Crème de la Crème
A WRITER'S WIT
The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.
Joe Orton, Playwright
Born January 1, 1933
These stories either knock my socks off emotionally or in some other manner or else are so skillfully written I can’t deny them this status—even if I may not particularly flip for them.
Honjo 1. January 21, 2013, Tessa Hadley, “Experience”: Forty-year-old Laura stays as a guest in the house of Hana, an older woman who’s out of the country, and she encounters the departed woman’s troublesome boy friend. ¶ Hadley is imminently resourceful. This story so easily could have slipped into being something else, yet she masterfully allows this character Laura to find her way in Hana’s house, with Hana’s supposedly discarded boy friend. Some delicious moments in which Hadley cites the concrete so that she can move on to the abstract with authority:
“Then my eyes fastened on two protruding screws, one on each side of the interior of Hana’s letter box: in their functional ugliness they were reassuring” (65). “People seemed to take me more seriously—as if I’d been initiated into something after all, although nothing had happened” (65).
Victo Ngai 2. January 28, 2013, Kevin Canty, “Mayfly”: On a trip from Utah to Colorado, a couple in their thirties—James and Molly—drive their car through a migration of Monarch butterflies to visit another couple who have three children. ¶ This is a great yarn in that it doesn’t spell out everything: what a “dun” is if you don’t happen to know, that Molly may be a playwright, the cup is already broken. You must be ready to infer that the cup of their marriage is so broken it can’t be mended, though these two marriages will probably continue. Canty passes easily from the concrete to the abstract, the former earning the right to use the latter. The fragility of butterflies, their death on the highway symbolizes the fragility of a marriage, how you must keep moving forward. If some force doesn’t strike you down on life’s highway, you can, you can just keep on moving forward. Canty’s most recent novel is Everything.
Victo Ngai, Illustrator
Victo Ngai, Illustrator
José Manuel Navia 3. March 4, 2013, Colm Tóibín, “Summer of ‘38”: Montse, an old woman, when confronted with the idea of seeing a man who was the father of her eldest child, tells the story of how they first met during war time. ¶ This is a very tightly written narrative that, though it covers a long period of time, seems brief. The reader is relieved that Montse and Rudolfo do not meet in the end. Montse does not reveal to daughter Rosa that her real father was a soldier, instead of Paco the man who posed as her father all those years. Probably millions of women have found themselves in Montse’s position following a period of war, but Tóibín makes it seem as if it only happened once—this time. His most recent book is Testament of Mary.
José Manuel Navia, Photographer
José Manuel Navia, Photographer
Jashar Awan 4. March 18, 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Checking Out”. A Nigerian man living in London after his visa expires, Obinze, plans to marry a London woman in a “sham” marriage that will provide him citizenship. ¶ This story, like Will Mackin’s narrative (see #22. on Thursday) set in Afghanistan, is absorbing, in part, because the reader is plopped down in a world most Americans know nothing about. Obinze (aka Vincent) lives in a London he knows little about. Each day, to avoid the authorities, he must live invisibly in plain sight. He seems to do so until the very end, when he is apprehended and held in jail until he can be deported. It must be the story of tens or hundreds of thousands of Africans or other “foreigners” in England. Oh, the pain of being where one is not wanted! Adichie’s latest book is Americanah.
Jashar Awan, Illustrator
Jashar Awan, Illustrator
Honjo 5. April 1, 2013, Sarah Braunstein, “Marjorie Lemke”: A young woman with a baby works as a maid in a motel, where she meets a man who becomes her lover for a short time. ¶ This is one of the more significant stories the magazine has published in some time. Why? It seems that the author has lived and lived to tell about it—even if none of these events really happened to her. You as the reader believe it is sort of an autobiography. The abuse Marjorie suffers as a child, the abuse she suffers at the hands of her druggy lover, the abuse of elementary school kids, being stuck with a baby and a crummy job. The motel man she has the affair with wants a child. One senses that Marjorie doesn’t really want her baby Della and would be willing to give away her Della—just to provide her with a better life—although Braunstein never outright says so. One senses it. The best kind of story. Braunstein’s most recent work is The Sweet Relief of Missing Children.
