"From a Farther Room"

By David Gilbert
~7600 words

With his wife and kids away for the weekend, a man stays out late drinking with an old friend and finds a strange visitor awaiting him the following morning.

Robert Childress wakes up with a blinding hangover and finds, in the spot by the side of the bed where he threw up in the middle of the night, an object

about the size of an eggplant, though in color more reddish brown, its body a mishmash of textures and lumps, a goulash molded into a ghoul. There was a shape that resembled a head, plus four distinct parts that roughly corresponded with two arms and two legs, further articulated by an assumption of ten fingers and ten toes, presently wriggling.

The rest of the story follows how Robert deals with this "creature," from initially trying to bury it in his backyard to eventually outfitting it in diapers and feeding it sweet potato baby food, until Becka and the kids return at the end of the story. By that point it has become reasonably clear that the creature is some sort of projection of Robert, filtered through bruised memories of childhood and reflections on a marriage that seems to be in deep trouble.

This story has many fine qualities. The plot is unusual but never strains credibility, nor does it try to pull off an O. Henry ending; at bottom it is a universal tale of a man struggling desperately for redemption. A keen grasp of human nature comes across in the complexity of the main character, who is deeply flawed but also deeply aware of his flaws:

Robert wondered if he was simply good at lying, or withholding, or whatever it was that he often did, or if Becka was too trusting and a savvier wife would have seen through him.

This type of self-reflection, as long as it doesn't cross the line into self-pity (and it doesn't in this case), makes for an ultimately sympathetic character.

Finally, Gilbert's language is beautiful. He has a knack for walking a nearly impossible line between the absurd and the heartbreaking, a talent that seeps into the story's imagery, from a turkey baster that sits "like a rogue exclamation mark" in Robert's hand to the muffled sounds coming from the creature's makeshift grave, "as if the earth were a heartbroken pillow."

My only objection to "From a Farther Room" is the ick factor. Yes, I know that's part of the point, but the descriptions of the creature are just a little too disgusting for me to say I really loved the story. But it's a powerful piece of fiction any way you measure it.

Strong.

Crime-Fiction Issue: "Brotherly Love"

By Jhumpa Lahiri
~13,900 words

Two brothers in Calcutta grow up in post-colonial India, their youthful adventures prefiguring a future that will be marked by violence.

At nearly 14,000 words, this story is nearly a saga in miniature. It reaches back to the 1940s, but gets up a head of steam in the fifties, when two brothers—Subhash, the elder, and Udayan, the junior—engage in nightly hijinks at the Tolly Club golf course, scaling the walls of this remnant of the colonial world in order to whack a few balls into the dusk with a bent putter. A police officer with a mean streak puts an end to this mischief, but the die is cast: Udayan has started a long career of dragging his older brother into trouble.

Eventually the problems turn political. After all, the brothers come of age in the sixties, and Udayan is singing the praises of communism. While Udayan flaunts authority and flirts with danger, cautious Subhash escapes to the US on a student visa, drawn by the sirens of security and science. It’s three years before he receives a telegram about his brother’s death, prompting Subhash’s return to the old neighborhood to find out how the police murdered his rebellious sibling. In a final gesture of brotherly love, he stands up to his parents and their traditions, and he offers to take in Udayan’s pregnant wife.

“Brotherly Love” is a captivating piece. Lahiri shows her trademark skill at portraying family dynamics, each member of the clan tilting toward different objectives. In the midst of tension, affection bubbles up. For those of us needing a refresher course on the fractious politics of the era, the author provides just enough detail to allow us to cobble it together. We may miss some of the details, but the gist is clear. Most important, though, is the relationship of the brothers, who are bound by their adventures and close calls, by the double bind of mutual admiration and rivalry. Lahiri draws this exquisitely. Nowhere is it clearer than in the encounter preceding their break:

You’re the other side of me, Subhash. It’s without you that I’m nothing. Don’t go.

It was the only time he’d admitted such a thing. He’d said it with love in his voice. With need.

But Subhash heard it as a command, one of so many he’d capitulated to all his life. Another exhortation to do as Udayan did, to follow him.

And thus Subhash departs, striking out for America, where he follows his hotheaded brother’s endeavors via a series of cryptic letters, understanding too late where it all will lead.

