Vheissu

Over the past week, I’ve discussed a story from The New Yorker every day. This is a good chance to list those stories from The New Yorker on which I’ve posted comments on the blog (some of them are very brief, some not that brief). Here’s the full list. I’ve starred those stories I liked best. Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (June 26, 1948) Daniel Alarcón, “The Idiot President” (October 6, 2008) Kirstine Valdez Quade, “Five Wounds” (July 27, 2009) Dave Eggers, “Max at Sea” (August 24, 2009) Sherman Alexie, “War Dances” (August 10, 2009) * Orhan Pamuk, “Distant Relations” (September 7, 2009) Paul Theroux, “The Lower River” (September 14, 2009) * Sam Shepard, “Land of the Living” (September 21, 2009) Marisa Silver, “Temporary” (September 28, 2009) George Saunders, “Victory Lap” (October 5, 2009) * Julian Barnes, “Complicity” (October 19, 2009) Jonathan Lethem, “Procedure in Plain Air” (October 26, 2009) E. O. Wilson, “Trailhead” (January 25, 2010) Kevin Barry, “Fjord of Ki...

Here’s a blast from the past that is well worth a note. It’s one of the best stories that the TNY has published in the last year or so. I mean George Saunders’ “ Victory Lap ” (TNY, Oct. 5, 2009) (which tied as the TNY 2009 story of the year in Perpetual Folly’s ranking ). Saunders pulls off a tremendous feat by combining three very different voices (two teenagers and an older man) in a story in which something actually happens: a guy tries to kidnap a teenage girl (for perverse sexual reasons), and a teenage neighbor intervenes to save her. What makes all this an even greater achievement is that the voices come out clearly while using a third-person narrator, inflected in accordance with the character each section follows. The ending, in which the most gruesome scene is blurred by protective parents, is masterful. The sections focalized on the teenage neighbor (Kyle Boot) are hilarious, each detail a testimony to the maddening obsession with precision and control that drives Kyle’s p...

Jeffrey Eugenides’s “ Extreme Solitude ” (TNY, June 7, 2010) deserves a chance, and it’ll reward it luxuriantly. I say this because the first sentence is terrible: “It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first moment she’d seen him.” That first adjective seems to have been picked by Eugenides’s secret enemy. And the “whether or not” construction is bland and superfluous. I hated it. But get over the sour taste and you’ll find a savory piece that’s told fantastically well. The story is about, yes, how Leonard and Madeleine met and—maybe—fell in love. Their romance takes place during the eighties and is mediated by Semiotics 211, a course they take at Brown and in which they are pariahs because everyone else dresses in black and compulsively questions things like the significance of his own name. They meet in Semiotics 211, they have sex frequently during the semester, and, at the end, there is a declaration of love and subsequent dashing of hopes ...

Jonathan Franzen’s “ Agreeable ” (TNY, May 31, 2010) has several things going for it. There are some good lines (“Paradise for Joyce [a Democrat] was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense”). There is plenty of humor in both descriptions and dialogue. For instance, when Patty feels ogled by her father’s junior partner, he is accused of “ocular pawing.” We also find Patty’s grandfather chasing down three-year-olds to force-feed them the amateur wine that adults “emptied into grass or bushes.” Furthermore, the subject of the story is forceful: Patty, a high school athlete, is raped at a party. The problem is that the rapist is the scion of a prominent family, the Posts. They contribute a lot of money to the Democrats, the party Patty’s mother works for. That, coupled with the circumstances (a condom was used, Patty didn’t scream), makes prosecution very difficult. Despite its pluses, I find two main objections to the story (and an add-on). The first obje...

Roddy Doyle’s “ Ash ” (TNY, May 24, 2010) is one of those stories that make you wonder how they got to The New Yorker . It’s tiny, mostly dialogue. Kevin has two daughters with Ciara, and Ciara is leaving him. She leaves him once, comes back and “rides” Kevin, and then leaves again. Kevin is worried, and is constantly counseled by his brother Micky. Ciara returns once more, and there is no riding this time. The television shows that the volcano eruption in Iceland has paralyzed airports. Perhaps this was why Ciara didn’t leave for good. One of the girls asks a provocative question: “What’s ash?” Kevin gropes for an answer. Then he says the ash will drift away or fall and things will get back to normal. The girl asks if the falling ash will hurt. Ciara answers: “No, said Ciara. It won’t.” The ending is the best part of the story. Even though “Ash” is brief, I think it could be reduced to the ending itself, starting when someone says “Amazing.” Add a hint of backstory, and you have the ...

