An interesting part of going through old issues of The New Yorker is seeing how the stories dealt with the then-current events. The last Clock at the Biltmore – Christopher Isherwood’s ”I Am Waiting” – featured the anxiety of 1939 when World War II was about to begin; there the character goes five years into the future and looks for answers about the state of the world in 1944.
Irwin Shaw’s ”Preach on the Dusty Roads” was published on August 22, 1942, less than a year after the United States entered World War II. I didn’t know it when I started reading the story, but its primary concern is World War II. In fact, more than “I Am Waiting,” which was kind of a satire, “Preach on the Dusty Roads” threatens to be a sentimental call to action. Another interesting part of going through old issues of The New Yorker? Looking at the cover art through the century. You pretty much always know what part of the century you’re in:
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Irwin Shaw published nearly three dozen stories in The New Yorker between 1937 and 1955. I selected one from roughly the middle, though I was tempted by “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It’s easy to see why he was so often published. “Preach on the Dusty Roads” begins beautifully. I have marked almost the entire section as material I should find a way to quote here. Of course, I won’t do that, but it is hard to pick out what to pull. Well, here’s the first paragraph:
Nelson Weaver sat at his desk and wrote, “Labor . . . Bridgeport plant . . . 1,435,639.77.” Then he put his sharply pointed, hard pencil down among the nine other sharply pointed, hard pencils arrayed in severe line on the right side of the shining desk, below the silver-framed photograph of his dead wife.
We already have a good idea about Nelson Weaver’s personality, and Shaw helps us feel the tedium and melancholy with a few well chosen details placed side by side in a long sentence. Nelson is an accountant in some Manhattan firm. He takes some time out of his work to look out his window. Below him are a few buildings that sit between him and the Hudson River. When I read the story, I was sitting in my own Manhattan office, which overlooks the Hudson. I was, in fact, taking a break from reading accounting reports (thankfully, I don’t prepare them). I wonder who could describe my life and demeanor in such a succinct sentence. And, after reading this next passage, I wondered how a masterful sentence about my own work would sound; the rhythm here is superb, the tedious job changed into an art:
The tax sheets for Marshall & Co., Valves and Turbines, were nearly done. He had sat at this desk for thirty-five days, working slowly and carefully, from time to time deliberately putting down a number on a page, like Cézanne with his six strokes a day on a water color, until the huge, elaborate structure of Marshall & Co.’s finances, which reached from bank to bank and country to country, from Wilmington, Delaware, where it was incorporated, to Chungking, China, where it sold electrical equipment to Chiang Kai-shek — until all this sprawling, complex history of money paid and money gained and credit offered and rejected and profit and loss, palpable and impalpable, was laid bare and comprehensible on five short pages of his clean accountant’s figures.
The already energetic prose — surprisingly energetic considering we are reading about a hyper-organized accountant just finishing up a tax report — builds with intensity as Nelson keeps looking at the clock. It turns out he is waiting for Robert to come along. We get a report at 10:35. A few paragraphs later we get to 10:40; then 10:43. And if we didn’t already feel sorry for Nelson, Shaw starts to let us see just how this job has affected him:
10:47. No Robert yet. Nelson put down the paper because the figures were beginning to jump before his eyes. More and more frequently, he found that happening to him. Well, along with the waistline that grew an inch a year and the tendency to wake at five in the morning and his lack of shock at overhearing people calling him a middle-aged gentleman, that had to be expected of a man who had led a quiet, rather unhealthy life at a desk and was now over fifty . . .
Robert, it turns out, is Nelson’s son. He comes into Nelson’s office wearing his new lieutenant’s uniform. Most of the remainder of the story describes their travel to Grand Central Station where, sometime after noon, Robert is going to get on a train that will begin his journey into the war where he will command five medium tanks. The son has performance anxiety:
“Thirty tons apiece, with a crew of four men. They represent an investment of God knows how many hundred thousand bucks. And I’ve got to tell them to start, stop, go here, kindly demolish that hot-dog stand to the left, would you be so good as to put six shells into that corset-and-lingerie shop five blocks down the street. It was easy enough in maneuvers. But in the real thing . . .” he grinned widely. “The faith the U.S. government has in me! I’m going to develop a beautiful case of stagefright.”
While waiting for the train, father and son sit down to eat. Again we get a glimpse of honorable and yet how pathetic Nelson is, even in the eyes of his son.
“When I was your age,” Nelson said, “I ate just like that.”
And suddenly Robert had looked at him very soberly, as though seeing his father twenty years old — and loving him — and seeing the long years that came after with pride and pity . . . .
It isn’t that Nelson has done anything wrong in his life. He’s a hard worker. He’s successfully raised a family. He’s dedicated. His son looks up to him and sees some great strength. What creates the pity, what underlies the whole story, is the great sense of loss when we consider Nelson’s life in that office overlooking the Hudson. It’s a remarkably well-written peace. Even if the general topic is simple (and it has been done more creatively in Cheever’s brilliant “The Swimmer”), the way Shaw puts it together is nuanced and nice to read — I only thought of “The Swimmer” afterwards. But then comes the final section where a roar of fury erupts from Nelson, and we move away from the general theme to how the immediacy of the war interacts with the hours in the office. Here’s a snippet:
I worked, and it wasn’t easy, and I was poor for a long time, and only the poor know how hard it is to stop being poor . . . . I worked . . . . Nonsense! I’m guilty . . . . I should’ve been out stopping this . . . . I am nearly the same age as Hitler. He could do something to kill my son . . . .I should’ve been doing something to save him.
