“Satellites”
by Rebecca Curtis
from the July 12 & 19, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
It’s a bit later than usual, but it has arrived: the 2021 New Yorker summer fiction issue! This year we have fiction from Rebecca Curtis, Sally Rooney, and — surprisingly — Marcel Proust!
Rebecca Curtis’s last story to appear in The New Yorker , “Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of Shit,” got a lot of comments here, with many hating it and many liking it. I didn’t read it, so I have no comment! And here we are with another: “Satellites.” I can’t wait to see the response to this one! Here is how it starts:
One day last July, my husband’s friend Tony Tarantino—a tall, good-looking, rib-eye-and-Scotch-loving, thrice-divorced, AB-negative Trump enthusiast—drove up from Virginia Beach to the Jersey shore to visit my husband, a retired banker, at his hulking nine-bedroom, eight-bath Tudor in the town of Coda-by-the-Sea, and after we’d all been chatting, sans masks, on the porch for a while, right after Tony enjoyed an organic, grass-fed “marrow burger” I’d picked up for him from Cavé, the excellent local paleo restaurant, his cell phone rang. He said, Hello . . . ?, then frowned and hung up. He blushed as he placed his phone on the table next to his mai tai.
My husband said, Auto warranty about to expire?
My husband asked whether Tony knew who the woman was.
Tony held his hands out, palms up. She hung up before he could ask, he said.
So please enjoy this issue, and let me know how you felt about the story!
Curious why no one’s posted about this? Did people start it and not finish it? I was tempted to stop. This was so highly based around “telling” and not “showing” that it seemed artless. Interestingly, Sally Rooney’s story is also very straightforward about delivering a lot of narrative/character info. yet somehow it worked for me. My other problem with this was its sort of heavy-handed social observations and invocation of both the responses of the political right to COVID-19 and their fondness for Trump.
I stopped after the first page. Bad writing. Too-long sentences artlessly constructed. Also each character is described with a series of phrases, as though those properties make up a person. Probably part of what Ken meant by telling not showing. And how can she like both guys if she thinks they’re both jerks? And how can any woman marry a guy who is thrice divorced? Talk about warning flags. I know that women do this, but do I want one to be my guide through a short story? Another story that makes me wonder, Was this the best they had available?