Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Night of the Satellite” was originally published in the April 15, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.
Trevor
It’s strange: I’m always interested while reading a T.C. Boyle story but uninterested when I finished it. He’s a fine writer and storyteller, but for me those don’t add up to anything that resonates. I know many, including Betsy (be sure to check out her positive take), really enjoy his work and find much more to appreciate than I do.
When I started “The Night of the Satellite,” I was immediately reminded of Boyle’s last story to appear in The New Yorker, “Birnam Wood” (thoughts here). In each we have a young couple going through school, struggling with their relationship and with the strains of having no money and no prospects. In fact, I wondered if the characters from this story would run into the characters from “Birnam Wood,” but the stories are set in different times, this one being contemporary. Still, the stories feel remarkably similar in theme and, to some extent, ending.
This story begins after a late-night fight between the narrator and Mallory. He thinks it wasn’t about anything important, just the general mood led to escalation. We then take a step back as he recounts the day before the fight. He woke up late (and might have slept through to the afternoon) because he and Mallory had been out drinking the night before. Despite the after-effects of the night, he woke up in a good mood, ready for the day. They’re on a three-week summer break from grad school in the Midwest, mainly just “marking time.”
We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense — jobs were a myth, a rumor — so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do.
Their plan was to spend the evening with Chris and Anneliese, their friends who were renting a place from a farmer. It’s a hot, humid afternoon when they’re driving to the house and see a young girl running to their car, crying and upset. A young man, who spends time at the gym, is by his Toyota, looking aggressive. Mallory demands the narrator stop the car. It’s just a lovers’ quarrel, he says. But Mallory won’t hear it.
Soon they’re on their way to their friends’ again, but Mallory is furious. They didn’t do anything to help (the narrator had even locked the doors so the young girl could not get in and Mallory could not get out). Safely with Chris and Anneliese, he doesn’t think Mallory’s bitterness is called for.
Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted instinctively, that was all. The problem was so had she.
After these thoughts about instinct, a new puppy who hadn’t learned the rules starts barking at the farmer’s sheep, causing the older dogs, who did know better, to start attacking the sheep, instinctively. The narrator and Chris join in the fight.
I think it was here that I started becoming wary of the story, thinking this was too clear a connection: instinct, animal instinct, aggression. Well, we then move on to an even more overt metaphor.
After more drinks at a club, the narrator and Mallory find themselves fighting in a dark field, reminiscent of one of my favorite, terrible scenes in literature: the terrible road-side fight between Frank and April Wheeler after the lousy and unimportant performance of The Petrified Forest in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.
Boyle moves away from that quickly when the narrator is struck by a piece of mesh from a falling, decommissioned satellite. Suddenly, falling or crashing down is everywhere. We even watch as ice-cream falls from an ice-cream cone, “just like anything else subject to the laws of gravity.”
Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it will burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess.
Again, I am interested in where Boyle goes during the story. I like the exploration of the underlying ideas, but I don’t particularly care for the overt statements. And I’m not sure that I’d enjoy the stories more if I got over that. Something, for me, just doesn’t add up.
Betsy
A new story by T. C. Boyle — always, for me, a cause for celebration. I just like his tough, tough look at what we are all about. It’s my cup of tea. In “Night of the Satellite,” a graduate student for whom a real job is “a myth, a rumor,” gets himself completely riled up, like the rest of us, about all the wrong things.
In fact, I remember those times, when every graduate department in the country had bulked itself up, heedless of any moral responsibility to stop producing Ph.D.’s who would never find a job. I remember it well; we had a year when there was one opening in the country for which my husband could apply. This, after 7 years and learning Japanese to boot. I also remember the shock when we watched a Law and Order that was the story of Ph.D. who had ended up driving a taxi-cab.
Being a stalled graduate student is actually the total surround of this story. How do you negotiate the betrayals that that situation produces? How do you deal with ordinary life when things are really tough?
Of course, T.C. Boyle relays all this in four words: a real job for this guy was just “a myth, a rumor.” I like it, too, that he uses the word “atavistic” when describing the way the guy’s dog goes after some sheep. I don’t mind having a point of view telegraphed to me when it’s T. C. Boyle doing the telegraphing.
