The Grant Catton Blog

New Yorker Fiction Review #317: "Jenny Annie Fanny Addie" by Adam Levin

2025-05-23T16:48:00.003-04:00

Review of the short story from the April 21, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

"Jenny Annie Fanny Addie" is a strange story little story but I found its attempt to capture the inner workings of the pre-teenage (tweenage?) mind interesting enough to read it a second time. It also helps that the story is short, weighing in at about 3500 words or so.

The action of the story follows an 11/12 year old girl named Addie and takes place on one day during the summer. While taking swimming lessons at her day camp, a special needs boy violently gropes her in full view of other members of the camp. The incident is short and a lifeguard neutralizes any danger quickly. Addie's Mom comes to pick her up. They go out to eat. They go to watch "Terminator 2" in the theater. They drive home. Addie takes a nap, wakes up, and goes out for a walk. Those are the barest mechanics of the plot on a temporal, Point A to Point B level.

The real "stuff" of this story, however, takes place inside Addie's head. And there are a few key data points or concepts about the incident and its aftermath that Addie seems to focus on. The incident itself is not that big of a deal to Addie, it seems. What is of more concern to her are the following ancillary paradigms:

1.) The boy who groped her called her by the wrong name during the incident. He called her "Jenny," when her name is "Addie." This case of mistaken identity does not specifically get resolved in the story; however, it relates to another paradigm or anecdote that she remembers about that day. She ties it to a discrepancy in the lyrics of the song "The Weight," by The Band. She recalls that her brother had pointed out most people thought the lyrics were: "Take a load off, Annie," when in fact they are: "Take a load off Fanny."

Again, it's not clear how these two paradigms (I can't think of a better word) relate to each other or to any broader point of the story. But, it is an example of what I think Adam Levin is trying to do in this short story, to whit...he is attempting to approximate how the mind works on a minute to minute basis. Even more specifically, he is attempting to approximate what it means to come to "intellectual awareness," during adolescence.

Note the following line, from late in the story:

"I looked out the window and listened to "The Weight" and had this awful sense of being part of the world in a way that I didn't want to be...This sense that when he [Harel, the boy who had groped her] was out of my sight he still existed...and that...if he thought of me at all he thought my name was Jenny."

2.) While she is not that emotionally disturbed by the incident, it changes the way Addie looks at her mother. A large chunk of this short story is devoted to Addie's perspicacious interpretation of her mother's concern for her. It is too long and involved to reproduce here, and unnecessary.

What's at stake, however, is Addie's understanding of herself as a (soon to be) autonomous young adult and her understanding of her mother as an individual with her own distinct habits of perception and approach to the world. At the end of Addie's soliloquy in which she speculates about what's going on in her mother's head and how she should feel about it, Addie seems to arrive at a very teenage point of view of her mother: that she is old, out of touch, and doesn't understand the way things are, certainly that she doesn't understand what's going on inside her, Addie.

What we are left with is a story about the incidents that push us -- whether we like it or not and whether we want to admit it or not -- into adolescence. It's rarely the big, notable, movie-worthy incidents like our first kiss, our first time shaving, some feat of athletic heroism, and more commonly something we never saw coming, do not understand, and spend many years afterwards (if not our entire lives) attempting to process.

Having read this twice, I can say that Adam Levin's achievement here is substantial. This is much more than a story about a girl getting groped and suffering public sexual abuse. This is a story about how we grow up. How our habits of mind are formed. And how we start to relate to the outside world on our own terms. And his incorporation of popular culture into the stream of consciousness narrative -- "Terminator 2," The Band, and a few other references -- closely imitates the way (especially as adolescents) we start making connections about the world via what we are watching on TV and hearing in songs. I feel like a much, much longer essay could be written about this short story and I hope someday someone teaches this story in a class.

Photograph by Adriana Nativio

New Yorker Fiction Review #316: "From, To" by David Bezmozgis

2025-05-08T12:42:00.004-04:00

Review of the short story from the April 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

Occasionally it happens that I read a short story with a great amount of focus and attention, underlining key passages and details I want to refer back to in my review, synthesizing ideas and themes on the fly, in preparation for the blog post I fully intend to write the moment I finish the story...and then it ends up taking me two weeks to sit down and write my review.

Sadly, such is the case with my review of David Bezmozgis' short story "From, To," a finely-wrought story about a Jewish family from -- presumably Chicago or perhaps Toronto -- as they go through the death of the matriarch and venerated elder (the main character's mother) while they also have to deal with the fact that the main character's daughter (Mila) is protesting against Israel's operations in Gaza.

Bezmozgis is a Latvian-born Canadian filmmaker and novelist with what looks like a shovelful of awards heaped at his six films, two novels, and one short story collection. It's not difficult to see why. Based on my one sample of exposure to his work -- namely, this short story -- Bezmozgis' sure, strong, directorial hand is clearly evident. This is a guy who knows how to tell a story. Knows how to pace it, what details to give, when to focus in on a certain character and when to pull back. I am highly curious as to the rest of his body of work.

It's been too long for me to offer a cogent and well woven examination of all the themes from this story and how they work together, so instead I here offer what I found to be a few of the story's more potent quotes and insights:

"Maybe that is the line between childhood and adulthood, when you begin to hesitate to die for your parents."

"In short, his family are essentially fascists, comfortable with totalitarianism when it suits them. Not just his family. He is convinced that this is true of most people. Democracy is a discipline, like diet and exercise, strenuous and irksome. Sooner take a pill or eat cake."

This line, above, is probably the "key" to understand this story. Vadik -- the main character -- sits in the middle of life (his mid-40s or so) and in the middle between his mother's generation -- hard-line conservative Zionists -- and his daughter's generation -- young, Liberal, and pro-Palestine or at least anti-genocide. As an attorney, he likely finds himself in the middle of many sticky situations and has to be the level-headed one, at times dispassionately abiding by the law of the land. It may not always suit him, but that's his job. Much as he, at the high-noon of adulthood, a professional man with a family and resources, must get his family through this crisis, steer the ship, as it were, through to calmer waters.

There is a lot to like in this story and in Bezmozgis writing. I am looking forward to watching his films.

Illustration by Franco Zacha

New Yorker Fiction Review #315: "Marseille" by Aysegul Savas

2025-04-22T22:25:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the April 7, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

Turkish novelist Aysegul Savas is in the midst of a highly enviable run of literary success. Since 2019, Savas -- who, it should be noted, received her MFA in the U.S. and writes in English -- has published three novels, a collection of non-fiction essays, and has a short story collection due out in July. Not to mention short stories and essays published in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Dublin Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, and others. And her third novel, The Anthropologists (2024), was cited by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year...which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.

The point is, other than winning the Pulitzer Prize or the Pen Hemingway Award, or having one of her books turned into a movie (and hey, there's still plenty of time), as a young writer of literary fiction you could not ask for a better career. According to the internet, Savas is still in her late 30s which, in the literary world, makes her a baby.

As for my relationship to her work, this is now the third short story I've read of hers in The New Yorker, which is the sum total of my exposure to her prose. Her short story "Notions of the Sacred," from the Jan. 2 & 9, 2023 issue, impressed me a lot more than did the first one I ever read, back in 2021. So, I suppose you could say she's growing on me. Although "Marseille" -- about three girlfriends on vacation in that French city -- doesn't carry quite the same weight as "Notions of the Sacred" -- about a pair of women going through their pregnancies together -- the two stories share some broader thematic elements that also connect to Savas's wider body of work. She mentions, for example, that when she was pregnant people opened up to her a lot more, as though pregnancy conferred special powers of forgiveness; this is directly tied to some of the themes in "Notions of the Sacred."

"Marseille" covers a few days in which three college friends -- Amina, Alba, and Lisa, now in their early/mid-30s -- take a long weekend trip to Marseille, France. Geographically, this is easily accomplished because they all live in Western Europe. Schedule-wise the trip is complicated because Amina (the main character) now has a one-year-old child. Amina's child is a concrete manifestation of a truth that is slowly dawning on all three women and which looms in the background of their weekend like a lengthening shadow: time is passing and their youth is fading away. This occurs to them during the trip, like it occurs to all of us, slowly and in small ways. The story does not "conclude" so much as fade out.

Motherhood, feminine power (read: sexuality), and aging, are all themes Savas deals with in this story. From very early in the story we understand that Amina -- the first to have a child -- feels a sense of unease at how her newfound motherhood will affect her friendship with the others. In fact, it seems she almost feels guilty for disrupting the bond of friendship and young, single womanhood they had.

"...their friendship had always operated in leisure: long meals, afternoon drinks, dressing up to go dancing. Amina wanted to see them on these same terms, rather than be disappointed by interrupted conversations and her friends' possible lack of interest in her daughter."

But here is the kicker...in the immediately following line:

"She herself had never paid attention to friends' babies before; she only surveyed the mothers. She noted the physical changes, their waning interests, trying to project what might become of her in the future were she to have a child."

These lines give us most of what we need to unpack this story. The difference is that now Amina is no longer watching young mothers from the sidelines, she herself is one, so now she's observing the changes to her own life and observing herself as "other" in relation to her two single friends, Alba and Lisa. She's also watching their youth and sexual power wane.