“Brotherly Love” is too long for a short story. Instead, it is the most concise of novels: Lahiri creates a world in these pages, flowing from the specific to the general, then springing back. Nicest of all, perhaps, is the way she develops the initial image of the Tolly Club, of the low ponds, and of the transgression represented by that first scramble over the wall. This scene prefigures all the rest, and we find the same dynamic as youthful exuberance matures into rebellion and even violence, always crushed by authority. The story is marked by images of crossing over—whether the boundary be a fence, an ocean, a padlocked gate, or the border between relationships. By the end, we have learned something. Like Subhash, we too might stand a little straighter in the face of injustice.

Outstanding.


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

"Art Appreciation"

By Fiona McFarlane
~8200 words

A young man whose mother has just won the lottery begins courting a woman he hopes to marry.

Henry works at an insurance firm, where Ellie is his coworker. When his mother wins the lottery (ten thousand Australian dollars, a hefty sum in 1961), it gives him the confidence to begin dating her. But there are complications: Henry doesn't like art whereas Ellie does; his mother is flighty and overbearing; and he can't seem to get over his girlfriend Kath even after proposing to Ellie.

The story presents a conundrum: can a character be interesting by virtue of being boring? If ever there were one to test this hypothesis, it's Henry, about as bland a fellow as ever walked the planet. But there is something of an evolution toward the end, when Henry's complacent and uncritical demeanor finally gives way to a bit of self-awareness:

Henry's chest shook. He saw the future and Arthur in it, steering his mother by her happy elbow, smirking above the Sunday table, and always giving Henry quiet, confidential looks. And in this future Henry saw himself in his mother's house, always and only the lucky son of a lucky mother. An inheritor before she was even dead. There was something indecent about it.

As far as epiphanies go, it's not much, but it's probably about as much as one can expect from a character such as this.

If that were the only problem, the story might be justifiable on the basis of realism. Alas, however, it's also far too long, weighed down by a plot as tedious as Henry's character. The detail of the lottery seems to have little bearing on most of the story, except maybe insofar as it prompts Henry to begin dating Ellie. Likewise, the title is a bit of a red herring: though Henry's lack of enthusiasm for art reveals something of his character and provides for tension with Ellie, it never becomes a major focus. And then there's Arthur—the mother's new boyfriend—a major character introduced over halfway through the story.

Finally, the language does far too much telling in place of showing: Henry is pleased, Henry is satisfied, Henry is covetous, Henry is proud, Henry is expansive and proud, Henry is concerned, Henry is reluctant, Henry is surprised. If you insist on such a conventional character, at least give us an interesting way to think about him. There are a few places where the language is good, as in the description of Henry trying to eat a hamburger in Kath's presence ("The thick slice of beetroot threatened to slide onto his plate—it purpled his bread and his tongue—and juice of some kind, silky with fat, ran over his fingers"), but McFarlane's diction is just as often ham-fisted: Henry's mental clarity is described as a "frost" upon his brain, Kath shakes "like an arrow," etc.

I'm always happy to see new authors in TNY's pages, but the slow pace and insipid characters of "Art Appreciation" make this story a tedious proposition. If I hadn't been reading it for the blog, I might never have finished.

Weak.

"The Gray Goose"

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"The Embassy of Cambodia"

By Zadie Smith
~8600 words

An African woman in London is mystified by the presence of the Embassy of Cambodia.

The main character, Fatou, is an Ivory Coast immigrant who works as a live-in maid at the Derawal residence, down the street from the Cambodian Embassy. Every Monday, on her way to the swimming pool, Fatou walks past the embassy, where a badminton shuttlecock flies back and forth, the top of its arc just visible above the eight-foot perimeter wall. Intrigued, Fatou asks her friend Andrew, a Nigerian immigrant who was instrumental in her conversion to Catholicism eighteen months earlier, about the history of Cambodia. Their friendship develops, and when Fatou is fired by the Derawals, Andrew offers to find her a new job and invites her to stay at his place.

The characterization is very strong. Both Fatou and Andrew are unique and fully realized creations with their own rich histories, and they gain the reader's sympathy through a potent combination of frailty and hubris. Fatou, for example, swims in black underwear because she can't afford a proper bathing suit and wonders if her job is a form of slavery. She is afraid of the Devil at the same time that she steals pool passes from her employers and is "unwilling to be grateful for past favors." Even the Derawals, who are only secondary characters, are represented with great skill. Mrs. Derawal's barely contained passive aggressiveness upon firing Fatou is a wonder to behold.

