A Story I Loved: "Three Thousand Dollars" by David Lipsky

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Today’s story is another story that kind of defies logic. I can’t trap the underpinnings of exactly why I love this story so much. I haven’t read much of Lipsky’s other works- I’ve heard good things about “The Art Fair”, but I’ve never read it. The closest I’ve come to another one of his stories is by watching the Jason Segel movie about David Foster Wallace, “The End of the Tour”. The movie is based off of David Lipsky’s book about DFW, and has a role set aside for him, with Jesse Eisenberg playing him. In that movie, he comes off neurotic and nerdy, bursting with the energy typical of an Eisenberg character. But after reading “Three Thousand Dollars” for the first time, I don’t know if the characterization sticks. 

Here is the plot of Three Thousand Dollars, which is expressed within the first line of the story: My mother doesn’t know I owe my father three thousand dollars. The premise of the story is very, very simple- a college-aged boy, whose parents are divorced, cannot tell his mother that his father, who is paying for his education, has given him three thousand dollars for tuition, and that he has gone and spent it elsewhere. I think the great thing about this story is that it’s concerned with energy. I think energy is a fascinating word for a story, and also one that reveals pretty much nothing in terms of semantics. It captures more than general mood or atmosphere, but the energy of the story can reveal the mechanics of the work, at least to a fellow writer looking in. It shows where the author is placing their energy- which things they are putting tension on, where they are putting less of that tension. But I don't sense any of Lipsky's film characterization's neurotic energy in his form as a writer, which shouldn’t surprise me, necessarily, but most of the writers I meet write the way they talk. Lipsky’s character is probably based on himself somewhat- the main character is intelligent and wryly sympathetic, and it’s easy to see how a writer could project themselves onto him. But for a story about suspense, it’s a very easy read. The intensity of that aforementioned energy is not there. 

The remarkable nature of a story like Three Thousand Dollars, which is not revolutionary in terms of plot, by any means, or even particularly emotionally charged, is how well this energy moves through the story. There are lots of things to like here- the dialogue, for one, is amazing. Pitch-perfect. Lipsky, again, is a master of capturing how real people talk. A writing instructor once gave some thoughts on dialogue: and he said it’s not really people talking to each other, it’s so often people talking at each other. Isn’t that the truth? In daily life, people are so concerned with the minutiae of whatever it is running around in their own heads- their own concerns, the laundry cycling, the cooking that has to be done, the argument they’ve just had before coming to this point. One person’s perspective is never the same as another’s, because they are standing in two different positions, coming from two different places. What a story does is try to bind that tension together and see the spot where the narration converges. I think in many ways, that’s why this story works so excellently- it shows that inner conceit of dialogue and writing in general through the main character’s deception. Whatever he is thinking of, which is almost always the money, and keeping his mother from finding out about the money, creates a distance from his mother. They are never on the same page, and conversations are laced with double-meaning, an irony only the reader is omnisciently privy to. It’s an amazing thing. 

When reviewing these stories, I’m technically supposed to be giving some thoughts about writing- how a story promotes good writing in its own special way. I guess what can be said about Three Thousand Dollars is that it demonstrates how a literary story is not a plot mechanism. A literary story is a character study. On the outset, we as the reader should be concerned about one thing- the money. Everything in this narrator’s life revolves around the money that he’s lost. The thought that his mother will discover how he has spent the money, even though he is so desperately trying to conceal it from her. But of course the story isn’t really about the money. It’s about other things- coming-of-age, a mother-and-son’s frayed relationship, trust, love, deception, deception of the self. We are alerted to the fact that we don't care about the money as soon as the main character says he won't bother telling you how he spend it, just that he did.

The ending is a bit of a cop-out, in my opinion, but it’s well-done enough that I can’t be angry, and again, another reminder that we don’t really care about the money, at the end of the day. All we care about is how the characters react to it, in their unique, idiosyncratic ways. Just like dialogue, the way these characters behave in their unique roles is informed by so many different things. Lipsky is more interested in what informs these characters in behaving the way they do, and doing so in a way that is done with verisimilitude and realism, than he is with the ultimate ending. In fact, at the end, nothing has really changed, in terms of a status quo. This might chalk up to a cardinal sin of writing in any other kind of fiction. But for literary fiction, it makes sense. It adds up, because we know what the characters have been informed by thus far. It feels right. 

That’s why energy is so important for a writer, because energy is something that can be sensed by a reader. Lipsky’s energy towards this story is not concerned about the money, and as the writer, he is aware of this, which makes the reader aware of it, too, and the reader stops caring about the money. Being conscious of where to stress things in a story, finding out what is really important about the story as you write it, what really matters to the characters, I think, will reveal itself in the natural rhythm you want to find, and produce better, more realistic work. Short stories are a slice of a person’s life. Even novels are, to an extent. But short stories are so much about energy, about saying the right thing, showing the right thing, that you have to know a character intimately by just the shadow of the things they do, because there isn’t enough time to say it outright. It’s like drawing a very fast charcoal portrait of someone, where you can’t rely on things like shading and getting the nose just right. You just have to capture the essence of a person in a few quick, confident strokes, and you can’t make them feel real until you know a character well enough so as to be able to draw out their personalities, their lives, with just dialogue, with just a few paragraphs. 

All this so that ultimately, when one character turns to another and says something, there can be layers and conflict. That’s when a story comes alive. Not when the characters are speaking at each other, but when they are their own people. The writer is always in the act of showing the reader something, but the reader is their own person, and so the reader too, becomes the third and most unknowable variable, projecting their own energy in the story, choosing what parts to leave, what parts to keep. Resources: Three Thousand Dollars | The New Yorker