It’s still great writing on a sentence level, but the problem now is that it’s hard to know whether it’s Nelson or Shaw whose doing the speaking. At the end of a subtle story we get this rant which fits with the character only slightly. Nelson’s son’s departure is brought up in the rant, as you see, but only as a means to bring about this worry, this fit of indignation, and it doesn’t feel quite genuine. This is more a bit of preaching — or, actually, condemning — from Shaw himself. I’m definitely a reader who doesn’t like a message to be conveyed that pretends to be universal, and its even worse when the writer abandons the story to purvey it. I like to take my characters and their stories as individual cases, individual explorations of humanity. I believe fiction should seek to enrich, not to prove. If I feel reproved, good — but let it be because of how the story itself affected me and not because the writer was preachy. Here Shaw seems to have diverted from his character to prove a point. Unfortunately this renders the character false because it appears that the character was derived from the predetermined ending of the story and not the other way around.
Perhaps I was feeling overly sensitive since I could easily relate to Nelson’s worklife. The truth is, I see value in that viewpoint — believe me, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that there are important things to do out there that I and many others are not a part of because work demands we engage with things as seemingly silly as recording depreciation and amortization. I could have come to that conclusion on my own from the subtleties and conversations introduced in the first 4/5ths of the story.
I’ve been slowly reading Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, which contains Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, and I’m surprise, as I frequently am, at how such a great author can slip somewhat under the reading radar — at least, under my reading radar. I’m loving these books, so I decided to see if he’d published anything in The New Yorker. Turns out, he published two.
“I Am Waiting” was first published October 21, 1939, a momentous and fearful time for the world. This story appeared just weeks after the invasion of Poland. As suggested to in the book titles above, Isherwood had spent some some time in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and he had spend much of the 1930s travelling Europe. He was very sensitive to the state of world affairs and to the general anxiety, and he plays with that in this very strange sad story.
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But before we look at that, let’s look at the beginning of the story, where Isherwood introduces us to his narrator and teases us with a vague allusion to the strange content we’ll be uncovering:
The incidents which I am about to describe are true, but I can offer you no proof — at least not for the next five years. By that time you will probably have forgotten you ever read this story. So please believe it or disbelieve it, just as you wish.
Today, October 17, 1939, is my birthday. At the age of sixty-seven I am what you, or anybody else, would call a failure. I have no career, no outstanding achievements behind me. I have never married and I cannot truthfully say that I have ever been loved, though half a dozen people are, perhaps, mildly fond of me.
This is very sad, though many of Isherwood’s characters are sad, and always in such direct prose. The narrator’s situation in life is made the more bleak when he tells us who those half dozen people might just be. He lives in his brother’s house. His brother is everything he is not: he is an energetic lawyer and successful family man. His brother is married to Mabel who is “very kind to me on the whole — as long as I am careful to be tidy and not unnecessarily visible.” His brother and Mabel have three sons who are all married and who all frequently visit — “All these people are well disposed toward me, I think.”
This seems to be developing as one would expect — though in better prose – until this line: ”With reference to the story which follows, I need only add that I have never at any time had reason to believe that I possessed psychic powers.”
I was not expecting anything like that to enter this story, even though the narrator warned us that we might not believe this story and that there would be no evidence for five years. But “I Am Waiting” turns out to be quite fantastic.
The narrator continues to describe a few occurrences throughout 1939 where he had some sort of foresight. Apparently he is actually travelling momentarily into the future.
No words of mine can describe the strangeness of those familiar words and sounds. I listened to them as a dead man might listen to the voices of the living. They were so near to me, and yet so immeasurably remote.
When he returns to the present he is invigorated, but there is still something pathetic about him. Just look how Isherwood has him describe his experience:
I was deeply excited and disturbed. Although it still wasn’t entirely clear what had happened tome, I was aware that something had happened, something so dimly tremendous that it dwarfed every other experience of my whole life.
To me, that is still very sad, for though he has had a momentous experience — travelling to the future is a big deal — he has brought nothing useful back. No one will know he’s even left the present. It is “dimly tremendous.”
A much more momentous event happens not long after, while he is rummaging around the trunk room. After a more violent sensation than before, he finds himself in the same trunk room, only now it is almost bare. After he finds that the door is locked, he begins to panic, only calming himself when he tries to do what he thinks his brother would do. In searching for any resources available, he finds some papers from a magazine published July 1944.
Only an archeologist can imagine the intensity of my excitement at that moment. Here was an actual tiny fragmnet of the future itself, palpable to my present-day fingers. It had been manufactured by men who could answer, off-hand, many of those burning questions which still perplex the wisest mortals of 1939. Shaking with eagerness, I began to read.
There is something prescient about the date of the magazine. Indeed, we know that many magazines from July 1944 would have a great deal of information of interest to someone in 1939. And even our failure of a narrator wants to know “Had the United States entered the war? Had there been a revolution? What is happening in Europe? In China? In the Near East?”
The rest of the story is brilliant. I’m sure some of you have more insights on it than I do, so please, offer them up in the comments.
If you have a print subscription to The New Yorker (which comes at the very reasonable price of $40 for a year’s worth of 47 issues — 5 are “double-issues”) you get access to their complete digital archive. I hope they never take away this perk. To me, access to every past issue of The New Yorker, in digital images of the original pages, is worth $40 per year on its own — more than $40, actually. There are countless treasures in there. I spend a bit of time each week going through old articles, particularly old essays, book reviews, and features on authors. With the death of Salinger, I was reminded yet again of the literary wealth found in these archives — most of his stories were originally published in The New Yorker. I thought, then, that it might be a worthwhile ongoing project to highlight some of the fiction from the past 85 years (The New Yorker was first published on February 21, 1925, so it’s almost anniversary time with its classic Eustace Tilley cover).
