"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. 

Chekhov's "The Darling:" Controlled Variation Says Saunders

 A "darling" is a beloved person who can do no wrong. One thinks of Peter Pan's friend Wendy. 

Wendy was quite literally a Darling -- that was her last name. The implication, of course, was that she was also a darling in the definitional sense and, as depicted by J.M. Barrie in his stories about Peter Pan, that seems to have been the case. She was indeed a beloved person and except that her difficult father at one point objected to her telling "silly stories" to her younger brothers, she was apparently about as perfect as a girl, and later a woman, can get.

But unlike Chekhof's darling, a woman named Olga Semyonova, or Olenka as she is known to family and friends, Wendy had to make a difficult choice: whether to stay in Neverland with Peter and remain a child forever, or return home and face adulthood with all of its challenges. Olenka, about whose background readers are told little, just drifts through life, falling in love with one male after another and then conforming her life to theirs -- sharing not only their activities but their opinions.

"The Darling" is one of three Chekhov short stories that American author and creative writing instructor Geoge Saunders elucidates in his recent book "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain." The book's look at seven Russian short stories is based on workshop sessions Saunders has conducted with students at Syracuse University over a period of about 20 years.

Olenka, "the daughter of a retired collegiate assessor," is presumably not uneducated. But her fundamental characteristic is that "she was always enamored with someone and could not live otherwise." Physically warm and comfortable, she's otherwise an empty vessel that needs to be filled from some external source and remains over the years unchanged in that respect. 

After first focusing on a French teacher, then on her now-dying father and then an aunt, Olenka as young woman first falls in love with a rather unattractive theater impresario because she feels sorry for him. When he somewhat mysteriously dies on a business trip shortly thereafter, she marries a lumberyard owner and lives happily with him for six years although they are unable to have children. Next comes as an army veterinarian (armies had a lot of horses back then), but he's married so her infatuation is removed and mostly one-sided. Finally, as a mother figure, she loves the now-retired vet's young son, who finds her annoying. 

End of the story.

For Saunders, "The Darling" is a "pattern story" -- a tale in which a basic theme recurs, but each time with slight changes that both give readers pleasure and appear to infer new meaning.  In his book about Russian short stories, he spends a lot of time explaining just how Chekhov went about constructing it.

Readers who like music will probably immediately recognize this technique as theme and variation. It's ever-present, such as when jazz musicians pass around various riffs on a particular melody, but I most enjoy it Handel's vocal music where theme and variation is ever present and with great imagination. Easily approachable in that respect is "Every Valley," the second aria from "Messiah." 

The technique is probably a lot less used in literature, and especially as blatantly as in "The Darling." And not without reason: as the tale proceeded, Olenka seemed came across for me as more caricature than character and, indeed, at one point Saunders admits she can appear to be somewhat robotic.

No matter how good a melody is, it can become boring if it is simply repeated in unchanged form. Likewise, Saunders warns against stories are too static in nature. One or more expectations need to be set at the beginning and resolution comes through a series of what he calls "escalations." In other words, the stakes have to get higher.   

At the end of the day, and in view of the fact that "The Darling" ends without a striking development that proclaims "Resolution!" one can't help wondering what the theme that was subjected to variation was all about.

In Saunders view, Chekov was writing about love, and how it can become a complete absorption for one person as opposed to a form of communication between two. Others, such as Leo Tolstoy ("War and Peace," "Anna Karenina") have tried, Saunders said, to make tale about the nature, or natures, of women. There is, of course, the age-old question: "what do women want?" In Olenka's case, the answer would seem to be "to be a caregiver." 

Well, fine, but it still seems to be told as caricature, or too simplistic. Olenka lacks complexity and as such, it's tough to find her of any great interest as an individual. 

At the end of the day, Saunders said that he teaches "The Darling" as "a brisk little primer on just how much organization the story form can bear and will reward," adding that in this instance, he finds Chekov's tale "a beautiful system for presenting a tale of controlled variation."

Now let's see, where did I put my cd of "Messiah" arias and choruses? Talk about a beautify system of controlled variation!

   

An Alternative To Saunder's Sense of Chekhov's "In the Cart"

 Since I am about to take a continuing education course on Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, I thought I would get a copy of George Saunder's recent book "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" and see what he had to say about three of them.

Saunders, an award-winning American author, is also a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University where he has taught a course on Russian short stories, in translation, for about 20 years. "A Swim in a Pond ... " is essentially a collection of seven of his workshop sessions and it begins with Chekhov's "In the Cart," published in 1897, one of seven stories that Saunders says are clear, simple and moving, but also meant to challenge, antagonize and outrage -- "and in a complicated way, to console."

He also says that while the stories are for the most part "quiet, domestic and apolitical," they are also resistance literature written at a time when writers could face censorship, or even exile, imprisonment and execution, for anything considered transgressively political. 

In general, the key to success in story writing, Saunders says, is an emotionally moving tale that a reader feels compelled to finish.

While at one point Saunders says he considers terms such as "theme," "plot," "character development" and "structure" not very useful, as he takes readers page by page through "In the Cart," character development is what he mostly talks about.  

We initially encounter the chief protagonist of the story, a woman named Marya Vasilyevna, and discover that she is "unhappy because of the monotony of her life" -- and as a result, "the story has become restless." So says Saunders.

Eleven pages later, after various interactions with her cart driver, with a wealthy, but useless local landowner and with some peasants in a tea-shop, things are going downhill. But a momentary vision of a woman on a passing train reminds Marya of her mother and her much better life as a child, leaving her at least momentarily elated.

The result of all this, says Saunders, is that readers have been taken through the depths of Marya's loneliness to the point where one feels her loneliness as if it is one's own.  

"Over the course of these eleven pages, the blank mind with which you began has been filled with a new friend, Marya, who, if my experience is any indication, will stay with you forever," the professor says. End of the workshop.

