New Yorker Project 3 - Stories Least Liked

A WRITER'S WIT
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
Cicero
Born January 3, 106 B.C.

Stories I Liked Least and Why

Although my selections are about as subjective as one can get, I have attempted to include in my discussion a spirited and logical argument as to why I believe these stories may fail.

Tomer Hanuka

45. February 25, 2013, Paul Theroux, “The Furies”: Ray Testa divorces his wife and marries Shelby, a young (thirty-one) assistant from his office; together they attend his fortieth high school reunion, and all the women the man has ever wronged begin to appear before him as hags that haunt him. ¶ A very simple story by comparison to many of the finer ones this year—the sort of story perhaps you might think a good amateur could write. (Can I say that?) Intriguing idea, but Theroux seems so obvious about his purpose. He tells more than shows what he wishes to convey to the reader. Theroux’s latest book is The Lower River.
Tomer Hanuka, Illustrator

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Bryan Christie

46. April 15, 2013, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Night of the Satellite”: A young couple argue over whether to intervene in a lovers’ quarrel and help a young woman, and, along with the descent of an old satellite, it colors their relationship one hot summer in the Midwest. ¶ Boyle certainly knows how to reel you in. The sensory details. Emotions. Visual clues. He manages to make the falling debris of the satellite intersect with the fighting couple—a catalyst of sorts—but his denouement seems as heavy-handed as a bus-sized satellite: 

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“Space debris that collides in two wide bands of low Earth orbit, at six hundred and twenty and at nine hundred and thirty miles up, can fragment and fragment again—things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. space walk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess” (69). 

This narrative about the petulance of a young straight couple, while being utterly familiar, seems overwrought. Read Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done.
Bryan Christie. Illustrator

Owen Freeman

47. July 1, 2013, Joyce Carol Oates, “Mastiff”: A man and woman hike up a mountain and near the end of their trek down are attacked by an English mastiff that breaks from its young owner’s grasp. ¶ I’ve not read much of Oates’s writing since her novel Blonde came out in 2000 (which I found fascinating), and I realize why. Something about this work seems overwrought: too much detail, even an essence of deus ex machina immediately following the dog’s attack:

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“But a hiker, who had witnessed it from a distance, had alerted the rangers and taken down the plate number of the young man’s Jeep” (62).

Why is this bit of knowledge necessary? It seems inserted to make the story become part of a civilized culture, which is truly incongruous in this tale. Justice concerning the dog’s owner, who allows this to happen, is another story—irrelevant to the one Oates is relating about two lonely adults reaching out yet not reaching out to mean something to one another. ¶ With even the subtle use of the omnipotent narrator, Oates wishes to leave no stone unturned, but is it not a bit too much? One likes to feel that a story unfolds, not that it is so hermetically sealed that it winds up with not a breath of air. Oates’s The Accursed was released in 2013.
Owen Freeman, Illustrator

Simon Landrein

48. August 5, 2013, Shirley Jackson, “Paranoia”: A Manhattanite, on his way home from work, believes he is being pursued by, among others, a man in a light hat. ¶ Compared to contemporary stories, this one, most likely from the 1940s, does not move. Oh, yes, it has a plot. Mr. Beresford moves from place to place. But what of it? Jackson may be attempting to demonstrate his paranoia, but I think she fails. Moreover, we’re supposed to believe, I think, that, in light of the very last line spoken by Mrs. Beresford, she is somehow complicit in his difficulties in getting home for her birthday. ¶ This story was discovered by Jackson’s children and obviously submitted to the magazine. Like Hammett’s story, there may be a reason why Jackson never saw it published in her time; perhaps she didn’t wish to have it published. Perhaps she felt it wasn’t up to snuff. Perhaps it was even rejected. ¶ There is something disconcerting about publishing a story that is clearly inferior to the author’s best stories, say, “The Lottery.” I believe it may dishonor Jackson and her entire oeuvre.
Simon Landrein, Illustrator

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Martin Ansin

49. August 12 & 19, 2013, Zadie Smith, “Meet the President!”: Bill Peek, fifteen, citizen of the future (in maybe a hundred years), meets an old woman and young girl, the latter of whom he escorts to the “funeral” of her sister, “a real girl.” ¶ Drones the size of gulls? (I think.) The White House now in Scotland, presumably because the U.S. has sunk beneath the ocean? Tsunami season? The “reconstruction” of an original animal, one known as a reddish fox? We’re definitely in the arena of sci-fi or speculative fiction, never a place I’m very comfortable, primarily because I cannot seem to relax and believe what the writer is telling me. It is a language only Zadie Smith knows, and while she reveals the “etymology” of some of her vocabulary, the rest is up to us. ¶ On the face of it, Bill Peek meets the President briefly before a blackout occurs (this image can never leave Brits who’ve seen even one WWII movie)—to what end, I’m not sure—then attends, in the same location, ostensibly, the funeral of the little girl, Aggie’s sister. I rather enjoy speculating, along with Smith, what might happen in this dystopian future, but as with all good fiction, I like to feel that the narrative consists of more than plot. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World both provide something about what might become of the human race. I admire Smith for making the effort and the magazine for adding this story to the repertoire of literature presented in 2013, but I think this piece might work better if it were expanded as a novella, at least. If there were ever a story that needed to be covered in the “This Week in Fiction” section of the magazine’s Web site, this is it! Smith is the author of NW.
Martin Ansin, Illustrator

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Marco Mazzoni

50. September 9, 2013, Dorthe Nors, “The Heron”: The story seems to be a first-person monologue in a stream-of-conscious fantasy that considers all the elements of the narrator’s life: a pond in Copenhagen’s Frederiksberg Gardens, a murder from his childhood, a friend Lorenz, young mothers with their prams, a heron. ¶ The narrative is so brief and yet confounding in its impenetrability. Is it because it’s a translation, and I find translations wanting? Is it because the symbols never seem to translate into something else, quite? Provide feeling or emotion for the reader? Am I poor reader? Nors’s Karate Chop is out in February.
Marco Mazzoni, Illustrator

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Javier Jaén

51. October 28, 2013, Haruki Murakami, “Samsa in Love”: Gregor Samsa, having existed previously as a bird-fearing beetle, is transformed into a man one morning in Prague. ¶ Kafka may have done it better in his novel The Metamorphosis, by transforming Gregor into a beetle. Clever by half seems an appropriate description of this story, for there exists a problem with point of view. First of all, how is it that the transformed is familiar with the language the story is written in? Okay, one might cite suspension of disbelief as a tool, a great feature of magical realism. Still, it is disconcerting that Gregor is able to name all the items in front of him, call foods by their proper names, speak so fluently with the hunchback woman—and at such a glacial pace. Oh, yes, perhaps it is the author who is using an omniscient POV, not Gregor's POV at all. Yet, for a moment, the POV shifts to the woman hunchback, to affirm in some way this new creature’s humanity. Perhaps Murakami relies too much on the reader’s suspension of disbelief and . . . perhaps he hasn’t given the reader anything that is worthy of suspending his or her disbelief. Perhaps the conceit of playing off a famous novel has failed. For me it’s always a toss-up with translations. Is the reader getting the real story? Murakami’s three-volume novel 1Q84 came out in 2009-10.
Javier Jaén, Illustrator

Until next year, when I undertake this once again . . . .

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD: ALONG THE BORDER
WEDNESDAY: RECENT PHOTOS OF LAS VEGAS
THURSDAY: A SHORT STORY
FRIDAY: I SHOWCASE THE LASTEST NEW YORKER STORIES

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