Category: Short Story Review

  • Short Story Review: “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao (Translated from the Chinese, by Jeremy Tiang.)

    (The short story “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao appeared in the October 9th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Sally Deng

    If you write a story about a parent/child relationship, and then throw in a dying parent, you pretty much are half way to claiming a small place in my heart. My logically analytical side gets thrown out the window, and I am running on emotions. And let’s be honest, if you’re creating art, you want people to have an emotional reaction – it’s like the whole point. I say this because I can be completely biased when it comes to certain subject matters, which can complicate things when I try to review short stories from an objective place.

    Which is why it’s strange for me to say that I didn’t feel an emotional connection to “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao. This is a fine story, well written, engaging, and just odd enough to keep me intrigued with what was happening. And as I was reading this piece, I kept expecting it to “click” into place and tap that raw parent/child emotion in me, but it never came. But I don’t begrudge the story for this, nor am I left feeling that the story “misfired” in its execution. Oddly, I feel this might have been exactly the reaction the story was attempting to create in the reader.

    The story mainly takes places on a medical bus that is driving late at night to Beijing. The passengers are an older man dying of heart disease, his son, a driver, and ER doctor who agreed to accompany the father and son. We learn from the narrator, who is the son, that the heart disease that is killing his father skips every other generation, meaning the son is immune from the fate of his father.

    The tone of the story is straightforward, logical, and there are no literary flourishes. But the events in this story slightly graze the edge of surrealism – just slightly. It’s enough touches to make the story feel that it’s not completely in reality. But still I had to wonder why these touches were there. What did the father’s daily boxing routine really symbolize? Why was the driver sleeping as he drove the vehicle? Also, what about the doctor’s sleeping? Was this all a dream? And the need for the son to have to use the bathroom? Was there a meaning to the son’s self-described laziness and his recent decision to stop working, while the father worked every day; even when he retired, he went and found a new job to keep working? All of these questions left me feeling uncertain, unsettled, and wondering what I was supposed to make of this?

    And then there is a moment in the story where the son wonders what he is supposed to do when his father does pass away. He thinks of all the work that will come with making the arrangements for a funeral; contacting family and people his father worked with, raising money to pay for it all, and cars for the procession. Then the son thinks that once his father is gone, that he will truly be alone and by himself. To that the narrator says, “I guess that’s what freedom looks like nowadays,…” A sobering, and heartbreaking realization, that can also feel overwhelming to the point where one can be left numb, and disconnected.

    There isn’t one way to mourn, and that’s what “Heart” reminded me of. I don’t know what all of these pieces in this story amounted to, but I don’t think Shuang Xuetao is wrong for presenting that either, if that was the intention. Maybe not having a feeling right away is still a sort of feeling. Maybe.

  • Short Story Review: “ProCess” by Abigail E. Myers

    (The short story “ProCess” by Abigail E. Myers appeared on September 26th, 2023 in Rejection Letters.)

    image: MM Kaufman

    I remember how when I was a kid, I was told in school that technology, someday, would solve all our problems, thus making the world a better and perfect place. My dad, when he was a kid in the 50’s, was told how there would be flying cars in 1980. Yeah, that never happened, but we sure did get loads of new tech which has changed the world – just no flying cars. Sometimes I think the real role of technology is to create new problems while solving old problems. The things that annoy us, will still annoy us, just not as much.

    I feel that was the starting point with “ProCess” by Abigail E. Myers, a tight, efficient and humorous flash fiction piece in the form of a rejection letter. The rejection letter is from the App Store, informing the developer that their new app, “ProCess: The App for Funeral Processions” will not be accepted, with a suggestion of next steps for the developer.

    What I enjoyed most with Myer’s piece was its full commitment to the flash form. Yes, the work is short, but this isn’t a short-short story; This isn’t an uber-condensed form of a hero cycle, or a quick character study. This is flash fiction in the form I like to see; quirky, unconventional, but a story that still moves from a starting point to an ending point, firmly rooted in honesty.

    The quirkiness is apparent by this app for funeral processions, and it’s unconventional in the form of a rejection letter, but what I was most impressed with was how Myer’s moved the story forward. The building and movement of the piece is accomplished in the three bullet points which use syntax and formatting of the text to accomplish this goal. The first point is formatted normally with no additions, but in the second point, italicized letters are used to highlight the developers thoughts. By the third point, the italicized and normal formatting seems to have been reversed, implying an urgency and irratition toward the situation. It’s an effective choice that I didn’t notice on my first reading, but I felt its implication immediately. It causes the narrative to move towards a conclusion, which is the app store stating, “all must yield.”

    I admit that I am thinking very hard about a very short flash fiction piece. Yet, when someone accomplish the feat of executing a very good story, in what I think is a great example of what makes flash fiction an original form of literature, it should be applauded. “ProCess” makes its point on how some situations cannot be avoided, even with technology, and that’s just life. A complete, honest thought, that rings true.

  • Short Story Review: “The Narrow Way” by Liliana Colanzi (Translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews.)

    (The short story “The Narrow Way” by Liliana Colanzi appeared in the September 25th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (Do I even need to say SPOILERS?)

    Photograph by William Mebane for The New Yorker

    Liliana Colanzi pretty much nails it in the first four paragraphs of her story “The Narrow Way.” We come to understand that the Devil is real to these characters, that the Reverend holds power over this community, that the protagonist and her sister have an uncomfortable close relationship, and if you leave this community then you leave for good. Everything that follows in this engrossing story relates back to these four paragraphs, thus creating a structure for this world to exist in, leaving us to see how these characters function in it. This set up, which is what it is, was handled so subtly and with a lite touch, that jaded me didn’t pick up on it until I reached the end of the story.

