Matthew Groff

(The short story “Nondisclosure Agreement” by Said Sayrafiezadeh appeared in the May 9^th, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.)

(I see dead people and SPOILERS ahead!)

(Note: This review was updated on 5/8/22)

I don’t like being a grownup; it sucks. I’m not saying that I want to be a kid, because that also sucked. What I am saying is that adulthood is not all that it’s cracked up to be. The narrator in Said Sayrafiezadeh’s story “Nondisclosure Agreement” seems to be discovering this as well.

The narrator is a relatively recent grad school graduate in literature, who misses being in school, and has been finding dissatisfaction in post grad school life by meandering through a string a meaningless low paying service jobs. That is until he lands a position doing data entry at a mail-order catalog company. From the get-go, the story lets you know that this job does not work out, though the narrator is offered double the salary than he was expecting. The narrator enjoys his large paycheck, and gets a larger apartment, a new car, and better clothes. Then one day the narrator and his boss have a moment where they discover that they both have a love of poetry and literature. Turns out the boss originaly wanted to publish a lit journal, but his bankrolling parents wouldn’t allow it, so the boss was forced to create the mail-order catalog company. The narrator suggests to his boss that he should read his work, including his grad thesis. The boss loves the work and decides to publish them, which starts a process of editing and reediting with no end in sight, as the boss keeps moving the publication date off further and further into the future.

I started off liking this story, and then I just became confused by it. The story felt like it couldn’t decide what style or form it should take, like it was at odds with itself. From the beginning, the story seems rooted in realism. Yet, these slightly Kafka-esk elements are dropped in, like how the narrator is the only full-time employee, doing data entry for a company in a dying industry, the never-ending edits, the delaying of publication, and how money just comes out of nowhere.

Then there is the narrator. For the hero of the story, he does nothing heroic. He just puts up with everything. The character is shallow, selfish, and gullible when someone shows the slightest interest in his work. I don’t think those are disqualifying traits to have for the main character, but the character still has to confront something, or at least make a choice. Unfortunately, the narrator makes no choices, which leaves the story feeling unfulfilled.

Which brings me to my final point, as this story executes a trick that I have been seeing in several other short stories of late; the foreshadowing of a climax that never materializes. (I’m sure there is a succinct one-word term for this that I am not aware of, most likely in German.) It works like this; the story tells us from the beginning how it will end, then the reader is reminded two more times in the story how it will end. When the ending of the story arrives (and it’s an ending not a climax) it’s not the ending that was foreshadowed, but a different one, but it should lead to the foreshadowed ending. It’s a literary bait and switch, as in the climax doesn’t happen in the story, but sometime after the story ends. We are told there will be a lawsuit between the boss and the narrator, and we are also told the boss is crazy. The lawsuit is meant to function as the climax, and the craziness of the boss, which is his inability to publish the journal, is never given any evidence as to why he would behave this way. Yet, the story is being presented in such a manner that the reader needs to accept these two criteria for the story to reach its conclusion. Sadly, this trick doesn’t work.

What we are presented with is a story and a narrator who straddling between the two worlds of child and adulthood. Both worlds may suck, but inevitably, you have to make a choice to live in one. Maybe that was the point of “Nondisclosure Agreement,” but it’s not clear, because no one made a decision.

(Say, don’t forget to like this post, or share it, or leave a comment. I got bills to pay, you know.)