from The New Yorker (January 16, 2023 issue)
This story snuck up on me a little. Builds itself up out of the premise of a group of Asian Americans who are in a book club together, after one of them got attacked and is now in the hospital. After the last couple of stories (Lethem, Ernaux) I’ve read in The New Yorker, apparently been thinking a lot about where each of these get their inspiration, their jumping off point. Ong’s story is inspired by and in response to these hate crime attacks and what it would feel like to be afraid to walk through your own city and also the impact of watching, on the news and social media, the attack of one of your friends.
The attackee, Allen, is in a coma for the entirety of the story, while also being at its center — the other characters orbit around his absence, and we learn about both Allen and these book club characters, by what they tell us about him.
Allen was, in some ways, a kindred spirit. His one-word self-description, at our first book-group gathering, was “lapsed.” What did he mean? You name it, I’ve lapsed. To much laughter, he enumerated: lapsed Christian, lapsed Korean, lapsed middle-class person, lapsed heterosexual. He was an unusual gay man, but maybe I was relying on stereotypes: he was young but chubby, unstylish, unprepossessing in appearance and manner. He wasn’t the most talkative of the bunch of us, and he had a fondness for upspeak, like a teen-ager.
from The New Yorker (October 31, 2022 issue)
Part of me hated this story, part of me loved it! Meta and self-aware that I feel a little tired of, but that also felt like it was doing something a little different and new and unique in kinda exciting ways. Apparently inspired by / a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” it reminded me a bit of my recent read of Ernaux’s “Returns,” the way stories can be in dialogue with on another, the different ways to be inspired by an old text to create something new, an interesting jumping off point and also way of playing with refraction...
The story acknowledges borrowing the language of its acknowledgment of its occupation of stolen Tongva land from the Web site of a collective of spirit healers, who will go unnamed in this acknowledgment, for they may not wish to be associated. The story admits that it also depends for its existence on an occupation of the text of R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” a text that the story’s author first encountered in the anthology “Other Dimensions,” edited by Robert Silverberg in 1973. The story takes place six years later, in 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, of the Iranian hostage crisis, of the imminence of the Reagan era. The feeling that the Reagan era was coming is a migraine prodrome, a hangover suffered before a decades-long binge on Militarism, Bogus Optimism, and Imperial Fantasy that hasn’t abated yet. Since, really, what is the twenty-first century except the endless unspooling of the implications of the Reagan era? But the writer digresses.
from This is the Afterlife, originally published in The North American Review
The collection opens with this story about a community burning metal records because they're "devil's music," and features a Kurt Loder cameo or two. Incredibly up my alley. It so perfectly captures that moral panic of a community responding to a local crisis that is getting blamed on pop culture.
from Nobody Gets Out Alive, originally published in The Paris Review
I hadn’t read Newman before; really enjoyed this story, am excited to keep reading the collection!
There’s a moment maybe 2/3 of the way through the story, where Carl—in the narrator’s words, "the beautiful, bedeviling heartbreak of my life”—is asking the narrator to watch his dog. He tells her he’s going down to Texas on a fishing trip, but she realizes he has cancer and is going down for a treatment to (probably only slightly?) extend his life. “Long ago,” he’d told her, “Inside you hides a soft, secret pink balloon of dreams.”
“Wait,” I said and stood up. “I’ll keep your stupid dog.”
“I don’t want your money,” he said. “And you don’t even like her.”
“Sure I do,” I said. “She’s kind of spirited, that’s all.”
“What’s her name?” he said, not stopping, not slowing down in the least.
“Rita,” I said. All his dogs were named Rita, one after another.
He stopped to scrape some dog puke off the bottom of his boot. But he waved. “I call her Pinkie,” he said. “After your secret balloon of dreams.”
That was how I knew it was the last time we would see each other. Carl always liked to leave me a little more in love with him than ever.
There’s lots to admire in the story, but the way that final paragraph is so heartbreakingly perfect makes the story for me.
from The New Yorker (November 14, 2022 issue)
The beginning of this grabbed me right away, echoing as it does John Cheever’s “Reunion,” one of my fave stories of all time.
“Returns”:
The last time I saw my mother at her home, it was July, a Sunday. I travelled there by train. At Motteville, we sat in the station for a long time.
“Reunion”:
The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station. I was going from my grandmother's In the Adirondacks to a cottage on the Cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half, and asked if we could have lunch together.
That “The last time I saw me mother/father...,” of course, but then also the train station. Both, too, are short — under 2k words, and probably closer to ~1500.
After that opening, Ernaux’s story differentiates itself and becomes its own: a daughter’s last visit with her mother, who lives alone. It’s a quiet story, beautiful and also heartbreaking. That relationship of visiting a parent after you’ve moved away, loving your life and where you’ve ended up but loving your parent too, and those complicated feelings of being absent and home and what it all means, all felt incredibly familiar and well rendered.
A new fave story.
from Rainbow, Rainbow
I liked this one less than the first two in the collection, though that says as much (more?) about how much I loved those two than it does about this one.
It starts “We meet in the Plague.” and is set in mid-/late-2020; it doesn’t name Covid but is set during and to a degree about that first year of the pandemic and how we responded.
