New Yorker stories

I recently gained access to the New Yorker archives and am totally thrilled about it, specifically loving old Mavis Gallant stories. They're so perfect in all their details and their explanations of human peculiarities. Reading them I feel like a student, that I need to understand and memorize everything she's doing so that I can learn to do it myself. I'm looking at the one I'm currently in the middle of, called "The Chosen Husband," and trying to find some lines to excerpt but I can't choose because there are so many beautiful lines, and yet I'm not sure their beauty will be conveyed out of their perfect context.

For instance,

Marie at this moment seemed to think he would do; at least, she showed no sign of distaste, such as pushing out her lower lip or crumpling her chin. Perhaps she had been getting read to drop her Greek: Mme. Carette had warned her that she would have to be a servant to his mother, and eat peculiar food. "He's never asked me to," said Marie, and that was part of the trouble. He hadn't asked anything.

I'm particularly liking this one (although I feel that "particularly" about many of them), it being set in Montreal and mentioning the street I live on several times, and having all sorts of good detail about the city in 1949. For instance I had no idea that the mayor was imprisoned for sedition throughout the World War II, either for agitating against conscription or for saying that French Canadians are closer to Italy than England and also that they are Fascists "by blood but not by name" whatever that means. The quote continues "The Latins have always been in favour of dictators." What is he talking about? It's almost charming in its craziness. (this information is all wikipedia, Gallant simply alludes to a mayor's internment during the war).

I am not as in love with the most recent fiction issue, in which I found two of the stories downright bad and the three best were good but not amazing. The magazine did this thing where it got contributions from their chosen "Best 20 under 40" (there's only seven in the issue, the others are in future issues). I have a feeling that they made the list first, got the contributions later. They then maybe had to accept whatever their solicited writer gave to them, and some of the stories seemed thin and rushed. I liked Jonathan Safran Foer's story for being stylistically unusual, but the end was disappointly weak. The other two I liked best, by ZZ Packer and C.E. Morgan, seemed cut off at weird points. The story about the two runaways seemed like a novel excerpt, and I think I might like the novel that it would be part of. Gary Shteyngart is what I imagine you would get if you walked onto St. Viateur and picked up the worst Mile End hipster you could find and then smooshed him into written form. It's even stronger in the story from the issue but it's also pretty true of The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003), which I found very funny at first and then not.

I think some contemporary writers (examples here, maybe, being Philipp Meyer and Salvatore Scibona) confuse nasty occurrences with interesting plotting. On the other hand, the seven stories mostly have good titles (like "The Entire North Side Was Covered With Fire").

Howard Jacobson, Coming From Behind (1983)

Coming From Behind was recommended to me by someone who, though I didn't know this until later, hadn't read the book. She had read a later book by the same author and found it funny. Maybe I'm not as subject to humour as some people (ie maybe I don't enjoy a joke as much as the next guy) but I found this book really irritating. It's about a professor at a polytechnic (those second-class universities they used to have in England until they abolished them but everyone still treats them as second class because the English don't let status markers be erased quite that easily). His life is terrible and depressing and he himself is terrible and depressing in his values and aspirations and his general state of being a schlub. So is everyone else in the book. It's that approach to comedy where it's funny because everything is blown up into hyperbole. And bad things happen but I don't care because a) it's inevitable that bad things happen in this kind of book, so I'm braced for it (I have a low tolerance, under regular circumstances, for bad news, even in fiction) and b) I dislike everyone involved.

It's is also extremely, but exceedingly, Jewy. He's obsessed with everything being about being Jewish. Maybe it's because he's British, where there's less of a tradition of writers writing about Jewiness. I don't love that kind of thing, being kind of an unjewy Jew myself, and in this case it became particularly irritating because it is subjected to the same hyperbolizing treatment as everything else, so that, for instance, the reason dude doesn't know what a flower is called is because he's Jewish.

Occasionally I found it funny, but mostly I just wanted to get to the end.

Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk (2006)

Since I'm running a terrible backlog in this chronicle of my reading, I've had a fair bit of time to reflect on Mother's Milk before sitting down to write about it. And I think I like it better now than I did when I read it. Some books are like that for me, they swirl around and mature in the mind. I don't know if that happens a lot to other people. Certainly in music it's a common idea that you have to listen to something three or four times before you know if you really like it.

Mother's Milk is narrated by three different characters with two chapters of first-person apiece: first the eldest son of a family, who is four years old (I believe; one of downsides of writing with such a delay is that the book is back at the bibliotheque). He's a strange four year old in that there's absolutely no indication that he's four, except that the book tells you so. He's preternaturally precocious. In other kid's-voice books, the kid is often unusually smart or gifted but still a kid. If it was St. Aubyn's goal to achieve that kind of balance, he failed. The other two narrators are the mother and father of the nuclear family. They're very intellectually and wryly clever, with a feeling of superiority that is not exactly my favourite, but at least it fits since they're adults.

I don't usually like to say that a book has a theme, because it feels reductionist and assumptionist, but this book definitely has a theme. It is a consideration of the parents' relationships with their own parents, but really only the mothers. They each had what they consider to be highly dysfunctional childhoods, in the sense that both their mothers were too preoccupied with other matters to properly love and care for their children, and, when they became parents themselves, these two seem to have done it with a conscious mission to improve parenting and break the cycle of dysfunction, and both seem to have worried whether or not they would accomplish it. During the period the book is set in, the mother of the pair of little boys has gone over to the light side. She's a wholly, self-sacrificingly attentive mother. She does everything she can to make life perfect, especially for her younger son. The father, on the other hand, is falling apart. He's fighting a lot with his mother and mourning the loss of the mothering attentions of his wife, who now has no time for him because of the aforementioned wholeness of her attention to her baby. And his bitterness is infecting his precocious and perceptive elder son. To his credit, he realizes that he's doing this, and feels bad about it. I suppose both are partially succeeding in their attempts to break the they-fuck-you-up cycle, and partly, inevitably, fucking up in their turn.

It's a neatly organized book. It's an intelligent book. But it doesn't feel like a lovable book. Maybe for the very reason that it states its theme and makes its arguments too clearly. It made me reflect on the nature of parenthood and the history of families, and it had interesting insights into those questions, but they were essayistic insights rather than flowing fiction.