It’s an Italian horror film, being made by a director with a long list of credits and a certain reputation. She not only is telling the character what is happening but she is showing us how the inevitable accrues and acquires momentum.Ī young actor, struggling, in 1979, accepts a role in a film being shot in the Columbian rainforest.

The second-person present tense is like a set of instructions. Like a magician explaining the trick as it is being performed, the only thing that can save the experience from the failure of banality is if the exposition of form enhances the total experience.įor example, Kea Wilson’s new novel, We Eat Our Own, from the first line exposes its inner workings and makes us complicit in the construction of the experience. It’s a risky thing for a writer to make the nesting itself part of the story, to show the workings of narrative baldly, like pulling away the curtains on the machinery of the narrative and make it one of the surface elements.

The more we identify with character, connect with setting, and surrender to the flow of the narrative, the more substantive is the story and the truer it feels. The better a writer understands the essential reality of the material, the more potent the experience is for the reader. Even when we’ve never heard that particular story before, the lexical and symbolic soup, sometimes called culture, we swim in makes certain elements part and parcel of what we recognize as truth.įiction depends on this mantle of story sediment. We recognize the truth of stories because they remind. The walls are permeable, the delineations indistinct, and viscera moves from one to another to another, and so, osmotically, verisimilitude emerges with reference and resonance. Like Matryoshki dolls, they nest inside each other.

We eat our own kea wilson