“Separation”
by Clare Sestanovich
from the April 12, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
I‘m away this week, so I haven’t had a chance to really look at Clare Sestanovich’s story, “Separation,” in any way yet. I see she has a new story collection, Objects of Desire, coming this summer from Knopf. That’s exciting news! I don’t know a lot about Sestanovich’s work, but I did think “Old Hope,” which showed up in late 2019, was promising.
Here is how “Separation” begins:
He asked Kate out at the reservoir, where she went skinny-dipping in the summer. Early in the morning, before the kids arrived, or sometimes late at night, when the water was almost black. She was towelling her hair when he appeared, and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her pubic hair was unkempt.
Kate was taken aback, but she said yes. As he walked away, she noticed his uncertain footing on the rocks and the spray of eczema, like something coughed up, all over his back and disappearing into his bathing suit. Already she had forgotten his name.
Well, where is this thing going? Please feels free to comment below with your thoughts!
Can a writer be too proud of their details? Should the pigs in blankets have been a guillotined darling? Such questions that come to mind. Are too many short one-sentence paragraphs a fast ticket to Short Shelf Life Land (where Lauren Oyler has already lampooned Jenny Offill and other practitioners of such offal)? Is this an actual story, or an obligatory cancer-story exercise? I liked Sestanovich’s previous New Yorker piece very much but the following paragraph and its self-conscious awareness, its minimalism-aping over-refinement, left me quite displeased:
“What happened next wasn’t that she recovered—never that, really—but she did move to a new city, where she would have to bump into life every day. She got a job at a nursery school. She rented an attic room with a slanted turquoise ceiling. On weekends, she woke to the sound of things being banged in the house’s shared kitchen. Old muffled sounds, which she heard and remembered all at once. Kate lingered like that, her eyelids erupting with morning color.”
This paragraph, for contrast, is excellent:
“The women she worked with had gray or orange hair and arms that jiggled when they scrubbed the tabletops. Kate wondered if she really belonged there. Her stomach sank between her hips, her muscles showed through her skin. She didn’t think this looked attractive. She thought it looked a little grotesque.”
But…Preceding it with that one single line offset all by itself, portentous and too-conspicuous—”Kate worked at the nursery school for too long.”—isn’t a good choice.
The rush forward to the married-man father among the mothers who becomes the next man in her life (the opposite of her dead husband) is a tad predictable but well-executed. She goes for hyper-concision and succeeds (largely). Second husband, ok, ba bum ba bum ba bum, no drama, just style, ok ok ok. Still kind of feels like an exercise, though, an inessential thing.
I find it interesting that the protag is embarrassed by drama because the author seems to be too.
See, a sentence all by its lonesome as a paragraph. Is it all that innovative or cool?
The last two lines are quite good. Does a fine ending save an otherwise “meh” story?
I was confused by the daughter’s pain and their lack of connection. Were we to understand that the main character’s early loss lead to her to fear connecting with a child that she could possibly lose? she seemed to connect with Felix though.
I had no problem with style here and I enjoyed the humor at parts of the story (more in the early part) but my problem was how opaque the main character was and I also had a hard time answering the question “What’s the point here?” It’s not that Sestanovich never describes the character’s moods or feelings but I still didn’t have much sense of her overall personality or traits–It’s hard to imagine her talking to a stranger at a party for instance–she seemed somewhat a blank.
The whole story felt like a blank in a way. It’s not that I need to be lectured at to think a story has a point. The wonderful story last week by Sterling Holywhitemountain didn’t didactically state “Here’s what this is about” but I quickly could state, if asked, that it’s meditating on native American identity in the white world (specifically academia) and also telling a moving story of first love. With this you certainly get all the significant events of melodrama–death by cancer, a daughter with teenaged body issues, two very cute meets–but at the end I was left wondering what the point was? What is her attitude about life and the character?