{"id":12036,"date":"2010-06-07T11:39:28","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T15:39:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=12036"},"modified":"2016-06-20T17:58:07","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T21:58:07","slug":"the-new-yorker-20-under-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/06\/07\/the-new-yorker-20-under-40\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Yorker<\/em>: 20 Under 40"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The Pilot\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Joshua Ferris<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Here We Aren't, So Quickly\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Jonathan Safran Foer<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"What You Do Out Here, When You're Alone\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Philipp Meyer<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Rivka Galchen<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Lenny Hearts Eunice\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Gary Shteyngart<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Dayward\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby ZZ Packer<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"The Kid\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Salvatore Scibona<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Twins\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby C.E. Morgan<\/span>\r\n\r\nOriginally published in the June 14 & 21, 2010 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/span><\/pre>\n
\"Click<\/a><\/p>\n
This\u00a0special and much talked about issue features eight of The New Yorker<\/em>‘s “20 Under 40,” that elite group considered by the editors of The New Yorker<\/em> to be the twenty most promising young authors writing today.\u00a0I think it’s a good idea to go to the issue’s table of contents to see all of the “web only” material available for your perusal.\u00a0 Not sure how long this link will remain active, but here it is<\/a> for a bit anyway.<\/p>\n
One problem with this week’s offering — several of the stories are only available to subscribers.\u00a0I’ve linked to them all below (and as I read them I’ll place my comments below the links), but if you haven’\u00a0t subscribed, you won’t be able to read the ones with\u00a0* next to them (which is five of the eight).\u00a0I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but even though most of the fiction and many of the articles are available online for free, I highly recommend subscribing to The New Yorker<\/em>.\u00a0It is not that expensive, first of all, at only $40 for the full year of 48 issues.\u00a0Second, often their best stuff is behind a paywall (though I personally feel they are overly generous).\u00a0And third and perhaps most importantly, with the subscription you get unfettered access to high quality pdfs of each and every New Yorker <\/em>published from the beginning.\u00a0Seems like that alone should cost much more per year (though don’t tell them I said that — I like things the way they are).<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>*\u00a0Joshua Ferris: “<\/strong>The Pilot<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"I don’t know what to say. This was lame.\u00a0I don’t use that word often.\u00a0Possibly because I almost never finish and therefore never write about something\u00a0I feel this way about.\u00a0Ferris is highly respected by others, and I really liked his story “The Valetudinarian” that was published in The New Yorker <\/em>last year. But this story was completely uninteresting.\u00a0While there were no stumbling blocks in the writing, nor did it ever seem inspired.<\/p>\n
This is a very boring story about a man failing to write a television pilot.\u00a0He has received an email invitation to a party hosted by one of television’s biggest successes, Kate Lotvelt, the highly respected creator \/ writer \/ actress\u00a0in “Death in the Family,” which has just wrapped its third season.\u00a0 Most of the first part of the story is about our Lawrence vacillating about every decision, even whether Kate herself intended to invite him. This is no Hamlet; Lawrence’s mind is not interesting. Watching his struggle is boring. I found nothing new here, and even the old elements were not done well.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>*\u00a0Jonathan Safran Foer: “<\/a>Here We Aren’t, So Quickly<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"I wasn’t expecting much from this story, so I read it first (plus, it’s just two pages long, a nice piece to get this issue under way).\u00a0I’ve a prejudice against Safran Foer, have always considered Safran Foer to be gimmicky and showy.\u00a0It’s not that his pieces lack substance (as much does), but that seemed to be secondary to cleverness.\u00a0When I began this piece, I thought I was reading a piece with the same affliction.\u00a0Here is the first paragraph:<\/p>\n
