New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT  
I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.
Rachel Field
Born September 19, 1894

Hot Time in Tucson

Pacaud/Roberts/Shere

September 22, 2014, Victor Lodato, “Jack, July”: Jack, twenty-two, of Tucson, is a meth addict who’s been rejected by his mother, his sister, and girlfriend, Rhonda. ¶ In a way you feel like a voyeur while reading this story, so intensely does Lodato let us in on what it is like to be a crystal meth user. Living fast is what Jack calls it, life speeded up past the speed of sound. You witness Jack’s stink. You witness his thoughts of the past (sister mauled by a dog, a less than competent mother). You feel the searing July 4th heat as Jack negotiates this fast life. You even glide into the fuzzy, foggy world of meth as he returns to the place where he’s flopped for the last two weeks, the only home he has left. His obese roommate pats his kimono pocket, and answers Jack's silent question with “I do I do I do.” Life couldn’t seem any bleaker than this, yet somehow you hope. You hope. Lodato’s novel, Mathilda Savitch, was published in 2010.
Illustration by Julien Pacaud. Left: H. Armstrong Roberts. Getty (Dog). Right: Sam Shere. Time Life Pictures / Getty (Man).

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