In other words, this story is an example of successful character development. The bottom line for Saunders is that Marya, as an individual person, is timeless.

While I can't take issue with anything Saunders has to say, I came away with a completely different reading of what the story was all about. To me, Marya is of no great importance, or particularly memorable as an individual. Rather, her life helps to elucidate the state of Russia at a particular time.

"In a Cart" (that title pretty much says it all) takes place about eight years before the tumultuous if  ultimately unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905 and the country, other than wealthy cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, is gradually falling to pieces. The cart in which Marya, a schoolmistress, is riding and the terrible roads over which it is traveling exemplify the state of most of the country. The express train that temporarily halts the cart and the sophisticated woman she notices riding on it speak of profound income and opportunity inequalities. A few Russians can ride such trains; most of the rest are stuck in carts -- and stuck in other ways, too.

As the cart bumps along on a damp day in early Spring, some snow still on the ground, readers learn:

-- Marya, originally from a middle-class Moscow family, "could imagine no other future than the school, the road to town and back, and again the school and again the road." [Russia is a country without upward mobility.]

--The mayor of Moscow has just been killed. [An actual event at the time of the story.] 

--The wealthy landowner in his four-horse carriage who encounters the cart drinks heavily and when servicing as an examiner of students at the school, gives nothing but the highest grades because he knows nothing. He could easily have improved the roads, but doesn't. He gives the school globes, which Marya considers of no need. [These students aren't going anywhere.]

Saunders makes much of Marya's thoughts about the wealthy landowner as being handsome despite all his flaws and perhaps a way out of her situation -- and how that helps readers understand her. My sense is that Chekhov added this to the story to help disguise its true nature: a critique of the state of Russian society and thus of the country's rulers. The Marya-landowner relationship, or potential relationship, turns out to be just a bit of wheel spinning by Chekhov. Nothing comes of it -- but it helps cloak the underlying nature of the tale.

--Marya wants to get the school janitor, who does nothing but cuff the boys, discharged, "but no one paid any attention to her." The person with such authority can rarely be found and when he is, claims to have no time for whatever needs to be addressed. An inspector has only visited the school once in three years and has no understanding of anything connected with it -- and got his job not because he was qualified, but because of who he knew. The School Board rarely met and no one knew where. Someone with the title of Trustee of the school is half-illiterate, stupid and a friend of the janitor. [So much for the education of rural Russian children.]

--"Marya continues to think of the school and its corrupt administration, and the fact there is no one for her to turn to."

At one point, Sauders talks about how Chekhov keeps describing the road the cart is traveling as getting worse and worse, indicating "a steady degrading situation." That, in my view, is an allegory for the state of Russia in general at the time of the story. 

--Marya had begun to teach school from necessity (her parents died when she was young) and she has little interest in the students themselves -- just getting them past the examinations. "What kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and so be reduced by it?" Saunders asks in his commentary. My view: that is exactly what this story is all about; not Marya the individual woman, but Marya the representative of the state of Russia.

-- "Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctor's assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyena can bear it for long; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work." [With that passage, Chekhov interrupts his narrative for the sake of more critical social commentary. Russia is in such bad shape its best people simply give up.]

--The cart driver claims that when a local school was being built, graft was rampant. Marya tries to dismiss it as nonsense, but Chekhov says no one believed her and thought she was both paid too much and guilty of graft herself. [This is a society where those on the bottom trust no one higher up the social ladder.]

Well that's pretty much it. For me, Chekhov may well have painted a compelling picture of a lonely woman deserving our sympathy -- "an emotionally moving tale," as Saunders put it -- but only to serve a greater purpose: a scathing critique of the prevailing state of Russia at the arrival of the 20th century. Marya, like the cart, is a vehicle upon which the critique rides.

  

"Notions of the Sacred" by Ayşegül Savaş Seems Mistitled

 "Values" is a word frequently tossed about.  Although there can be an overlap, one's values are not the same as one's morals. Values are what one thinks are more important as opposed to less important, or not important at all.

For instance, while it is far from immoral to pull out a cell phone and answer a message at dinner, an important family value might be no electronic devices at the dinner table. 

I bring this up because values seem to loom large in "Notions of the Sacred," a short story by Ayşegül Savaş in the Dec. 26, 2022 electronic edition of The New Yorker.

The story begins with an unnamed protagonist relating how she had entered a new dimension upon learning that she had become pregnant -- almost as though she had become like the Virgin Mary in scenes of the Annunciation. 

She's unmarried and the pregnancy was unintended, the product of a brief affair with a man she would prefer not learn what happened and become upset. "I just wanted to enjoy my new state."

Thus far, it seems what is important to this woman -- what she values -- is her pregnancy and presumably the welfare of the child since she isn't inclined to get an abortion. 

But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly clear that what she actually values most is her lost friendship with a college friend named Zoe -- lost because they had "grown apart over the years," in part as a result of a careless comment one had made. But then one day, after Zoe and her husband had moved to a nearby town, it was Zoe who had gotten back in touch, in part to disclose her own pregnancy.

Eventually, a certain development occurs (I won't totally spoil the story) and it turns out what is most important to Savaş' protagonist is whether Zoe will still like her or not after what has happened. I found it a curious sense of values. Somehow, this woman doesn't appear to have her priorities straight.  

A question along those lines does come up in the usual New Yorker author interview, but Savaş' answer fails to explain why the protagonist considers one thing more important than another. Rather, she ends a somewhat rambling response with a complaint about "the way that the sacred and the body have been commodified in New Age discourse" -- which seems to relate more to the title of the story than to what the tale comes across as being all about.  It's about values in my humble estimation. 