The protagonist's cultural dislocation is also brilliantly symbolized by the placid presence of a war-torn, developing country's embassy in central London, where the staff apparently have nothing better to do than while away the hours in a quintessentially British-colonial pastime.

An interesting technical aspect of the story is the instability of the narrative voice. The narrator presents herself (I refer to her as female, though there is actually no grammatical proof of her gender) as an observer living in the same neighborhood in which Fatou resides. The story begins with a first-person plural point of view:

Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It's a surprise, to all of us. The Embassy of Cambodia!

And:

No doubt there are those who will be critical of the narrow, essentially local scope of Fatou's interest in the Cambodian woman from the Embassy of Cambodia, but we, the people of Willesden, have some sympathy with her attitude.

For most of the story, however, this real-body narrator remains invisible, leading to a third-person perspective centered on Fatou, in which the narrator's observer status is problematized through the possession of intimate details more typical of an omniscient or partially omniscient narrator. Toward the middle of the story, she briefly transforms into a first-person singular, Homeric-like rhapsode:

In Willesden, we are almost all New People, though some of us, like Fatou, were, until quite recently, Old People, working the land in our various countries of origin. Of the Old and New People of Willesden I speak; I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right.

Suffice it to say that the narrative voice, along with section headings that would appear to represent a badminton shutout in progress (0 - 1, 0 - 2, 0 - 3, etc.), is a playful experiment that doesn't quite work for me. Perhaps the form is meant to reaffirm Fatou's disorientation in British culture, but I find it mostly a distraction. Nevertheless, excellent characters can make up for a lot, and in the case of "The Embassy of Cambodia," they save the day.

Strong.

Reader poll: I found "The Embassy of Cambodia" to be ___.

"The Women"

By William Trevor
~7600 words

The appearance of two mysterious women in an adolescent girl's life raises unsettling questions about her past.

The story follows the main character, Cecilia Normanton, as she grows up in London in the "listless nineteen-eighties." The initial focus is on Cecilia's relationship with her father, described as a melancholy soul who was left irreparably wounded when his wife, of whom Cecilia has no recollection, left him for another man. When the father sends Cecilia away to boarding school at age fourteen, two women, later identified as Miss Cotell and Miss Keble, begin appearing at seemingly random moments—a hockey game, a trip to the post office, a roll call—and the story veers into their perspective on several occasions. Eventually Miss Keble tells Cecilia that Miss Cotell is her mother. Startled by the revelation, Cecilia at first attempts to dismiss it; when that proves impossible she tries, to no avail, to coax her father into confirming it.

I liked the premise of this story but found the execution lacking. The narrative is ultimately about the relationship between Cecilia and her father and how it is tested by the two women and their shocking revelation. The long digressions into Cotell's and Keble's perspectives prove unnecessary and often confusing, cluttered with details intended to provide motivation and backstory that only end up bleeding the main story arc of tension. There is a single short section told from father's point of view, in which he watches Cecilia perform in a play, that also seems superfluous. (As an experiment, I reread the story by skipping over the sections told outside Cecilia's perspective and found it much improved.)

While "The Women" is based on an intriguing premise and graced with beautiful diction, it is marred by unjustified perspective shifts and cluttered storytelling.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "The Women" to be ___.

"A Voice in the Night"

By Steven Millhauser
~7600 words

Suffering from insomnia, an aging Jewish writer recalls his childhood fixation with the biblical story of Samuel.

The third-person point of view encompasses three related narratives, each told in four interlacing parts. The first narrative is a rather conventional retelling of 1 Samuel 3, in which the young Samuel awakens three times in the night upon hearing his name called, incorrectly attributing it to the high priest Eli before realizing it is God. The second narrative takes place in Stratford, Connecticut in 1950, where a seven-year-old Jewish boy—unnamed but clearly a fictionalized version of the author—lies awake in bed on four successive nights, puzzling over the story of Samuel and what it means for his own tenuous Jewish identity. The third narrative takes place in the present, in which a writer, unable to sleep, reflects on his childhood and the events described in the first two narratives.

