"I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Brontë, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became."
"Creature" is the short story which kicks this off this collection. It is an appropriate choice for foreshadowing what is to follow as many of the stories which come after also feature protagonists who are young women, express a keen interest in fiction, and reveal a propensity to imagine themselves as heroines in a story. Teenaged Carol is especially situated as this recurring character trope, however, as her references to both Charlotte Brontë and a revolutionary 1960's sitcom reveal. This quote reveals that her circumstances within the storyline vaguely resemble that of Charlotte Brontë's gothic heroine, but the juxtaposition with the wide-eyed Anne Marie played by Marlo Thomas is the really relevant clue that whispers to the informed reader that Carol is perhaps just a little too naive and innocent for her own good. Situation such a character in a story titled "Creature" practically guarantees that this budding writer will soon be facing the kind of darkness of which great fiction is often made.
"He felt as if he would burst. He’d read about this feeling in novels, but he was sure he’d never experienced it. Meeting his wife had brought him pleasure, or a sort of relief, the mystery of whom to spend his life with solved—or so he’d thought. But he’d actually been fairly content before he met her, talking on the phone with Aaron, eating tuna in his little room, reading from the stacks of books borrowed from the store he now owned."
The protagonist of the title story shakes things up a little by virtue of being a middle-aged man. Nevertheless, the thematic tapestry of individuals who lives revolve around books—especially novels—remains firmly intact. The "he" here is Mitchell, the owner of bookstore who is accused of loving his merchandise but hating his customers. This quote is another illustrating how many of the characters throughout this collection of short stories keep an account of their real lives through comparisons to fictional living. Mitchell's pleasurable wife left him because he was too isolated. Even his own pre-teen daughter sets about playing matchmaker by enticing the interest of a younger employee of her father through insisting he is "the most reticent man in the world." This sensation of being on the verge of bursting is actually the result of that unexpectedly successful strategy. That "feeling" that he imagined existed only in fictional romances is the result of his precocious daughter's machinations.
"I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived...I have never seen either of them since, though I have read all three of Ed’s novels and liked each one."
As in the opening story, this one is also told by a fourteen-year-old narrator. In this case, however, the narrator is recollecting a significant event in his youth from the perspective of the middle-aged man he becomes. Grant and Ed are two young men hired by the narrator's parents to engage in a combination of housesitting/babysitting while his parents head to France for two months as a psychological salve for the father's suicidal tendencies. Much like Carol in "Creature" there is an unusual depth of innocence to this teenager that seems almost quaint by today's standards and so there is almost immediately a sense of potential menace in these two strangers. This quote specifically addresses how experience comes with the passage of time while the allusion to reading also addresses the collection's overarching theme that suggesting that people often view their real lives as if they are characters in a story.
