Pacific Ocean in her eyes and race down the bluff – tumbling, falling, getting up to run again.
Don, there’s a lot of promise here, but my sense is that you’re trying too hard, and the effort is intruding between me and the story. Lyrical language must serve the story, enhancing the sensory experience, engaging the emotions as well as the mind.
What I am seeing here are Cassie’s body parts taking over the story. Her legs are “teasing” the ocean foam (I would have thought it would be the other way around…) and then these legs are acting like birds, still for a moment, then hopping around in the water. Her tongue is dancing around in her mouth. So far, I’m more grossed out by these images than interested..
Then we pass to the narrator, who seems hysterical with jealousy, and this is not a hook for me, though others might disagree. I see lots of potential in your writing, and wonder if your first thirteen lines might be better rewritten in a more natural voice, with a hint of what the problem is besides jealousy–and if jealousy is going to be the main problem, I need a reason to be interested. Again, this might be idiosyncratic–others might consider jealousy a big hook.
Don,
Cap “Pacific” and drop “ocean.” It’s the biggest body of water on the planet. Everyone knows it by its first name, even if they’ve never seen it.
I second Sherwood on all of what she said. I love lyrical descriptions, but they need to serve the story, and your narrator is jealous and upset about his bikini girl being stared at–or apparently not–by a bunch of old fishermen, who must either be gay or puritans to be staring at the toes of a bathing-suit clad lovely standing on the beach talking to them.
Also, one man’s lyrical can be another one’s overmodified. You’re trying too hard here to convey the beach, rather than just conveying specific images from it.
Also, the sound doesn’t penetrate the “silence” but the “distance,” and anyway, that’s incorrect because she’s glancing up to the narrator even if she can’t understand what he’s saying.
However, if he fell off the cliff at this moment, I wouldn’t much care, because the jealous boyfriend story simply bores me, especially since I don’t like his voice.
Sorry.
I must “third” the comments so far. And this opening line is really overused.
I suspect something more than jealousy, but that’s just a feeling. When he sees the ocean in her eyes - possible at such a distance? - I’m thinking maybe she’s a mermaid about to go home:-)
You’ve got a good eye for details, but with the plethora of them, we can’t tell what’s important–the beach, the girl, the speaker’s reaction. If we’re in his head, we need to know what’s bothering him. No fair hiding it just for “dramatic effect.”
The dancing body parts bothered me, too. We need to see all of her before the narrator focuses on the legs, perhaps.
I do think, though, that jealousy is a perfectly valid theme for a story. It can set all kinds of drama, usually unpleasant, in motion. Obsessive detail is one way to lend force to a description of jealousy, but the problem is, it’s been overused ever since Robbe-Grillet. (Have you read his JEALOUSY or JALOUSIE to give it the original punning title? Something about the rhythms of your prose reminds me of his in that particular book.)