The Short Story News
Honest reviews of the past month's output
Dear Republic,
This is an experiment that I’ve wanted to do for a while — to have reviews of published short stories the same way that the whole world reviews books when they come out. There are two main reasons for doing this — and for being as honest as I’m being in the critiques. One is to try the nudge the short story back towards the center of the culture, and that requires treating it as a live art form as opposed to the sort of chloroformed museum piece that
so lucidly describes. And the other is to introduce some accountability into the form. As it stands, magazine editors get the final say on what’s good and what’s not, and nobody really pays attention to the stories after they go out. In a perfect world, the debates on them would continue long after they’re published, with credit going where it’s due and the lousy stories getting called out. The intent is to make this a monthly feature. The stories below were all published in March/April in leading magazines.-The Editor
THE SHORT STORY NEWS
Said Sayrafiezadeh, “Nocturnal Creatures,” The New Yorker
C+. A combination of two genres — the hard-a-knock life story and the precocious kid story. The narrator is an exterminator with a king of genial blank space of a personality — his favorite line is to show up in an apartment and ask “What am I here for today? Unicorns? Werewolves” — and he develops feelings he wasn’t expecting for a mother-on-the-verge-of-eviction and her wisecracking wise-child son. This isn’t the worst story in the world. It has heart and feels lived-in, but the salt-of-the-earth tough talk can be a bit much (“A.M. is the new P.M”; “[roaches] settling for crumbs in the same way I settle for five dollars”) and, more importantly, the stakes are really unclear. I have no idea why the two main characters don’t simply end up together and why the story drifts off on a random downbeat with the narrator thinking about his next job.
Domenico Starnone, “Tortoiseshell,” The New Yorker
B+. A very, very simple story with a curious power to it. The narrator is a born liar. His lying turns into storytelling. The storytelling confounds everyone around him. As he grows up, he decides he prefers the fabulist version of things to the drab reality. As I was reading, I decided that this was a very old story that The New Yorker had decided to translate, and it was a surprise to me to realize that the author is alive, albeit old. It’s not only the dates; this just feels like the kind of story you read first in an anthology, and probably in a dual-language edition. What saves the story from a certain harpsichord quality is the wordless power that the narrator’s storytelling habit has on those around him. He tells a particularly outrageous tall tale, is caught out in it, and, he recounts, “Only my cousin Maria remained. She walked over to me and took my hand. Then she started to cry.” Starnone is a gifted enough storyteller that he doesn’t try to explain why Maria burst into tears or why, when the narrator’s mother is dying, she whispers to him, “Aldo, Alduccio, you scare me.” Storytelling — and I can’t help thinking of Calvino and a tradition of Italian Fabulism — comes to seem like a sort of wind-up toy, an unstoppable and dangerous machine. As the narrator puts it, in the reflective mood that characterizes the story, “Even I, believing the liar within, have been afraid of the self-hatred and suffering I would experience if I stopped telling lies.”
Adam Levin, “Jenny Annie Fannie Addie,” The New Yorker
B. I guess I appreciate the nerve of this story — a man writing from the perspective of a pre-teen girl who gets groped at camp — and I have the feeling that this wouldn’t have been published a couple of years ago, but it is also, like, the quintessence of a “B” story, just so carefully loaded up with its off-stage denouement, its charged anti-climax, its naïve-and-yet-all-knowing narrator. This isn’t exactly Levin’s fault, but I had the curious feeling that the same author had written it as the Starnone story — the same this-happened-then-that-happened way of relating a child’s perspective, but, more so than with Starnone, there’s a very paint-by-the-numbers feeling to “Jenny Annie Fannie Addie.” The narrator has a traumatic experience and then the next few scenes are the narrator describing trivial events in intense detail — Terminator 2, the Band’s song “The Weight” — in such a way that (guess what kids!) means the narrator is avoiding the emotional content of what happened. I would have written the story off as a kind of MFA-land technical exercise, but there is something Levin is getting at — the way that off-screen events, beyond our control, can shape us far more than any of us would like: and that the indirect is as powerful as anything else. “I looked out the window and listened to ‘The Weight’ and had this awful sense of being part of the world in a way that I didn’t want to be,” the narrator says at the story’s climactic moment.
