 | A WRITER'S WIT |  R. Caro |
New Yorker Fiction 2017
***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average
John Clang ***October 30, 2017, Joseph O’Neill, “The Sinking of the Houston”: A Manhattanite father of three teens sets out to retrieve his mugged son’s phone. ¶ This story which strikes one note at the beginning—FATHERHOOD—quickly veers and intersects a larger history. In his high-tech fashion—monitoring son’s mugger by way of a track-your-child app on his own phone—Dad looks to rectify this wrong. After weeks of surveillance, he sallies forth in what looks like will be a kill and in the elevator encounters an old-man neighbor who soon reveals that when he was a teen he’d survived the sinking of the Houston in his engagement with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1962. The reader never learns whether Dad locates the mugger, but this chance meeting with a former teen does seem to change the context of his mission. O’Neill’s collection, Good Trouble, comes out in June 2018.
Photograph by John Clang
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
Photograph by John Clang
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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