Bullet in the Brain

There’s a risk in being a critic: the risk of becoming blasé. Most people read a book or go to the movies to be entertained. Critics, though, read book after book or watch film after film, not because they want to, but because their readership demands their guidance. Reviewers may tire of the mediocre works they must absorb. Often, they witness the same plot repeatedly until they want to scream. In “Bullet in the Brain,” one such critic already feels exhausted by his life and the endless parade of boring books he must read and condemn. Spiritually dead, his worldview charred by embers of perpetual anger, he meets his unintentional executioner with crazed laughter.

Anders, his own life marinated in fiction, sees everything around him as poorly designed make-believe. His frustration with the ever-imperfect world spills over at the very moment his life is in peril. The story ponders how the arrogance of criticism might degrade a critic’s personality to the point of nervous collapse. To heighten tension, Wolff speculates how such a breakdown would unfold during a bank robbery. Anders’s running commentary during the bank robbery bespeaks a man who, saturated with works of fiction in his career, no longer can shut off his critical mind, to the point where he puts his own life in danger. Unable to silence the relentless professional cynic in his head during the robbery, Anders comments loudly on the crooks’ spoken demands as if they were lines of trite dialog from a mediocre film. Despite the extreme danger of his position, he can’t help himself; he laughs aloud at the absurdity of it.

When the head robber calls Anders “Bright boy,” Anders replies that this moniker comes from a famous short story by Hemingway called The Killers. That story, in which two hired assassins invade a restaurant in search of their victim, has been adapted multiple times into film; the robber might have watched one of them and remembered the sassy nickname, thinking it would put Anders in his place. Instead, Anders hears a clichéd movie line and ridicules it. Wolff feels a strong connection to Hemingway, whose spare, direct, powerful prose influenced many Americans writers to write whittled-down, taut fiction, especially in hard-boiled stories about crime and life on the streets.

The bullet plowing through a critic’s brain reveals that it is not merely his work that has warped Anders’s perspective. He also suffers from a long string of social failures with people close to him—a lover, his wife, his child—who disappoint him by failing to live up to his high expectations. He’s impossible to please; instead of improving his life, these high standards render it barren.

The bullet also miraculously transforms the protagonist’s mind from angry disapproval to acceptance and ecstasy. The angry protagonist was once a young boy who played baseball during the summer; it’s this memory that comes to him at the moment of his death. The scene is filled with an unexpected kind of perfection: The boys’ argument about who is the greatest ballplayer of the age resonates with the simplicity of youth; the idiomatic declaration that shortstop is “the best position they is” somehow punches through Anders’s lifetime of disappointment to generate an extended moment of ecstasy. This casual, artless memory means more to him than anything from his unsatisfying adulthood. It embodies the beauty he sought as a critic but never found. This leads to the final conjecture: Under the stress of trauma, perhaps even the cruelest critic might experience an epiphany, a moment of clarity that changes his attitude.

The motif of a frozen moment in time recurs often in literature. The tale of a memory that immediately precedes death echoes a renowned short story by Ambrose Bierce, "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a captured US Civil War Confederate soldier about to be hanged performs a daring and miraculous escape, only to feel a choking sensation when he embraces his wife. He is still being executed: The entire escape was a fantasy that took place in his mind during the final second of his life. An endless moment is the theme of John Keats’s poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. Keats wonders at idyllic moments captured on the surface of an ancient artifact: Villagers gather for a rite; two lovers lean together under a tree, preparing eternally to kiss; a piper plays sweet melodies forever unheard.

The bullet hurls Anders back in time to the moment when he first knew what he loved—the way language, with simple elegance, can evoke a sense of wonder. Anders’s epiphany, though, seems tinged with sadness: To free him from the prison of his bitterness and return him to the founding inspiration of his life, the bullet must kill him.

Still, the story’s resolution is a kind of redemption-in-extremis, a moment of forgiveness for all of Anders’s sins of arrogance. This original moment of inspiration was the satisfaction that Anders sought after ever since. From the bank robber’s perspective, Anders flies back from the shot, dead when he hits the floor. Perhaps, though, in his own altered time frame, Anders glories forever in a beatific, spiritual vision: “They is!”