When I came across Nathan Englander’s “ Free Fruit for Young Widows ” (TNY, May 17, 2010), I said, great, a war story. Now something momentous will happen. And it did. But most of what happened was the author getting in the way of the best part of the story. Around that powerful central storyline, the author tacked on side stories apparently to add consequence to the overall tale. The result was an unkempt series of anecdotes, a tiny coming-of-age story, and an interpretive apparatus that pretends to guide our understanding of the main story. Allow me to explain. Central story: a boy called Tendler escapes from a Nazi concentration camp and returns alone to his old family home. He finds it has been occupied by former neighbors, who were great friends of Tendler’s family before the war. They welcome him enthusiastically, but Tendler overhears their plans to kill him. He reacts, but I cannot say how without spoiling the end. Anecdotes: in 1956, a soldier called Shimmy Gezer watches how...

Dagoberto Gilb’s “ Uncle Rock ” (TNY, May 10, 2010) goes nowhere. Yes, you can fish out tiny specks that, stringed together, show that the main character is changing. But the story’s three short pages require much more patience than they should. It’s a story about the morose 11-year-old son of a young, beautiful Mexican immigrant who keeps losing her jobs while she’s wooed by countless men. She is clearly looking for stability, and reaches for those men who seem to offer her that. A man called Roque pursues her dutifully and tenderly, but she appears to look for other, perhaps richer men instead. Erick, the boy, is initially not that much into Roque, and even tells his full-familied neighbor that Roque is his uncle; hence the title of the story. At one point, Erick goes to a baseball game with his mother and Roque, and Erick catches a home-run ball. A busload of players sign it, and we find out why: one of them wants Erick to pass a note on to his mother. He doesn’t. And that’s it. T...

Back to The New Yorker after eloping with One Story for a while. Once I’ve posted a note on  Jeffrey Eugenides’s story (from June 7, 2010) , I’ll resort to the minimalism I announced a couple posts ago : I’ll write comments only on especially strong stories. Afterward, there’ll be a small series of posts on books about craft. Allegra Goodman’s “ La Vita Nuova ” (TNY, May 3, 2010) fits snugly into a mold I’ve mentioned before : quotidian stories that hint at deep psychological struggles in a blasé, offhand, and symbolic manner. In this case, an art teacher called Amanda is dumped by her fiancé after the invitations for the wedding had already been sent out (ouch, I know). Her parents try to be supportive, the school doesn’t rehire her because her personal life interferes with her work, and she spends the summer babysitting one of her former students. Her life doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The story ends with a high-decibel scene in which Amanda says goodbye to the boy and announce...

I know it’s aged in the last few weeks (three generations or more in magazine shelf life), but the article by Ken Auletta called “ Publish or Perish ” (TNY, April 26, 2010) is certainly worth reading. The future of books appears even gloomier than I had thought, with many people just giving up on the printed tomes we’ve grown so accustomed to over the last hundreds of years. Add to that an economic crisis and a culture of downward pricing (or free access) associated with the Internet, and we are left with legions of authors orphaned by traditional publishing houses (or simply routed away from them), who turn to self-publishing and direct marketing of their books through retailers like Amazon. The article is filled with interesting facts about the book industry, which I always find elusive and intriguing. For instance, I didn’t know that Amazon is constantly selling books at a loss, and has done so especially in its e-books for the Kindle. I was surprised to find out that the major boo...

This is the fifth comment I’ve rapid-fired about New Yorker stories over the last few days. This time it’s about Junot Díaz’s “ The Pura Principle ” (TNY, Mar. 22, 2010). I had thought about publishing a single post, in which I’d refer briefly to each of the stories I’ve discussed. That was fitting, as not one of these stories seemed especially strong. Some, in fact, appeared particularly weak. I won’t go into details about those that were published in the three issues after the March 22 edition, like the wispy and quirky fable by Janet Frame called “ Gavin Highly ” (April 5). Ben Loory’s “ The TV ” (April 12) is an amusing existential tale, which lost its way in the middle, when the man watching TV finds himself in a show about doctors. At that point, the story stopped being interesting, and it reminded me of Agent Smith in the Matrix , thus becoming what seems like a rather boring allegory of the ego absorbing the world like a black hole. There was also Joyce Carol Oates’s “ I.D. ”...

