“The Shape of a Teardrop”
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
from the March 15, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
It’s been a couple of years since we last got a new T. Coraghessan Boyle story in The New Yorker. The last was “Asleep at the Wheel,” which showed up in the February 11, 2019 issue of the magazine. When it was published I wrote exactly what I first wrote when I sat to start this post: “Even though I’ve only loved a few of them, I’m always excited when I see that Boyle has a new story in The New Yorker. His ability to carry me from start to finish with an exciting voice is something I always enjoy even if the story itself doesn’t speak to me.” Well, I’m delighted to say: here we go again!
It looks like “The Shape of a Teardrop” will take us to a fraught parent-child relationship. First, the magazine put this as the story’s blurb:
What I really wanted to sue them for was giving birth to me in the first place.
And then we also have this opening section:
I’m not going anywhere. They can come in with police dogs and fire hoses and I’ll cling to the woodwork till I’m stripped to the bone. They’d like that, wouldn’t they, their one and only child, who never asked to be born in the first place, reduced to an artifact in his own room in the only home he’s ever known.
This story is divided into thirteen sections, each with a title, almost like a chapter title: “Police Dogs and Fire Hoses,” “Every Advantage,” “The Document in Question,” etc. They go back and forth between the child — who is not a child anymore — and the parents. “Every Advantage,” for example, is from the parents and begins:
He had every advantage. We loved him, we still love him, our only child, who came to us as the sweetest and truest blessing from God when I was forty-one and so empty inside I was staring into the void in my every waking moment and in my dreams, too, which used to be full of wonder but had turned so rancid I could feel my brain rotting right there on the pillow while Doug snored the night away — because he’d given up, he really had, worn out from working overtime so we could afford the in-vitro treatments, which were just money down the drain, because nothing ever came of them except heartache.
So Boyle sets up these warring factions: the bitter son on the one side, upset he is no longer on the family plan, and on the other the mom and dad, who just served their son an eviction notice.
I’ll share my thoughts below once I’m done reading the story, which I have ready to go over lunch! I hope you’ll let us know your thoughts as well!
I thought this was very interesting, not necessarily for the story but for how Boyle puts it together.
Justin is an unsympathetic “deadbeat dad” who lives in his basement at thirty-one and who has nothing to do with his seven-year-old son, Alejandro. But his parents have evicted him, and he has tried to counter sue them for breaking their parental obligations, feeling emboldened by such stories in the news.
This story is told when we hear from Justin and then from his mom. His father, Doug, is in the background of each, the firm hand.
The reason I found this so interesting is that Boyle does not pull any tricks that I could see to make us sympathize with Justin. Justin’s anger and resentment is extreme, and his sense of being the victim is all over his parts of the story. He is no father to Alejandro, though he blames his own parents — who feel abused — for bringing him into his bad life. I figured somewhere we’d get a nugget that I could point to and say — aha! there’s Boyle putting his finger on the scale to make us sympathize with Justin. But I don’t think that happened, and to be honest I don’t sympathize with Justin’s viewpoint so much as I’m devastated for them all to be in this terrible situation. Boyle does let us know that there have been — long in the past — moments of warmth, and that some of Justin’s sense of betrayal is due to his insecurity and probably a longing for a time when he could take his parents love for granted.
Anyway, I liked this quite a bit, and I’m thankful that Boyle, to me right now anyway, lets the characters just talk on the page without making me feel manipulated into wanting redemption or condemnation for any of them.
Good thoughts here Trevor! Regarding your concluding remarks, I’m curious if you have a handy example of a recent NY’er story (or other story) where the author clearly does make the reader feel manipulated in such a manner? I agree with you that the best stories will present well balanced characterizations, allowing the reader to simply see the world from the characters POV, irregardless of how backwards those characters may internalize/rationalize their own behaviors/situations.
I also thought this story was generally well done, this pathetic Justin is a caricature of the uber privileged “momma’s boy”, the kid that just simply expects his parents to provide in perpetuity. While this phenomena is certainly becoming common in the US, I’ve heard in Italy upwards of 2 out of 3 young people will remain at home well into their 30s (search: “mammone”). There was something vaguely reminiscent about Justin to that of Ignatius J. Reilly from ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’. His infatuation with these fish was most hilarious, especially in light of his complete disregard for his own son! It seems (perhaps with minimal effort) he could have gotten a job at that fish store that he easily walked to…but alas he is the type of person to always see the problems rather than the solutions, to always be the victim!
Be careful what you wish for. This echoed at the back of my mind as I read this. Fate, nature or whatever faceless guides we have, were solidly informing Justin’s parents that having a baby would be an almost impossible reality for them. But at the risky age at which his mother did become pregnant with him, she was able to have a baby, and sign up for all the inherent risk and rewards that go with it.
Justin shows all the hallmarks of being a bit on the spectrum, right down to his favorite subject: fish. His neurotypical parents were more than generous in their support of his challenged behavior. Boyle put a fine light on the perspective of both parties in this type of relationship.
“The limits of love” sums up this story quite well.
A fuller commitment to reimagining a present-day version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man — Justin has a lot of mass shooter traits, or if Boyle wanted to be really brave he would have made his ‘pity me I’m the victim’ boy a person of color men’s rights activist doing his griping online — would’ve been preferable to this choppy and rather thrown-off-feeling piece from TC. That may sound harsh, but the man obviously has talent and is squandering it (and some strong ideas) via the form of this piece. There are too many turns and twists that give us glimpses but not excavations, allusions instead of explorations.
A capital insurrectionist type honky hatched from maw and paw’s basement. An ogler of and piner for women at the mall. A riff on parental expectations and the expectations of children. Suburban self-pity in the First World. Obligatory reproduction vs. willful non-procreation and anti-natalism. People who love animals more than humans. An overly litigious country. It’s a mishmash, a series of notebook entries (good ones, very good ones, but still just jottings and notions), not a fully-formed piece of fiction.
Still, Boyle is a near-master and some of the turns of phrase capture the self-pitying son perfectly (a character who, though detestable, is rather witty; his description of the judge made me laugh out loud, and the closing imagery and his own judgment of Alejandro’s drawing is fine black comedy). There’s a miserablism to it, and I wish the author would have invested his significant talents in fleshing out one or two of these big conceptual ideas, but on the whole it’s a moderate thumbs up. In his 70s now, at least Boyle’s brain is still burbling.
(And good comments above! I agree with Brian S’s ‘Confederacy of Dunces updated’ point, and with Robin Baker’s about the sociological phenomenon of older and older people trying incredibly hard to become parents in America and the potential consequences that come with it).
I have to echo Sean H. Boyle is such a good writer that he has never even come close to boring me and this was riveting, but I’d also ask “And?” Sure…there may be an uptick in this type of person today and the Internet may be allowing their resentments to fester, but I’m not sure this is enough. His brilliance, though, is getting into a character’s voice and speech patterns and sucking the reader in. I’ve noticed Boyle often seems to dislike and punish his characters as well, in novels and in short stories (I was thinking of Ronnie in “Drag City” for instance).
I was waiting for something with more layers of colors as I read the story, in particular, the phrase “the whole point of life is to create more life.”