Riddle Me, Riddle Me Not!

A WRITER'S WIT
If you’re really a gaucho, you can’t change, because wherever you go, you’ll go with your soul leading the way.
Ricardo Güiraldes
Born February 13, 1886

Ricardo Güiraldes

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Rating the Story
***—Excellent [includes profile]
**   —Above Average [one-sentence description]
*      —Average [one-sentence description]

Grant Cornett

***​February 13 and 20, 2017, Curtis Sittenfeld, “The Prairie Wife”: A married woman with two sons becomes jealous of the success of a woman she once knew when both were young. ¶ What a perfect Valentine’s story! Yes, Kirsten is jealous of someone she once worked with at a kids’ camp when she was nineteen. Now the woman, Lucy Headrick, has an insanely successful career as “The Prairie Housewife,” a Christian persona that is a far cry from the less-than-angelic girl Kirsten knew in 1994. For a number of spoilerish reasons, I will only say that her jealousy forces her to recall her past and reevaluate her marriage to her spouse, Casey. This story is cleverly devised, written à la the following riddle:

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A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!”

Figure this out and you'll have a leg up on Sittenfeld's story, which you should read now and enjoy! Her collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes out next year.
Photograph by Grant Cornett.

NEXT TIME: A Valentine's Anniversary