The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue

I always heave these fiction issues out of the mailbox with a deep sigh; they ought to excite me, as the once did, back in the day, but instead they just make me weary. Maybe it's because I know I'm not in them. I don't think so, though--I think that I prefer normal New Yorkers--they're more likely to take you by surprise. The fiction issues, on the other hand, always seem to give you something you're guaranteed to like, which means I'm guaranteed not to.

Jhumpa Lahiri's story, "Year's End," is unbelievably long, and it will surprise no one to learn that it's about love and family, set against a backdrop of New-World / Old-World tension. I have nothing against Lahiri, her writing is fluid and clear, but like a lot of contemporary literary fiction that people actually pay money for, it spends a hell of a long time saying absolutely obvious things. The narrator, a fully Americanized Indian college student, recalls a nurse speaking to him during his mother's final illness. "This is the worst part," the nurse says, referring to the days of waiting for death. "I realized that Mrs. Gharibian had been right," the narrator admits, "there had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come, that the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days."

Didn't Tom Petty say all there was to say about this, back in 1981? Do we really need such detailed elaboration upon facts that every human being on earth already knows? To be fair, there is more to the story than this small sentiment, but not nearly enough. I kept asking myself, What Would Alice Munro Do? (Perhaps we should print up some W6 tee shirts bearing this slogan.) I had a good idea of what, and I wanted it real, real bad--it could have made this story a knockout. But Lahiri let me down. Instead, she ends the story with somebody burying photographs in the sand. Cue the strings.

Lore Segal's story, "The Arbus Factor," is slight, and hinges on a zinger--the smug upper-middle-class couple whose restuarant conversation we have been listening to for a page and a half...turn out to be OLD! Good God, we've been tricked! The woman goes into the ladies' room and looks in the mirror, and some kind of crone looks back! And here I thought we were reading about middle-aged boring rich people. And even Junot Diaz's "Alma" doesn't do it for me--I generally find it hard to fault Junot, and this piece crackles with the same energy as all his other stuff. But it's about a guy who falls for a Dominican girl with a nice ass and then he cheats on her and she dumps him. It ain't bad, but he's written it already.

And "Beginners," Tess Gallagher's retro-Carverian reconstruction, well--I couldn't get through it. Lish's edit is so, so, so, so much better. Don't get me wrong: at the end of his life, the more discursive writer inside Carver came into his own. Carver knew it--a couple of the stories he collected in Where I'm Calling From are in fact pre-Lish versions, and he knew at the time when he was right, and when Lish was right. (Case in point: "A Small, Good Thing." The long version is the right one.) And his final story, "Errand," was in my opinion his best story, and is one of my favorite stories, period. But Lish was way right about "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and I find this version painful to read. Like the Lahiri, it's needlessly elaborated; like the Diaz, it's a lesser work by a master of the form.

Maybe it's the weather, but I feel a terrible drear hanging over this issue. Every story's about the same damn stuff--love, marriage, boyfriends, girlfriends. They aren't dead topics, for sure, but can we have maybe one weird story? Just one that conforms to nothing whatsoever?

Here's a list of topics, then--all of you, go write these and send them to The New Yorker. Quick, before they fill the summer fiction issue. Pick one at random and get working:

1) An astronaut on a voyage to Mars ends up someplace entirely unexpected.
2) A day in the life of a five-year-old mind reader.
3) The zoo employees go on strike.
4) Some townspeople are protesting the building of a new bridge, and one goes missing.
5) A woman loses the mayoral election by five votes.
6) A breakfast cereal designer runs out of ideas.
7) A solider in Iraq goes AWOL and is taken in by a cadre of disillusioned reporters.
8) A man tries to commit suicide by walking into the sea, but he can't get it to work.
9) An agricultural scientist is angry at the college where he works because they claimed ownership of his many potato hybrids, and so he plans revenge.
10) An adolescent girl, discovering she is adopted, decides to start a rock band.

Good luck! If they accept your story, I get ten percent.

T. C. Boyle, "Sin Dolor"

A professional acquaintance of mine was warning me the other day of the dangers of overexposure. "You know," he said, "it's possible to publish too much." He must know me better than I thought he did, because this is a problem of mine--I want to be in every magazine, every month, forever. I don't want a single human being on earth to forget about me for one moment. Needless to say, this is not healthy, not for my psyche and definitely not for my career.