I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time.\u00a0I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers.\u00a0I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were backhanded. I was not as tired as I said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This sets up the flow of this piece.\u00a0The next paragraph follows a similiar structure of similar summaries of character, only they begin with “You.” As I said, I thought, great, this gimmickry again. But before I knew it, the piece subdued me, this quick summary of two lives by their minutia.\u00a0Soon we add a child:<\/p>\n
You loved tiny socks. You were not depressed, but you were unhappy.\u00a0Your unhappiness didn’t make me defensive; I just hated it.\u00a0He was never happy unless held.\u00a0 I loved hammering things into walls.\u00a0You hated having no inner life.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s sadness in the descriptions, and the descriptions seem to catch it all so well: “We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations.”\u00a0The pace quickens: “He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned.\u00a0One night I couldn’t help him with his math.\u00a0 He got married.”<\/p>\n
Soon, all of this is displaced, and Safran Foer begins speaking in the negative (which really works): “And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty.\u00a0I’m not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into the sea.”\u00a0This goes on, and I really found it perfect. It’s like a revision of “The Swimmer.” I have to revise my prejudice against Jonathan Safran Foer.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>*\u00a0Philipp Meyer: “<\/strong>What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"A true winner.\u00a0Here’s how it begins:<\/p>\n
Max had a name for what had happened to his son: the Accident, he called it.\u00a0He wondered if his wife had her own name for it, though it wouldn’t be the same, because she didn’t think of it as an accident.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We meet Max a little bit after the accident.\u00a0His wife Lilli has left witout leaving a note. The first part of the story is a brilliant look at a man wandering around the house, worried about his son, about what happened to his son, worrying about his relationship with his wife, which is only going down hill, though they’ve made love more since the accident than they had in the last year.<\/p>\n
Lilli stayed out with the Stocktons all day, and Max turned in early.\u00a0He was barely aware of her coming to bed. Later that night a noise woke him, and he thought, It’s just Harley coming in, and then he heard another noise and woke up all the way.<\/span><\/p>\n
Lilli was lying on her side with her back to him, and he reached and touched her hip lightly. She was small and delicate; she looked like a pixie, like something from the movies.\u00a0Even now, at forty-two, she seemed to glow in the dim light.\u00a0She didn’t pull away from him, and he stayed there with his hand like that, looking at the curve from her shoulder to her small waist and up to her hip, aware of the feeling of her not pulling away.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is a great story.\u00a0I particularly liked how it presented Max’s needs, often contradictory, and how Max wanders around in the days following the accident.\u00a0The writing is subtle and unobtrusive, leaving the reader to the story.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>Rivka Galchen: “<\/strong>The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"So I read this story on Friday.\u00a0Now, Sunday, I am struggling to remember anything about it.\u00a0I didn’t like it when I read it; I know that much.\u00a0 Since it is short, though, I am able to reread it and find the passages I marked.\u00a0Here is how it begins, and I thought it was promising:<\/p>\n
People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case. Prisoners read.\u00a0I guess they’re not given much access to computers.\u00a0A felicitous injustice for me.\u00a0The nicest reader letters I’ve received — also the only reader letters I’ve received — have come from prisoners.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I liked that.\u00a0I started to get wary of where this was going when I read the next few lines:<\/p>\n
Maybe we’re all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?\u00a0That’s not nice, my saying that.\u00a0Maybe it’s an evil, to co-opt the misery of others.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Far from bringing me into the story, this step back to generalizing threw me out, and with what came next I never really got back in.\u00a0We find out that the narrator, Trish,\u00a0has been left by her husband, some time in the past, and that he left her while she was pregnant.\u00a0The story, however, focuses on the mundane, which I was inclined to like.\u00a0For example, we learn that her husband, when he left, had packed up a really excellent Parmesan cheese grater:<\/p>\n
