A few years ago, The New Yorker inaugurated a "Summer Fiction Issue." The latest model just came out, and it tells us something about the state of fiction and the culture at large. While the issue includes one story by an established writer, E.L. Doctorow, the centerpiece is a section headed "Debut Fiction," which features stories by four young writers. This is the second year in a row that the "Summer Fiction Issue" has focused on what the magazine's introductory note calls "debut writers."
Readers—and editors too, of course—are always on the lookout for fresh new voices. But when a number of writers are packaged as the Next New Thing, whether in a special section like this or in an anthology, one can't help but feel that the stories haven't been chosen simply for their quality as stories. The newness, the youth of the writers: those are the crucial ingredients, marketed as such. And beneath this ploy lies an anxiety that fiction, mere fiction, isn't a sufficient draw.
Such suspicions are confirmed and deepened by the layout of the issue. Each of the four "debut" stories is accompanied by a photo of the author. As you read the stories, you realize that the each author photo alludes to its story. Nell Freudenberger's story, "Lucky Girls," about an American woman in her early twenties who lives in India for several years and becomes the lover of a married man, shows the author (in her New York apartment, the caption informs us) kneeling on what looks like an Indian bedspread. Gabe Hudson's "Dear Mr. President," a story in the form of a letter (dated October 17, 1991) to then-President George Bush from a soldier who has returned from duty in the Gulf War with a third ear sprouting out of his ribcage on one side of his body, is accompanied by a photo showing Hudson writing at a table in park, with a gas mask at hand and toy plastic soldiers deployed on his notebook. (Hudson's story, which might be labeled a Kafkaesque satire, implies that contrary to the official U.S. position, Saddam Hussein did in fact employ biological weapons in the Gulf War.) You get the idea.
Shades of Dave Eggers, yes, and the jokey, self-referential mode he supremely exemplifies, found at every turn these days. But what about the stories themselves? Oddly, given the stature of The New Yorker and the immense field (one imagines) from which the editors had to choose, the stories are barely mediocre. I haven't yet mentioned Jonathan Safran Foer's "The Very Rigid Search," narrated by a Ukrainian who is serving as the guide for a young American Jewish man (who, in another dazzling stroke of self-referentiality, just happens to be named Jonathan Safran Foer: clever!) searching for a village where his grandfather lived before the war, and where he alone of the Jews in the village escaped a Nazi raid. The shtick of this story is the Ukrainian narrator's butchered English.
And finally there is "The Husbands," by Erika Krouse, told by a woman who has taken her sister's husband—among many others—as a lover. "I like to sleep with other women's husbands," the story begins. "I try not to like this. It's not a healthy thing to do, either mentally or hygienically. I see a shrink. I see a gynecologist. But then I sleep with the husbands anyway."
Taken as reports from a certain narrow but influential slice of young Americans, these four stories are depressing, not only for the moral chaos they take for granted but for the slackness of the tellling. They could be brutal or tender, of the Devil's party or God's, funny or not—they could be anything you like, but to work as fiction they would need to have qualities that these four stories conspicuously lack, beginning with a feel for the heft and rhythm of words.
Summer Fiction Issue? No. It's a debutantes' ball, a marketing tool, a happening. You want real fiction, you'll have to look elsewhere. Whatever happened to The New Yorker?
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.
The New Yorker's site may or may not still have excerpts from its fiction issue online.
Books & Culture's literature area has more on fiction trends—and includes an exclusive novel only available on the magazine's Web site.
Dave Eggers, referenced above, is editor of McSweeney's, which has its own fiction pieces. He's also the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but that's a nonfiction work so it probably shouldn't even be in Related Elsewhere. In fact, Dave Eggers is only mentioned in passing above, and it doesn't seem fair to give him all this space in "Related Elsewhere" and no space at all to the authors who actually appear in The New Yorker fiction issue, does it? Still, these are "debut fiction" authors who don't have much about them online, while Dave Eggers is bordering on overexposure. It's really easy to find stuff about him online, so that's why he's the one to get a link.
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