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“Call Me Ishmael”
by Shirley Jackson
“Arrivals”
by Bryan Washington
“A King Alone”
by Rachel Kushner
“Peking duck”
by Ling Ma
from the July 11 & 18, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” text_color=””]F[/fusion_dropcap]or years and years the fiction issue of The New Yorker came out in early June, but this is the second year it’s arriving in July. I’m not sure which I prefer, but I’m excited it’s here! This time we get an early story from Shirley Jackson and new stories from Bryan Washington, Rachel Kushner, and Ling Ma.
Enjoy! And please come back and leave your thoughts below! Which was your favorite?
Here are the pieces:
“Call Me Ishmael,” Shirley Jackson
“Yes,” she said. “It’s incredible.”
It was quite stupid of people, she thought, to make everything, even conversation, so interrelated and dependent that she could not say merely that it was incredible but must be referring to something preceding or obvious; nothing exists, she thought, unless it depends upon something previous; people are incapable of realizing anything that does not bear upon that interrelation. In this case, it was the number of warm days that was incredible (warm days being a factor in anyone’s understanding), instead of anything more important, and there seem to be so few important things, she thought desperately, besides the weather.
“Arrivals,” by Bryan Washington
You’ve caught the morning’s first flight and your car is late, but Aiden told you it’d be there and five minutes later it is. He’s filming in Georgia, because apparently everyone’s filming in Georgia, which means he’s sleeping on set, which means you won’t catch him during daylight hours—but he still puts you up in a hotel on Piedmont for the weekend.
“A King Alone,” by Rachel Kushner
He was on a low road next to the French Broad, which divided the town in half. He thought about how with small cities, like this one, that were split in two by a river, you added the word “West” or the word “East” to the half that was less desirable, the half that was not the commercial center.
“Peking Duck,” by Ling Ma
In my first years in the U.S., my parents take me to the library to encourage my learning of English. With my mother’s guidance, I check out ten, fifteen books every weekend. Though I gravitate toward picture books, my mother pushes me to start reading more advanced chapter books. “Just the words themselves should be enough,” she says. “If you can’t think up the image on your own, then that’s a failure of imagination.”
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For me the biggest best surprise of this New Yorker Fiction issue is Rachel Kushner’s “A King Alone.” It’s the short story equivalent of one of those top twenty countdown songs you hear on the radio for the first time and know it will instantly be one of the 41 songs that have remained at No. 1 for at least 10 weeks.
She has an uncanny ear for the odd remark slipped in out of nowhere: “Did you know most people are dehydrated?” Her protagonist is named George and you think of George Strait but he is more of an outsider like Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard.
This is road trip story with George having some adventures and reflecting on his life. The really small towns in rural west Tennessee that possibly got stuck in a 1950s time warp actually look very much like how she describes them. All the detail and especially the hardscrabble tone of this story is superlative. George is so well rendered that he makes you remember people like him you may have met in your life or if you ever see someone who seems like him, you will know all about him.
Kushner’s characters are singularly individualistic and live their lives fiercely outside the mainstream. She brings them to life very precisely with what they say, what happens and how they see it.
She is very wise about how tough self-focused men and women relate or can’t relate to one another because they are either too recklessly subjective or cannot abide having to be someone’s object or in any way under someone’s thumb. These dynamics are murky but very true to life.
Kushner almost seems a bit like Joan Didion’s literary great granddaughter. Both write in a simple boiled down direct style with perfect description. They both went to University of California, Berkeley. But Joan Didion’s parents were Republicans and Rachel Kushner’s were Communists. But both wrote novels set in Latin American countries. Though their characters are hard-boiled, you can sometimes glimpse their vulnerability in their shadows if the light falls just right.
“A King Alone” is a classic topper you don’t see very often in the New Yorker or in any other short story venue.
I agree that A King Alone is stellar. It seems to me very much a retelling of Alice Munro’s Save the Reaper.
Kushner’s parents were communists? More like champagne socialists– she’s as bourgeois as they come… which explains her romantic, sentimental portraits of the working class. The only people who find her “hardscrabble” characters authentic are middle class MFA writers. But hey, did you know she used to race motorcycles?! LOL.
PS- Kushner is 53, she’s too old to be Didion’s literary granddaughter, let alone great-granddaughter.
I’ve never had a particularly high opinion of Shirley Jackson. In fact, when The New Yorker republished it a year ago, I found her classic “The Lottery” rather uninteresting once one knows the (admittedly brilliant) twist.
But this story, “Call Me, Ishmael,” is academic in the best sense of the word. Language is always in reference to something previous, notes our third person focalizer and daughter of the main character, it’s never just standalone. She then goes through and analyzes the actual emphasis behind her mother’s sentences and the way we can turn people into functions and objects with language. This is really interesting and a surprise.
And what of Shirley Jackson invoking Melville with her title?
Heath —
When you call Kushner’s story a “retelling” of an Alice Munro story, what do you mean? I don’t know the Munro story. To what extent do you think Kushner’s story is a new twist on a previously used theme and to what extenht is it copying?
my favorite stoy from this issue is “Peking Duck”. First she gives the duck a symbolic value. Then, in the latter half of the story, she completely turns around the pov from the first part — which was from the daughter’s pov — and re-tells it from the mother’s pov. In the process she completely reshpes the mother’s personality in our minds and shows how children can misinterpret or misremember their parents’ actions.
I also liked “Peking Duck” a lot. The shift from high reflexivity into the first person (which ends the story and thus is not a further example of something being embedded) is emotionally satisfying and moves the story from the clever into a more thoughtful realm.
Heath mentioned that Rachel Kushner’s “A King Alone” seems a retelling of Alice Munro’s “Save the Reaper”. Both stories have a vulnerable hitchhiker but Kushner’s has a father and “Save the Reaper” has a mother and the mother has dementia and the father in “A King Alone” doesn’t appear to. He’s just old. Both parents seem to have weaknesses or failures. If you looked at in a general way, they might seem the same. But Monro’s story takes place in Canada and Kushner’s in Tennessee. Also there is a tone and voice difference in that Kushner is fairly unrestrained and Alice Munro is bit more guarded or circumspect although just on the surface. The question for the reader is if they got a lot out of the Munro story and less from the Kushner story because it seemed too much the same. Heath seemed to admire the Kushner story even if it seemed to him, a retelling of Munro’s story.
I was going to read the Munro story but I didn’t find a convenient way. However, I did find a commentator who said that Munro’s story was a retelling of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. Irony of ironies. A retelling of a retelling? Or a theme —‘mothers and daughters — that female writers are drawn to?
In both ‘A King Alone’ and ‘Save the Reaper’ there is a parent, who is also a not-entirely-successful artist, who has a strained relationship with their daughter due to the wanton life they have led as an artist. While the parent drives, they sift through their memories of the relationship with that daughter. Then the driver picks up a vulnerable hitchhiker which in the parent’s mind has connections with their absent daughter. The parent tries to help the hitchhiker, offering her money and a place to stay. In the end the hitchhiker disappears, leading back to the the original thoughts of the daughter.
Most stories don’t have this plot.
It is true that the stories take place in different locales and have different moods.
The mother in ‘Reaper’ does not have dementia, though Betsy argues that she does on her article about the story on this site.
I recommend reading ‘Save the Reaper’ and ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ as they’re both amazing short stories.
Stories are always retelling other stories. There are no themes of mothers and daughters in Flannery O’Connor’s story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’
Thanks for that explanation, Heath.