Category: Short Story Review

  • Short Story Review: “My Sad Dead” by Mariana Enriquez

    (The short story “My Sad Dead” by Mariana Enriquez appeared in the February 13th & 20th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (Translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell.)

    (It goes without saying, but just saying, SPOLIERS!)

    Photo illustration by Silvia Grav for The New Yorker

    “My Sad Dead” is a finely written story by Mariana Enriquez, and I am sure there are people who will love it greatly, but it fell flat to me. It was the equivalent of being a kid and eating my vegetables with dinner; I know it’s good for me, but I just don’t like it. Part of my hesitation to embrace the story was that the premise of a woman who can speak to dead people and get them to “calm down,” was too close to the idea behind Ghost Whisperer, the Jennifer Love Hewitt television show from the early 2000’s. The other reason is boilerplate basic, as the protagonist doesn’t learn or grow over the course of the story.

    Now, it wasn’t lost on me that the theme, or the central metaphor, was about how middle-class communities cannot divorce themselves from the blight of their societies. That these problems will land on their doorsteps eventually. Which is what happens when a ghost knocks on all the front doors late at night in the neighborhood, repeating his last act of looking for help before he is murdered by the kidnappers he escaped from. All the neighbors ignore him, thinking that he is a thief faking needing aid so as to gain entry to their homes and rob them. In this regard, the story reminded me of the short stories of Haruki Murakami, especially from his book The Elephant Vanishes. Both writers are very good at making their fantastical situations feel believable, and exist in the real world.

    Yet, when “My Sad Dead” concludes with the protagonist staying where she is, I was left feeling hollow, unsatisfied. All the ingredients are here for a satiable conclusion; death, mothers, children, ills of society… But the protagonist goes nowhere. The piece starts with the protagonist wanting to stay in the house with her mother, and ends with her reiterating that she wants to stay in the house with her mother.

    Nothing changes.

  • Short Story Review: “Different People” by Clare Sestanovich

    (The short story “Different People” by Clare Sestanovich appeared in the January 30th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (SPOILERS ahead!)

    Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

    I have been trying for some time to come up with a good introduction for this piece, but I have decided that the best way to open this is to say that I really, deeply enjoyed reading “Different People” by Clare Sestanovich. So much so that I just want to start talking about it.

    This was such a smart, honest, tactile story which allowed me to meet and spend time with three characters. This was a story where I enjoyed the journey it was on, and when the conclusion of the piece arrived, I was completely satisfied with how it all tied together. This is the type of story that inspires me to write. It’s about people living their lives, and it is so cleverly constructed that the story never feels forced, or artificially fabricated.

    The story is about Gilly and her parents, Peter and Lisa, their divorce, how all of them change because of the divorce, and how Gilly begins to see her parents as people. But, it’s also about how one should beware of what they wish for. Or, it might also be about the need for security even as the world shifts under one’s feet. Or it might be about how one has to always grow and learn. Maybe it’s about how people hide in plain sight. Maybe. Maybe not. There could still be a level that I haven’t discovered yet.

    This story is divided up into six sections. Each of the sections are paced well, leading to a rise in the action, and then if not ending with a small climax, it concludes with a “button.” And these climax/buttons do a wonderful double duty of enlightening us on the characters in these sections, but also foreshadow upcoming events. Yet, this foreshadowing is so slight and sly that it seamlessly exists with the flow of the story, and doesn’t reek of a plot point.

    Also, I so enjoyed the very smart choices that Sestanovich made to develop her theme. I appreciated that the narrator doesn’t dwell often in the internal thoughts of any character, and allows actions to do the telling. Even a simple choice of having the parents referred to by their first names, which never puts the reader in the frame of thinking of these two people as parents first – Peter and Lisa remain adults. Thus, the reader sees the world as Gilly does – observing these two adults and how they react to this situation. All choices made by a writer that understands the craft of storytelling.

    I have read this story three, maybe four times now; it’s like a song I like listening to on repeat.  I still find these three characters compelling, and hope the best for them, if that makes sense. It’s also nice to be surprised with a well written story.

  • Short Story Review: “Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li

    (The short story “Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li appeared in the January 23rd, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (I will SPOIL this story.)

    Illustration by Camille Deschiens

    I sometimes need to be reminded that grief is an individual experience. Not only does each person grieve differently, but the grief one feels is also specific to the person who is lost. This is what I think was the point to “Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li, and I have to stress the word think as this story, though it pings some fine authentic truths, ultimately is an uneven exercise.

    This story is about Rosalie, a middle-aged woman who is traveling by train from Amsterdam to Brussels. The train is delayed due to a person having walked onto the tracks, and it so happens that Rosalie’s fifteen-year daughter had committed suicide by laying down on a set of train tracks years earlier. We also learn that Rosalie’s unloving and harsh mother has recently passed away, and this trip to Europe is an act of dealing with Rosalie’s grief. As Rosalie contemplates the life she had with her daughter, a pregnant woman on the train goes into labor, which Rosalie goes to help before the train stops and EMT’s arrive.