But for some reason it hasn't seemed to put a dent in T. C. Boyle's. Like Joyce Carol Oates in the eighties, he is everywhere, and his period of everywhereness seems to have extended longer than Oates's. He is absolutely a fixture--a writing addict.

Honestly, I don't mind. You can expect a certain quality of product from Boyle. I'm sure a hundred reviewers have called him a "master," and bully for him, but he's not. He is stunningly competent, though, and his stories are always enjoyable.

This one, from this week's otherwise-anemic New Yorker, is no exception. It's about a small-town Mexican doctor, a bit of a snob, who delivers a child incapable of feeling pain. He watches the boy grow, and grow more morose and desperate, as his father transforms him into a sideshow act. Terribly aged (though painlessly) at thirteen, the boy finally dies when he is challenged by some kids to jump off a building.

I like the narration of this story--it is free of the big overspiced mouthfuls of prose Boyle is sometimes prone to, and fizzes with a surprising and very appealing arrogance. The doctor's a bit of a prick, and is proud of it. But the problem with a Boyle story--and this one is no exception--is that you can see where it's going from a mile off. It's a beautiful, symmetrical construction, fitting as nicely into the literary landscape as a classic brownstone into a Manhattan street. This particular story comes off as a kind of Kafka lite, like "The Hunger Artist" except you'll never have an argument with anybody about it, like Marquez but somehow not as grand. The plot is smooth, the pieces fall gently together, and the dialogue sounds like it was taken from the movie that will someday be made of it. It's solid, and kind of disappointing.

This kind of flaw really stings me, because it's exactly the kind of thing I'm prone to--moral and emotional tidiness. So I'm likely to find greater fault with it than most people would. I sometimes feel like Boyle's shadow: the skinny bespectacled dude with an initial initial who writes too much, except I have a less adventurous hairdo and will always be less famous.

That said, Boyle is never going to flame out, and this is an enviable position to be in. I feel like his work is more inspiring to writers than it is to general readers--he makes you feel like writing is something you can do. He has always made me feel that way, anyhow, and that's worth being grateful for.

Tessa Hadley's "Married Love"

There's a lot to like about this Tessa Hadley story in the latest New Yorker (the one that landed in my mailbox with the sickening thud that indicated another utterly horrifying piece of Sy Hersh reportage)--she is a highly skillful composer of sentences, and arranger of sentences into paragraphs. The story is about a young woman of 19 who marries a man 45 years older than she (and who is also already married); and about (more about, really) her large family and its reaction to the match. The wedding goes off, the couple has three kids, and the girl is ultimately disappointed and embittered, but only a little bit.

A few choice lines. About the protagonist's father: "He was...stocky, densely and neatly made, with a wrinkled, ugly, interesting head." About her angry mother, seen by her brother: "His mother's high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car." Later, the poor girl "never recovered her neat boxy little figure, or that dreamily submissive phase of her personality." Overall, the story is sophisticated, compact, and nicely fitted together, and it is more or less a pleasure to read.

So why is my jaw so tight as I think about it? It isn't Hadley the prose stylist I object to--and that is usually my first objection to just about any writer--but rather Hadley the observer of humanity. Taken as collections of individual details, these characters are lively and well drawn, but taken together they reflect a certain class smugness, a lack of perspective, a lack of humility. They are very, very clever--they bicker, but they do so in well-prepared exchanges, as though they're reading from a beautifully crafted script. Their foibles are offset by interesting and precious careers--violinist, teacher of "special-needs kids," composer, English teacher, student. Such people exist, of course, and many of them are nice to be around. It isn't who they are that bothers me--it's the way I fear that Hadley feels about who they are. They are never made to confront anything truly upsetting about themselves or each other. They are comfortable. They belong.

I am not eager to give the impression that I fundamentally dislike stories about privileged people. But the ones here don't really think about their station in life at all--it is as though privilege, to them, is the default state of human existence. Congratulations to anyone for whom it is, in fact, the default--but I don't really need to read a story about people so cozy in their own skin. Hadley's mind is interesting, but, to judge from this piece, there is a disconcerting smoothness to her worldview. I would love to see her lay down the paintbrush and pick up the knife.

Lara Vapnyar's "Luda and Milena"

I don't have a great deal to say about this week's New Yorker story. It's about a couple of Russian ladies in their seventies, immigrants to New York and indistinguishable from one another, who take an English class together, grow to hate one another, and soon compete for the attention of a charming widower named Aron by cooking increasingly elaborate dishes for him to eat on the class's "International Feast" night. And at the end...he chokes on one of the dishes...and dies!

