20 under 40: a roundup

I've been out of town, and work is piling up, and other projects are eating in to blogging time. Despite this, I've put together a round-up of the other six stories in the New Yorker's 20 under 40 collection. Here they are, with my sometimes warty synopsis:


Rivka Galchen: The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire
Another quirky break-up story. A pregnant writer's husband dumps her. Apparently he was keeping a blog that was a list of grievances against her. A friend comes over to console her. Their conversation wanders around, eventually coming to the great Tunguska blast of 1908. They ponder mystery and uncertainty. End story.

Gary Shteyngart: Lenny Hearts Eunice
A hilarious, heartbreaking love story set in the near future. Lenny works for a company that provides immortality services to those lucky enough to qualify for the treatments; he himself is 40, and aging quickly, a misfit in his job and life. On a sabbatical to Rome he meeets Eunice, a nice Asian girl, and falls in love. He returns to an America that has been taken over by the American Restoration Authority. He invites Eunice to join him, and after a breakup, she does. Their romance is heartbreaking, if unbelievable, but the world Shtyengart creates around them is a perfect match: rigidly conforming, politically savage, and bitingly real.

ZZ Packer: Dayward
A former slave, 14, escapes from the oppressive South to New Orleans. In the first scene, he is being chased by a dog; to escape he shoves his hand down the dog's throat, choking it but mangling his hand. By starting with the highest point of action, Packer loses all tension except the seeping wound of the boy's hand; her prose is tense but often confusing; the narrative is clipped and loses its own train of thought - Packer has probably done better work than this.

Salvatore Scibona: The Kid
A simply amazing story on themes you'd need nerves of steel to go near.  Probably the best story in the collection. A soldier in Latvia falls in love and has a son with a local girl. Things go bad, they break up. Five years later, she wants him to take the boy to America. Along the way, he gets cold feet. Reading as the man abandons the boy in a Hamburg airport and drifts back to his life in New Mexico, and the boy is held by airport security, is harrowing, riveting, and disturbingly real. There's precious little information about Scibona on the web, but I'm going to look for his novel The End and read it some day.

C.E. Morgan: Twins

A lyrical portrait of 1980's Cincinnati, about a set of twins - one light, one dark, born to a single mother in a working-class neighborhood. I need to take a closer look at this story. Instead of a proper review, I'm putting in her picture and a link to her interview on the New Yorker website. It's interesting that her first novel took 14 days to write, and that she revised it over two semesters in graduate school. My first thought was that she was lucky to have the time to write, that oh, here's another golden-cage writer of privilege. Then I realized that was about the same thing that happened to me, and I never ended up in the New Yorker. I guess we all have our path.





Summary of the collection:
Like any collection striving to present the best voices of a generation (or two?) there's a lot of variety here. Which is another way of saying The New Yorker must have felt there were a lot of critical slots to fill: Campus intellectuals, urban minorities, feminists, immigrants, goofballs and valedictorians. A Breakfast Club of writers. But variety isn't the spice of youth alone. This collection, then, is a perfect cross-section not of young American writers, per se, but of the major themes of contemporary American writing. That they're under 40 is just a nice hook for marketing.

But write on, fellow scribblers and strivers, don't worry that you've crossed the New Yorker's rubicon of fame. Bukowski was 50 when he published his first novel; Raymond Chandler wasn't published till he was 49. Harriet Doerr was in her 70's. It's never too late to become who you were meant to be.