Setting the Scene
Imagery engaged throughout the collection for the purpose of setting the scene. The staging of the opening story is an illustrative example that will be thematically repeated in the opening pages of the other stories in the collection:
“Robins and starlings and sparrows flowed over the smooth lawn in great droves, turning it into the likeness of a marketplace; and the raucous babble of their bargaining (of dealings in worms and beetles and flies) poured itself, like something distilled or dehydrated, from the jar of darkness into the morning air, which made it swell and burst. This enormous shout of birds at morning was always a delight to Harper Dewey.”
Politicizing Geography
The opening paragraph of “Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye” depends upon a certain familiarity with famous figures from the 1960’s zeitgeist of American politics for fully understanding the setting. If one is unfamiliar with Cheever and Buckley, of course, this imagery is almost pointless:
“At the end of the street there are stone steps leading down to a beach with a wide view of Long Island Sound. On the far shore, barely visible, is the home of William F. Buckley, Jr. Everyone looks over there with envy — liberals spitting on the sand, conservatives quietly narrow-eyed and muttering the Platitudes. It is a large place, the lawns of which are encroached upon by rocks, some casual — deposited by the whim of Nature — others cast by the art of man.”
Characters
Most of the stories in this collection are not really plot-driven. They exist more as sketches than fully formed stories that cohere to the basic plot outline you may have learned in school, the one with rising and falling action, climax and denouement. Character dependent stories often live or die on the power of the imagery that is used to bring them to life. This is especially hard to do when the character is purposefully enigmatic such as the narrator’s description of the title character of “About Effie” which pulls off the trick by ironically not using descriptive imagery to introduce her:
“Not many people have the name Effie, so if you meet one, take a good look, because it might be her. She hasn't got red hair or anything, or a spot on her face or a bent nose or any of those things, but the way you'll know her is this: she'll look at you as if she thought you were someone she was waiting for, and it will probably scare you. It did me. And then if she lets on that her name is Effie, it's her.”
Repetition
In one particular story, imagery is so essential to the resonance the author is seeking to create that the story actually begins and ends with nearly identical paragraphs. A casual reading might convince one that the opening and closing pagagraphs of “The Book of Pins” are, indeed, exactly the same. Closer scrutiny reveals one minor divergence that serves to change the meaning with greater significance:
“The old hotel still smelled the same and it gave off the same gold light. In the lobby, the dark oak panels shone with the same deep glow of oil-of-lemon wax and the smoky mirrors reflected still the same old women in the same brocaded chairs. Nothing changed. The people were changed, perhaps, but never their image — never the basic reflection of what was there.”
“And the old hotel still smelled the same and gave off the same gold light. In the lobby, the dark oak panels shone with the same deep glow of oil-of-lemon wax and the smoky mirrors reflected still the same old women, the same brocaded chairs. The people were changed, perhaps: but never their image. Never the basic reflection of what was there.”
