“A Challenge You Have Overcome”
by Allegra Goodman
from the January 25, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
It’s been a while since we last got a story from Allegra Gooman in The New Yorker. The last was “F.A.Q.s” in September 2017. I like her work a lot, so I’m looking forward to this one. I think the opening paragraph is promising and intriguing.
They were a family of long marriages. You might sleep in separate bedrooms and wash dishes in a fury. You might find a moldy peach in the refrigerator and leave it on the counter for three days as evidence in some private trial—but you would never leave. Dan and Melanie had been married for thirty years. Steve and Andrea were coming up on twenty-five. Andrea felt a certain vindication about this anniversary because she had married in, and her own parents had split when she was young.
I’m planning to settle into this one later tonight and will post my thoughts below. If you’re so inclined, please let me know your thoughts as well!
Some textbook concision here from Allegra Goodman, who’s a semi-regular in The New Yorker and whose “La Vita Nuova” from 2010 is one of the better short stories of the last ten or fifteen years. In-laws and honesty, the secret languages of long-term couples; underrated and underexplored subject matter these days. A chubby man with little will power who gave up on his true passion (whose son shows evidence of food issues as well, with the tub of pretzels) now in a dying industry’s crepuscular months is timely and frightening in its realism, as is a qualified but lazy applicant son who will lose out to lesser ones with backstories more likely to manipulate the pathos-and-poverty worshippers who run the Ivies.
These characters feel bourgeois as hell but are teetering at the edge of a precipice. And they’re not that much better than the full-on LA-actress college application cheats anyway. A parent “proofreading” their child’s application borders on plagiarism (where is the line btw a “second pair of eyes,” who happens to be a paid professional in the field, and a cowriter?). I laughed out loud at the “triggering” line, though. And the story has a resilient ending that abuts cheesiness, “at least we have each other,” but is in keeping with the world the story is presenting.
All that generally positive stuff said, the story needed way more Jeanne (who appears, as does her family, in connected stories that AG has published over the years). Her presence really enlivened the first third, and her dissipation as it went along, and Goodman’s choice to move closer to the husband and away from the wife and the mother-in-law, is a real misstep/missed opportunity. An above average effort but a good ways from the masterworks by Updike, Joyce, and Chekhov to which Allegra’s story alludes.