"The Story of a Painter" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

This story can be found in the January 18, 2016 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be read at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "There once lived a painter so destitute that he couldn’t afford a single crayon, let alone brushes and paints."

Last Line: "'It’s because you’re a silly one,' Vera told him. 'Always were and always will be.'"

How wonderful to read a story that is merely a fairy tale - a story intended to amuse, to entertain, to hold the recepient's interest from beginning to end!  And though this piece is elementary, it is fun, and also current, touching universal and timeless themes and characterizations.  Fairy tales remind us that some things- some thoughts and emotions - some of life's circumstances - never seem to change.

No Big Bad Wolf, no little gnome of a man, and no princess to be found here.  But amid echoes of Dickens and Tolstoy we find a poor, abused painter; a young woman with a withered leg; a melodramatic swindler; and magic - paints, brushes, canvases...  There are "strangers in a strange land" and there is "no room in the inn" for a woman giving birth.  And guilt!  Oh, the guilt that runs throughout this piece - a thread weaving together the fuzzy differences between wants and needs!

As in any fairy tale, there are positive events that suddenly lead to negative turns and a moment when all seems lost.  Despair looms and threatens the thinnest fabric of humanity and hope.  But then there is a moment when what is real overcomes what is magic, in the end, and the hero comes through triumphant, and legally and lawfully wed.

Mormon Moment: "For behold, are we not all beggars?"  Mosiah 4:19
 
Photo Credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Ludmilla_Petrushevskaya_seven_2009_Shankbone_NYC.jpg/200px-Ludmilla_Petrushevskaya_seven_2009_Shankbone_NYC.jpg

"1=1" by Anne Carson

This story can be found in the January 11, 2016 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be read at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "She visits others."

Last Line: "The fox does not fail."

I do not understand everything about this story, but I know there is so much in there. I wish I had more learning, more background, more intellect to make and see the connections that are here in this piece.  So I'd like to encourage discussion about this story.  I am ready to learn. 

What did you notice?  What struck you about the beginning and its connection to the ending?  Is there a symbolism that ran through here that was heavy for you?  Did this prose piece feel poetic in tone and theme?  What is this tale really about?  

Water predominates this piece - the lake, the sea.  It held and cradled characters - the main character, the dog, refugees... 

The first line is haunting: "She visits others."  Yet, then the protagonist calls herself selfish.  How?  Why?  She notices people, situations, individuals...  But she says there's "no momentum in sharing"...?

"There is pressure to use this water correctly... Every water has its own rules and offering... Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty... Every water has a right place to be, but that place is motion.  You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.  Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke.  You can fail it with each stroke.  What does that mean, fail it."  What does "fail it" mean?

And how does this connect to the end?  "The fox does not fail."  And Comrade Chandler's connection to the fox?

So much to talk about here.  Let's see what we discover from each other.

Photo Credit: http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1380283628p5/34336.jpg

Mormon Moment: "And he said unto me: What desirest thou?  And I said unto him: To know the interpretation thereof... [for] I do not know the meaning of all things."  1 Nephi 11:10,11,17

"Jelly and Jack" by Dana Spiotta

This story can be found in the December 14, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be read at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "In the damp late spring of 1985, Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed in her ear."

Last Line: "But she cried as she sealed the envelope, because for a moment she thought she might have gone a different way."

When I was a little girl, my parents had Reader's Digest Condensed books on a cheap metal shelf, that bowed in the middle under the weight of partial stories.  I am always reticent about pieces pulled from a larger work - they usually feel flat and leave me disappointed.

This time, however, not only did I enjoy this piece on its own, I am looking forward to reading the whole when it comes out next year.  I want more, but not because something was lacking here.  Rather, this tale was so complete that there must be more to discover about Jelly.  There must be a further ending that answers the ending we find here.

"Jelly" is how the narrator addresses the protagonist, a woman named Nicole.  And as the story begins, I am brought into a Doris Day-like film but with real true, non-comedic seduction.  Jelly lures and controls men through a "pink plastic Trimline phone".  She knows what she is doing - how long a conversation should last, how to listen to what the man is saying on the other end of the line, how to hear what he truly wants her to hear yet isn't saying.  She is in control.  That is, until she dials Jack's number.

For the first time, Jelly finds the intimate distance of the phone to be too much.  The phone is, indeed, "a weapon of intimacy".  The con artist finds herself conned by love itself.  But this isn't THE TWIST.  There's more.  And when Dana Spiotta dropped it down in front me, I was truly surprised.  For it wasn't unbelievable, but I was unprepared.  I was lured in by the seduction of minute and gorgeous details, unabashed storytelling - lulled by the process of the con and the process of fiction.  I was caught unawares. 