David Bezmozgis, “From, To,” The New Yorker
A+. A beautiful, almost overwhelming story — really more of a novel — the kind of story that restores all possible hope in the form.
I was a bit skeptical when I started reading this — it felt so formally austere and narrowly realist, like Grace Paley or Lous Auchincloss had decided to drop in on the 2020s — but the form perfectly mirrors the story. It’s like an epitaph for a whole world.
That world is the Jewish Century — the journey, as Bezmozigs concisely puts it, “from the drowsy meagre shtetl to the great Soviet fraud to the gratification-industrial complex.” What that was based on was, above all else, an unflinching realism and practicality — the constant remembrance that, as the main character Vadik puts it in the midst of an argument, “the survival rate for five-year-old Jewish boys in Latvia…was basically zero.” That kind of absolute, unassailable knowledge of what matters in life — ‘never again,’ the need for ‘Jewish strength in a Jewish land,’ the ability ever and always to call things by their true names — was supposed to be the bulwark against whatever was to come. But somehow, somewhere in the midst of the ‘gratification-industrial complex,’ that certainty breaks down into relativism, and Vadik — clearly no fool, a tough-minded real estate lawyer — finds himself unable to impose those kinds of certainties, to carry out the necessary continuity. “This was a distillation of his parenting,” Bezmozgis remarks of one typically soft-hearted moment in which Vadik tries to stop paying his daughter’s cell phone bill and can’t bring himself to actually do it.
Vadik finds himself really in the nightmare — his daughter participating in a Columbia encampment and lost to him, his daughter choosing Palestinian resistance over her own grandmother’s shiva. His sense of continuity turns out to have no capacity to reach his daughter. “Remote beyond conception,” he thinks of his Soviet family’s relation to her life. The qualities that he so prized in partners and family members — his ex-wife’s debating capacity, for instance — are revealed to be of limited value in contemporary America: that “talent lent itself less well to connubial life,” Vadik drily thinks. And a diatribe he delivers to his daughter’s Palestinian girlfriend — within the context of the story, an utterly-credible expression of his grief — of course offers no solace at all. “He regrets his outburst, not because what he said was technically wrong but because he gained so little from saying it.”
If there is salvation, from this lost world and the lost common sense that buoyed it, it comes actually from Farah, the daughter’s girlfriend, who has “evidently been brought up right” and, wearing her Free Palestine buttons, marches up to the mourners at the shiva and says, “I am very sorry for your loss.” The politics aside, Vadik can’t help but be impressed: “Uncharacteristically for the times, a sincere and simple sentence in the active voice,” he thinks.
The scene comes too late for the characters to heal over their wounds — Farah leads Mila, Vadim’s daughter, away from the shiva; the rest of the family are annoyed with the buttons. But the story is about more powerful material than that — about continuity after a rupture, about resurrection after catastrophe. From a formal point of view, the story buries its own genre: in one of its more moving movements, Vadik considers the inevitable demise of the local publication that posts obituaries. But the sense is that the power of a clean, intelligent, heartfelt story like this never actually goes away. The whole American Jewish community seems to be finished — the divided loyalties in the Columbia encampments encompassing that more than anything else — but Judaism, Bezmozgis is arguing, is made of something tougher than the halcyon period of American Jewishness, or even than the state of Israel. The real Judaism is somewhere in the domain of reconciliation and forgiveness, of finding the path forward even after all hope is lost.
Curtis Sittenfeld, “Relatable Mom,” The Atlantic
C. I’m not sure what to do with this. Sittenfeld is kind of the ‘Minnesota nice’ of American letters — she’s a high-level performer but everything she writes is so understated and takes so long to warm up. With ‘Relatable Mom,’ she seems to have gotten herself into a couple of fairly obvious cul-de-sacs — a pandemic story combined with a story gently satirizing Hollywood. A social media ghostwriter for a mid-list celebrity finally has the nerve to quit her job with the celebrity and chats about it with a woman she’s befriended during the pandemic. There’s really not much more to it than that. The sneak-up-on-her-honest monologue she eventually delivers to the celebrity never moves beyond the obvious complaints about Hollywood vapidity. A line like, “I could feel how easy continuing to be her ghostwriter would be, like sinking backwards into a soft couch,” gives a sense of the charm Sittenfeld has when she’s on her game, but, with this story, she’s just phoning it in.
