Marisa Silver's "Tiny, Meaningless Things" and the Precariat

"She eats less now than she used to, but she hasn’t got used to grocery shopping with that in mind. She watches the women who roam the aisles gripping baskets barely weighted with a single chicken breast, two oranges, a child-sized carton of milk meant for lunchboxes. Walking advertisements for precarity."

That's from Marisa Silver's story "Tiny, Meaningless Things" in the Oct. 24, 2022 print edition of The New Yorker.  It's about a 74-year-old widow who lives by herself after a short-lived second marriage and who has a difficult time connecting with or relating two her adult daughters, and vice versa. 

The Blogger spell checker didn't like the word "precarity" in the paragraph above and probably not without reason.  Although it is a perfectly legitimate word, it's not a word one hears bandied about much. I'm not sure I've ever come across it in a text previously and I read a lot. 

Dictionary.com defines precarity as "a state of existence in which material provision and physiological wellness are adversely affected by a lack of regular or secure income." The Cambridge Dictionary simply calls it "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse" or, alternatively, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost." Other definitions are similar if stated in slightly different ways.

While "precarity" pretty much encapsulates the state of affairs in which readers find Evelyn, the protagonist of Ms Silver's well-crafted tale of what it's like to be an elderly woman whose grip on the world is slipping away, there is a problem with using such an unfamiliar term. I remember it more than I remember much else about the story.

Central to the tale is Evelyn's relationship with a young boy who lives with his family in another apartment in the same building. It seems to have developed both as a result of idle curiosity on the part of the boy and because Evelyn is overjoyed to discover someone actually has an interest in her. No surprise: it doesn't end particularly well when, arguably with Evelyn's encouragement the boy begins testing certain boundaries. 

In her New Yorker author interview, Ms Silver says she doesn't know why Scotty, the young boy, did what he did, but that he would probably say "Because I wanted to,"  Well, maybe. Children test boundaries and if Scotty, at age seven, could be candid, he would instead say "Because I could."

If it can be done, it will be done: that is a fundamental aspect of human nature.

But back to precarity: according to an entry in Wikipedia, around the year 2000. a version of the world -- the precariat -- gained currency in the global social justice movement to describe a class of people with no job security and no prospect of regular employment, presumably as a result of the ills of globalization.

This would be a class lower than the proletariat -- a Marxist notion of people with jobs, but exploited by their capitalist employers such that they are unable to reap in full the rewards of the work they do under what is known as the labor theory of value.

More recently, we've also begun hearing about the woketariat, or a class of people devoted to pushing political correctness above all else.  They don't seem to be in jeopardy of much of anything as might be expected given the unassailable moral high ground they perceive themselves to be occupying.