“The Children”
by Andrea Lee
from the June 10 & 17, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
It’s always great to welcome in the summer with the annual New Yorker fiction issue. This year’s issue features three pieces, including Andrea Lee’s “The Children.”
Andrea Lee, like Han Ong, is an author I didn’t know coming into the issue. I may have read some of her work before, because prior to this issue she had already published thirteen stories in The New Yorker, going back to 1982. I’ve been a reader of the magazine since 2000, so I have possibly ran into her work before. I almost certainly read the last piece of fiction she published in the magazine, in September 2008, but that was a few months before I started tracking the stories here, so maybe not. At any rate, it’s really nice to get a fiction issue that isn’t from the usual suspects.
And I must say that I’m intrigued by the opening of “The Children,” which looks like it could have been called “The Adventure of the Lost Heirs”:
The adventure of the lost heirs begins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café. This happens in the early two-thousands, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads. The mysterious beheadings are not connected to the events recounted here, except to establish the lawlessness that is always present behind the dazzling Anjavavy panorama of sugar-white beaches and cobalt sea. The crimes begin to surface one hot January morning, as a French hotel manager is taking his predawn constitutional along Rokely Bay and spies through a mist of sand flies something just above the tide line that looks like an unhusked coconut. It turns out to be a human head, one that was last seen on the shoulders of a part-time sweeper at the Frenchman’s hotel.
In the next months, four more severed heads are discovered, hideously marooned near grounded pirogues, on paths through the sugarcane, and even on the rocks that are used by villagers as public toilets. The victims are all men from various Malagasy tribes: Antandroy, Tsimihety, Sakalava—night watchmen and groundskeepers of so low a status that no one bribes the island gendarmerie into investigating their deaths.
Let us know your thoughts on the story below!
I’ve known of Lee and used to enjoy her cool, composed stories. They are filled with beautiful, leisured people for the most part, usually light-skinned or mixed race but always with an emphasis on their beauty and remote superiority. But the writing is always very fine. This story was similar but seemed to me to be very subdued, and thus feels a bit dated…times are not as complacent as they were in the ’90s, when I first started reading her work. I do feel haunted by the “heirs” left behind, probably more so than the two protagonists.
As a metaphor for colonialism this was perfect. The “children” are the colonies: used, abused, left stranded, ever hopeful cadgers. The two women, the “old hand” and the “naive newcomer” are Europe today. At one point the various interior soliloquies reminded me of Emmanuel Macron, who toured French West Africa with the refrain, “I wasn’t even born when colonialism ended, so why is it any of my responsibility?” The old gatekeeper “interpreting” for Shay when the lost son comes to the Red House is likewise part of the colonial script. The Red House itself stands-in for the local district commissioner or governor’s mansion. Finally the narrators, Shay and Giustinia, and story structure (no voice for the subalterns, they are exoticised and gazed upon) fully exemplify colonialism (which, no doubt, is presumably the point of the story?) As a short story, however, I found it cool and not so interesting: the meta-commentary on exoticism is never overturned, and the linking back to universals, of lost children, seemed forced. Shay’s recounting of the story is indeed much like the Malagasy gossip, just a banal story to be jazzed up with a headhunter!
mkevane, I had a very similar reaction to the story. I felt pulled in two directions, both finding I liked the story but also thinking that the metaphor of colonialism didn’t tell us anything new about it or anything that might be unique about this particular place. I would not call the story banal – it was better than that, but the headhunter subplot was very strange.
David, Agreed, maybe banal too strong a word. Excellent clear writing and enough plot to keep moving forward. All the way back to (the final scene of “La Dolce Vita”?) the seaside…