{"id":6109,"date":"2023-01-09T15:00:50","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T15:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6109"},"modified":"2023-01-09T15:00:53","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T15:00:53","slug":"spirit-level-by-john-kessel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6109","title":{"rendered":"Spirit Level<\/em><\/strong> by John Kessel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Spirit Level<\/em><\/strong> by John Kessel (F&SF<\/em>, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story\u2019s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents\u2019 house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren\u2014who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands the truth. She then walks into the living room and disappears:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

He touched his hand to his head. He took a deep breath.
Yes, he was awake. He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then returned to the bedroom.
He told himself it was some vivid fantasy, but lying on the air mattress, hearing the furnace turn on and then off, he felt a bone-deep uneasiness. Lauren was not dead. She was alive and living in the house they had lived in for the last twenty years. \u00a0p. 53<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story sees Michael haunted by the ghosts of other failed or troubled relationships: the first is his (dead) father, who ends up striking Michael with a spirit level; then his (live) teenage son Trevor, whose ghost visits just after Michael has sex with his current girlfriend, says, \u201cI smell her on you . . . You stink of her\u201d before fleeing.
Alongside these encounters we get more backstory about the failure of Michael\u2019s marriage and his unhappy relationship with his father, and we also come to see that most of Michael\u2019s relationships are unsuccessful (we see this at his work, with his current girlfriend, and with the care staff where his senile mother lives\u2014and whom he hardly ever sees). We begin to realise that Michael is part of the problem, something put in sharp focus when he dumps on his girlfriend Donna about a troubling visit to his mother:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Donna sighed. \u201cI think you need to ask yourself a few questions, Michael. Is this about your mother or is it about you? If you can\u2019t stop beating yourself about the head and shoulders, you shouldn\u2019t expect someone else to stop you. You certainly shouldn\u2019t expect them to give you sympathy for something you\u2019re doing to yourself. Your mother\u2019s situation is tragic, but it\u2019s what happens. If you wanted to visit her more, you would, though I doubt it would make much difference.\u201d
\u201cThat\u2019s cold.\u201d
\u201cI don\u2019t mean to be cold. You know I like you. You\u2019re not a bad guy. But I can\u2019t solve your problems for you. I\u2019m sorry about your mother. At least you can be with her at the end, if you want to be.\u201d
He looked her in the eyes; she took a sip of coffee.
\u201cI don\u2019t think we ought to keep seeing each other,\u201d Donna said.\u00a0 p. 72<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, Michael\u2019s late-life crisis worsens (as well as the previous events, he starts taking drugs he has found in his parent\u2019s home), and (spoiler) the climactic scene sees him entering his parents\u2019 house to find himself in his childhood home, his mother still in her mid-thirties, and his father\u2019s spirit-level lying beside an unfinished doorway (the spirit level is obviously some sort of symbol, as it appears on a number of occasions throughout the story).
This is fundamentally a literary short story about late life problems and angst (the spirit level, the references to Moby Dick, etc.) with a few fantasy tropes thrown in. For the most part this works pretty well\u2014there is a lot of good observational writing\u2014but the problem the story has is that the genre features are not used consistently, i.e. we go from ghostly apparitions to an ending where the protagonist is apparently transported back in time to his childhood home. This (perhaps dying fantasy) makes for a dissonant and inconsistent ending (I can see why he may want to return to when he was younger and start over, but why to his parents? And how does this ending flow from ghostly apparitions?)
I think this piece will mostly appeal to males in later life, who may recognise some of the situations and appreciate the story\u2019s insights1<\/sup>\u2014but, even if the ending doesn\u2019t throw them, they may tire of a disgruntled protagonist who seems to be unable to get out of his own way.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,700 words.

1. Re the story\u2019s observations, a couple of passages that struck me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Nobody had a soul, Michael knew. All you had was the face you prepared to show to other people. Your character was a performance, a persona you put on; by the time you were a teenager, under the pressure of other people\u2019s expectations, you worked out who you were supposed to be. You lived your invented self to the point where you imagined that was who you were. Everybody thought they knew you\u2014you thought you knew yourself. Until something happened, like Michael walking out on Lauren, to reveal that there was nothing inside you but a few desires and an echo chamber.\u00a0 p. 71<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\n

He couldn\u2019t blame anybody, and he realized that the sadness overwhelming him was not a result of things he had done or failed to do. It was the result of the simple passage of time. Things changed. When you were young, you thought the past could be recovered, or if not, corrected by the future. When you were old, the silent, inexorable slide of now into then, and its associated accumulation of losses, small and large, crushed any future.\u00a0 p. 76<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spirit Level by John Kessel (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story\u2019s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents\u2019 house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren\u2014who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1210],"tags":[256,1400,25,1146,528,1212,1408,7,649],"class_list":["post-6109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-kessel","tag-2-5","tag-1400","tag-fsf","tag-father-son-relationships","tag-ghosts","tag-john-kessel","tag-late-life-crisis","tag-novelette","tag-relationship-problems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6109"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6128,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions\/6128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}