Honjo, Photographer
Honjo, Photographer
Eric Hanson 6. April 29, 2013, Joshua Ferris, “The Fragments”: Via a cell phone call with his wife, Katy, a man overhears a conversation she is having with another man and concludes Katy is having an affair. ¶ When she fails to answer her phone and come home the next night, the nameless man begins to pay attention to the fragments of life around him, bits and pieces of people’s conversations as he passes by. The couple’s things are fragmented into his, hers, and theirs, and the narrator stumbles around their apartment night after night staring at those items, like flotsam from their marriage. Finally, he begins to shout from his window and give away these bits and pieces of her life, his life. We don’t see the confrontation to follow as Katy comes home and sees her luggage rolling up the street, her husband looking at their wedding album with a stranger, but we know it’s coming. ¶ A great, unique handling of a worn-out but universal theme. Who hasn’t experienced infidelity, one side or the other? Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came to the End, was launched in 2007.
Eric Hanson, Illustrator
Eric Hanson, Illustrator
Goodman/Cornett 7. June 10 & 17, 2013, Dashiell Hammett, “An Inch and a Half of Glory”: Earl Parish, age thirty, saves a young child from a non-threatening fire before the fire fighters arrive, and his story is awarded an inch and a half of space in the next day’s newspaper. ¶ No one could publish a story similar to this today, one that features hubris as a theme, at least not in this manner. It would seem too preachy, eh? But as a matter of history, Hammett did write such a story. Written in the 1920s long before word processing, this story is air tight. One would love to see the rough drafts. ¶ A few coincidences might seem a little too convenient, but isn’t that the way of fiction? One probably would not literally run into two fires in one’s life time, but Earl Parish does, each one with a different literary purpose: the first one to make him a hero, the second one to shake him to his senses so that out of the flames might rise a new person. As this is a previously unpublished story, one must ask if it should have been? Would Hammett have wanted it published? Is it as good as his entire oeuvre? The Hunter and other Stories, a mix of published and previously unpublished stories, was released in November.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Goodman/Cornett 8. June 10 & 17, 2013, Annie Proulx, “Rough Deeds”: Duquet, eighteenth-century Canadian logger and entrepreneur, out of a kind of mercy, kills a teenage boy whom he has captured as bounty from a raid on his land. As he returns to camp one day, he senses that it has been disrupted, but he cannot tell what it is. When Duquet later hunts down McBogle, the interloper who has cut into his forest, his own rough deed is rewarded by a rough deed McBogle bestows upon him for having killed one he calls his boy. C’est tout! ¶ When I first begin reading this story, I think to myself that it is more like a novel, and when I catch the New Yorker’s “This Week in Fiction” blog, my suspicion is confirmed. It is but a strand of Proulx’s novel-in-progress, yet all the pieces of this narrative fit together perfectly. It could be a novel whose print has been miniaturized and stuffed into one of those tiny books and sold as a novelty. ¶ Proulx cannot publish anything bad or mediocre. Her vocabulary is extensive yet germane to the fabric of the novel. Magnifique. Her novel Bark-Skins is due out in 2015.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Goodman, Cornett, Granger 9. June 10 & 17, 2013, Jhumpa Lahiri, [JOOMpuh LuhHEERee] “Brotherly Love”: This twenty-thousand-word-plus story is one of two brothers born in post-war Calcutta, whose love for one another never falters—though they are as different as night and day. ¶ In Part 1 Udayan, the younger by thirteen months, convinces Subash to scale a wall and enter a posh golf course. A policeman later catches them and uses a golf club to beat the back of Subash’s legs. They go to college and Udayan becomes a revolutionary. ¶ In Part 2 Subash receives a visa to study for a doctorate in Rhode Island. Then he receives word that Udayan has been killed. ¶ Subash returns to Calcutta in Part 3 to comfort his family; he is unhappy with the way his parents treat Gauri, his brother’s widow, who was not their parents’ choice for a bride. ¶ In Part 4 Gauri tells Subash how his brother was executed in view of his parents and wife, the police staging it to look as if Udayan had been trying to escape. ¶ Subash decides to ask the pregnant Gauri to marry him in Part 5.
“It was all he could do to help her, the only alternative he could provide. And the only way to take her away was to marry her. To take his brother’s place, to raise his child, to come to love her as Udayan had. To follow him in a way that felt perverse, that felt ordained. That felt at once right and wrong” (88). In the end Gauri says, “[Udayan] once told me, because he got married before you, that he wanted you to be the first to have a child” (89).