Jennifer Egan’s “ Ask Me I Care ” (TNY, Mar. 8, 2010) is told by a high school girl who joins a hard rock music scene in 1979. Her name is Rhea, her best friend is Jocelyn, they have a rich acquaintance called Alice, and they all gravitate around a couple of men who backbone a rock band called the Flaming Dildos: the “magnetic” Scotty, who loves bearing his chest, and the “electric” Bennie Salazar, who sports a Mohawk. I went through the names because the story revolves around a domino sequence of crushes: Rhea is infatuated with Bennie, Bennie with Alice, Alice with Scotty, and Scotty with Jocelyn. Jocelyn breaks the loop, because she goes for a sleazy record producer called Lou, who is much older than Jocelyn and abundantly progenied. The sequence comes crashing down one night when the Flaming Dildos gets a chance to perform at an important club called the Mab (“where all the punk bands play”). Jocelyn makes out with the record producer in public, and so Scotty “now understands for ...

Claire Keegan’s “ Foster ” (TNY, Feb. 15 & 22, 2010) tells the story of a young girl who is sent away over the summer to a relative’s home. Because her parents keep having children and they have run into economic problems, the girl’s father drops her off at the house of man called John Kinsella. It turns out that Kinsella and his wife recently lost a child, who drowned in a well; the girl finds out through a gossipy neighbor. This makes the relationship between the girl and the Kinsellas both intimate and eerie. One gets the impression that they are projecting their love for their dead son on their guest. The girl picks up quickly on the manners and habits she is supposed to have at her new home, and cherishes the attention she gets, which doesn’t exist at her parent’s house. This is at once enticing and troubling for her: “Kinsella takes my hand in his. As he does it, I realize that my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go, so that I ...

Kevin Barry’s “ Fjord of Killary ” (TNY, Feb. 1, 2010) is a fast-paced tale about a poet who buys an old hotel in a remote corner of western Ireland. Locals gather to drink at the hotel bar, which is tended by the narrator in the evenings, but the customers constantly dismiss him and his urbane ways. The hotel is staffed by promiscuous and scowling Belarusians. The narrator is evidently in a midlife crisis: he hasn’t published anything in five years and he’s always trying to turn into a romantic version of himself (“I’d had a deranged notion that this would establish me as a kind of charming-innkeeper figure”). Buying the old hotel was part of his crisis. The short story focuses on one night in which a storm ravages the town and the hotel floods. Led by the narrator, the people at the bar take refuge in a function room upstairs. As the night progresses, the narrator is swooped up again by a lyrical urge and he ends by saying that the “gloom of youth had at last lifted.” He grew up. ...

E. O. Wilson’s “ Trailhead ” (TNY, Jan. 25, 2010) is a very peculiar kind of story. It’s about ants. No overarching parallels with human beings, no allegories: just ants. We can presume it was drawn from Wilson’s forthcoming novel on the same subject. I’ll say this for “Trailhead”: it’s daring. It treats the exciting world of insects as fiction, and runs with it. The story is also instructive: you learn quite a bit about ants, and this from a world renowned expert on these insects. The story starts on edge, with the death of the queen ant. It then rewinds and describes how the colony was created by the queen ant. It was a struggle, and it paid off with a successful and buzzing colony that lasted decades. Then the queen ant died, and she was replaced by the winner in a struggle among a handful of pretenders to the throne. The colony is doomed to die, though, because the new queen is only producing male drones, incapable of inseminating her. A vibrant neighboring colony eventually takes...

I used a short break from the hustle of everyday routines to pore over a heavy pile of unread New Yorkers . Flipping through almost ten of them back to back got me thinking about the magazine itself. Besides, the time to renew my subscription is coming up, so one of the main issues here was this: Should I renew it? I subscribed to The New Yorker almost a year ago. I celebrated it on the blog as a great literary decision. It was—you get access to wonderful stuff, in both fiction and nonfiction. There’s no doubt that TNY’s coveted fiction slot has hosted great authors and great pieces. And the nonfiction is often dazzling and thought provoking. And yet… Someone, an editor, told me recently that she abandoned weekly and daily publications because she felt just too guilty about not reading them properly. Magazines inevitably started to stack up. That made me realize that my own pile was not (just) a matter of my own inadequacy in fixing my schedule, but of an honest difficulty in man...