I did not find this story compelling. The mise-en-abîme structure, while technically flawless, feels plodding and formulaic. The first narrative adds very little to the biblical tale of Samuel and might be better handled through allusion. The second and third narratives consist of meandering reflections on the fairly commonplace topic of Jewish-American identity (see Roth, Philip). The language is unremarkable throughout. All in all, a disappointing effort from an excellent writer.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "A Voice in the Night" to be ___.

"The Semplica-Girl Diaries"

By George Saunders
~8900 words

In a future world in which low-wage female workers are strung up on high wires as lawn decorations, a family gets more than it bargained for when it buys into the fad.

The narrative is written by the main character in the form of a first-person diary, for reasons he explains in the opening paragraph:

Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now.

Because the diary headers include months and days but not years, and because the setting at first glance feels like our world—complete with OfficeMax and DVD players and NPR—it's not until several entries in that the reader realizes we're dealing with a futuristic scenario. In addition to goldfish ponds, perfectly manicured gardens, and faux-Oriental bridges, the Joneses of the future hang garish displays of so-called SGs (the Semplica-Girls of the title): young immigrant women who are hoisted up together on thin "microlines" that pass through their temples and the newly-discovered "Semplica Pathway" of the brain. Like fish flopping on a stringer, they hang in this lobotomized state—"Is very gentle, does not hurt, SGs asleep during whole deal"—presumably for all the non-SGs to see and enjoy. When a fortuitous lottery winning allows the narrator to purchase an SG display that would otherwise lie beyond his means, he is initially ecstatic with his purchase, "as if at last in step with peers and time in which living." But things go awry when his youngest daughter begins to object to the cruelty of the lawn display and sets the SGs free.

What to say about this bizarre story? I love the critique of a consumption-obsessed world that exploits its underclasses while patting itself on the back for its humanity; and I love the sheer quirkiness of the plot and setting. Saunders is either brilliant or insane—probably both. The journal format, however, is close to a death sentence in my opinion. First, it drains the story of drama, for we never feel as though we're witnessing events in the heat of the moment; it's always after the fact, like watching a time-delayed sportscast when everyone else already knows the score (an inherent weakness of the epistolary genre in general). Second, reading the main character's prose is about as pleasant as chewing on a mouthful of nails. Presumably the point is the extent to which the English language of the future has been debased and corporatized by an instant-gratification society—tellingly, the narrator's father-in-law, who appears to be the only one who lives within his means, writes in beautiful complete sentences—but surely this could have been accomplished through dialogue.

I have some more minor objections as well. First, the futuristic setting seems out of sync with itself: on the one hand we're still in the world of OfficeMax and Burger King and Home Depot; on the other the SGs suggest a technological evolution far beyond the present. I suppose there's an argument to be made here for suspension of disbelief. A bigger objection is that things seem to happen just a little too conveniently: the lottery win, for example. Why not just make the narrator wealthy to begin with? His financial struggles feel like a transparent attempt to portray the difficulties of the current recession. Finally, though the narrator says his plan is to write for a year, we get only twenty-three days' worth—September 3-26—which makes the story feel incomplete.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit torn about "The Semplica-Girl Diaries." There's much to admire, including the risks Saunders has taken with his form. In the end, however, the defects drag down a great story to a mere pass.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" to be ___.

"Amundsen"

By Alice Munro

~9500 words

During the Second World War, a young teacher from Toronto is assigned to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Canadian hinterland, where she falls in love with the resident doctor.

The first-person narrative consists of the protagonist's reflections, presumably in the present day, upon her experience in the sanatorium and, in particular, with Dr. Alister Fox. Fox is unremarkable in almost every respect, "a spare man of ordinary height, whose reddish-fair hair was cut very short" and who "was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into." Somehow, nonetheless, Vivien falls in love with him, loses her virginity, and rushes into wedding preparations until, for unexplained reasons, Fox calls it all off and sends her packing. Over a decade later, now married, she runs into him on the street in Toronto and still feels the pangs of love.

The story is at its best in its descriptions of the bleak Canadian landscape:

Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some small, untidy evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. And the building, with its deliberate rows of windows and its glassed-in porches at either end. Everything austere and northerly, black-and-white under the high dome of clouds.

