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.)
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