The chief "plot incident" -- we might call it -- in the story is that Alba, who has always been the most confident and sexually assertive -- gets the phone number of their waiter, Vincent, and attempts to set up a date with him for after dinner. But the date never happens. Alba and Vincent exchange text messages. The three friends attempt, unsuccessfully, to secure a table, and then seats at the bar, of a restaurant, and end up having to leave. Vincent texts Alba that he's sorry, but he cannot meet her that night.

Quite obviously, Savas intends this incident as a way to show how Alba and the group as a whole, are aging. There is the idea that, were they younger, Alba might have been able to pull Vincent away from whatever he was doing. In the world of these three friends, you get the sense that's happened before. Now, the age and attractiveness of the friends might have nothing to do with why Alba's date never happened, but the point is they are old enough now not to know for sure.

"And perhaps this had dawned on all of them, like an answer, though they hadn't realized until then that there'd been a question. It had never been a question, not yet. It was still their turn.

'Oh my God,' Lisa said. 'What if...what if he thought we were just a bunch of aunties?'"

It's as though the very question: "Am I getting old?" is what causes your youth to be over. It's a fascinating idea, driven home in the story by the fact that the friends decide to buy one last bottle of wine for a "nightcap," only to remember that they never drank the bottle of wine they'd bought for a nightcap the night before. The three probably have many decades of friendship and many girls trips left in them, but it is the beginning of the end of their youth, and deep down the they all know it.

One line I particularly liked was when the three meet a young woman on a ferryboat who is on her post-university year of traveling. Savas writes that:

"She was still young enough that she could sum up her life in a continuous narrative."

I like this because it carries with it the implication that, if you live long enough, your life takes enough unexpected turns and unfolds in a way that makes so little sense to you at times, that you lose the ability to sum it up as one continuous story. I think it's very subtly wise, and funny.

Illustration by Virginie Morgand

New Yorker Fiction Review #314: "Hatagaya Lore" by Bryan Washington

2025-04-18T14:22:00.003-04:00

Review of the short story from the March 31, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

"...to feel even this connected somewhere, for a moment, was a gift."

It has been a while since I read a short story by Bryan Washington; about five years, to be precise. The last one was "Heirlooms," which I reviewed on this blog back in Aug. 2020. Apparently, that was just long enough to forget who Bryan Washington -- an American writer born in 1993 who already has a novel, a short story collection, and six New Yorker stories under his belt -- was and that I had read "Heirlooms" at all. To be honest, I probably could have forgotten in a much shorter timespan than that, but I digress...

While reading "Hatagaya Lore" I got that sneaking suspicion that I had read something very similar before. As we know now, I was right. Like "Heirlooms," the short story in question here deals largely with the tensions between a young gay couple who are living together but whose relationship is fraying. The story in question starts out that way, but then moves well past that.

In "Hatagaya Lore," as in "Heirlooms," there is not a plot so much as there is the unfolding of a series of events in the life of the main character. In that sense, it's a lot like life and, frankly, if there is a such thing as a talent for keeping the reader engaged despite the lack of a readily discernible plot, Bryan Washington has it. Does every story have to feature a murder, a robbery, or some kind of pre-determined structure? Absolutely not. In fact sometimes the lack thereof can be refreshing.

In "Hatagaya Lore" the main character -- an gay man about whom we get astonishingly few biographical details -- reluctantly moves from Texas to Japan with his lover, Craig. We assume he is in his mid- late-20s when the story starts, but we do not know for sure. We never learn his first name, and we also do not learn until near the very end of the story that he is black. Anyway, the process of adjusting to life in a foreign land causes the two lovers to drift apart. After about a year, Craig wants to leave but the narrator wants to stay, and so he does.

What follows it a sort of forward-moving carousel narration of the main character's adventures on the dating scene in Hatagaya, a neighborhood in Tokyo, and the surrounding area, as well as his process of making friends -- short term and long term -- while time passes and he matures into adult life. With each dating encounter the main character has, we see a different angle on gay life and -- as is probably the intention of the story, to the degree there is one -- it becomes apparent that gay life is not some kind of monolithic experience but rather something that's as unique and intricate as the individuals who live it.

In our culture we love to categorize people. There is the "Black experience," the "Jewish vote," the "Latino community," etc. etc. and despite our best intentions we apply sets of characteristics to these groups or these experiences. Life for gay men is not something that can be commodified any more than it can for lesbian women, transgender individuals, or any other group. As much as we now see LGBTQIA+ characters in film and fiction now, people who live these lifestyles are still seen as "other" in many ways. I think, regardless of plot or whatever, a story like "Hatagaya Lore" is important because it shows that there is not one "gay experience." And life for gay men is just life.

In the process, the story is about the passing of time and what it means, or doesn't mean. Time and the passage of it, and what we do within the ever-present knowledge of it's passing, comes up frequently in the story.

When the main character's friend Juro tells him his Japanese is improving, he replies:

"Bullshit, I said. I'll be useless forever."

"Nothing is anything forever, Juro said. Not even nature."

When, a few paragraphs later, the same friend tries to get the main character to work behind the bar as a bartender, he uses the following logic:

"The time passes anyway, he said, ya know? Sitting water rots."

Later, an older friend named Tatsuki says to him:

"This is a good night. You have to appreciate those. You might think they're infinite now, but they're not."

Tatsuki dies a few months later.

Closer to the end of the story, a West Indian woman named Sherry, who befriends the main character, echoes exactly the words of his friend Juro from a few years earlier:

"The time passes anyway, Sherry said. I've lived here for what, thirty years?"

The main character participates in life and watches the lives of others move on with a sort of removed, somewhat disconnected clarity. Is this because he is in a foreign country? Is it because he is -- as we find out later in the story -- a triple minority? He is a foreigner, and gay, and black.

One particular paragraph of the story really stuck with me.

"I'd been living on the block for years now. The grocers knew me. The pharmacists, too. I'd seen vintage stores and yakitori stalls and flower shops come and go. I could recognize the tint of dawn on the road. Had seen the neighbors' kids take their first steps, and then later walk themselves to school. Knew that I probably would never feel completely a part of it. But I also knew this was a lot to ask for: to feel even this connected somewhere, for a moment, was a gift."

This paragraph does not have to do with being black, or being gay, or being anything except a human being. This is something we all feel in one way or another, at various times in our lives. And it is, in the end, a profound statement of the narrator's gratitude for simply being alive.

Illustration by Kotori Mamata

New Yorker Fiction Review #313: "The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates

2025-04-15T23:38:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the March 24, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

Every time I read a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker I ask myself: "Why am I not reading JCO all the damn time??" She is so good she makes me want to start writing fiction again. Anyone who is looking to write fiction needs to stop what they're reading and read anything by this woman. I'm serious.

Part of the problem might just be that there's so much of her writing out there. Since she started publishing back in the 1960s she has published something like 58 (maybe more?) novels as has to her credit a list of short story publications that would make anyone who has ever tried to get even one short story published weep with envy. But the simple fact is: where do you start? For me, the answer has always lain in the pages of The New Yorker.

The short story at hand -- "The Frenzy" -- about a middle-aged man and his 19-year-old mistress who take a hasty, tense, winter road trip to coastal New Jersey, is not a "great" short story. It does not have grand, wide-ranging implications. It will not be passed around the internet, nor will it probably even be referenced among Joyce Carol Oates's best stories. It is, however, really good short story, rich with multiple layers of meaning to be interpreted, and a demonstration of Oates's supernatural gift for creating characters and putting them in awkward life situations that -- although sometimes even mundane-seeming -- always manage to surprise.

So, what happens when Cassidy, a bored, 46-year-old Manhattan family man, begins an affair with Brianna, the troubled, 19-year-old daughter of a family friend, and the pair, ten days before Christmas, take a surreptitious road trip to Cape May, New Jersey? Well, it goes about as well as you might expect.

Cassidy has a daughter that is Brianna's age. In fact, Brianna and Cassidy's daughter went to high school together. That's how he knows her. This, right off the bat, is a level of queasiness that needs to be acknowledged and is palpable almost immediately within the context of the story. If Brianna could be said to have "Daddy issues," then Cassidy may have some "daughter issues," or at the least "parent issues."

As the two drive together down the coast of New Jersey, it is quickly evident there is a parent-child type of relationship between them, including all of the attendant frustrations parents have with their children and including the sort of watchful, authoritative, protecting instincts as well.

"Does Cassidy miss being a daddy--a daddy to small children? The overseer of so much emotion, a puppet master with weary arms?"

I have said again and again that a great short story will often give you the keys to understanding it somewhere within its paragraphs. A line like the line above is, without at doubt, one of the keys to understanding this short story. Fortunately, in the hands of a great author like Oates, you get a few such pithy lines like this which lead you to deduce a broader "meaning" to the story, but she never spoon feeds it to you.

Much later in the story, when Cassidy thinks about the possibility of being caught in his infidelity:

"For he could not bear being considered selfish, cruel, a bad daddy. He has simply lost his ability to impersonate himself, the way over time you can lose a skill like piano playing or speaking a language."

While by no means a justification for cheating on your spouse with someone your kid went to high school with, that certainly describes a way almost all of us feel at times. Who among us has not felt tired of having to uphold our own vision of ourselves, a vision which is -- of course, no matter how much we want to admit it -- ultimately how we see ourselves through the eyes of others.

