“Suffocation Theory”
by David Rabe
from the October 12, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
David Rabe, at 80, has really burst back onto the scene with his third story in The New Yorker in just over a year. Here we have “Suffocation Therapy.” I’ve been (and this is getting to be a familiar refrain) very busy the past several weeks, so I have not been keeping up and have not read this one yet. Rabe’s interview with Deborah Treisman does introduce the story nicely, though. And here is how it begins, with an introduction to a world that reminds me of Mad Max:
Amanda surprised me when she said we had to move. I’d barely got in the door, barely been in the hallway of our apartment a second, when she passed in and out of my peripheral vision, catching sight of me, I guess, and making her announcement. I’d been planning to take off my shoes and flop down with a cup of coffee and watch the news on TV — one blast of terrible news after another. I didn’t know what the terrible news would be today, but I knew it would be terrible. Car crashes would be the least of it. Accidental ones, anyway. It had become common for people in cars to mow other people down. But that wasn’t the only thing. There were terrorists and gun battles in shopping malls. Locals and tourists in Malaysia and Mali and London and Paris fleeing, stampeding as soldiers ducked behind jewelry displays and fast-food counters, hunting down militants in one boutique after another. Bombs were often involved.
That’s just a sample of the first paragraph. Skimming, I see a lot of longer paragraphs here, suggesting Rabe is working more closely in the style of “Things We Worried About When I Was Ten” rather than the more clipped, dialogue-heavy “Uncle Jim Called.”
I think Rabe is doing great work, and I’m excited to see how folks like this one. Not many commented on the other two stories, though I quite liked them myself, so I’m curious if it’s just me enjoying Rabe’s resurgence.
I couldn’t get past the place where the big blonde guy with the drippy sandwich pokes his gun repeatedly into the narrator’s body. What’s with the wife deciding to move without consulting her husband? She’s less a character than a mechanism. I need someone who has read to the end to tell me that I should read it, that it eventually makes sense, that it’s worthwhile.
I read it until the end, and it’s not worth it. I’m a bit stubborn about completing things but this is just a dystopian dream which puts together various environmental and political concerns (global warming, Trump) and paranoid thoughts (being cuckolded) and which just tiresomely and unconvincingly drones on and on. I’ve liked other stories by him but this is perhaps the worst New Yorker story I’ve read in a long while. Clearly Rabe being a noted writer gets him entry here which this would never get if by an unknown writer. Boo!
Thanks, Ken, for confirming my impression and for saving me time.
I enjoyed elements of the story, such as the text messages of ever-more-traumatic news, but it didn’t work for me as a whole and I agree that it wouldn’t have been published without the name behind it.
“…the worst New Yorker story I’ve read in a long while”
Emphatically seconded. Unfocused and irresponsible.
I kept reading hoping it would let me in. Your comments validate my feelings.
Echo the comments. I could not get past the third page. I am certain not one to tell someone what to write but this was pretty terrible.
I’m surprised by the emphatic unanimity of the negative comments here, because I liked “Suffocation Theory.” I’d never before read a short story told entirely through a chain of dream narratives, with no actual real-world events whatsoever. Once you realize that these vignettes are all dreams, you stop scratching your head about illogical plotting, e.g.,the wife moving without consulting her husband.
I do see why it wouldn’t be appealing to many readers though. I think the dream structure worked here but it also reminds you of why it can be so boring to hear other people’s dreams at breakfast – always a conversation-stopper.
But dream logic is compelling to me because it reveals vivid, raw emotion visually and symbolically, through “events” and characters that mean little to anyone except the dreamer, and often the dreamer doesn’t fully understand then. I felt as though I’d been granted entry into his head, and felt a sense of intimacy with him because his private, suffocating anxieties were all on display, intense and unprocessed.
Not my favorite story of all time, but i admire the creativity of Rabe’s approach and the story’s tone of anguished ferocity.