The Writer’s Coin

About six months ago I got a thing in the mail saying I could get a full year of The New Yorker for around $19, which I thought was great and felt I couldn’t turn it down. One reason was my newfound theory of knowing where you write, the other being that it would expose me to different subjects I may not find out about on my own (the impetus behind Outside the Box), like the street graffiti artist who sells his work for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Banksy.

So my main interest was reading the fiction in the magazine—usually a short story (sometimes not so short) or a novel excerpt from a distinguished author. Having a story show in The New Yorker is the equivalent to “making it” for a writer. Getting an agent and selling more work is a formality after that. So it’s also a great place to “break through.”

For the most part though, it has been a disappointment.

Most of the stories are stuffy and pretentious. A select few are entertaining—it makes you wonder why some of them are chosen. After reading so many of the stories they put in there, the image I have of their fiction editor is of someone intensely worried of what his/her friends are going to think of the story he/she has chosen. So to make up for that, he/she tries to confuse them and maybe hope that his/her friends feel it is over their heads, eventually praising the editor for picking out “such exquisite writing.”

Some people call this “a writer’s story.” I call it pretentious, boring, and steering completely away from the purpose of fiction, which is to—at some level—entertain.

So it was a nice surprise to read back-to-back excellent stories in the January 7 and 14 issues of the magazine.

• “Outage,” by John Updike is a story of a man who works from home—a typical suburban setup: kids, wife, all of it—when the power goes out and he finds himself in the attractive neighbor’s house. Where he clearly shouldn’t be. It kind of reminded me of Richard Ford’s work in The Sportswriter and Independence Day (I have yet to read the third of the trilogy, Lay of the Land), except something really exciting and out of the box is happening. Updike pushes the boundaries of the typical suburban story and then, when you think he’s going to cross the line, he comes right back. This man knows what he’s doing and it results in a very entertaining, well-written story.
• “Wakefield,” by E.L. Doctorow is a hilarious story of, coincidentally, a man who lives in the suburbs with his wife and family. Oddly, there is a power outage of some kind and he has to walk home from the train station. Then he falls asleep in the garage and wakes up the next day. Knowing his wife will be pissed off wondering where he’s been all night, he decides to delay his re-entry to his house/life. For months. He lives in the garage, he lives in a nature preserve, he becomes friends with the neighbor’s autistic patients, all the while keeping an eye on his wife and kids, who presume he’s died or run off or some combination of the two. It’s so odd and believable (we can all relate, trust me) that it keeps you turning the pages. The whole time, though, I was wondering how he was going to end it. When I got there, I thought it was a brilliant way of doing it and wondered how he got there. Did he fight the urge to end it in a different way? Was this the way he always thought of ending it? This is what I love about writing fiction: these kinds of decisions. The magic of it. It’s what I was standing up for when I wrote about Will Leitch’s article in Publisher’s Weekly.

So I was pleasantly surprised and reinvigorated with reading the Fiction in my weekly magazine. These are the kinds of stories you go back to when you’re writing your own stories. When you need answers or a little help.

Maybe I should start writing about living in suburbia with my family and then the power goes out. Oh wait, I have none of those things yet.

Update: There is some hope — I’ve found another story or two since this post that is pretty good.

Tags: fiction, reading, the new yorker