Viewing "A Challenge You Have Overcome" Through Ghosts

 I suppose we are all to one degree or another creatures of our past, which in my case, in this particular instance, has to do with my having spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Virginia Woolf.

In that context, Allegra Goodman gets high marks for her short story "A Challenge You Have Overcome" in the Jan. 25, 2021 New Yorker in that it treats with ordinary people going about their ordinary days. But Goodman loses points when viewed through another Woolf filter for depicting her characters first and foremost through materialistic concerns -- whether someone will get into college, whether someone will lose a job, and so forth.

 Fundamentally, it is a gloomy story that Goodman makes a metaphorical attempt to redeem at the end in a fashion that also brings Woolf to mind. In "Mrs. Dalloway," Richard famously brings roses home to reassure Clarissa he hasn't abandoned her by accepting a lunch date without her. In "A Challenge," Steve first thinks to bring home flowers to his wife, Andrea, to reassure her as his job ends, but then ops for a rather impractical ficus plant, impractical because he has to carry it from Manhattan home to New Jersey on a crowded Jersey Transit commuter train. The ficus is metaphorical because it hearkens back to a song Steve and Andrea used to sing to their young children about the nature of life -- and Steve wants to start over again.

It's easy to see why because Ms Goodman's story fits nearly into a New Yorker short story trope: life is a downer. (Please click on that phrase to see what I have had to say on that topic.)

What was Steve and Andrea's house like? "Unhappiness filled every room." That extract gives the flavor of this story about professional disappointments and, first and foremost, a family in which communication between husband and wife, and especially between parents and child, has pretty much disappeared.

Well, perhaps Ms Goodman thinks that characterizes all too many American families and that is her point. But the title of her story suggests there is a way out, and readers can decide for themselves. There is also a hint of a sequel since this is apparently to be part of a cycle of short stories about Jewish family life (there is nothing in this story that jumps out at one as singularly Jewish) and, in one of the usual New Yorker author interviews, Ms Goodman declines to say whether what happened to one of the sons in the story was a favorable or unfavorable development for him. Presumably she intends to pick up on that in a follow-on effort.

In another respect, Ms Goodman's story brings to mind "The Dead" in which James Joyce depicts a dotted line between those who are living and those who are not. Joyce may well have borrowed this idea from one of his own favorite authors, Henrik Ibsen and his play "Ghosts" with which Joyce was very familiar.

The ghost in question in "A Challenge" is Andrea's deceased mother-in-law, Jeanne, who Andrea keeps hearing and whose "breathtaking honesty" she has come to appreciate -- after the fact. This is a bit like the relief many Americans apparently felt when Donald Trump dismissed the need for political correctness.

In this case, the ghost helps Andrea see life from more than just her own perspective, but does it matter? There, Ms Goodman is disappointing.