(The short story “Yogurt Days” by Jamie Quatro appeared in the August 7th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)
(SPOILERS! Though I think you know that, and I should stop announcing it now…)
Illustration by Alex Merto;
Source photograph by Bonnie Taylor Barry / Shutterstock
Ah… religion and faith, and rules and guidelines, and patriarchy and pragmatism. This all has to do with Christianity and not religion in general. Christianity does get a bad rap in most fiction – used mainly to highlight the hypocrisy in human nature. Every now and then we get a work of fiction that is nuanced toward its representation of Christianity in the world around us. That’s what I felt reading “Yogurt Days” by Jamie Quatro – a story that is strong on theme, ideas, and structure. While the prose is adequate for the piece, Quatro strength is in taking all the tricks that are taught in writing classes, and uses them effectively to accomplish her goal of delivery a solid story that is honest, and even a tad melancholic.
This is a story about faith, and the actions behind faith, and those motivations. The story is about the narrator’s mother who has more faith than sense, and is blessed with an affluent lifestyle which allows her to survive with that disposition. This mother isn’t a bad person at all, and the narrator, even as a child, is aware of that. The story jumps from the past to the present, and how the past situation is still influencing the narrator in the present.
I said writing tricks because that’s what they are, but it works. The opening sentence is a textbook in making the reader want to find out more. The first paragraph previews the theme of the story. An early example of the mother’s faith is given to show why she behaves the way she does. There is the breaking up of, what could have been, a simple linear story through time jumps, in essence to create more drama, but also pad out the story. I’m not saying this to be mean, or to imply this is a “color-by-number” story, but to say that Quatro’s structure is easy to follow, and allows us to know that this story is going to land.
But what Quatro does very well, and I think it is a strength of the story, is that by using this standard structure, it gives the story freedom to flow and bring life to little truths about faith, or the illusion of faith, and how faith can even infect the unfaithful. And best of all, in the middle of this story, the daughter (narrator) forgives the mother for her past transgressions. I think most writers would have made this the climax of the story, but I appreciated that this type of cliché was avoided. Instead, by putting the forgiveness in the middle, what we received was a better understanding of how faith had influenced the narrator’s life, along with a better understanding of the relationship between mother and daughter.
Matthew Groff 