    I’m a sucker for a slow, contemplative piece that examines the nature of grief and what we choose to remember and obsess over, as if we could make changes to past events. This is what Rosalie does in the story, and that is when I found the writing to be the most honest. Yet, I had a few issues which stuck up, and caused me to be pulled out of this reality. First was the climax of the piece, which was the pregnant woman going into labor. And of course the woman was going to go into labor because the second the woman walks in the train, you knew she was going to go into labor. The use of this cliché is completely jarring to the quiet, introspective nature of the story. It feels more like a climax was forced in, rather than being organic with the piece. Second was the flatness of Rosalie’s mother, who just plays a single note of awfulness. There is no dimension to this character who, like the climax, seems to exist only to say awful things to thus move Rosalie’s character development forward. Rosalie wrestles with why her daughter killed herself, which is a question that can never fully be answered and is wrapped up fully in her grief. But Rosalie never questions or wonders why her mother was such an awful person to her. I found that difficult to accept as Rosalie’s character questions everything else that happens.

    It’s too bad, because there are some finely written parts of this story that work very well. Grief and loss are never easy to deal with, let alone define and explain to another person. “Wednesday’s Child” gets very close to hitting the mark, but unfortunately, stumbles and falls a little short.

  • ODDS and ENDS: China Visitors, North London Derby, and Fantasy Football

    (Crystal Pepsi wasn’t that bad…)

    I am very thankful and grateful for the people who look at this blog; There are my friends from high school, college, and my life in New York.; And there are the other writers and bloggers on this platform. I appreciate the time you spend on the posts, and the likes you give. Then I started to notice about a month ago, I was getting a shit ton of visitors from China, who are looking mainly at two posts; Short Story Review: “The Face in the Mirror” by Mohsin Hamid, and especially Short Story Review: “My Wonderful Description of Flowers” by Danielle Dutton. No one is leaving any comments or likes, so I am beginning to questions if this isn’t just a bunch of bots pinging these posts. Has anyone else encountered a situation like this? If this does happen to be real people looking at the post, then I guess I’m a little like the band Citizen Dick, cuz they were really huge in Belgium.

    The North London Derby is on Sunday! And Spurs gotta win it. Yeah, Tottenham needs to stop going into a hole in the first half, as Arsenal will not let up on them if they get a lead. This just means that my Sunday will be rather stressful. I want to be confidant about this team, but I still don’t feel that the defense has gelled together, and the Kane/Son combo has been nowhere to be seen this season. Ung… They are making me feel like I’m watching the Cubs again.

    Speaking of sports; I won my fantasy football league. I accomplished this feat with no skill, and all dumb luck. See, I let the computer draft my team, and all I did was adjust the lineup, which guaranteed me a losing season. But, there are so few people playing in my league, everyone got a spot in the playoffs. And that’s when my menagerie of players decided that they should start showing up. Hence, my amazing string of victories that lead to a Championship. My second, I would like to add. No one cares about this success, except me. And now you. You’re welcome.

  • Short Story Review: “Future Shock” by Peterson Berg

    (The short story “Future Shock” by Peterson Berg appeared in Rejection Letters on January 9th, 2023.)

    (SPOILERS AHEAD! – I think…)

    I know I have brought this up many times before, and I will be bringing it up again, but I really am enjoying all of the stories that are now coming out that are dealing with how Covid affected us. (The other night I saw a trailer for “Sick” which I believe is a horror movie set during the pandemic. I mean, if there is a film genre that is primed to deal with the anxiety of Covid, a horror movie seems pretty damn perfect.) Though the story “Future Shock” is not an overtly Covid story, I feel the pandemic is in the subtext Peterson Berg’s piece.

    Sorry to overly simplify the story – the narrator watches the movie “The Parallax View” a thriller starring Warren Beatty from the 70’s. There is one specific scene in the movie where a woman is trying to convince Beatty that people are being killed and she will be next. Beatty doesn’t believe her, and that scene jump cuts to the woman, now dead, laying on a table in the morgue. The viewing, and then obsessing of this scene leads the narrator to make a few quick and rash life decisions, which then cause him to withdraw from the world. After a few intervention attempts from his sister, the narrator is able to return to the world, at which point his with drawl may have been due to cold feet of upcoming events.

    The resolution of the story did strike me as bit of an easy button to end the piece, but what I feel brought me to that conclusion was that Berg did an excelent job of building up the anxiety, obsession, and confusion taking place in the narrators mind. And though this is not a stream of consciousness story, Berg’s writing does a great job of telling how the narrator latches on to this one scene from that movie, and keeps looking at it, replaying it, examining it, looking for some new revelation or discovery. All the while, the narrator makes quick observations of the world around him, and the tiny space he occupies in his apartment. A wonderful sense of claustrophobia is created in this story – of being trapped in this place, but also in the narrator’s thoughts.

    We might be past the dangers of the pandemic now, but I think we are now coming to terms that we all did some slightly weird or crazy shit to get through it. I am clearly in the camp that we should explore what that experience was like, and not ignore or deny what we went through. “Future Shock” is a welcome story to remind me that I also did obsess on a few things to get through it.