Matthew Klam's Hectic Depiction of a Slice of Society

 Matthew Klam's "The Other Party" in the Dec. 12, 2022, online version of The New Yorker is another example of short fiction as a snapshot in time as opposed to a traditional story with a beginning, middle and end. It's also fiction for our time in that it offers a convincing depiction of a contemporary inter-generational relationship, in this case a father and his teenage daughter in a very white middle-class neighborhood of Washington DC, as evidenced by a reference to Wisconsin Ave. 

Having lived there for 20 years, I know it well.

The wife and mother of the family is present too, but she doesn't loom particular large in the sequence of events. That's because in the pandemic, she has moved her practice into the basement of their house and is depicted as dealing onscreen with an endless stream of patients "in states of dislocation and despair." Having recently lost a job, dad, the chief protagonist, is managing quotidian affairs, 

Publication of the piece is well-timed in that it depicts a hectic pace of events connected with the Christmas season -- a neighborhood party centered on a traditional decorated cookie swap lubricated by a bowl of punch for the older generation and something far less structured, and, given the state of the world, a lot more dangerous for the teenagers.

Dad's method of coping seems to be "go with flow" because there is really no alternative.

Klam's prose style is almost stream of conscious in nature, mostly from the father's point of view.  It's as though readers are seeing and hearing the smallest of developments, as they take place, in exquisite and often colorful detail. The mix becomes increasingly cacophonous as the chief protagonist attempts to deal with the cookies, think about his wife, cope with rapidly changing developments involving his daughter and her friends, and try to absorb and properly relate to a piece of very bad news about a long-time neighbor and friend of his own.

The amount of detail is so rich and the flow of events so fast-paced I personally felt rather exhausted by the time I reached the end of the piece -- and very impressed with Klam's ability to convincingly assemble and depict so much information. 

What the point of all of this?  Hard to say. As I mentioned at the beginning, this is fundamentally a snapshot in time of a certain strata of contemporary society. There is a stab at a conclusion with a somewhat sappy message (although one with which I can identify) -- but the main point seems to be that life is increasingly messy: don't fight it. 

Danielle Dutton's "Wonderful Description" -- of Vulnerability

 A lot of contemporary short fiction seems to take the form of a snapshot in time as opposed to a story -- the latter traditionally having a beginning, middle and end, the end being something that brings all the threads together and ties them up in a neat, satisfying bow. Well, of course there have always been exceptions and especially after Modernism arrived, but I think it is safe to say readers generally expect to know what has happened and why when they reach the end of a piece.

But one might also consider abstract art where the notion often is: "What it means is whatever it means to you." 

Or as I have written previously, the appeal of fiction for an average reader (if there is such a person) may be whether the reader can identify with a character in the piece of writing in question. 

Such thoughts came to mind when I read "My Wonderful Description of Flowers," by Danielle Dutton, in the Nov. 28, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker. It's basically a snapshot in time in the life of a middle-aged, intellectual woman who seems to find some sort of danger lurking in every corner of her otherwise ordinary life -- ordinary in today's world, Dutton quickly makes clear, by providing her protagonist with a videogame loving, gender non-conforming child who uses the pronoun "their" as opposed to his or her. The subsequent prose is carefully constructed so as to never identify the child by name. 

Well, that's one of several mysteries. The woman's husband, who readers are told never has dreams of any consequence, suddenly dreams his wife has left him. A man the woman may have known in the past persistently seeks to meet her. The woman's husband and child aren't home when they are expected to be and don't respond to calls and texts. All this seemingly happens in a short space of time, although the passage of time is rather vaguely depicted. 

This is a woman whose life appears to be sliding off the rails. Her response: stay on the rails and ride a commuter train past her stop to the end of the line where only one other passenger gets off and, well, there is a bit of a mystery to that person as well. What's out there?  The once-endless prairie, one is told in the usual New Yorker interview. Now more just an idea than a reality. The reassurance of nature, bringing to mind perhaps the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What will happen to the woman out there as darkness settles in? Not reassurance, but more danger? 

While Dutton says in her interview the story is littered with references to "other texts and media," it basically relies on an age-old literary gimmick to keep readers going: "Something is about to happen: what can it be?"

My guess is that readers who like this story best will be those who can identify with the apparent fragility of Ms. Dutton's protagonist, The attribute that arguably most distinguishes a woman from a man is a sense of vulnerability. That's ever-present in this story.

One last observation: in littering her fiction with references to other works and then, in her books (as opposed to in this short piece of fiction), spelling out the connections in "pages of notes," Dutton is channeling the approach taken by T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land" -- although initially in his case not by design (the pages of notes that is; not the references themselves.) 

Johathan Lethem, "Narrowing Valley" and the Woketariat

 At the bottom of the preceding post -- Marisa Silver's "Tiny, Meaningless Things ... " --  I talk about a relatively new class of society: the woketariat. In a nutshell, these are people for whom political correctness trumps other values.

Johathan Lethem, the author of the Oct. 24, 2022 (electronic edition) New Yorker short story "Narrowing Valley" is a professor of creative writing at Pomona College, an award-winning writer and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship.  He's also arguably a member of the wokerati, or the woketariat.

"Narrowing Valley" is a story about an earlier story and it's laced with cultural references, presumably giving it a writerly quality. A potentially dramatic denoument is in the offing, but the tale never gets there. It just ends.  

Therein lies what Lethem suggests may be the real tale: the state of prevailing political correctness and what he clearly feels is his obligaton to toe the line.

The problem is this: the presumably dramatic denouement would involve an Indian, or Native American, man as a key protagonist  -- and for a white male to create such a character would, in Lethem's world, constitute cultural misappropriation.

Just imagine the flap that could ensue,and the possible adverse consequences for Lethem himself, given that cancel cuturse has far less to do with culture than it has to do sociopolitical power and who gets to hold desireable jobs.