This last sentence renders the title ironic, not ironic, tied by a sturdy thread to the entire story. Lahiri can do no wrong. Her novel, The Lowland, was published in 2013.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Granger Collection, Archive
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Granger Collection, Archive
Michele Borzoni 10. July 8 & 15, 2013, Tobias Wolff, “All Ahead of Them”: A newly married couple—Thomas and Arden—apparently spend their honeymoon in Italy, but the husband is unsettled when he discovers his wife has lied about the cost of her bridesmaid dresses. ¶ The story seems to be concerned with the idea of perceptions. Thomas (called Bud since childhood) has previously viewed his new wife in one light, and yet he realizes at some level he’s always known. And what does Arden (Nedra spelled backward, a name of her making) think of him? Is he weak? A patsy? That neither one of them has ever been called by their real names may be symbolic of how they perceive one another—particularly Thomas. Yet he seems to view the future as if it is a dream and realizes he desires to save Arden from the pain of telling him the truth. No matter what happens, he will protect her from herself, because he loves her. Wolff’s last book was Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, published in 2008.
Michele Borzoni, Photographer
Michele Borzoni, Photographer
Scott Musgrove 11. July 22, 2013, David Gilbert, “From a Farther Room”: After an evening of self indulgence shared with an old buddy, Robert Childress, a fortyish man “vomits” up a baby-like being. ¶ At first I’m put off by the fantasy-like nature of Childress trying to bury then save this “baby.” But then the story dawns before me . . . this “baby” is Bobby, Robert Childress’s childish form—somewhat amorphous and arrested in his development:
“Then he saw his old name on the lid and his mood darkened. Was he so different from that easily injured boy? Sometimes it seemed that the only point to life was death. Dirt slid from the shovel back into the hole. Robert hoped it sounded like peaceful rain, because after that the rest was a storm” (65).
Some part of Childress wishes to rescue this Bobby, return to his blue collar roots in Michigan, and allow Bobby to mature, but as he is entrenched with his wife and three children in the safety of Westchester County (so Cheever-like), he can only move ahead—the glacial yet fleeting forward motion of life on earth. This may be The New Yorker's most significant, most complex story of the year. Gilbert’s novel & Sons came out in November.
Scott Musgrove, Illustrator
Scott Musgrove, Illustrator
Larry Towell 12. July 29, 2013, Daniel Alarcón, “Collectors”: This is the life story of a dyslexic young man Rogelio, who is placed in perhaps a Peruvian prison for carrying drug contraband for his brother and then makes friends with a playwright. ¶ The prison is named Collectors. It does. It collects men. It is like no other prison I’ve ever read about. Inmates must “purchase” (more like "rent") a cell and otherwise live outdoors or on the floor until they can afford to buy one. Collectors is run by a man, Espejo, who has worked his way to the top of prison life. Rogelio arrives first and then Henry, a playwright, whose play The Idiot President angers the government. Delicately, not really in a homosexual manner, they become lovers—first fantasizing what it might be like to make love to the women of the inmates who have, that afternoon, fucked on their cell beds:
“Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as they lay on their bunks, they could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the stench of the prison dissipated, though, in some ways this other smell was worse. It reminded them of everything they were missing” (61).
This narrative is absorbing primarily because it is so alien to even prison stories in the U.S.—which give the illusion, at least, that our prisons are under the control of authorities. This fictional prison, like an insane asylum, is in the hands of the inmates, the collectors. Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles was published in October.
Larry Towell, Photographer
Larry Towell, Photographer
Moises Saman 13. September 16, 2013, Tahar Ben Jelloun, “By Fire”: Mohamed, thirty, college graduate with no prospects for a job, attempts with great difficulty to earn a living for his family by selling fruit, using his late father’s cart in a corrupt Tunisia. ¶ No matter what direction Mohamed chooses to move, he is thwarted by greed, graft, and other evil acts performed by crooked government officials. Mohamed is a rare character in fiction: a true victim of all that is wrong with the world—yet with no way out; often literature gives a character some escape besides death. ¶ Of course, the basis of this narrative is not fiction. Yes, a certain bell went off in my head when I reached the part of self-immolation. Jelloun has brought to life the story of the Tunisian man who, in 2011, to protest against the horrible events of his life, ends it in a slow and painful manner, but surely, with the hope that things might change, might get better for everyone. Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village was published in 2011.
Moises Saman, Photographer
Moises Saman, Photographer
Jeffrey Decoster 14. September 30, 2013, Joshua Ferris, “The Breeze”: Sarah asks her husband Jay to come home early so they can enjoy the first nice day of spring in New York City. ¶ As near as I can tell, this is a story of the roads not taken—with each section serving as a version of how this evening might turn out. Sarah longs for a better marriage, a better life, a better, more meaningful everything. Sections of idealized love and dining are alternated with the mundane, how things might really be with the couple. It would otherwise be a very short story. Ferris bothers to explore something as fleeting as a breeze, maybe a dozen in a lifetime, which in turn serves as a metaphor for this couple’s fleeting life. This story—nonlinear to the max—may be the magazine’s most ambitious of the year, and perhaps the most fully realized in terms of artistry. I greatly admire it. Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came to the End, was launched in 2007.
