(The short story “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang appeared in the May 25th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Chris Harnan
Reading “The Dreamdrive” was like watching my favorite basketball player miss an unobstructed layup.
First, there was the tone of the piece, which was attempting to be lighter, easy, and humorous. The effect of this was that the story never achieved a depth. Everything was presented at arm’s length, making the story feel like nothing was at risk, or truly important. Also, in an attempt at humor, one character was described as “his then girlfriend,” implying her eventual fate. This cliched trick of description can work if it is partnered with irony, but in this setting, the attempt was to humorously build sympathy for our sad sack of a protagonist. Unfortunately, I did not see the reason why we needed to have this information presented in such a manner.
Second, the revelation of the dream fell out of the sky and crashed like dishes on the floor. It was as if the narrator decided that the story needed to end now, and we were quickly given the relevance of what had been happening. But without any foreshadowing, or even a climatic build up, the revelation doesn’t achieve any resonance. Such as, now that the protagonist understands where his reoccurring dream is coming from, how does that help him move forward? It’s implied that he can sleep again, but is there nothing deeper here? How is the hero changed, other than being able to sleep? It felt to me that an emotional plot point was missing.
Third, with the tone and lack of resonance in this story, it made the narrator sound condescending to the protagonist. The narrator treats the protagonist as a person to ridicule and kick around. Multiple times the hero is shown as a person no one takes seriously. And honestly, if the narrator doesn’t care about the protagonist, then why should the reader?
I have been trying the “gratitude list” thing for the past month now.
In the rendition that I was shone, when you wake up in the morning, you are supposed to make a list of 10 things you are grateful for, but you cannot repeat the same thing day after day. You gotta come up with new ideas. Makes sense, because I can see people cheating at this and putting down their spouse, or kids, or dog… maybe not in that order. The point is that you start off the day on a positive note, listing what you have, or what’s working on your life, or what you have in abundance.
I won’t lie, it kind’a works. And I say kind’a because you have to have the right attitude for it.
Here are a few funny things that I have gratitude for at 5:30am on most weekeday:
Not sure what I did, but I was walking home from Trader Joe’s on Tuesday, and all of a sudden I got this sharp pain in my left ankle. At first the ache was so bad that I thought I was going to have to sit down, but slowly it started to subside. The issue is that everyday since, I continue to have an ache down there. I’ve tried bending and turning my ankle in several different way to see if there is a specific position that causes the pain, but I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s not so bad that I can’t walk, but it has made me nervous to return to the gym and run on the treadmill. It’s just odd.
I read this article in The Athletic, about how Kobe Bryant used to sit quietly for 15 minutes at the start of each day to center himself. I am on a bit of a self-improvement kick right now, so I thought, what the hell, let’s see if this will work. I am aware that it may take several day if not weeks for there to be any noticeable improvement in my centering, but there has been one change. I no longer doom-scroll in the morning, and I have to admit, that has put me in a much better mood.
Today at my kid’s school is an art show, and I am very proud to say that my daughter has two pieces on display. I’m about to head out and look at her and her classmates work, which I am looking forward to. The kid has always been a creative type and she has and is still fill sketchbooks of little drawings. When I asked about the work she made for she, I was curious as to my her inspiration was. Her answer; “I don’t know. I just like making stuff.”
(The short story “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee appeared in the May 11th & 18th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Adrian Tomine
When I graduated high school, my uncle got me a subscription to The New Yorker. He was a very smart and well-read man, and he knew of my ambitions to have a writing career, and this graduation gift, which I emphatically received with much excitement, was his way of encouraging me. I say all of this because off and on over my adult life, I have continued to subscribe to The New Yorker, and for that reason I feel fully justified, due to my extensive financial investment in the publication, to complain to the Fiction Department, and formally request they stop publishing works of short fiction which are merely excerpts from novels. I speak of Chang-rae Lee’s “Standings”, which by the magazine’s own admission “… is drawn from “A Tender Age.”” Then adds Change-rae Lee “…is the author of the novel “A Tender Age.” (August, 2026)” Though this work is an excerpt, it was published in the short fiction section of the magazine, so I will be reviewing it as a short story.
“Standings” is the type of story that suffers from the sins of being too smart for its own good, and wanting to do too much. The story is overly long, bringing in as many details as possible to give the reader the full feeling and experience of what it was like to grow up in this environment of 1976 adolescence. Not to make light of the subject matter, but this is a coming of age story of boys on the cusp of crossing into adulthood, and being unclear what to do with the rage and aggressiveness they are supposed to embrace as they try to figure out what manhood is. This is a pack of “lost boys” with no direct positive male influence, and left to their own devices, devolve into racism and violence. On the surface, this is a deep well to work with, and speaks to the potential of an engaging and enlightening story. But here, the story felt unfocused on what it truly wanted to tell, with many tangents of ideas flailing. As Milhouse would say, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?!”
Another issue that I had here was that I never felt the protagonist was ever in any peril through the course of the story. I spoke of the aggression between the boys, but the tone flipped between a comical story of boys posturing toward each other knowing that nothing would happen, to a very serious they must kill or be killed. Instead of creating a logically narrative development, such as playing at being violent leading to violence as survival, the story seemed to flip a switch. What we are given is a bipolar feeling of it just “happens,” which left me thinking I had missed a step, or an unearned short cut was taken. By doing that, the intention of the action never felt believable. The protagonist does pull out a knife at school and tries to harm another student, yet his consequences are suspension, some therapy, a bit of social ostracization, but on the whole he was able to continue on as a well-adjusted adult. Meanwhile the other boy has trouble coming out of his home due to the trauma, and another boy turns out was schizophrenic all along. Other than that…
This brings me to my last point, which is that I never felt an urgency in the writing. In my point above, I stated that the protagonist never felt in peril, and part of that has to do with the language used. The narrator/protagonist is clearly writing this story – this is a first-person narrative that would never be confused with a friend talking to us, or a person at a bar telling us this story. No, this is unquestionably a story being written, and as such, it sticks to the rules. (Hell, the knife was introduced in the second act, and was used in the third.) It felt like an undergrad working hard to get an A in a creative writing class. The narrative plays it safe and does everything right, but in so doing, it never takes a risk or displays an intensity. The thought that I had reading this was maybe you can be simplistic and minimal.
“Standings” doesn’t work as a short story, but I also admit I don’t think it was ever meant to. For all I know, “A Tender Age” could be a great book, and given the breath and space that a novel can take, perhaps all of these pieces tie together and it plays like a fine-tuned song. But in the end, this just hammers home to me that not every story should be a short story.
Sometimes I sit down with my laptop, and I have no idea what it is that I am going to write, and then nothing happens. There is no inspiration, no spark, nothing happens, and I just sit here in my livingroom, looking out the window.
Then there are those super rare moments when I sit down and I know exactly what it is that I am going to do, and how I want to say it. Yeah, like I said, those are rare.
What most often happens is that I have to sit down and force myself to do something creative. The thing I want most in life, I have the hardest time making myself do. I would rather do anything else in life, than what I am doing right now, which is trying to figure out what to write. And even sometimes when I know what I want to write, I can’t commit to just sitting down and doing it.
But then again, when I choose not to write, or do anything creative for that matter, I feel like shit. Everything in me starts screaming at me that I am wasting time, I am losing another day, that the reason that I never amounted to anything is because I am so completely lazy.
So I sit in front of my computer, and nothing comes. Then I start looking out my window again.
