"Wednesday's Child" Perhaps Better From a Different POV

 In "Wednesday's Child" by Yiyun Li, a short story in the Jan. 16, 2023, on-line version of the New Yorker, Marcie, the nearly 16-year-old daughter of Rosalie, the story's protagonist, commits suicide by lying down across some railway tracks. This occurred just three weeks after Marcie began attending a "highly selective prep school" to which she had apparently been determined to gain admittance.

Marcie had been a precocious child who read challenging books and otherwise apparently walked to her own drum, such as in the manner in which she ate melon. That's about all readers are told about her.

The bulk of the story consists of Rosalie pondering her daughter's death as she travels toward a famous WWI battlefield where as many as one million soldiers died. An analogy for the apparently senseless nature of Marcie's demise?

What's odd about this story is that while her daughter's death is quite naturally a major preoccupation for Rosalie -- recalled here through associations with current events -- Rosalie apparently made no inquiries as to what may have transpired during Marcie's first three weeks in what was probably a pressured school environment. Or if she did, her findings were apparently of insufficient interest to recall or relate. 

Rather Rosalie thinks about what may or may not make a good mother and whether she mistakenly allowed her daughter -- and in one instance encouraged her -- to read age-inappropriate books. A version of the familiar female refrain: "It's all my fault." 

Perhaps Rosalie's self-absorption lies behind the untimely death of her daughter to even a greater extent than either she herself or the author of her story realizes. “Any time a child chooses that way out, you have to wonder what the parents did,” Rosalie’s mother at one time told Rosalie. One thinks the word "readers" could easily be substituted for the word "you" in that statement.

Rosalie considers the comment cruel and in line with her mother's streak of such behavior. But at the same time, "Rosalie and Dan (her husband) had received their verdict," or so the narrator would have readers believe, In view of the contents of the story, it's a classic case of tell, don't show. Readers are left with no depiction of the child's upbringing.

After finishing Ms Li's piece, it occurred to me that a story about Marcie, from her point of view, would have been far more interesting than the one I had just finished about Rosalie. Perhaps Ms Li will oblige, or maybe she already has. 

A Couple of Reasons to Read "Hello, Goodbye" by Yiyun Li

 Did you meet someone in your first year of college who became a friend for life?  Are you a parent who has difficulty, or memorably had difficulty, dealing with the wisdom of young children?

If the answer to either of those questions is "yes," you might enjoy Yiyun Li's short story in the Nov. 15, 2021 edition of The New Yorker entitled "Hello, Goodbye."

The story, like a lot of  contemporary literary fiction, doesn't go much of anywhere at the end of the day, but it's well written. It's a partial exploration of certain interpersonal relationships as opposed to a tale that ends in the resolution of a plot or a set of issues.

The friendship is between two women, Nina, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, and Katie, who is apparently white and of European descent. Brought up in Kansas and Indiana, respectively, they went to U.C. Berkeley and ended up saying in California, both working in marketing (of course) for Silicon Valley firms. This was back in the late 1990s.

After that backdrop, the story jumps 20 years or so forward, into the current pandemic. Nina has a couple of precocious young daughters and a reliable, but boring husband. Katie, who has never had a child, wants to get out of her marriage to a wealthy jerk considerably older than she is and arrives on Nina's doorstep in need of help. Nina tries to balance her friend's needs with those of her children, the latter exacerbated by the pandemic and her husband's rather passive attitude toward parenting. 

If that sounds interesting, perhaps because you can identify with one or more aspects of the situation, I recommend "Hello, Goodbye."  The dialog in particular is good. If not, forget it. 

Perhaps the most memorable sentence in the entire story comes near the beginning. It goes as follows: "Nina was 27, not helplessly young, yet far from being trapped in a mildewed marriage, as she tended to believe many middle-aged women were." Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which she may have ended up in one. 

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Ms Li said that when it comes to relationships, she believes "muddling through" is better than wrecking things by opting for more extreme measures. The story is definitely in that vein.