Bob Canter

Grafton’s “The Parker Shotgun” riffs on the American hardboiled detective tradition. For example, her narrating protagonist uses similes snidely or even cynically, much like the slouching, chain-smoking, bourbon-mulling, world-wearied, shadow-surrounded, fedora-wearing gumshoe of the classic 1930s-1950s narratives and movies. These similes almost dismissively distance the protagonist’s own very guarded feelings from the characters and situations she’s observing. However, this trope also creates a useful dynamic. The thing or person pushed away by a snide simile might turn out to be the thing or person that the narrator actually sympathizes with the most. The shove is the hug. We can see one example of this pattern in which passage below from “The Parker Shotgun”? Group of answer choices “His breast pocket was torn and flapping sideways, like a street mutt’s almost-stolen ear.” Later, when we see that the protagonist typically evaluates scroungers, opportunists, and liars as “mutts,” this simile’s meaning becomes clear—and slyly sympathetic. “Her mouth was starting to tremble again, and a tear splashed onto her skirt as though my ceiling had a leak.” Here, the protagonist portrays the recently-widowed Lisa Osterling as emotionally insincere or insignificant, or both. Yet it’s for Lisa that the protagonist not only pursues the case, but also commits a significant crime. “The way that the Malibu cliffs kept crumbling into the sea that summer, it was as though nature itself were as sick of California as most Californians are. No wonder I was making so little progress. A wobbling planet works against forward steps." Here, the protagonist shifts away from Lisa’s sudden weeping, looking at the landscape for distraction. But we later see that cliffs helplessly crumbled into the sea is how the protagonist very sympathetically metaphorizes Lisa’s grief. “Her eyes widened, and then waxed over. She was clearly disappointed to find that I wasn’t a man. ‘Well,’ I told her, ‘I can abandon my own children and scratch myself in odd places, if that will give me the credentials you want.’” Here, the protagonist portrays the recently-widowed Lisa Osterling as deserving scorn. Yet it’s for Lisa that the protagonist not only pursues the case, but also commits a significant crime. “His breast pocket was torn and flapping open, like a heart accidentally confessing.” This seems either reverent or dismissive. Only when we learn the priest’s full role—and real identity—can we gauge what accidentally confessing means to this protagonist and story. “How can you get clues from someone clueless enough to wear a tawny toupee? It looked like he’d stuck his head in a cotton candy machine on its root-beer-flavor run.” This seems quite mocking—until we learn that the protagonist’s own mother ran a cotton candy booth at her local county fair, and that root beer was the protagonist’s favorite flavor as a child.