A WRITER'S WIT |
New Yorker Fiction 2017
***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***June 5 and 12, 2017, Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”: Some Navy seals in Afghanistan, in 2009, set out to ambush a group of Taliban. ¶ In this rich story the narrator relates two flashbacks, one rather lengthy, which seamlessly portray the complexities of wars and those intrepid souls who fight them. The author creates character more by interior shots and with zingy names such as Hugs and Cooker than by things visual. He creates character when the narrator encounters a vision of the Virgin Mary in a near-drowning situation. The narrative’s climax may occur when Hal, the Big Kahuna, disappears beneath the surface of a river that appears on no map, that virtually disappears in different seasons. Is Hal alive or not? The narrator apparently does not know because even though Hal is his best pal, he must carry out a mission of war. This story—with its rich imagery and figurative language—is the sort I love most, one that carries me into a world I would never encounter first-hand, nor want to, but with great skill Mr. Mackin snatches me up and returns me safely to my seat when he has finished with me. If I were awarding four stars it would receive five. The author’s debut collection, which I can’t wait to read, will come out in March 2018. Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz. NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
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New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ** June 5 and 12, 2017, Sherman Alexie, “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”: In this compressed story a pious woman named Marie toils as a motel maid for many decades of her sixty-two years. Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me comes out this month.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***May 29, 2017, Samanta Schweblin, “The Size of Things”: Enrique, a wealthy young man who lives with his mother, is abruptly cast aside and begins to live in a toy shop he often patronizes. ¶ For his keep he reorganizes the store for the owner, arranging toys by color instead of type. Business booms! The author seems to withhold as much as she reveals about Enrique. Why has he been kicked out by his mother? Why is he so child-like? Why are his unconventional methods so successful? Readers only know what the store owner knows, and though an omission of detail would normally be a storytelling sin, it seems to work here. It allows me to imagine. The author’s book, Fever Dream, recently came out in English. Illustration by Ben Newman NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **May 22, 2017, Samantha Hunt, “A Love Story”: A northern California mother of three in her forties takes the reader on an almost surreal journey in which she tries to reconcile her roles as mother and wife with society’s perceptions. Hunt’s most recent book is Mr. Splitfoot.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New yorker FICTION 2017***—Excellent **May 15, 2017, Etgar Keret, “Fly Already”: A man out with his five-year-old son attempts to talk a man out of jumping from a building while his son, believing the man can fly, encourages him to do so. Which one wins in this very short but significant story? The author’s most recent book is The Seven Good Years.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017 ***—Excellent **May 8, 2017, Yiyun Li, “A Small Flame”: A Chinese-American woman reviews her would-be match-girl life in which adults consistently betray children. Li’s most recent book is a memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
new yorker fiction 2017***—Excellent **April 24, 2017, Lara Vapnyar, “Deaf and Blind”: Two Russian women become friends, and one of them falls for a deaf-and-blind man who teaches both something about the vibrant yet soundless power of love. Vapnyar’s novel, Still Here, came out in 2016.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **April 17, 2017, Akhil Sharma, “Are You Happy?”: In a story told largely without dialogue, Lakshman, an Indian-American teen watches as his mother plunges into the depths of alcoholism. Sharma’s collection, A Life of Adventure and Delight, comes out in July.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **April 10, 2017, Emma Cline, “Northeast Regional”: A fifty-one-year-old man cuts short a weekend with his mistress, a younger, married woman, to handle a crisis created by his only son at an exclusive northeastern prep school, from which he is being expelled. Cline’s most recent book, The Girls, came out in 2016. NEXT TIME: My Book World READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here! At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99 Introduction to My Long-Playing Records "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "Ghost Riders" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Blight" "A Gambler's Debt" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Engineer" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "The Age I Am Now" "Bathed in Pink" Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts: "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "My Long-Playing Records" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "Bathed in Pink" Also available on iTunes.
New Yorker Fiction 2017 ***—Excellent **April 3, 2017, John Lanchester, “Signal”: A London couple and their two young children are invited to the country-house of a longtime friend for a weekend party and witness events that rather disturb them. Lanchester writes for The London Review of Books, as well as The New Yorker.
