“Old Hope”
by Clare Sestanovich
from the December 9, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I love this week’s cover. The end of the year is approaching, and I’m looking forward to some peaceful twilight as the month comes to its end. I need some time to catch up here and refocus, and I am hopeful that time is coming. Certainly this cover gives me hope!
But on to the reason for this post, this week’s New Yorker fiction from an author I don’t know. Clare Sestanovich is on the editorial staff at The New Yorker , but I think this is the first piece she’s published in the magazine, fiction or otherwise. Looking online, I see that she has published in The Atlantic and at Electric Lit. It’s always nice to see a new voice, and I’m very interested in hearing if you like her work.
Here is how “Old Hope” begins (I like it!):
When I was about halfway between twenty and thirty, I lived in a large, run-down house that other people thought was romantic. There was a claw-foot tub with squeaky knobs, and philodendrons that draped over the bannisters. The door to my bedroom was at least twelve feet tall. I installed a coatrack over the top, and whenever I needed to retrieve a jacket, or a towel, I stood on my desk chair, swivelling uncertainly.
There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again. Two boys lived on the top floor and another lived in the basement. (They weren’t men, not really.) I was aware of being surrounded. Shirtless, they cooked big vats of tomato sauce, the steam beading on their faces and clinging to the fur in their armpits. They smoked bongs they didn’t clean, and returned my books warped by bathwater.
I know I’ve been away a lot these past few months, and, as I said above, I’m looking forward to a bit of a holiday so I can regroup. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts below!
An intriguing piece by a young writer who appears to have some legit chops. From the protagonist’s early confession that “I thought about acting more than I acted” to her concise unpacking of Hannah’s character (“an avid reader, with relatively few opinions about the things she read”), I felt in the hands of a gifted scribe from the outset.
The mom is well-portrayed too (in her limited page time; again, concision), as she sets out one of the major themes — it’s usually not the big thing that gets you, it’s the little things. And though the mom is right, occasionally the big things ARE what gets you (like the 19-year-old fraternity boy who dies). Her mom has it figured out, the English teacher has it figured out (Quaker school dream job!), but she and Hannah and Max? Not so much.
That said, adulthood isn’t all that great. Adults engage in the act of “carefully calibrated discourse” while the narrator is still trying to figure it out. There’s dignity in the way she’s trying. She’s like the Quaker kids. She sits in silence (or likes to anyways, sometimes a whole day’s worth) before speaking honestly and with vulnerability. She overthinks things, but she’s growing out of it. She’s thinking. Max and Hannah aren’t really thinking. They’re in the flow. They’re adulty without the wisdom. They’re gonna get pregnant. They run and listen to pop music. They have nice physiques but their pretty privilege (and probably other forms as well) makes it so they never much needed to think. They’re not thinking or being, they’re doers. The narrator hangs at the park, Hannah runs and listens to insidious pop music. Max is always doing something too, drawing attention to his body passive-aggressively like a wannabe Adam Driver in Frances Ha, or thinking he’s wise because he read a factoid about peppers on the internet.
Some of the yearn vs. want stuff is a little predictable in a twentysomething I-just-smoked-weed-and-it-seems-profound way. The invisible friends list was like something out of Reality Bites. A lot of this is 90s-ish, actually, just updated for the millennials.
But there’s also real, earned profundity here. The philosophical question of ‘What counts as being alone?’ is an intriguing one and the detail about being able to hear your neighbor’s electric toothbrush through the wall is perfectly chosen. The narrator’s observation of the platform guy whose name she doesn’t know but she can tell when he’s gotten a new coat — right on, Clare.
I’m sure there’ll be some Sally Rooney comparisons here, and like Rooney, Sestanovich occasionally is preternaturally good with the sex writing (though she doesn’t go as deep or as dark). Whether it’s the teacher pricking himself with the unbent paper clip (Ow! = orgasm) right after the narrator experiences the thrill of being watched by an older male she admires, or her waiting for him after the graduation, or her nonchalance in mimicking her buddy Max’s shirt removal (or even Hannah’s basic-bitch offhand jealousy), she does a good job incarnating human sexuality in a non-cheesy way.
It’s hard to write about ennui in a non-boring way, but Sestanovich manages that too. The ending is somewhat thought-provoking and ties back to that little things/big things theme. The petite mort of deleting the email. Relief and loss as one abandon’s old hopes. The glow-in-the-dark star that doesn’t fall. Sparse and anti-epiphanic. Solid choice. Knowing where and how to end is difficult for young writers.
This, per the comment above, works because even if the material is hardly original–much like any number of Mumblecore films–the writing is careful, pointed, literate.