The New Yorker's summer fiction issue highlights 20 writers, all of whom are under 40 years old. These are writers who will be, they think, 'key to their generation.' It's an absurd idea, of course, that the editors will cop to almost immediately, admitting that its best side effect is an industry of second-guessing, with TNY at the white-hot center. Which is why they went ahead with their little game anyway, apologizing and winking along as they take us down the barely shameful promotion of a marginal idea. Such is the state of American fiction.
The lead story, The Pilot, by Joshua Ferris, is perhaps an obvious nod to what old curmudgeonly editors would expect a young writer of this era to write about: Television. It's a satire designed to show off the writer's talent for 1) wacky names like Kate Lotvelt, Eaton Aitken, Gleekman and Mark Pleble, and 2) Ferris's flair for uncomfortable situations.
The lead character is an insecure nervous wreck with a sitcom pilot he wants a famous actress to read. So we get to sit in his head for a few hours as he kvetches and complains, then he goes to a party dressed as a character from another television show, and fails miserably to achieve his goals. He gets stinking drunk, accidentally sets fire to his manuscript, then has a revelation about his own shallowness before drowning (perhaps) in a pool. It's a pretty okay story, even if part of me thinks that hopeless shlubs don't need deathbed revelations to realize they're hopeless shlubs - wallowing in their hopeless shlubbiness is one of the major pre-occupations of shlubs around the world.
The second story is 'Here we aren't, so quickly,' by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's more a prose poem, a show-stopping piece of barely sufferable cleverness. It's not a story so much as a series of statements, often in tortuously negated constructions, about characters named I and You: 'I couldn't explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn't know where e-mails were.'
It goes on like that, descending into Alanis Morrisette-style lyricism near the end: 'I'm not disappointed, just quiet. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn't.' I know there are people who love Jonathan Safran Foer, and I think passages of his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, are quite brilliant. And there are those who might see this story as a loving, fractured portrait of a marriage moving through inevitable cycles of love and loss. And it is. But it's also an unintentional horror story, I think, of a mind trapped into exploring itself as a thing which does not have emotions per se, but as a machine dedicated to processing emotion-like things through a tortured syntax machine powered by the owner's delicately uber-sensitive genius. It's a cool trick, but tiring to us mere mortals.
Okay, so. But the whole collection, the idea of 20 under 40, as though younger writers were bugs to be pinned to a wall and examined. Kinda creepy. And then to have the first story be a satire of self-pity and narcissism, and second to be a celebration of the same... It's as though there's this cliche that young writers are self-obsessed and shallow that The New Yorker had to uphold, and that's just not fair. All writers are self-obsessed and shallow.
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