I cannot stop thinking about this piece and I cannot soften the affect it had on my heart.  This is not a condensed book, I assure you.  Like Jack, I fell for Jelly's enticements, and am anxious to see more of her. 

Photo credit:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Dana_Spiotta_2011_NBCC_Awards_2012_Shankbone.JPG/170px-Dana_Spiotta_2011_NBCC_Awards_2012_Shankbone.JPG

"Oktober" by Martin Amis

This story can be found in the December 7, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be read at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the hotel."

Last Line: "'Dark Continent' is not a book about Africa; the rest of Mazower's title is 'Europe's Twentieth Century.'"
 
"Novelists should never deal in duties or obligations. But if they feel a literary impulse to take on political realities—then by all means."

This doesn't feel like fiction at all to me.  In fact, it reminds me of a creative writing assignment from college - write something true that happened to you and write something made-up. The class then votes which is the fiction. I vote that this is not very "fictional", based on the voice, the pacing of the story and the seemingly didactic purpose.

What ideas and thoughts readers will find addressed in this story:
politics
festivals
war
refugees
women
religion
geriatrics
inclusion
bigotry
a literary narrator
family
business
alcohol
ID theft
vignettes of Thomas Wolfe and Nabokov
borders
immigration
history
repetition of history

"The repetitions.  You go through the same things again and again.  And it just doesn't sink in."

Readers are intelligent.  And here they find an event in an author's life melded together with his way of approaching (forcing connections between) ideologies rather than a tale exploring universal truths from a side angle.  Readers are not encouraged to form their own opinions by watching a story in action.  Here, instead, they are overtly lead to situations and instructed what to make of them... like fifth graders. Almost like an "obligation"...

The tone of the writing was easy and flowing - conversational and intimate.  I am sure Martin Amis is a wonderful writer, for he executed great skill in the act of writing.  The content, however, left me frustrated and unimpressed.

Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Martin_amis_2014.jpg/220px-Martin_amis_2014.jpg

 

"The Weir" by Mark Haddon

This story can be found in the November 16, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.  

This review can also be seen at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "He pops the catch and lifts the rusty boot."

Last Line: "And the last few minutes may be horrible, but that's O.K., it really is, because nothing is lost and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in sporing and the buzzard will circle above the wasteland."

I love The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.  I found it to be powerful and moving and thought-provoking.  The exploration into human emotion and the sensation of such was touching and well-portrayed.

I am not as impressed with "The Weir".  It is another story with great potential to be tender and compassionate, honest and vulnerable.  A man whose wife has left him (he gets the car with the rust...) and his son has abandoned them both, takes his dogs for their daily romp in the fields on the banks of the Thames.  Battered tennis balls and racket show us that he is not faring as well he thinks he is.

Then Ian spots a woman, on the weir, behaving strangely in a spot that can only mean thing - she plans to jump.  After this extended scene, the emotive drive behind the story seems to loss a little "umph". 

The tale moves into a direction of life's complexities, yet trying to show continuities of life bring hope...  I was waiting for something, but I am not sure what that something was.  The ending was wrapped up, but rather messy and poignant, as in life.  But I did not walked away moved, or pondering.  There is no residue left in this piece for me.

There were lines of feeling and imagery to love: "Enough blue to male a pair of sailor's trousers."
"The sour self-pity in her voice, daring him to reach out and have his hand slapped away."
"...as if she were a superhero and this was her power."
"...he's like a lobster in a warming pot, claws scrabbling at the metal rim."
"She listens better than anyone he knows.  Or maybe it's just that she doesn't interrupt.  And maybe that's enough."

"The Weir" doesn't feel real to me, but it seems it should.  Instead, it seems like I am being told a made-up story...  and while I have something akin to pity for Ian, I do not empathy for him.  I see him too far ahead in the distance to even try to connect with him.

Photo credit: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/436449989946908673/9_ZPDodB_400x400.jpeg

"Honey Bunny" by Julianne Pachico

This story can be found in the November 9, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be found at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "He comes up to her on the dance floor. 'Nice purse,' he says almost immediately."

Last Line: "It's not the world's most comfortable nest.  But it's a start."

I went through several  sensations as I read this story.  First: another twenty-something year old's drug story??  Then: a lot of fragments that I have to seam together, and I don't feel like doing the work on another twenty-something year old's drug story.  To: there seems to be something familiar here in this heroine's journey.  And finally: I liked it.  A lot.

