The New Yorker Story of the Year

In what may be a sign for the Iowa Caucuses later this week, the voting for Story of the Year was extremely close. In fact, Story of the Year honors must be shared by Antonya Nelson's "Or Else" and Paul Theroux's "Mr. Bones" (but it must be acknowledged that T Cooper's "Swimming" was only 1 vote behind, and would have been a worthy champion).

I find the results interesting. First, let me say that I didn't vote for either one, so I can't be accused of influencing the outcome. Second, I nearly didn't even include the Theroux story in the Top-Ten and almost left them both out of the Top-Five, except that they were both fan favorites and many people left comments about them both.

"Mr. Bones", you may remember, is about an ordinary, if dysfunctional, family of the '50s, the father of which begins to perform in a minstrel show. He eventually quits, but the family is forever changed. "Or Else" is about a young man from an unpleasant home who from childhood has insinuated himself into the family of a friend, and despite his violations of their trust can't let them go.

In any event, the people have spoken. Congratulations Ms. Nelson and Mr. Theroux!

The New Yorker: "Year's End" by Jhumpa Lahiri

Is there any doubt why I waited until today (the last day of the year) to comment on this story? It’s also not online, apparently, but if aren’t a subscriber I don’t think you’ve missed much. I did enjoy it, and I think it’s a well-structured story. I just don’t think it’s particularly well written – it feels rushed to me, all the way through, and I never felt that the author had settled into a comfortable narrative pace. The story is told by Kaushik, a college student at Swarthmore who is the son of Bengali immigrants who have settled in a northern suburb of Boston. Although his mother has been dead for more than three years, Kaushik still feels the pain of her loss (and yet, he tells us, neither he nor his father have cried for her). So it is naturally a shock when his father telephones to say that he has been visiting India and brought back a new wife along with her two daughters. Great premise! Fantastic conflict! And we see all of that conflict – between the son and the stepmother, the son and the girls, the son and the father. Ultimately it is about a son who has not only lost his mother but has also lost his father and it is quite naturally painful for him, doubly so. I wonder if anyone agrees with me about the pace of this piece? I would like to have seen a much longer story, I think, one that lets the narrator take his time with his relationship with his girlfriend, with his father and mother and grandparents, and then lets us also feel the presence of the stepmother and her daughters. Although it isn’t a great story, it is a fine story with which to end the year.

December 24 & 31, 2007: “Year’s End” by Jhumpa Lahiri

The New Yorker: "Beginners" by Raymond Carver

In addition to the story “Beginners” by Raymond Carver, which is a restoration of his original version of the famous story that was published under the title “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the Winter Fiction issue of The New Yorker also includes an article about Carver’s relationship with editor Gordon Lish. That Lish edited Carver almost beyond recognition has been known for some time. It is going to be interesting to see the original stories emerge, as Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, is determined to publish them.

What I find most chilling about this is the timing of it all. Carver’s career began to really move when Lish, as fiction editor of Esquire, accepted a Carver story in 1971. That was the year I graduated from high school and began college. I believe I knew of the magazine, but had certainly not heard of Lish or Carver. Carver’s first collection was published in 1977. For not knowing this, I have an excuse. I don’t know anything that happened in 1976 or 1977 because I was living in the Korean countryside in the Peace Corps. But I did come back in 1978, so you’d think . . . His next collection came out in 1981, and this is the one that Lish had so much affect on. (My excuse this time – I was in Law School, too busy to worry about fiction.) His next collection came out in 1983, just as I was about to move overseas again. I don’t remember this either. He wrote his last story in 1987 and died in 1988, before I moved back to the U.S. Basically, what I’m saying, is that I missed Ramond Carver’s entire career and didn’t read him until just a few years ago, which is why I find this whole discussion about his relationship with Lish fascinating.

I read Lish’s edited version of the story about 5 years ago, in my MFA program. So it is amazing to see Carver’s original version here and to see the line-by-line edit here.

And now for the story itself: "Beginners". It’s a great story about four people sitting around drinking, talking about love and how they all got to where they are right now. The dialogue is what makes it a killer story as the four of them, especially Herb, get drunker and looser. Herb tells the story of an old couple seriously injured in an accident. The story goes on and on and gets interrupted, and then it ends, although he’s forced to give the story a happy ending and the reader isn’t wholly convinced he’s telling the truth. And then he comes back to talking about his ex-wife.

In the Lish version, that’s where the story ends, with Herb heading off to take a shower. In the original, we get a couple more pages: after Herb leaves to take his shower, his wife Terri talks about how he’s been suicidal, and she breaks down and cries, which makes the narrator think.

