76 pages • 2 hours read
Tim WintonThe Turning
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Beta“Damaged Goods” and “Small Mercies”
“Damaged Goods” Summary
Vic Lang’s wife is the narrator of this story, and she has returned to Angelus alone to try to understand him better. Both of his parents have recently died, and the story implies that things are strained between Vic and his wife. When Vic was younger, he was obsessed with a girl with a birthmark (Strawberry Alison), and now his wife is trying to understand the nature of his obsession after she finds him “weeping over an old photograph and poem” (57). Vic loved Alison from the first time he saw her, even though he found her birthmark frightening. The romance was entirely one-sided, and Vic “loved Alison because of the mark, not just despite it” (58). Vic’s wife knows that he was previously infatuated with Melanie from “Abbreviation,” who similarly was disfigured.
Vic’s childhood was difficult: his father Bob was a police officer who started drinking because of his job, and his sister died of meningitis as an infant when Vic was fifteen. A year later, his father disappeared. When Vic’s wife confronts him about never mentioning a sister, he says he had forgotten about her. All of this has made Vic into someone who compensates through charity and kindness, which causes his wife to wonder “if your husband’s love could be another act of kindness, whether there’s something about you he feels you need to be compensated for” (60).
Vic watched Alison from a distance throughout school. In her final year, she published a poem about two girls in flames. When Vic sees her, he tells her that he loved the poem, and then he went on to confess his love, which caused her to burst into tears and run from him. Alison became a lesbian at university, which young Vic has trouble believing. The poem, he realized, was about her sexuality. At an end-of-year bonfire, Vic was left alone with Alison’s girlfriend. When Alison approached them, he told her he still loves her poem, to which she says, “And I still love you for loving it” (64). Vic left the party early, and only heard later that Alison and her girlfriend died in a drunken car crash that night.
Vic’s wife visited Alison’s gravesite, and she has seen the photograph and poem, both of which “[…] seem unremarkable except for the fact that they entranced the boy who became [her] husband” (65). The story ends with her sitting in a motel room in Angelus “like a woman waiting for a man to show up” (65).
“Small Mercies” Summary
Peter Dyson comes home to find his wife has committed suicide. He tries to hold it together and keep a sense of normalcy for his son, Ricky, but finds himself suddenly disgusted with the town, and particularly the smell of sheep from the docks, so he moves back into his deceased mother’s house in Angelus.
Peter hopes to keep a low profile in his old hometown, but quickly runs into Marjorie Keenan. Peter dated Marjorie’s daughter, Fay, who is now a recovering addict with a daughter of her own who lives with Marjorie and her husband Don. Marjorie invites Peter and his son over for dinner, and they all catch up; Don had been Peter’s football coach, and Peter was close with the family. Don is bitter about Fay’s behavior, as she has stolen from them and abandoned her child, and the Keenans want Peter to talk with her.
Peter has no interest in seeing Fay; they had an abortion in high school, which was kept secret from Fay’s Catholic parents, and Fay subsequently failed her exams. But soon after Peter visits the Keeners, Fay is on his porch, asking if they could be friends. Peter hesitates, and she leaves. When he sees her again the next day they speak, and she says, “Looks like I’m still trouble […] for you at least,” which causes Peter to think, “How could you trust her? If it wasn’t the drugs it was the old thrill of the power she wielded. He just wasn’t strong or confident enough to battle it right now” (88). Seeing Fay again affects Peter, and he sinks into despair, falling asleep in his living room.
He is awakened by Fay knocking at his door with his son and her daughter. Peter slept through picking up his son from school, and Fay walked them all home in the rain. Fay makes a point of saying she won’t tell her parents about this, as they always thought he was a good influence, and being a bad parent would tarnish his reputation.
Fay comes over again late on Sunday night. She has skipped her Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and she says that Peter is the only one she can turn to. It’s clear she wants sex, but Peter doesn’t want that, and the conversation between them gets heated: Fay says she needs a friend, and Peter says he is, but he knows it’s a lie.
Fay says of her parents, “Nothing I’ve done in these past six months to put my life right could impress them the way you did by simply arriving […]” (97). Then she threatens to tell them about the abortion, knowing it would devastate them. Peter knows this will ruin the progress she’s made with them, and he implores her not to, for her own sake. The story ends ambiguously, with Fay leaving, saying “Well, […] I s’pose we’ll see, won’t we?’” (97).
“Damaged Goods” and “Small Mercies” Analysis
Vic is fascinated with Strawberry Alison, who he sees as damaged, and Peter spends a long time in a relationship with Fay indulging in destructive tendencies; for both of these characters, their unhealthy high school relationships have consequences for their adult lives. Vic’s wife feels she has lost her husband to his old obsessions and Peter’s wife commits suicide, and he suspects that he is partially to blame because “he loved the safety of her above all else. Maybe she knew it all along” (89).
The framing of “Damaged Goods” is crucial to understanding the story: Gail Lang, the narrator, is the one left picking up the pieces of Vic’s history when he falls back into old obsessions after his parents’ deaths. The trauma that Vic went through in losing both of his parents is having a profound effect on him, but so too are the obsessions of his youth. Here, Strawberry Alison works as a counter to Gail, who is not outwardly “damaged” but worries that there’s some lesson about herself in this story.
Vic’s obsession with Strawberry Alison is entirely one-sided; Alison is a lesbian, and the poem that she writes about “two girls in flames” is misinterpreted by everyone, including Vic, because they continue to define her by her deformity. Alison is not a fully-realized person to Vic; she’s a symbol, or an object of desire, and his failure to realize this is in line with his other failures of empathy in stories like “Abbreviation” or “Defender.” Alison dies tragically (and prophetically), and Vic feels a sense of ownership over that tragedy, even though he never had any impact on her life. This is deeply troubling to Gail, and when it is later revealed in “Defender” that she has an affair during this time, it is clear that her actions are linked to the thoughts she’s having about her husband and his relationship with Alison. Gail is starting to realize that for Vic, the idea of a person may be more important than the person themselves.
For Peter Dyson of “Small Mercies,” the opposite is true: his self-concept is what he most desperately clings to, and the messiness of his history with Fay threatens to upend it. Fay’s parents saw him as a good boyfriend and a stabilizing force in her life, and attribute her decline to lacking the kind of good influence that he brought to her. In some way he believes this, too. The Keenan family serves as an anchor for him after his wife’s suicide: “After all, he’d been closer to them at one stage than he was to his own mother” (78).
The tension between Fay and Peter is rooted in a mutual lack of empathy: Peter is grieving and wants nothing to do with Fay, and Fay needs someone to cling to and sees Peter as a way to both not be lonely and to rebuild trust with her parents. Neither is in a position to help the other, and the story ends with the two of them at that impasse, but it’s important to note that they both see this clearly: Peter knows that he didn’t really “ruin her,” like she claims, and Fay says, “It’s blackmail, I know” when she speaks of telling her parents about the abortion they had (99). Regardless, they’re unable to reconcile their needs.
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