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Lethem says he's enmeshed in conversations with students and colleagues on a daily basis as to what is permissible in the current environment. "This story's hesitation, precisely at the limit of a willinness to invent a Native character to advance its cause, is informed by it," he said, adding: "I don't mean that as a defense, but I hope it might be a useful description."

Elsewhere in the intereview, Lethem says: "The tone I struck here -- that of nervous guilty riffing in the treacherous realm of 'appropriation' -- may seem almost to beg a reader's own anxieties into play. Or a readers's condemnation. That risk is one of the subjects of the story, really."

Nominally, this is a tale about a whilte family about to attempt to occupy some desert land purchased from a "Realtor"  sight unseen. But the land has a history and apparently wasn't the "Realtor's" to sell. Rather, it is Native American land and so the story is "headed into crsis" because the white family in question, traveling west in a Winabago, must meet an Indian.

Sounds like an interesting exchange of views, or more likely a clash of some sort, is in the offing, but, alas, no. Lethem simply can't bring himself to "appropriate" the Native American protagonist. So the story ends abruptly (as many New yorker short stories seem to), in a casino -- on Indian land, of course. Ironic -- get it?

Good thing Alfred Uhry was't Lethem or we wouldn't have "Driving Miss Daisy." Altenarively, good thing DuBose Hewward or Ira Gershshwin wasn't Lethem or we wouldn't have "Porgy and Bess." And so forth and so on..

Within "Narrowing Valley," Lethem refers to a white make writer as "another exemplar of the Exhausted Normative."  In other worlds, "please take me out into a pasture and shoot me. Liberate that Pomona creating writing post and award it to someone far more worthy." Hmmm. would the new occupant be able to write a story involving a white male, or does cultural misappropriation go only in one direction?

I will have more to say on wokerati-type issues in due course.

 

"Come Softly to Me:" Ritual in a New Yorker Short Story

“A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence.” So says Wikipedia, adding that rituals are common to all known human societies.

What else? Well, among other things, many cultures have rites associated with death and mourning. And one of the many purposes of ritual is social control – such as keeping a family together when various members may be prone to go off in differing directions or have tensions or conflicts among themselves, one might imagine.

Sticking with Wikipedia, rituals generally involve the recitation of fixed texts, the performance of special music, the manipulation of certain objects and the use of special dresses. They are also typically formal, traditional and invariable. They are often characterized by careful choreography performed by groups.

I mention all of the above because that is what the Oct. 10, 2022 (online edition) New Yorker short story “Come Softly to Me,” by David Gilbert, is all about. In fact, readers will encounter pretty much all of the above in Gilbert’s generally well-drawn tale.

Lots of stories conform to one familiar formula or another. What makes them interesting – absent surprise endings -- is setting, character development and perhaps a subplot or two. In that context, a couple of Gilbert’s characters definitely tend to stick in one’s mind.

But the story, which involves an extended family, has a lot of characters and it can be difficult to follow or understand who is who until well into the piece. And for a fairly long short story, the ending is rather abrupt and unconvincingly mystical, given the participants. But endings are rarely easy: I suppose the hardest part of flying a plane is bringing it in for a satisfactory landing (before the age of computers, that is).

A New Yorker Story by Claire Keegan That Needed More

 In the usual author interview, Claire Keegan said she wanted to make "So Late in the Day," her Feb. 21, 2022, New Yorker short story, "an exploration of misogyny," But it's more a description of ships passing in the night and a failure to explore what women want.

In a nutshell, the piece is about a man named Cathal who appears to work as a clerk at a Dublin institution that provides financial support to the arts -- near the famous statue of Oscar Wilde on one corner of Marrion Square. Unmarried, and apparently never married, he lives an unremarkable life in a coastal town called Arklow, a lengthy bus ride south of Dublin. 

A couple years earlier, he had met a well-dressed, rather petite woman named Sabine at a conference in Toulouse, only to discover she worked near his office in Dublin and unmarried, lived in a flat with three younger women. The daughter of a French father and an English mother who divorced early in her life, she had grown up in Normandy and spoke English in a fashion that sometimes grated on Cathal.

Nonetheless, after to getting to know her a bit and discovering she liked the countryside, he invited her down to Arklow. Soon she began showing up most weekends and since they appeared to be getting along quite well, Cathal eventually, and in an almost offhand fashion, suggested marriage.

Simone initially dismissed the notion with "a type of chocked laughter" and questions suggestive of incredulity, but three weeks later, "finally relented."

It's all downhill from there as they discover they don't actually know each other that well and that Cathal, used to living alone, would prefer to have her more as a possession than as a partner.  Keegan's depiction of that is well done, but what's totally missing from this story is any explanation of why Simone would have agreed to marry Cathal in the first place. She's attracted to the town in which he lives more than to the man himself -- clearly a beta-male to everyone who encounters him in the story.

The addition of some exploration of the age-old question "what do women want?" would have made this a far more interesting tale than the version printed in the magazine. As it stands, while it is easy to agree that Cathal got what he richly deserved, it's a mystery as to why the more sophisticated Simone was content with Cathal as little more than weekends in the country and an escape from those other women, paid for with some uncomplicated, consensual sex and very good dinners after which Cathal, the misogynist, would clean up.

This is "a world where women expect more," Keegan said in the New Yorker author interview. What Simone's actions say about her values in that respect is a bigger question than what Cathal's say about him -- based on Keegan's depiction of the man.

A Feminist New Yorker Short Story by Lauren Groff

 Lauren Groff's short story "Annunciation" in the Feb 7, 2022 New Yorker is probably about as feminist as it gets, although not so much in terms of third wave "intersectionality." This is a woman-focused story in which men, to the extent they only vaguely appear, are disinterested, ineffectual, distant or in two cases, while no longer present, clearly malevolent. It's a story in which a woman can do a man's work and in which women rely on each other for support. 