The story actually contains this passage:

Luda and Milena had, of course, heard that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, but they had never believed it. Aron Skolnik convinced them.

Sigh. I don't really want to take Lara Vapnyar to task, personally, as she's my age, in the same business as me, and has an impressive life story: having moved here from Russia in her twenties without any English, she has (like Nabokov, probably the best thing we ever got from Russia) mastered the language well enough in ten years to make a career of writing in it. But this is not an ambitious piece of work, is essentially sentimental in outlook, and depends upon the kind of hackneyed reversals of fortune that used to be the hallmark of fiction in, say, Cosmopolitan in the sixties.

Did the New Yorker publish it because it's, you know, immigrant-y? Is that enough? Am I even allowed to say that, being a guy who would, you know, love to be in the New Yorker more often? In any event, insofar as the New Yorker is considered to be among the last remaining mass-market outlets for "serious" fiction, I think they should have passed on a story in which the response to a man's choking to death on a yummy meatball is "And he died happy, didn't he?"

T Cooper's "Swimming"

Well, I found it. I hadn't recycled it after all--it was sitting on the radiator next to the bed, underneath volume 16 of The Onion and a handbook on drum kits. So, a week late, I have read "Swimming," which I am afraid I really intensely dislike.

I don't want to overstate this, because I think T Cooper is possibly a very good writer. It's all in the rhythm--the story has a nice coiled-up energy to it, and repeats itself in musical ways, and feels precipitous, all fine things for it to be and do. But the story itself--the protagonist, the situation, the moral universe it inhabits--seems odious to me.

The narrator is an American living in Cambodia. He moved there after he backed over and killed his own son with the car, and his wife left him. He's a doctor, and his manner is casual and numb, until his anger comes spurting out in random ways. He states that his accidental murder of his child has given him "the right to fuck the youngest, hottest girl with the tightest pussy in town and make her fall in love with me and yet bear no responsibility toward her or her family beyond shuttling them to the clinic when their grandchild was ill."

In other words, he's an asshole. The assholitude, I think we are supposed to understand, is in some kind of compensation for his guilt. At the story's end, he seems to be supposed to be learning some lesson by gagging on some sharkmeat while hearing about his girlfriend's father's escape from the Khmer Rouge, but I dunno--it seems like horseshit to me.

The thing is, a guy who killed his own son doesn't sound like this, would not be telling this particular story in this breezy way, because who is he telling? Who would listen? Guilt is hard to write about, and I feel that Cooper isn't bothering--he's writing about displaced guilt instead, and anybody with a laptop can displace guilt onto any emotion he likes, and run with it. The dead kid is an excuse for the displacement riff--it's not a real experience, it's not real guilt.

I can think of two stories you should read instead--Lorrie Moore's horrifying "Terrific Mother," about a woman who accidentally kills her friend's child; or, better still, Andre Dubus's fantastic "The Doctor" (is that in fact the title? I don't have it in the house, I think that's it), about a doctor who fails to save the life of a drowning child trapped under a heavy stone in a creek, and then later sees a garden hose, slices off a twelve-inch length of it, and stows it in the trunk of his car. Simple, beautiful, and perfect.

I admire Cooper's ambition here, because it's damned hard to write a story that starts the way this one does. And I will gladly read more of his stuff. But--and I say this as a guy who imagines backing over one of his kids every time he gets into a car and will probably do so long after they've grown and moved away--this one eluded me.

UPDATE: Well this is interesting!! Rhian remembers "The Doctor" differently--she recalls the garden hose already being in his trunk--thus making him more culpable for the child's death. Who's got this story handy? Maybe we're both wrong!

Daniyal Mueenuddin's "Nawabdin Electrician"

So...I think I missed a week of the New Yorker story there...it's recycling day too, and I wonder if it has already been trucked off to the shredder. In any event, the new issue arrived yesterday and I read this story on the bus this morning, while trying desperately to shut out the blaring country music with nothing more sophisticated than my mind.

This one's a winner. Mueenuddin doesn't have a book out--he's described on the bio page as a former New York City lawyer who now lives in Pakistan, where the story also takes place. It's about a rural electrician, entrepreneur, and all-around handyman named Nawab, who ostensibly works for the local absentee landowner but is known by all as the guy who can fix the electricity meters so they run more slowly. He rides around on a bicycle, and later a motorcycle, and is the father of thirteen children.

