Ordinary Sins

Abstract

I chose to write Ordinary Sins as short stories rather than a novel, but also made the decision to deny the reader any central narration. The opening story introduces readers to the four central characters: Andy, Linda, their daughter Emily, and Andy's new love interest, Debra. These characters all also appear in the last story, but in the middle often have entire stories to themselves, or share the narrative with one or two other central characters. The first and last stories are set in the present day, each told in third-person close. The six intermediate stories are each first-person and move freely throughout time, giving history and context to each of the characters. . . . Ultimately, I hope to capture what I think is a central facet of human behavior: For the most part, the world is filled with people doing their best to do the right thing, though no one really knows what the "right thing" actually is. The title Ordinary Sins comes from a line in the opening story, "Only he believed that his sins of ordinariness could be undone." I chose the phrase as the title of the collection to suggest that, while life is full of catastrophic events which can ruin relationships, often when a family disintegrates it is no one's fault, that the "sins" committed in relationships are often ordinary, commonplace mistakes and miscalculations that no one intends to be destructive. The word "sins" has no religious intentions, but rather illuminates the gravity these characters perceive in their every day actions. The collections of short fiction I examine below are examples of the short story collection genre I selected specifically for their strengths that I hoped to borrow. The stories in Dubliners are the least obviously connected, and I examine Joyce's skillful use of theme and motif in stringing the stories together. Both Too Far To Go and Unaccustomed Earth contain stories of family, and of the minor and major events that make up daily lives. Updike's success lies in his use of subtle symbols to intensify ordinary lives, and Lahiri creates marvelously complex characters with unassuming language and dialogue. The thematic progression from Joyce to Lahiri also creates a stylistic sequence that moves closer to the style I strive for within Ordinary Sins. Unlike Joyce, who loads his stories with symbols and philosophical implications, I am much more interested in the psychological motivations of each story. Frank O'Connor calls Joyce's "a heavily pictorial style; one intended to exclude the reader from the action and instead to present him with a series of images of the events described," while my style is far more interested in precisely presenting the action of a scene, including the reader in the progression of events (O'Conner 305). My writing, unlike Updike' s, is not heavily imagistic or poetic, but follows in the footsteps of contemporary fiction writers, those working in the vein of Raymond Carver's unaffected domestic stories, like Amy Hempel and Alice Munroe, and is most similar to Lahiri's writing in this way. Ultimately, my style is meant to suggest that Andy, Linda, Emily and Debra are not people prone to extravagance, and so it is in extravagant situations that they are most in jeopardy. [From Introduction]