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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Lorrie Moore’s “Referential” was originally published in the May 28, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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This weeks story is an explicit gloss on a great short story by Vladimir Nabokov, “Symbols and Signs,” which was first published in the May 15, 1948 issue of The New Yorker (you can read the Nabokov story in its entirety on The New Yorker website here). Each story is very short and focused. A “couple” is going to the hospital to visit a schizophrenic and paranoid “son” who has, as it is called in Nabokov’s story, “referential mania,” a system of delusions under which the teen-age boy believes that a system of codes and symbols exists in everything around him, and he is subject of it all.
There are times when Moore’s story nearly quotes Nabokov’s story verbatim. For example, in each story the son has attempted suicide more than once. Nabokov’s says:
The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
Moore’s says:
The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded, but a fellow-patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. For a time, her son had wanted only a distracting pain, but eventually he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it.
I think what we have here are two gifted writers approaching the same subject from different perspectives. Nabokov’s is a bit more detached and, perhaps, cynical, as the fellow-patient isn’t trying to save the son but rather unintentionally disrupts the suicide out of envy. Moore’s, to me, is a bit more personal. I don’t know why the girl from group stopped his suicide, but, in the absence of explanation, it seems there was concern rather than envy, that the disruption was deliberate. Also, the idea of him wanting to tear a hole in himself rather than the world . . . Moore is using Nabokov as the foundation, but she’s taking it her own direction, and in this instance I think she’s improved upon it.
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In “Referential” the “couple” is not actually a couple. The mother is a widow, and for years now Pete has been a part of her life, playing a fatherly role to her son. A while back they aborted plans for Pete to move in with them as he couldn’t find the room he needed in order to fit into their lives. Pete has gone with her to visit her son, as he often does, but he is more withdrawn. We learned early that “‘To me, you always look so beautiful,’ Pete no longer said.” In each story, the focus is on the couple, on the injustice, on the depression each feels but cannot find a way to share, as much as they may desire comfort.
I loved this story and “Symbols and Signs” and admire Moore for taking the risk of basing her story so clearly on one by a master. “Referential” works well either on its own or as a complement to “Symbols and Signs,” and I highly recommend it. After what I felt were some disappointing weeks, The New Yorker fiction is certainly on a strong run right now. May it continue.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Maile Meloy’s “The Proxy Marriage” was originally published in the May 21, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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It isn’t a secret to anyone who has followed this blog in the past that I’m a huge fan of Maile Meloy’s short fiction. I loved her excellent debut collection, Half in Love, and cannot praise enough her even better follow-up, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (my review of Half in Love here; of Both Ways here). I was thrilled, then, to see that she was back with this week’s New Yorker story. I was doubly thrilled to see that it begins in Montana, where my favorites of her stories take place.
“The Proxy Marriage” focuses on the love that William, an awkward and shy boy, has for Bridey Taylor, a confident singer who wants to become an actress. The story begins when each is in high school, looking forward to a life beyond the small town they are growing up in. Though William loves Bridey desperately, he is under no illusion that his future will include her in any greater role than she already plays. He hasn’t the courage to ask her out. In fact, after another boy has asked Bridey out, told her that he has already accomplished two of the three goals he has for high school, and that he thinks she can help him with the third, which is to have a serious girlfriend, Bridey laughs to William, “He was so earnest.” Then, “William made a mental note never to be earnest with Bridey.”
Bridey’s father is an attorney. As it turns out, Montana is one of the few states to allow proxy marriages and the only state to allow double proxy marriages, where neither person has to be present. Due to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is quite a demand for these types of marriages, and Bridey’s father asks William and Bridey to act as the proxies. Of course, the prospect of even a proxy marriage to Bridey makes William unable to speak straight. He accepts and shows up to the ceremony dressed in a suit. Bridey hasn’t taken it nearly as seriously.
“You look nice,” she said. There was annoyance in her voice.
“Thank you,” he said, mortified.
