the where of it

God’s in the (right) details: No frills New Mexico in “The Five Wounds”

• Posted by Summer Wood on July 29th, 2009 filed in craft of writing, people, places
• 3 Comments »

Hats off to Kirstin Valdez Quade for her moving story, “The Five Wounds”, published in this week’s issue of The New Yorker – and a nod of appreciation to the magazine for taking a chance on a story that’s so thoroughly steeped in New Mexico lore.  Quade’s New Mexico (she’s from here, a cursory Google search suggests) is gritty, honest, current, and as rich in tradition as it is poor in material wealth.  There’s more than a little of the magical here, but it’s not fairy dust; it’s a bitter kind of magic, faith walking hand in hand with despair, love vying with betrayal.  And although she describes a way of life the unfamiliar would view as exotic, she shepherds the practices of the penitente brotherhood into the realm of shared experience by revealing the complex character and conflicting motivations of its members.

By which I mean to say:  this story is the real shit, and you should rush to read it.

We talked a lot in the workshop in Taos about ways writers reveal place, and I looked at this story with a special interest in how Quade tackled the task.  (I’ll try not to spoil your experience of the story by giving away plot points.  Seriously, you’ve got to read it.  It’s online.  Click on the first link above.)  First – clearly – there aren’t many other places in the country where secret societies of men reenact the Passion annually.  “This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus,” the story starts.  “The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station,” and – bingo – we’re set not just in place, but roughly in time.  The story continues to accrue details that set it squarely in present-day northern New Mexico: we learn we’re close to Espanola, we get “Law and Order” and “America’s Next Top Model” on satellite TV, we meet Amadeo’s fifteen-year-old daughter Angel, pregnant and enrolled in parenting classes.  This is no caricatured New Mexico; this is the place in all its rough glory, with its cholos and its lowriders, its fringe Catholicism and contorted views of women and sex, its sense that family is all you have and that that’s why you betray them, again and again, for the sin of their importance to you.

What we don’t get are sweeping vistas of iconic landscapes.  We don’t get blue-framed windows or blossoming hollyhocks or adobe walls or howling coyotes.  We get exactly the details this story requires: nothing less, and nothing more.  An unnamed village where Amadeo Padilla grew up, the “roll of skin where skull meets thick neck,” the crucifix, “violence in the very carving,” hanging in the morada.  These are the details we need to understand the movement of the story, the slow burn of Amadeo Padilla’s growing awareness of his role in Christ’s Passion as well as in the human one unfolding before him.

I have nothing against hollyhocks.  I like adobe walls.  But in the same way that writers can rely on readers to conjure a picture of Paris in their minds without mentioning the Eiffel Tower, I’m happy to see this particular writer lay off the iconic images and direct our attention to the details that matter.