ABSTRACT
That paragraph is the last of three in a Jayne Anne Phillips story called “What It Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive”; the title is a play on a line from Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story,” the tune drifting through Sue’s window. I sometimes wonder how good a song has to be to make its way into fiction like that-into lives like that. I wonder what the song does there. This isn’t the old “soundtrack of our lives” routine: you know, when Sue gets older and “Every Picture Tells a Story” comes on the radio as an oldie she’ll remember working at the amusement park. Something is happening in Phillips’s story, to her character and to the song. It isn’t clear what; maybe the contact itself is all that can be dramatized. Beneath the drama, though, there’s an ugly, blank feeling, as if, lying on her bed in the heat, a girl with a dead-end job has found herself humilitated by Rod Stewart’s wild-oats ramble from Paris to Bangkok-or as if the facts of her life have humiliated the romanticism of the song. Or has the girl ignored the tale Stewart tells and stolen a moment from it, a moment that comforts because it tells her she’s not the only one who can’t change her life? Or is the empathy inside out-Fuck you, Rod Stewart, who gives a shit how your hair looks? Maybe none of that matters here; maybe the point is simply that Stewart was right. If a song is good enough, one story leads to another, which is what else there is after birth, copulation, and death.
