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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). Rivka Galchen’s “Appreciation” was originally published in the March 19, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I have read little by Rivka Galchen, but didn’t really enjoy the last piece she published in The New Yorker, “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire,” which was part of the “20 Under 40″ (now nearly two years ago!). This is a short one, but, you guessed it, I haven’t been able to read it yet. I’m still hung up on the fact I haven’t read Munro’s latest, so how can I move on until then? I do have the goal — I promise — to catch up completely and be more timely. In the meantime, I’m enjoying your comments!
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Donald Antrim’s “Ever Since” was originally published in the March 12, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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My inability to read these short stories is getting frustrating — as frustrating as these posts excusing myself! At any rate, I have enjoyed Donald Antrim’s work in the past and look forward to this one, but I just have to read the Munro story first. In the meantime, though, please feel free to comment below.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro’s “Haven” was originally published in the March 5, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’m late getting this posted because I kept hoping to have a moment to read the story this week, and then just post here when that was done. As you can see, that time has yet to materialize. I can’t wait to read this, though, as it’s always an event when we get a new Munro story (which, these days, are coming rather frequently, despite her saying a few years ago that she was done).
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Thomas McGuane’s “A Prairie Girl” was originally published in the February 27, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’ve been running behind on my New Yorker reading lately. Last night I made the goal (easy, since I have today off) to read the story in the morning, whatever it be. I was thrilled, then, that it was a story by Thomas McGuane, who I’ve been drawn to over the past years. His stories have a mixture of seriousness and humor, usually set in Montana or somewhere else in the American West, and this calls to me. I was also happy to see that the story was very short.
Though short, “A Prairie Girl” covers a lot of ground. It opens, I’m assuming, sometime in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century:
When the old brothel — known as the Butt Hut — closed down, years ago, the house it had occupied was advertised in the paper: “Home on the river: eight bedrooms, eight baths, no kitchen. Changing times force sale.”
The omniscient plural first-person narrator (quite a feat, if you can do it — it worked fine here; there is even a reference to the townspeople making up a fine Greek chorus) takes us comically through the history of the town by way of the brothel, presenting a nice local scene:
Who were they? Some were professionals from as far away as New Orleans and St. Louis. A surprising number were country schoolteachers, off for the summer. Some, from around the state, worked a day or two a week, but were otherwise embedded in conventional lives. When one of them married a local, the couple usually moved away, and over time our town lost a good many useful men — cowboys, carpenters, electricians. This pattern seemed to land most heavily on our tradespeople and worked a subtle hardship on the community. But it was supposed by the pious to be a sacrifice for the greater good.
When the brothel closed, all of the girls leave town save one, Mary Elizabeth Foley. She attended the Lutheran church and when a woman (her future mother-in-law) asked her where she was from, she said, “What business is it of yours?” McGuane goes for more humor: “Where was the meekness appropriate to a woman with her past? It was outrageous. From then on, the energy that ought to have been spent on listening to the service was dedicated to beaming malice at Mary Elizabeth Foley.”
Mary Elizabeth Foley is an ambitious woman, and she eventually weds — because she truly does love him and he loves her — Arnold, a gay man, the son of the president of the local bank. After all, “[s]he had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world.”
The story moves quickly through their lives, much like an Alice Munro story. It says something for the story and its ambiguities that I wanted more, quite a bit more. I’m still trying to work out if that is a fault in an otherwise interesting story about the loving (though duplicitous) relationship between a former prostitute and a gay man in a tiny, judgmental community, but one where time can burnish faults. Where in a Munro story the clipped passage of time is part of the theme, I’m not sure it was here, and I wanted more room for the characters to develop.
Still, a nice story to get me back to reading The New Yorker fiction each week.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Michael Chabon’s “Citizen Conn” was originally published in the February 13 & 20, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I believe my work/life balance shifted dramatically in the favor of life today, so I hope to get caught up shortly — and this double issue gives me a bit of time to do it.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Los Gigantes” was originally published in the February 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I am slowly but surely catching up — in the meantime, please keep the discussion going.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice McDermott’s “Someone” was originally published in the January 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Just as I was crawling out of the hole I was in, my blog gets hacked! Things are back up, and I will finally start catching up on my reading of The New Yorker. I will have thoughts here soon.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Roberto Bolaño’s “Labyrinth” was originally published in the January 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’m a big fan of Roberto Bolaño, though it didn’t come easy. My first encounter with the now legendary writer was in the earliest days of winter in 2008 when 2666 was published (my negative review here). It was powerful, but in the end I decided I didn’t like it. I shake my head at my not-much-younger self and now consider 2666 a true masterpiece. Naturally, any time something else is published by the prolific author, even if it’s just part of his computer files as is the case here, I’m on board. Sometimes I read one of these posthumous pieces and think, well, I’m glad we have that as it’s indeed Bolaño, even if it’s not very good Bolaño. That’s not the case here. I found “Labyrinth” to be an exceedingly powerful short piece that begins when Bolaño looks at a picture.
There are eight people in the photo:
They’re seated. They’re looking at the camera. They are, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade and M. Devade.
There’s no photo credit.
That’s how the piece begins. Not a particularly engaging opening perhaps, but where Bolaño is about to go who needs a good opening.
Incidentally, the photo is real. You can see it by clicking on the link to The New Yorker website above. It must have been taken in the 1970s (a good time for Bolaño fiction). Bolaño proceeds to pick the photo apart, describing each individual, what they do (the only one I’d heard of was Julia Kristeva), what they are wearing, etc. This is not as dry as you might thinkg, but the story really picks up when Bolaño leaves the photo behind:
Let’s imagine J.-J. Goux, for examle, who is looking out at us through his thick submarine spectacles.
His space in the photo is momentarily vacant and we see him walking along Rue de l’École de Médecine, with books under his arm, of course, two books, till he comes out onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
The piece goes back and forth from the photo to some imagined present for the individuals pictures (all real people — most relatively famous). And then there are two ghosts: “Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z.” Strangely, when Bolaño strays from the photo, we don’t feel he takes it too far; in other words, one feels Bolaño is being faithful to the image, even as the people suffer in their imagined lives. As usual, Bolaño sums it up best:
Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy” was originally published in the January 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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As you can see from my complete lack of posts and commentary, I’ve still been under the work bus. I’ll get caught up eventually — I promise!
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). John Lanchester’s “Expectations” was originally published in the January 9, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I am, obviously, getting behind here. The culprit is work. I have been at the office from the wee hours of the morning until the wee hours of the morning for some time now, and I haven’t had a second to catch up. While there are a few more days that promise to be just as bad this week, there should still be some time to catch up on sleep and on my reading/reviewing. Until then . . .
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