“The Boy Upstairs”
by Joshua Ferris
from the June 6, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
It’s Memorial Day in the United States as I sit to write this, and my kids all finished school and are looking forward to summer holidays. I was kind of hoping the summer fiction issue would be this week since we’ll be taking off for a vacation, but that’s not to be so. Still, a new story by Joshua Ferris is a good way to start the week.
Though I’m not sure this is one that will brighten the mood!
She was often tempted to be done. She was tempted, but she would never do it. She had principles, and she had pleasures, too, sources of dumb joy. She had her husband and her dog. She had her books. True, books were also a source of anguish, as was her husband. But, on the whole, there was more upside than downside to books and husbands. She taught two classes a semester, and in her spare time made sense of her thoughts in papers submitted to journals of philosophy. She despaired over her low acceptance rate. The adjuncting gig was necessary but paid next to nothing. With her husband, she owned a small clapboard house with green shutters and a decaying front porch where sat a pair of teal Adirondack chairs made of plastic. They had no children.
She was tempted, but never would. To her, the temptation was not a sign of despair but a sane acknowledgment of the world we live in, and sane acknowledgment was its own source of comfort. She would carry on. She would put gas in the car. She would park and feed the meter. When she couldn’t find any coins under the floor mats to feed the meter, she would go from shop to shop with her dollar bill, asking the clerks to make change. Life was made up of these little hassles—and of big tragedies, too, incalculable cruelties, things that no right-thinking person should abide.
I have been enjoying Ferris’s work more and more over the years, and I’m definitely intrigued to know more about this woman and where we’re going in “The Boy Upstairs.”
Please feel free to share your thoughts below!
I was disappointed by this story. I felt that the author was cheating by giving us such a quick summary of the protagonist’s unraveling without bothering to do the more difficult task of making us believe in her in the first place. For example, the idea of a philosophy professor writing “f*** off” repeatedly on a student’s paper is interesting, and worthy of a short story in itself. What on earth would make her do that? What could possibly lead to this? We never find out. There is a certain glibness in moving the chess pieces so quickly in order to focus on this woman’s downfall.
I liked it okay as a thought experiment, though I cannot unpack the initial quandary: would I sacrifice my own status—let every little or big secret I harbor come to light—in order to retroactively save a friend from such pain? I guess I don’t get what thought pathways this is supposed to open up.
Not that I think it needs to necessarily, but I think it would appeal to me more.
Were are all the public scandals she experienced after hearing of Nicky’s possible suicide real? Or was she trying to imagine the horrible things she would have to do, and have exposed, to be able to save Nicky? We don’t hear her husband’s name in the story, so the”Chad” sequence catches us by surprise. A little surreal.
A question that occurred to me was whether her wish to trade places with the boy’s mother, Anna, was based in a wish to experience the kind of attachment motherhood brings. She describes herself as “barren,” with a life that seems to verge at times on meaninglessness. Her first tears are of ordinary, self-centered, “protest and tears of guilt.” Her later tears reflect the loss represented by death, and reveal an appreciation of the deep connection that risks devastation. She seems sadder, but more alive.
Callie and Joe both suggest that the story is underdeveloped. “…a quick summary” in Joe’s words and Callie says “We don’t hear her husband’s name so … catches us by surprise.” I agree with them both. I am not a writer or involved in creative writing in any other way and it’s difficult for me to come up with more substantial and insightful comments sometimes. So here, I’m reduced to giving feedback on the other comments.
I found the build up of the story to be worth the read and was pulled in by her unhinged mental state. The Chad surprise was fun but..
can someone tell me was he the student in the pictures?
Dee Dee, since Chad had a wife, I think he was not the student, but could be!
There is a lot of ambiguity here and I’m not sure it makes for a productive read, although this is certainly interesting. For instance, how long has she been seemingly doing things without remembering them? Has this been ongoing or could it be connected to the pact she has made to sacrifice herself? It’s almost like “Fight Club” where the narrator has a second self doing things he wouldn’t dare to do, a sort of inner id. Here it would be doing things like writing curses on a student’s paper.
As for the end, I would have liked more resolution yet I am also aware that is possibly a conventional response. Certainly ambiguity or open endings are valid strategies sometimes, but here???
Finally, is the bringing up of Internet shaming and sexual misconduct not a bit too opportunistically placed considering the current cultural moment?
I’ve thought about this a bit more and what’s interesting is that we have two difficult realities to accept. One is that this was a miracle or some sort yet within the secular world of literary fiction and the story itself and presumably many New Yorker literature readers this is not something to be countenanced EXCEPT in fantasy, horror, or science fiction writing. The second is that it’s all coincidence. Yet…it’s really quite a coincidence. Or maybe not–maybe she’s just reaped the bitter harvest of activities she may not even remember having committed. Still…all in a few hours?