Bridey looked like an ordinary girl in a sullen mood, not like the love of anyone’s life, and he felt a flicker of hope — not that she would ever come to love him, but that someday he might not be in thrall to her, he might be free. She was chewing gum.
We feel for William for whom this love is a torture, especially as we see him recognize that peace might come if he could only stop loving her. Even when they both go to school in different states, and even when they are both finished with school and seeking stability. In expert fashion, Meloy quickens the narrative pace, while showing us that through the passage of the years William’s feelings do not change.
Bridey laughed, and then it turned into something like a sob. “Maybe my mother was right,” she said. “I’m just not pretty enough.”
“Bridey,” he said. “You’ve been there eight months.”
But they had the same conversation after two years, then three. [. . . .] Sometimes he went weeks without thinking of Bridey, and sometimes she haunted him. Then came a year when there were no calls, no e-mails, no word.
The years continue to pass, and William cannot remove himself from his feelings for Bridey; it doesn’t help that any time both are visiting home and are free they participate in proxy marriages. William spends much of him time resenting his feelings, even suspecting that Auden’s line — “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me” — is just an example that proves “[t]he role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.”
This isn’t my favorite of Meloy’s stories, but I still loved being back in her world where the writing is succinct and direct. There’s no evasion here, as we learn the story of William’s love through the years. Highly recommended.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Peter Stamm’s “Sweet Dreams” (tr. from the German by Michael Hofmann) was originally published in the May 14, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’ve had my eye on Peter Stamm for a while now because one of the best translators working today, Michael Hofmann (son of Gert Hofmann, whose work I’ve loved — see here), has been steadily translating Stamm’s work over the years. It’s one of those things: If Hofmann finds it worth translating it must be worth reading. Still, I haven’t taken the dive. After reading this exceptional story, I must rectify that.
On the surface, this is a simple story. Two young people have left their homes and their parents to make a life with each other, starting out in a shabby apartment above a restaurant along the train tracks. Lara is twenty-one and Simon is twenty-four. They’ve been living together for four months. It’s a beautiful time. Though Lara finishes work well before Simon, she still waits for him so they can take the bus home together. That’s where this story begins, a bus ride home.
Stamm expresses this time of happiness incredibly well. This young couple is independent for the first time, and the strangest, most mundane things have a deep significance as they start their life together:
“Do we need milk?” “You know, the coffee’s almost gone.” “We’re out of garbage bags.” Sentences like that had an unexpected charm, and a full shopping cart was like an emblem of the fulfilled life that lay before them. When Simon wheeled it into the underground parking garage, with Lara at his side, she felt a deep pride and a curious satisfaction at being so grown up and independent.
But this portrait of a new life is rendered even better since Stamm allows doubt and insecurity to lurk just below the surface. It’s constant and yet not unbearable. In other words, unlike many stories of this type, Stamm is not leading the reader to assume this is the beginning of the end for this couple. They are happy and insecure, a bit anxious, just like most of us would be in this situation.
Even without any additional elements, I’d still think this was one of the best stories of the year. However, Stamm introduces something new. At the beginning of the story, on the bus ride, Lara notices a mysterious man in a black coat. He gets off the bus, and a few times in the rest of the story she swears she sees him. Finally, she flips on the television and there he is, giving an interview. It turns out he is a writer, and he is discussing how on the bus earlier that day he saw a young couple he would like to write about. Now, it’s not what we might expect: Stamm may or may not be that writer, but that’s not the point. The writer speaks about the time in his own life when he was first with a woman with whom he wanted to start a family, before something got in the way: ”But I’ve never felt so sure of anything as I did then, before I really knew the first thing about living.”
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Louise Erdrich’s “Nero” was originally published in the May 7, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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This is a strange little story I can’t quite make sense of — though I did enjoy it. The narrator is an older woman looking back to when she was seven and spent a few weeks with her grandparents while her own parents prepared for the birth of a sibling. The opening paragraph is great as it introduces the perhaps slightly paranoid world of her grandparents. First, we meet the guard dog, Nero, who at night is set out to pace in front of the cash register in the grandparents’ grocery store. Then we meet the grandfather who “slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other. This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.”
