A Type of Love Story
Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 12. Today’s story is a love story. Well, sort of. It’s a “type” of love story, and the tweezered noun is necessary. I’m talking about Russell Banks’s “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story.” It’s part of that book I keep referring to, Contemporary Fiction . You can find it here . I read this story for the first time a few weeks ago, but I’ll refer to it now because what I read today didn’t make it to the “generally liked” threshold. I appreciated “Sarah Cole” right after reading it, true, but it’s the weeks that have passed that have made me really fond of it. I have found myself thinking often about the subtle cruelty of the tale, and about the ease with which it’s narrated. There were two chronologies to the story, mingling with each other. One is set in the narrator’s present, ten years after the incident with Sarah Cole. The other takes place when the narrator is twenty-eight; at that time, the incident with Sarah Cole happened o...