Prose off: Another Writing for Beginners type of story in The New Yorker v. Fleming story

Wednesday 3/13/24

You know what I find myself asking myself whenever I see fiction in The New Yorker, which I only do these days for a prose off on here?

"Why does it always need to suck?"

That's what I ask myself. Why is it so important that this writing has to be so terrible? So bland, so blah, so nothing? Making sure this is all about having a certain kind of person in the caste-system is that important? Hooking up the right kind person and keeping the sinecure in a perpetual state of "As is" is that important?

Why?

What does this writing do for any person in the world? Why is it so important if you're New Yorker fiction editors Deborah Treisman, Cressida Leyshon, Willing Davidson, and David Wallace, to be a bigot? To be a country club gatekeeper that always privileges connection and box-checking over quality and value?

Why would you ever allow yourself to be that small and sniveling and pathetic? Sad? Clownish? Empty? What does that do for you? Why are you so enthralled with bigotry? Would you die if you were not a bigot? Lose the ability to breathe? To go out?

Why is bigotry, clannishness, and shitty, boring, nothing writing so important to you, if you're these people? Why is that what you always answer to? Why is that the only setting? Why is that nonsense akin to your god?

(Funny aside: You know how you write "How are you?" at the start of an email? It's just something you put there. Not really meant to be answered. David Wallace is so arrogant, so out of touch with how to act, a reasonable way for people to be during normal human interactions, that he answered that question one time, but he didn't just answer it, he answered it in the third person, like the predictably pretentious person he is, and almost all of these people are, by saying something like, "Just doing as one does." Which actually says a lot about someone like this.)

It's so transparent what is happening, what these people are all about, when anyone bothers to take an honest look at what they're publishing.

I could pick any single New Yorker story and do what I'm about to do with this latest prose off. I could pick any part of any story that magazine publishes.

So let's spin the bottle and see where it lands, shall we?

This is from "This Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard.

It was a Tuesday, early evening, and Kevin was the only person out. Darkness had descended upon him since he’d left home. Drizzle beaded his face.

He’d told his father that he was going out to get some fresh air. He wasn’t actually sure that his father had even heard him. His father never heard anything when he was gathering his deposit bottles.

Anyway, there Kevin was, walking along the side of the road. Occasionally, he looked up to see if there were any cars coming. Only a single truck had gone past in the half hour that he’d been walking.

He was approaching the neighboring village. He’d never been this far. It was actually quite near his own village, but his father never took him there.

“What would we want to go there for?” his father had said when Kevin pointed at a signpost over by the church one day and asked if they could drive in that direction for a change. “It’s a piddling little place with bugger all to see. All it’s good for is driving through.”

It couldn’t be that little, Kevin thought now, as he passed a sign with the village’s name. There were lampposts, too, with soft pools of light. White lines ran down the middle of the road. And soon there were houses, set rather far apart at first, then closer together.

Lettering was peeling off from the front of one. coffee. tobacco. betting. There were some lights on inside. He went up to a window where a small sheet of paper with some handwriting on it had been affixed. The letters got smaller and smaller as they neared the edge of the paper.

Open by appointment.

But there was no telephone number to ring. Kevin stood on his tiptoes and leaned forward. There was a slight bump as his forehead touched the pane. The shopwindow was crammed with china dolls wearing crocheted bonnets. Shoulder to shoulder they sat, staring out empty-eyed at the road. Two Madam Blå colanders, also, and a pair of hospital crutches. Farther inside, an old-fashioned spinning wheel and a desktop computer with its keyboard. There were price stickers on everything.

Someone sneezed. Then sneezed again. It sounded like a “no.” Kevin dropped onto his heels and went round the side of the house. Some tall steps led to a door. He went up them and considered for a moment a Teddy bear crafted from moss which sat at the top. He raised his hand and gripped the knocker. It was made of brass and looked like a boot. But before he could bang it against the door the lights went out inside, one after another.

Do you care about any of this? What makes this good? Do you think I focused on the bad parts part and kept the good stuff from you? You needn't trust me--go look at the rest of the thing. I'm not ever pulling some fake-out here.

