Jhumpa Lahiri's “Jubilee” is available for free (well, free as of 6/30/2025) from The New Yorker.
A wooden ruler with the etched faces of Henry VIII’s six wives running down the middle; ticket stubs from Hampton Court and the Chamber of Horrors, where we walked ahead of our mothers, hand in hand; a few wrappers of Dairy Milk. I still see clearly the brochure from Madame Tussaud’s, a green nameplate on the cover with white lettering. We shuddered at the likeness of one particularly sinister man standing in an olive-colored three-piece suit with old brown pharmaceutical bottles behind him. We’d seen him in the chamber dedicated to those who poisoned and stabbed and slashed. Later, flipping through the brochure, sitting side by side, we braced ourselves for his effigy; how we dreaded turning to that page. A Mavis Gallant story I discovered only recently likens the compulsion to save tickets and programs to a type of narcissism: that’s how a mother interprets a daughter’s need to hold on to memorabilia. But was that not what Gallant had done in some of her stories, and taught me to do? Intertwining invention with preserved bits and scraps of life? Already that spring, about to turn ten in the city of my birth, I was attempting to leave some trace, struggling to glimpse myself on a murky surface.
How do we face up to death, our own transience?
And by some weird miracle, The Walrus today published “A Wonderful Country”: A Mavis Gallant Story Rediscovered
I called him the Hungarian because I couldn’t pronounce his name. If he had a name for me, I never heard it. We weren’t what you’d call chummy.
A much different rhythm than Lahiri's story. A real estate transaction that seems small, that is sticking with me right. A life in an eggbeater.
Although Rewriting the Rules: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (Library of America) has excerpts, it is not the whole short story as with the previous links. Its title is truth in advertising; which does not make it any less worth reading.
Although O’Connor—in the spirit of Chekhov’s famous dictum about the onstage gun needing to go off—has prepared us for the appearance of the Misfit, in a more profound sense she has radically rewritten the rules that seemed to have governed her tale. The effect is dizzying, and intensifies when it becomes obvious that the family can only be murdered by the Misfit and his men.
***
...Her darkly funny, violent world continues to exert tremendous appeal—and fascination—not least because of its collision of incongruous elements: the low and the transcendent, the comic and the speculative, the grotesque and the divine. In her meticulously crafted fiction, these opposites resolve via the unlikely transmutations and orderings of the creative act. For within her peculiarly personalized spiritual orthodoxy, ultimately nothing is incongruous; all is one. As she wrote, quoting the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Everything that rises must converge.”
I think of Lahiri as elegiac, Gallant as sharply condensing lives as an observational vignette, and O'Connor as twisted.
sch 6/30
I had not heard of Grace Paley until the last ten years, since I went to prison. I had heard of Zadie Smith. I still have not read Grace Paley, but I have read Zadie Smith (and written about her on this blog).
The New Yorker that published the Lahiri story, also published a Zadie Smith story. That I have not read, yet. I chose to read her write about Grace Paley: Zadie Smith on Grace Paley’s “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age”.
Paley reminded me of my past but also of my present: living in Greenwich Village, with a poet as a partner, trying to write while bringing up two kids. The startling aspect, to me, was that she included it all. She didn’t put a cordon around a short story and use a special literary voice to create it. In her expert hands a short story is like one of those cavernous shoulder bags you’ll need to carry in the city if your plan is to tote around four or five novels, a feminist treatise, a bunch of diapers, somebody’s lunch, a photocopy of a zoning law to brandish at a community-board meeting, and a large banner that reads “END THE WAR.” Paley is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of a writer, with an emphasis on the kitchen sink. The domestic is not banal to her, nor is it bourgeois. It’s perhaps a little perverse to write a story called “The Silence” in homage to one of the chattiest writers on the block, yet for me Paley has always served as a kind of stimulant to honesty. I can get all up in my head when I’m writing. But if I read a bit of Paley just before I open the document I feel some of that wildness and openheartedness enter me. My character Sharon in “The Silence” is a fictional person from a shadowy region of my mind, but Paley cleared the space and built a little platform so that Sharon could step forward and just . . . be. My Sharon is dealing with “the Change,” which seems also to be on Paley’s mind in “My Father.” (“We should probably begin at the beginning, he said. Change. First there is change, which nobody likes—even men. You’d be surprised. You can do little things—putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet.”) But Sharon is not a participant in what I want to call “menopause discourse.” She doesn’t really have a language for what’s happening to her. She’s just trying to get through it.
When I gave up writing in my early twenties, one part was not having anything to write. What I did not learn until I began telling my Indiana stories to people from the East, until I read Joyce Carol Oates's western New York stories and Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, was that where there are people there are stories to tell. You look around and see what you can see, and then try to recreate the life you see on paper.
Edna O'Brien's illuminating short stories
sch 7/1