A Wrinkle in the Realm
by Ben Okri
from the February 8, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road won the 1991 Booker Prize. I thought I had reviewed it on the site in the early days, but I don’t see that I did. I found it wonderful and complex, but it’s the only book of his I’ve ever read. I admit I needed a lot of help to get through it, and I’ve been intimidated by his work ever since.
I really like how “A Wrinkle in the Realm” starts.
The first time he realized that there was something not quite right about him was when a woman crossed the street as she saw him coming. He thought it was a coincidence. Then it happened again.
He began to watch those around him. One day, on the Underground, a woman three empty seats away moved her handbag to her other side when she saw him. He wasn’t sure why.
After the fourth or fifth time something like that happened, he looked at himself in the mirror. He thought he was normal, like everyone else. But when he looked at himself through the eyes of those who clutched their handbags when they saw him he understood that his face was not as normal as he’d thought.
I’m getting behind on some of the latest New Yorker stories I want to read, but this one is going on the list. Let me know your thoughts below.
Evocations of The Elephant Man and “The Nose” at the outset, with “othering” and “invisibility” as immediate themes, perhaps even rather didactically and obviously so. I quickly started to feel that I was in the realm of the insipid, an old eminence writer who’s lost his way, a first-person POV narrator/character nattering about how the trees are his only friends because they don’t judge him. I’m all for a winnowed-down story but this abuts the childish, I started to think.
The subject matter has been addressed, long ago, by everyone from Kafka to Ralph Ellison, hasn’t it? And there are a gazillion essays written by a person of color about people grabbing tight to their purses in elevators or following them around convenience stores. Every college anthology has one. Brent Staples’s “A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space” is a title I remember. There’s the Jewish version and the Latino/a version and the Asian version and the disabled/disfigured person’s version of these essays as well. For an amusing one, Youtube has Greer Barnes’s standup comedy bit “If I Was a White Woman, I Would Rob Black Dudes.”
I know Okri as a folklorist with magical realist tendencies, so maybe the masks for any given reader might call to mind Poe, or Eyes Wide Shut, or The Scarlet Letter, or countless other narratives to hang a story on the symbol of “The Mask” (the Jim Carrey movie of that title just one of the countless). A political person inclined to see race might think of “passing” or of black people “acting white” to fit in, the slur of “Oreo,” so Fran Ross and Nella Larsen might emerge, or a handwringing liberal white guilt discussion of Obama’s appeal and racism in America as perpended by a foreigner and that whole shebang.
Or is it a metaphor for workplace harassment, men being forced to subsume their sexuality in order to have a more egalitarian world? Or a commentary on Covid masks and dehumanization/objectification? A riff on online dating and e-dentities? It’s certainly a gnomic little thing, a parable capped with an O Henry ending. Hard to say if it’s “good,” it sort of resists interpretation and quality-based judgment. It’s certainly not original, though. Does it bring anything new to the proverbial table? Is it substantive and complex? Or is this the case of a piece the New Yorker never, never, never would have published if you put a random name on it and slipped it to an editor and said, “Hey, you guys should publish this short story by Joe Smith”? I think that’s my final verdict.
What a painfully condescending analysis.
There are so many short stories in the world still in print or out of print or out of circulation or forgotten or the orphan never published ones sitting in an author’s drawer. So chances of reading anything new are pretty remote if a new story only reminds you of older stories and doesn’t register any sort of thought except total dislike or complete rejection.
And there are certain problems in the world that we seem stuck with that will never get solved. But with every problem sometimes there is progress and sometimes bad human nature persists to the point that cynics and pessimists counsel that nothing can be done and it all has to be endured, like in some ways, the pandemic. There is pandemic fatigue and there is short story fatigue and there is all that’s bad in the world fatigue. It is always a glass half full or half empty or in this case the perception of a story being totally empty out of the fatigue at having read so many similar stories.