While the little girl is there, she witnesses the development of parallel love stories. Her uncle Jurgen is secretly courting the grocery store’s bookkeeper, Priscilla Gamrod. Priscilla has a “mean snub-nosed cocker spaniel named Mitts,” and every day Nero spends his time trying to figure out a way over the fence to find Mitts.
Both love affairs seem doomed. For one, Nero is hardly trained for love. While the smaller dogs are treated with affection, Nero is handled at a distance, the thinking being that the lack of human affection will make the dog more apt to going after any perceived threat. As for Jurgen and Priscilla, there’s Priscilla’s father standing in the way.
Priscilla was twenty-five, but she still lived with him. Her mother had died, leaving the two of them bound by a grief that eased with time but was replaced by Mr. Gamrod’s jealous dependence. This had got so bad that he insisted on fighting any man who tried to court her. He’d beaten them all.
When Mr. Gamrod finds out about the relationship, he and Jurgen schedule a time and place for the fight.
I won’t go into how the story moves from here, but one of the interesting aspects of the story is the relationship between Jurgen and Nero and between the narrator and Nero. Jurgen is a bit small, his muscles stringy and tight. No one thinks he’s going to win the fight, but he goes calmly. It’s the same kind of calm he has when we see him subduing animals, such as those he needs to wrestle before their slaughter and even Mitts, whom he flicks on the nose each time she bites his hand until “Jurgen is inevitable.” He doesn’t subdue Nero, though, for the reasons already laid out. Nero is high-strung and destructive, almost mad.
How does the little girl fit into all of this? I’m working this out, enjoyably. We see that she has a connection with Nero that no one else has. She sympathizes with him and even feels in him a kindred spirit: “For I had a confused sensation that we were both captive — in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out.” Later in the story, we learn of another connection the little girl has with a wild animal, that time with an escaped python who slithered over to the terrified girl, touched her cheek with its tongue, and then moved on.
So there are a several interlacing elements in this story, and I haven’t quite reconciled them all. In fact, I I believe my ultimate estimation of the story will be dependent on that reconciliation; at this time, I’d still recommend Erdrich’s last New Yorker story, “The Yeard of My Birth” (thoughts here) over this one, but “Nero” is an interesting read nonetheless. Happy to get any help from the comments.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Ian McEwan’s “Hand on the Shoulder” was originally published in the April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Another week, another excerpt from a popular, prize-winning author’s forthcoming novel. The New Yorker disappoints again. There is a world of gifted short fiction authors out there who get ignored each week this magazine decides to market a new novel instead of cultivate the art of the short story. The short story is an art form far removed from the excerpt, but The New Yorker (is it more and more?) seems to treat short stories as primers, apprentice pieces, a precursor to a novel proper. What a reductive perspective. The short story need not be so humble. Fortunately, there are dozens of quality literary magazines out there publishing a generation of short story writers; it’s just too bad that their readership is a tiny fraction of that of The New Yorker.
So, “Hand on the Shoulder,” an excerpt from McEwan’s fall novel Sweet Tooth. I haven’t been a fan of McEwan’s late work, but Sweet Tooth sounds interesting. Here, quickly, is the current write-up on Amazon:
The year is 1972. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight against Communism goes on, especially in England’s cultural circles.
Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has just completed her maths degree at Cambridge. Her brief affair with one of her professors leads to an interview with MI5. Serena lands an assignment in Operation Sweet Tooth: the funding of artists and writers with whom MI5′s political views align. Her “target” is Tom Healey, a promising young writer. First she falls in love with his stories, then she begins to fall in love with the man. When his novella wins a prestigious prize, the deceit becomes too much for Serena to bear. But before she can confess, her cover is blown, scandalizing the literary world and crippling MI5′s efforts. Who blew the whistle and why? Ian McEwan will keep you guessing in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal, intrigue, and love.