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent *** March 27, 2017, Victor Lodato, “Herman Melville, Volume I”: A young homeless woman is abandoned by Evan, her fellow-traveler boyfriend, and she must depend on the charity of others to survive. ¶ Because Evan has left behind a backpack with all his belongings, the twenty-year-old doesn’t at first realize her predicament until she comes to understand that he has also absconded with a substantial roll of money she has earned by playing an inherited banjo, for mere coins tossed into its leather case. Among Evan’s effects is a biography of Herman Melville, one must assume Hershel Parker’s Volume I of nearly a thousand pages. Its two pounds become a metaphor for her own weighty biography in which she’s left Tucson, her home, in part, because of her father’s violent death. This story is one of those in which you experience a tingle because you haven’t had the misfortune of living like this unnamed woman, and yet receive a jolt because for less than an hour you are bestowed the privilege of doing exactly that—feeding on a small sliver of her life, one that is equally as significant as a traveler called Ishmael. Lodato’s novel out earlier this month is Edgar and Lucy. Photograph by Anthony Blasko. NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **March 20, 2017, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The I.O.U.": In this story set about a hundred years ago, a New York company publishes the long-awaited book of an author who writes of his astrological connection with a nephew having died in World War I. ¶ On the Contributor’s Page of this issue, one learns that this story was to have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1920 but never did. One must wonder . . . could it have been because largely it is a plot-driven narrative with a clever trick ending? Who wouldn’t want to read that in 2017? I would imagine that the New Yorker turns down thousands of such stories a year but makes this one exception merely because it is written by FSF. Now, I’m a fan of his—I taught and annually re-read The Great Gatsby for a decade—but I believe he would now rise from his grave and shake a fist at us knowing that this story, not nearly as developed as “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” has made it into print at long last. Yet more unearthed works of Fitzgerald’s, collected in I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories, is out in April. Cahn’t wait.
Illustration by Seth. NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ** March 13, 2017, Enright Anne, “Solstice”: A man in contemporary Dublin, Ireland, drives home on December 21, 2016—a dark and dreary day—and stares with his ordinary wife and children at a long trajectory toward the summer solstice. Enright’s novel, The Green Road, was published last May.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ** March 6, 2017, Zadie Smith, “Crazy They Call Me”: Billie Holiday addresses herself, Lady Day, in essence making the reader privy to a two-page biography of a woman who is still larger than life though gone for nearly sixty years.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017Rating the Story ** February 27, Lore Segal, “Ladies’ Lunch”: Five elderly Manhattan women—Lotte, Ruth, Bridget, Farah, and Bessie—meet for lunch every other month for over thirty years until Lotte’s health fails, and then the others fall away, too; Segal relates this old story in a way that is fresh.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017 Rating the Story ***February 13 and 20, 2017, Curtis Sittenfeld, “The Prairie Wife”: A married woman with two sons becomes jealous of the success of a woman she once knew when both were young. ¶ What a perfect Valentine’s story! Yes, Kirsten is jealous of someone she once worked with at a kids’ camp when she was nineteen. Now the woman, Lucy Headrick, has an insanely successful career as “The Prairie Housewife,” a Christian persona that is a far cry from the less-than-angelic girl Kirsten knew in 1994. For a number of spoilerish reasons, I will only say that her jealousy forces her to recall her past and reevaluate her marriage to her spouse, Casey. This story is cleverly devised, written à la the following riddle: A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Figure this out and you'll have a leg up on Sittenfeld's story, which you should read now and enjoy! Her collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes out next year.
