TN2 Magazine’s ‘Fiction Club’ is a monthly forum for writers to read, discuss and dissect selected works. To suggest a piece of literature for consideration contact literature@tn2magazine.ie
‘Macadam’ is a length of prose recounting the narrator’s memory of a road paved. It was most recently published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, a selection of stories written by Lucia Berlin.
Dr Rosie Lavan, School of English Teaching Assistant at Trinity College, Dublin
This story of a girl’s perceptions and divinations evoked generalised, unremarkable yet lasting memories from my own childhood of the sight and smell of a road being resurfaced. It is the smell, not the sound, of tar, or tarmac, that I remember; and its heat. I’m almost certain I was in my late teens before I heard the word ‘macadam’, and was struck by the linguistic innovation which flattened those capital letters in John Loudon McAdam’s surname to denote the levelling surface he devised. So, following the thread of associations Berlin unwinds so brilliantly here, when I reach the story’s concentration on the word macadam, I’m struck again by my own sense of the relative novelty of that word, as well as what she shows us through it.
I am very drawn to the groupings in this story: the female relatives, themselves a family chain, of daughter, mother, grandmother; and the men who work, and of whom we know enough to know they’re convicts, but no more. They’re linked by the female gaze (a notably characterised way of seeing) of the ice-chewing child and her grandmother on the swing. But what I really like is the next connection, across into the third paragraph. After the working men, whose personal histories are inaccessible and can only be guessed at, Berlin gives us the brief but telling sketch of matrilineal effort and disappointment: the simplicity and directness of her mother’s hate for where and how they live, and the macadam street representing a slight measure of improvement; and the simplicity of that word “just” attached to her grandmother’s wish to keep things clean, and the work to achieve that – the floor is polished – and to protect, in the mahogany table, a possession of material and symbolic value.
The narrator herself takes us from the present tense into the continuous past of childhood, and her own implicit loneliness. The penultimate paragraph begins by connecting the women around the word and its utterance; the final one begins with the child alone, speaking the word aloud, making macadam a name again for a person, a friend, who is not there, and echoing that “sounds like” of the opening line – this time, though, with the poignancy of imagined recognition, not with the recovered memory of the noise on the road.
Ferdia Foley, Contributing Writer
Her prose agitates you and yet leaves you feeling like something’s been omitted. There’s something more there; something you’ll have to explore for yourself. Short stories, especially very short stories like this, have a way of sticking with you. Macadam will plant itself in the back of your head and stay there, germinating.
In secondary school we had to read Hemmingway’s ‘baby shoes’ bit where he means very little besides a brief, sad shock. I wish we’d read Macadam where, despite the larger word count, Berlin says less but means far more. Her strength lies in allusion. However, to dwell on this evocative quality would merely serve to detract from its effect. It is simply enough to say that Macadam sticks with you, remains stuck with you, and gains power from the time spent contemplating it.
That being said, what a terrible chore reading would be if you had to wait days to get anything from it. At its most basic level, Macadam is a story about how nice it is to say the word macadam. Our narrator is quite right and indeed, the same can be said about the entire story. It sounds great. You might read silently at first, but I’d be very surprised if most readers did not return to the beginning immediately and recommence, with a deep breath, this time out loud. For some readers that might be too unsophisticated a reason to praise a story, but to say this piece sounds great and I love it because of that is not to undermine the power of its content.
Too often we’re concerned with meaning over form; Macadam balances the scales. We don’t need a discussion on modernism to qualify the crisp, rhythmic prose employed here. It’s short but it sings. It’s close to poetry but it’s decidedly prose. In a story concerned with the power of a word, Berlin captures the music and meaning all in one. Berlin’s prose reconciles sound and sensation in a poetic manner, and you should read Macadam out loud, to yourself, again and again and again.
Killian Beashel, Contributing Writer
As Patricia Lockwood remarks in the ever irritating and persistently puerile London Review of Books, “there ought to be a cult, really, of teenagers with Lucia Berlin’s books in their back pockets.” Berlin has become a cool author, one who is recommended quietly to friends, always in the hopes that you yourself are the one chosen to spread the Good News to an as-yet-unenlightened public. Her status as a semi-cult author whose work was rediscovered and repackaged certainly complicates any initial engagement with her. However, her prose will always win. Berlin could write a sentence like few could.
