Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
Stunningly good narration in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of philosopher Derek Parfit, with a decidedly un-New Yorker-ish relentlessness and momentum; the way its pared-down phrasing shifts into Parfit’s and his wife’s points of view, it’s more like a Gordon Lish-ed up short story.
(two paragraphs above are excerpted from non-contiguous sections)
If you were thinking about reading the recent New Yorker article on the Abbottabad raid/killing of Osama bin Laden, you should also read this.
He even describes how the translator Ahmed hollered in Pashto at the locals that a security operation was ongoing to allay their suspicions about the nature of the cacophony in the cantonment town. (This detail caught my eye as the majority of persons in Abbottabad, where the raid took place, speak Hindko rather than Pashto.) He account is replete with quotes and other minute details obtained from persons seemingly involved directly in the assault and presumably speaking to him in person.
The article was in fact so detailed that it left the unmistakable impression that Mr. Schmidle had interviewed at least a few of the SEALs involved in the raid.
… All of this makes for a gripping read. Too gripping I thought to myself. As it turned out, there is one very serious problem with Mr. Schmidle’s account: Schmidle never met any of the SEALs involved, as reported (with great tact and restraint) by Paul Farhi on August 3.
It gets a lot more suspicious from there. Must-read.
(Source: ecantwell)
Walking to my office on a warm, drizzly morning (Taken with instagram)
My dash is well-populated with brownstones this morning, reminding me of Judith Thurman’s being reminded of how:
I roamed the brownstone blocks of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, often at dusk, just as the lights came on and before the shades were drawn, peeping into the parlor windows of old houses inhabited by rich bohemians, and lusting for a saffron-yellow library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder; a gilt pier glass with chipped gesso above an Eastlake mantle; French doors opening to a little balcony or a cobbled patio; a lumpy recamier with a broken leg propped up by an unabridged dictionary; slanting pine floors; a high ceiling with a plaster rosette; a spitting fire; and a piano in the corner under which slept a shaggy dog. I was gratified to read in “Bricks and Brownstone” that James Fenimore Cooper was an errant voyeur of my ilk. “There is,” he writes in “Notions of the Americans” (1828), “a species of second-rate, genteel houses, that abound in New York, into which I have looked when passing with the utmost pleasure. They have, as usual, a story that is half sunk in the earth . . . and two floors above. The tenants of these are chiefly merchants, or professional men, in moderate circumstances, who pay rents of from $300 to $500 a year. You know that no American who is at all comfortable in life will share his dwelling with another.” The relish with which he describes the tasteful opulence of these mediocre houses’ mahogany appointments suggests that he did more ogling from the sidewalk than passing by.
- Alice Munro, “The Children Stay”
Happy Canada Day! Miraculously, Munro’s story “Gravel” in the June 27 New Yorker is not subscriber only.
Who’s your favorite Canadian writer? Canadian novel/story?
Ramona Ausubel’s story is non-stop pitch-perfect and absolutely ruthless:
The girl handed her a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it. In the girl column: Grace, Honor, Constance, Mary, Faith. And in the boy column: Peter, Adam, David, Axel Rose.
Hazel thought about a giant bird of prey with the name Constance.
New Yorker fiction editor Cressida Leyshon interviews Ausubel:
This week’s story, “Atria,” is about Hazel, a teen-ager eager to leave adolescence behind who has decided to say “yes” to growing, and the complications that ensue. Did it take you long to understand the mind of your young protagonist?
I knew right away what would take place in the story, but it took a long time to really understand why. All the under-layers emerged slowly, like Hazel’s relationship with her mother, sisters, and deceased father. Over the years that I worked on the story, those were the parts that kept getting deeper.
The New Yorker’s publication in January of Libyan fiction writer’s Hisham Matar’s “Naima” now has an eerie resonance. Reading the story—in which the home country of the exiled narrator remained unnamed—was frankly the first I’d thought about Libya in since the news that Qaddafi was giving up his nuclear aspirations.
Cressida Leyshon’s Book Bench interview with Matar explores something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: addressing politics and history/events in fiction without the narrative or character being subsumed by set-up, or the demands of character development ossifying the fluidity of real events and the things people do:
Leyshon: You never mention the family’s home country by name and are careful never to refer to any specific dates. You delineate Nuri’s [the narrator’s] emotional frame of mind with great precision, yet are deliberately vague about the political contours of his world. Why did you approach that aspect of the novel in this way?
Matar: I wanted to see if I could do it; if I could, simply, rely on the existential, emotional, and psychological reality of a man and let that express his historical condition. I don’t believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don’t think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that; but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person.
While I do like seeing fiction valued at a premium, I’m glad The New Yorker didn’t put Mary Gaitskill’s story “The Other Place” from this/last week’s issue behind its paywall, not only because its content is important* but because its storytelling craft is so strong and interesting.
The narrator’s openness about his concerns is itself a kind of assault, at once confiding and undomesticated. The threat it announces gives the narrator leeway to be relatively leisurely—sadistically so—in revealing his story. Yet the story is lean, infrequently breaking out of narration into full-blown scenes, so that when it does the scenes land with incredible force.
Gaitskill shows just how potent and efficient non-linear narrative can be. She sets things up with a narrator relatively close to the time he’s describing. His dive back to his youth underscores the chronic nature of his tendencies and the weight of his concern, an interpretative filter which, were we in the moment with him at ten and twelve years old, we wouldn’t know to add (yet the details are vivid enough, the segments sufficiently sustained, that our temporal distance doesn’t remove us viscerally). The threat of present violence purples the past with menace, complicating our emotional reaction to the climax. With this narrator, returning to the past feels dangerous; we sense he’s not only telling us things but trying to figure them out himself, and might be as surprised as we are.
The end is at once revelatory and—appropriately, not coyly—cryptic.
An early contender for best short story of 2011, and one I’m adding to my syllabus for next fall.
*See Gaitskill’s talk with New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman [h/t @Maud Newton]
I’m reminded of the discussion on Clifford Garstang’s Perpetual Folly blog after Alice Munro’s—awesome—”Corrie” last fall.
I forgot to mention in my thoughts on Gaitskill that “The Other Place,” like a lot of the fiction I tend to prefer, is grounded in the details of particular times and places, but lightly, deftly, allowing it to cover great expanses of time.
- John McPhee
So much beautifully contained in this first sentence.