“Hand on the Shoulder” covers the affair that leads Serena into MI5. However, that she ends up at MI5, this being an excerpt rather than a fully fleshed short story, means next to nothing in the end, yet here’s how a story that ultimately is about an affair begins: “My name is Serena From (rhymes with “plume”), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service.” It’s 1972, and the world is changing. For one, her boyfriend Jeremy is the first openly gay person Serena knows, as the laws changed only five years earlier (they don’t remain boyfriend and girlfriend long). The Cold War is in a “moribund phase.” The very fact that a woman would be recruited into MI5 was a fairly unique event. But Serena doesn’t really care about much of this — not yet. She’s busy happily dealing with men from the old school.
One day while she’s walking with Jeremy, his history tutor Tony Canning comes toward them and begins asking questions. He was fifty-four and Serena twenty-one, and his questions and his authority were probably more directed at gaining her affections than pushing her into potential recruitment. It worked. That summer of 1972 becomes a golden age for Serena as she meets Canning at an out-of-the-way cottage each weekend for cooking, sex, and cultivation. Canning’s is a heavy hand, and he began directing Serena’s reading, forcing her to read histories and newspapers (well, only the Times) he chooses and give reports. She gets better, but she doesn’t think any of it is as important — distant as it felt — as the affair going on in front of her.
When I started reading the paper, the government’s fifth state of emergency was still months ahead of us. I believed what I read, but it seemed remote. Cambridge looked much the same, and so did the woods around the Cannings’ cottage. Despite my history lessons, I felt I had no stake in the nation’s fate. I owned one suitcase of clothes, fewer than fifty books, some childhood things in my bedroom home. I had a lover who adored me and cooked for me and never threatened to leave his wife. I had one obligation, a job interview — weeks away. I was free. So what was I doing, applying to help maintain the security of this ailing state, this sick man of Europe? Nothing, I was doing nothing. I didn’t know. A chance had come my way, and I was taking it. Tony wanted it, and I had little else going on. So why not?
I actually found “Hand on the Shoulder” interesting as it roamed around 1972 and the imminent change coming for both England and for Serena. But this is all a setup. In order to resolve this piece of “short fiction,” we need to leave behind the themes that make the story interesting and focus solely on the affair. And it’s not that the affair isn’t interesting in and of itself: Canning is one of those older men who becomes infantile during sex. ”He was one of those Englishmen wrenched from Mummy at age seven and driven into numbing boarding-school exile. They never acknowledge the damage, these poor fellows; they just live it.” But the story goes in many directions, suitable to a novel, and we readers are forced to either get excited or not about that novel coming in November.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Junot Díaz’s “Miss Lora” was originally published in the April 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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It’s been just over two years since Junot Díaz’s ”The Pura Principle” was published in The New Yorker (click here for my thoughts). In that story we spent time with Yunior and his brother Rafa, who was dying of cancer. When “Miss Lora” begins, it is 1986. Rafa has died, and Yunior, still suffering a “fulgurating” sadness, is about to realize he has more of his brother in him than he thought.
Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her — how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care.
Rafa, like his father, was content to sleep with any woman. The skinny woman above was a middle-aged school teacher whose toned muscles eliminated any fat from her body. Yunior doesn’t particularly find her attractive; he would rather sleep with his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Paloma, but she doesn’t want to make any mistakes (and realizes that sleeping with him would certainly be one).
Suffering from grief, hormones, and a daily dread of a nuclear holocaust . . . well, we know where this is going, in part because of the first lines of the story: one day Miss Lora touches him, and he can tell it’s different:
Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.
They sleep together, this school teacher and this sixteen-year-old boy. He’s insatiable for some time, and it’s only later, when he’s in college, that he feel comfortable enough to tell someone and that someone realizes the criminal nature of the events.
One thing I like about Díaz (and I admit I’m not a fan) is how even using ugly language — both in content and grammar — he’s able to have characters earn the reader’s sympathy, even if the character himself doesn’t realize anything is out of hand. Here’s a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey in the shadow of Manhattan, part of a culture where such things are relatively common, even looked on with pride. And Díaz can present this without making judgments, leaving it for his readers to determine how they feel.