I hope someone will comment on a different sort of reaction they might have experienced on reading “A Wrinkle in the Realm.” Authors can write one really great novel or short story that gets widely read and readers look forward to their next one. And sometimes it is never as good as the first one. Sometimes a reader gets nothing out of a short story and can’t find anything good about and so just dismisses it entirely. Other times a short story has a little kernel of something that made it worth reading. Some little tiny occurrence in one’s life that was or is enjoyable.
A very short allegoryi. Okri had a whole volume of short allegories some time ago, that I found difficult to read. Here the idea is straightforward, but it is a wrinkle. I think maybe a wrinkle on Recitatif, by Toni Morrison? The fiction works because the reader is constantly aware of all that they are bringing to the story: an immense cultural and literary understanding through which the simple story is filtered. Like Recitatif, it feels like an exercise, and the allegory’s subject matter is so serious that maybe we humans do need regular exercise in this realm? I listened to Okri, with his quiet straightforward delivery, and I think that might be better than reading it?
I enjoyed this but was genuinely puzzled at what exactly the allegory was here? I ran through a few things like race and COVID but the inconsistent reactions to the narrator made anything hard to stick. If it’s race then why only at certain times of day and not at work? Poor self-esteem leading into a vicious circle? That seems potential but what would have started it? I thought the group here might provide answers but clearly there is a general tone of puzzlement with some more positive than others about the story.
Sean H–thank you for your incisive critique. I found it quite telling, especially your last 2 sentences.
Thanks John. I just always think that’s a good standard, not just for writing but in all things in life. I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt to an established writer (or person in their field) and saying “Hey, this person has done good work in the past,” but there are clearly times when it seems like The New Yorker may be doing someone a favor or publishing something out of some weird sense of nepotism or obligation. The same holds true for year-end anthologies or anything that comes down to selection in the literary world. It’s sad that the publishing industry is so profit-driven but that’s capitalism, I can live with the fact that things of dubious merit are published because it’s known that they will sell a lot of copies. I certainly wouldn’t proffer books like The Help or The DaVinci Code as fine writing, but they sell books. But if we abandon meritocracy in venues for literary fiction (like The New Yorker), then mediocrity flourishes, and again, that’s true whether that’s in literature or auto repair, in cooking or in carpentry. Whatever your field or industry, you should want good, high-quality work to prosper. We’ve got enough McDonald’s and particle board furniture and sloppy work under car hoods. We certainly don’t need more mediocrity in our short fiction either. And just because someone USED to make a good omelet or bookcase or could fix a transmission, doesn’t mean they still can.
What is the theme? the Genre? and the tone of this short story? Please enlighten me.
Sean H. thank you for your comment. You are better read and have far more experience than I in literary criticism. However I have often thought the same thing that you contend. Big time publications will publish sub-par work if the name attached to it is also big time enough. I suppose name recognition works in the publisher’s favor in that it sells copies. Wouldn’t meritocracy be lovely across all fields–publishing, politics, plumbing. Alas, who you know accounts for a dismaying amount of what passes as progress. Many, many artists, despite their creative work, plod in obscurity never finding the one step elevating them into that next level, Yesterday I had a piece rejected. I was tempted to respond, “I sent you an original work. Why did you send me a form rejection letter?” Thank you again for sharing your thoughts. I greatly enjoy your comments and always read them when they appear in my inbox. here is access to some of my work johnvanbecay.com. thank you, Sean, take care, john
I’m finally catching up here and find myself mixed on this one. On the one hand, I quite liked the transformation that takes place in this story. I like that at the end our narrator is the one walking across the street because of the others’ masks. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I find it an intriguing premise.
On the other hand, the breezy allegorical tone made me feel like I was reading a rough draft more than anything. I would have liked some of this fleshed out a bit more, I think. Perhaps some more verve. The premise could find its way into a story by Krzhizhanovsky, but it would be much stranger and unsettling and fun.