“Abject Naturalism”
by Sarah Braunstein
from the July 29, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
Looking back through the archives, I see we have had three prior stories by Sarah Braunstein in The New Yorker, and it looks like I have enjoyed them. But I’m getting older. I have no strong memory, and that should not be used to evaluate her work. I’m excited to have another opportunity to read her.
Here is how “Abject Naturalism” begins:
The baby’s father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil. Perfidy! This from a man who’d once said he’d die without her, who’d written her piles of letters after she’d rejected him, back in graduate school—though graduate school makes it sound more serious than it was. They’d gone to a university to become fiction writers. The degree took two years. During this time, Toni slept with several of her peers but not with the man who eventually became her child’s father. He left letters in her mailbox about how much this pained him. But he was too odd, she thought, terribly intense, with a work ethic that made her ashamed of her own and a burrowing gaze that at once flattered and repelled. He was skinny and had a ponytail. He carried a briefcase. He didn’t die for lack of her, despite what his letter warned.
I hope you all are having a good week. I look forward to your thoughts on this story below!
Abject Naturalism — My first quick response is that after a dose of Roddy Doyle, then a ho-hum Tesaa Hadley, then skipping the 70 column holiday special, and finally reading the recent Aysegül Savas, and the much longer Andrew Martin from Harper’s (hoping neither is a chapter one.)
Reading and listening to Sarah Braunstein reading at the same time compelled me much more than any of those previous stories. She drew me into the narrator’s urgency. Then she held my interest to the end, even when the narration seemed to go on like a novel, fully explaining itself, even before the author was given her turn in the interview… Almost as good as some of the ‘Samples’, in its way.
If that wasn’t enough, this additional story may just be!
https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/a-childrens-story-weike-wang
This last *may be the gem of the bunch. I plan to.look at it again.
In Sara Braunstein’s short story, “Abject Naturalism,” I didn’t fully understand from its title exactly what this short story is about. In the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, “abject” is defined as “terrible and without hope”. “Naturalism” is defined as “a style of writing showing things as they appear in the natural world” or “a theory that everything in the world and life is based on natural causes and laws and not on spiritual or supernatural ones”.
Aha. Just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Reading the first paragraph, the protagonist had gone to university to become a writer and in the second, she had given up writing. That, in itself, seems “terrible and without hope” and also if having give up writing was of no significance; just a random occurrence or the natural order of things which makes it that much worse. But like any excellent short story the “what happened before” part in the first two paragraphs really captured my attention.
The details of what happened, how and why are carefully set out. Some readers might call it overwriting but as long as it ties in well with the overall forward motion and doesn’t kick you out the story, it’s all good.
I love how things just happen randomly like the glossy black telescope the man gave to Amalie, “It’s needs to be cleaned.” Metaphor. Is that a metaphor? Raising interest, locking me into the story. Does this refer to her mother’s misjudgement concerning who the child’s father should have been?
But “Abject” brilliantly expresses a peculiar writer’s Catch-22. A writer needs to live life fully in order to know what to write about. Yet in living life fully, they may not have enough time to actually write about it or write about something else that is comparatively insignificant. Which is cruel for the child’s father even if he is successful because it estranges him from his daughter. And don’t get me started on what this does to the mother! Such a shallow male organism!
And the mother seems so much like a writer when she says at one point, “And I could never end things right.” She voices a concern that many writers have, but it also serves as a telling comment on how she might have handled her relationship with Amalie’s father.
The characters in this story are sharply honed somewhat in the way Lee Child deftly constructs his characters making them have so much more depth than anyone might have expected from a major thriller writer. But it’s this depth of character in the character that Sarah Braunstein continually demonstrates that strongly connects us to her story.
There is the writing professor’s implied criticism that an abject naturalism story is bad when it doesn’t take responsibility or I think what he objects to is the protagonist’s lack of “agency”. (Or full or better control over her life situation) Full agency is a pet peeve and arbitrary rule for “good” writers to always observe that some professors and book editors sometimes have. Wrong. This story is all about how a women finds and acquires the agency needs to have in order to live a full life. If that isn’t important then maybe someone needs their lenses cleaned. This is an awesome short story. Highly recommended.
Larry – I’m glad you thought to probe the title… and glad to see you commenting. Not much attention on stories these days. I hate to see no comments. But I’m afraid I’m not giving NYker stories all they deserve lately. I’ve been reading many outstanding stories from books, which leads to disappointment and impatience with some of the new. I actually think “Abject Naturalism” is one of the better ones lately. I’ve praised lesser. It compelled me enough to finish it, although it did seem to go on and on. (That’s me, the one who rarely reads novels anymore.) Writers are our friends, working hard to write something that will please us. They deserve our praise and courtesy, not to be dumped on.
Eddie,
I totally agree with you on this story. Definitely one of the better ones. The author has also published a book called Bad Animals so I decided to purchase it. I went to the author’s website and wrote that her short story in The New Yorker is awesome, that everyone should read it in the New Yorker and that I am buying her new book. The book is her second. And the first one looks interesting as well. She’s a college professor in Maine but her short story is so unacademic, which is so refreshing. Where do college professors have the time to write books? I haven’t been reading a lot of New Yorker shorts stories because I only found a few that I really like. But I decided a good reader should be reading a lot of short stories as well as novels. And The New Yorker is one of the last remaining venues for commercial short stories and also a venue for promoting the novels of their short story writers. And Trevor is so great at finding excellent books domestically and internationally that are overlooked or are underappreciated that I wanted to get back to reading the Mookse too. Writers do work so long and hard to provide readers a good short story or book to read. Writing, in order to survive, needs to be encouraged more than discouraged and as a reader, I can learn a lot from any New Yorker short story even if some other reader might enjoy a particular story more than I do.
a complex story about the consequences of choice and steering through life, finding ways to skirt the storms. Lots of thematic crafting but not heavy-handed. Excellant story, very enjoyable.
“Abject naturalism” was apparently Frank Conroy’s term for a slice-of-life story that doesn’t quite work because nothing of narrative interest actually happens. I’m sure there are some Iowa grads around who could explain this far better than I, who never “studied with” Conroy and know very little about his methods or his pedagogical lexicon.
Is Braunstein an Iowa MFAer?
It says on Sarah Braunstein’s website that she is indeed a Iowa MFAer. Slice of life short stories are a little undervalued compared to a conflicted beginning, torturous middle and awesome ending powerhouse short story. It is a little more lilting and not so hard edged and blunt like Carver. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good powerhouse short story or one of Carver’s. But I thought this one was such a little rarely seen great little “gem” of a short story.
Well, I’ll be honest, I rarely read the fiction in the NYer these days. But this one I did. And I really liked it. A lot. Until the end. Then it reminded me why I don’t read the fiction anymore. I really hate a story that doesn’t actually end (that’s what life is for!). What happens? Does the kid die? Is there a school shooting? Why do they both get sick, and what does that lead to? I truly, truly Cannot stand that kind of non ending ending, where after getting invested in the characters, we have no idea what happens to them, but just have to intuit, or sense, or imagine on our own. I mean, two people don’t get sick from donuts and coffee, unless something else is afoot. Did the creepy guy poison them? And at this point, I’m just fed up, and have no idea what the point of this story even is, just that it is in line with the fashionable stories about nothing that NYer publishes and why I don’t read them. I came to this forum, not to whine, but to see if anyone could tell me what this story was about. Blurgh