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“The Monkey Who Speaks”
by Han Ong
from the September 13, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ text_color=””]I[/fusion_dropcap]t’s nice to see Han Ong back in the pages of The New Yorker. After a thirty-year career, Ong’s first New Yorker story was published in 2019. Another came in 2020. And now we have a third!
I am running late this week due to the holiday, so I’ll just post the first taste of the story here:
Roscoe could stand to lose twenty pounds. Closer to thirty would be even better. It would ease the burden on his heart. One blessing, though: he’s still ambulatory. At his most intrepid, he makes do with an aluminum cane. Not for him the “suave” models he and Flavia marvelled over in a catalogue “for the dapper older gentleman,” which had appeared in Roscoe’s mailbox, but with somebody else’s name on the address label. One cane had a detachable metal-eagle handle and a tapered body whose tip was sheathed in copper. Another had a concealed dagger that you accessed by unscrewing the head, which was of a beagle, deceitfully hapless.
I hope you’ll share your thoughts on the story below!
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Ah, another chunk of overwritten, bumbling, half-baked musings from yet another unspectacular fictioneer. No tension. No rise, no risk, no resolve. A story about nothing built on nothing. The immigrant guilt trope is annoying. The forcefully inserted pandemic-heavy anti-ending is banal. The wannabe edgy postmodernism jumps are garbage. The writer’s insistence on forcing plotless work is garbage. The “look at my thesaurus” passages are garbage. The narrative integrity is garbage. How can someone making $4,000 per month not afford home internet?
This. Is. Garbage.
I haven’t read this one yet. I’m curious what others think. Gavin, thanks for sharing. I must say, I’m not sure what you like in New Yorker fiction yet, but I’m glad you keep letting us know what you don’t like — ha!
I’m not surprised that there are no entries here other than Gavin’s smash-and-grab – he makes me feel as though it would be sacrilegious to admire the story. (What I do admire, Trevor, is your patient response to his vitriol ) I am certainly not without my prejudices where New Yorker fiction is concerned; when a story is not about the undead in any guise, I am willing to give it a chance. So I’ll be brave and say how much I liked this story and why. I read it with curiosity and admiration, both for the plot and for the characterizations and even for the imagery (the people on the subway who were finally “swaying, sweating wallpaper.” ) I liked the relatively unusual subject matter (the relationship between a caregiver and a patient) and Ong’s treatment that was both complex and sympathetic to the characters.There were things about Roscoe that Flavia understood and liked, and things about him that were hidden and vague that concerned her both as a caregiver and a person. She snooped. She inadvertently gave away information. She was about as good a caretaker as I can imagine. I liked her complicated relationship with Roscoe’s daughter; especially Veronica’s insistence on rectitude, and Flavia’s shyness about asking for money. I promised myself I wouldn’t respond directly to any of Gavin’s angry rhetoric, but I will note that Ong was careful to credit Flavia’s money management: she understood the tentativeness of her windfall salary and knew she had to save. Since the story is so clearly set in present time, I have to assure Gavin that four thousand dollars a month in Manhattan is barely a living wage.
There’s lots more to say about this story, and I hope other readers will weigh in.