“Keuka Lake”
by Joseph O’Neill
from the March 3, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
Every time I see something new by Joseph O’Neill it takes me back to the early days of this blog. When I started it in 2008, Joseph O’Neill had just published his debut novel, Netherland. Not only did I review it in the first month of this blog’s life, but I was reading it in the hospital when my second child was born. It just takes me back in a good way. While I really enjoyed Netherland, I have not spent a lot of time reading more of O’Neill’s work. This one — “Keuka Lake” — has an intriguing start, though, so I’m hoping to get to it soon:
Between the ages of fourteen and fifty-four Nadia does not for a single minute not have an admirer or a boyfriend or a better half. Then Drew, her husband, disappears forever.
Each minute of the next six months is a thicket. The thickets contain police officers, undertakers, insurance agents, attorneys, claims adjusters, benefits counsellors, human-resources workers, notaries, friends. Unforeseen names—Emmaline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Dalary Mason, Clyde Bender—become very important then very unimportant. Somewhere in there her two daughters fly in from and back to their respective lives, in Chicago and Asheville. In early January, Nadia emerges from the last thicket. She drives up to Montreal.
Please feel free too
Wow I was really lost in this story. Did anyone read it?
Keuka Lake concerns a lady named Nadia, whose husband Drew, randomly dies and all the details don’t quite add up. His death places her in a confused state of mind.
She visits a friend named Yolanda, whose boyfriend is named Laurent. Nadia is the beautiful one and Drew was never as handsomely beautiful on a par with her. So their relationship doesn’t quite add up.
Laurent is more beautiful than Yolanda so their relationship doesn’t add up. There is something missing to the story or to different parts the story just like the tiger jigsaw puzzle Laurent is assembling that Yolanda tells Nadia not to touch.
Of course she steals a piece of the puzzle so it will always remain incomplete like the reason why Drew died in a tragic auto accident.
Sometimes when the man in a woman’s life dies, she may look for a man in another woman’s life, who hasn’t suddenly died as somehow to blame for her loss. Which may be why she steals his puzzle piece.
This is an existential theme that has sometimes appeared in other New Yorker stories. In the existential viewpoint, there is existential confusion and never an answer because there isn’t one. Death and Life are always ridiculously so absurd and ridiculous. That is the modern answer.
And the clue for me that this is an existential story is the detail that the husband Drew died in an automobile accident. Existential writer Albert Camus thought auto accidents as being stupid and meaningless and indicate that anybody’s life is absurd and has no purpose. And unfortunately Camus died in an automobile crash at age 40.
Existential thought is a philosophical way to trash or a cancel the Oxford and Cambridge traditions of rigorous logic and reason applied to any question or social issue including the meaning of life.
O’Neill cleverly dismisses Western philosophy when Nadia hires private investigator, Beatriz at seventy-five dollars an hour to find out why Drew got into the fatal car accident. And she gives Laurent’s missing puzzle piece to Beatriz to help her with the investigation. But she never returns Beatriz’s emails and probably never pays her invoices as a way of razing her, giving her the raspberry or a Bronx cheer.
Private eyes are fully capable of finding out the reasons why anything bad happened to someone if you read Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone novels. The only caveat is that it is usually hit or miss, that is, good luck or no luck.
Keuka Lake serves as a literary repository of all life in it’s various manifestations. This is a clever short story but it would be even better with less generalization and more concrete detail.