Photograph by Grant Cornett. NEXT TIME: A Valentine's Anniversary
New Yorker Fiction 2017 Rating the Story ***February 6, 2017, David Gilbert, “Underground”: Forty-seven-year-old Michael Salter, divorced father of two daughters, meets his mother and brother at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant for lunch and then is confronted with the imminent threat of his own death. This crisis, however (no spoiler here), is only a metaphor that has unfolded throughout the story: his new ami whom he meets through Grindr, a young man with “tens of thousands of followers” (61), the loss of his father as well as a childhood friend, the fact that as a poster dealer his bank account is shrinking daily, an ex-wife reminding him of the monthly check he owes her. His entire life is a crisis and yet at story’s end, where he has the opportunity, faced with a real life-or-death situation to save someone else, his own crises take on a different patina. “But at least he was doing something, something bigger than himself and full of possible meaning, courageous—right, this was courageous, rather than stupid, a sign that he was special, or, at a minimum, useful” (69). A very nuanced story in which a gay man happens to be the protagonist instead of the subject of a story. Normalcy may just have arrived at last. Gilbert is the author of the novel & Sons, and his November 12, 2012 story, “Member/Guest,” is one of my all-time favorites of recent New Yorker stories.
Illustration by Floc’h NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker fiction 2017Rating the Story ** January 30, 2017, Alix Ohlin, “Quarantine”: In her youth Bridget, a Canadian woman, befriends Angela, whom she many years later nurses when the woman insists she has an incurable disease. READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here! At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99 Introduction to My Long-Playing Records "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "Ghost Riders" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Blight" "A Gambler's Debt" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Engineer" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "The Age I Am Now" "Bathed in Pink" Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts: "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "My Long-Playing Records" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "Bathed in Pink" Also available on iTunes.
New Yorker Fiction 2017Rating the Story ***January 23, 2017, Elif Batuman, “Constructed Worlds”: Selin, an eighteen-year-old Turkish-American, reveals her life as she enters university in the mid 1990s. ¶ I love this story, if for no other reason than the author captures a character’s freshman year at a prestigious university. And, of course, the magic is all in the details, beginning with the fact that Selin’s frosh year is concurrent with the emergence of e-mail, over twenty years ago. Each section of the story, for a while, anyway, chronicles her five classes, one of which is an art class called Constructed Worlds, in which an embittered male professor talks about the phoniness of museums. Ah, the true semester (eighteen weeks), when finals “were after the [Christmas] vacation instead of before” (65). The story ends subtly—there is no traditional arc, much like many semesters—with Selin’s train ride back to Harvard from New Jersey, seeing a friend on the train, and her frenetic studying for finals in the university library: “At two in the morning, the library closed and I walked home through the fresh snow. The clouds had cleared, revealing the stars. Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? I thought about it for a long time, but somehow I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t picture any part of it at all” (65). Selin, in spite of all her brilliance, is a typical freshman, with one eye on the present but one eye on the future. Where is all this hard work taking me? Batuman’s novel, The Idiot, is out in March.
Illustration by Stephen Doyle NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017Rating the Story ** January 16, 2017, Thomas Pierce, “Chairman Spaceman”: Dom Whipple, forty-five, surrenders his considerable wealth to join GPS—God’s Plan for Space—so the group can establish a colony on a distant planet that has been deemed habitable. READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here! At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99 Introduction to My Long-Playing Records "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "Ghost Riders" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Blight" "A Gambler's Debt" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Engineer" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "The Age I Am Now" "Bathed in Pink" Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts: "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "My Long-Playing Records" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "Bathed in Pink" Also available on iTunes.