That said, I’m still not much of a Díaz fan, as much as I admire what he’s capable of doing. I can’t quite get into the language which can, in a couple of lines, use a phrase like “hating on her” with a word like “fulgurating.” I just haven’t wrapped my mind around that, and I had a similar hangup with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (my review here), and I realize that it is my hangup. I liked this story quite a bit more than “The Pura Principle” (which I thought meandering), and I sense that in time it will grow in my estimation, but I’m still hoping for something a bit different in the weeks to come.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Colum McCann’s “Transatlantic” was originally published in the April 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Okay, I’ve come back to the top of my post after writing my thoughts on “Transatlantic” below. So I now preface those thoughts with a plea: warn me if it seems I’m just becoming a finicky reader who cannot be pleased, because my unusually negative reactions to last week’s story and to this week’s story have made me wonder. It doesn’t help that I’ve just finished Eric Chevillard’s fantastically fun Demolishing Nisard (review to come), a novella about an obsessed man who wants to do all he can to destroy a nineteenth-century critic — Nisard – whose conventional, narrow, life-sucking views on literature have tainted everything. Of course, in this obsession, the narrator himself becomes fairly life-sucking and bitter and worries about his own Nisardification. Please warn me if I, too, am becoming unbearable and unopen, like Nisard.
The inclusion of this “short fiction” in The New Yorker ticked a couple of the wrong boxes for me. First, according to the interview McCann did with Deborah Treisman (click here), this is an excerpt from a novel in progress. In “Transatlantic,” for me more than usual, it is obvious its inclusion had little to do with its qualities as an independent, cohesive piece of short fiction. It’s advanced advertising in the guise of short fiction, something award-winning authors can depend on from time to time from The New Yorker. I have nothing against these writers. This is good for their work, but I believe it is bad for readers. Yes, this advanced advertising sometimes works on me, I know. For example, I was very excited to read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad after reading the excerpt ”Ask Me If I Care” (click here for my thoughts on the short story and here for my thoughts on the novel); in fact, that excerpt is the only reason I rushed to read that book when it came out rather than wait. And by far the best part of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! was the excerpt published in The New Yorker, “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” (click here for my thoughts on the short story and here for my thoughts on the novel). I’m also not under the illusion that publishing excerpts of upcoming works is something new; William Maxwell, the esteemed fiction editor of The New Yorker for forty years who helped bring us the brilliant short work of John Updike, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Alice Munro, among others, even had an excerpt from his own novel published in the magazine (click here for my review of that novel — one of my absolute favorites).
The other wrong box: timeliness. It’s hard not to look at this piece — “Transatlantic” — and not think it was included in this week’s issue primarily (solely?) to mark the centenary of the tragic transatlantic journey of the Titanic. Indeed, the transatlantic journey recounted here took place in 1919, albeit by plane. Ahh, perhaps I’m just being silly. I’ll move on.
“Transatlantic” tells the relatively unknown story of the first non-stop transatlantic flight, accomplished by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. The two took off on June 14, 1919, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landed in Clifden, Ireland. I’m sad to say that that is just about all this story does. It’s not that a historical story is not worth writing or reading, but this one was dry, straightforward, and simplistic. I actually really enjoy similar short stories that take on the zeitgeist of scientific discovery and adventure, such as those by Andrea Barrett, but this one was dull. Here is how it begins:
The Vickers Vimy. A modified bomber. All wood and linen and wire. She’s wide and lumbering, but Jack Alcock still thinks her a nippy little thing. He pats her each time he climbs on board and slides into the cockpit beside Teddy Brown. One smooth motion of his body. Hand on the throttle, feet on the rudder bar, he can already feel himself aloft.
What he likes most of all is rising up over the clouds and then flying in sunlight. He can lean out over the edge and see the shadow play on the whiteness below, expanding and contracting on the surface of the clouds.
Brown, the navigator, is more reserved — it embarrasses him to make such a fuss. He sits forward in the cockpit, alert to whatever clues the machine might give. He knows how to intuit the shape of the wind, but he puts his faith in what he can actually touch: the compasses, the charts, the spirit level at his feet.
