I’m Not Going To Spoil It By Quoting…
…because Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova” (in the May 3 New Yorker) is just that good (I would cut exactly one word). The juxtapositions of big and little, of direct addresses of the situation and seemingly throwaway details, set up a marvelously skewed narrative space in which ordinary things seem set to detonate, pull us under or lift us away.
I particularly like Goodman’s use of dialogue quoted directly but without quotation marks. It lets her shift very agilely into different times and registers, closer and further from Amanda’s (the protagonist) point of view.
Writing students leap on instances when New Yorker fiction doesn’t match its myth. Here it definitely does.