New Yorker Fiction 2017Rating the Story ** January 9, 2017, Yiyun Li, “On the Street Where You Live”: Becky and Max’s son, Jude, is diagnosed as a victim of monophobia—a six-year-old who is afraid of being alone.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
For six years I have read approximately fifty New Yorker short stories each year, evaluated each one, and then blogged a response. At the end of each year I published separate posts about data I had collected: average length of story, number of male or female authors, domestic or foreign settings, even the most oft-used point of view or tense, attempting to formulate some sort of profile of the New Yorker story. I’m not sure that any such profile made itself evident. A great story is often great because it cannot be nailed down; there is a certain essence, part of the creative process, which cannot necessarily be delineated. New Yorker Fiction 2017 ** January 2, 2017, Camille Bordas, "Most Die Young": Julie, a thirty-eight-year-old journalist living in Paris, lives through a terrorist attack, a separation from her husband, and the death of a dog her vet sister is treating.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2016December 19 and 26, 2016, Mariana Enríquez, “Spiderweb”: An Argentine woman travels from Buenos Aires with her husband, whom she detests, to visit family in Paraguay—a place in the “humid north” (107), where the air is difficult to breathe. ¶ This story would have one believe that ghosts appear everywhere, in this land where murders occur often, and unpleasant or even innocent people disappear. The narrator foreshadows a deadly fire when she is on an airplane and sees one the pilot claims was never there. Soldiers “put dead people in the cement” (112) of a bridge to hide bodies—there a driver has seen a woman on the bridge and hits her. One is fairly sure the narrator’s husband’s turn is coming. She’s grown to detest Juan Martín and his disagreeable ways. The narrator’s cousin Natalia doesn’t care for him either. And even though Natalia says, “‘Babe, death is the only problem without a solution,’” (109) one feels she is responsible for Juan Martín’s disappearance in the end. “‘Oh, there was a misunderstanding,’” (113) she declares to the hotel clerk, when Juan fails to appear with them at check-out time. Enríquez is the editor of Buenos Aires newspaper, Página/12. Photograph by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. NEXT TIME: My Book World 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2016December 12, 2016, Joseph O’Neill, “Pardon Edward Snowden”: A young poet pens a poem that petitions President Obama to pardon dissident Edward Snowden. ¶ There is always a difficulty in fictionalizing pop culture or more accurately living history. Snowden’s plight has not played out completely. The light shed on Dylan’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for poetry seems to have exploded and dimmed like a nova. O’Neill’s story really seems to be about the plight of poets: their anonymity despite a competence with and superior understanding of language that far surpass those of the most proficient prose writers. The poet Mark McCain, by way of a BCCed e-mail, is solicited by the young on-the-cusp-of-success poet, Merrill Jensen, to sign his petition. This is how the decade-older McCain responds: “He did not write Merrill back. He did not put his name to the poetition. I’ve never see utter rage portrayed more splendidly—at least as far as a spurned poet is concerned. O’Neill’s most recent novel is The Dog. Illustration by Alex Merto. READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here! At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99 Introduction to My Long-Playing Records "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "Ghost Riders" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Blight" "A Gambler's Debt" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Engineer" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "The Age I Am Now" "Bathed in Pink" Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts: "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "My Long-Playing Records" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "Bathed in Pink" Also available on iTunes.
New Yorker Fiction 2016December 5, 2016, Sam Shepard, “Tiny Man”: A man looks back at his life in the distant past when he is a teen, and his father is miniaturized as if appearing in a diorama. ¶ The story seems to center around—in a rather impressionistic manner of dreams and memory—one or two significant events. One, the man’s father having sex with a young woman named Felicity; then the teen having sex with Felicity. The rest seems like wallpaper or atmosphere: Shepard is a master at capturing sensory details, but they seem only to serve as a conveyance for readers as they float from one scene to the next. And perhaps this move is Shepard’s intent, attempting to create for readers the same jumbled mass of memories, some of which are vivid, the others of which are faint or exaggerated—very Freudian, although the narrator makes light of such an idea: “No matter. People will talk. It could also be that I’m dreaming him like that—tiny—because it’s a way of distancing myself, but that’s a bit Freudian, don’t you think? As though there were some kind of intelligence driving all this—the subconscious or some bullshit like that. Something I find hard to believe in. Why would I want to be distanced, anyway? There’s nothing I’m still afraid of” (73) So many fathers become tiny—not because they are dead but because they are insignificant and perhaps they always were—and the author brings this idea to life. Shepard’s novel, The One Inside, comes out in February. Illustrated by Ryan Heshka. READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here! At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50 Kindle: $2.99 Introduction to My Long-Playing Records "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "Ghost Riders" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Blight" "A Gambler's Debt" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Engineer" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "The Age I Am Now" "Bathed in Pink" Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts: "A Certain Kind of Mischief" "The Best Mud" "Handy to Some" "Tales of the Millerettes" "Men at Sea" "My Long-Playing Records" "Basketball Is Not a Drug" "Snarked" "Killing Lorenzo" "Bathed in Pink" Also available on iTunes. |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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March 2024
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