What is clear is that Cassidy and Brianna are not really having an affair with each other, at least, it is not an emotional affair. Brianna is a distracted, willful, impulsive, teenager with some substance abuse issues. Cassidy is a middle-aged man who is channeling his sadness and existential angst at the mundanity of life -- the one he chose -- into a dalliance with someone less than half his age and less than half his emotional capacity. For a brief moment it makes him feel young and virile again, but the results prove to be disastrous, if not catastrophic (we don't get to see the full aftermath).

There is at least (at least) one other plane on which to understand this story. The story's title refers back to a memory Cassidy had of witnessing a feeding frenzy in the Atlantic Ocean during a boat tour he took long ago before he was even married. The sight of the fish all wildly and frantically feeding on each other -- the small fish feeding on plankton, the bigger fish feeding on the small fish, the even bigger fish feeding on those fish, etc. -- simultaneously disgusts and entrances Cassidy.

How do we connect that to a possible "meaning" of this story? It's clear that Cassidy's affair with Brianna is not something undertaken with precision and planning. It's not even something being undertaken out of passion, as it's clear he and Brianna have hardly any emotional connection. It is, rather, the opportunistic grabbing of what has drifted right in front of him. Asked "why" he started the affair, we could see Cassidy blankly responding: "Because I could."

Thus, I believe Oates is drawing some kind of connection between the feeding frenzy -- especially the big fish / small fish metaphor, which could be applied to the character's age and emotional maturity levels -- and some sort of mid-life crisis rashness within Cassidy that needed, and found, an escape valve.

Brianna herself is a fascinating character who while perhaps not outwardly a match for Cassidy, is not a victim or a "babe in the woods." She may be not know how to articulate her emotions well and she may be erratic in her behavior and attention, but she is not powerless, as we see later in the story.

Photograph by Noah Wall.

New Yorker Fiction Review #312: "Techniques and Idiosyncrasies" by Yiyun Li

2025-04-05T12:33:00.001-04:00

Review of the short story from the March 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

The more I read of Yiyun Li -- and at this point I've read and reviewed seven of her stories in The New Yorker -- the more I like her. To me her writing demonstrates the kind of timeless sensitivity and insight into the human condition that is one of the hallmarks of a truly gifted writer. Someone who themselves is complex enough, and has thought deeply enough about life, that they can enrich your experience of your own life simply through writing fiction. It's a talent that seems more rare than it ought to be.

"Techniques and Idiosyncrasies" is an odd story and does not have a conventional plot structure. It's more of a meditation or rumination on how we learn to deal with grief over time and -- in some ways -- it is about how writers learn how to portray grief through fiction, although this last one (in my opinion) could have been developed slightly better.

In the world of the story, the direct action concerns a middle-aged writer (somewhat famous, we are meant to think?) named Lillian, aged 51, who goes to the doctor and finds there is a new nurse working the office instead of the former one she had become accustomed to. Lillian, we gradually learn, has lost both of her sons to suicide, and quite recently. During the process of the doctor visit, Lillian looks back at her past and examines several incidents that relate to her current situation, as well as studying the face of the new nurse, and the doctor, to see if their reactions to her have changed or betray new information about how they see her. Like I said, it's not a "what happened" kind of story.

However, it is very much about something. Death is referred to at least 25 times, in a variety of forms. The word death, itself, as well as the word suicide, murder, and a few other euphemisms for death are laced throughout the story to a degree that would make it sound macabre. But it's really not. What's at the heart of this story's obsession with death is how we deal with grief.

Lillian, in the face of the almost unthinkable suicide death of both her sons (her only children), has implausibly learned how to joke and to focus on small, mundane things as a way to cope.

One of the "keys" to understanding this story can be found in the following line, about a third of the way into the story:

"The unfathomable is unsettling, and that makes the most banal thought a shelter."

With this line, Lillian (or to be more specific, Yiyun Li) is articulating her prescription for coping with grief: thing of things in small, logical terms. For in the very next line:

"Those who don't think of themselves as monsters feel less uneasy if catastrophes can be explained as consequences."

It took me a few times reading that sentence to fully understand it, but...given the context of the rest of the story, it makes sense. Lillian goes on to relate a few childhood instances -- one of them involving witnessing the torture of a hedgehog -- which forced her to learn how to numb and harden herself to her feelings and to grief.

At some level this is also a story about writing and writers, as evidenced by a few moments of intertextuality. Yiyun Li mentions Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen and American writer Patricia Highsmith (twice). I've never loved referencing other writers or artists in a story unless the plot specifically concerns them. I feel like it's alienating to the reader who might be unfamiliar with those authors. In this case, I get the Patricia Highsmith references, because I am familiar with her work. But, luckily, one does not have to be familiar with Elizabeth Bowen's work to understand the quote Yiyun Li uses. But I'm sure knowing more about her work would add to one's understanding of the story.

I rarely read short stories twice, but I read this one twice and may go back to it a third time. There is still a layer of meaning I'm not sure I've tapped into here. Something that cannot be articulated easily and, perhaps, is not meant to be articulated easily.

Illustration by Na Kim.

New Yorker Fiction Review #311: "Hi Daddy" by Matthew Klam

2024-10-18T11:09:00.001-04:00

Review of the short story from the Oct. 14, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

Normally I don't love "domestic" stories that take place all within the context of some character's otherwise unremarkable -- usually white, suburban, and upper middle class, for some reason -- family life or day to day life. I do not deny that domestic life can be filled with drama, struggle, conflict, and all the highs and lows of the human experience. I just feel as though its too easy to look around you and try to make fiction out of what you see. I do realize there is a word for this: autofiction.

I partly blame it on Ernest Hemingway's perhaps most famous (and in many ways poisonous) piece of writing advice: "Write what you know." Hemingway and others of his time are also famous for writing stories -- and most importantly, having success writing stories -- about his himself and his friends sitting around drinking and talking, seemingly giving every subsequent generation of writers license to just write about whatever they were doing and call it a story.

Look, not every story has to have man-eating sharks or drug-dealing former school teachers in it. But sometimes a man gets fed up of reading these kinds of "kitchen table" stories about people taking their kids to soccer practice or trying to catch-out their partner who might be having an affair, but actually is not. All that is to say, I did not have high hopes for this story.

However...I ended up truly enjoying this piece.

The main character is a middle-aged suburban white man, happily married (or at least not unhappily), who is facing the loss of two important people in his life: his father, due to dementia and old age, and his teenaged daughter, due to young adulthood and freedom.

I do not have kids. But I did have a father who I watched go through a rapidly-progressing illness that ended with his death. Much like the character in this story, I watched as a once powerful, almost larger-than-life man who watched over and loomed over me my whole life, succumbed to weakness and then departed. Something a lot of people have to go through. Which is why these types of domestic stories -- at their best -- can actually be really touching to read.

The following passage stuck with me:

"As I watched him, a terrible energy, that menacing strength he'd had all his life, coursed through me. I could imagine things: dropping him like a stone to the bottom of the ocean, or lifting him gently and carrying him to bed. My desperation to please him--or my need to get along with him, or to get away from him--had formed me, but now I was in charge."

Is Bad Monkey any good?

2024-10-09T13:58:00.002-04:00

Bad Monkey (2024) is a streaming TV show that premiered in August 2024 and is (so far) only one-season long. The show is a black comedy / crime thriller set in the present day, and based mostly in the Florida Keys, Miami, and Andros Island, Bahamas. The show is based on a book by the prolific and legendary dark humor / crime fiction author Carl Hiaasen.

Most notably and, in my opinion, the one and only thing anyone really needs to know about this show, is that it stars Vince Vaughn as the main character, Andrew Yancey, a detective who has been suspended from duty following an incident involving his ex-girlfriend's husband. Yancey is pleasantly enjoying his suspension by sipping cocktails on his lawn and staring out at the sea, at his home in the Keys, until a local fisherman reels in a severed arm instead of a fish, thus kicking off what will be the plot of the show.

Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that we are now in what I believe are the end days of the The Golden Age of Television, the hallowed period over the past 20-years or so that saw the creation of such prestige TV classics as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. These shows are -- as someone once said -- our cathedrals of today; they are the very pinnacle of visual entertainment over the last 20 years. I challenge you to name a movie that's had more impact than any one of these shows.

Anyway... it's also been at least 15 years now since the dawning and subsequent proliferation of streaming TV, to the point where it has now taken over everything and virtually strangled the box office, feature-length film industry to death or, at the very least, pummeled it into a new and somewhat sad shadow of its former self. When Netflix got the brilliant idea to develop and produce its own exclusive content -- shows like Lilyhammer (2012) -- to be available only on its own platform, it was only a short time before other streaming services popped up and followed suit.

Fast forward a decade or so and it seems like not only are there now at least a dozen streaming services, but they all seem to have their own original content. For a while, this seemed great. There was this vast proliferation of new shows, new voices, new entertainment. The TV industry had become this giant vacuum cleaner that was sucking up stories into it and spewing out a buffet of visual entertainment the likes of which the world had never seen.