There are two little more “meta” or “autofiction” or whatever moments that were maybe my favorite:
And since you’ve used my right pronouns, which my girlfriend can’t always quite get, which I can’t always quite get, which confuses and upsets my friends, to what extent they think about me or it at all, which my family won’t know about until they read this story, whatever final form it takes, I assume what you are doing is right.
and then, near the very end
When you read this, you’ll feel so bad. Especially since some of this is not exactly true, while most of it is exactly true. Maybe for you, none of it is.
from The World Doesn't Require You, originally published on Midnight Breakfast
Early in the story, we get the basic background and premise of the story:
This story, though, isn’t about God. It’s about one of His sons. Not His son in the metaphorical sense—well, he was, as we all are the children of God—but more so he was His son in the physical sense.
David Sherman was God’s last son. The youngest child of thirteen by five different women who lined up to have children with the fleshy embodiment of All Things in Existence.
As the story acknowledges, this could be some kind of “metaphorical” sense, but it isn’t, or it could be handled more cynically, but instead it sets up this idea and treats it literal and true and goes from there, in sometimes surprising and often really powerful ways.
Been meaning to pick up this collection for a while. Excited to read more from it!
from The New Yorker (December 5, 2022 issue)
I’m not sure I really “got it,” but I liked this one a lot. Found it interestingly hypnotic. I kind of kept getting a little frustrated that I wasn’t understanding it but then would remind myself that that was okay and would instead just let it was over me, and when I did, I really enjoyed it. Strong “vibes” !
from Rainbow, Rainbow, originally publishing in The Gettysburg Review; story isn’t online, but a great interview with Lydia here
I really loved this story a lot. That kind of “teenagers discovering themselves/the world/their bodies/sexuality/everything” that I can really be a sucker for.
Probably my fave story I’ve read so far this year.
from The New Yorker (December 19, 2022 issue)
Man, I did not like this story!
On the surface level, I think I’m closed-mindedly sensitive to what could be read as upper middle class and smug.
On a craft level, it felt like too many characters, I couldn’t keep them straight, I didn’t care about any of them, and its told in the first person POV from the dad but gives us these sections about the daughter that the narrator wouldn’t know and it really bugged me! All of which I would have overlooked or maybe even taken as “exceptions that prove the rule” aspects about short story “rules” and breaking them, but the story never connected with me and so I couldn’t overlook them
That said, trying to think about why I didn’t like it felt really interesting and instructive.
from Best American Short Stories 2022, originally published on Joyland
There’s a moment early on, where the characters just “say the thing”:
They were both married, both with a second kid, but spoke candidly about their desire for each other. They could not sleep together because their motivations were not perfectly aligned. They overlapped but were not concentric. This was insurmountable. Cora wanted to fuck Sam. It was physical only, but had grown strong. She had no control over it. She became a slavering animal in his presence.
She told him this one afternoon, a few months into their acquaintance, on a stretch of sharp incline. Her quads burned and she panted slightly. He laughed.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” said Cora.
“No, I’m glad you did. It’s just the way you put it.”
I so often when writing do so much work making my characters avoid saying the quiet part out loud, and I love when someone just says it, and that pushes the story into a new arena.
from Not Everyone is Special, originally published in Third Coast
About a little person working at Santa’s Workshop, a Christmas-themed amusement park in Illinois. This feels a little like a George Saunders story without the Saunders... voice? Maybe like a George Saunders premise fed through Denslow’s own style and pov and writing style. I really dug it!
There’s something about the way the characters converged and all the pieces felt like they clicked into place in the last couple of pages that really reminded me of the pleasures of a great story. Super fun, found myself wanting to both speed up and slow down as I got to the end, fully engrossed but wanting to savor.
A small little fave passage:
You know how when you look through a telescope and you can only see that one small part of the sky and the rest is outside your vision? Everything else disappears and I only see Charlie and his unibrow and his inflated nostrils.
from Afterparties, originally published in The Paris Review
I think what will stick with me here is how much it felt like an emotional arc of a story, rather than something more plotty. By the time it gets to Maly looking at the baby and saying “I’ve changed my mind. She’s actually pretty cute.” To which the narrator adds, “And this, out of everything, is what chokes me up,” I felt a little choked up as well.
The “plot” mostly feels like it is there for So to hang a bunch of great stuff on — about being Khmer, and Californian, and gay, and sometimes how those things intersect and other times just each on their own; about growing up, and the summer before you move away to college; getting high with friends; and movies and TV shows. My favorite passage might be the characters talking about Videodrome.
“The fuck’s a Videodrome?” ... “It’s about this lame white guy,” I explain, “who’s obsessed with a TV station called Videodrome... The station plays, like, snuff porn. You know, people are sex-tortured.”
“Why not jack off to actual snuff porn?” Maly asks. “Why even bother with a dull artsy film?”
“It’s a metaphor,” I answer.
“And the metaphor means . . . what?”
“It’s about how we are constantly violated by the media and . . . like . . . TV commercials . . .” ... “There’s this part of the movie,” I continue, “where the white guy’s stomach turns into a vagina, you know, and then some other white guy forces a videotape into his vagina-tummy. . . . The rape of our minds, or some shit.”
...
“That’s fucking idiotic.”
Steven Rinella, Meat Eater
Wesley Morris on Focus ep of The Rewatchables