Before going further, I need to say that "a clanger" created a hurdle for me at the start.  In her third sentence, Groff describes her unnamed heroine running in the hills above Palo Alto, California, as "the mist falls in starched sheets over the distant hills, the ones that press against the Bay."  I'm very familiar with that region and there are no hills the protagonist can see that "press against the Bay."  The south bay is surrounded by flat lands with big freeways running through them. The hills are well back from the water.  

But most readers probably wouldn't be that familiar with the terrain and I suppose one can write this off to artistic license.  "Annunciation" is a work of fiction after all.

Groff's story begins with a woman graduating from a college in New England. No one in her large family attends and as a result, with little money, she gets into an awkward old car given to her by a grandfather and heads west, ending up in a San Francisco youth hostel.  Although the story ends late in the protagonists' life, that's almost the last readers hear of her original family. At one point, the protagonist's mother does tracks her down, but their reunion is very short-lived. Graff's heroine has no need for her mother.

After the brief stay in San Francisco, the protagonist finds a job down the Peninsula in Redwood City ("Climate best by Government Test," although that isn't mentioned in the story) and takes a low-wage clerical job in a government welfare agency. There she befriends a down-and out co-worker, a victim of domestic violence who lives with a young daughter in a Volkswagen Vanagon -- in one of the wealthiest areas of the U.S. 

Groff's heroine has also found cheap housing close to her job in the compound of a strange, somewhat spooky woman who eventually dies of the law of unintended consequences, sending Groff's heroine on her way. 

The two connections mentioned above -- they seem to fall short of real friendships or relationships -- are described in great detail by Groff, but in the end, neither one goes anywhere. This is not "sisterhood" feminism. 

From here, readers are suddenly taken to a point significantly later in the life of Groff's heroine -- in Italy where readers are told she is now living a life of "grace," fundamentally a Christian concept, but in this case associated with such things as birds singing amid "beauty."

In the interim, readers learn that the woman in question created a family of her own and while it "has become my true north," it is one from which she apparently episodically flees. -- thinking good things about this behavior because she has so far always eventually returned.  No mention of a husband, but she claims to be a mother who "sees her children fully." One wonders if they see it that way, but readers learn nothing of them.

One thing she likes about Italy is that she is surrounded by a thousand Madonnas, with a thousand different faces" (in churches), all unnamed, but wearing "the particular mortal face of a woman the artist loved."  One supposes that's the way she would like to think of herself. 

In the usual New Yorker interview, one learns Groff struggled with versions this story for a decade, apparently because she had no idea where it was supposed to go. Then she made a bet with another writer on who could first write a short story with a happy ending (a rarity readers are told) and voila!

Grace, wherever it came from and for whatever reason Groff's protagonist was worthy of it, is where it's at. And who needs men?

Amen, those of a feminist persuasion might say.

The Methodology of "A Lot Of Things Have Happened"

 One of the age-old questions is: should a work of art, such as a short story, be able to stand on its own, without explanation, to be valid? In other words, if its creator has to explain it, is it a failure?

In general, I think that's a good general proposition, but there are exceptions, and such is arguably the case with respect to "A Lot Of Things Have Happened," a short story by Adam Levin in the Dec. 27, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. It's a string of awkwardly unpleasant, or downright disgusting, incidents that take place over a period of years to a college instructor, first with a girlfriend and then with his wife.

Curiously, he is named Adam Levin, or at least that's what his parrot calls him -- sometimes just "Adam," other times just "Levin," but in the last two words of the story: "Adam Levin." The complete name out of the parrot's beak seems to imply that we now know everything we need to know about Mr. Levin. The preceding set of incidents in the story paint him in full -- as someone who, if you don't happen to know him, you don't need to.

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Levin (the author) is asked how he went about constructing his story and this is where matters get more interesting.

In reply, Levin, a seasoned writer, said that he had recently gotten more interested in trying to figure out how to put anecdotal material together without "artful transition." 

"With this particular story, the first thing I did was write a handful of fictional, largely disconnected, first-person anecdotes as sparsely and impactfully and comically as I could, each one in the same voice. Once a certain number of these anecdotes accrued—a greater number, to be sure, than appear here, in “A Lot of Things Have Happened”—I began to notice some commonalities between the anecdotes (example: tools kept getting misused) and adjusted the volume on those commonalities so as to make the anecdotes more continuous with one another. In the course of doing that, I began to discover what the larger story wanted to be (or what I wanted it to be), I cut away the redundancies and distractions as best I could, and rearranged the order of the anecdotes till (hopefully) they fell into the sequence that best served the whole."

Interested readers can decide for themselves whether Levin was successful in putting together a compelling work of fiction, but his methodology is worth thinking about. I think one often stumbles across, or comes up with, a vignette that seems worthy of writing up, only then to wonder: "What to do with it? "

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.

Ong Comes Up Short In "The Monkey Who Speaks"

 To use the words of its author, Han Ong, the Sept. 6, 2021 New Yorker short story "The Monkey Who Speaks" is about a woman who has a job "where the professional can't help but bleed into the personal."

"I was interested in that slippery border" he said in one of the usual New Yorker author interviews. 

It is indeed an excellent subject for fiction, and Ong does a respectable job depicting the life of a young Filipina named Flavia who works as a home health aid for a predictably difficult, well-to-do, elderly white male named Roscoe, aided by Roscoe's fair-minded, accommodating daughter Veronica.

While the story is commendably free of transgressive behavior -- the stock-in-trade for far too much contemporary fiction -- Ong fails to do much with the slippery border in question.  One expects a situation to arise where Flavia has a difficult choice to make that involves a significant moral or ethical dilemma, the resolution of which is not just compelling reading, but also illuminative of the woman's cultural background.

But none does. There is a twist or two centering on the identify of the talking monkey, but they are of little consequence and based on her responses, Flavia could easily have come from somewhere other than the Philippines.