Except that the eventual result of that is now, as we're approaching 2025, there is a certain level of "Where's the beef?" Like...what happened to the good shows? What's with all this thin gruel? What happened to the Golden Age of Television?

To me, Bad Monkey fits somewhere within this broader context, the idea that we are now on the other side of the slope (specifically, we are on the down slope) following the peak of the Golden Age and are spending the hours and nights of our lives getting episodes and episodes deep into lukewarm streaming TV shows, hoping they are going to yield us some high quality entertainment...and then being disappointed.

Lest this become more of a rant than a review (I probably crossed that line a while back)... Bad Monkey is -- at best -- a halfway decent show that is completely carried by Vince Vaughn. If there were a no-name actor in the role of Yancey, this show would not even be watchable. At worst, it's unsatisfying and forgettable, like eating popcorn for dinner.

By all means, watch a few episodes and see if you get into it. There are some interesting plot twists and, other than Vince Vaughn, you do get some pretty good eye candy in the form of Rachel Monaghan (True Detective, Season 1), although she's way, way under-utilized IMHO, and the other supporting actresses like Jodie Turner-Smith, Natalie Martinez, and Meredith Hagner, all of whom are pretty new to me. But, overall, a lot of the dialogue just seems forced and -- if you're like me -- you end up checking your phone a lot, even pausing the show to go do other things, and never coming back to it.

Ripley vs. The Talented Mr. Ripley

2024-07-05T16:10:00.004-04:00

Which is better: Ripley or The Talented Mr. Ripley?

Ripley (Netflix, 2024) is a one-season Television series that dropped in April of this year and is based on the 1955 thriller novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith. The series stars Andrew Scott (Moriarty in the 2010 BBC series Sherlock), as Tom Ripley, Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, and Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, Paramount/Mirimax) is a feature film featuring Matt Damon in the title role, Jude Law as Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddy Miles, and which is also based on the Patricia Highsmith novel.

As much as you can compare a movie to a television series, there is no question in my mind which one is better: The Talented Mr. Ripley from 1999 is better than Ripley, the Netflix series, from 2024. The casting is better. The acting is better. The cinematography is better. The script is better. To me, the film beats the television series in just about every way.

I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley in theaters back in 1999 and have re-watched it a few times over the years, as well as read the novel. The 1999 film adheres pretty closely to the book and is, in my opinion, one of the best novel-to-movie adaptations in film history. It completely stands on its own. With a lot of film adaptations there's this sense of "Yeah, but you really need to go back and read the book." While the Patricia Highsmith novel is a great crime thriller, I think you can get everything you need to get from this story by watching the 1999 film.

In the 1999 film you've got a pretty unbeatable cast, with four -- FOUR -- of the best actors of their generation in their primes: Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Each of these actors is perfectly cast and turns in an impeccable performance. I could probably go on, but I don't need to. If you don't believe me, go ahead and watch the film.

The 2024 television version, on the other hand is woefully miscast and underacted, starting with John Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf. Even without having to fill Jude Law's shoes in this role, Flynn's Greenleaf is so subdued and muted as to appear as though he's sedated most of the time. As opposed to Law's vivacious, charismatic, Golden Boy portrayal of Greenleaf, Flynn at times looks as though he is in a coma. Andrew Scott is tolerable as Ripley; however, in his late forties, I daresay the actor is a bit old for this role and -- like Flynn -- he just doesn't bring enough energy into the role. Furthermore, unlike between Jude Law and Matt Damon, there is almost no screen chemistry between Flynn and Scott, in a role that requires there to be a lot of chemistry. Tom Ripley is supposed to be in love with Dickie Greenleaf. In the 1999 film, you see and feel this infatuation; in the 2024 television series, it's like you would only know this if you knew the plot already. Otherwise, it's just not believable.

The character of Marge Sherwood, played in the 2024 series by Dakota Fanning, is cast well enough and grew on me as the series wore on. The only other performance I know by Fanning (as an adult) is from Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019), in which she appears for a few minutes of screentime and does a lot with an otherwise dismissible role. Her turn here in Ripley chews up far more screentime and she's moved up a few notches in my estimation.

The other strange casting decision was that of the Freddy Miles character. In the 1999 film this part is played -- again to a pitch-perfect performance -- by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the role in a boisterous, swaggering, kind of way. In the 2024 series this part is played by Eliot Summer who has that "maybe I've seen him somewhere before" kind of look but who plays the role in a sort of understated, cat-like way that -- when held up against Hoffman's portrayal of Miles -- just turns the entire role into something else. I'm willing to grant that the showrunners intended for it to be that way; after all, why do exactly what was done before. However, Summer's version of Miles sticks out like a sore thumb even in this altogether miscast series, which is saying something.

It's extremely difficult to take Ripley on it's own terms because The Talented Mr. Ripley was so good. But even taken on its own, Ripley takes far, far too long to heat up. It's an eight episode series that's basically a snooze fest until the fifth episode. That's not good. In fact, I finished the show simply so that I could write this blog post. Otherwise, I probably would have stopped after episode two and not picked it back up.

If I have anything good to say about the show it is that, once it does start to get interesting, it gets really suspenseful, even ending on a cliffhanger so good I found myself saying: "No, please no...there has to be another episode..." only to find that I had, in fact, finished the series. Maybe it takes a while to come around, but it gets there.

Still...in just about every category imaginable, the Damon-Law-Paltrow-Hoffman version of The Talented Mr. Ripley wins by a mile.

New Yorker Fiction Review #310: "Thataway" by Thomas McGuane

2024-07-05T14:03:00.004-04:00

Review of the short story from the May 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

Thomas McGuane's contributions to The New Yorker's fiction section over the years (and there have been many, maybe the most?) have been -- in my opinion -- spotty, at best. While I can remember having read and reviewed a lot of his short stories in the magazine, I can't remember any one story very distinctly, which usually doesn't speak well for his work. Perhaps it doesn't speak well of my memory, which is increasingly spotty as well...

"Thataway" did not do much to change my opinion on Thomas McGuane's work in The New Yorker. This lightly comical story about a pair of elderly siblings brought together by the death of their sister has McGuane's fingerprints all over it; it is set in the American West and features a rich old eccentric and a dysfunctional but ultimately loving family brought together by a less than urgent situation that's more just a backdrop to give the characters something to do, than a plot.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. If you like Thomas McGuane's writing, you'll likely find this story amusing, if not exactly compelling, reading material.

New Yorker Fiction Review #309: "Consolation" by Andre Alexis

2024-06-29T14:01:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the May 20, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

What we have here is a touching, mature, and finely-wrought short story by Trinidadian-Canadian novelist and playwright Andre Alexis about a grown man's attempt to understand his now-deceased parents, through the lens of one particular period of time surrounding his father's infidelity.

Every once in a while, I encounter a short story that affects me so deeply, it is difficult to write about. I think I could probably sit on this review for days or weeks and still not fully be able to articulate what this story means to me, but...as your loyal (if highly erratic) New Yorker short fiction reviewer, I will try.

"Consolation" is a story that travels through time, much like our thoughts, and asks the reader to -- along side the first person narrator -- take into account the narrator's life and relationship with his parents all at once. His parents are now both gone, and he has children of his own. But the story puts us into the gyre of time and memory that encompasses his father's impoverished childhood in Trinidad, the family's emigration to Canada, the father's infidelity, both parent's old age and death, and the narrator's middle aged reflections, all at once. In that way, it is a bit sentimental and also deeply profound, as the narrator looks back from his middle aged perch and is actually older than his father in many of the memories with which the story is concerned.

I'm a firm believer that, in many short stories, and in my favorite ones, there is always a passage or a sentence that reveals what the story is really "about," to whatever extent the author wishes to reveal it.

For me, that passage comes in the last fifth of the story, near the end. Andre Alexis writes:

"But years of considering these fraught unions have led me to appreciate the small miracle of unhappiness. I don't mean, of course, that unhappiness is desirable. I mean that it is capable of travelling such great distances. For instance, I often felt the impact of Bedford Lane (his father's poor neighborhood in Trinidad) on my father's behavior--his need for validation, his struggle for a sense of self-worth, his shame at his origins. What surprises me is that the lane--the houses so close to one another, the sound of a man beating his wife because he has spent the little money he had on drink, the dogs that rush at strangers--had it's influence on me as well, through my father.

I understand his feeling unworthy of love. And although I did not live on Bedford Lane, I am affected by the squalor it represented to him. It's difficult not to wonder how far back the misery goes--like seeing light from a distant star and marveling at its longevity--and how far forward. Do my own daughters feel the presence of Bedford Lane in me?"

What I find so deeply touching here is the grand sweep of the narrator's question, a question that -- like all the greatest questions in life -- cannot be answered in words but that can only be lived into. These are things most of us grapple with, in some way or another, all our lives. None of us exists in a vacuum, and none of us spring out of the ground with no context, though sometimes we would like to believe so. Instead we are living inheritors of the dreams, hopes, fears, successes, and failures of those that came before us, and it takes a long time, perhaps all our lives, to understand what this means in our lives and many of us never even come close.

Illustration by Andre Derainne

New Yorker Fiction Review #308: "We're Not So Different, You and I" by Simon Rich

2024-06-28T13:24:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the May 13, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

What we have here is a somewhat entertaining, "light snack" of a short story, written by Simon Rich who is (apparently) some kind of comedy writing Boy Wonder, being the youngest person ever hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live, and having written for a variety of publications and Pixar films as well.