I plan on making this a regular feature on The Mookse and the Gripes. For now — and maybe forever – it is going to be called “The Clock at the Biltmore” as an homage to the place where J.D. Salinger and The New Yorker editor William Shawn met, a collaboration that in my mind represents a particular aspect of classic New Yorker fiction. William Shawn (besides being father to Wallace Shawn) was editor from 1952 – 1987, longer than any other. Franny and Zooey is dedicated to Shawn. “The Clock at the Biltmore” will also remind me of when I started this feature, and of this first post’s subject. Ideally I would have liked to have worked in some sort of reference to William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor from 1936 – 1975. While I believe The New Yorker has always had high standards and high quality, there’s no denying that these were fantastic years for fiction — American fiction in particular. I’ll just assume that William Maxwell met with Shawn and Salinger at the clock at the Biltmore too, and if someone could confirm that for me, I’d love it.
So here is the plan. Fortnightly I’ll revisit some piece of fiction first published in The New Yorker. I’ve already reviewed a few here: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and “Sexy” and “The Third and Final Continent” in Interpreter of Maladies, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” in Goodbye, Columbus, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” and “Rosa” in The Shawl (I don’t count the ones like Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” or Tobias Wolff’s “Class Picture” because they were part of and became something else). Obviously, The New Yorker is a favorite of mine, so on The Mookse and the Gripes you’ll also find a round-up of all the fiction published in 2009. And, of course, there’s the new New Yorker fiction forum on the left sidebar where we discuss the fiction being published in each week’s issue – we’d like to get some more participants there, if you’re interested. Why all of this attention to The New Yorker when great short stories are also published elsewhere? Because The New Yorker has a corner on the market — and because I have a subscription for it.
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This past week KevinfromCanada did a blog tribute on J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and he spent some time focusing on that collection’s first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” While Salinger’s death reminded me that I need to revisit Nine Stories (it had been a decade since I read them all in one day — along with The Catcher in the Rye), it was Kevin’s post that really prompted me into action.
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“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” published January 31, 1948, was Salinger’s second story in The New Yorker, and it set the bedrock for a relationship that would help, in part, define the two. Also, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is the first of Salinger’s stories to feature the Glass family. Besides the ones found in Nine Stories, I’ve never read Salinger’s Glass stories, almost all of which (all but one) were first published in The New Yorker, so I’m hoping this project gets me to read them all finally. After rereading this story, I can’t wait.
Interestingly, the first member of the famous Glass family we meet is an in-law. Muriel Glass, “a girl who for a ringing phone dropped nothing,” is married into the Glass family by way of the oldest son Seymour. When the story opens Muriel and Seymour have been married for around six years (1942 – 1948), and they are in Florida celebrating a second honeymoon. Since they married, however, Seymour has been deeply scarred from fighting in World War II. People, particularly Muriel’s parents, have noticed. While the phone rings we watch Muriel fix her nails, slowly. When she finally picks up, she hears her worried mother. Seymour is the topic of this telephone conversation, and we’ll meet him in a few minutes, but this conversation says a lot about Muriel and her mother — a lot that helps understand the ending to the story. It’s been said ad infinitum over the past week, but Salinger is a master at dialogue. You feel like you’re in the room watching with an analytical eye.
“Muriel? Is that you?”
The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. “Yes, Mother. How are you?” she said.
“I’ve been worried to death about you. Why haven’t you phoned? Are you all right?”
“I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here’s been — “
“Are you all right, Muriel?”
The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. “I’m fine. I’m hot. This is the hottest day they’ve had in Florida in — “
“Why haven’t you called me? I’ve been worried to — “
“Mother, darling, don’t yell at me. I can hear you beautifully,” said the girl. “I called you twice last night. Once just after — “
“I told your father you’d probably call last night. But, no, he had to — Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m fine. Stop asking me that, please.”
“When did you get there?”
“I don’t know. Wednesday morning, early.”
“Who drove?”
“He did,” said the girl. “And don’t get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed.”
“He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of — “
“Mother,” the girl interrupted, “I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact.”
“Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?”
I love how Salinger conveys his information. We don’t even know Seymour’s name yet, but we have an accute sense of him that continues to build over the next few pages as the conversation continues to talk about him without ever approaching specifics. Much comes by alluding to something else — for example, Muriel asks her mother where that German book of poetry that Seymour sent her from the war is. It seems a minor point in the conversation — Muriel wants to know where it is because Seymour asked about it on the way to Florida, wondering if she had read any of it. The mother exlaims, ”It was in German!” The poet is never mentioned here by name, and the dialogue moves on, but by simply alluding to Rilke Salinger has added a whole new dimension to this very short story.
After the phone conversation, we move out to the beach where Seymour sits in a terry-cloth robe, conversing with the five-year-old (or so) Sybil Carpenter. He is very kind to Sybil, plays with her, tries to get her to be more kind to the three-and-a-half-year-old Sharon Lipschutz who sits by Seymour when he is playing the piano in the evenings (Sybil wants Seymour to push Sharon off the bench). There’s some vitality to Sybil, something pure, that Seymour loves, and he adores it — he kisses her foot. As kind as he is, though, we can’t help but fear him when he takes Sybil out to play in the sea, even though (or perhaps because) he is exciting the little girl with a nonsense story about bananafish eating so many bananas they get stuck in holes under the water.
There is much to this short story, and it completely stands on its own, meaning it does not require any knowledge of the Glass family at all. But, of course, there is much more about the Glasses — perhaps volumes and volumes more.
Thanks to a comment from KevinfromCanada, there is now a New Yorker Fiction Forum here. The New Yorker publishes a piece of short fiction in each (practically) of its weekly (except for five times a year when they produce a double issue) issues. You may have seen my post I put up a few weeks ago that reviewed very briefly all of the fiction they published in 2009. As fun as that project was, I did miss the chance to see what other readers thought about the stories when they were published. For example, who else hated the except “Max at Sea” by Dave Eggers? I don’t know if anyone did. Who else loved “A Tiny Feast”? I would have loved to have discussed this piece when it was published last spring.