I hope others will offer their opinions here, but I think the Lish version is stronger. It’s definitely tighter, but ending where it does also leaves the focus on Herb, which is where it belongs, instead of shifting onto Terri, or even back to the narrator. So, Carver fans, what do you think?

December 24 & 31, 2007: “Beginners” by Raymond Carver

The New Yorker: "The Arbus Factor" by Lore Segal

The photograph accompanying this story (which is not online, it seems) conveys more, I thought, than the story itself (it's of an woman with a deeply lined face and may even have been taken by Diane Arbus). Jack and Hope meet for lunch; it’s clear they know each other extremely well and gradually the circumstances reveal themselves, but for me to reveal them now would be to spoil what little pleasure there is in the story. The end.

December 24 & 31, 2007: “The Arbus Factor” by Lore Segal

The New Yorker: "Natalie" by Anne Enright

This story does little for me. The voice is interesting – a teen Dublin girl – but that’s just not enough. The girl and her boyfriend are friends with Natalie and her boyfriend Billy, and the narrator spends a lot of time, as we know teenagers do (especially girls?) worrying about what’s going on in their friendship, which is thrown off the tracks by Billy’s mother’s cancer. In the end she draws conclusions about fleeting adolescent relationships and my only question is, So What?

December 24 & 31, 2007: “Natalie” by Anne Enright

Five more days to vote for Story of the Year!

The New Yorker: "Alma" by Junot Diaz

The Winter fiction issue of The New Yorker kicks off with this very short piece by Junot Díaz. This story is all about the voice, which is pretty typical for Díaz. The problem is that the story is told in the second person, which annoys me. Here we can speculate as to why (other than just experimentally), Díaz used second person. One possibility is that the character he's writing about is a scumbag and a first person scumbag is hard for a reader to relate to and care about – so second person creates some distance between the narrator and the character. Another possibility is that the character keeps a journal, and we can imagine that this is the perspective he takes in the journal. That’s about as much thought as I want to give the question – the second person point of view didn’t work for me. In any case, the story is about a kid in New Jersey who is dating Alma and although he’s disrespectful of her, he does admire her. But he also cheats on her and makes the mistake of writing about it in his journal. Uh oh. This one is no threat for “Story of the Year” honors. (And, by the way, just 6 more days to vote!)

December 24 & 31, 2007: “Alma” by Junot Díaz

The New Yorker: Vote for the Year's Best Story

After much thought and toin-cossing, I have narrowed the choice down to just five stories - the five best stories that have appeared in The New Yorker during 2007. And finalists are (drumroll . . .)

"Homework" by Helen Simpson
"Swimming" by T Cooper
"Mr. Bones" by Paul Theroux
"Or Else" by Antonya Nelson
"Found Objects" by Jennifer Egan

You'll notice that I've added a poll to the right sidebar. Please vote!

The New Yorker: 2007’s Top-Ten Stories

The year’s not over yet, quite, but it’s time to name the Top-Ten New Yorker Stories of 2007. Although I retain the role of “decider,” I did allow opinions expressed to me here and elsewhere influence this list. One story on the list was a favorite of several commenters, although I’d left it off my initial stab. Another that I was tentative about stayed on the list because it received support in the comments. But I did rule a few pieces out despite nominations. The Don DeLillo story, “Still Life,” for example, is not on this list. I liked that story, more than the novel from which it is excerpted, but I’m under the impression that the excerpting of that piece was not done by DeLillo himself but was done by The New Yorker’s editors. I find that disturbing and so I left it off the list. Sorry, Don. And I also didn’t include the Miranda July story, “Roy Spivey,” although that story continues to attract interest in Google searches that bring readers here. It apparently found a wide readership, but I didn’t love it.

So, here’s my long-list for story of the year, in chronological order:

1. “Teaching” by Roddy Doyle
2. “One Minus One” by Colm Tóibin
3. “Homework” by Helen Simpson
4. “Magda Mandela” by Hari Kunzru
5. “Swimming” by T Cooper
6. “Luda and Milena” by Lara Vapnyar
7. “Mr. Bones” by Paul Theroux
8. “Brooklyn Circle” by Alice Mattison
9. “Or Else” by Antonya Nelson
10. “Found Objects” by Jennifer Egan

Complaints?

