“The Liver”
by Matthew Klam
from the March 16, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
Matthew Klam is the author of two books, Sam the Cat and Other Stories and Who Is Rich? I don’t know his work, though. I’m not sure if I’ve ever encountered either book or any other work by Klam. I’m excited for this opportunity to do so, then!
Pleasant, easy to read,but is this a story? More like a journalistic report.
I was engrossed by this but there’s not much beyond the suspense and empathy it creates. 2 days later and I can barely remember it.
Myra is portrayed as an optimistic person in the story.Justify the statement by mentioning two incidences from the story?
Having a premature baby is certainly a dramatic and stressful time and this is a solid bit of reportage of what that experience is like, but it doesn’t transcend that sense of reported experience. “Our kid was like an old person living backward, dying a little less every day, trying to get up to zero.” Nice sentence, well-executed, but the story as a whole is wanting.
Evocative imagery? Yeah, like the breech-forward baby driving a truck, nice, well-observed detail, same for the doctor with the bad sense of golf humor, formula the size of a lipstick, the straightforward hippopotamus dad, or even the presence of an anti-Trump t-shirt to ground us in time/setting. For negatives, the heart discussion dialogue with the doctor seemed really protracted and the segue from caffeine for the preemie into the dad’s coffee intake was forced.
I agree that this isn’t enough of a story. It’s more of a journal entry by a guy who, admittedly, can write well and has good tools. Klam’s story “Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine” from The New Yorker back in 2006 is quite strong (and about a similar subject). This one isn’t at that level. It’s more of a chronicle. Yes, bougie couples sometimes rely on porn to get pregnant. But the description of hanging out in hospitals as Kathy eats ice cream and her partner holds suction cups to her breasts, that’s just not enough to sustain. It’s an interesting conundrum.
For instance, the writing here is fine: “She pulled the spoon out of her mouth, ice cream half eaten, and slid it back in. She was not herself. Normally, if I listened carefully, I could hear a sound coming out of her head like a humming refrigerator. Now there was nothing.” But what does it really do for the story? The characters are dealing with their plight by using humor, but the story itself is not laugh-out-loud funny. It needs to be smarter and wittier (like Geoff Dyer writing about his stroke in “Why Can’t I See You”) or more fully realized (like Lorrie Moore’s famous story about the pediatric oncology ward “People Like That Are The Only People Here”).
Also, the ending is also pretty sentimental and the whole story then can be read as a warning against geriatric pregnancies and in support of adoption.
I wonder if this story seems more like a journalistic report, why the editor didn’t suggest it be done as a New Yorker nonfiction article unless the author wanted it to be anonymous? Sean points out some literary passages that demonstrate a fiction writer’s perspective. And I could always go to one of those writing advice books and look at one of their expert checklists of what there needs to be in a really great short story. But I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of fictional qualities or left out literary aspects that they may have wanted to see in this story that would have made it a better. Although it is his story and not ours and he most likely wrote it exactly as he wanted to, it never hurts to speculate as to what could have added to its urgency from a fiction writer’s viewpoint to go along with whatever took away from its effectiveness.
I am interested in the position that of
this is a non-fiction piece. For me it woks as a story rather than journalism not only because of the imaginative, interesting writing on which others have commented, but because of the delicate pacing and the quiet, powerful suspense. I liked knowing the wife through her husband’s description of her while learning about his inner self through the creation of the character as he lived the experience. That’s fiction. I was with him through the trajectory of his feelings about the baby and I was a witness to the place of love to which he never thought he’d get. That’s how fiction works differently from reportage. In an essay we’d have a thesis statement and ensuing development. In fiction, a discovery.