Julian Barnes’s narrator in “ Complicity ” ( The New Yorker , Oct. 19, 2009) is a man who recently got divorced and who tells the story in a chatty, freewheeling tone. Through a doctor friend of his, he meets a female doctor and a relationship may be hatching between them. The narrator wonders obsessively about her, focusing his curiosity on tactile impressions such as the kind of gloves she may wear. We get very few details about her (we don’t find out her name, for instance). The narrator goes to a movie with her; then they go out to dinner. At dinner, their hands touch. With that touch, the story ends. It’s an interesting story. In fact, messy is the first word that comes to mind, but messy is not always a bad thing. In this case, it’s shouldn’t be counted as a virtue. Note how the story starts like a fable of sorts (notice the repeated “When I was” structure of the first three paragraphs). We get the sense there is a reason why this is being told to a particular person, but this...

“‘I do fundamentally believe that publishing is not an expanding business,’ [Leslie Morgestein, a publishing executive at Alloy Entertainment] says. ‘It is contracting—even our corner of it [books for teens and tweens], which has been vibrant in the past few years. I don’t think long term there’s going to be sustainable growth there.’ As a result, the Alloy executives spend as much time thinking about ideas for television and movies as they do for books, and consider their book ideas in terms of their viability as television and film franchises.”  “‘Forbidden love is a lot of what’s behind “Twilight,”’ Morgenstein says. ‘It’s about longing and lust, but it’s not about sex, and that’s very powerful to younger teen girls.’” In the spirit of commenting on bestsellers this year, these quotes come from a revealing and sobering article about the industry of bestselling teen novels in The New Yorker (Rebecca Mead’s “The Gossip Mill,” published in the Oct. 19, 2009, issue, and no longe...

In Jonathan Lethem’s “ Procedure in Plain Air ” ( The New Yorker , Oct. 26, 2009), a man called Stevick watches outside a coffee shop as two workers in jumpsuits dig a hole in the street, cover it tightly with planks, and then lower a dark-skinned man inside. Some sense of duty awakens in Stevick, who asks the workers about the prisoner; they give him an umbrella to shield the man in the hole from the rain. Quickly but implicitly, this becomes Stevick’s new occupation: he cares for the man in the hole, reports to a supervisor, and even gets a bag full of jumpsuits. Apparently, the macabre practice is common enough for passersby to know what it’s about, but they treat it as a strange form of art or as an offense that will devalue their properties. We don’t find out what’s really happening, but many symbolic meanings can be attached to this event. I don’t think it’s a strong story. In fact, it’s rather weak. The opening strikes me as careless, and trying to find particular reasons for...

Marisa Silver's “ Temporary ” ( The New Yorker , Sept. 28, 2009) seems to be a story about Vivian and Shelly: both are young and both live in downtown L.A.—that’s all they have in common. It’s really a story about the nervous and concerned Vivian, who was adopted by somewhat older, decent parents (they tell her she’s adopted when Vivian is a teenager and her mother appears to be in her deathbed). Vivian gets a job typing transcripts of interviews at an adoption agency. (This was the highpoint of the story for me: Vivian tries to imagine the people whose interviews she hears, and writes codicils at the end expressing her approval or disapproval.) Vivian lives with Shelly, who seems to be well off and thus has no need to land a job (for which she seems inapt, anyway, even though she met Vivian at a temp agency: in retrospect, this detail seems off). Shelly leads a reckless life headquartered in an industrial space downtown, and invites Vivian to join her. Shelly sleeps with diff...

Paul Theroux’s “The Lower River” (published by The New Yorker last month) is a great story. Its full text is available here . Okay, so it’s a bit uneven. It seemed to miss a step when it started, but then it catches on and it keeps you hooked until the very end—when it offers no easy solutions, psychological or otherwise. More on this in a minute. “The Lower River” is a story about an elderly American man, called Altman, who travels back to the tiny town of Malabo, in the south of Malawi. Altman had been a teacher there for four years when he was younger, and he remembers it fondly (“his Eden,” he calls it). People quickly remember him when he returns, they almost idolize him, and he glows with the warm reception: if only people back home could see him now, he thinks. He feels nothing has changed (“It was as it had been—[…] a world that was ancient in its simplicities”). But things have changed. The village leader is a young and wily man called Manyenga, who greets Altman with u...