The New Yorker: "The King of Sentences" by Jonathan Lethem

Although this was fun to read, and seems like it must have been fun to write, it doesn’t do enough for me to climb into the year’s top ten stories. Two young New Yorkers live together and worked in bookstores, worshipping books and, specifically, sentences within books, finding them so erotic that they enter into the couple’s lovemaking. They are particularly fond of the sentences of one author whom they dub the King of Sentences. They learn that he moved from Greenwich Village a long time ago (at about the time his book jacket photo was frozen in time) and they track him down to a post office where they go in hopes of meeting him. They’ve written a postcard of warning, so the police and the author are alerted. In the process of telling the story, Lethem allows himself to write some pretty great sentences of his own (although he apparently isn’t opposed to the occasional comma splice, I’m pleased to note).

“The King of Sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by poets.”

Heh. And then of course the climax of the story is the eventual meeting between these aspiring writers (the boy – they seem like children to me – has brought a manuscript with him to show the King) and I think that’s where opinions on the story will diverge. I didn’t love that scene. I’ll be interested to hear what others thought.

December 17, 2007: “The King of Sentences” by Jonathan Lethem

The New Yorker: "Found Objects" by Jennifer Egan

Now this is a story. Sasha has been seeing a therapist because she knows she has a problem. She even knows subconsciously that it has something to do with the fact that her father ran off when she was six, although she won’t go there. She takes small things – a screwdriver, a wallet, bath salts – but realizes she has a problem when she sees the impact she’s having on a the person she steals from. The real kicker, though, is when she takes an inspirational message scrawled on a slip of paper from the wallet of a man she’s been on a date with.

“Sasha hesitated. She and Coz had talked at length about why she kept the stolen objects separate from the rest of her life: because using them would imply greed or self-interest, because leaving them untouched made it seem as if she might one day give them back, because piling them in a heap kept their power from leaking away.”

But the message “I believe in you” that she steals from the man’s wallet is something she DOES want to keep, whether because it could be a message from her father or because it implies a connection with someone, anyone, in cold-hearted New York City. And in the end she stays on the therapist’s couch because she knows she needs something; she just isn’t sure what. This is a good one.


December 10, 2007: “Found Objects” by Jennifer Egan

The New Yorker: "The Visitor" by Marisa Silver

Candy is a nurse’s aide in a V.A. hospital and is taking care of badly wounded soldier she thinks of as El Lobo. At the same time she is dealing at home with her grandmother, the two women who together have had to face struggling with Sylvie, Candy’s mother, through her addictions and death. Candy is frustrated with El Lobo because he does not speak, but she also senses his anger and hatred. The ending of the story takes place in the apartment Candy shares with her grandmother. There has been a blackout and the grandmother cannot finish the dress she has been sewing. As a story, there isn’t much about this piece that works. The two threads – in the hospital and in the apartment – do have some linkages, but they aren’t tied together in any cohesive way, and the story doesn’t end, it just stops. But I suspect that’s because this isn’t really a story and once again The New Yorker is passing off an excerpt from a novel as a short story. (The contributors’ notes indicate that the author is publishing a novel in the Spring called The God of War.) Since this makes no sense as a story there's hardly any point in discussing it.

December 3, 2007: “The Visitor” by Marisa Silver

The New Yorker: "Álvaro Russelot’s Journey" by Roberto Bolaño

Although I liked this story much more than “The Insufferable Gaucho,” the Bolaño story from a few weeks ago, this still doesn’t appeal to me greatly. One reason is that the climax is unsatisfactory and another is the wealth of irrelevant detail. This is the story of Russelot, a young Argentine novelist who travels to a conference in Germany and then visits Paris. His motivation for going to Paris is that a filmmaker appears to have plagiarized two of Russelot’s novels and although the writer has no plans to take legal action, he does want to come to some kind of closure with the other man over what has happened. While in France, Russelot has various adventures and finally tracks the filmmaker down to a country town in Normandy. The confrontation with Morini is very brief – too brief to really make sense in the context of the story, I thought – and then Russelot returns to Paris having come to some kind of understanding about himself as an Argentine writer. All of which is interesting, but there is some suggestion of a greater truth about Argentine literature here that it is lost on me. Russelot is one of the leading lights of Argentine literature, and he reveres older writers from his country. He meets up in Paris with a writer he admires. He discovers that the French translations of his work have not sold very well, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him or, for that matter, the publishers. So this is a pleasant enough read, but it feels like something is lost in the cultural translation.


November 26, 2007: “Álvaro Russelot’s Journey” by Roberto Bolaño

The New Yorker: "Or Else" by Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson is a terrific story-teller and this piece is, I think, typical of her. In it, David Chalmers is an unsympathetic liar who tells a woman he meets in Tucson that his family has a home in Telluride, when in fact it is the home of a family with whom he spent several summers as a boy. In revealing this information to the reader, we learn about his unsatisfactory home-life and how he fell in love with the Hart family, the mother, the father, and three daughters. David and the woman break in to the house and are discovered there. David gets off lightly, although there are consequences to be sure. The crux of the story is in this paragraph:

“He never got away with anything, he thought. If it wasn’t an officer of the law pulling him over, it was a ticket in the mail, the indisputable evidence of his vehicle flying past a camera at many miles over the speed limit. What such a person might eventually ask himself was why he felt a need to break the rules, tell lies, have things to get away with. Why couldn’t he, in some definitive way, exhaust or outgrow his childish defiance?”

