“Attila”
by Nell Freudenberger
from the August 5, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
Back in 2010 Nell Freudenberger was one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” and that’s when I read her story “An Arranged Marriage.” I don’t remember it specifically, but from my old post it doesn’t appear that I liked it that much. Indeed, I placed it in the bottom five of the twenty stories that were published. I haven’t read any of her novels published since (The Dissident from 2012, Lost and Wanted from 2019, and The Limits from just a few months ago). I’d be very curious how folks like those books, and I’m glad for an opportunity, nearly 14 years after the last time, to read more of her work in the magazine.
Here is how this one begins:
Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.” Martha assumed it was called that because mothers were more likely to move in with daughters, and men were more likely to own houses. She wasn’t married, though, and her sister, Molly, who was, didn’t have a mother-in-law apartment in her garage in Los Angeles, where real estate was much more expensive than it was in Baltimore. Also, Molly was busy with her children and hadn’t spoken to their mother in more than a year.
I look forward to reading it! Please leave any comments below!
This short story is different. I liked the inciting incident and the how the different elements of the story are like counterpoint in a Bach piece. I probably don’t really know what it’s about because it seems written in a higher anesthetic. But I like the clues or what seem like they may be clues as in “Was it possible that a creature with Attila’s particular combination of wellness and vulnerability shouldn’t be loved, that loving him showed Martha’s desperation.” Freudenberger also mentions the John Donne’s poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” and a seventeen century poet, Katherine Philips and then there’s the student named Ava, who writes poems and publishes them on Instagram discussing the seventeenth century lady poet who Martha, her teacher explains, “read the Bible by the time she was four, married at seventeen, written all these poems and given birth to two children before she died.” Even though it’s mostly dialogue, this story is very poetic in how it juggles odd older images with comfortable upper middle class ones in Los Angeles. It’s interesting in how it is offbeat in how the unfamiliar can seem to surface within the familiar or somewhat familiar. Aggressiveness pitted against domestic vulnerability. Any more explanation of what this is really about would be helpful.
To some degree, it seems about roles we are prescribed. Despite being the “second” sister (if one believes the idea that they’re more rebellious), Martha is the more mature yet the “wild” one, despite that, is the one who achieve a more normative middle-class solidity through the rupture of her rupturing mother’s (probably real) transgression. In other words, destiny, one’s basic nature and chance all create us? Is that helpful? I hadn’t cared for earlier work by Freudenberger which had struck me as a bit dull in its realism, but this adds nice nuance of character.