I was unsure for most of the story.  The nameless protagonist and her cocaine struggles were well-described, I just felt like it is a very common story line these days.  Girl meets a boy in a club.  They do drugs together.  Her odd, drug-induced behaviors...

But then the story follows on the wings of insects found in the coke - leaves, flowers, crackers, dirt... and a nostalgia - clearly evoked memories of her very young years - comes wafting in smelling like chicken broth and sounding like her grandmother.

I have recently finished reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and so I felt comfortable in this young woman's reminisces of her privileged background and current stylish existence. 

There were hints to history and politics, but the reader is allowed to come to their own conclusions about them.  The implications of adult politics on children who then grow up is evident but not decided for us.  And for this reason, I was able to connect with this twenty-something year old in another drug story as an individual still dealing with sadness and loss in her little girl heart.

Photo Credit: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/151109_r27259-884.jpg

"The Gospel According to Garcia" by Ariel Dorfman

This story can be found in the November 2, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be found at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "We watched him come in, how his steps faltered at the threshold of the classroom, how he just stood there, his first mistake, giving us enough time to size him up, not enough time for him to figure out who we were, what strategy might win us over."

Last Line: "We remain absolutely still and wait."

I do not like stories that have a moral as their purpose - that have a message as their medium - that have a point that may be categorized as political.  I like stories that let me find my own joy or sorrow in the plot and characters.

Ariel Dorfman has written a piece that feels like I am to read it for homework and come into class prepared to discuss the themes and how they apply to our lives - here and now.  I felt 16 again, anxious to get it "right", get my A, and feel a bit intellectual in the process.

Which is to say "kudos!" to Mr. Dorfman.  The first person narrator is plural.  We are supposed to feel part of a nameless, faceless group of students, feeling intellectual and wise, and unsure when a new teacher takes the place of  the beloved.  We feel their uneasiness - we feel our own mind dart in and out of old thought patterns and new ideas.  They do not know what has happened to the man that could lead them, nor do we.  We just sit and watch and wait, as they do, to see what the new teacher can pull from the group.

There is great symbolism (the title, for instance) and deep philosophical questions ("Why is indifference worse than murder?").  There are fantastic images ("...with a bird in a nearby tree watching the snow cover his body...") and the length is perfect for its politics (5 pages when I printed it up).  

But I love the connection with one or two characters - I don't care about how the group feels.  A group is made of individuals, but even here that is cleaned and refined by Garcia.  He claims to have taught them to rebel, but here they sit, unsure of what that rebellion should look like to their former instructor, not to themselves.  

I like the examination of the individual and the only place I found it here was: "...he was not disappointed when somebody asked, this time I am sure it was not me, 'Does that mean we should never love intensely, give ourselves entirely to another human being?'"  This was in response to Garcia's comment: "Remember that he who loves more in a relationship always ends up screwed."  We see the one narrator speaking for all. And we see that Garcia is not just the "resistance leader of the week" - we see that somehow, his heart was broken.  And that is not politics.

It is well-written and conveyed with great skill.  It just isn't my cup of tea.  The brush strokes paint a beautiful nose, but I prefer teeth.

Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/DorfmanA1.jpg/250px-DorfmanA1.jpg

"Vespa" by Tim Parks

This story can be found in the October 5, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be found at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Mark parked his Vespa beside three others outside Yasmin's school, in Manchester, where it would be safe."

Last Line: "He braked to let it go by, then changed his mind, accelerated, and drove straight on past their house, up the slope beyond the village, then on toward the wooded hills and the horizon."


Really!?

Now, everyone knows I am annoyingly cheerful and supportive of authors’ stories, but this one drove me nuts!  But as I am not a lamabaster by nature, I will limit myself to five points.

1.            The title is just two words about an object in the story, albeit a central object, but without creativity and excitement for the tale at hand.

2.            The writing feels like a well-proofread first or second draft.  I had to check to see who the author was and if he had anything else to his credit warranting a New Yorker placement.  The story does not unfold.  It tumbles and jerks.

3.            The characters are clichés – well-drawn clichés, but still…  Exotic adolescent lover, privileged young man, distant parents in the midst of divorce, something with an engine that gives a young man his freedom (usually a car, but…) the bullheaded police officer… Even down to the female nude model in Mark’s art class.  And why is she even there?  She doesn’t need to be.  Sure, there are connections made to her feelings and Mark’s later, but other methods could have been used.  Or at the very least, this choice could have been more skillful.

