Fess Avenue wasn’t a long street. There were only three houses on it, all with attics and fairly large yards. Drawn there by an ad in the classifieds, I moved into the attic room of the middle house, which belonged to a Mrs. MacMillan. She herself occupied the lower floors. Such being the case, I had an excellent view—not only of Mrs. Nolan’s house, but Mrs. Casper’s as well.
This is the opening line of the first story in this collection. And it could not be a more appropriate choice for that particular honor. There is much in this quote that can be extended to the entire collection as a whole. In the first place, every story is conveyed by a first-person narrator. This is a selection of stories in which the “I” perspective is of utmost significance. The stories are no told by a nebulous third-person party removed from the action. The most important aspect of this quote, however, comes at the end. The admission by the narrator in this opening paragraph of a certain level of voyeurism will recur throughout the collection. The first-person account is significant because these are stories being told partially about others by someone peeking into the lives of others. Much like the author who created them. And much like the person reading them.
To be fair, the weather that day was hot and dry. Maybe that was what caused her to rise from her seat, call to the postman in a shrill voice, and berate him with great force. Perhaps the postman, too, suspected that Mrs. Elberhart was merely a victim of the awful weather. Hence his polite reply that he didn’t genuinely didn’t have any mail for her that day.
It is definitely worth adding that shortly after this description, the narrator admits that it was only by the most unlikely of coincidences that he was present to witness this interaction. He normally never took the route that placed him on the particular road in which this collision of personalities would come into conflict. It was only because he had been in search of a particular doctor’s office that he did happen to be there. But he wasn’t even sick—in fact, he rarely ever does get sick—but decided to check the doctor out because he had heard he was reputable. Coincidences of a most absurdly prosaic and almost utterly uninteresting sort just so happened to come together to put this narrator in a position to witness that interaction at that moment. And what happens? Well, only the most likely thing to happen, of course: his interest is piqued by the unanswered questions surrounding the disagreement. And so, naturally, this street suddenly does become part of his normal routine. Because that is how life works. The unfamiliar becomes familiar because something happens and this something is usually not something big, but just barely fascinating enough to rouse one’s interest. This is another aspect of story that recurs again and again throughout the various narratives.
“And that’s why, if I manage to reach old age someday…and have the leisure to write some good poem and select a few for publication, I’d pretend that they were written by who was dead and that I’d discovered.”
The narrator of this story is the person to whom the title character is speaking. Joshua is a poet who does gains pleasure and satisfaction from the act of writing. He is actually being sincere here and not just mouthing off about an absurd situation the way some writers are prone to do. The meat of the narrative, however, is that Joshua does not live to reach old age, but dies at a rather tender age and on something of a whim the narrator enters Joshua’s verse into a competition which he actually goes on to win. The crux of the conflict here being that the poetry is submitted as being the work of the narrator rather than Joshua. So, in a weirdly ironic way, Joshua’s odd ambition actually does come true. Sort of. In a collection that is about voyeurism, isolation, alienation and loneliness, this may be the most creative mode of thematic exploration. From the outside, there does not seem to be much in common between the either of the first two narrators explored above, but ultimately the plagiarist comes to be seen as belonging very much to the company of the old man who literally peeks into two houses across the way and the narrator whom coincidence has turned into a different sort of looky-loo. The important thing to keep in mind is this behavior is not confined to Bloomington by any stretch.
