"Hinges" by Graham Swift: When Words Have a Role to Play

 Graham Swift, interviewed about his story "Hinges" in the Nov.14, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker, says it's a story about words and indeed it is.

The tale leads up to the funeral of a father, to be "done" or perhaps "conducted" by a minister unknown to the family before surviving members awkwardly consult with him about the Order of Service and who will say what -- not that anyone really knows what they might say at that point. This makes what is almost always a ritualistic event -- certain words, certain phrases, safe, expected -- even more stilted than might otherwise be the case.

Moreover, it doesn't appear much actually can be said about the deceased father. He spent his working life in a blanket factory in the north of England and apparently much of his subsequent years, with his wife, in a retirement community located in the southern part of the country. Stock homilies -- "he was a family man" -- are about it.

From start to finish, certain words and phrases associated with death and funerals immediately come to the minds of family members and mainly, in this case, to the deceased man's daughter since the story is told from her point of view. There are roles to be played and lines associated with those roles to be spoken.

That's not quite all there is to it, of course. The daughter both wonders why she and others are stuck with some words and she recalls the mother of a childhood friend who wouldn't play the game. This stirs up other memories -- her first crush, on an older man who it appears her mother -- and other women -- might have found sexually attractive as well. Just a hint or perhaps a figment of imagination. But the man, a carpenter who comes to fix a door ("hinges")  also seems to have been a friend of the father, and that for some reason surprises the then-much-younger daughter.  

"I don't think I'm alone as a writer in seeing sex and death as a sort of inseparable combo," Swift says in the interview. Sex and death, heath and humor, humor and sex -- a wheel of narrative in Swift's view.

Swift is English and there is a distinctly English sense of understatement to the story. Most American writers in this day and age would exploit the potentially transgressive aspects of the tale to a far greater extent than does Swift. He simply intimates there may be a skeleton of one sort or another in a family closet and leaves it at that. Which families don't have something in their background that perhaps comes to mind because it can't be mentioned at a funeral as opposed to because it can?

The bottom line: this is a story with which a lot of readers can probably identify, English or not,