(The short story “Life with Spider” by Patrick Langley appeared in the February 5th, 2024 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photo illustration by Hana Mendel for The New Yorker
First of all, when I read a story that has to do with a grown man and a large insect, I can’t help but think of “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka. And I have run into more stories than I can count about men and bugs. (Kafka created a secret literary genre that no one talks about.) It’s unfair to Patrick Langley that I immediately made that comparison when I started reading “Life with Spider,” but when I finished the story, I think Langley was counting on me to do that, so he could mess with my head.
“Life with Spider” is a story about Fletcher Hardy and his bug-like creature called Spider, even though it is not a spider. We are told off the bat that Hardy, not his real name, has given permission to the narrator to tell the story, provided that we aren’t able to figure out who the “real” Hardy is. It’s an interesting framing of the story as everything that Fletcher says and does, in essence, is told to us second hand. Several specific details are given about Hardy; who his family is, where they live, what he does, and what they do, and so on. It made me wonder if the narrator was lying to “throw me off.”
Either way, we learn that Hardy is being visited by a six-legged insect like creature, which will not leave him alone. Hardy convinces his friend, the narrator, to help get rid of the creature. I don’t want to give away too many details, leave a few surprises, but I am sure you can surmise that Hardy and the narrator survive, as they are telling this story.
I enjoyed this story even though it did befuddle me. I mentioned the one above about the details and if the narrator was reliable. But the big question for me about this story was, what was Spider? Did it represent something specific? Was it death? Since the two main characters were young men transitioning into adulthood, was Spider a metaphor for their transition? Possibly, Spider was a manifietation of their friendship? Was I supposed to think about Kafka? Am I thinking too hard about Kafka? And the story had a “Dead Chick in the Basket*” ending, which maybe made sense? Or maybe it wasn’t supposed to make sense?
What “Life with Spider” reminded me of was some of the more fantastical stories from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. Both had a sense of play, humor, and the humans in the stories react with a relative sense rationalism to their extreme situations. I didn’t need “Life with Spider” to make sense or tie up all the loose ends neatly, because the enjoyment was trying to figure out a mystery that would never get completely solved.
* “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a clichéd writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. The first known use of this device was in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”
Matthew Groff 