The cheerlessness invades every crevice, from the "smell of winter clothing that never really dried out" to wretched meals of Postum, canned salmon, and cold apple pie to the sacrifices inherent in the wartime effort. Life in the sanatorium is particularly dismal: the students are "quiet and tractable but not particularly involved," and when they miss class it usually means that they are feverish, undergoing surgery, or dead.

The story's main characters are as dreary as their surroundings. Yes, this is surely the point, but that doesn't mean it's an advisable one. Fox is about as forgettable a character as there ever was, and the narrator makes no effort to explain how she can fall so hard for a man who serves up boxed mashed potatoes and, on their first sexual encounter, "did not want me to say anything" and "provided a towel, as well as a condom." She, too, is a lifeless creation, with almost no unique or endearing qualities. She states that "My passion was the surprise, to us both," which comes as a great surprise to the reader as well, for there is no evidence of it anywhere in the story—except, perhaps, when she confesses to wanting to feel "my spine crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter." But that's one sentence in a 9500-word story, at the end of which we're supposed to understand why Vivien, over ten years later, still feels the sting of loss.

In my personal hierarchy of characters, which faithful readers of this blog will have come to recognize, deeply flawed but ultimately sympathetic beings reign at the top. This is the case of "The Cheater's Guide to Love" and "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy." (It's also key, by the way, to Aristotle's concept of the tragic hero.) In the middle are characters we can't ultimately love but who nonetheless prove unique and intriguing (often with a touch of humor or morbidity), as in "Expectations," "Ever Since," "The Golden Vanity," and "After Ellen." At the bottom are specimens so colorless and insubstantial it feels as if they'd tip over if you blew on them: behold "Someone" and, unfortunately, "Amundsen," whose beautifully rendered ambiance is insufficient to redeem the bloodless souls that populate it.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Amundsen" to be ___. 

"Permission to Enter"

By Zadie Smith
~9900 words

In the Kilburn neighborhood of northwest London, two girls divided by race and class are united by a traumatic event as toddlers but drift apart as they age.

The third-person narrative adopts the perspective of Keisha Blake, daughter of Jamaican immigrants who, at the age of four, saves the red-haired (and Irish) Leah Hanwell from drowning in a wading pool. The story follows Keisha's friendship with Leah through their teens and university years. It also recounts Keisha's first sexual relationship, with a Caribbean boy named Rodney Banks, whom Keisha's mother nudges her toward as a safe romantic option: "They were like siblings in every way, aside from the fact that they occasionally had sex with each other." Gradually, Keisha's ambition "to charm her way through the front door" leads her to abandon the familiarity of her roots—including Rodney—and even to adopt the more canonically English name Natalie.

The story's strength lies in the complexity of the racial relationships it portrays. The more Natalie enters the world of white power, the more alienated she becomes from her white friend Leah and the more attracted she becomes to an exotic young man she meets in a philosophy of law lecture. The description of him is worth citing at length because it embodies the racial complexity to which I am referring:

He was made of parts that Natalie considered mutually exclusive, and found difficult to understand together. He had a collection of unexpected freckles. His nose was very long and dramatic, in a style she did not know enough to call Roman. His hair was twisted into dreadlocks that were the opposite of Leah's, too pristine. They framed his face neatly, ending just below his chin. He wore chinos with no socks, and those shoes that have ropes threaded along the sides, a blue blazer, and a pink shirt. An indescribable accent. Like he was born on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean and raised by Ralph Lauren.

The young man is Francesco De Angelis, rumored to be the product of an Italian mum and "some African prince." The remainder of the story portrays Natalie's gradual drift into his orbit, or, as the narrator quips: "There was an inevitability about the road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route." In a satisfying denouement, a recriminating letter from Rodney accuses Natalie of selling out to Francesco: "Keisha, you talk about following your heart, but weird how your heart always seems to know which side its bread is buttered."

This story places considerable demands on the reader and may require several perusals to be fully appreciated. Told in an elliptical, postmodern manner, it's divided into sixty-seven numbered sections, each with its own title and containing such disparate contents as lists of secret desires, quotes by Nietzsche and Montaigne, menu ingredients, and obscure allusions to popular culture and current events (which will be especially obscure to non-British readers). Because of the fragmentation, the voice is unstable and vacillates between admiration and cool irony toward the main character. Major events, such as Keisha's name change to Natalie, happen with no warning. And so on.