I like to read a story first, without any context, and then learn about the author afterward. Sometimes I feel like it doesn't even matter who wrote the story or what the background is...sometimes it does. In this case, I suppose it makes sense that the author is a film and television writer. The setup, the dialogue, and the pacing of this short story are all very polished and professional and it has an "episode" kind of feel to it, as though it were (or should be) part of a longer work. It is, in fact, part of Simon Rich's forthcoming short story collection Glory Days.

"We're Not So Different, You and I" is a somewhat funny story about a cartoon villain named Death Skull (loosely patterned after Skeletor from He-Man) and his attempt to make friends. Death Skull is, I suppose, some sort of a stand in for the everyday man. He has walls built up, finds it difficult to reach out to people, he hides his true feelings behind humor.

Death Skull's inability to resist making lame wise-cracks (which only his henchmen find funny...because they have to), is probably the funniest part about this story. I don't know whether this is Simon Rich experimenting with some new material, or just toying around, and...again...I don't wanna know.

What I know is, this is a pretty forgettable effort by someone who is so successful that probably the last thing in the world he needs is a layup of a short story in The New Yorker to serve as advance marketing for his short story collection. But...that's the way things work. The weird part is, based on this story, I actually might crack open Glory Days if the chance ever comes along. The writing is slick, fast, and easy to digest. Furthermore, I'm willing to give Simon Rich the benefit of the doubt that there may be some really good pieces of wisdom or life observations in these stories. I'm sure he's relieved.

Movie Review: Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

2024-04-07T21:23:00.006-04:00

Google "Love Lies Bleeding" and you'll get (mostly) results relating to the the 2024 feature film -- still currently in theaters -- which I'm about to review here on this blog. But Love Lies Bleeding is also the title of a 1948 detective novel by Edmund Crispin and bearing no resemblance, plot-wise, to the current film. It's also the title of a 2005 stage play called Love Lies Bleeding, by none other than Don DeLillo. In 2011, a writer named Jess McConkey also used the title, for a novel.

Love Lies Bleeding is also, apparently, the common name for Amaranthus Caudatus, a flowering plant native to Peru. And, last of the references but not least, is a lyric from the Elton John song "Funeral for a Friend," from the 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

What do all these references have in common? Without reading each of the books and plays in question, it's pretty impossible to say. Perhaps nothing. But it at least explains why, when I first heard the title to the film a few weeks back, I did one of those "Wait...what?" kind of double-takes. If the peculiar little poetic phrase has been kicking around the English language long enough to inspire (at least (and I have to imagine there's more)) a plant name, two novels, a stage play, a mention in a rock song, and a movie, it's no wonder it sounded familiar.

Maybe that in-and-of-itself is enough of a connection, because the film at hand -- Love Lies Bleeding, in case you forgot -- has an oddly familiar type of neo-noir quality to it, especially if you grew up in the late 80s / early 90s, when the film takes place. At the same time it is a bizarre, sexy, grotesque, and wholly unique piece of filmmaking I was unable to take my eyes away from for a second. There are no "look at your watch" moments in this film; I even sat through the credits just in the simple hopes there would be a "stinger" with a few precious moments of additional footage.

Set in a nameless, seedy town in the American west in 1989, the film centers on Lou Lou (Kristen Stewart), a manager at a gym, who falls in love with Jackie (Katy O'Brien), a drifter with ambitions of becoming a body builder, who has stumbled into town on her way to a body building competition in Las Vegas. When an act of roid-rage fueled violence causes trouble for the newfound lovers, Lou Lou's father (Ed Harris), who owns the gym, a neighboring gun range, and has his hands in a variety of other illegal operations as well as the local police force, attempts to clean up the mess. I hate plot summaries with a burning passion, so that's all you need to know. Just watch the film.

Why should you watch the film?

Love Lies Bleeding is the kind of sweaty, gritty, hang-onto-your-seat species of neo-noir we don't see enough of in theaters. Don't get me wrong, this film is no Pulp Fiction, and I don't think it's necessarily trying to be, but it has that same type of dark, dangerous, and ultra-contemporary feeling, even if it is set in the 80s. From the opening scene, taking place in the absolutely perfect, analog, 80s small-town gym, featuring close-ups of sweaty bodies and trite slogans spray-painted DIY style on wooden signs, we know exactly the world we are about to step into.

Director Rose Glass does this film a huge favor by using some serious 80s deep cuts for the soundtrack. It would have been very easy to turn this film into an 80s music video, using all the familiar and by now overused 80s tracks that normally show up in a film like this, and it would have turned the film into a half-assed MTV joke of itself. I consider myself a pretty serious aficionado of 80s music, and the film still pulled a few brand new ones on me such as "Nice Mover," by Gina X Performance. Who the hell is Gina X Performance? Well, I know now. And I'm glad I do.

Speaking of "Nice Mover," that particular song backs what is -- in my opinion -- a montage that is the undisputed highlight of the film and the moment when Love Lies Bleeding truly got its hooks into me. The art of the "montage" is something that seems to have died with the 80s. Movies used montages so much back then that they became a joke. But, this being film that pays homage to the 80s, the choice to include a montage was a good one. I almost can't imagine the film succeeding without it.

Another cool element of the film is how the back story is delivered. Apparently, Lou Lou's dad is a pretty heavy-duty criminal when he's not running a shooting range and playing with oversized bugs (a personality quirk which really isn't explained or made enough of). The film does not, however, burden us with backstory, but rather delivers it in weird, short, wordless clips filmed under red lights. It's a strange choice but it works. The film relies on us to be smart enough to piece it all together, and in this case we are.

As to the actual performances, Kristen Stewart carries the film as Lou Lou, the most sane, most stable, and most genuinely likable character in the film. I can't recall ever being impressed by a performance of hers before this, to be honest. But after this, I'm going to be paying closer intention. Perhaps not as nuanced of a performance but perhaps a bit more of a pure cinematic spectacle is the glistening, toned Katy O'Brien as Jackie, who dominates the screen every moment she's on it. Whether she's doing pullups in her bra and panties, posing in front of a mirror, or hulking out due to the black market steroids Lou Lou has been providing her, she is impossible to look away from.

New Yorker Fiction Review #307: "Neighbors" by Zach Williams

2024-04-01T14:02:00.005-04:00

Review of the short story from the Mar. 25, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

Zach Williams is a new one on me, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. After all, my New Yorker short story reviewing has been sporadic at best the past (oh jeeze) three or four years now, and also there are just too many emerging authors to keep track of any more and I can barely keep track of the ones appearing in this publication.

Apparently Zach Williams' first published short story "Wood Sorrell House" graced the pages of The New Yorker in March 2022. For someone's first publication credit to be in The New Yorker, they have to be pretty damned good. And, after reading my first Zach Williams short story "Neighbors" last night, I can conclusively say that's true.

"Neighbors" tells the story of a young family who move to the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco sometime in mid/late pandemic era and find themselves sharing their townhouse wall with an elderly woman named Bing who plays the TV too loud and whose ancient landline phone also rings loudly and frequently. When the dad in the story (the main character and narrator) sort of befriends Bing's middle aged son and becomes Bing's de facto "check in" neighbor, a strange incident ensues. It should also be noted that the couple have moved to San Francisco to get away from the location of the wife's recent infidelity, something which they have decided to work through and keep the family together.

I never know whether or not to put spoilers in these reviews but, in this particular case it's almost impossible not to review this story without spoiling it. In this particular instance, I'm going to refrain from spoiling the plot. I will just say the following:

1.) I really, really like the way Zach Williams exposes details and deeper themes in the story, something which is often difficult to do without seeming heavy handed. Williams appears to be a big acolyte of the "show don't tell" school of writing which, although it's dangerous to abide to closely to truisms and quips ("write what you know" etc.), of all the off-the-cuff, back of the envelope writing advice out there is probably some of the most useful. In Williams's case it makes the story seem organic and helps the prose recede into the background as the tale unfolds. The story had me mesmerized, for the most part.

2.) I do somewhat wish Williams had pushed the story's central conflict a bit further. There is a moment of tension that takes up almost the entire middle of the story as (sorry, I am going to spoil it a bit) the main character confronts an intruder in Bing's house; however, nothing really ultimately happens from this incident, and it seemed like a wasted opportunity. All the same, Williams manages to make the story seem meaningful even without some "whizz bang" type of plot twist. That in and of itself is an achievement.

3.) I have long maintained that, in most short stories or works of art, the author drops -- somewhere in the story -- the keys to understanding what it is really meant to be "about." Of course there are many layers of "about" in any work of art, but without a subtle, sometimes only one sentence key, you run the risk of leaving the story without any real clue to why the author wrote it. In the case of "Neighbors" the key to understanding the story lies in the following lines:

"A paradoxical calmness came over me. And what I felt, then, was that my life was not in me but diffused across the darkness, which was an unbroken field containing everything. Me and him. Anna, the girls. Bing. Everything. And so, no matter what happened next, there could be no consequence, because I had no identity separate from that field. No one did, nothing did. Everything just was, together, without boundaries or names."