This ability at the level of the sentence is exhibited perhaps at its best in the short, idiosyncratic “Macadam.” Again, my initial reading of this piece was shaped not by the piece itself, but by the context of my reading of it. It comes almost exactly at the middle of A Manual for Cleaning Women, and is completely unlike any other story in the collection. Almost veering into the realm of the prose poem, “Macadam” is a glorious work of striking sonorous immediacy.
The idea of spectacle seems important in the story. Right from the opening line, the tarmac itself is presented as something of a spectacle – gleaming like dark caviar, the crunch of someone chewing ice. The convicts working the road operate with rhythmic simultaneity, as if in performance. And, as they perform, “the macadam made the sound of applause.”
There’s a puckish and unusual joy in language present as well in the story, and this indeed pervades all of Berlin’s work. A wonder at the sound of words and knotty sentences. This culminates in the final line of the story: “I used to say macadam out loud, to myself, because it sounded like the name for a friend.” No matter how many times I’ve read this story, I’ve also found there to be a sadness in the line that I can’t pin down. Lonely macadam.
Fiachra Kelleher, Deputy Literature Editor
Reading this story is like watching a train pull into station. In the distance it’s only an abstraction, its front recognisable as the face it half looks like: insipid windscreen eyes and a cowcatcher moustache. This is the “macadam” of Berlin’s opening line: materiality itself, pure texture; oscillating, as a strange new thing will, between the incongruent experiences by which we try to make sense of it – at once caviar, glass, and ice.
Still foreshortened, the narration moves closer to its narrator in the next paragraph. He or she looks down from the porch at the chain gang. The narrator attributes the sound of applause to the crunching tarmac. Berlin manages to write sensation without descending into solipsism. So often when a less talented or less experienced writer tries to bring the aural texture of their language very close to the things they are describing, the writing becomes incomprehensible. This doesn’t happen here. Berlin renders the scene in a way that makes us feel like she has included the most important details. Verbs are carefully chosen to give an impression of haziness without obscuring our view of events – what does it mean, exactly, to “sway” on a swing? This is, I suppose, a sort of impressionism.
The third paragraph brings us closer again to the narrator. Just as, in the preceding lines, a sense of context – and of tension – was introduced by the chained men and their overseer, here we learn how it is the mother and grandmother view the development of their street. The narrator sees something of their mother and grandmother in the macadam, as if moulding tarmac statues out of them: dark, crude, and glistening things.
In the final line, the train pulls in – goes past slightly, in fact, its momentum taking it somewhere we, the reader, didn’t expect it to go. Like many pieces of flash fiction (though I’m not sure Berlin would have used the term “flash fiction”) the final line is a punchline, making us reconsider what we’ve just read. The portraits of the family are vague, we might think, because the narrator’s relationship to them is vague, or impersonal, or lacking human connection.
At 148 words, this piece of writing is tremendously economical. It is a short poem in prose form. Would I like it to be longer, with more of a story? Yes.
Shane Murphy, Literature Editor
It is written in prose: ‘Macadam’ is short fiction.
“Yeah, no sh*t”, but still, the above statements feel like judicious interpretations of the work rather than indisputable formal determinations. Separating poetry from prose in Berlin’s piece is like peeling two things apart. Its rhythm and size is something familiar to poetry, as is lush imagery. Flash fiction is the flip side of the same coin. Instead of language being short but stylish, it must be short and tactile. Flash fiction is most of the time about deprivation; pinching the reader’s imagination sentence by sentence to coax their mind into hallucinating any literary stimuli into clear and concrete images. It is a form that requires incredible skill and leaves little-to-no room for personality. One cannot jettison syntax or linguistic deviances in the same way that a poet can.
I say this because of how shrewd Berlin is with form in ‘Macadam’. If this was written in verse, it wouldn’t work as well. (Now, bear with me as I make several wide generalisations about literature. I must assume the stance of a tarmac layer guiding traffic — caution: potential holes ahead.) Emotional beats provide forward momentum for literature. In poetry, these beats are placed, if not consciously word by word, then crucially line-break by line-break; it is the balance of silence and then passion that strike the reader. The emotional beats of prose are different, often made once every paragraph. Berlin’s shrewd dispensations of silence is what makes this piece actively thrum for me. It swells and lands with weight, like the Red Texan dust onto the mahogany table.
Condensed writing is something that is increasingly prevalent in internet culture. Article clippings suffice for articles, comments suffice for commentary. News headlines seem like feats of flash fiction. ‘Macadam’ is so condensed. It has only 816 characters, fitting comfortably into three Tweets. It is dense and rich — watertight like tarr. Its form is a matter of thematic curiosity, built like concrete poetry.
