“Clay”
by Caleb Crain
from the August 12, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
This is going up a week later than it should because I have been away, but I’m back! Those of you who have already read this week’s fiction can now comment on it, and those of you (like me) who haven’t can now be reminded of it. For the purposes of having an easily searchable archive, I am going to date this post for when it would have been up had I been able to follow my usual schedule.
Caleb Crain has been publishing since the 1990s and has two novels out (2013’s Necessary Errors and 2019’s Overthrow). I know I’ve seen his name, but I do not know if I’ve ever read any of his work, even the one short story he published in The New Yorker in September of 2022 (“Easter”). I do plan to go back and fix my oversight with “Easter,” and I’ll post there when I am able. Have any of you read Crain’s work before?
Here is how “Clay” begins:
The county had recently put in a light at the intersection of 14 and 273, because of all the semis that were coming through. The Old Spot was a little south of that. It was a bar in what had once been a Mexican place, and a big wooden board with the old menu, painted by hand, was still standing in the empty lot beside it.
Coming from a small town, I love how this establishes, very quickly, a familiar place. I am looking forward to catching up! Please share any of your thoughts below!
“She was unfinished on the inside, as a person, she sometimes thought. If she ever did live by herself, she would probably get to be very odd.” This sentence jumped out at me from inside Caleb Crain’s short story “Clay.” Is being “unfinished” an advantage or a limitation? And being odd. In these times of many people trying to achieve finished inner perfection, it’s refreshing to meet a character in a short story who considers she won’t have bowled a lifestyle gutter ball if she ever needs to live alone and become “very odd.” It could turn out okay.
It’s a curious situation, this character, Jane is in when her apparent significant other, Lindy doesn’t arrive home for dinner at the usual time for the last three nights. The whole thing gets one thinking about a clay tableau that is unfinished, incomplete so as to not have been molded into full definitive shape and form. Used as a metaphor the unfinished clay compares how one may not have worked out their life or a relationship into full definitive shape and form. Kind of comforting. Unless it’s not.
Which seems to be the case after the story takes an unexpected tragic turn. Some readers might be jolted by the sudden shift. The significant other turns out to have been a horrible life partner choice.
From the tenderness in the beginning I hadn’t expected this story to go full out Quentin Tarantino but usually when bad things happen, up to when they do, no one is especially suspicious of what might mostly otherwise seem ordinary behavior.
Crain is especially crafty at pretty much withholding all the key information concerning the why of the culminating event. Readers have to figure it out and there may be variation in what conclusions they reach.
We know all about Jane but not much about her partner Lindy or any of his thoughts and reactions to his personal situation. But it seems being unfinished on the inside can turn out to have been a huge liability as it was for Jane. Incredibly sad but well written.
Would be great to read other reactions to this short story.
In stories like this, the victim often becomes indignant or vindictive. Here instead, she stays calm and thoughtful, and within herself, like someone who is centered and likes herself. She’s not weak and is willing to protect herself by sleeping near a gun. It’s a different perspective in an era of honor culture. She wants to be herself and live her own life, and if she has to live alone, she’s fine with that – a fine story.