No, this is a deep, deep philosophical thought. This is not the kind of thing you write a 2,000 word short story about and then never come back to. This is the kind of thing it takes years, decades, a lifetime to work with and, if this is Zach Williams' material, I will 100% be reading more of his work.

Zach Williams was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2021-2023. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's. His short story collection "Beautiful Days," is forthcoming in June 2024.

New Yorker Fiction Review #306: "Hostel" by Fiona McFarlane

2024-03-17T11:25:00.006-04:00

Review of the short story from the Mar. 11, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

Fiona McFarlane is one of those rare writers who can awaken me out of my short story reviewing slumber to actually read an entire story and write a review. There was once, if you can believe it, a time when I reviewed these shorts stories on time and in sequence, providing real (or imagined) value to the reading public. But I digress...

Fiona McFarlane wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker short stories -- "Art Appreciation" from the May 6, 2013 issue --which then led me to read her subsequent novel The Night Guest (2013). Both of which I reviewed on this blog and, while it's been fully 10 years and change since I've read anything by her, her prose made enough of an impression on me that, here I am, eagerly reading and reviewing "Hostel," her latest effort in The New Yorker.

This short story did not fail to remind me why I like Fiona McFarlane's stuff. Her stories always have this underlying thread of foreboding, of darkness coming from somewhere. You can't be sure where, but it's there, and it's coming. She still gets high marks for her pacing and her grasp of what's needed -- just enough of what's needed -- to develop a narrator and a character. And she accomplishes that trick of being so good that her prose sometimes recedes thereby making you forget that you're reading a story, which ought to be more common, but is not.

In this particular tale, a first-person narrator relates the story of a young Australian couple (once close friends of the narrator) take a walk at night and find an attractive young woman, a backpacker staying at the local youth hostel, crying in the bushes. What ensues from there is not exactly what you might think (and depending on what kind of a mind you have, you might think of a lot of different situations that could ensue from there); however, given the way McFarlane sets up and unravels the story, you know its not going to be good.

What's important to remember about this story is that it's narrated by someone who knew the couple in the story. Narrated as though you might be sitting down with the narrator at brunch or at coffee, years later. So there is that sense of doubt, always, and there is the slight undertone of prurience, as the narrator confesses to having hoped the male end of the couple (Roy) would have made a pass at her when she used to stay over at the couple's apartment.

What sticks with me about a story like this is -- for one thing -- the time travel element. Sitting here years later with the narrator, we get not only the story, but we get the story backloaded (even subtly) with everything the narrator has experienced since then; we get the story told to us within the context of the years that have passed since. For example, in the actual action of the story, Roy and Mandy are a happy young couple about to have their first child. In the narrator's broader contextual world, they are long-since divorced.

Further adding to the complexity and darkly mysterious shading of the story is the fact that we don't really get confirmation that what is supposed to have happened (No Spoilers) actually did. McFarlane brings us 99% of the way there, but stops short of confirming it. Much like in life, we can almost not ever know the real answer to things. We have some facts we can rest our worlds upon, but the rest is and will always be a mystery.

New Yorker Fiction Review #305: "Crown Heights North" by Rivka Galchen

2024-02-05T08:31:00.005-05:00

Review of the short story from the Dec. 25, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

A story by Rivka Galchen is enough to make me get off my gazoo and start reviewing New Yorker short stories again. This one was kind of a light snack. Nothing overly consequential but an interesting sort of exercise -- pun intended -- about one man's afterlife, which (impossibly) somehow includes a running app.

The main character -- who is now dead -- died in his mid-fifties, and has not been a runner since his mid-30s. Personally, I hope Rivka Galchen is not here suggesting that giving up running leads to an untimely middle-aged death, but I doubt it. The story seems to have more to do with the main character's crossing the border between life and death and realizing -- for better or for worse (does it even matter at some point) -- that there are no great secrets to be revealed in death. In fact, in Rivka Galchen's vision, the process of crossing over to the next realm is somewhat like life itself: you have no real choice but to keep going, but you are not alone in the process. In the case of this man's afterlife, he has the running app's Global Head Coach who, we must assume and it would be ridiculous not to, is a stand-in for God.

If there was a such thing as a short story catalogue or library for every short story ever written, there would be an entire section for short stories that take place within the author's vision of the afterlife. It's almost its own genre of fiction. Never personally been my favorite, but it's a subject a lot of writers turn to at some point. Writers are, after all, human beings and as human beings we all know we're going to die and are obsessed with that fact, to varying degrees. How we, as individuals, deal with this immutable fact is as varied and deeply personal as our own personalities and inner lives.

Thus, in a way, a story like this feels like the author being as open and vulnerable as she possibly can be, about one of the most intimate topics human beings deal with and will always have to deal with. In Rivka Galchen's vision, death and dying are indeed no picnic -- the main character looks back on a swirling whirlpool of visions, hallucinations, and memories while in the ICU -- but it is bearable and there is guidance throughout the process.

As someone who used to run but who now hates running for fitness (I believe in staying in shape, even running on a treadmill, but jogging/running outside, on the street is not something I plan to do much of ever again in my life), I do like Rivka Galchen's use of running as a sort of "purgatory" that has to be gotten through in order to reach whatever is beyond.

Movie Review: American Fiction (2023)

2024-01-30T20:22:00.002-05:00

American Fiction (2023, Amazon MGM Studios) is one of the best mainstream theater releases I've seen in a long time. Highly recommend.

The film features Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat, Ali, Syriana, a variety of Wes Anderson films) as a professor who is also a frustrated novelist. Why is he frustrated? Because his books aren't popular. Why are they not popular? Specifically, so says his agent, his books are not "black enough." And so, a few plot twists and turns aside, he sets out to write a book that is black enough. Laughs, irony, and various levels of social criticism ensue.

Where American Fiction succeeds is by taking a humorous slant on the way that institutions like academia and the publishing industry handle any issues of race with such a gentle touch that it almost fetishes race and, in the process, continues to position people of color as "other."

It is difficult to put a lighthearted spin on issues related to race and class, but sometimes it's necessary. And in that vein, American Fiction is a lighthearted and welcome film that also, in the process, ends up being a heartwarming (yes, heartwarming) story about family, middle-age, careers, and about being genuine to oneself regardless of whichever way society, the publishing industry, or even your own family is pushing you.

If I had a complaint, it's that the film is almost too lighthearted, not pushing the ultimate conflict to enough of a resolution. Furthermore, there were a few opportunities for the director (Cord Jefferson) to sort of "go bigger," namely with the side plot about the female writer (played by Issa Diop) who essentially triggers the main character to write his "blacker" novel by writing her own, which has succeeded. There were a couple squandered opportunities like this that could have pushed the film in a funnier, smarter direction. As is, it ends up feeling a little bit like a consequence-less yet well-paced story about witty, nicely dressed, urbane people whose lives are otherwise pretty tame, reminiscent of Woody Allen at his most mundane.

I don't know that I'll ever find the need to re-watch this film and I'd like to fast forward to see if, in five years, anyone is still talking about this film or still remembers it. I have a sense the answer is "no." However, right now, in 2024 the film feels necessary and like a welcome breath of fresh air in an epoch and a culture in which we could all use a bit of fresh air and a laugh at our own collective expense.

Free YouTube Movie Reviews: Fitzcarraldo (1982)

2023-09-19T10:58:00.000-04:00

You may know Werner Herzog from his famous and tragic documentary film Grizzly Man (2005), at least that's the first film that comes to mind when I think of him. But he also directed something like 20 feature films, among them is Fitzcarraldo (1982), free on YouTube right now.

Starring Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, this adventure drama is set in the Peruvian rainforest around the turn of the last century, and tells the (true) story of the Irish business man Brian Fitzgerald, who attempts to make money in the then-burgeoning rubber trade so that he can build an opera house in the remote Peruvian village where he lives. Rarely does the plot outline of a film cause me to thoughtfully raise an eyebrow, but this one did.

What's great about this film is the seemingly ramshackle, low-budget filming and the setting. Apparently, most of the stunts in the film (eventually Fitzgerald and his team of mostly indigenous workers attempt to pull a 300 ton ship up and over an isthmus between two rivers so they can get to the supply of rubber trees in a remote area of the jungle) were real. As in, while making the movie, they actually tried to pull the ship over the mountain and then sail it down some treacherous rapids. And you can tell because, other than one brief segment which is clearly done using a model, it all looks astoundingly realistic...and it is. You actually feel like you're there with them, sweating in the mud and creaking along down the river in an impossibly cumbersome vessel not built for what they are trying to do with it.

In the balance, it just happens to be a sort of (dare I say it) heartwarming tale of ambition, dreams, and even friendship. Fitzgerald -- called "Fitzcarraldo" by Spanish speakers who cannot pronounce his name correctly -- is obsessed with the opera, a simple enough preoccupation. And, although his girlfriend (Cardinale) and his business associates do not particularly share his enthusiasm, he is able to win them over with his charisma and determination.

It would have been easy to turn this film into a dark tale of treachery with a grizzly, violent ending -- much of the action takes place as the crew of the boat are surrounded and outnumbered by the indigenous people, with whom they seem to have struck a tenuous truce -- but (spoiler alert) the film doesn't end that way.

