I’m blown away, all flecks and specks of flesh torn asunder by an absolute banger poem about someone else’s basement from their youth that somehow transforms into a very memorable metaphor for their life. This poem has it all, pure 90’s nostalgia, with a hint of horror driven by references to their childhood home on Elm Street (hello, Mr. Kruger), and then an evocative modern-day turn that captures the meaning of the title. Just as a memory palace exercise asks us to come up with unique, imaginative ways to remember something, I won’t soon forget the bloated tomato paste can, the white mask with no eyes, only more wall behind them, or Greta, the forgotten department store mannequin with her breasts bared for all the plumbers to ogle.
Read it for yourself on the New Yorker website.
Reading
Reviewing “Coconut Flan” by Catherine Lacy
Thematically, “Coconut Flan” is a story galvanized around identity. Doria is in Guadalajara and has lost her passport. Queue panic and a trip to the consulate. But then we see Doria mirroring herself against all that she sees, the cupped massage bruises of the woman in front of her at the consulate, her horrid replacement passport photos, observing (again) the battered woman from the consulate on the beach, and wondering if she’ll be recognized, although she knows she’s ordinary. The passport photos and the identification itself drive the story forward, but there’s less momentum than a wooden sleigh in dry grass meandering downhill to nowhereville.
Doria is childlike and isolated in the beginning. She’s an outsider in a foreign country, being treated like a non-citizen by her own country. Put on hold when she calls the Embassy, given the cold treatment by the man at the consulate, and even lied to by her countryman, whose existence in the story is both a cultural touchstone, Americans are bad actors abroad, loud and cantankerous, but seeing someone from your own country should bring about feelings of home and togetherness, but this encounter only alienates her more.
I consider all this, and then the title of the story comes into view. Why coconut flan? There’s a moment in the story where Doria and her husband are eating at a restaurant where the aforementioned loud American makes conversation, and his aggressiveness ends when he walks away, only for them to be given some coconut flan by the waitress, courtesy of Kevin, the loud-mouthed American. This disjointed entrance by a foreigner into this story and the land, languidly stretches to identity, and Doria even comments about how encountering a loud, boisterous person like this is always disheartening, especially when you learn that you share origins. The flan is also surprisingly good, sweet, and delicious — the opposite of the encounter with Kevin.
The story’s shape remains in flux throughout, never really gaining a solid footing. Doria sees herself in one way; she’s Narcissus gazing at their reflection. Her internal misery is tossed about like the ships that keep appearing in the story, only to be forgotten and sail away.
Is this a story about being isolated and entrenched in one’s stereotypes, or is it a story of chance encounters and misguided opportunities? Perhaps it’s a tale about how we never truly know our partners. There are shades of feminism, where Doria is relegated to the back of the taxi to listen to her handler husband, who converses too quickly in Spanish for her to understand. And maybe that’s the point of it all. We’re in the backseat, trying to make sense of all that happened.
Reviewing “Love of My Days” by Louise Erdrich
Love of My Days is a western set around the time before telephones, as the opening of the story tells us, and communication plays a significant role in the events that unfold. Or, rather, the lack of communication. I’ll give away the plot a bit, so if you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do so. It’s a good one.
I’ve been on an Elmore Leonard kick this year, reading four of his novels. This story reminds me of Last Stand on Saber River. A man returns home to find that someone has taken it as their own. The circumstances are different, but the chase and the scenes remind me of Leonard’s writing, if only in theme and description. Erdrich has a much deeper emotional connection to her characters, and those emotion’s come to a head at the end.
Timble is the man charged with trespass and the one who steals Weir’s buggy, along with his precious mother and son horses. These horses have been trained together and have become one unit. By the end, though, the pursuit of Timble leads to the mother’s death. Timble escapes on foot for the moment and is later shot. The final two scenes encapsulate the entire story. The young male horse stands next to its dead mother, knowing the distant calling of a cold barn, where he’ll never again be happy. This is the same for Timble, whose lover died while he was away, of typhoid, and he’s been without happiness ever since.
In the final scene, Timble encounters his dead lover walking towards him. She’s beautiful, as he remembered, and we get a glimpse into his past. At this point, it’s interesting how much I care about Timble. In the beginning, he’d shot a sheriff, which we later came to realize he did by mistake. He wasn’t meaning to fire, but the sheriff shot his hand and thus triggered the incident. Timble appears to be in a mental health crisis. He’d squatted at the farm because it’d belonged to his dead lover’s family. He’d wanted to return to that time in his mind, if no where else. So when we see him shot and encountering his dead lover once again, by this time, we have come over to his side as readers. We’re sad that he’s going, but there’s some peace knowing he’s with his lover again and then the emotional gut punch happens. We are shifted back into the reality of the moment.
