“The Hollow”
by Greg Jackson
from the November 29, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
Greg Jackson has had two stories in The New Yorker, and I liked both so I’m excited to see he’s back with “The Hollow.” Here is the rather lengthy opening paragraph:
Jonah Valente had been an object of amusement to Jack and his college classmates, and presumably he had gone on being one to other people ever since. An awkward, intense, muscle-bound young man, the sort you could imagine crashing through a wall accidentally, he had had the dim, muddled quality of students recruited to play football at the school, who either didn’t measure up academically or didn’t believe they did. Valente’s claim to fame, what had made him a figure on campus—one of that subset of maybe fifty classmates who, possessing some extravagance of character, defined the larger composite character by which the student body understood itself—came from his having abruptly quit football during sophomore year to take up painting, a passion he had developed apparently out of the blue and with a single-minded earnestness that embarrassed his more sophisticated classmates, who knew to disguise their sincerity. When Valente left the football team, changed his major, and began hanging out with a group of druggy slackers who loitered around the Visual Arts department like sun-drunk flies, the school paper ran a feature on his unusual transformation and he acquired the nickname Beaux Arts. This got shortened to B.A., and then Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, simply the Whale, and, by a different route altogether, Picasso. A year later, after spending the summer in Florence on a painting scholarship, Valente got kicked out of school. According to rumors at the time, his expulsion had to do with drugs, but Valente maintained among his friends that it was the school’s way of punishing him for quitting football. Jack had no basis for judgment. Nor did he really care. You knew very little about your classmates in the end, their real lives and disappointments and hopes, and what you did know was mostly hearsay, and often dubious and even somewhat fantastical.
With Thanksgiving week, I haven’t had a chance to look at this at all, but I hope it’s a great one! I look forward to hearing any thoughts you all might have!
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After Gish Jen’s story of real people living real lives with real problems, this facile collection of self-absorbed one-dimensional privileged young people nurturing their neuroses seems like an insult. Maybe something serious happens eventually. I couldn’t get past the first two pages.
I had put down Jackson’s last New Yorker story, “Poetry,” in irritation but had liked a story of his from earlier. This I also liked. I think that the Jack character is privileged but not necessarily the Jonah character. I didn’t read Gish Jen’s story since that issue of the New Yorker disappeared in the mail. What I liked about this was that you saw two types of exile–the temporary and the permanent. Jack ultimately gets things back together and what’s interesting is that this is so foreordained that Jackson doesn’t even describe how or why he reunites with his wife or even if he finds another job (although I’d assume he did). Jonah, though, was a moving depiction of people with more ambition perhaps than talent or savvy. His discussions of Picasso and Van Gogh ARE pathetic and irritating and also suggest an inflated self-opinion yet there is pathos to this figure and even a sort of stubbornness and integrity to his refusal. I found the meeting up at a certain point between the temporary and the permanent non-conformist to be dramatically interesting as we can potentially see two paths which will ultimately diverge from each other.