The New Yorker, like other similar publications, is evidently feeling a need to demonstrate a commitment to greater cultural diversify and in principle, this story would seem to fit the bill.  But in practice, it provides readers with little if any new insights into how demographic changes are impacting the U.S.

"Being from the Philippines, I've wanted for some time to write about an industry where Filipinos are well represent, even over represented," Ong said.

Well, that's about it. As such, it's not a bad story, but it's not a particularly interesting one, either.

"Superstition:" The Subliminal Power of Culture & Religion

 "Superstition," a short story by Sarah Braunstein, in the Aug. 2 New Yorker is about the lingering claims of culture and the almost subliminal power of religion.

Two teenage boys, conventionally dismissive of anything but what strikes their prevailing fancy, live with a permissive, understanding father, perhaps excessively so because the mother of the boys died some years earlier. They have been indulged with all manner of toys and youthful paraphernalia, now no longer valued. 

As is often the case with children in general, and particularly teenagers, the boys are into testing boundaries and at one point discover eBay. The story is set relatively early in the Internet age, before the advent of social media. 

One of the boys, named Lenny, suspecting the public is easily duped, makes up a lucky-charm story about a plaque-mounted fish he had once bought at Goodwill for a couple of dollars and sure enough, after a round of bidding, someone buys it for over ninety dollars. 

James, his brother, is impressed and wants to do likewise, but struggles to come up with something to sell about which a convincing story might be told.  Until he recalls a cross that he received at his first communion, kept in a velvet box.  Eventually he comes up with a story -- it had been in the family since 1915 and, when in the possession of a somewhat distant family member, had been blessed by Pope Pius XII, a controversial figure, James knows, because he "had been reluctant to intervene as a genocide unfolded in Europe."

As far as the plot goes, I will stop here so as not to spoil Ms Braunstein's tale, but suffice to say that James is far more entangled in the cultural and religious background of his family than he would care to admit if, indeed, he understands the genesis of his emotional crosscurrents. 

It's a story that is more interesting than initially appears to be the case and, no surprise, the New Yorker, in the usual author interview, fails to explore the seminal issue. (These interviews are frequently disappointing.)

The ending is an allegorical short cut, necessarily, I suppose because this is a short story. Ms Braunstein's topic is complex and as such, deserves a more sophisticated denouement.

"Balloons" in the New Yorker Comes Across as Trivial

 Thomas McGuane  has a style of writing that makes his May 3. 2021 New Yorker short story a pleasure to read, but "Balloons" is unfortunately a rather trivial piece of work. In the usual New Yorker author interview, McGuane talks about how he began writing the story without knowing how it would end, but thanks to a dream, something came to mind. Too bad.

Sex, in the familiar triangular configuration, serves as the framework for a  rather simple-minded plot: a man depicted as a bore and a buffoon in his seemingly successful prime degenerates into a pathetic mess when his unfaithful life leaves him.  But guess what?  He ultimately has the last laugh on his predator -- a man who views himself as on a considerably higher plane.

An unexpected development -- the subject of the dream -- serves to give the story a twist, but it could have been used to much better advantage.  

There is an early signal that trouble looms ahead in the form of a discussion among the three characters about a mugging. The bore insists that a victim has every right to retaliate. That's about the only topic we encounter that might provide clues as to what McGuane's characters think about, together or separately. They are, shall we say, rather uninteresting.

In particular, just what the women might have to offer, other than sex, is a complete mystery. She's depicted as a woman characterized by "her contempt for everyone who was not interested in her looks."

Hmm.  Isn't that what intelligent woman complain about?  That they are objectified by the male (or even another female) gaze? In this story, the unnamed woman is apparently distressed if she is not.

Well, character development, in this story at any rate, is not McGuane's strong point and in the afore-mentioned author interview, he actually seems proud of it. Ok, for some readers that may be a plus.
 

"Separation:" Where Readers Need to Fill In The Blanks

The latest New Yorker short story was written by a member of the magazine's staff and it's a piece where readers who find it of interest need to fill in a lot of blanks.

There is a genre of fiction known as the fragmented novel and "Separation," by Claire Sestanovich, might be viewed as a fragmented short story. It has that aspect, according to the writer in the usual New Yorker author interview, is because it's all about coherence, or the lack of it, in life. Things that are separated or don't connect well can be incoherent.

In "Separation," readers are told a few things about the chief protagonist -- a woman named Kate -- such as at the very beginning, that she had "unkempt" pubic hair after skinny dipping in a reservoir. Later, another not particularly interesting or surprising detail of her nether regions is revealed.  Other than that, one has no idea what she looks like, where she comes from, her family background, the state of her education, her religion or lack of same and so forth and so on. Well, one must keep one's character-development priorities straight.

The other main characters are also sketches at best. 

In addition, motivation is for the most part absent except, perhaps, when Kate has a month-long affair with a man whose large face is almost ugly. "But he was tall and tanned and his voice was so softly beautiful that Kate let herself assume it was full of the same grief as hers."

That's presumably the grief of losing a spouse (which he hasn't), but Kate apparently felt it unnecessary to make any inquires. Her concerns are about herself except perhaps with respect to her first marriage, which appears to have been as much about compassion as it was about love, given the sketchy depiction of her spouse. He has long-term eczema and is basically blind when not wearing huge glasses. The only other thing one finds about about him is that soon after marriage he comes down with a terminal condition of one sort or another and dies.

Kate experiences separation as a result: from just about everything because she responds to this development by leaving town -- as she does again later after separation from her ill-advised married lover -- an affair that appears, among other things, to have been a conflict of interest for a teacher whatever the man's marital status. Readers with children of their own might think that, but if so, they will have to fill in those blanks as well because that aspect of the affair is apparently of no concern to Ms Sestanovich,

While separation is an essential part of life -- Kate helps young children learn to cope with this when they first experience day care or school -- it can also be a source of incoherence, leading to a life that doesn't really make sense.