The course of the story, however, is not about a career. It’s about relationships, and about how the main character almost wrecks a friendship and may have certainly wrecked his relationship with a girlfriend — unless he comes to his senses. It’s the coming to your senses part that the reader recognizes.
“Night of the Satellite” wraps several confrontations one into another, all of them happening so fast that the main character cannot sort out his motivations, his options or his responsibilities. It is this speed that makes the story so powerful, but the way the situations interlock heightens the power.
First, there is setting situation, marked by Midwestern heat, of being in the middle of a graduate career that may lead nowhere. Then there are several happenstances — running into a another couple who are fighting, having the dog get into a dogfight, running into that couple again — and all the while being too distracted to notice what is happening in your own relationship.
This is a great story about a terrible argument this couple will revisit for the rest of their lives. Everything about the story is right, right, right. I am a complete fan, I admit, of T. C. Boyle. His subject — the way our adrenaline overcomes our common sense — makes sense to me. And his stories just burn up in the reader’s atmosphere, fast, fast, fast.
I read the Treisman interview after I read the story, the way to go with those interviews, I think. I like the way Boyle remarks to Treisman that he’d “like to leave these questions to the reader.”
This reader completely buys the idea that we are first of all animals, for better, for worse, but animals yearning for something more, for better, for worse. I am really looking forward to the new story collection Boyle has coming out: T. C. Boyle Stories II.
This is a test. I understand someone is having trouble leaving a comment here, so I wanted to check this link.
I breezed through this story, and found it entertaining, although it didn’t completely leave me feeling ‘fulfilled’. I liked the two central characters, and felt they were described well, with the writing also developing the scenery around them beautifully.
However, it’s always a little disappointing to have a writer spell things out to a reader. I always feel slightly insulted to have something presented so obviously to me, I much prefer a subtler approach. In addition, I felt that TC Boyle forces his viewpoint upon the reader, not allowing any space for us to come up with our own conclusions. We are told what to think, and why to think it, and life is never that black and white.
Hi Manel – I see your point. But I like my reading a little varied. A woman cannot live on philosophy alone. If I am going to survive my Sebold, my Gordimer, my Coetzee, I welcome a little Boyle on the side.
But subtle is good, too. What do you recommend?
The kicker in the story is the seeming non-recognitions or, rather, the instinctive dislike of mirror images of the self. The narrator and the girl in the Toyota are of a type: those that get hit and look on it as the way things are, just random events. While the bullying Mallory and the muscleman hit others and feel justified. What comedy: masters and slaves forever.
William’s comment is brilliant.
What do we make of the satellite bits, how they are meaningful for the narrator, and the fact that Mallory tosses them? And what is their purpose in the story?
I’m generally a big fan of Boyle’s because of how his fiction is simultaneously entertaining and thoughtful. There is always that unpretentious narrative voice behind which lurks so many insights. I enjoyed this one almost all the way through till I was pulled up short by the disappointing ending. Paul is standing on line for the ATM. He either will or won’t return to Mallory, and his decision will be made either sooner or later. The story, for all its great action and pacing and tension, finally seems to lead to nothing more than Paul’s observation that “you can never tell what’s going to come down next.” In the interview, Boyle calls this Paul’s “self-realization,” but it strikes me as an underwhelming one. For all the expert storytelling Boyle shows off here, we don’t end up with a story worth telling. Still, like Betsy, I’ll look forward to T.C. Boyle Stories II. I know it will be filled with stories way better than this one.
I found it interesting that we don’t really know what the problem between this couple is. They fight over the situation with the other couple whose argument he, sanely in my opinion, wishes to avoid. They fight about the satellite. But, while these fights are completely believable and realistically described, as if their aftermath and lingering hostility and resentment, why would any two relatively happy people fight ABOUT these things unless there was some underlying problem? But what is the underlying problem? Why are these two so prickly? Why would he consider driving off and leaving so abruptly. I find this ambiguity interesting.
Hi Ken – I like the way you referred to the story as “interesting” rather than a problem with the story itself. Why do the two argue, and why the hostility you wonder? And yet you find the ambiguity interesting. So does an author need to spell out everything? I find in most of Mr. Boyle’s stories, he asks the reader to make up his/her own mind. How much information is necessary, how much should a writer feed the reader, or should the author give subtle hints? I still find your take on this interesting and one that made me think.