One could argue that the complex themes of "Permission to Enter" justify its challenging form. I'm not sure I agree with that argument, as I can imagine the story told in a more conventional manner without losing much. Furthermore, the language has a few tired moments not in keeping with the postmodern style ("the one and only true reality of this world"; "the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake"; "the revolution had arrived"; etc.). Nevertheless, Smith has produced a compelling, nuanced tale noteworthy for the depth of its characters and the true-to-life messiness of their relationships.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Permission to Enter" to be ___.

"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 ___.

"An Abduction"

By Tessa Hadley
~7600 words

A teenage girl in 1960s England loses her virginity.

"Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and no one noticed." Thus reads the intriguing first sentence of this third-person narrative, which goes on to recount how Jane, feeling bored and neglected one summer afternoon at her parents' posh Surrey estate, gets into a convertible with three unfamiliar teenage boys. She returns the following morning a changed young woman, and the story concludes with the ramifications of the event on her adult life.

The tale of Jane's experience is one worth telling, and the story's plot is its main strength, but several glaring defects keep it from realizing its potential.

In the first place, the storytelling is misleading. That intriguing first sentence works so well because it immediately raises a question: How could Jane be abducted without anyone noticing? The mystery motivates us to read: a perfect hook, in other words. Except that it's a hook based on a deception, for the commonly understood definition of "to abduct," as Webster's explains, is "to seize and take away (as a person) by force." Yet Jane enters the convertible voluntarily—which the reader, however, doesn't discover until over two thousand words into the story. So then he thinks, Ah, but perhaps the opening sentence means that Jane will be forced to do something against her will? Nope, not that either—which takes another five thousand words to figure out. Having now revealed the original hook to be a sham, Hadley throws out another one: "Jane was thinking, Will I ever see my home again? It seemed unlikely." This, too, turns out to be a head fake, for Jane returns home the next morning of her own accord. By the end of the story, then, the reader will be justified in complaining of manipulation. If the issue were just the title, it could understood as a metaphor; but, as demonstrated above, the prose deliberately misleads at several crucial junctures.

Perspective is another problem. Jane is clearly the main character, but we also enter the thoughts of each of the following: Jane's father, her brother Robin, the three boys in the convertible (Daniel, Nigel, and Paddy), Nigel's younger sister Fiona, and Jane's counselor in her adult life. In chasing so many different points of view, Hadley misses prime opportunities to develop Jane's character and garner the reader's sympathy. This is especially important because Jane is not a terribly sympathetic character, and we need to be convinced that we should like her. Unfortunately, that never happens.

Finally, Hadley's lackluster prose is characterized by tired metaphors—"the wings of her spirit," "the recesses of her consciousness," "sick with desire," etc.—and a perplexing over-reliance on parentheses: up to four or five per paragraph, some quite extensive. Surely there are more elegant ways of threading backstory and character motivations into the narrative. In cases where the observations are truly parenthetical—and there are several—they probably don't belong in the story at all.

"An Abduction" begins promisingly and has a tender tale to share, bit it is marred by deceptive storytelling, an unfocused perspective, and mediocre writing.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "An Abduction" to be ___.

Sci-Fi Issue: "Monstro"

By Junot Díaz
~8500 words

During the outbreak of an unknown disease in Haiti, a student chases after a girl he is unlikely ever to get.

“Monstro” is set on “the Island,” which means Hispaniola, the land mass composed of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—a kind of monstrous creature itself, with two very different cultures joined at the hip. Our time is: the future—but perhaps not very far. It’s true that people now glypt instead of text, the Web is the Whorl, and global warming seems a little more advanced. But there’s just been (another?) economic collapse, and Haiti seems to be the place where, no matter what you do, shit just keeps happening.

Our narrator, a student at Brown, has returned home to the D.R. for the summer to help take care of his ailing mother. Only he doesn’t take care of her, because he’s too busy hanging out (janguiar, a monstrous Spanish word formed from the English) with his pal Alex and the troubled Mysty, into whose shapely pants he would dearly love to get. Alex is wealthy beyond imagination, half prick, half go-getter.

