Crime-Fiction Issue: "Slide to Unlock"

By Ed Park
~1100 words

A man contemplates the logic behind his many cyber passwords.

Most of the sentences in the story explain the logic behind one password or another: "Your daughter's name backward plus the year of her birth" or "Your daughter's best friend's name backward" or "The girl at work backward and lowercase plus last two digits of current year." Every once in a while the flow is interrupted by a two-word sentence in italics: Stop stalling. Only in the last paragraph is it revealed why the protagonist is rehearsing his passwords in this manner.

I liked the premise of this piece, but I have a few objections. First, I don't find second-person narratives convincing when they are really just a substitute for first-person. If there is a good reason—shame or psychological remoteness, for example—for the narrator to distance himself, the second-person can be effective (Junot Díaz's "Miss Lora" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love" come to mind in this regard). But I don't see the justification here; instead it feels like a phony attempt at suspense. Second, the transition into the last section feels artificial for me and, to some extent, defies the general logic of the narrative in order to set up an O. Henry ending.

Though not without flaws, "Slide to Unlock" is an entertaining story built on a unique premise to which we can all relate.

Satisfactory.


Also from the crime-fiction issue: "Brotherly Love," "Scenes of the Crime," "Happy Trails," "Rough Deeds," "An Inch and a Half of Glory."

"The Third-Born"

By Mohsin Hamid
~4700 words

Through the accident of his third-born status, a young boy seems poised to rise out of squalor.

The story is a kind of a monologue directed at the unnamed main character, told in the second-person by a narrator—possibly the protagonist at a later stage in life—with direct knowledge of the future. The main point seems to be that the desperate conditions in which the boy lives (he is suffering from hepatitis E when the story opens) do not doom him to a life of misery:

As you lie motionless afterward, a jaundiced village boy, radish juice dribbling from the corner of your lips and forming a small patch of mud on the ground, it must seem that getting filthy rich is beyond your reach. But have faith. Your are not as powerless as you appear. Your moment is about to come.

But the narrator never reveals this "moment," preferring to dwell on the luck of the draw that makes it possible:

There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do do with chance, and the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village [like the firstborn sister]. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant [like the second-born brother]. Third means you are not, like your parents' fourth child, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.

While "The Third-Born" is beautifully written and abounds with fascinating characters and rich descriptions of the setting (an unnamed developing country, perhaps the author's native Pakistan), it is weak on plot and feels more like a novel excerpt than a self-contained story.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Third-Born" to be ___.
Reader challenge: This week's story by Mohsin Hamid is written in the second person, a once-unusual choice that appears to be gaining in popularity. Off the top of my head I can name four other second-person stories: "Forever Overhead" by David Foster Wallace (1999), "Miss Lora" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love" by Junot Díaz (both from this year), and, thanks to a previous comment on this blog, "The Places You Find Yourself" by Jerome Edwards (2010). What other second-person narratives (short story or novel) are you familiar with? Please answer in the comments.

"The Cheater's Guide to Love"

By Junot Díaz
~9200 words

A Dominican professor in Boston sinks into a deep depression after his fiancée leaves him upon discovering his infidelity.

As is Díaz's "Miss Lora," the story is told from a second-person perspective that centers on the main character, Yunior. While a second-person POV is an unusual (though not unprecedented) choice, it works well in this instance, resulting in a first-person feel with a bit more distance. Whereas in "Miss Lora" the distance could be said to reflect the time that transpires between the events and their narration, in "Cheater's Guide" it has more to do with the sense of shame the narrator feels about his actions:

She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you're a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn!

This sense of shame becomes the story's strength. Despite the fact that the main character is a royal jerk, we come to feel a certain sympathy for him because he is aware of his flaw and critical of it even as he seems unable to correct it. At the end of the story, we find him paging through what he calls his Doomsday Book: all the emails he sent to his women, which his fiancée compiled and mailed to him along with a note: "Dear Yunior, for your next book." The narrator reflects:

You are surprised at what a fucking chickenshit coward you are. It kills you to admit it, but it's true. You are astounded by the depths of your mendacity. When you finish the book a second time, you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra. You did the right thing.

An interesting subplot involves the issue of false paternity, first in a law student who tells Yunior that he is the father of her child only to reveal the truth in the delivery room, where she kicks him out. Later, he flies to the Dominican Republic with his friend Elvis to visit Elvis's supposed son, Elvis Junior, who turns out not to be his son at all. Both incidents succeed in conveying the desultory nature of the narrator's existence as he plumbs the depths of despair. A debilitating illness that keeps him from enjoying physical activity adds to our sympathy for him.

Díaz's storytelling is powerful and his language is strong (though I often wonder how readers with no knowledge of Spanish fare with him), but it's the superbly drawn characters of "The Cheater's Guide to Love" that garner top honors for this story.

Outstanding.

Reader poll: I found "The Cheater's Guide to Love" to be ___.

Sci-Fi Issue: "Black Box"

By Jennifer Egan
~8600 words

Equipped with implanted surveillance technology, a woman undertakes a mission to infiltrate an unnamed criminal organization.

It’s not every day we get a story recounted in the format of an instruction manual. Fans of this possible genre were tantalized in 1978 by George Perec’s Life A User’s Guide, but the novel didn’t live up to the title. Jennifer Egan takes the genre’s constraints more seriously, and since manuals tend to privilege the imperative (“Insert tab A into slot B…”), the narrator of “Black Box” speaks almost entirely in the second person. True, there are a few descriptive comments in the third person, but most of it is addressed to you. At the outset “you” appears to refer to the generic reader of the story; a bit later we figure out that “you” is female (addressing perhaps a hypothetical female reader?); soon we realize that the “you” in these terse guidelines is really one particular woman—the protagonist—who mentally repeats instructions to herself as the situation on hand evolves.

