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").