I searched online for a replacement for that Parmesan grater, because I had really liked that Parmesan grater.\u00a0It was the kind that works like a mill, not the kind you just scrape against; it had a handle that was fun to turn.\u00a0There were a number of similar graters available, but with unappealing “comfort” grips.\u00a0Finally I found the same model.\u00a0Was it premature to repurchase? Two days passed basically like that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I liked that, but eventually the narrators blas\u00e9 tone was in itself grating. And then there’s the rather ineffective segment where Trish and her friend David are talking past each other, bringing to mind some existential performance. I may have been predisposed to dislike this story by that time (I really didn’t like the first half), so I may have really missed something here. That happens, certainly, but I didn’t ever care if I was missing stuff in this story.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>Gary Shteyngart: “<\/strong>Lenny Hearts Eunice<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"Hmmm. I’ve never read Absurdistan<\/em>, and I’m afraid this offering did little to convince me I would find it to my liking.\u00a0Does Absurdistan <\/em>come off as glib? I certainly hope not.<\/p>\n
In “Lenny Hearts Eunice” we go into the future a bit, and I’m sad to say that the future looks very similar to the futrue dreamed up by many other authors extenuating the worst of our time to the nth degree.\u00a0I’m thinking particularly of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood<\/a><\/em>. In this short story we have such conglomerates as LandO’LakesGMFordCredit, ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit,\u00a0and UnitedContinentalDeltAmerican. The human race — well, maybe not entirely human since there is the Post-Human Service Division — is very absorbed in their skin.<\/p>\n
Still, Shteyngart’s piece has the benefit of not taking these elements entirely seriously. They are added for fun, something for the reader to chuckle about while reading about the grotesque Lenny and his crush on the young Asian Eunice. In his interview with The New Yorker<\/em>, Shteyngart says that the inspiration behind this story is the “never-ending feelings of Soviet Jewish worry about the future.”\u00a0These bits are tongue-in-cheek.\u00a0But they were too distracting for me to get into the heart of the story, and I lost all interest in these lost individuals.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>*\u00a0ZZ Packer: “<\/strong>Dayward<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"I hadn’t read anything about this story before picking it up, and perhaps that’s a good way to approach it. I’m going to talk about it briefly here, but I’ll state my recommendation up-front: not as good as the Meyer but very good and recommended.<\/p>\n
Now, for those sticking around, the story starts with a bit of disorientation.\u00a0All we know is that a young man and his younger deaf sister are being chased through trees by vicious dogs:<\/p>\n
Early yet, the morning clouds the color of silver fox, and Lazarus was running.\u00a0His sister, Mary Celeste, hadn’t heard the dogs chasing after them — nor could hear them, being deaf — and, despite his signing to her what the plan was and for her to keep up as best she could, she’d nevertheless been treed, and soon so would he, if he was lucky and could make it to a likely pine in time.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This dog-chase is\u00a0a great introduction to the story (actually, it might be a bit more than an introduction, taking up almost one-third of the piece); we learn little by little why the two children are running and Packer’s writing is both urgent and, to pleasing effect, matter-of-fact.<\/p>\n
We learn early that Lazarus and Mary Celeste, fifteen (or fourteen) and nine, respectively, are emancipated slaves on their way to New Orleans. Upon telling their former mistress of their plans to leave with their newly granted freedom, she becomes bitter, reminding them they’d always been fed and clothed.\u00a0After a few days,<\/p>\n
Miss Thalia had knocked on their door to announce that she’d decided to have them sicced by Kittredge’s dogs and in all probability hanged, but that she was giving them a half day’s head start.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Once freed from the dogs, Lazarus and Mary Celeste wander onward to New Orleans, hoping to find there their Aunt Millie. I found the writing solid and the story an original, though conventional, narrative of post-emancipation slavery.\u00a0Packer has some beautiful lines, like this one where Mary Celeste tells her brother what it felt like to go slowly deaf:<\/p>\n
She said the voices sounded as though people were being suffocated, desperately trying to speak but hampered by pillow down, or straw ticking, or pond water.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n
<\/a>Salvatore Scibona: “<\/strong>The Kid<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"Apparently based on a personal story, where Scibona was one of the ones trying to help, this short story begins when a young boy is lost in a German\u00a0airport.\u00a0 People surround him, trying to ask him where he came from, where his parents are, how they can help, but the boy is generally unresponsive; when he speaks it is\u00a0a foreign language no one\u00a0understands.<\/p>\n
