“Café Loup”
by Ben Lerner
from the September 5, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
It feels like Ben Lerner is always showing up in The New Yorker, and I don’t mean that in a bad way — I like his work; however, in the fourteen years I’ve been posting the stories here he’s actually only showed up five times before this week, the most recent being back in 2020.
When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra — that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He had an aneurysm on the toilet,” which is one of the ways I often fear I might die. (I’m sure she’d withhold the toilet part, at least on a first date, but that would just make it worse, amplify the shame.) If I were to die on the toilet tomorrow, I assume Inma wouldn’t share many specifics with Astra — who, like most three-year-olds, finds everything relating to the “potty’’ fascinating and hilarious — but, as Astra grew older, she would want to know more about the circumstances of my death, at which point Inma would have to either lie or divulge the details (“withholding,” “divulging” — all these terms sound scatological). Inma would, I’m confident, eventually tell Astra the truth. In fact, I can imagine a version of the conversation that’s tender, sweet: Inma finally tells Astra it happened on the toilet (let’s say “while reading on the toilet”), there is an awkward moment of silence, then they both start laughing, then they both start crying, embracing each other, laughing and crying, remembering me as a well-meaning fool who projected or tried to project some seriousness as a poet, as a person, but who in fact met an appropriately ridiculous end, “Silly Dada,” as Astra always says.
Lerner’s writing always pushes me quickly through the paragraphs, and I’m anxious to see what comes next. Please share your thoughts on the story!
Ben Lerner’s “Cafe Loup” makes me think of the phrase, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or how to detach one’s self from a traumatic physical event and use it like the madeleine drop of Proust to expand one’s vision and carefully analyze all the possible aesthetic implications of its every aspect. Like one those psychedelic South America or Mexican mushrooms. Such a great setup of suspense when the air is cut off and for how long can the guy reel off a concise verbal ph.d thesis covering every meaning, every implication. I guess every one is different. I admire the logic and the calm analytics. For some nameless persons their perception shrinks rather than expands. They are in the dark of their worst nightmare and will hoping their throat would clear and even if they had to go to the hospital in an ambulance, they would be happy it only ended in a $200 copay instead of a bill for $3,000 if they didn’t have health insurance. Clearly it is story great at drawing you in.
i loved the conceit, I loved the love the narrator felt for his child. . . and I found myself holding my breath as i read , which almost killed me.
What an amazing story! Jokey (“blue wine”, dying of an aneurysm on the toilet) and serious – choking in a restaurant. It’s striking how he shifts suddenly from dying on the toilet to choking, from absurd death to scary death. At which point we are dropped into a world dissociated from normal reality.
I can’t possibly do justice to Lerner’s creativity, so I’ll just mention a few aspects that I think are best.
In its content, the story is completely mixed up, with his remembrances, his actions, his love for his daughter, and so many other things that it’s like a collage or parade of images.
Which is appropriate, since Lerner is first and foremost a poet.
Even in this “prose” piece his rhythms and “facts” are those of a poet, not quite literal, but emotion twisted out of a diverse range of thoughts.
Its first quality – and the one that is essential for a good story – is that it is eminently readable. It pulled me in. Not only because of the odd “events” and skewed time sequence, but also because it has a driving propulsive narrative. It switches from thought to thought randomly. Also it has long sentences alternating with short and normal ones, which creates diversity.
We are in suspense about how the choking episode will end. Not real suspense because the person who had the episode is telling us the story – this is a first-person narratrive – but still, we want to know how it comes out. Do we eventually find out? Not so clear.
Lerner is also juggling two parallel life-and-death situations —the hypothetical one concerning his daughter and the “real” one concerning himself.
There is lots of extravagant commentary about what he would do to avoid having his daughter die. Is his choking part of that bargain?
His thoughts during the choking are the main stuff of the story. Thoughts that go on unrealistically long. Yes, time seems to stretch out in certain circumstances, but this is clearly a surrealistic imaginative device. It is as though he recovered from this incident and is now reviewing it while interpolating odd bits of his life and imagination.