There is a subtle, deeply irritating, and condescending tone that some writers fall into when they write about working-class characters, especially "colorful" ones. This is inevitable, I suppose, as most writers either have never been working-class themselves, or, alternately, grew up working-class but have since gotten educated and have mixed feelings about their relationship to their origins. I'll even go so far as to say that class consciousness is one of the most important and most ignored elements in contemporary fiction. In any event, it's not unusual to see a writer struggling with the topic without seeming to be aware that's what he's doing; the result is a kind of patronizing cuteness that mars the authority of the narrative.

Zadie Smith is one writer who handles this issue well. Chekhov was another. This guy, Daniyal Mueenuddin, is also good at it--"Nawabdin Electrician" is quiet and assured, serious in tone, yet funny. Moreover, Mueenuddin brings this firm hand to bear upon a character who, in less skillful hands, might come off as ridiculous. As written, Nawab is a fascinating figure, a goofy person whom Mueenuddin entrusts, at the story's conclusion, with a difficult decision. Nawab makes the decision swiftly and mercilessly, revealing a deep hardness to his character only hinted at before.

The writing style is sophisticated but straightforward, a strong third limited that lifts itself up into omniscience from time to time for some selective and useful contextual detail; it is at its best when unpacking character and place, as this little gem of a sentence about Nawab's aquisition of a motorcycle:

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.

The narrative goes on to describe the road Nawab now takes home to his wife, explaining, in a quick excursion 150 years into the past, how it came to be lined with the dying trees the motorcycle is passing beneath. It's a lovely blend of good humor and narrative privilege, and really effective.

This is my favorite New Yorker story in a while, and I'll be looking forward to the collection Mueenuddin is said to be working on.

Hari Kunzru's "Magda Mandela"

Maybe being a writer has ruined reading for me. Because just about every story I have read over the past few weeks has let me down in exactly the same way--starts off great and peters out into a faint disappointment. Perhaps I'm writing endings as I read, comparing the real ending to the one in my head. Perhaps I have too much riding on the one in my head being better. Or something.

In any event, the disappointment this time was particularly acute--small, but acute, like a flu shot--because the beginning of Hari Kunzru's "Magda Mandela," in last week's New Yorker, really appealed to me. It's all in the voice--an antic first person that projects itself into the object of attention with unusual elan. Our narrator, a vague smear of a fellow living in London, is talking about his nutty neighbor, a boisterous and amorous woman:

Magda is a nurse, a qualified pilot, a businesswoman and a philanthropist, a gifted and sensitive lover, the holder of certificates in computing and English grammar, a semi-professional country singer, and a mother. Yes, a mother! Magda has a daughter. Who came out of this pussy right here.

Right here, she says. Out of this pussy. RIGHT HERE.

That transition at the end of the first paragraph, from the narrator's voice to Magda's, is seamless, surprising, and very funny.

The whole story is pretty funny, in fact, but as I said, it ultimately disappointed me--Magda wakes up the neighborhood and gets arrested, and along the way we meet some of the other quirky locals, and observe their run-ins with Magda. But what of it? A grad student of mine said to me the other day, apropos of a story she had written and was trying to figure out how to revise, that for her, a narrator couldn't just tell the story; he had to be telling the story for a reason. And that reason had something to do with the story she, my student, was telling.

Obviously not everyone has to work this way, but that's what I was hoping for here--for the story's narrator to find himself implicated, somehow, in Magda's sad drama. Instead it's more of the same--quite funny, but never amounting to much, with the narrator lurking in the shadows. We are given to understand that Magda will return and the cycle of madness will begin anew. The ending suggests some shame on the neighborhood's part--

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we returned Magda's love. If we believed in her, she could do great things for us. But our problem is that we are faithless. Our problem is that we are stupid. Our problem is that we just don't listen.

Aesthetically I like it--Magda's voice has inhabited the narrator's in a new, less mocking way. But there's no bite to it--it's an afterthought, a hail mary pass.

Still, this story has inspired me, as it's essentially plotless, a character sketch spun into a narrative with the thinnest of threads, and while it doesn't entirely work, in my view, it is doing something I like. And the writer's Wikipedia page informs us that he is a member of that rare tribe of award-refusing novelists:

Although he was also awarded The John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK, he turned it down on the grounds that it was backed by the Mail on Sunday whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he felt was unacceptable. In a statement read out on his behalf, he stated "As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line.... The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it." He further went on to recommend that the award money be donated to the charity Refugee Council (UK).

