Short Story Review: What you do out here, when you're alone, by Philipp Meyer

This story is next in line in The New Yorker's 20 under 40 special summer fiction issue.  It's apparent now, from these samples, that the authors the New Yorker chose play for different stakes. Jonathan Safran Foer and Joshua Ferris strive for self-reflexive cleverness, trying to shake our assumptions about reality by illuminating the lives of freaks and aestheticians. But there's another class of writer on display with Phillip Meyer, whose relatively quiet voice attempts a more difficult task, to describe how real, normal people live in the relative quiet of their everyday lives.

This story is about a mechanic, an expert with Porsches, whose success has led him to move into a posh southern neighborhood. But the move has led to alienation from his social climbing wife, and to drug troubles for his teenage son. The story takes place in a pause between major events, in the days after his son is arrested for possession, while his wife is away on a day trip with some neighbors who have a free-wheeling reputation.

So Max broods. He starts to mow the lawn, but is overwhelmed by the beauty of the tiny flowers he would destroy, so knowing that the neighbors would hate the shaggy lawn, he puts the mower away. He contemplates an affair with a neighbor, but doesn't follow through. He studiously avoids thinking about his son's condition, an emotional position I understand, but one that turns the structure  of the story into a start-in-the-middle hide-and-seek bit that, as a matter of personal taste, I find annoying. But it's forgivable, a minor quibble in a story that's playing for high stakes, and winning.

A glance at Meyer's website shows reviews that compare his first novel 'American Rust' to Steinbeck, and others that throw around the term 'Great American Novel.' Yikes. But I'd say from the title, and the quiet despair of the main character, that Meyer is working Raymond Carver territory here (if it matters). And while this may not be the great American short story, it is the only one in this collection, so far, that lives and breathes in the classic American tradition mastered by writers like Cheever, Updike, and Roth, a tradition most modern writers are running from in terror.