    There were many aspects that I enjoyed in this piece, but I really want to look at the format/structure that Colanzi used to accomplish her story. First was making the reader slightly uncomfortable with the sisters game of “cows and calves” in the third paragraph – somethings not right with these people as they don’t seem innocent, but ignorant to the changes that are happening to them. Clearly the children of the colony are maturing into puberty, but without any guidance due to the “narrow way” that their religion demands, they go blindly forward, stumbling into these changes. And then with the fourth paragraph, we know that this “colony” is a place of repression and control. Everything that follows next in the story is filtered through these two notions, making the rest of the narrative always feel uneasy, and with a threat of violence. As the story unfolds with each new section, this ignorance and violence continue to be heightened, building to the climax.

    And if one criticism must be laid on this story, it is the climax. When I was first reading the story, I was caught up with the narrative, the language, tone, mood, all of it, so the climax felt correct. When I thought back on the story, it became clear that there were only really two outcomes for this story; escape, or death. The idea that this colony would be destroyed or overthrown by its residents is never entertained by any of its characters, so it never was a narrative option to begin with. I understand that escape and death were foreshadowed by Colanzi from the relative start of the story, but… When you tell a story about repression, isn’t the release into freedom, either through escaping or death, the only stratifying options on the table?

    That having been said, “The Narrow Way” is a very good story – built well, written well, and encompassing a very specific world. This is not a place I want to live, as it’s a repressive and disquieting environment. Yet, there is a very honest humanity in this story that is compelling, and makes one yearn for people to be free.

  • Short Story Review: “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal

    (The short story “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal appeared in the September 18th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

    “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal is an interesting exercise. I read it twice, enjoyed it both times, but I’m still wondering about the ending. Each time I read it, and I can’t put my finger on why, or where the example is in the story, but I kept thinking about French Absurdist one-act theatre. (I was a theatre major, I read a lot of their works.) Something about this story seemed to parallel that. This story isn’t blatantly absurdist. It does have a foot in reality, but there is something off, which works.

    The story is about ladies who lunch, but not the Sondheim “ladies.” The story of these ladies is broken up into sections; the first being “JANUARY: THE FORGETTING OLYMPICS,” which also happens to be an agenda item for the meeting of the ladies. What if forgetting was an Olympic sport? And the ladies give examples of their forgetting, comparing, and expanding this idea. At this point, the story could be about aging. But with the next section “MARCH: NEXT TO GODLINESS” and “JUNE: FUNK” we are given examples of the ladies friendship, and how they are dealing with their forgetting. And again, it all feels purposefully off center, ever so slightly. But when the final section comes along, “NOVEMBER: NO MORE TRAINS” which is broken up into three sections, with the last being the one I questioned the most – It’s a single paragraph with no dialogue, which is different and shorter than all other sections of the whole story. This paragraph thuds the story to a close, help with a rhetorical last question “For now?”

    From the way the story started with that absurdist feeling I had while reading, I never was expecting this to be a story that would wrap up cleanly, or even conclusively for that matter.  But that last paragraph is completely and radically different from the rest of the story – what was the point? Then I remembered the French Absurdists, who sometimes made the point of not having a point, and just ending things.

    Or it’s about death?

    I’m going with death.

  • Short Story Review: “Hobbies” by Robbie Herbst

    (The short story “Hobbies” by Robbie Herbst appeared in X-R-A-Y on August 30th.)

    (SPOILERS, people! SPOILERS!)

    Art by Bri Chapman

    There sure are a great number of short stories and novels that cover the subject matter of the male midlife crisis. Or, as a friend calls them, “Sorry your penis stopped working, stories.” In one way or another, midlife crisis stories are about virility; the lack of it, the fear of losing it, of losing it, or desperately keeping it. And it is an attractive cliché to work with, as it is soaked in drama due to impending change, and can lend itself to comedy or drama, or a little of both.

    “Hobbies” by Robbie Herbst is just a short story that could have taken a turn down the midlife crisis trope. In fact, I kept expecting that it would, but it didn’t, and that was a completely refreshing development. In fact, the whole story is told in this realist yet absurdist style; claiming to be neither, but clearly dabbling a toe in both. In this way, the story stays lite, but also rooted in an honesty.

    The protagonist is a man sliding into a transition. The story opens with a mysterious letter from a woman named Therese that the he does not know, and rather than share the letter with his wife, he burns it, thus keeping it a secret. As we learn more about him, we see that he is a good person, with two good kids, happily married, with a good job, living a good life. But that night he wakes up having no idea who he is, but slowly, the details of his being return to him. This moment starts his journey to see if he is missing something. This is the fear of losing virility. Or maybe relevance. Either way, the hero is in a place of security and yet feels incomplete.

    And what follows is the breaking of the midlife crisis cliché. Here, the marriage is still fine, the kids are okay, and the job is fine. Yet, there is a threat that looms over him and the family – something that has to be prepared for. It’s not identified, nor does it need to be, as it is a fear that takes the form of whatever it needs to be for each person. But our hero keeps making choices, figuring out what he needs to do to confront whatever is coming.

    This was a smart story, and also very funny. Herbst is very good at keeping the story moving, throwing in details, and never letting the narrative get bogged down. But most of all, “Hobbies” took what I thought would be cliched, and gave it a twist and an insight that I wasn’t expecting.