It seemed, somehow, Polish. The hodge-podge dialect of a town that ten different empires had captured on their way to someplace else.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In Scibona’s own story, eventually some of the airport personnel took the young boy, and Scibona has no idea what eventually happened.\u00a0In this story, he imagines.<\/p>\n
The lost child serves as a springboard to the past.\u00a0 Elroy Heflin is a young man in the Army, deployed around the world.\u00a0 While\u00a0in\u00a0Latvia\u00a0he meets Evija, who gets pregnant. Theirs is the child whom no one can understand in the airport, and it’s a sad story all around, with scared people populating its pages.\u00a0 Scibona goes just far enough to give us some context, but he allows the reader to interpret the events and the motives.<\/p>\n
I didn’t like the story of Elroy and Evija nearly as much, however,\u00a0as I liked the scenes in the airport.\u00a0This was a good story, but I have the feeling\u00a0that, other than that poor intelligible boy,\u00a0the story will soon drift away.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/a>*\u00a0C.E. Morgan: “<\/strong>Twins<\/strong><\/a>“<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"This is the last story I read, and I’m glad —\u00a0the issue ended on a high note for me.\u00a0I had never read anything by C.E. Morgan, which is no real surprise since her debut novel came out only last year. However, this piece shows that C.E. Morgan has already developed a style that would have led me to believe she wasn’t part of this generation of writers. It’s a bit slower and, I think,\u00a0a bit more complex, possibly one of the best in this bunch.\u00a0Here, for example, is the second paragraph of the story; we’ve just been introduced to Marie and her twin sons who live in Northside:<\/p>\n
But again, the valley: They lived in the valley, four miles from the river, and whenever the waters rose, as they had in 1884 and again in 1937, the gray river coursed along the low arteries of the city and swamped the heart of Northside. The wealthy lived on Cincinnati’s seven hills, and when the flooding came they gazed down from their hills, troubled.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Marie is the first of her family to get a high-school diploma, and she also has an Associates Degree. She would like to become a teacher, “to teach children just like her own,”\u00a0but that dream has been deferred due to some sickness.\u00a0 So she and her two five-year-olds live near the Harrogate factory which produces a wondrous amount of smog.<\/p>\n
Some days the sun fractured the filth in the air and made a hundred thousand rainbows of it.\u00a0Sherbet, roses, and cantaloupe orange, wedding pink, white. The first thing Allmon would think of his tiny purchase of sky: I want to eat it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We do meet early on the boys’ father, but after a period he’s essentially absent from their life. They both miss him and Marie always wants them to be on their best behavior so he might stay.\u00a0The father is white; Marie is black. Allmon is black; Mickey is white.\u00a0This dynamic is interesting, but it isn’t fully developed in this short story, which happens to be part of the novel Morgan is working on. Instead, the novel comes to its climax in the form of a visit from the father, who has promised to take them to a carnival.<\/p>\n
My final thoughts here, then, are that Morgan is a magnificent writer, and I’m anxious to get to know her better.\u00a0It doesn’t feel like the short story is the right vehicle, though, at least not for all she’s dealing with here. It’s not that the elements aren’t contained; it’s that they are developed and then kind of left aside.\u00a0However, I have full confidence that this novel and whatever else Morgan writes is worth checking out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With this week’s New Yorker, the magazine kicks off it’s special “20 Under 40” series of stories. This issue features stories by Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philipp Meyer, Rivka Galchen, Gary Shteyngart, ZZ Packer, Salvatore Scibona, and C.E. Morgan. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The New Yorker: 20 Under 40","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[267,523,521,406,94,522,314,525,524],"tags":[998],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-12036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c-e-morgan","category-gary-shteyngart","category-jonathan-safran-foer","category-joshua-ferris","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-philipp-meyer","category-rivka-galchen","category-salvatore-scibona","category-zz-packer","tag-2010-new-yorker-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/June-14-20101.jpg?fit=556%2C760&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-388","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12036"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18794,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12036\/revisions\/18794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12036"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}