In due course, Kate meets a man in a bar, about whom readers are told almost nothing, and has what appears to be a conventional marriage -- outwardly. Inwardly, Kate can't get over the separation from her first husband and she tucks the remnants of that life into labeled boxes in the attic, hoping her daughter -- an only child from the second marriage -- will find them and presumably learn that her mother isn't who she thinks she is. Separation and incoherence, one might say.

That aspect of Kate seems again to suggest she is a modern woman -- probably a type Ms Sestanovich knows well and my even identify with: "It's all about me."

Even though Leah, Kate's daughter, doesn't find the box, she's clearly experienced a sense of separation from her mother through other means. There is an (unexplained, of course) incident involving blood and a cut and a bathtub and when it comes time for Leah to leave home, she moves all the way across the country for no identifiable reason. But when readers discover she's only interested in talking to her father on the phone, one can surmise why and fill in yet another blank.

As for style, once again, as has been the case with a number of recent New Yorker short stores, this piece is not particularly "writerly." That seems to have gone out of fashion. If Ms Sestanovich attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop or some other literary MFA-type program, it doesn't show. Here again, readers can fill in the blanks.

 

-----

 

A few years ago, I wrote a brief post on a related topic, since deleted.  It was the following:

 

"And anyhow, whether reading one or trying to compose one, novels are terrain for discontinuities, sometimes violent ones."

Rachel Kushner, author of "The Flamethrowers," explaining the nature of her home office in Los Angeles, a large, but cozy room that she says has lately become "porous to certain brutalities."

 

"Featherweight:" Good Title for the Latest New Yorker Story

"One Night Standards"

        By Ashley McBryde 

I ain't gonna stay for the weekend
I ain't gonna jump off the deep end
I ain't gonna ask where your ring is

Thing is, we all got secrets

You don't wanna hear about my last breakup
I don't wanna worry 'bout the space you take up
I don't even care if you're here when I wake up

It's just a room key
You ain't gotta lie to me
Can't you just use me like I'm using you?

And so forth and so on in the same vein.  The lyrics of this song, identified by The New York Times as one of the best songs of 2020 came to mind as I was reading a short story called "Featherweight" in the March 29, 2021 New Yorker.  It's by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and concerns a young Native American man who has gone away to college.

Basically, it's an ode to hookup culture even when it arguably morphs into something that resembles a relationship, but not one that gets much further than sex, and even that turns out to be not what the young man in question thought it was. If you're interested, you can read the story for the details.

As we know, sex sells. It's sort of like the law of gravity: it never changes. Mr. HolyWhiteMountain clearly knows it and the New Yorker clearly sees no reason to resist. 

The story is written in the first person and the unnamed hero, having left his reservation, wants to "know what larger America is all about."  In his case, that means having sex with as many white girls as possible. Readers are told a couple of their names but little else about them other than that they are into power, hatred (not against him) and that "racist cowgirls give the best head."

Now let's turn to the usual New Yorker interview and see what Mr. HolyWhiteMountain has to say about this portion of his story:

"The white girls come to the table with their notions of what indians are, and what it means to be an indian, which don’t really speak to his experience at all, whereas he’s noticing things about them that they don’t know about themselves, things that indicate an unbridgeable gap. There’s a difference between assumptions that come from stereotypes and the kind of understanding that results from closely observed experience. The early situation in the story was a way for me to talk about how whiteness—which, and this is something we never talk about, is different from being white—functions. The most striking thing about people who really embody whiteness is that they see everything but themselves. Whereas people who aren’t coming from that space, usually people of color but not always, see themselves (because they’ve been objects of the white gaze for decades and centuries) and the peculiarities of whiteness at the same time. This blind spot is one of the reasons this country is such a mess right now; whiteness doesn’t get to function in an unimpeded manner anymore, and this process of coming to self-awareness is extremely painful, both for these people waking up to the values that underpin whiteness and for the rest of us, who have to experience their resistance to that awakening. I felt from the start that much of the support for Trump was about this: the promise of a return to a time when white people didn’t have to look at themselves, which means they could continue participating in the great American project of forgetting—the past, how the country was made, etc."

This strikes me a little like conceptual art:  you see a small heap of objects on the floor of an otherwise bare room that appears, well, like a small heap of objects. Staring at it for some time doesn't change much.  Then you notice that on one wall, usually in small print, the piece of art is identified and underneath, is a lengthy explanation of the work by the artist. There you learn it is all about, say, colonialism, slavery, racism, exploitation, police brutality, etc. etc. 

This is called conceptual art and one can, I suppose, view Mr. HolyWhiteMountain's story in that context. There is the text and then there is what he says it is supposed to be all about. 

Mr. HolyWhiteMountain's notion that people who embody "whiteness" (see Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" for the best explanation of this) don't see themselves while others do is an interesting notion worth exploring beyond just a concept. Why doesn't Mr. HolyWhiteMountain, who in the interview says he is working on a couple of novels, actually do so? As opposed to maintaining that a bunch of undescribed tawdry hookups comporting with "One Night Standards" somehow illuminates it.

Well, if it weren't for all the sex, would readers bail out on this piece?

Finally tiring of white girl hookups,  the story goes on to what the narrator describes as his first love, a native American girl, but of a different tribe than his. What readers learn about that is, surprise, surprise, their sex life -- and how a French woman studying abroad is forced to listen in. Our hero views the French girl in much the same fashion he imagines people of "whiteness" view others. "She was an endless entertainment to me."

While the narrator of "Featherweight" has little in his mind throughout the story beyond his next sex act, his girlfriend appears at least somewhat more substantial if in only as a trope. She's interested in social justice issues when not locked in the bathroom by herself smoking dope. 

