Last Week’s New Yorker Review: Fiction Extravaganza
Last Week’s New Yorker, fiction extravaganza.
"swirling a dollop of Ampro gel with Vaseline so that the gel wouldn’t crust up."
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The magazine is off this week, so as announced last time it's a recent-fiction extravaganza! I feel weird, for some reason, sorting fiction into the usual categories; it needs its own thing, I think. Gabe in the Today in Tabs Discord suggested the perfect rating system: Munros. Stories will get up to three Munros. As with restaurant stars, any number of Munros indicates a generally positive review. In lieu of the boldface author-descriptions that nonfiction pieces get, I'm giving fiction pieces three lowercase tags.
"The Beach House" by Joy Williams. One Munro. dementia, real estate, collapse. Lesser Joy Williams is still Joy Williams, full of delicious slippage between modes and realms. (Katy Waldman covered her work in the magazine a few years ago.) The internal collapse of the father mirrors the external collapse of the world, and dream logic creeps in at the edges where it's easily mixed up with loss of mind. The information is all wrong – the astrologer's given the "wrong coordinates," and so are we; nothing is known or certain, which reflects the eternal alienated contemporary, though not in a slick or obvious way. Why lesser, then? In part because it's so dialogue heavy, bringing to mind experimental theater as much as fiction. But as theater it's only so-so; vaguely Beckettish (though not as funny) back-and-forth that edges around the real topic – death, mostly. Sometimes the overarticulation and focus on the inaccuracy of even the most specific language reminded me of David Lynch. ("I said that, too, in precisely the same manner. I’m quite aware what those words imply...") But there aren't enough striking images to pair with the dialogues; the stage is bare. (The too-obvious spot art doesn't help.) And the ending limits the possibilities of the scenario instead of expanding them.
"Chance the Cat" by David Means. No Munro. animal consciousness, security guard, power struggle. I quite like Means' work in general, but here there are so many layers of conceit all feeling is lost. Almost every paragraph begins "Does it matter" or "What mattered..." which never especially pays off. The difficulty of rendering a cat's interiority is another interesting subject that doesn't particularly enhance the thematic thrust of the story, which seems to be about race relations – centering around Kayla, who is Black, and her ex-boyfriend William, who is white. It feels almost as if Means is drawing a line between his total inability to imagine cat interiority and his partial inability to imagine Black interiority, a metaphor I find slightly distasteful. There's also a degree of latent disdain for William, who feels constructed around certain insecurities of Means'. It keeps us from really understanding William, but he also hogs the story; perhaps Means felt more comfortable poking holes in William's psyche than he would poking holes in Kayla's. But that's a cop-out. And centering things around a conflict in which William is needlessly interrogated, and rattled, by a Black security guard feels too neat. In the interview, Means says one detail is for the reader "to tweeze out," but I wasn't given enough of a reason to grab my tweezers.
"Poor Houdini" by Anne Carson. Two Munros. sonnet, escape artist, impatience. Carson's slippery, poetic prose is always a pleasure to sink into. It's also damn hard to summarize or critique, relying as it does on the sort of poetic construction where the space between each line matters as much as the line. Sure, there's a story here, about Eddy, a so-so boyfriend, Vern, a friend, and Eddy's younger brother, who the speaker sleeps with. But this isn't where the voltage of the story comes from, that's all in its strange and spiky rhythm, which can only be conveyed in quotes: "Shivering, she watches them. She is curious how this will work, Vern and Eddy. Will he do his tough-guy act? Things tilt when two become three. Vern is opaque. Eddy tells them he found an arm bone today. Eddy is a forensics guy. He was investigating a house." I kept returning to age – it feels like a story about being young, but unless I missed something there's no direct reference to the speaker's age; she could be twenty-three or Carson's seventy-three. It would change the story a great deal, it would change the story not at all. All we get is exactly what's in the text, and the fun comes in the way Carson's specificity forces us to realize how much we regularly assume without being told.
"Life with Spider" by Patrick Langley. One Munro. burden, lost friendship, carapace. A remarkably propulsive horror comedy; as the interview points out, it's easy to read the central image of an inexorable insectoid companion as a metaphor, but the story's greatest strength is its beat-by-beat concrete action. Everything here is extremely clever in its construction. The narrative is basically "The Cat Came Back" with H.R. Gigerian flair, but putting the story in the mouth of an outside observer who's eventually implicated in abandoning his friend at a time of need deepens the story's themes, and the presence/absence dichotomy helps ensure the reader is only there for the bits of the story that matter. Too much time spent with Spider and he becomes mundane; by keeping his role supporting his strangeness doesn't wear off. Langley eventually underlines his themes too many times ("[Spider] had stayed with him, after all, when I had not") and the neatness of construction I mention above plays against the story's strangeness – everything works out exactly as it might in a thoughtful short story, which means there's not much surprise, or mess. Still, it's a wildly enjoyable tale, especially at its most darkly slapstick – Looney Tunes does Kafka.
"That Girl" by Addie Citchens. Three Munros. girlhood, kool-aid, sapphism. A stunningly lived-in tale of the Black southern experience – but that's the easy note, that's what the story is on its face. Its real beauty comes in Citchens' willingness to amble, to include reams of detail for detail's sake – not just sensory detail but whole scenes that aren't strictly necessary but expand the world, like her mother's boyfriend Roger cooking "macaroni salad, Italian sausage in a potato bun, and baked beans" and spinning "Southern-soul records at the Classic Hitz club on the weekends," or the time spent in Aunt Trina's special-needs classroom. (In the interview, Citchens says the story is "part of a larger piece that I’ve been sporadically working on," which makes sense.) Keeping those moments in adds to the resonance of the main story, concerning the doomed relationship between teenagers Theo and Shirlee. Their romance is played perfectly – there's not much tortured interiority, which wouldn't be right for teenagers, just a kiss that brings something to life – and lots of un-self-aware gestures and revelations that convey more than either girl quite picks up on. The story's very close third-person perspective gives a sense of Theo's future that's unspoken but somehow feels secure, but Shirlee, who is obviously neglected and living in poverty, is hard not to worry about (though the story is never maudlin.) Her voice is the story's most finely rendered – and Citchen's ear for dialogue is superlative, deliberately pairing the inelegant vehicle of teen language with the bluesy rhythms of Southern speech in particular. I want more of this world.
Letters:
Nothing in the mailbag, which surprised me! I thought last week's edition was generally excellent and had some pieces worth talking about. Perhaps the week off has given you time to formulate your thoughts on, say, the Mary Gaitskill personal history on friendship, the Alexandra Schwartz piece on female violence, or the Patrick Radden Keefe reported feature on a suspicious teenage death in London?
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