Why, indeed? And it is clear in the end that he he can’t, and that he isn’t just lying to others but also to himself. As much as I liked this story and Nelson’s languid style, I thought the ending hit a slightly false note. While I believe that he’s going to keep deceiving himself and others, the disjunctive in the last sentence seemed too flip a way of showing it – or else it wasn’t.

November 19, 2007: “Or Else” by Antonya Nelson

The New Yorker: "Brooklyn Circle" by Alice Mattison

Constance’s Brooklyn apartment has been invaded by her ex-husband, Jerry, who lives in Philadelphia, and their daughter, Joanna, a sculptor who lives – or lived – “in the South” (as if people in New York don’t need anything more specific than that to fully understand) with a boyfriend. The husband is in town to explore history; the daughter is angry about a perceived injustice, somehow related to race or if not that then political views about the Iraq war. In any case, Jerry is in town to hunt for the “Brooklyn Circle,” a scheme from the 1920’s that was partially built – an elevated train like Chicago’s Loop. Jerry, though, is sure that traces exist and so he and Con (she calls in sick to join him) go hunting. And indeed they find bits and pieces. (Intriguingly, she spots the first trace and for some reason doesn’t tell him.) Somewhat incredibly, they climb one of the structures. Once they’re on top, Jerry sprains his ankle and Con has to shed her reluctance (which seems to define her) in order to help him. This is a terrific story, one of my favorites of the year for sure. Subtle, but not too subtle, the Brooklyn Circle is a fine metaphor for the lives of this family: there are still fragments of love, they are “almost a family” as the story tells us, and it was once a great idea; but the pieces aren’t connected – worth preserving, but not restoring. And it is clear how the protagonist, Constance, has changed. She is at the beginning timid, although she’s a lawyer (and hates the fact that she’s timid, and denies it), she’s unwilling to take interest in Jerry’s hobby and she’s also unwilling to fight for her daughter’s rights. But by the end she has admitted there is something to Jerry’s interest (if not quite enough for them to reunite permanently) and resolved to look into her daughter’s case. There are also some interesting questions here about Black-Jewish relations and their place in society as a whole; the trampling of civil rights by the Bush administration; the crutch of alcohol; the role of women – but I’m not quite sure how those facets of the story fit. This is one that bears re-reading. I’m looking forward to reading how other people react to it.

November 12, 2007: “Brooklyn Circle” by Alice Mattison

The New Yorker: "The Dog" by Roddy Doyle

A husband and wife have grown apart. They let petty grievances fester. They’re both getting older – spreading flesh, hair where it doesn’t belong – but one day the wife comes home with a dog and they reshape their relationship around it. Until the dog goes missing, for which the wife blames the husband. And in the absence of the dog, they deteriorate further, more rapidly, and neither can do anything to stop it. The only thing interesting about this story is that the dog is named Emma, after the Jane Austen character. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

November 5, 2007: “The Dog” by Roddy Doyle

The New Yorker: "The Cold Outside" by John Burnside

I’m not sure how many people will agree with me, but for me this is one of the best stories of the year, if not the best. On the other hand, it’s a “cancer” story, and we’re all sick of those, right? This one involves Bill, a truck driver (he delivers “treacle” to farms for their feed) in Scotland. His cancer has returned and he’s worried about how his wife Sall will take it and more worried about their daughter Caroline who works in Montreal and whom he hasn’t seen in a while. Sall and Caroline, it seems, have never gotten along well and as a result Sall has prevented Bill from accepting Caroline’s invitation to come visit. Bill cares about Sall but the love is gone and she isn’t really there for him, more worried about herself than about him, it seems. He just needs someone to talk to and he regrets turning down the offer of tea from one of the farmers he delivers to. Then he picks up a hitchhiker, a young man dressed as a woman who has obviously been beaten. Bill even tells him that the coming Christmas will be his last – he has needed to tell someone – but the boy’s problems are somehow bigger. The story borders on the over-sentimental, which is a risk with cancer stories, but it’s a satisfying read.