The moment is shattered. Beatril is not really there. She’s in Timble’s mind, soothing his swift exit from this world. It’s a heartbreaking and powerful moment. By suggesting that Budack loomed over them, not him, but them, we know we’re still seeing this moment as Timble sees it. We’re in his lens of the world. Budack doesn’t see anyone but Timble, so it’s equally poignant.
Excellent story. This is one of my favorite stories from my pile of New Yorker magazines sitting next to my chair. I have maybe thirty to forty magazines to go through. I read the fiction before shelving them. I think the resonance of that final paragraph will stick with me, and I imagine I’ll return to this one again.
Reviewing “Safety” a short story by Joan Silber
Logged story info: https://jasonfrye.com/short_story/safety/
This story by Joan Silber has a lot of present day themes. Here’s a quick plot summary. The story tracks two friends, both girls who grow up in New York City, Brooklyn, one a Jew the other a Muslim. They become fast friends but grow apart as many due in adulthood. The narrator, the Jewish girl, becomes a lawyer and finds her way back to New York after some time outside the city. In their thirties they reunite. Yasmina has become a performer with her husband Abdul. Abdul has a Pakistani background, but is an American citizen. That doesn’t help him later in the story when he’s detained by ICE and self-deported back to Pakistani. That’s a very wide view of the story, but it gets to the crux of the piece, that injustice has been done and the world has been turned from one with clear rules to one without.
The story title and narrator’s career and life share similar thematic resonance. We consider ourselves safe if born in the US. The narrator is safe, as the final lines of the story prove. She’s able to take the same train to work, like every other day, like nothing had happened, while all this madness is going on in the world. And her safety is never under fire. In fact, she’s safe as can be in a world of political evil. She’s also a lawyer who once believed the law was a real thing, something substantial, if not messy. Now law is something that is suspect, a thing of utility for despots. So is safety a reality for all or just for some, depending on an ever-changing set of rules.
There were ties in the story to the Nazis. Anya’s origin story, who is Yasmina’s mothershowed the dark side of despots and their rule. The forced migration by Stalin of her people led to her being separated from her family. Those parallels to the current story’s situation were not lost. And it speaks to the trauma happening right here in America to our friends, community, and sometimes to our loved-ones.
A key piece of Yasmina and Abdul’s story is that they’re comedians. Comedians often have the language and cultural touchstones in places where other, regular folks do not. They can pierce to the heart of issues with cutting references and sarcastic wit. They’re also one of the first performers to be silenced by overbearing administrations, so while the story doesn’t admit this part of the equation, it does seem like the Trump ghouls might have silenced and forced out Abdul due to his jibes, especially seeing as he was from New York, a city that runs from this administration.
I thought some of the trauma of the events that unfolded were muted, maybe on purpose. For instance, we don’t really see Yasmina leaving the country to be with her husband in Pakistan. We know the narrator visits her and helps her unload copious amounts of detritus from her apartment, but we don’t really see those moments and feel the loss that Yasmina is going through. But it all happened so fast for the narrator, who at once realizes her friend is really leaving the country too. And isn’t that how this all comes to be? Before we realize it, these atrocities happen and we’re left behind picking up the pieces.
Review of Beartooth by Callan Wink
Beartooth takes place in the mountains of the same name. The story tracks Thad and Hazen, two brothers living in their inherited home and largely doing as they please in the wilds. Callan Wink focuses the narrative lens on Thad. The brothers are a good foil for each other and their interactions lead the story for much of the book.
The book opens with the brothers on a multi-day hunting excursion into the backwoods, where these two characters feel most comfortable. Later, they drift further into the wilds and we see Wink’s prose shine. He pulls us into the wooded areas and gives us clear but not flowery prose that lifts the story and sets it into this world of bears, rocky inclines, and so much wildlife. We can feel and smell the outdoors through his writing. Often with books that focus on the landscape, it can become a character. That certainly happens in Beartooth, with the landscape becoming this secretive friend to the brothers.
At roughly the halfway point, I thought the novel was leading me one way and then it took an unexpected turn. The novel misdirected and rounded back on itself. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but it was a good ruse that led me back into the story, like walking on a trail, losing it for a bit, and then finding that well-worn path.
Thad and Hazen go through a transformation in the novel’s pages. I won’t go into that in the review, but these brothers go through inner battles and we see the results of these fights on the pages. I have issues with the ending, but those are minor.
I’ll be checking out other work by Callan Wink in the future. I highly recommend this one for the masterful descriptions of the outdoors and the ease with which Wink captures the essence of these two characters.