Mailboxes

Andrew Holleran's narrator in The Beauty of Men finds himself waiting behind a school bus and musing

He regards the school bus now with a certain awe — even if he knows it's filled with bullies and brats trying to inflict pain on gentler children — as he watches them get off the bus at the dirt road that leads into a pool of trailers among the pine trees o the shores of Lake Sampson. Nothing has changed: Some kids get off by themselves, walk over to a mailbox, open the lid, then flip it back in disgust. (They need mail too, he thinks. Perhaps I can spend the rest of my life writing children letters.)

Note the sharp shift in pronouns. It provides some poignancy. No matter how many letters get written few arrive except for the novel that one is reading if that counts as a letter and we the readers as expectant children. We can turn in disgust from a novel not meant for us.

And so for day 552
17.06.2008