October 29, 2007: “The Cold Outside” by John Burnside

The New Yorker: "Among Animals and Plants" by Andrei Platonov

The author, Andrei Platonov, died in 1951 and the contributors’ notes indicates that the “complete text” of “Among Animals and Plants” will be included in a collection to be published this December, which suggests that what appears in this issue is an excerpt from a longer work. Yikes. This is plenty long as it is, surely the longest fiction of the year in The New Yorker. And too long, in my opinion, with too much repetition. But it was written in 1936, in Russian – a different world, a different style. This is the story of Ivan Alekseyevich Fyodorov, a poor worker on the railroad who lives in a hut with his parents and his wife and child. The story begins with Fyodorov in the forest, filled with animals and plants that interest him not at all. But he does want to provide for his family, as ungrateful as they are, and so he tries to better his work situation, eventually being given more responsibility. And then disaster strikes! Here’s a sample that reveals a bit of Fyodorov’s character:

“One summer, a member of the Writers Union had come and given a talk about the current state of creative dialogue among writers. Fyodorov had asked sixteen questions and had been given “The Travels of Marco Polo” as a present; the writer had then left. The book was extremely interesting; Fyodorov had at once begun reading, from page 26. At the start of a book, a writer is just thinking, and that makes it dull; the most interesting part is the middle, or the end, which was why Fyodorof preferred to choose pages at random – now page 50, now page 214. And although every book is interesting, reading this way makes it even better, and still more interesting, because you have to imagine for yourself everything you have skipped, and you have to compose anew passages that don’t make sense or are badly written, just as if you, too, were an author, a member of the Soviet Union’s Writers Union.”

Seems like good advice for reading this story, if you ask me.

October 22, 2007: “Among Animals and Plants” by Andrei Platonov

The New Yorker: "Sin Dolor" by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Set in Mexico, this is the story of a doctor in a village who one day delivers a baby who doesn’t cry. He finds this odd, but the boy is otherwise normal. A few years later his parents bring him in for the treatment of burns and it is learned that he feels no pain. The doctor suspects abuse, but there is no proof. A few more years go by and the boy is brought in with a broken leg. The doctor tries to take the boy under his wing but his parents resist. While at the doctor’s house, the boy allows the doctor’s scorpion specimens to sting him, but he survives. Years go by and the father turns the boy into a sideshow freak, but the doctor never forgets him. The boy reappears, and the doctor makes a last effort to help him. Apart from the way the boy is treated by his family, there is a sinister side to the doctor, too. At least there is a suggestion that the doctor has committed infanticide, and there is no question that he is experimenting with this boy (the scorpions, and there is also an episode with wasps) and envisions his own fame at the boy’s expense. This is a terrific story that, unfortunately, steps over the sentimentality line when the boy, who never does feel physical pain, tells the doctor that he feels pain in his heart. Ugh. I was with Boyle until that moment. Otherwise, this is one of the best of the year. (But I thought Boyle was officially going by T.C. these days, not T. Coraghessan. What’s with the reversion?)

October 15, 2007: “Sin Dolor” by T. Coraghessan Boyle

The New Yorker: "Married Love" by Tessa Hadley

Lottie is far from sympathetic. In order to escape her household and feel more grownup, she announces she’s marrying. No one believes her, which is funny and telling, but it eventually comes out that she’s been having an affair with an older composer of religious music, her teacher. Who is already married. Time passes, they marry, she has children, and life is tough. She has what she wants, but of course she isn’t happy. Her husband actually uses space in his ex-wife’s house to do his work because his home with Lottie is too chaotic. And in the end she is left longing for more. As is the reader. I did not enjoy this story much and found that I really didn’t care what Lottie did. I felt some sympathy for Edgar, her husband, but we got to see so little of him it was hard to really know if that was misplaced since, after all, he had a history of fooling around with students. I think this is one of my least favorite stories of the year so far.

October 8, 2007: "Married Love" by Tessa Hadley

The New Yorker: "The Insufferable Gaucho" by Roberto Bolaño

In this story, after a realistic beginning in which the lawyer Pereda’s life in Buenos Aires is told – his wife, his children, his career as a judge – Argentina’s economic collapse leads to a break in the story that then resumes in a more magical tone. Argentina’s famed ranches are in ruins, the cows replaced by rabbits, men of courage replaced by coke-snorting adolescents. Once a gentleman of Argentine culture, Pereda no longer belongs in the city, and if he also doesn’t belong on the pampas, at least he has an objective, a goal – to return the land to its former glory. And honestly, I think that’s all I see here, with not a lot to talk about. I liked the illustration, though. I'd be interested to know if anyone got more out of the story than I did.

October 1, 2007: “The Insufferable Gaucho” by Roberto Bolaño