Jeffrey Decoster, Photographer
Jeffrey Decoster, Photographer
15. October 7, 2013, Paul Theroux, “I’m the Meat, You’re the Knife”: A man returns to his home town of Medford, Massachusetts, to attend his father’s funeral, but also makes regular visits to his former high school English teacher who is dying in hospice. ¶ Theroux weaves two strands together, along with a number of shorter narratives (mostly from Africa, where the character has lived in the past) into one fascinating story. Jay, almost as a distraction from his father’s death and funeral, visits his dying teacher, a man who apparently molested the boy in high school. Theroux limns Jay’s anger without denigrating the humanity of either character. By relating “stories” to the stroke victim, who can do little but listen—all oblique—Jay is able to torment the man with his anger. A few days after his father’s funeral, when Jay’s mother announces that his teacher Murray Cutler has died, Jay falls apart.
“I had begun to cry, sniffling, then sobbing with an odd hopeless honk of despair.
‘He thought the world of you,’ she said. ‘Dad knew that. He used to talk about it to me.’ And then she was comforting me. ‘Go on, let it out, Jay. I know how much he meant to you’” (73).
This story is admirable for a number of reasons. Theroux uses narrative as a tool to build yet more narrative, yet more subtext. He uses indirection to relate a difficult tale in such a manner that the reader is hungry to know what happened. One has already guessed, but one wants the exact truth. And the reader gets it, if obliquely. This is the type of story one expects to see in a literary journal. It is a much better one than his story, “The Furies,” published earlier this year in the magazine.
Theroux’s latest book is The Lower River.
[The magazine gives no credit for the illustration.]
Theroux’s latest book is The Lower River.
[The magazine gives no credit for the illustration.]
Leslie Herman 16. December 2, 2013, Romesh Gunesekera, “Road Kill”: Vasantha, a Sri Lankan taxi van driver, transports a young pregnant woman and her husband on an eleven-hour trip with an overnight stop at the Spice Garden Inn. ¶ In part, Gunesekera’s tone is witty: Michael Ondaatje meets E. M. Forster, perhaps. Yet it is a story about a certain darkness. Vasantha is intrigued with the assistant manager of the inn, Miss Saraswati, her marksmanship with regard to killing a rat a nine paces with the toss of a beer bottle—with little blood or beer lost. But he also observes a darkness in her, a darkness brought to bear by her surroundings:
“Blackness is like ink seeping through my eyes and into my head.”
The stop at the inn causes Vasantha to wonder further, all humor aside:
“It is only when you come to a stop like this, in a black night in the middle of nowhere, that things wobble a bit and you wonder about the purpose of roads. You sit in the dark, frightened at the life you’ve led and the things you’ve left undone. You can only hope that in the long run it won’t matter, but that in itself is no consolation.”
So much of this story is beneath the surface: a dark comedy on top because one must laugh at the daily absurdities of life anywhere on earth to survive, including the civil war that the people of this country have survived; the blackness of night may stand in for the darkness of the human spirit, a blackness we all fight to overcome along our own war-torn journeys. Gunesekera’s book, Noontide Toll, is due out soon.
Leslie Herman, Illustrator
Leslie Herman, Illustrator
Javier Jaén 17. December 23 & 30, 2013, Rebecca Curtis, “The Christmas Miracle”: The narrator relates to K, a Russian Soviet, her story of spending Xmas with a houseful of relatives in which a certain miracle—odd and bizarre—does ensue. ¶ In this mountainous locale, cats are being killed by coyotes. A houseful of nutty relatives, also the narrator, who has a disease whose symptoms include a hunger for sugar—seeks to stop the cat killing, and in the end it happens! A certain cat character turns the tables on the coyote. ¶ This is my kind of Xmas story, snidely satirical—poking fun in a lambasting manner at everything Xmas, and yet in the end, a miracle does occur. The evil lump that has been invading their lives for years seems to be destroyed. Most important, there is never a drop of sentimentality, unless it thrown out on a fully dressed table to ridicule thoroughly. Perhaps the best Xmas story ever! Curtis’s latest book is Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money.
Javier Jaén, Illustrator
READ "The Big Middle" ON THURSDAY
Javier Jaén, Illustrator
READ "The Big Middle" ON THURSDAY
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