Ethan Hightower's "Holes Full of Dirt" is about a young teen who wants to impress a girl who is not at all interested in him. She's old enough to drive, and he just barely isn't. The year between them (two years for four days between their birthdays, she points out) makes him feel inferior, too young and inexperienced to catch her attention. He sees a chance to impress her when she makes an offhand comment about the holes in the road to his house, and it's just the kind of sudden project-that-will-take-more-effort-than-I-anticipate that I think a fifteen year old would make to impress a girl. Unfortunately for him, the narrator is forced to realize that the undertaking was, essentially, pointless.
The tone of the piece is spot on for a fifteen year old boy as a narrator. The awkward dialogue between the narrator and Ashlyn makes it clear to the reader that he is very much interested in her and she is very much not interested. Sometimes, it can be difficult to make the relationship (or lack of romance) between two characters without using exposition. At the same time, the tone between the narrator and Denver is absolutely frank -- Denver can see right through the narrator, and they both know it, but the narrator will stalwartly deny it because that's the relationship they have.
This needs a whole new paragraph: the depressing realizations on page 6, starting with "I sat in the truck overwhelmed by a sense of failure," captures the uneven way human emotion works perfectly. The sudden change from "I can do this" to "I can't believe I even tried that, what was I thinking?" fits so well into the story that I have to applaud Hightower.
I understand that this is a story about the narrator's love for Ashlyn, but I think the story would be enhanced by more mention of the father earlier in the story. The character's realization of self is very much tied to his father helping him out of his mess, and I think the relationship between them would bring another dimension to the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment