TD reads short stories from The New Yorker and doesn't like them · 11:09pm Aug 25th, 2014
Inspired by Bad Horse writing about the dreariness of stories from The New Yorker, I decided to go see if I could find some stories from it in recent years and see if they were as bad as he said they were. I have vague recollection of reading The New Yorker long ago, in libraries, I think because Family Guy made fun of it, and I wasn't really fond of it.
So I browsed the internet and found out that The New Yorker was allowing some of its stories to be read for free on its website, and looked for a list of good ones. I found a list by Jacob Shamsian, of Entertainment Weekly, and began to read.
This was a mistake.
I couldn't bear to read more than a few sections of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden or The Embassy of Cambodia; they were that dreary. The writing in them did not bring me joy, nor did the content of the words, and I turned away after a few pages worth of text. After having read the others, I feel the richer for it. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden appeared to be about awkward silences, or awkward situations, but reading it just made me think that the person who wrote it must be familiar with them for telling such terrible stories. The Embassy of Cambodia just felt too ephemeral to really latch onto.
I had to force myself to read Town of Cats, which centers on the conflict between a man and his father, and ultimately their reconciliation. It managed to take many, many thousands of words to establish things, but in the end, I didn't really care about either the protagonist nor his father. I am fairly certain I was meant to sympathize with the protagonist - his parents didn't get him - but I didn't. Or maybe I was supposed to sympathize with the father, who just wanted a good life for his son who was not really his son? I took no joy in reading it, and the only reason I went all the way through it was because I forced myself to do so. It didn't emotionally engage me. It just made me wonder: why am I doing this? Why am I subjecting myself to this? There was something there, in the very end, as the story had an actual conclusion, and the implication of perhaps some reconciliation, but it took far too long to get there. The writing was not beautiful, and neither character in it was sympathetic.
The Bear Came Over the Mountain was almost readable, but was far too long. However, it violated all the rules of literary fiction by possessing both a conflict - how the man should feel about his senile wife having an affair with another senile man in a nursing home - and a resolution - he should care anyway, and things will get better if he does.
If they published too much stuff like that they might lose their rep.
Alas, I would not say that I enjoyed it. In fact, I would say that it was very long for what it was, and may have started too early. The whole thing was working very hard to establish that the protagonist was a good man, that he regretted the necessity of putting his wife into the nursing home, and that while he had had his infidelities in the past, he had stayed loyal to her and would continue to stay loyal to her even as she appeared to completely forget about him to have a very wrinkly affair. And it did work - I actually could sympathize somewhat with the protagonist here, as while he had once behaved poorly, he had come to realize that what was really important to him was his wife, and not his little affairs and the world of being an exciting college professor who his students all wanted to get in bed with. The trouble was that the story was very long, and while it went into a large number of digressions in order to establish who he was and what his motivations were as a human being, I think that they managed to do that early on and thus the later repetition was pretty much grinding "This guy is a decent human being" into the audience's face. If the story had been half its length, it might have been decent, but as it was, it greatly overstayed its welcome.
Symbols and Signs was the shortest of the bunch, which made it the most readable of the bunch simply because I knew it could not go on forever, and I could see how close I was to the end. It was a short story about a husband and wife going to visit their suicidal, mentally-ill son, apparently the "Rainbow Dash breaks her wing" of The New Yorker given that three of these stories dealt with people who were unwell and committed to a facility as a result.
It contained an error - be it a typo or a copy-editing error, I couldn't say, but a word was missing from a sentence, and it was half of a hyphenated word at that. At least everyone who has ever left a word out of a sentence in their story can take solace in the fact that The New Yorker screws up, too.
This story was precisely the sort of nasty, despairing story that Bad Horse was talking about, where there was no real conflict because the world just ground down the characters, and the characters fell into despair. Indeed, the story held a passage which summed up this sentiment perfectly:
All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.
Alas, it lacks self-awareness of its own ridiculousness.
And, to top it all off, the story probably ends with a phone-call from the facility that their mentally ill son killed himself. At least the other two stories had the grace to end on a sort-of positive note with the person showing signs of dementia showing some sign of recognizing their loved one and that they cared, that the journey that the author had taken mattered in some way.
I can't imagine sitting down and reading these and enjoying them. The writing in them was unenticing in many cases, and outright ugly in others. I suppose the ugliness of the writing reflected the ugliness of the stories, but... why would I want to read ugly writing in an ugly story?
Maybe it is just the sort of thing people read so that they can convince themselves of their personal depth? They read a story about someone losing their mind in a mental health care facility and someone's mentally ill son trying to kill themselves; they must be deep! Who else would read stories like that, shallow people? But it is the pretension of depth, rather than actual depth, which seems to guide these stories, and as Bad Horse noted, they seemed to wallow in despair.
All in all, I have to say, I don't feel like I've missed anything by not reading The New Yorker.
I got lost somewhere around when "in visible" giants were tormenting someone. Also... By jove that last sentence is a doozy. Giants to weeds and farmers in one sentence! Pick a visualization!\
Sympathies, Titanium. Still, your blog post did give me a chuckle, so there's that. Entertainment is had by reading The New Yorker.
Just not by the one reading it.
Ech. People get paid for that dreck? And they wonder why literary magazines are dead.
2401025
I only noticed after you mentioned what a doozy that last sentence was that it has five semicolons in it.
Five!
And people thought I overused semicolons in The Butterfly's Burden.
Not even I am so shameless as to put five semicolons into a single sentence.
This is a great zinger.
Wait, so you're saying that a highbrow fiction outlet falls prey to the same kinds of foibles as a magical talking pony fanfiction website?
2401102
The New Yorker: Fanfiction for real life.
I think any outlet that ostensibly makes money by selling copies of its work must eventually pander to some audience or another, lest they alienate the only source of revenue they have left. Sadly, that appears to be the sadfic sort.
As to "High Brow"...
Brows Held High
My response.
2401048
Your horror at these stories is well-justified, but I do have to step up and defend the semicolons. They're not clause separators, they're list separators. Canonically, if you are writing a list of objects, and one or more individual items in the list contain comma clauses, you use semicolons between list items to avoid ambiguity. E.g. "At the store, I bought jalapeños; whiskey; and bread, for French toast." Without the semicolons, that's a really crazy recipe.
2401169
You're absolutely right, it is. I just got caught up in proving that someone abused semicolons worse than I do.
Alas.
What's worse is, I've used semicolon separated lists like this before. I've explained them to people.
I just wanted this guy to be abusing them.
2401102
Yes, yes I am.
Though I think a big part of it is pandering to the audience's idea that it is "socially conscious".
Hmm.
So I just read Symbols and Signs.
It's a weird one. My first clue that something important was probably going on with this story was that it was written by Vladimir Nabokov. I get the feeling that the particular mental illness of the child is important here, perhaps an attempt at a commentary on the state of modern art.
I mean, his illness is that he sees everything as a symbol: "Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme." Surely this could be compared to the tendency to look at art exclusively with an eye to discovering the "theme" or learning something about "the human condition". I think all of us who went to public high school had to endure some tripe or other in this vein:
humourtouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/A-typical-English-Teacher-way-of-thinking..png
But nowadays, meaning in art is passé, if not dead, as you'll surely remember.
inventoryofeverything.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/peterjane.jpg
So, if the final phone call really is the child killing himself, which makes the story meaningless, then the story ironically makes a lot of sense. Because I can only make sense out of the story by reading meanings into it, like the child who killed himself would have, and the meaning I read into it is that it is a deliberately meaningless story about the death of meaning—meaning, that perhaps meaning is not so dead after all, if even this story needs meaning in order to work.
Sorry for double posting, but damn, I'm still trying to get my head around this.
"Symbols and Signs" is a story about a boy who represents meaning—unless there is no meaning, in which case he doesn't, for the two reasons that there is no meaning to be represented and no way to represent anything—who either kills himself or doesn't, depending on the meanings (if any) which you take from the story.
If the boy survives, then the story has meaning, because the final scene is a hopeful one and his survival would resolve what conflict does exist in the story—we can look forward to his new life living with his parents. If he survives and also represents meaning, then the story also has meaning in the sense that its symbol of meaning continues to exist.
If he dies, then the story becomes both meaningless on its surface and meaningless by losing its symbol of meaning—unless there is no meaning, in which case the boy was never a symbol of meaning to begin with. But because the ending is ambiguous, you can't even decide whether the boy lives or dies without using some kind of meaning to prop up your interpretation of the story.
So the true meaninglessness can only be found in a refusal to even decide whether the boy lives or dies. For the person who despises meaning, the logical conclusion is to end by ceasing to care whether or not there is meaning anyway, and to simply stop looking for it.
Well, you might appreciate this, at least.
i.imgur.com/9G8YhbX.jpg
I read, and enjoy, the short stories in the New Yorker. However, I am the type of reader to see far, far more meaning in a story than others. Literary fiction often relies upon this analysis to get its message across. It's not a pleasant or pretty genre; its one that will make you think about if the curtains really are a symbol for something.
2401939
There's nothing wrong with writing a story with a deeper subtext to it. There is something wrong with it when it is done at the cost of making the overlying story terribly boring.
Look at Watchmen. There are all sorts of subtle, hidden things in there, all sorts of things hidden in the background, or which are implied rather than outright stated, or which just are meant to symbolically tie things together and be clever. Fearful Symmetry is wholly symmetrical in its layout, for instance, but if you don't notice that, it doesn't ruin the comic.
But even if you miss most of the subtext, you're likely to pick up on at least some of it (if not the same subtext as everyone else), and you're still reading a good story on the surface. The same is true of The Sixth Sense - there's some hidden symbolism in there, there are all sorts of clever hints and clues, but the story still works even if you miss them.
All that stuff in the background of Watchmen wouldn't be nearly so cool if the overlying story wasn't good, though. And that's the problem with a lot of this stuff - it isn't.
Are any of these stories asking a question as interesting as The Lady or the Tiger? If not, then what is the purpose of their obscurity, other than to pretend to be more interesting than they actually are? I fear that they have confused obscurity with depth, and navel-gazing with wisdom. I am reminded of XKCD:
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/impostor.png
It feels to me like their goal is trying to be exclusive and thereby feel elite, rather than to actually be genuinely elite.
It reminds me of my own reaction to the Harry Potter books back in the day, when I was like "man, some of this is pretty badly written, why are people so enamored with this?" without realizing I was looking at it in the wrong way.
That's not to say that I consider Harry Potter to be a brilliant tour de force, but that because I had my nose held too high, I couldn't see the ground anymore.
2401939
That is not to say that there is anything wrong in you deriving enjoyment from this game. I actually like the game of seeing hidden depths.
But if I'm looking for hidden gems, I'd rather be looking in a field of pretty flowers than a pile of manure. Especially if I'm not sure that there even is a gem.
The New Yorker features nothing but sad porn, and I'd say it's just as substanceless and artificial as every other kind of porn. Still fun to read every now and then, though, if you're in the mood for an emotion wank.
2401967
Ah, but there's your perspective. I don't see them as manure; rather, I see them as a field of gems. Frankly, I love the heavy-handed, depressing writing present in the New Yorker. It is sobering for me, lest I find myself participating in the Pity Olympics.
2403047
Well, at least someone enjoys them.
Thanks for helping convince me that I'm not crazy!
Unless I am crazy. In which case, curse you!