Short Story: "My Widow"

There is a big overlap in friends, blog readers, and book club, so many people I know will have read this one already, but it's . . . oh my. T.C. Boyle is a weird dude & really great writer, with an amazingly prolific body of work, full of diverse characters and places. "My Widow" was the most horrifying story about animals in the house I'd ever read, until he topped himself with "Thirteen Hundred Rats" in 2007, and then . . . well, I have a personal problem there, so "My Widow" remains high in terms of the visceral, if one step lower in the terror department.

I like this story for the same kinds of reasons I love Flannery O'Connor: there is a mastery of using the grotesque for its own inherent power, and not for shock value. Done badly, the grotesque is inserted to cheaply stun rather than be the means of moving the story and slowly building the sense of place and character, which this story accomplishes in spades. There is no escaping the widow's house once you've joined her there.

It is always impressive when writers do an unconventional narrator well and without pretension (for the opposite, see: The Lovely Bones); Boyle here uses a dead husband, watching his beloved widow from heaven or thereabouts. She is very old, has dementia, lives in a house going to ruin, and is surrounded by dozens of cats. The narration is loving and tender, not without a few wry jabs now and then, though they are filled with fondness and sympathy for her loneliness and advancing helplessness. The story is structured into sections with cryptic titles, and reads like a series of observations, which works well from a dead narrator who seems old himself. I don't sense that he is omniscient as much as able to observe her actions, and when he tells us what she's thinking, the sense is that he knows it not because he is dead, but because he was her husband. It helps the story stay far away from the supernatural or the maudlin, which is why the structure works so well at establishing the horrifying sights and smells of the widow's cavelike existence. Though it isn't chronological, the list structure still contains a definite passage of time, a closing-in of cats and decay, a building sense of dread and sadness.

"My Widow" also seems to be unavailable anywhere Google can find it, so you can either locate the February 12, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, read it in Boyle's After the Plague, or ask me in the comments and I'll send you a .pdf toute de suite. If that all seems like much too much hassle, let me tempt you with the opening paragraph:

"My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantlepiece their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you'll pardon the expression."