I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact that I’m just now reading the Summer Fiction issue (June 14 & 21). I like short stories, or at least, I think of myself as liking short stories, but somehow I don’t actually read that many of them in book form: at any given moment I’m much more likely to be reading a novel, or a book of poems, or maybe a book of essays. But that’s where The New Yorker comes in, except that I often find the short stories in its pages to be, well, semi-memorable at best. This may partly be a function of the fact that I don’t tend to write about those stories here, or to discuss them with anyone else—and what I read but don’t write or talk about, I tend to forget. But I’m starting to think it might also be about the subject matter. I’m generally just not that interested in short fiction about middle-aged people who are privileged, heterosexual, and/or having marital difficulties or career trouble. And I feel like The New Yorker‘s fiction section has a lot of that. Not that there aren’t other kinds of stories represented as well, and not that I don’t sometimes appreciate a style or phrase in those stories, or even the way the plot unfolds. But unless something formally quirky or interesting or fun is happening, it’s probably not going to resonate with me. Also, I think I like short shorts, or even just short-ish shorts, best of all short stories.
Which is why a two page story by Jonathan Safran Foer called “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” made me pause when I started reading it and made me smile when I kept going. Here’s how it start: “I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers.” And it continues like that, except with some paragraphs being all “You” statements, and some being a mix of “I” and “You” and some being “We.” (There are some “They” sentences at the end, and some that don’t even start with a pronoun—but not very many of those, comparatively speaking.) I love it, the pace of it, the length of it, the way it tells a story through all the accumulation of these insignificant-seeming bits and pieces, how it traces the line of the speaker’s life through love/marriage/parenthood/boredom but does so in an unexpected way.
You can only read the whole story on The New Yorker‘s website if you have a subscription to the magazine, but someone else liked this story enough to type the whole thing out: here it is in its entirety.
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