It could be that my misgivings with “Transatlantic” began with the first three sentences. I’m not a fan of serial sentence fragments to begin with, but I really couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind starting this piece out in such a stuttering manner. The remainder of the section simply introduces and contrasts Alcock and Brown, but they’ll be contrasted throughout the entire piece, so for me this entire section, introductory as it was, did not accomplish much other than to defer my entrance into the story.
Alright, I need to stop for a moment. My feelings for this piece are obvious now, but I don’t attribute its failures to McCann. I cannot understand why a story in this state would be published in a magazine known for high editorial standards. Or, rather, I suspect I understand it: advanced advertising and timeliness were given prominence over quality. My complaints against the story are really complaints against Treisman who, in my opinion, should have been a more vigilent editor. For example . . .
Its structure, a series of fairly short segments, though primarily chronological still managed to come off as unorganized. It was like McCann had written a bunch of segments and, rather than fit them together and allow them to build off one another, just placed them side by side. This is certainly how it felt when I got to the segment on the experiences of Alcock and Brown during World War I. Even this segment, short and lifeless, felt like it was there simply to provide a redundant contrast of these two men: Alcock is a bit wild, gets off on the thrill, while Brown is cautious and deliberate — we get it.
Moving away from the structure to the characterization, it’s even a bit more frustrating that these personalities are reduced to a contrast when — without the help of the story — we know that Alcock dies in a plane crash just months after this flight and Brown dies thirty years later by overdosing on Veronal. None of that is in this story. Such facts, of course, don’t need to be here, but shouldn’t the story suggest more depth to these two than can be incorporated by the binary of making one reckless and one cautious?
And so the story moves on through these segments. There’s preparation, a scan of the newly-developing publicity machine, and finally we get to the takeoff. My goodness, even the takeoff is boring, hampered as it is by those serial fragments, by poorly chosen words (“attends”), and by badly divided sentences (“There will, later, be a good moon.”):
A strong wind attends takeoff. Arriving from the west in uneven gusts. The fog has lifted and the long-range weather reports are good. No clouds. The initial wind velocity is worrying, but will probably calm to about twenty knots. There will, later, be a good moon. They climb aboard to scattered cheers, secure their safety belts, check the instruments yet again. Contact! The swing of the starting handle. Alcock opens the throttle and brings both engines to full power. He signals for the wooden chocks to be pulled clear from the wheels. The mechanic leans down, ducks under the wings, armpits the chocks, steps back, throws them away. He raises both arms in the air. A cough of smoke from the engines. The propellers whirl. The Vickers Vimy is pointed into the gale. A slight angle to the wind. Uphill. Go now, go. The incredible engine roar. The waft of warming oil. Speed and lift. [. . .]
In that mountain of detail where we watch the mechanic remove the chocks in slow motion, the best detail is one we’re about to get to: “They say nothing.” But then it reverts to the what we’ve had before — “Hang on, hang on.” To be fair, I did get excited when the journey was underway. They’ll be flying above icebergs, flying blindly through clouds, but the story never quite transcends above its simplistic trajectory, and we go on about like that until we land in Ireland –
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland.
That’s the end, and it’s also the only time in this story that we really hear about Ireland, so to understand why Ireland is set up with repetition and that ominous line about being both beautiful and savage one has to go to the interview to find out more about McCann’s book. As it stands, it’s like the author just threw it in there.
So, for me a very dry skim on a transatlantic voyage. What have I missed?
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Jonathan Lethem’s “The Porn Critic” was originally published in the April 9, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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How is it that after weeks of not even posting brief thoughts on a story from The New Yorker do I already have this one up this morning. Well, work has been terribly. So terrible, in fact, that I haven’t left the office yet. I had a bit of a lull in the middle of the night and decided to jump ahead of the curve here. If my thoughts are a little strange, well, I’m no Varamo.
Or maybe I am too tired, because it took some time for the meaning of the opening sentence to settle on me:
Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a punctuated cylinder operates a player piano.
