Marisa Silver on Leonard Michaels’s “Murderers”

(Guest post by Marisa Silver)

Although it’s usually a character in a particular situation that launches me into a novel, I don’t really know how to write a book until I locate its tone. Tone is such a tricky concept. It’s aural, but it almost feels physical to me, as if it has to move through my body in order for me to make the right language, rhythm, and structure choices that create the singing voice of the novel.  

My new novel, The Mysteries, investigates the lives of a group of people who are affected by a tragedy. The central figure is a seven-year-old girl named Miggy Brenneman, an unruly, vibrant, kinetic kid who shakes a fist at every limitation but has little agency. When I started writing, I tried the opening of the novel several different ways, but each time I felt that the tone was off the mark. A retrospective stance created too elegiac an attitude, a soft-focus remove that put me too far from Miggy’s visceral, unanalyzed experience.  I tried narrowing the distance so that I kept the focus as close as possible to Miggy, but found the tone too childlike, as I was limited by her narrow perspective and language choices.  

Then, I remembered Leonard Michaels’s story “Murderers,” which starts with this astonishing paragraph:  

When my uncle Moe dropped dead of a heart attack I became expert in the subway system. With a nickel I’d get to Queens, twist and zoom to Coney Island, twist again toward the George Washington Bridge—beyond which was darkness. I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t? The poor in spirit, the ignorant and frightened. My family came from Poland, then never went anyplace until they had heart attacks. The consummation of years in one neighborhood: a black Cadillac, corpse inside. We should have buried Uncle Moe where he shuffled away his life, in the kitchen or toilet, under the linoleum, near the coffeepot. Anyhow, they were dropping on Henry Street and Cherry Street. Blue lips. The previous winter it was cousin Charlie, forty-five years old. Moe, Charlie, Sam, Adele—family meant a punch in the chest, fire in the arm. I didn’t want to wait for it. I went to Harlem, the Polo Grounds, Far Rockaway, thousands of miles on nickels, mainly underground. Tenements watched me go, day after day, fingering nickels. One afternoon I stopped to grind my heel against the curb. Melvin and Arnold Bloom appeared, then Harold Cohen. Melvin said, “You step in dog shit?” Grinding was my answer. Harold Cohen said, “The rabbi is home. I saw him on Market Street. He was walking fast.” Oily Arnold, eleven years old, began to urge: “Let’s go up to our roof.” The decision waited for me. I considered the roof, the view of industrial Brooklyn, the Battery, ships in the river, bridges, towers, and the rabbi’s apartment. “All right,” I said. We didn’t giggle or look to one another for moral signals. We were running. 

The paragraph, like the entire story, is animated by physicality. The boy moves laterally underneath New York City in the subway, then he and his friends climb a fire escape to watch their Rabbi and his wife have sex. One of the boys falls to his death. It’s a story structured around movement, and the sheer physicality creates the terms of the character’s awakening. 

I understood that the tone of my story was indeed a physical thing as I had always thought, and that it was hidden inside the body, inside the rushing blood, of Miggy herself. I heard my story then, its particular music and attitude. In a private nod to Michaels, I began my novel where his paragraph left off:  

They are running. There is no reason to go slow. They run out of Miggy’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the living room, skipping over the albums that lie scattered across the floor. Miggy nimbly avoids Brubeck, Evans, and Monk, but she wants to crush them, too. To hear the satisfying snap of the records under her Keds. To feel the momentary pulse of destruction.  

No, her mind says. Why not? 

Because no, her mother would say sharply. Jean’s reactions are one part anger and two parts fear, the fault between those feelings a line Miggy senses in the quaver of misgiving that passes across her mother’s face when she wants to reprimand her daughter. It is a line Miggy can’t resist treading, the same way she must trouble a loose tooth, the sharp pain and dull tickle equally irresistible. 

“Who are you?” her mother asks, after Miggy shatters the back window of the station wagon with a rock, or draws a butterfly on the living room rug, because a rock, so dense in the hand, must be flung, and a Magic Marker, its tip as wet as a dog’s nose, must draw. 

“I am Miggy!” she says. But of course, her mother knows who she is. The words mother and father don’t exist without the word Miggy. She is the reason for them. 

“I am Miggy!” she declares now, as she dances around the albums, imagining them as lily pads, imagining herself as a fairy so light she can land on the water between the pads and not drown. Or maybe the albums are the water and the spaces between are leaves the size of elephant feet. Because everything is always itself and the inside out of itself. 

A shirt. A lie. Vomit. A dream. 

The Michaels story has one of the most stirring and gorgeously written closings I’ve ever read. The boy goes to a summer camp run by injured WW2 vets where he is surrounded by men whose experience of violence and loss permeates the atmosphere. Leonard writes, “At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I’d never before heard that sound, the sound of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.”     

A tonal shift from the visceral to the philosophical. Music, indeed.

Marisa Silver is the author of The Mysteries (2021), Little Nothing (2016), a New York Times Editor's Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction, Mary Coin (2013), a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone With You (2010), The God of War (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, No Direction Home (2005), and Babe in Paradise (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic.com and many other publications, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

In 2018, Silver was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.