In the end things don't work out leaving the protagonist wishing that, if only for a moment, he could be a classic (white American) "dreamer" living in suburbia (see again the aforementioned "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi-Coates).

Mr. HolyWhiteMountain is, by the way, currently a lecturer at Stanford University.  Sounds like something a "dreamer" might like to be.

"Love Potions" May Be More New Yorker Promotional Fiction

 In a recent post, I raised the question of whether at least some of the weekly fiction published by The New Yorker is promotional in nature.  In other words, is it fundamentally a form of advertising for the author or more likely, for the author's publisher and if so, does the publisher pay the magazine to run these pieces, or perhaps give them to The New Yorker without charge?

These questions came to mind because often what passes for a short story is an excerpt from a new novel about to be published or just published.

The story, "The Case For And Against Love Potions" by Imbolo Mbue in the March 22, 2021 issue of the magazine appears to fall into this category, but with a twist.  Instead of an excerpt from Mbue's just-published book "How Beautiful We Were," the story I will refer to as "Love Potions" is an outtake from "How Beautiful." In other words, it is material originally written with the book in mind, but which didn't make it into the book.

To put it another way, still using the film analogy, this is material that has been picked up off the cutting room floor, dusted off and printed in The New Yorker.

That doesn't mean it is bad.  Indeed, "Love Potions," set in a subsistence farming community somewhere in Africa (presumably Cameroon), has a certain charm to it.  Commendably devoid of the all-to-familiar "craft" one associates with Writers Workshop-influenced fiction, the story reads like a folk tale, but for adults as opposed to children.

In a nutshell, it explores the idea that while humans need to love and be loved, there are other reasons for marriage, stated in simple, declarative sentences replete with a lot of down-home wisdom.

If it has a flaw, it's because it reads exactly like what Mbue says it is in the usual New Yorker author interview. The first draft of the story, Mbue explains, was a very short story about a character named Wonja. Too short and too one-sided (just the case against a potion), a second story about a character named Gita was tacked on.

If I were Mbue's editor, I would have said: "If you want this published, you have got to better integrate these two tales." As it stands. it reads like two separate stories, but with no pause in between. At a minimum, a better transition is needed, but finding a way to weave the tales together would be even better.

Although it may not be evident to readers, Mbue explains her story can be viewed as a critique of the patriarchal order of society. Fair enough, but I don't think that comes across as strongly as the aspirational nature of life as it unfolds in an African village setting.

Flirting for Profit: A Taibbi Article and a New Yorker Story

 I was reading an article by Matt Taibbi on how an ordinary American couple rather innocently got swallowed up in student debt when one particular turn of events in the saga reminded me of the March 1, 2021 New Yorker short story: "Good-Looking," by Souvankham Thammavongsa.

In his article on student debt, Taibbi said:

They [the young couple] took classes at Sacramento State, finished credits for degrees from Humboldt, and then discovered what a lot of young people in the eighties and nineties were learning, that the implied bargain of college — get a degree, get a good job — was less than a concrete proposition. “It was a wake-up call,” Robin says. She remembers an early job selling muffins.

“The muffin route that I took over, was from a beautiful woman, who was very charismatic, bubbly, and stunning,” she recalls, laughing. “She knew her route, and gave me the list, saying, ‘Do these muffins.’ I shadowed her the first day, and she sold them all! ‘Okay,’ I thought. ‘I'll do the same thing.’ I quickly found that part of the customer attraction was seeing her. I came back with half the muffins.”

Well, the muffin lady was undoubtedly using her charms to either overly, or in effect, flirt with her customers, monetizing that capability.  Some customers, her replacement found out, evidently weren't all that interested in the muffins. They were paying for the delights of charming lady's company, apparently in an innocent and harmless fashion. 

Monetizing one's ability to successfully flirt is the jumping off point of "Good-Looking," but with a twist.  Someone other than the charmer is apparently getting all, or at least most, of the proceeds.

The chief protagonist, a 38-year-old married man who works part time as a gym instructor, was encouraged by his boss to flirt with the predominately female membership, in part because he was good looking. That would help keep the women coming, the boss said, arguing that it was "harmless."  Except that the married instructors who engaged in such activities were urged to take off their wedding rings.

Well, of course, one woman interpreted the message a bit differently and invited the instructor out.  He accepted, but with a twist that I won't reveal here so as not to ruin the story.

According to Thammavongsa, in the usual New Yorker author interview, "Good-Looking" is a riff on the question what is love?

But to me it was more compelling as a profile of the protagonist and as brief exploration of whether one can harmlessly flirt for profit. 

Lily King's "Timeline:" A Story of Manners, or Who Are We?

 It was more or less by chance -- browsing through the latest Lit Hub email on a slow pandemic morning -- that I read "Timeline" via a link to "OprahMag."  There it was identified as a new short story by award-winning author Lilly King and as "the perfect romantic drama." On the that score, readers can decide for themselves, but I hope not.

The story mainly got me thinking about why one reads fiction.  Well, most fiction is written for entertainment and in the interest of providing a living for the author. Some books eventually fall into what is known as "the canon" and one then reads them  in the interest of "becoming cultured." This notion actually plays a role in "Timeline."

But over the years, the reason I personally have read fiction is to get a better understanding of social values, both here in the U.S. and in other countries.  When I worked in Japan for five years, for instance, I mainly read Japanese novels in translation.  And when I worked in England for eight years, I mainly read English literature. In most cases these were, at least loosely, novels of manners, which is to say books about how people interact with each other in normal, ordinary society.  

"Timeline" is a short story of manners, and in that vein, serves to illuminate the nature of present day American life. It's not definitive of our current culture, of course, and I'm sure Ms King would be the first to say so. But it may well be all too representative of certain currents now running within it. As such, it is worth a read.