“My Friend Pinocchio”
by David Rabe
from the February 10, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
He’s still at it! David Rabe is 84 years old, and this is his fourth story in The New Yorker in the last few years. I have enjoyed each, so I’m glad to have another. Best known as a playwright and screenwriter, I’m glad he has been writing more fiction, and I need to pick up his 2022 book Listening for Ghosts: A Novella and Four Short Stories.
Here is how “My Friend Pinocchio” begins:
When I broke Kenny’s bedroom door, I was in the middle of a crazy argument with my girlfriend. Kenny and his wife, Cathy, were away, and, actually, I didn’t ruin the door, but I damaged it and hurt my hand. This was the girlfriend I’d run after in a panic-stricken, wild breakout that destroyed my first marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Time in the breakdown lane. It turned out to be a kind of walking collapse, in the sense that pneumonia is sometimes “walking.” So I walked around pretty much like shattered pottery glued back together haphazardly, all the while drinking, with a teeth-gritted determination to hang on to my girlfriend and survive. Not that pottery can drink or walk. But I could and did, and one of the things I did in that time was break Kenny’s door.
Please feel free to post your thoughts below!
I found this rather pleasant and digressive and it seemed like it could be auto-fiction, but I wonder if this would be published in The New Yorker if not the work of a well-respected playwright like Rabe.
Certainly, memory, friendship, questions of sexual identity are interesting, but to me this didn’t do much more than sort of toss things out (albeit pleasantly).
Agreed. I lost interest and started skimming towards the end.
After reading David Rabe’s “My Friend Pinocchio,” I wrote an email to a friend I especially appreciate for being a friend to me. Such is the power of this short story.
It’s like a little play or a film staged in a reader’s imagination. We see Donny in an idle moment thinking of his friendship with Kenny. And the stage goes dark and the little scenes Donny remembers come alive on stage or unspool onscreen.
The smooth progression of this story from beginning to end is amazing because the precision of one’s memory can be difficult to effectively translate as words on paper or on to an electronic space.
So much of the meaning in this story is generously left for the reader to fill in. The Pinocchio image to me means how we, as guys, may feel so unprepared after we are born to actually build a decent life composed of close fulfilling relationships and stellar accomplishments.
It is so spiritually debilitating to realize late in life how one may have fallen short but on other side one may feel blessed by the presence of a particular friend, who may now be no more. Rabe makes this so real in his story that it has resonance probably for almost any reader even if it concerns something they’d otherwise never think about.
There is the skillful counterpoint of looking at sex toys and going to an ashram to meditate. And then juxtaposing the glittery blockbuster Hollywood film with the not so widely seen sleeper Italian neorealist one with it’s simple yet so much more spiritually fulfilling story.
The strengths and weaknesses of good friends are explored. I especially like how in a good friend one can’t help but see the good stuff no matter what else has happened.
Best lines are “You are Puff the magic dragon, who helped poor, clumsy me.” And then later, when Kenny is meditating and imagines Jesus asking if Kenny will help him carry his Cross. And Kenny says he can’t and Jesus turns to him and says, “It’s O.K. You don’t have to. But I will help you carry yours.”
Gets you thinking of Donny and what good friends are for.