Well, for those who want to read at least one of the pieces of fiction published in 2010 (most are available for free on The New Yorker’s website, and I will have links), there will be a place for you to share your thoughts, and hopefully a few discussions will arise. I have created a New Yorker Fiction Forum homepage that will contain links to a forum dedicated to each week’s piece of fiction.
Click here to see it in its first incarnation. A permanent link to the forum’s homepage will always be on the left sidebar. At this point, there is obviously very little content, but it will come! Please return often to share your thoughts.
If there are any of you are trying to find some engaging material to read over the holidays, I can’t recommend enough searching through the fiction (and other articles) of The New Yorker. A subscription would be a great gift to you or from you (I know, because that’s how I got my subscription). The New Yorker is my favorite place to read short fiction, as well as many other things — no, any other thing. If you missed David Grann’s brilliant — brilliant – article on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham and the investigations leading to his conviction, you must read it (you can click on the link above to read the whole aticle online). It is a tour de force in reporting and writing, a perfect specimen of what I consider The New Yorker to be. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed Ian Frazier’s long two-part article on his travel across Siberia (unfortunately, this links only to the abstract — you need a subscription to read it). And then there’s the fun “Shouts & Murmurs” column which featured this comical colloquium (also by Ian Frazier) on how climate change is affecting the temperature in Hell as well as this fun take on that farmboy who wants to use Rosetta Stone software to ensure his only chance with that Italian supermodel isn’t a failure: “Personalmente, sono stato un ammiratore di Valentino fin dalla scuola agraria” & “Familiarize yourself with the conjugation of the verb ‘to milk’”! (Wow! Also by Ian Frazier — sir, cheers to you!)
Back to the fiction — and there’s no Ian Frazier here — I have a hard time getting through a whole collection of short stories by one author, but a weekly short story from a variety of authors is just the ticket to maintaining a healthy short story appetite. Last year I saw that The Millions blog did a quick review of all of the short fiction titles published in The New Yorker in 2008, and I decided that I wanted to do that same thing this year. This goal forced me to keep current in my reading, which was certainly a pleasure, and to more deeply consider the gems (or duds) that come with this publication. Here’s what there was, complete with links to the stories should you be interested (and you should be : ) ). Links to each story, all but two available in its entirety on The New Yorker website, are included. My favorites of the year have the dates bolded, though others were also very good. Interestingly, I tended to favor the very strange stories, often involving myth or the supernatural, rather than the more realist pieces I would have first suspected.
January 5 - Julian Barnes: “The Limner” – Should be a good year for fiction that starts with Julian Barnes. This story takes readers back to an age of portrait painting. The limner of the title has just been commissioned to paint the portrait of the pompous customs collector. Barnes evokes the feel of an old story nicely while showing how this mute, deaf limner can interpret and portray hidden human traits.
January 12 - Joyce Carol Oates: “Pumpkin Head” — This disturbing story begins by immediately unsettling the reader. A widowed 39-year-old answers the door to find a tall, lanky man with a pumpkin in place of his head. While the immediate horror dissipates soon, the unsettling feeling continues when the widow invites the man into her home for a drink. Strange that with such a conceit, the story dwells on Americans’ relationships with other nationalities.
January 19 – Antonya Nelson: “Soldier’s Joy” – I both liked and didn’t like this story. On the one hand, I enjoyed the account of a slightly-over-middle-aged woman not really being the central person in anyone’slife. The central story is about the emptiness she feels as she navigates in her relationships with her husband, her friend, her ex-lover, her parents, and her dogs, though to them she’s a side-story. To the septuagenarian husband, she’s what makes him feel young, vital, and shamefully exciting. For her parents, she’s a lost cause they’ve already found a replacement for. For her ex-lover, she’s the fling who will never be the focus. And the way this emptiness makes her feel like an abandoned, mopey adolescent is intriguing. However, and this is not always a fault in a story, I had a hard time connecting with any of the stories. These are all empty people. They caused their own problems. That she would “love” her ex-lover, a stoner who kicked his children out of their own treehouse while he “searches for a job” is part of my problem with the characters. And this time, my problems with the characters turned into my problem with the story.
January 26 – Aravind Adiga: “The Elephant” – I was both intrigued and wary when I saw Mr. Adiga following up his Booker win with a short story in The New Yorker. While I was among the few who liked The White Tiger, I didn’t think it deserved the Booker. This story (on the longish side for The New Yorkerthese days) takes us to India, again, where a cooley is delivering items on a cycle-cart (or his head). I wasn’t enjoying it until I saw that the three rupee tip he got at one place was basically used to pay the boss for the opportunity to do the delivery. It’s the illumination of that kind of routine in India’s economy that helped me appreciate The White Tiger. Like that work, though, this short story felt a bit like an apprentice-piece. It was worthwhile but not entirely satisfying, and it was full of juvenile imagery that, to me, subverted the serious work without emphasizing the indignities therein.
February 2 – George Saunders: “Al Roosten” – Al Roosten is the overweight man in a gondolier costume waiting in a queue behind an attractive man in a skimpy swimsuit. That man is about to walk out to the stage for the Local Celebrity Auction, a charity event to raise money to fight drugs. Here’s a great line: “Roosten was deaf to the charity in this.” This is about as close a third-person narrator as your going to find, and it works brilliantly to show the angry, jealous mind of Al Roosten. It also helps usher in a mother who taps her foot impatiently at him in heaven when he acts out his frustration in an impotent manner when obviously he’d like to do so much more. Highly recommended.
February 9 & 16 - Steven Millhauser: “The Invasion from Outer Space” – One of the shortest of the year’s stories, “The Invasion from Outer Space” is about a town’s anticipation at the approach of something from above. Then there is disappointment. Though this story is short, Millhauser still manages to imbue it with his excellent run of fluid details.
