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I want to talk a little about the use of detail in Stuart Dybek's "Pet Milk". I teach this story in my intro to fiction class, because it's exemplary of how strong and carefully chosen detail not only creates the fabric of a world, but subtly pushes story along
There's a ton to focus on here, but something that struck me recently is the use of color in the first three long paragraphs. The narrator is drinking coffee with condensed milk, which reminds him of his grandmother and her radio, which segues into a remembrance of his first love
This kind of nested memory/story is a fairly standard Dybek move, one he often uses to great effect, for instance in "Paper Lanterns." But the way the details support this slippage into the past is fascinating
We begin with whiteness, snow and milk, the purity of present experience. But the Pet Milk is this off-white ivory color, and this announces the first slide into memory, taking us to the grandmother's apartment,
where she drinks off-white Pet Milk. Her radio, we're told, is yellowed. Further, on the top where the dials are, the plastic has turned amber. As the memory hardens into the stuff of story, the color grades darker and more opaque
Finally, in the third paragraph, fully in the main story about his first love and their favorite restaurant, we're given the King Alphonse—a drink made by swirling creme de cacao with cream. This past moment is a swirl of rich darkness
The color details subliminally lead the reader into this past, both earthily alive and unstable, like the swirling of the after-dinner drink. The narrator, in the past, looks into the swirl of this drink the same way he now looks into the snow/coffee while remembering that time
The story proceeds from there (with a lot of dark details, for instance, the waiters' black tuxes, etc). The color slide does a lot of work describing the way a memory starts as something fleeting but can become concretized, real, as we remember and emotions return
The larger point, I think, is the amount of care Dybek brings to this. The details are tactical—they don't just describe, they move the reader along. They are not purely or even primarily ornamental. In what is a nearly plotless story, they to some extent provide narrative motion
It's worth saying, also, that memory doesn't *really* work this way! Details here are not deployed in the service or realism per se, but rather in the service of creating a manufactured and streamlined representation of emotional memory