This stuff sucks that bad, all the way through. And it always does. Who could possibly care? Blah blah blah blah. Nothing nothing nothing nothing. There is not a single thing here. What do you think is here? What are the stakes? Why should this matter to anyone? Does the action interest you? The language? The voice? What interests you?

The answer is nothing. There is nothing here to interest anyone. If a person tells you they like this, they are lying. It's the tote-bagging of American fiction. The same as having that tote bag in order to convey, "I read The New Yorker! Don't you think I'm smart? That's why I have this tote bag! So you will know i'm smart. That's why I have the subscription."

And it's just so amateur hour, isn't it? Like an exercise someone did having gotten a prompt from a book titled Writing for Beginners.

Meanwhile, back here on the totally different level, this is from one of my new ones.

Sue complains to her mother and me—but to me especially—that we gave her too plain a name. In this matter of the naming, I was but the sounding board, though I keep this information guarded. My wife played the actual keys. My job was to affirm the selection of a given note once she had found one she deemed that she wanted.

I say, "Who did you want to be? Honoria?"

I try and change the hypothetical name each time to keep things fresh, though they often start with an H. Hyacinth is another. Hortense. I have not used that last one yet, but now that it occurs to me I’ll run it out later on.

These efforts often make her smile. The smile of someone backing down because they think you're all right. Not literally all right, as in not nuts. Well, it can be that, because she’s in middle school and I’m a long ways removed, which doesn’t help my cool quotient with a twelve-year-old. We’re talking more that "all right" of, "Fine, you win, I love you, you don't totally suck." The "all right" of "we're good."

What Sue does not know is that I’m able to summon something of the experience of my own middle school days. I have thoughts like, “I remember the time I popped my collar to be a cool guy like it was just last Tuesday.” It’s the sensation of the immediacy of that memory—rather than embarrassment over the memory itself—that makes me never want to share it with anyone. It’s just mine for me. A friend’s sheltered secret, though I’m being the friend to myself.

It's funny—when that happens I sometimes feel like my daughter is my friend, except I don't hate her like I hate my actual friends. At the basketball games, Rich screams out the statistical achievements that his kid Margaret-Theresa is closing in on, as he tabulates each of her points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals in a faded green notebook that looks like it could have come out of a drawer labeled, “And herein reside objects from 1983,” where it’d been been lodged between a Ghost Rider comic and a dismal, and thus-sequestered, early report card of third grade failings.

He logs her turnovers, too, the occurrence of which I figure causes him to give her a stern talking to later. Rich was the bestower of Margaret-Theresa’s names—he’s bragged to me about being the “go-to” in that department in his family—with neither being short, and together being quite the mouthful, because that's the kind of person he is. A more is better guy.

You know how people—and let's face it, it's usually women—will act like they're some sage, the Yoda of their time period, corner of the internet, and peer group, and say, "Quality over quantity!" as though this had never been thought or expressed by anyone else before, or there was someone who has decided, "Nope, it's quantity for me, not quality. Quantity all the time. Quantity gets my vote."

Then again, Rich is kind of that person. We were talking about this once at a pool party. The guys go off over here to do something manly like the grilling of meats with Coors cans nestled in the hollows of their hands, and the stupid talk starts.

Quality and quantity came up, and sure enough Rich says, "What about cock length?" while raising an eyebrow as if he'd opened the door to another dimension where superior, surprising logic was to be found and until then we’d all been fumbling in the dark, eating unpeeled bananas.

And try to repress this memory as I have, it’s proven impossible to forget that occasion in the men’s room at the gym where our kids were playing basketball when Rich pulled up at the urinal next to me, unzipped, looked down, and said—to me, to himself, to the universe, or all three—“Whoa, Nelly.”

What about cock length, indeed.

What can you say? Completely different, isn't it? All of that life coursing through every line. Lines replete with life. This is something real and true and alive. It's in the turns the story is taking, it's in the voice, it's in the language, the stakes, the design, the architecture, the sounds, the knowledge, how you connect with this, how relatable it is. Totally different level. Not the result of a prompt from Writing for Beginners.