4.            The themes are universal.  But here they are forced and tried into a very predictable and clumsy story.  Details abound, but they seem out of sync, heavy, trite.   Even reading the interview with Parks was like listening to a high school English class – adolescence feeling quite brilliant.

5.            I didn’t care about Vespas before reading this story and I care even less now.

 Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/PerthVespa.jpg/220px-PerthVespa.jpg

"The Driver" by Thomas McGuane

This story can be found in the September 28, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be seen on The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Mrs. Quantrill lived in a beautiful old Prairie-style house built in the twenties, which she had restored to its original elegance with Mr. Quantrill, a patent attorney attached to Montana's burgeoning natural-gas industry."

Last Line: "A widow up at Ten Mile went on TV with a hailstone the size of a grapefruit, but subsequent investigation revealed it to be something from her freezer."

I live in a rural town out West and today was “ditch-day”.  I could not curl up with this story, hold it in my hand, and let the print dazzle me.  I had to listen to it on SoundCloud as I traipsed through short, slicing yellow grasses, willing the irrigation water to move further across the orchard.

This rather uninspiring activity allowed me to be more than “wowed” by McGuane’s obvious mastery and skill.  I became consumed.  I found metaphors, themes, connections, imagery, and methodology galore!

Now I know I am an optimist and I like to cheer for almost any story, but there was so much going on in this short piece that I listened twice, and even ignored the ditch for twenty minutes to read it through one time.

Spencer’s silence in school elicits a meeting between his mother, the “tallest person in the room and very thin, with unblinking blue eyes”, the principal, and the struggling boy, himself.  Special ed is the proposed to solution and Mrs. Quantrill responds by insisting that some time in Bavaria will “cure” her son.  

The narrator takes us to their car for the mother’s hen-pecking and elitist soliloquy.  Only when we reach the end of the paragraph do we realize that she has forgotten her son!  She was so wrapped up in her own judgments and thoughts, her own superiority, that she has not even seen her child!  It is here, also, that we discover our narrator is third person omniscient – not limited, as we might have supposed.

In this story, we are introduced to the concept of things not always being what we think they are based on our limited perspectives.  “Subsequent investigation” is often necessary. 

Spencer starts walking, now that he’s alone.  Home?  We don’t now know.  Just that he has decided to walk.  And here we meet “the driver” – at this point, I had forgotten the title and was so wrapped up in the neat little “tricks” McGuane had already employed.  

The interchanges between the driver and the boy further show that things are not always as they appear.  The driver has a schema that is challenged.  He tries to do the right thing.  And there are evidences of “too quick to judge” in the resulting events.

The ending of the story isn’t in the last sentences of the last paragraph.  It is in the last sentences of the first paragraph.  Spencer inherits the house, has it “demolished” and turned into a storage unit facility.  Are things what they appear, even here?  Is the demolition due to an “acting out” of an older, neglected Spencer – or is it an acceptable, adult decision by a man who wants to move on?

Again, I am just enthralled with the craft of this story.  There is so much more here to talk about!  If only there wasn’t a ditch to watch!

Photo credit: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ce/ae/82/ceae82de022219d3f7a466c856375263.jpg 

"Chicken Hill" by Joy Williams

 You can read this story in the September 14, 2015 issue of The New Yorker. 

This post can also be seen on The Mookse and the Gripes.
 
First Line: "She didn't know what had possessed her to participate in such a thing."

Last Line: "She didn't even see herself leaving, having just, at last, gone."
 



I am fascinated by stories of older women – how they look at their past, how they anticipate the future, and how they see their present experience.   This focus in fiction creates microcosms of how we all tell stories – create our own narratives – to make life a little bit easier, to validate who we have become.

Joy Williams took us right into the center of a story, knowing we would catch on rather quickly.  How can we not?  We see, even if Ruth cannot – will not.  

Ruth is like many we have met.  She has a sense of superiority, propriety, gentility.  She has seen the neighboring child before, but they only begin to converse when the older woman is eating lunch – a tuna sandwich with adverse effects.  The child is not there to play in her gulley (is that what Ruth would have loved to do as a child?) but to draw the woman with art supplies from a hard-to-ignore backpack.

A friendship of sorts is born.  The child visits.  Her questions are as pointed and guileless as her responses are very adult and clinical.

This story is sweet and simple.   The themes are universal – easy to find, and easy to connect with.  I am enthused by how unencumbered the piece is.  Even what may appear complicated – intricate - is really quite straight-forward.  

  
"Chicken Hill" is a clear-eyed view of what we do not like to see.

 Photo credit: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/65/14/98/651498b227e651057a681ba49809f2a6.jpg