Editor’s Corner
June 19, 2009
Vovó, Joe Onions, and the Art of the Vignette
By
Constance Hale
We favor a wide definition of narrative journalism here at the Digest (see the last two posts!), and welcome the rare piece that might be called a vignette, or slice-of-life story. These are slight narratives with an outsize impact—they may or may not convey news, they may or may not sketch a character, they may or may not dance around a brilliant metaphor.
To figure out what makes a vignette work, we need look no further than Dan Barry, who produces them on a regular basis for The New York Times, in a column titled “This Land.” (He also writes the occasional essay elsewhere in the newspaper.) We’ve selected a few pearls for this issue.
Our Notable Narrative, “In a City Under Strain, Ladling Out Fortification,” is an elegy to an almost-extinct way of life, as seen through an almost-extinct kind of person. Ines De Costa, or Vovó, is a 76-year-old Portuguese grandmother who works 70-hour weeks to feed Fall River, Massachusetts, measuring out soup “not by the quart but by the heart.”
Barry moves back and forth between the travails of the cook and the travails of the town. (“The city clearly needs daylight—a plan. In the meantime, how about some soup?”) Artfully grounding the storytelling in Vovó’s washing, chopping, stirring, and ladling, Barry manages to slip in unemployment statistics, civic politics, and the spirit of American democracy. Not to mention old-world Catholicism.
In “Just One Last Swirl Around the Bowl,” an essay in the Sunday Modern Love column, Barry contemplates the to-be-or-not-to-be of his daughter’s goldfish, using humor and humanity to circle around the subject of death. “What is it these fish eat, anyway?” he asks. “I check the ingredients: fish meal, wheat flour, soybean meal, krill meal, corn gluten meal, stabilized fish oil, squid meal, yeast, lecithin oil, on and on. It strikes me that I eat pretty much the same food, save for the krill.”
Barry could stop there, at the funny joke. Instead, he uses the unpalatable to reflect on his own childhood (“I think of the sugary tea and cinnamon toast that my mother, 10 years gone, would serve me when I stayed home from school, partly sick, partly seeking reassurance that she would always, always be there when I needed her”) and on his mother’s terminal illness: (“Have a sip of tea, I would say. Have a bite of toast. Have some Ensure. Chocolate? Strawberry? Vanilla? But she would not. She would smile, shake her head, look away with that look past panic.”) His attempts to persuade a dying fish to eat also bring back memories of his father’s illness, and his own, when tea and toast again represented sustaining love.
If you want to taste a more pungent Barry essay, try “In Rhode Island, an Old Mobster Lets Go of a Long-Kept Secret.” Here Barry uses the murder of Joe Onions, the confession of a flea-market Mafia associate, and the subversion of a movie cliché to tell a tale of crime and redemption. (In this case, it’s the police rather than mobsters who take a guy “out for a ride”).
Point us in the direction of your favorite tales by adding a comment or sending us narratives that touched you in unexpected ways.