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? "