Operation Short Story

I don’t want to be a total hater and trash the fuck out of this story that was in last week’s New Yorker. I was planning to write about a different story that I liked, but then that magazine–it was in Zoetrope–got buried in some pile, and I can’t find it anywhere, and how do you expect me to write about it if I can’t find it?

The truth is, I can’t help myself. Part of me just wants to reproduce the entire New Yorker story so you can see what I’m talking about. But I wouldn’t want you to choke to death on your own vomit. So, a quick rundown:

It’s called “Playdate.”

Seriously? Somebody wrote a story and titled it “Playdate,” and it’s an unironic account of a playdate on the Upper West Side, with lots of charming and authentic details, and the New Yorker published that? WTF?

It’s full of cliched writing, ridiculously pat and phony dialogue (why doesn’t this lady try her hand at Broadway plays or something?), sentimentality, characters doing stuff nobody would ever do, tired tropes, blah blah blah blah blah. I could give examples, but who really cares. Just read this one part.

Does anyone not live uptown? Liz wants to know, but she asks the question only of herself, so there’s no answer, just the relative quiet of her studio—a big loft in what was once considered Chinatown. Liz spends most mornings here spinning clay into pots and teacups and dessert plates.

Oh! so Liz is a bohemian.

Listen to how these people talk:

“I can’t say that anything really happened with Richard,” Fran says. “It was just, you know, the feeling.” She lies on the floor in the now dim light of the apartment, balancing her wineglass on her chest, her feet propped on the sectional. “The elephant-in-the-room feeling.”

“The wha?” Liz says.

…

“The elephant-in-the-room feeling,” Fran says. “You know, the thing that’s just, God, there. It’s big and heavy and real, somehow, though unnamed. It’s just there, is all, this blob of feeling; the feeling from the Black Lagoon.”

I can’t deconstruct this. I can only hate it.

For the record, I don’t think the world of this story is inherently uninteresting. Two bourgeois bitches guzzling wine in the afternoon while their children play… sounds like Cheeverville!

Except, not.

I am disappointed in the New Yorker. Plenty of times I find the stories they publish to be predictable and overly neat and tidy: a series of deftly-rendered scenes, a gentle climax with a glimmery epiphany, a clean ending, and an hour later I’ve forgotten I ever read it. Those stories aren’t exactly bad. They just have no soul. It’s like they’re computer-generated or something.

This is a whole other thing. Tripe.

by Pistol Whip | 31 March 2007 | rant, in earnest, reading, hate | Comments