February 23 – Italo Calvino: “The Daughers of the Moon” (translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin) — For those unitiated in Calvino’s Cosmicomicsthis story might be a bit too abstract. In these tales, narrated by the extremely old Qfwfq, Calvino extends some scientific tidbit into a great imaginative work. The tidbit this time? The gradual dissolution of the moon and its consequent descent to Earth. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say the dissolution of amoon, Qfwfq having seen so many come and go. Calvino links this dissolution with a highly consumeristic society, where the moon is one blighted ceiling that is due to be thrown away and a better one acquired. This is not my favorite story in the Cosmicomics(I have only read a few). I recommend beginning with some others and getting a sense of the motief and Qfwfq.
March 2 – A.M. Homes: “Brother on Sunday” — This was a rather slow moving story, which fit because most of it takes place on a sunny beach while Tom, a skin doctor, waits with some friends for his older brother Roger to arrive, like he does each year. Tom and his wife often go out with these friends, and they seem to know Tom doesn’t particularly like them. Still, as the story moves forward, we realize that Tom dislikes his brother even more, and fears somewhat that he considers these friends his friends. Then Roger arrives “like a storm.”
March 9 – David Foster Wallace: “Wiggle Room” — Possibly my favorite of the year, this short story is actually a segment of Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King. Here we go into the head of a man who reviews tax returns for any inconsistencies. Wallace shows how mind-numbing this job is and how a man seeks to get by, trying to keep from something simple like looking at the clock and to keep from something not so simple like thoughts of suicide. In walks a man who knows the history of the word “bore.”
March 16 – No fiction this issue, but there is a large selection of recent John Updike poems.
March 23 – Tessa Hadley: “She’s the One” — I didn’t think I’d like this story once I started it and realized what it was about. The main character is Ally, a young graduate of English studies who lives in Manchester, England, close to the moors. Her little brother Ryan has just committed suicide. It’s not that I don’t find this premise important. I just feel like I’ve read it several times. However, what I found instead was a freshly written account of the aftermath of such a tragedy, especially when the narrative introduces Ryan’s girlfriend Yvonne.
March 30 – Craig Raine: “Julia and Byron” — Though short, this story manages to get through the diagnosis and treatment of a cancer patient, her death, and the repercussions on the husband, who never treated her well. Its quality stems from the short details that give a lot of depth to Julia and Byron. Still, not one of my favorites of the year.
April 6 - Brad Watson: “Visitation” — This nicely paced, tense narrative describes a divorced father’s attempts to maintain a relationship with his young son. There’s a tragic sense of failure as the father takes the son to McDonald’s and then to a run-down hotel by the freeway for their weekend together. Turns out this is how they typically spend their time. Things are worse this weekend, however, when an obnoxious family of four takes over the swimming pool and intimidates the guests. I took a family law class wherein we read sad case after sad case, sad law review article after sad law review article, about “visitation.” This piece takes it in a different direction while maintaining the desperation.
April 13 - Colm Tóibín: “The Color of Shadows” — This was a fairly simple story about Dublin man, Paul, whose elderly aunt Josie, after falling in her home, needs now to be put into a rest home. We get a look at some elements that are expected: the guilt of putting someone you love in a care center when they just want to be home. However, as to be expected from such a brilliant writer, the story has other intriguing elements. Paul’s mother abandoned him when he was a young child, too young to remember her; Josie raised him. Sometime in this process, Paul’s mother has moved back the area. The ending, referring to breath, feels like a deep breath, opening up a larger story while remaining sadly ambiguous.
April 20 – Chris Adrian: “A Tiny Feast” – This strange little story took me by surprise. To reconcile after an argument, Oberon gives Titania a stolen mortal child. As a toddler, however, the child begins to suffer from leukemia, forcing the faerie king and queen to interact with mortals in a cancer ward. Mixing dark humor with genuine sadness, Adrian presents a unique perspective on parental love and on mortal folly. I love a story that shows how even a bizarre, implausible, potentially lame idea can become wonderful when rendered by a master. Here’s a quick passage where Titania reflects on the young child’s chemotherapy: “Within a few days, the poisons had made him peaceful. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made, except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair . . . . Oberon had voiced a fear that the boy was sick for human things, that the cancer in his blood was only a symptom of a greater ill — that he was homesick unto death. So she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy.”
April 27 – Guillermo Martínez: “Vast Hell” (translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel) — This short short takes its name from an Argentinian proverb: “A small town is a vast hell.” And we go into one of those small towns. The narrator is a grocery store clerk, and he begins to reminisce about “that young man whose name we never knew and whom no one in town mentioned again.” Martínez lays bare the way gossip spreads and poisons a small town’s people, which has been done before. It is done very well here. But that is not where the heart of the story lies. What is discovered is far more hideous than the truth that gossip can cause pain. One of my favorites of the year.
May 4 – Gail Hareven: “The Slows” (translated from the Hebrew by Yaacov Jeffrey Green) — Yet another bizarre but excellently crafted story. Whoever said The New Yorker only publishes realism is way off this year. Still, here again we have a bizarre situation told in a realist voice. The narrator is a researcher at a Preserve, home of the Slows. I’ll let you find out for yourself who the Slows are, and what ethical battles the researcher must battle when a Slow woman comes to ask him not to take their children.
May 11 – J.G. Ballard: “The Autobiography of J.G.B.” — Placed in one of the year’s longest issues, this was the shortest story at a mere three columns. If we are to follow the title, apparently Ballard woke up one morning to find his neighborhood absolutely empty of its inhabitants — except for him. A bit of roaming around leads him to discover that his neighborhood is not the only one suddenly empty, with no explanations.