Lynn Steger Strong, “Beautiful Partygoer,” Harper’s
C+. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a story as gynecological as this. I guess there’s a certain hard-won experience — all the tales of middle-aged orgasms and OB/GYN checkups — but I’m not sure what the point is and it just feels like a case study of a problem with an IUD that might one day be written up in the medical literature.
Joshua Cohen, “Posterity,” Granta
F-. Beneath all possible contempt. Everything this person has ever written is exactly the same — icky, self-absorbed, status-obsessed shlock. Nothing ever happens, certainly nobody ever connects, the plot is something that a ten-year-old might come up with (writer on way to memorial event of famous father, whom he’s worried is more famous than he, encounters turbulence on plane). There are perorations (“wallowing in the watching”; the plane “dipped and juddered and dove”) that are meant to be the show-stoppers here but have about the same relationship to actual writing that a pianist playing scales with jazz hands has to music. When we’re not treated to that, we’re in for the kinds of punch-you-on-the-arm, double entendre jokes that a third-tier Catskills banquet hall comic might assault you with when you’re just trying to eat your starter salad: “he’d known about his late father’s hundredth birthday for – about a hundred years now?” There is nothing about this story that isn’t rancid.
Susie Boyt, “All Being Well,” Granta
B+/A-. A very strange story. Too clever, too formal, but it does seem to contain an entirely different view of the world — kind of the way the angels might look at things. Here’s a piece of dialogue that gives a sense of the general tenor of the writing:
“You know I think what I’m going to take from this little talk is that when I do err as I inevitably will, I’ll imagine you punching the air with the angels.”
“I’m not much of an air puncher, though, am I?”
The main characters are elderly teachers and they have the prim, highfalutin fantasy life of teachers — discussing hallucinations starring T.S. Eliot, that sort of thing — and that tone seems to extend to everyone around them. This is a world where spunky 15-year-old girls wonder fretfully about the difference between ‘wiggle room’ and ‘wriggle room.’ But there are people like this, and this may be how the world looks as death approaches — like a still life painting — and human conduct becomes the dour carrying-out of one meritorious task after another accompanied by an arch, whimsical sense of humor. One woman asking another to take care of her granddaughter after she’s gone might phrase it in the following way: “Ruth’s voice struck an elaborately casual note, as one might ask, before a journey, if a neighbour could shake a hose at the sweet williams.” And why not? It is slow, it does cloy a bit, but this may well be the way the angels speak.
Achy Obejas, “Dachau,” One Story
B/B+. This is ok, it’s basically a travelogue of a trip to Dachau that veers into the nightmarish as the two travelers — Cuban friends — find themselves pursued by neo-Nazis. The style feels a little clunky and the ending abbreviated, but it does, with real eeriness, capture the mood of Germany — the sense of a place like Dachau no longer being sacred, the horror of it lost, and then a new horror emergent, with visitors scrawling swastikas in the guest book and neo-Nazis taunting tourists. “The sound of our shoes against the cement ricochets off the narrow corridor, to my ears a perverse mimicry of SS jackboots patrolling the hall,” reflects the narrator in a line that nicely encapsulates something of our current mood — everything is performance, everything safe (they are just tourists visiting a museum), but menace is ever more interwoven into daily life.
Sam Kahn is the editor of The Republic of Letters and writes
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This post "gave" me that great A+ story to read. So thank you!
Although I am Jewish, that family's Jewish journey was not personally familiar to me, which perhaps made it all the more fascinating. Our familial records of the old country stretch back to pre-1880. My grandchildren are the fifth generation to be born in America. On Friday we had a Jewish baby-naming ceremony for our six month old granddaughter. The story made me think how precious that continuity is.
I hope this becomes a monthly feature.
I like this idea a lot. Normally I wouldn't bother with short stories but you led me to go and read Starnone's, an author I'm familiar with. I really enjoyed his story, which feels very, very Italian to me, similar to authors like Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. They also have stories about young children, told from their point of view. One thing to mention, which might add a bit of meaning to Starnone's tale and the question of truth/falsehood in storytelling, is that Starnone is widely considered to be Elena Ferrante. Ferrante is a pseudonym for anyone who doesn't know.