The weird thing is the illness that breaks out. It starts as a “black mold-fungus-blast” that spreads slowly through the population, afflicting only those already weakened or sick. People are quarantined. But gradually it worsens, and those suffering from la Negrura are drawn together by a powerful herding instinct. Health care providers struggle to keep them separate so their bodies don’t actually fuse, like disparate patches of coral growing into one. Worse yet, the patients all begin screaming in unison, wherever they are. And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, thermal imagining reveals that nearly everyone in Port-au-Prince is affected.

The authorities nuke the place, but our main characters, still in the D.R., hear tell of twenty-foot monsters clambering about, gobbling down bodies. The descriptions read like late Goya paintings. Our trio heads for the border, cameras in hand, hoping to see some of the action.

It’s probably safe to say that the first thing you’ll notice in “Monstro” is the title “Monstro.” You might have noticed that it’s not in English, but it’s probably close enough that you’ll get the gist. And you’ll be pleased with yourself for understanding the Spanish. Only it’s not Spanish. (In Spanish, the word is monstruo.) Already there’s something not quite right. This story is a monster, all right—a thing crawling with both English and Spanish, though even these languages seem to have caught a bug. Victims are viktims. Photos are fotos. Monstruos are monstros.

Díaz knows how to create an engaging character. Our narrator is romantic and self-deprecating. He berates himself for not taking better care of his mother, and he knows he is outclassed by Alex and Mysty. But at least he is genuine and loyal. And Díaz endows him with marvelous language, teeming with hip and colorful expressions. However, the narrator is a little monstrous himself: out of place in the D.R. (his Spanish is lousy, his skin surprisingly dark), pulled between social classes (he’s a scholarship kid at Brown, but hangs with one of the richest young men in the Americas), he is left pining (Mysty will never be his, and he knows it). In short, he’s the one who straddles all the borders, not one thing but many, the linchpin between two worlds—princely and healthy playboys versus the disease of the proletarian.

It’s fine to read “Monstro” as a mini sci-fi thriller, a kind of puffed up version of zombies in the wilderness. But it’s hard not to hear the allegorical echoes: while the rich party on, the down and out who are afflicted with la Negrura (the Darkness, yes, but more bluntly the Blackness) are issuing their primal scream, they are fusing together, and they are beginning to rise up as a colossus.

As in all the best science fiction, “Monstro” is not really science; nor, in fact, is it really fiction.

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

Reader poll: I found "Monstro" to be ___.

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

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."

"Hand on the Shoulder"

By Ian McEwan

~7800 words

A woman recalls how she was recruited into the British security service (MI5).

The first-person narrative is told by the main character, Serena Frome. In the present day she is sixty-one years old, and the events she narrates are said to have taken place forty years earlier, when she was a student in her final year at Cambridge. The story opens with Serena's boyfriend Jeremy and her inability to please him sexually. One day she meets Jeremy's history tutor, Tony Canning, with whom she is soon having an affair. Canning proposes Serena for an MI5 interview but eventually leaves her over what appears to be a trumped up misunderstanding.

As can be gleaned from the short summary, McEwan's storytelling is a bit meandering—some might even say misleading. The reader never learns anything about Serena's work in the MI5, despite the fact that it figures prominently in the first sentence. Jeremy's presence in the story feels like a too-transparent means of introducing Canning, and his homosexuality a too-convenient means of getting rid of him once he has served his purpose (he runs of to Edinburgh to purse a PhD after falling in love with a German violinist named Manfred).

The main flaw of the story, however, is that the relationship between Serena and Canning, which becomes the plot's central thread, is just not that interesting. On the contrary, it feels oddly like what Serena feels when she gazes upon Canning's naked body:

And in a certain light, though it may have been the bedroom curtains, Tony had a yellowish look, like an old paperback, one in which you could read of various misfortunes—knee and appendicitis operations, a dog bite, a rock-climbing accident, and a childhood disaster with a breakfast frying pan, which had left him bereft of a patch of pubic hair.

In the end neither Serena nor Canning makes for a compelling character, and the prose, despite an occasional glimmer, is for the most part forgettable.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Hand on the Shoulder" to be ___.

"Transatlantic"

By Colum McCann
~8400 words

A chronicle of the first transatlantic flight, by British aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown in 1919.