May 18 – Salman Rushdie: “In the South” — I admit it: Rushdie completely lost me with The Enchantress of Florence. About halfway through that book the author I respected (I loved Midnight’s Children) became for me what he was already for others: over writing, self-indulgent, overrated. I was not excited to read this short story, which only a year before I would have been thrilled about. I can’t say this story brought me back into the fold, but neither did it fully reinforce my disdain. A simple story — two octogenarians, Junior and Senior, live next door to each other, have opposing views on almost everything, and don’t want to get away from each other. Rushdie gives them and their environment a nice symbolic meaning, but I didn’t feel it ended up saying too much. Still, the last one-third of the story had me deep in though.
May 25 – Jonathan Lethem: “Ava’s Apartment” – A man abandons his old life and, following the directions of a friend, takes up residence in a strange apartment complex, an apartment complex made for abandoned dogs. His own roommate happens to be Ava, a three-legged pit-bull. Together they form a new life. While this maintained my interest, I kept hoping for more. Despite its pensive, drawn-out sentences and its tone, it actually seemed to take great pains to tie things together to say something meaningful.
June 1 – Craig Raine: “Love Affair with Secondaries” — And so Craig Raine becomes the first author to have a second story appear in the same year. I didn’t much care for “Julia and Byron.” Here we have a married man in the middle of an affair. While this one was better, it still left me a bit cold.
June 8 & 15 – Fiction Issue:
- Jonathan Franzen: “Good Neighbors” — In my opinion, this was the best written story in the fiction issue. It’s a disturbing tale about the dissolution of a family through the years. Starting out like a dream, the young couple moves into a cheap fixer-upper into a neighborhood not yet gentrified. Two children come along and grow up as the neighborhood does — and while the neighborhood’s gossip and backbiting grow. The wife seems to be mysteriously impervious to such talk; rather than cast judgment when she hears others gossip, she merely says something was “weird.” The husband remains aloof from the neighborhood and the family. Yet this family becomes the center of it all. I like this one because, while the topic is what feels typical in The New Yorker, its style if quite different, told from multiple perspectives, the verdict on this particular family is, to me at least, unascertainable.
- Edna O’Brien: “Old Wounds” (subscription required to read online) — It seems a good contemporary Irish story can’t help but deal with family wounds and burials. While different, I didn’t feel that this story added anything to this tradition, though I still enjoyed this story. The narrator’s mother’s family had a falling out when the narrator was very young. The only time they would get together was at funerals. Years later, the narrator meets and creates a healing friendship with her cousin, the cause of the initial falling out. Now much older, the two cousins feel that the wounds are healing, but the cousin’s wife and the burial ground come in between.
- Téa Obreht: “The Tiger’s Wife” (subscription required to read online) — This is the début fiction piece, and it did feel like the product of a creative writing program: each sentence carries a weight of profundity, there’s a multi-generational and multi-cultural current, the ending attempts to interpret it all before drifting into its own unknown. Often these features turn me off to new writers’ fiction, though I greatly respect what they are doing and wish them all the best and want to support them. While these features did limit my response, “The Tiger’s Wife” has the advantage of being well constructed and interesting. We are situated in Eastern Europe in 1941. Into the village walks a strange survivor of a recent battle: a tiger formerly held in a zoo. At first more of a phantom, soon the village is confronting its reality. Among those confronting the tiger are the narrator’s grandfather and a young Muslim girl purchased by the town’s butcher to be his wife. Sixty years later, the grandfather’s story reveals more about the psychology of the villagers than it does about the truth.
June 22 – Tim Gautreaux: “Idols” – I very much enjoyed this one about a lost remnant to a great family. In the beginning, our narrator, a fixer of manual typewriters who is over sixty, finds out that he has inherited what is left of his great-grandfather’s estate, which now includes only just over $20,000 and a dilapidated grand house. He decides to move to the house and fix it up to its original grandeur. To do this he hires a man in his fifties whose been kicked out by his wife. The man needs money to get his tatoo collection burned off his skin, hoping his wife will take him back then. So the hired man proceeds to fix up the house while going to the doctor weekly to get his tatoos burned off. It’s a nice story that looks at loneliness and greed.
June 29 – Stephen O’Connor: “Ziggurat” — Yet again, one of my favorites of the year takes some fantastical element and modernizes it and brings it into mundane realism (at least partly). Here the creature is the minotaur. The story starts when he sees one of the new virgins (well, not really, according to her, but, you know, what to tell the mother) playing a video game while he lounges on a pool table in some strange room in the labyrinth. I couldn’t believe that a story that combines some Greek myth with the decadent present would be that good, but it did an excellent job exploring emptiness. Definitely one of my favorites.
July 6 & 13 – Lorrie Moore: “Childcare” — I’ve been interested in reading something by Lorrie Moore because some of my friends get very anxious whenever something by her is put out there. They were really excited when this piece was published. When I began the piece, here’s what I was thinking: This is excellent stuff! She really does have a natural fluency in her writing! Then because of some distraction I put the magazine down and didn’t feel the need to pick it up again until two weeks later. I was ultimately pleased with the story which deals with a young woman getting a childcare job before the employer has even adopted her child. They go together to an interview with the birth mother, a sassy teen wearing an electronic bracelet. On the whole I enjoyed perspective this young employee provided on the tension between the birth mother and the hopeful adoptive mother, though I have to say that somewhere the steam ran out — but that was probably just me and my distractions. It was definitely excellently written and made me more interested in Moore.
July 20 – William Styron: “Rat Beach” — I was really excited when I saw that for this issue we’d be taken back to a prior era of writing. I wasn’t disappointed! Styron’s story about a young marine preparing to invade Japan during the final stages of WWII is affecting both because of its subject matter but also because of its powerful, controlled, and lucid prose. It’s an excellent look at a young man frightened to death trying to find any distractions, and what motivates him. Highly recommended read.