Or wait, after writing it, I’m not so sure the meaning of it has settled. I’ll welcome anyone’s opinion because of my aforementioned state-of-mind, but I really got nothing here.
It’s the 1990s, and the “uncooperative world” was “slouching through a new propriety under Clinton.” The main character Kromer is first introduced as a clerk. It doesn’t take too long, though, even for a short story, for us to find out that he works at a porn shop called Sex Machines. In fact, he writes the Sex Machines’ newsletter. In his home he has towers of VHS cassettes filled with porn, and this gives guests the wrong impression.
And that’s about all I got out of the story, even after reading the equally opaque interview on The New Yorker website. I felt the story was uninteresting and any payoff at the end — which was certainly intended — nonexistent.
Also, maybe it’s just the series of all-nighters and I’m really missing things, but does this make sense to anyone: “The permanent mystery was how much you seemed to know before you knew anything at all. Or maybe the permanent mystery was how stupid you could be and yet how you clung to evidence that your stupidity knew things you didn’t.” I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but for me this was a bunch of false cleverness and profundity.
So I didn’t like the story, but from a “glass-half-full perspective” with the title of the post, the hits on my blog should go up quite a bit.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Victor Lodato’s “P.E.” was originally published in the April 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I don’t believe I’d ever heard of Victor Lodato before, but he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a poet, an author of thirteen plays (by my count), and his first novel was published by FSG in 2009, so he comes to the pages of The New Yorker quite accomplished. I hope to see more, as “P.E.” went down very smoothly indeed.
Lodato’s skills as a playwright are definitely on display as he captures the voice of his narrator perfectly and uses that voice not simply to show some pizzaz but also, importantly, to lend texture and shadow to an already interesting story. Our narrator is a large man in his late twenties, a man who became very large, suddenly, in his late twenties (“There are miracles in this world — I absolutely believe this. But I also believe that they’re not always progressive. Some miracles, sadly, are destructive.”).
When we first meet him, he is waiting at the Tucson airport for his father. The first few paragraphs really pulled me in:
The night my father came in from New Jersey, or wherever the hell he was living, his plane was two hours and twenty-seven minutes late. I hadn’t called to check on the flight, and so I ended up waiting at an airport coffee kiosk, absorbing greasy pumpkin loaf and chasing it down with a triple-shot white-chocolate latte. When I went up to the counter to order a second slice of bread, the girl didn’t bat an eye. But three pieces was clearly too much for her. At that point, she hesitated, like she wasn’t sure if she should give it to me. I mean, what did she think I was doing — making a bomb out of the stuff? To look at me is to know that, obviously, I was eating it. I’m a large man, as my G.P. likes to say. But people at airports are all about suspicion.
“Don’t call security,” I said. But smiling, you know, with good cheer.
“Why would I call security?” she said. Now she looked even more nervous.
“I don’t know. All the bread.” And then I sort of laughed.
We sense from the narrator’s first sentence that he may not be particularly fond of his father, but when his father arrives it’s obvious there has been a major rift. It can be chalked up to the weight gain, but his father doesn’t even recognize him and they don’t touch until a bit later when the narrator touches him “lightly” on the arm. His father is ragged, an ex-junky (probably ex-), and the narrator doesn’t even know if he lives in New Jersey or just had a flight from Newark. They stand around the luggage carousel, and a nice bag comes by. The narrator wishes the bag were his fathers, “[j]ust like in an alternate reality I’m thin and wear a wedding ring.” However, the narrator actually believes in these alternate realities — he’s a member of “Parallel Energetics.”
Using P.E. techniques, you learn how to initiate a dialogue with your other selves and then ultimately you can draw aspects of their energy matrix into your own life. Of course, you’d only bring in the energy matrix of an alternate self that is better (“more evolved”) than your current reality. Because some of your other selves are actually worse off than you, and that can be pretty depressing, especially if you meet like three of them in a row.