Ultimately, Fitzcarraldo is a visual spectacle and (I think) a tremendous filmmaking achievement that is suitable for all ages and -- despite the black cloud of danger and violence that hangs over the film -- turns out to be uplifting.

Incidentally the story about how the film was made is a whole other fascinating subject in and of itself. Apparently the likes of Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, and Jason Robards were at one point supposed to star in the film and -- because of his temperament and frequent clashes with Herzog -- Klaus Kinski was at one point in danger of being killed by the indigenous extras in the film.

Free YouTube Movie Reviews: 13 Days (2000)

2023-09-16T09:43:00.004-04:00

Free for streaming right now (with commercials) is 13 Days, a 145 minute feature film based on the actual facts of the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and starring Kevin Costner as Kevin O'Donnell, one of the key figures in the Kennedy administration at that time, and Bruce Greenwood (who? yeah, he's one of those guys) as John F. Kennedy.

This film is essentially a workplace drama. It's just that the workplace happens to be the White House in the Fall of 1962 and the "work" involved dispatching fighter jets and calling the captains of naval destroyers who have their fingers on the triggers of torpedos.

If nothing else, this film reached peak levels of "middle aged white men in suits arguing" and -- unless I'm missing something -- was peak "Kennedy administration feature film era." If there has been another significant one since, I'm not aware of it. In my mind, September 11th, 2001 closed the book on that particular chapter of American Grief and ushered in a whole new one. If they had waited another year to make this film, I doubt they could have gotten done and it would have ended up a TV mini-series or something.

What this film does very well is show how the Geo-Political sausage is made (or at least, how it was made back then), as the highest government officials and military leaders sit or stand in conference room after conference room arguing who and when to bomb, or whether to use diplomacy to solve the problem of an imminent weapons build up in Cuba. Kennedy is portrayed as a liberal peace-maker who wants to use any possible means other than violence and war to solve the problem, while he is virtually surround by a pack of old, grizzled war-hungry generals.

Anyone who knows the story of the embattled and short-lived Kennedy administration, and is familiar with all the conspiracy theories about his assassination, will fully understand this story already and know why at times it's so cringe-worthy. Just about one year later, he would be dead, and almost immediately after that the grizzled generals depicted in those rooms would escalate the U.S.'s Vietnam operations -- which Kennedy had been trying to wind-down -- into a full-scale war and we all know what happened there.

To me that's really the underlying point of 13 Days. Yes, the Cuban missile crisis was an extremely tense moment for the U.S. and the world, in which we stood on the brink of all-out nuclear war, even if we may have pushed ourselves to the brink out of fear and itchy trigger fingers. But the broader message is that Kennedy was beset on all sides by forces that wanted to counteract his instincts, and though he came through the Cuban Missile Crisis okay, he was still doomed.

This is a good, solid film but it won't be for everyone. Some of the military action scenes keep this from being a completely office-bound Mad Men-esque workplace drama (minus any of the sex). And if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty of the JFK administration -- there are likely to be fewer and fewer of us each year -- then you'll not need to watch this. If I had one major complaint it would be that they should have cast a bigger name star in the role of JFK, and maybe even of RFK. If you're going to have Kevin Costner on screen for 85% of the movie, you need someone with a better "face" and more acting chops than Bruce Greenwood to handle the job of being the president. No offense to Greenwood's fine acting performance, but it's like a bulldog and a chihuahua in a fight. The supporting cast is so middling that it occasionally felt like Kevin Costner found himself plopped in the middle of a made for TV movie.

Free YouTube Movie Reviews: The Ghostwriter (2010)

2023-09-14T22:29:00.001-04:00

Since I have sworn-off all paid streaming services and been kicked off the ones for whom I was using someone else's password, I have started watching free movies on YouTube. There is a surprisingly good selection of feature films out there for free, including...

...The Ghost Writer (2010), directed by Roman Polanski and featuring a heavy-hitting cast led by Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, but rounded out by a platoon of recognizable supporting actors and actresses including Kim Cattrall, Jim Belushi, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach, and a bunch of other "hey, it's that guy" level stars such as Olivia Williams (Rushmore, The Sixth Sense), Jon Bernthal (one of the main guys from The Walking Dead) and Tom Wilkinson, who has excelled at playing rich, evasive, corrupt or depraved characters in bit parts for as long as I can remember.

Based upon a British novel called The Ghost, the plot on this one is pretty sound: when the former British Prime Minister's ghost writer turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, a new one -- played by Ewan McGregor -- is hired to complete the job. Traveling to Martha's Vineyard, Mass. where the former Prime Minister (Brosnan) is vacationing, The Ghost (as McGregor's character is called) starts to unravel the former Prime Minister's carefully hidden past. I loathe detailed plot synopses, so we'll just leave it at that.

Overall thoughts:

For a pretty standard mystery/thriller type movie, the cinematography and direction are incredible. Somehow they manage to make every single minute of this film seem dark and foreboding, without seeming hammed up or overwrought. Even the mundane scenes are shot in such a way that shadows seem to surround the main character. You just never lose the sense that danger is around every corner.
I wish I'd seen this film on the big screen because -- related to the above point -- the setting of this film is just fantastic. Since Polanski can't travel to the U.S., the film was shot in coastal Denmark and Germany, stand-ins for Martha's vineyard. There is always something cinematic about the beach in the winter. Furthermore, the house they used for the former Prime Minister's dwelling could not have been chosen better. It is almost a character of its own in this film.
Big shout-out to Kim Cattrall for her performance in this film, even though she had to fake her way -- lightly -- through an English accent. Having not seen Cattrall since Sex and the City, it was a pleasant surprise to find her in a completely different type of role. Cattrall has always been great to look at on screen, but in this role she simply radiates with a kind of composed, yet animalistic sexuality and completely steals every scene she is in, just by standing there. It's also a pleasant reminder that she does have an acting range beyond her role as Samantha in Sex and the City.
Not Ewan McGregor's or Pierce Brosnan's best roles, by any means, but they turn in solid performances being the pros that they are. Hey, every film can't be an Oscar Winner.
The worst thing I can say about this movie is that it started to heat up just a bit too late and the resolution seemed maybe just a little bit forced; however, there is a big payoff in the end.

If you are like me and don't have a streaming service, this 128 minute film will be well worth your time.

New Yorker Fiction Review #304: "Valley of the Moon" by Paul Yoon

2023-07-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

Review of the short story from the July 3, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

"Valley of the Moon" is a short story from Paul Yoon's forthcoming short story collection The Hive and the Honey, set for release in October. Based on the strength of this story, I would be inclined to buy the whole short story collection, or at least rent it from the library.

"Valley of the Moon" tells the story of a North Korean man who returns to his home after the war (presumably the Korean war), deep in the mountains, after a long spell spent in a refugee camp and, before that, serving in the army. I say North Korean only because in the story one of the characters refers to wanting to reach the border, which is some 100 miles north of where the action takes place, and I assume this refers to the border with China, since I further assume no one would want to go north to escape into North Korea. But the politics in this story are never fully explained, which is one of the reasons I like it.

The man settles back into his solitary life on his family farm, his mother and father having been -- again, presumably -- killed at some point during the war. He accidentally commits a murder. Adopts two children who eventually run away. Has a telephone installed into his home. Grows old. And eventually dies. It is a simple, essentially plotless, and yet intriguing story.

"Valley of the Moon" is a great example of how a story doesn't have to have a complex plot in order to be gripping. Sometimes simply the character and the "world-building" are enough to carry the reader along. Furthermore, Paul Yoon's choice to keep the reader in the dark about specific things like the exact geographical location gives the story a sense of being unmoored in space, time, history; such a story could take place in any country and at almost any time throughout history. In part, Paul Yoon is exploring the effects of isolation and loneliness upon the human heart. That is not something that needs to be tied to a specific time and place.

What also gives this story its tantalizing quality is the overriding presence of violence, death, and mystery. The main character Tongsu, is returning from a war which he narrowly survived, while many of his contemporaries didn't. In the very beginning, he and his fellow passengers on the bus discuss their war stories and show off their injuries. Tongsu has lost an eye.

When Tongsu finally makes it to his family farm, he finds bomb craters everywhere and assumes -- without much emotion -- that his family have been killed. He does not find out how they died and never will. As Tongsu grows into his solitary life on the farm, he discovers a place he likes to visit at night -- the eponymous "valley of the moon" -- a riverbed where he likes to sit at night in the light of the moon. But one night, a mysterious visitor accosts him and Tongsu accidentally kills him. For the rest of Tongsu's life, this murder exists, in various ways, as a little dark cloud in the corner of his skies; never fully darkening out the sun, but never leaving either.

Paul Yoon's achievement in this story is subtle, but I believe he has achieved something of note along the lines of the "less is more," and "show don't tell" philosophy of fiction writing. The narration sits at a far enough remove from the main character, that we as the reader do not feel spoon-fed or overburdened with detail. And yet the details Yoon does use in the story are carefully chosen to create a character whose world and activities are foreign, even to the main character himself. Tongsu, it seems, is as isolated and alien in his own environment as a man living on the moon. He is as foreign to his own post-war world as we the reader.