The strength of the story lies in the suspense that accompanies the flight narrative: exposure to the elements (wind, rain, snow, and numbing cold), malfunctioning equipment, and a harrowing stretch in which the plane gets lost in heavy cloud cover and comes within a hundred feet of crashing into the Atlantic.

The story is marred, however, by a third-person omniscient voice that jumps back and forth from Alcock to Brown and even to a journalist covering their flight, making it difficult to appreciate the uniqueness of the main characters or even to differentiate between the two. Indeed, it sometimes feels as if we were reading about Siamese twins:

Alcock and Brown rise at sunup, then wait. Turn their faces to the weather. Walk the field. Play gin rummy. Wait some more. They need a warm day, clear skies, a full moon, a benevolent wind. They figure they can do it in less than twenty hours. Failure doesn't interest them […].

It would have been more effective to limit the perspective to either Alcock or Brown and show the reader the world through his eyes. As it is, there is a certain safety in the omniscient perspective—similar to that of a historical narrative—that insulates the reader from the suspense and prevents full identification with the characters.

McCann's mastery of the technical aspects of the flight is impressive, and there are some fine historical details that add a quaint feeling to the narrative ("Some day soon it may be possible to read the daily edition of the San Francisco Examiner in Edinburgh or Salzburg or Sydney.") Unfortunately, the story never feels like much more than an historical account of the voyage.

Weak.

"Citizen Conn"

By Michael Chabon
~11,900 words

A Rabbi tries to resolve a feud between two aging comic book authors.

The first-person narrator and main character, Rebecca Teplitz, is the Rabbi in question. The story she tells dates from 1997 (the point of narration remains unspecified), when she first met Morton Feather, a resident of the assisted-living center in which she worked. In an even-handed tone sprinkled with wry humor, she recounts her attempts to make sense of the bitter rivalry between Feather and his former friend and colleague, Artie Conn. Feather has terminal cancer, and Conn hopes to reconcile with him before he dies. Rebecca's husband David is a lifelong comic-book fan who fills her in on the legendary status of the two men and the public account of their rivalry.

The highlight of the story is the touching portrayal of the decades-long relationship between Feather and Conn, both close to eighty at the time of the story. Because the narrative is told from Rebecca's perspective, the reader is initially as mystified as she is as to the reasons for their bitter rivalry and only gradually learns the details: how the two met in high school, how their friendship and combined talents gained them cult status at Nova Publications, and how an agreement Conn eventually signed with the publisher marked the decline of Feather's career. Conn believes that the latter incident lies at the heart of Feather's animosity toward him, and he goes to greater and greater lengths to earn his friend's forgiveness, desperate for absolution before Feather's imminent demise. True to life, however, the story's emotional conflicts are messy and do not admit easy solutions, and in the end the reader, like Conn, is left wondering what exactly it was that destroyed a friendship begun so auspiciously over sixty years earlier.

The weak point of the story is Chabon's penchant for wordiness and overwriting. He seems to have a special fondness for inanimate objects:

Its walls had been painted often enough since then, in the abject pastels fashionable among nursing homes, but sometimes in the late afternoon on one wall of my office I could still see, emulsified by years of Los Angeles sunlight, the shadow of a crucifix imprinted in the dust.

And:

The rest of his room was occupied only by canvases and paint, by the burnt-upholstery stink of his perfecto, and by the Los Angeles sunshine that drizzled in through the raised Venetian blinds and smeared itself across every surface like Vaseline.

And:

The kettle went on squandering its contents in an endless shrill alarum, as if registering its protest over what was about to happen.

And finally:

And then there were those who had felt moved, either on the spot or—after taking some time to reflect and make notes—in my office, to deliver themselves of wild, unanswerable orations, complete with hand gestures and table-poundings, on all the things I could not possibly know about life, the Torah, and the State of Israel, and on my evident personal shortcomings relative to the previous (old, male) rabbi, or, in one case, on the secret, malign accords between Hitler and Cordell Hull, F.D.R.'s Secretary of State during the Second World War.

In case you lost track, that last specimen features ninety-three words punctuated by two em-dashes, two parentheses, and fourteen commas. With long-windedness such as this, it's easy to see how a tale that might be told in something close to a standard-length New Yorker story balloons to 12,000 words. Even so, Chabon's unique, flawed characters make "Citizen Conn" worth the extra effort.

Satisfactory.