July 27 – Kirstin Valdez Quade: “The Five Wounds” – This fascinating story about a man playing Jesus in his community’s annual Passion play is well written with varied subtexts. Astonishing to me that this deft piece of writing was written by a recent MFA graduate. I like new writers’ material, but this one — to me — lacked the flaws inherent in most. Amadeo Padilla, the thirty-three-year-old man playing Jesus, is attempting to get holy and in the zone for the big day — he might just be the best Jesus since Manuel Garcia, who, because he actually used real nails, is still a legend as he wanders around the city, judging people with his curled, useless hands. Amadeo has been feeling pretty good, but then his pregnant fourteen-year-old daughter (who’ll turn fifteen on Good Friday) arrives, threatening to tarnish the whole affair. Very recommended.
August 3 – Joshua Ferris: “The Valetudinarian” — I’ve actually put off reading anything by Joshua Ferris, thinking he fit into what I consider to be the young, loud, overwriting writer. If this short story is any indication, I am so wrong. This story about a widower living his retirement alone in Florida is heartwarming/rending and funny and very nicely controlled. One of my favorites of the year.
August 10 & 17 – Sherman Alexie: “War Dances” – A few years ago I heard Sherman Alexie speak about his writing and his Indian heritage. I found it interesting, and though I know he’s a talented writer, I’ve always found it to be a one-note song: Native Americans have a tragic past and a tragic present suffering from alcoholism and nostalgia. It always seems he feels his job is to desentimentalize the Native American mystique. A bit of that is in here, but it is incidental to a much larger and subtler story about a man (Native American) suffering from a mysterious diagnosis that seems to be a recurrence of his hydrocephalia he suffered as a child. With wiffs of Kafka’s “Metamorphisis,” this is a stylistically acute piece of writing.
August 24 – Dave Eggers: “Max at Sea” — I was looking forward to this one. Even though I would never have thought to expand on the wonderful children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, the trailer for the film version of Eggers’s work gave me hope. I have not seen the film, but if this short story is any indication, it will be awful. Sometimes an author can breath new life into a classic work, show some other dimensions, expand it a bit. This piece, however, diminishes the original, seems to limit it by defining what makes everything tick. It begins before the classic story did, explaining why Max is having such a wild day. Here Max is picked on by his older sister’s friends. She does not defend him. He retaliates. His high-strung mother punishes him. His father has left the family, though Max is still attached. The mother’s new boyfriend is a fat dweeb. The classic story contains all of this and so much more — not the least, the very real possibility that Max was simply being a child rather than being psychologically damaged (by all sorts of complexes). It also limits the magic of the island with the wild things, who are all unimpressively named. To me this story was a stroke against imagination. The writing was flat and clichéd. It failed on every level. Why did The New Yorker publish this?
August 31 – Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: “The Fountain House” (tr. from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers) — Very short and even more strange. This story begins just after a bus has blown up. A man’s daughter was killed and taken away. Certain something can be done for her, the man steals her body and bribes a doctor to work on her (“Although the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor could see perfectly well that she was dead.”). It becomes very strange when the father keeps lapsing into dreams. I definitely didn’t understand this tale, but I did enjoy it.
September 7 – Orhan Pamuk: “Distant Relations” (tr. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely) — From the first few paragraphs, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did. It’s an interesting construct: a man is about to become engaged to his innocent love. She likes a purse they see in a window. The man goes to buy it for her, finds a distant relation at the store, and sinks into a deep lust. Very nicely drawn out.
September 14 – Paul Theroux: “The Lower River” — This one surprised me. I haven’t been much for short stories written in slow prose this year. The prose has felt weightier than the story itself. However, this nicely paced story – about an elderly missionary returning to a village in Africa where he’d spent some youthful years — was vivid and textured. Finally the weighty story felt substantiated by the prose itself.
September 21 – Sam Shepard: “Land of the Living” — I’m not sure I understood this one, and I don’t feel like going back to read it again. I enjoyed the beginning, where a man and his family are about to board a plane for a vacation. The man is in a very good mood. But then his wife asks, in front of the children, whether he’s having an affair. The tense vacation is great, but, like I said, in the end the pieces didn’t add up for me. Though I’m sure their is a sound equation that I failed to formulate.
September 29, 2009 – Marisa Silver: “Temporary” — I don’t have much to say about this piece because it didn’t interest me. It took me all week to get through it, in fact. The story is set up in the kind of down-and-out realism that I’m finding harder and harder to take, especially when in the end I don’t feel it offered much that is new. This one is about a woman who finds temporary work at an adoption agency. I did like her conversations and imaginings about a potential adopting family, but I’m afraid this one faded the moment I finished it.
October 5, 2009 – George Saunders: “Victory Lap” – George Saunders’ second piece of fiction to be published this year. When I started this bizarre piece, I thought I wouldn’t like it. We get inside the head of a Alison, a teenage girl, probably fourteen or fifteen, as she imagines descending a staircase to her suitors. She is interrupted by a knock at her door. Then we get insidethe head of a teenage boy, her neighbor and also probably around fourteen or fifteen, as he arrives home and imagines his parents scolding him for the rules he’s breaking while they’re away. He is interrupted when he goes outside and sees Alison open her door. All of this was interesting, but the highly stylized writing was getting grating. But then we realize that the man who knocked on the teenage girl’s door means to kidnap and rape her. The story then veers into the criminal’s head, then back to the boy’s, and finally to Alison’s. In the end it was a powerful trip, and the style augmented the irrationality of it all.
October 12, 2009 – Tessa Hadley: “The Godchildren” — After doubling up on George Saunders last week, this week The New Yorkergave a second spot to Tessa Hadley. I really liked where I thought this one was going. Three godchildren of the deceased have showed up at the house where they spent some days in their childhood. For two of them, the memories are either faded or perhaps repressed. But for the other, this is a big big deal. I’m afraid it lost some steam with me, though, towards the end.
