The polls have closed and the votes have been counted. We have a tie! Sharing the New Yorker Story of the Year honor for 2009 are two excellent stories, "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian and "Victory Lap" by George Saunders. Another fine story, "Idols," by Tim Gautreaux, came just one vote shy of making it a three-way tie.
I suppose it’s possible to write an original, successful dystopian story, but this one doesn’t work. Or maybe it does exactly what it seems to be trying to do—show the consequences of ignoring global warming. In this story, an English couple in 2040 are struggling to survive—food and fuel shortages, foul weather, billeting of foreign refugees and troops—in the aftermath of the collapse of government, which in turn was caused by the Big Melt. Fearing for their lives and unable to put up with conditions, they flee north. Life on the road’s not so good either and the man is killed by another foreigner, who gets the narrator pregnant. The worst thing is to bring a child into this world and so the narrator has to take action, against the man first.
Is it safe to assume that this “story” is an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, due out in 2011? The voice seems consistent with other snippets of the novel I’ve seen, so even though The New Yorker doesn’t tell us this (they never do), that’s the theory I’m running with.“Nevertheless, the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable “voices” and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well.”
The contributor notes for this issue tell us that McEwan has a new novel, Solar, due out in the spring. And while once again the editors don’t tell us this, the fiction appears to be not a short story but an excerpt, or perhaps an extraction, from that novel. The “story” deals with a Physics Nobel Laureate whom we first see as an infant, although the events in these pages cover the time when he is an undergraduate at Oxford first becoming interested in the “physics of light.” Through a lot of exposition—there’s very little scene in the story—the reader learns about Michael Beard’s parents (he’s an only child, his parents’ marriage was loveless, his mother, who died of cancer, had a series of affairs), and then his arrival at Oxford. He meets Maisie—the first in a string of wives—and pursues and ultimately seduces her by digesting the work of Milton, the subject of her own studies. Unconventionally, for the time, they marry, but are already drifting apart and by the end of this excerpt she leaves him and the reader is a left with a flash forward to Michael attending her funeral.
This story is going directly onto my top-ten list for the year. I enjoyed this more than any DeLillo I’ve read, and I’m going to assume that it’s not excerpted from a novel. (Readers will remember “The Falling Man,” a DeLillo “story” in The New Yorker that was, in fact, a single story line extracted from his novel of the same name; DeLillo himself didn’t even do the extracting.) Although I have some qualms about the ending, the rest of the story is completely engaging.
Sam Shepard has a story collection coming out in January, called Day Out of Days, and I get the impression that it’s full of road trips. In September, The New Yorker published a story from the collection, “Land of the Living”, which I discussed here, and another story, “Thor’s Day (Highway 81 North, Staunton, Virginia),” appeared in Zoetrope: All Story this Fall, and I discussed it here. I didn't love either one.
I’m not sure what to make of this story. It’s skillfully written, but it seems to lack emotion. Or perhaps that’s the point? (But then, of course, we’d have an imitative fallacy problem!) Suchen is a U.S. resident, originally from China, but she has put China in her past because of an incident that occurred when she was a girl. She and five other girls had entered into a suicide pact—the reasons aren’t clear to Suchen and if she doesn’t know, the readers certainly don’t know—and carried their plan out. Except that Suchen survived. Since then, an outcast, she’s been haunted by what happened, but not, it seems, with sadness. She doesn’t understand, but neither does she really seem to grieve.
Ray and Mary argue. She’s fat and he smokes, and they argue about that. They argue about the lawn, they argue about Biznezz, their Jack Russell terrier. But as Ray knows, “It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity.” In addition to arguing, they lie. He lies about how much he smokes and she lies about the Little Debbie cakes she eats. As the story opens, they’re on their way to Wal-Mart, but Mary wants to stop at the Quik-Pik to get a purple ball for her niece, a 99 cent birthday present. And Ray asks her to also get some cigarettes while she’s inside and he stays with the dog in the car, and to save money he’s willing to accept Premium Harmony, a cheap brand. We get the point. They don’t have much money, but they’re killing themselves with the things they’re wasting money on. Which is what happens.
A couple from Madrid is on an island vacation where they observe other people at the beach, including the attractive Inés and her older, far less attractive companion, Alberto. The most remarkable thing about this pair is that the man is constantly video-taping the woman, and it’s clear that he adores her. She, on the other hand, is “appropriately indifferent.” Their behavior puzzles the Madrid couple and eventually the man finds Alberto alone, by the pool late at night. Alberto explains, although it takes awhile to make himself understood, that he has two tapes for his camera: he uses one for one day’s taping, then uses the next for the next day’s taping; then he records over the first day’s tape for the following day, and so on. The reason for this, it turns out, is that he is that she is going to die and he wants to be sure that he has her last day on tape, to enjoy forever. But she’s not sick. The man realizes that before long she will lose interest in him and when that happens he will have to kill her. The revelation is startling to the man from Madrid, of course, who thinks of his wife who is sleeping in their hotel room.
Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, from which a story was excerpted in The New Yorker earlier this year, was recently released, so presumably the current story is not part of that book. It could be though, from what I know about it. Here we also have a portrait of New York City that is slightly off its axis—a little bit weird, but not alarmingly so. The protagonist, Stevick, is unemployed and hangs out near his favorite coffee shop, but not inside because he might run into his ex. While sitting on a bench outside, he witness an “installation”—two men in orange jumpsuits install a third, who is bound and gagged, in a hole in the pavement that they have dug. They cover it with boards and leave, assigning Stevick the task of standing over the hole with an umbrella to keep the fellow in the hole from getting wet. Eventually, another guy comes buy to feed the guy in the hole and he also gives Stevick a sandwich, along with a duffel bag. It is only when Stevick’s ex comes by, and seems to find nothing terribly odd about the situation, that Stevick learns that he’s been issued his own orange jumpsuit, and has a few extras to boot.
Our bodies, this story seems to be saying, are in complicity with our emotions. Young love gave the narrator a skin condition; divorce gave him hives. Now, having met a mysterious young doctor, he is intent on her skin, and her own body’s complicity with her emotions. They take things slowly, they let their emotions make contact first, getting to know each other, getting comfortable with each other. It is only in the last line, when their emotions are ready, that their bodies are allowed to touch.
Chris, Amanda, and Susan, three adults who had been the godchildren of childless Vivien, visit her house for the first time since her death a year before. Chris, an academic, claims not to remember the house or even Vivien herself. Amanda, who has organized this visit so the three can claim items in the house for themselves before a planned estate sale, has the most vivid, although selective, memory, because she kept a journal back in those days. And Susan, a lawyer, remembers, but is disdainful. They wander around the house, bringing up old memories, in particular one memory of spying on Vivien. Eventually, Susan leaves and Mandy reveals to Chris that Susan had had a crush on him when they were kids, which Chris didn’t realize. He understands that it’s too late to do anything about it, but he and Mandy now feel some “vibration of passion” between them—and a sudden memory returns to Chris of a makeout session he’d had with Mandy back then. The ending of the story spins out to Susan’s consciousness, in her taxi on the way to the station, fingering a small item she’s taken from the house: a pair of carved ivory masks.
Last week’s story was very good, but this one is better. Or at least I enjoyed it more and was more compelled to keep reading. Alison is fourteen, almost fifteen. She’s a typical teen, maybe brighter than most. She does ballet, loves everyone, has an active imagination (love the thing with the talking baby deer from whom she hides the death of its mother), and looks down on the neighbor kid, Kyle, with whom she played as a kid. But Kyle, into whose point of view we shift, is also pretty normal, except that his parents keep an extremely tight leash on him. Both kids have parents who are trying to do the right thing, and have taught their kids what is expected of them.
Everything is temporary. Vivian is living with Shelly in a temporary space (it’s not really housing at all) and they’re only temporarily friends. Vivian temporarily hooks up with Shelly’s temporary boyfriend. Vivian is a temp working in an adoption agency, where she was hired because she herself was adopted (having temporarily belonged to other parents, I suppose). And her adoptive mother gets very ill but then recovers. Temporarily. And then she dies, having, temporarily, taken up smoking because she thinks women who smoke look elegant. The point, it seems, is that Vivian is searching for permanence, and the only thing permanent in her life is that her mother is dead. The last line of the story is a beautiful statement of impermanence: “She kept her eyes closed as Vivian and her father watched the delicate curl of smoke dissolve and disappear, like sugar on the tongue.”
I didn’t hate this story, and it isn’t a novel excerpt, so that makes it one of the best stories of the year so far. A couple from Minnesota is vacationing in Cancun with their kids. There are other snowbirds on the same flight and at the same hotel. There’s a delay at customs, the only point of which that I can determine is to allow husband and wife to discuss his personality change now that he’s on Xanax. And to make them late getting into the hotel, the point of which isn’t clear. The wife, on the drive from the airport to the hotel accuses the husband of having a girlfriend, which he denies. The reason the wife suspects him is that she answered his cell phone and it was a woman on the line. Still, he denies it. On the flight home, an older man, whom the husband has seen several times on the trip, dies. When they get back to the house, the cell phone is ringing.
In the Contributors’ Notes we learn that Paul Theroux has work of fiction, “A Dead Hand,” forthcoming, but we are not told whether this story, “The Lower River,” is an excerpt (or an extraction, to more accurately describe what TNY often does with novels). In fact, though, A Dead Hand is set in Calcutta, and as far as I can tell the current story has nothing to do with it. Good.
Despite the relatively exotic setting of Istanbul, this New Yorker story—for a welcome change—takes a traditional form and has a satisfying, if open, conclusion. It may not be the best story of the year, but it’s the best in weeks. 