It’s easy to see why an alternate self with a worse life would be pretty depressing for our narrator — his life has never been and isn’t now going all that well. P.E. is the only thing that’s kept him from buying a gun and committing suicide. Our narrator genuinely believes in P.E., and it’s led to some interesting side-steps from reality:
I know now, for example, that the childhood I remember is not the only version that exists, and so this allows me to be more accepting and forgiving or whatever. Salvatore, my mentor, always says, “Choose your past, choose your path.” [. . .] He means be careful how you remember stuff, because it influences the shape of your future. So I’m trying to be open-minded about what I remember.
There are many great works that examine memory and its faults, but I find it interesting here to find Lodato examining a character accepting that his memory is only one version — there are better versions out there, so why not take those? As the narrative progresses, we develop a distinct sense of our narrator’s tenuous hold on reality — he even has a hard time controlling the story:
I need to stop here.
This isn’t right. This is, wow, this is practically backwards.
This is not about food, and the fact that it keeps going there makes me want to vomit. Literally. This story isn’t really even about my father. The thing is, though, you put him in something like this and he just takes over. He’s like a narrative virus.
There’s one moment, though, when we see precisely why our narrator accepts that he has alternate selves and why he tries to flee his memories (which, on this occasion, despite the playful revision of memory, is clear and tender):
He loved women, all makes, all models. Let’s just say, my mother became depressed. I didn’t know that word then. Then I would have just said she was quiet. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. I would have just done what I always did: tug at her hand, like at the string of a talking doll that had ceased to function.
It’s a sad story and, as the story continues to develop the threads above, quite virtuosic in its conclusion.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Antonya Nelson’s “Chapter Two” was originally published in the March 26, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Antonya Nelson’s “Soldier Joy” was one of the first New Yorker stories I posted about on this blog; it was published on January 19, 2009 (my brief thoughts here). I started my brief thoughts on “Soldier Joy” by saying, “I both liked and didn’t like this story.” Well, let’s just say I feel the same way about “Chapter Two.”
Hil is a member of A.A. who celebrates fictional milestones. Sure, she’ll celebrate a year being sober soon, but after the meetings, she usually goes out with another member for a beer (he doesn’t drink, but he checks his watch to see when he can take his next Xanax).
Recently, at the meetings, rather than talk about herself too much, Hil tells the group stories about her eccentric neighbor, Bergeron Love, a fifty-something-year-old woman who is “some composite of Miss Havisham, Norma Desmond, and Scarlett O’Hara.” So, yes, an eccentric with a noble (at least subjectively) past, refusing to see yet mourning the fall of such a legacy. Just the other night, Berge showed up at Hil’s house drunk, naked, and a bit upset because what does one have to do to get arrested on this street?
“Chapter Two” then introduces a fairly hefty load of side characters: there’s Janine, Hil’s overweight roommate; Jeremy, Hil’s fifteen-year-old son who prefers to be alone in his room; Allistair, Berge’s sensitive son who has grown up and moved away; and Boyd, Berge’s passive boyfriend.
But what is ”Chapter Two” about? The title brings to mind a narrative. Hil herself is telling her A.A. group a story, which, we learn later, is basically “Chapter One.” Hil doesn’t want to tell her group Chapter Two of that story because then no one could laugh at Berge’s personality.
But there’re other narratives here that haven’t played out fully, nor will we get their Chapter Two here. First, Hil, who prefers to tell other people’s stories rather than her own — “It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective” — what will happen to her? Her husband has left her (we don’t know why). Jeremy is kind to her and possibly will remain loyal to her, but, like Allistair, he will probably be moving out someday soon.
Which brings me to what I liked most about the story: trying to figure out Chapter Two for Jeremy and Allistair. Neither is fully present in this story (Allistair never physically shows up), but it’s obvious much of what Hil and Berge go through will affect them in the long run. It’s their Chapter Two that’s interesting to contemplate.
So that’s what I liked about this story, but I didn’t actually enjoy reading it. Liking the story at all came only upon reflection, which is one of the good things about blogging. Perhaps there’s hope for me and Antonya Nelson yet.
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