October 19, 2009 – Julian Barnes: “Complicity” — It’s like I’m reading the same authors as I was in the first few months of 2009. However, Julian Barnes is one I love seeing in The New Yorker. Sadly, this story didn’t really work for me. A divorcee begins courting a doctor, and I like the various ways Barnes works around the word “complicity,” but I remain fairly indifferent about this one.
October 26, 2009 – Jonathan Lethem: “Procedure in Plain Air” – What a nicely strange story! For some reason, this year, the strange stories have been my favorites. They’ve been fresh and incredibly well written. Here Lethem describes a mundane day where an unemployed man, just getting over his severance pay, watches two workers excavate a hole in the pavement and then ”install” a captive man into the hole. In a matter-of-fact way, they give the man an umbrella to stand over the hole when it starts to rain. It’s a very short piece, and well worth the read.
November 2, 2009 – Javier Marias: “While the Women Are Sleeping” (tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa) — As is the case with his novels, his short fiction also starts with a blessed tease: “For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again — at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere.” This story begins on a Spanish beach. The narrator and his wife people watch and are very intrigued by a large man who uses a videocamera to record his beautiful companion every day. One night, the narrator cannot sleep and, after he sees from his window the fat man sitting by the pool outside, he goes to chat. There’s a good reason this one was printed in the Halloween issue. It’s disturbing but very sophisticated.
November 9, 2009 – Stephen King: “Premium Harmony” — Stephen King, publishing in The New Yorker. If you’re surprised, as I was, it might surprise you further to know that this is the sixth piece of short fiction he’s published there. And I’d be unfair to say that it is just for sales — Stephen King has produced some pretty exceptional bits of writing in the mounds and mounds to choose from. Here we have an unhappy, poor couple. Each has a vice: Ray smokes and Mary eats hostess foods. On their way to Wal-Mart, Mary asks Ray to stop at a Quick-Pik so that Mary can go in and buy a 99 cent kickball as a birthday present for their niece. Ray knows it would be 20 cents cheaper at Wal-Mart, but Mary wants the purple one at Quick-Pik. As she’s going in, he asks her to buy him some cigarettes. The tension builds as Ray waits for Mary in the car, and we wonder if she’s going to come out with cigarettes or hostess cakes. But the tension really builds when Mary doesn’t come out at all. This has some of King’s usual cliches and you can sometimes see where it’s writing by numbers, and both of these have the tendency to subvert the parts where King is genuinely good — but I was surprised to find the story at times touching. Not a great success, though.
November 16, 2009 – Yiyun Li: “Alone” — This short story took me forever to read. I just wasn’t snagged in the first few pages, and for some reason, I really needed that snag in this case. However, when the story picked up — when the Chinese woman starts to tell her story about a fatal boating accident to the older man she’s just met at a ski resort — the story becomes quietly affecting and remained on my mind long after I finished. It remains one of my favorites of the year.
November 23, 2009 – Sam Shepard: “Indianapolis (Highway 74)” — I liked this story much more than Shepard’s last one. Here we still have the male narrator travelling, but this time he’s at a Holiday Inn near Indianapolis where he encounters a woman he had lived with forty years before. This is a great “road” story, even though most of it takes place in a lobby.
November 30, 2009 – Don DeLillo: “Midnight in Dostoevksy” – Despite the catchy title, this story confirmed my belief that I shouldn’t rush to buy DeLillo’s Point Omegawhen it is released. Here we have a couple of college students, kicking around town, arguing about the details of the life of a man they sometimes encounter. It starts with simple questions: What kind of coat is he wearing? Filled with his clippy dialogue, the story goes in and out of various discussions about the man and a class the students are taking. I’m sure there is a lot of brilliance hidden from my view in these lines, but I didn’t have the patience to seek it out.
December 7, 2009 – Ian McEwan: “The Use of Poetry” – McEwan used to be a writer I read voraciously. That has changed, and I actually wasn’t keen on reading this story when it appeared. As usual, however, I immediately fell into the rhythm of his sentences as he recounted, briefly, the youth of Henry Beard, a physicist who will one day win the Nobel Prize. The story slows down some when he meets Maisie Farmer at Oxford and they venture into the world of marriage, almost on a youthful whim to do just exactly what their sixties culture told them not to do — now there’s some conscientious rebellion. The story moves quickly and is told mostly in the tone of biographical summary. And, frankly, I’m not sure I caught the thread at the end that tied it all together. In the end I feel like his sentences are more impressive than his ideas. Which is not saying much with this piece.
December 14, 2009 – David Foster Wallace: “And All That” — I loved “Wiggle Room,” the first short story by David Foster Wallace to appear in this year’s The New Yorker. I loved it so much, in fact, that when I saw this issue featured another of his stories I lapped it up quickly. Not as good as “Wiggle Room” but still highly original. Our narrator tells us of a Christmas present he received as a child: a wooden cement mixer he could pull around on a string. His parents, in the way parents do, tell him that the mixer is magic, that it turns only when he is pulling it and only when he is not looking at the mixer. So the boy spends his time trying to come up with increasingly elaborate ways to try to catch the mixer rotating. It never crosses his mind that it was a joke. Later in life, he’s very religious and in a seminary. His parents are devout atheists but supportive.
December 21 & 28, 2009 – Helen Simpson: “Diary of an Interesting Year” — We close the year with this bleak The Road-like tale derived from a diary written in the year 2040, when the woman narrating it was thirty years old. The world is not right, and she and G., her boyfriend/husband, decide to go North towards Scotland to try to get to Russia, the land of milk and honey. In the chopped diary entries we rarely get a glimpse of what is actually happening except by intimation and by the author’s tone. This is a short piece, and great food for thought as we begin a new year, the year this narrator is to be born.
And that’s a wrap, folks. This was such a great project that I’m going to do it again in 2010. I can’t recommend enough that some of you join me in 2010.
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