New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
Gustave Flaubert
Born December 12, 1821

An Old but Comfortable Pun

December 15, 2014, Elizabeth McKenzie, “Savage Breast”: A woman returns to her apartment to prepare for a party, but because she is tired she easily falls into a nap. ¶ Once the reader catches onto the writer’s intent, the story unfold easily, and one must follow. The nameless narrator finds herself in her childhood home, revealing to us those details we all have stored in our memories: for her, a stained blind with a crocheted ring on a string to raise and lower the blind, and many other clues. The savage beasts she encounters seem to be representations of her childhood family. In the sequence she seems to spend days with them, recalling the past—even the fat fifth-grade teacher-beast whom she believes hates her for daring to pun a revered literary passage into “savage breast.” The narrator has an odd ability to float back and forth between different time periods, not at all like the little girl-beast of her reverie: she recalls the Korean War, a specific issue of a 1953 issue of Life. ¶ One imagines that we all are capable of such a reverie if only we’d fall onto our beds exhausted and refuse to go to a party that no one cares whether we attend or not. Stop That Girl  is one of the author’s most popular books.
[The magazine gives no credit for the illustration.]

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, MLPR—"Handy to Some"

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