New Yorker Fiction Review #303: "Thursday" by George Saunders

2023-07-07T13:44:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the June 12, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

If you are in any way interested in contemporary literature, you know that when a George Saunders short story pops up in The New Yorker, you are going to stop and read it. No questions asked. Saunders is, hands down, one of the giants of American letters and perhaps the greatest living writer of short stories English language.

While I would not put "Thursday" among his most notable efforts, I would say that it rewards the reader's 20-30 minute sojourn into the world of the story. In other words, if you get the chance, read this.

The story is about Gerard, an elderly man who visits a sort of "memory implantation clinic" a là Total Recall, in which you can go back and relive your childhood memories for 15-20 minutes at a time and they will seem as vivid as they did 50 years ago or whatever.

Sounds great, right? The problem is when Gerard goes back into his childhood memories, only to reemerge into real life and realize...he had just relived someone else's childhood.

The rest of the story, borrowing a little bit from Total Recall as well as Inception, centers in why this happened and what Gerard makes of it all. The answer is somewhat more mundane than you might think, but still makes for a good tale.

What I found most memorable -- and most human (probably Saunders at his best) -- was Gerard's inner monologue, scanning back through his memories, reviewing various girlfriends and the faults he found with each that prevented him from marrying them and hence, explaining (at least partly) why he is single into his old age and looking to revisit his memories with the help of the clinic.

New Yorker Fiction Review #302: "Do You Love Me" by Hila Blum

2023-06-27T22:31:00.004-04:00

Review of the short story from the June 5, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

The opening lines and paragraphs of a short story are all-important. As a reader, you are diving into a new fictional world which you will only inhabit for 30-45 minutes, at most. Thus, the author does not have a long time to hook you. Furthermore, unless -- like me -- you read these stories for the purposes of reviewing them and therefore force yourself to finish them, you could very easily be confused, put-off, or (more commonly) bored by the opening paragraphs and put the story down forever.

The first line of "Do You Love Me," by Israeli writer Hila Blum, is intriguing enough that I think most readers would decide to push through and at least see what the story is all about. It is one of those sentences laden with so much potential meaning and personal history, you almost cannot resist reading further:

"The first time I saw my granddaughters, I was standing across the street, didn't dare go any closer."

The first question in mind is, obviously...why is this the first time she's seeing her granddaughters? Furthermore, why does she not dare go any closer? Hila Blum addresses these questions in the short story "Do You Love Me," even if she does not explicitly answer them.

This time-jumping story starts in the present day, as an Israeli woman named Yoella finds herself (as in the the passage above) in the Netherlands attempting to track down her daughter Leah and Leah's two daughters, her grandchildren. The rest of the story is concerned with Yoella's reminiscences of Leah's childhood and family life with Meir, Leah's father and Yoella's partner, with an eye (it seems) to what might have caused Leah's relationship to her parents to go off the rails to a point where, as an adult, she now has a family in another continent and has cut off contact. There does not explicitly seem to be a direct incident or trauma that caused this separation, making it all the more mysterious and making the story all the more interesting.

In fact, if anything that is remarkable about this short story it is the way the author gives us an extreme close-up view of family life and family dysfunction, while not feeling the need to hit us over the head with anything, or overburden us with a clumsy A+B=C style plot. Instead, reading this story is like reading tea leaves, and in that way is very similar to what we do with our own lives as we look for meaning in them. Who among us has not looked wondered, "Why am I the way I am?" or "Why is my relationship to (whoever) the way it is?" and looked back into the now murky -- if not completely opaque -- waters of their own past for answers? We have all done this, and probably do it every day to some degree.

What we see in this story is that, perhaps, Yoella's own dysfunctional upbringing -- of which we get only the most glancing details -- caused her to be an excessively doting mother. And yet, perhaps also a cruel and distant one, evidenced by the fact that she and Meir called their daughter Leah "Foghorn" when she was a child, and saying that she had dozens of other names for Leah as well. To me this sounds like spirited ribbing gone a little too far, and at too young an age.

One part of the story that sticks out is an incident in which the small family -- Yoella, Meir, and Leah -- are at a campground on vacation, playing cards, and Leah gets caught cheating at the game. Again, I'm not precisely sure how something like this relates to Leah and Yoella becoming estranged in the long run, but it must in some way.

Yoella, it seems, has some intimacy issues. Her husband, in fact, was scared that she would not be able to love their child when it was born.

"I thought after you gave birth I would have to have you committed."

I listened breathlessly. The months of pregnancy with Leah were a horror ripening from within--the thing that was growing inside me, forming from my flesh, was also entirely sealed off and sujugating.

"I saw how you were holding on," Meir continued. "I knew you were holding on by your fingertips. I remember thinking, She'll have the baby and then fall to pieces. She'll never be able to take care of anyone, ever. I thought that after the birth I'd have to raise the baby on my own and also take care of you."

Is this just a type of parental cold feet? Or was this driven by some deep type of coldness inside Yoella that would eventually make her unable to love the adult Leah?

In this case, I am perfectly okay with a short story being inscrutable. The rich reality of the details and the accurate depiction of the joy and frustrations of family life -- and the way that we try and make sense of something that ultimately makes no sense (our pasts, and our lives) -- made this story satisfying enough without some big reveal or plot twist in it. A prime example of a short story that is so engaging on the journey of reading it that you don't care where it's going and even that it doesn't necessarily go anywhere.

New Yorker Fiction Review #301: "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz" by Michele Mari

2023-06-23T15:37:00.000-04:00

Review of the short story from the May 29, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

There's not much that can be said about "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz" other than it's a cute short story about a group of boys at a boarding school in Italy in the 1960s. I probably wouldn't even be reviewing it right now except for the fact that I took the time to read it, so I figured why not at least write something about it.

The details about Italian life in the 1960s are somewhat interesting, as well as the perspective: it is told from the close third-person perspective of one of the boys. Except that what Michele Mari manages to do -- and pretty well -- is imbue the narration with a grandiosity fitting of an adult. Since the story is about a 10 year old boy and his 10 year old boy problems -- namely that he and his friends keep losing soccer balls into the yard of a reclusive neighbor who never gives the balls back -- it has a funny and charming sort of effect.

There is a cute (yes, cute) plot twist in the end that makes this short story worth reading if you are in the mood for a light, easy literary snack. Otherwise, I doubt I would ever find reason to revisit this short story and could not really recommend it.

Illustration by Guido Scarbottolo

New Yorker Fiction Review #300: "Long Island" by Nicole Krauss

2023-06-14T13:35:00.002-04:00

Review of the short story from the May 22, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

Hard to believe, but as of this entry I have read and reviewed 300 short stories from The New Yorker over the past 10 years. I plan to write a separate entry covering my thoughts on what this project has meant to me (and not meant) over the past decade and what I have learned about short stories. But for now, I wanted to review this the latest offering from Nicole Krauss, called "Long Island."

I greatly enjoyed the last Nicole Krauss story I read in The New Yorker -- called "Switzerland" -- from back in Sept. of 2020. Since then I have not read anything else of hers, which is frankly not a surprise. I always say I'm going to go back and read books by a lot of these authors, but in the words of Andrew Marvell: "If there was but world enough and time..."

"Long Island" is a seemingly autobiographical recollection or anecdote (you can't really call this one a story) about the narrator's family moving from Manhattan to Long Island, to inhabit a stately old "fixer-upper" mansion. Along the way, the character relates what it was like to grow up in the late-70s and 80s, complete with the at-this-point somewhat trite reminiscences about how our parents left us alone for extended periods of time back then, unlike today, etc. etc. but Krauss stops short of overburdening us with these such details. If she had mentioned anything about participation awards, however, I would have stopped reading on the spot.

The recollections start to form into something a bit more like a story when she and her cousins find a safe in the closet of their Uncle Zolly's bedroom and attempt -- with eventual success -- to open it and find what is contained inside. In terms of any firsthand action, that's about it. Much of the rest of the story is consumed by placing her family into the broader context of their new Long Island neighborhood -- apparently more filled with nefarious characters than it would seem, at first -- and within the broader arc of the post-WWII world, as hers is a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust.

The strength of this story lies in the details of Krauss's recollections about her family and the people that made up her world back in those days, the kinds of details you almost cannot make up precisely because they are so varied and yet so mundane. The kinds of things our actual lives -- and not fictional stories -- are made up of.

Furthermore, Krauss's ability to draw meaning from these characters and their actions, as she sits at the far remove of middle age, is entertaining and thought-provoking to read. Take for example her description of her Uncle Zolly's life on the fringes of the law:

"We had come to accept that Uncle Zolly was criminal in the way of so many: that he operated outside the limits of the permissible because life was an ongoing struggle for survival that one was forever about to lose; that certain versions of morality simply weren’t affordable; that life had to be lived defensively, which required a shrewdness that saw a way around or over or through the obstacles, a way to evade the things that were coming to close you down, put you away, even kill you."

Whether or not we can relate because we have any characters like this in our own families, Krauss is here making a trenchant observation on life and the human character. These kinds of observations are, at the end of the day, why we read prose and fiction (why I do, at least), and it's pleasantly surprising what Krauss is able to do even in a simple recollection like this about an era in her family's life.

Illustration by Javi Aznarez