There was a time when I might have found such a gesture pretentious or arrogant, but nowadays it seems totally badass.

Daniil Kharms's "So It Is In Life"

This week's New Yorker story is a series of vignettes--if you could call them that--by an obscure early-twentieth-century Russian writer whose prose has not appeared in English before. Reading them, I wondered how many people like this guy are out there, waiting to be translated and appreciated by a worldwide audience. According to the introduction to these pieces (translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Simona Schneider, and Eugene Ostaeshevsky), Daniil Kharms was a founder of an avant-garde Russian artists' group called OBERIU, was arrested for anti-Soviet activities in 1931, was exiled, arrested again, and died in a prison mental hospital in 1942.

The most obvious comparison is to Babel, both in his lithe, unpredictable prose style and life history--but the stories remind me most of one of my favorite collections, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, which I brutally plundered for a similar book of my own. They have the same wry, bitter detachment, though Kharms's pieces are most noteworthy for their unusual habit of veering off onto some tangent and ending there. A fairly static story about a sick man who whiles away his time, listlessly, in his quiet apartment, suddenly shifts when the man realizes he has forgotten some important word, perhaps beginning with "M" and perhaps beginning with "R." The piece ends:

I was making coffee and singing to myself all the words that started with "R." Oh, what a tremendous number of words I made up beginning with the letter "R"! Perhaps among them was that one word, but I didn't recognize it, taking to be the same as all the others.

Then again, perhaps that word didn't come up.

Come to think of it, that ending is pure Lydia Davis--another W6 favorite. There's a colleciton of this stuff coming out in the fall, and these excerpts suggest that it might well be a new classic in the literature of the non-sequitur. Bring it!

A. L. Kennedy's "Wasps"

Who'd've thought I'd be blogging twice in a week about A. L. Kennedy? She's this week's New Yorker fiction writer, though, and thus the subject of the latest post in my Magazine Reading Project.

This is actually quite handy, because I wondered, in the previous post, if the things that bothered me about Kennedy's first collection were the result of youth, or of something inherent to her work. I complained about the narrative stasis that seemed a hallmark of her stories, and about her tendency to rely too heavily on victimhood as a topic. And indeed, this new story, at least in those respects, is just like her early ones--a cuckolded mother of two stays cuckolded, and does nothing about it, and everything remains the same.

However, Kennedy has gotten a lot better at it, and I like the story a lot. I felt a little funny complaining last time, because I know that a story doesn't require strong narrative drive to be good; nor does its protagonist have to "change" or experience "redemption." Here, though, Kennedy's immersion in the details of the character's life--and her superior ability to choose and refine those details--makes the piece worth reading. Of particular power is her portrayal of the protagonist's sons, who at the ages of 7 and 4 have learned to channel their anger at their absent father upon each other. There is a great moment where the older boy "washed his own hands very thoroughly, theatrically, with the air of a weary surgeon. As she watched, the weight of an older brother's responsibilities and trials hardened his jaw enough for him to look very much like his father."

The really excellent bit here, however, is a scene in which the father subtly, quietly, transfers the blame for his absence and infidelity onto the younger boy. "That's why I go away, Jimbo," he says. "For you."

Ouch. In the wake of this scene, the father leaves again, and the mother again lets him, and once again I longed for something other than stasis, true to life as stasis might be. But there's no accounting for taste, and no denying that, judging by this story, anyhow, Kennedy has gotten really good. It's a better piece of writing than anything in her first book. Here's hoping somebody someday says the same thing about me.

And We Thought We Were Snarky

The latest New Yorker has an informative and entertaining article by Dana Goodyear about the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, a writer I haven't read but about whom I've wondered: how do you say that last name? (co-EL-yoo) When customers at the bookstore looked for copies of The Alchemist I could only say, Oh, yes, the book by... that guy. I did look it up, several times, but it didn't take.

Anyway, he seems to be an inspirational/allegorical writer who writes things like "When you want something, the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it" (ahem -- still no letterpress). Goodyear quotes a Brazilian critic and history professor named Mário Maestri about Coelho, and it's a quote so good I'm going to repeat it here:

In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho's narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centered, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another that will be different but absolutely the same.

The most intriguing word here is "conformist," a word we in the US generally don't use in conjunction with words like "sentimental, self-centered" and "spellbinding" -- adjectives that we might apply to New-Agey writing -- because we still think of New-Agey stuff as being nonconformist. It isn't. Like any fashion, it adheres to its own cliches.