Just what is that situation? Well, our main character is a special brand of secret agent, a kind of Jamie Bond whose sole weapon is her beauty. Her mission is to work her way into the arms (and beds) of powerful men, all the better to gather crucial information about their activities. Like 007 she’s equipped with all manner of clever surveillance toys, though most of them are implanted in her body (one in her ear, another behind her knee), which makes her a bit like an airplane’s data recorder, also known as… a black box.

This is an easy story to like, but a hard one to love. At first you (and by this second person I really mean me) can’t resist the clever format and the rapid clip of the narration. The text abounds with crisp touches (“The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible. / When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.”). And Egan is deft in her handling of plot: at the beginning we feel that the litany of instructions is merely a list of general principles, but soon they morph into very specific commands that reveal the exceedingly dangerous plot the narrator is caught up in. When we read “A slim catlike man may well rebound before a hasty exit can be made,” the sentence reads syntactically like a general observation, but it’s also so specific that we know it applies to our spy’s here and now. On and on it goes, as we walk this tightwire between the universal and the particular.

On and on, on and on. “Black Box” is really a rather long story, one composed mostly of paragraphs so concise they make text messages seem gabby. Since Egan has locked herself into a pattern of staccato utterances, she has limited room to maneuver. In fact, you begin to feel that the author has landed in the same predicament as her main character: stuck in a situation with no opportunity for escape, where all one can do is march forward and hope for the best. After all, it’s tough to develop characters when you need to couch your language in the khaki style of a survival guide. She makes a valiant effort of it, but eventually even her main character bails.

What could have been a playful and engaging piece of very short fiction becomes a bit tedious here. I applaud Egan for taking a stab at it, but let’s hope “Black Box” is not an excerpt from her latest novel.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Black Box" to be ___.

Also from the sci-fi issue: "Monstro," "My Internet," "The Republic of Empathy."

"Miss Lora"

By Junot Díaz
~5200 words

A sixteen-year-old has an intense relationship with a middle-aged woman, the eponymous "Miss Lora."

An unusual feature of this story is its second-person perspective. While not entirely original—David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead" comes to mind—it is certainly a rarity. As in Wallace's story, Díaz's protagonist would appear to be an adolescent incarnation of the narrator with whom the latter can no longer completely identify, thus preventing use of the first-person singular. Another similarity with Wallace's story is that Díaz's is told in the present tense. The result is a haunting perpective that seems both tormented by the past and unable to escape it, as in the narrator's memory of his dying brother:

In those last weeks, when he finally became too feeble to run away, he refused to talk to you or your mother. Didn't utter a single word until he died. Your mother didn't care. She loved him and prayed over him and talked to him like he was still O.K. But it wounded you, that stubborn silence. His last fucking days and he wouldn't say a word. You'd ask him something straight up, How are you feeling today, and Rafa would turn his head. Like you all didn't deserve an answer. Like no one did.

The brother's death is the backdrop to the main focus of the plot: the narrator's relationship to Miss Lora, which is recounted in lurid detail in the streetwise voice that Díaz has become renowned for:

You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth. But you're at her apartment every fucking night. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in. You know I work, right? I know, you say, but I dreamed that something happened to you. It's sweet of you to lie, she sighs, and even though she is falling asleep she lets you bone her straight in the ass. Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come. You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides. That makes me shoot like a rocket.

Despite the raunchiness on display in this paragraph and elsewhere, there is an aching tenderness in the voice. The narrator's memories of Miss Lora become a mechanism for dealing with his sense of loss regarding the past, which is clearly tied to his brother's death. The subtlety with which Díaz ties together these two seemingly coincidental threads is a great strength of the story.

The voice, as can be seen from the examples already cited, is vibrant and authentic, though not without a few glitches. One has to wonder, for example, when terms such as "fulgurating sadness" and "super asshole" appear in the same sentence. A few tired-sounding or otherwise off-kilter turns of phrase—"the channels of your mind" and "forlorn tones" and "matching underwear underneath"—make an appearance as well. I also wonder about the me in the last sentence ("That makes me shoot like a rocket") of the long passage quoted above. Presumably this is Miss Lora, still speaking after the "she confides" tag, but doesn't it seem more like something a man would say in this situation? (Think of Loverboy's "Lovin' Every Minute of It" and you'll get my drift.) Could it be the narrator—perhaps an unedited remnant of a previous, first-person version of the story? This is where those pesky quotation marks actually have a function!

Finally, some may find Díaz's liberal use of code-switching (free variation between languages, in this case English and Spanish) to be a bit off-putting. Whatever the case, it is a defining feature of his style, and it trips up even TNY's legendary copy editors. Quick, can you spot the misplaced and missing accents in the following snippet?

What do you want, Ma? Se metío por mis ojos.
Por mis ojos my ass, she'd said. Tu te metiste por su culo.

"Miss Lora" is a very strong story. Not quite outstanding, but close.

Satisfactory. Strong (modified 24 December 2012, explanation here).

Note: Starting today, I'll be including a poll at the end of each post that will allow you to register your own evaluation of the story. (You are still free to leave an opinion in the comment thread whether or not you take the poll.)

Reader poll: I found "Miss Lora" to be ___.