June 14 & 21, 2010 Issue

Before the city, there was the land; but you’d never know it from the stories in this week’s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40” issue of the magazine. What a denatured collection! There’s hardly a tree or a plant or a sky or a river in any of these writings. Instead, we get all that man-made-social-network-second-nature-urban-landscape stuff: dinner parties in fancy houses (Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot”), brainless chatter about loving “tiny socks,” “watching movie trailers on my computer,” intolerance of “trace amounts of jelly in the peanut butter jar,” etc. (Jonathan Safran Foer’s ridiculous “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly”), suburban excess, e.g., “He had been on the floor all morning – Brazilian cherry …” (Philipp Meyer’s “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone”), surrealistic nonsense like “Prison bars of not-money grew around me in dreams, like wild magic corn” (Rivka Galchen’s “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire”) international airports (Salvatore Scibona’s “The Kid”), “the streets of Northside, down in the little choke valley, befouled by industry” (C. E. Morgan’s “Twins”), e-mail, data, texts and computers (Gary Shteyngart’s undeniably ingenious, but still artificially-natured “Lenny Hearts Eunice”). Shteyngart’s story does contain a reference to an elephant, but the elephant’s in a zoo and he's a sad looking creature: "He slowly flicked back one huge ear, like a Galician shopkeeper of a century ago spreading his arms as if to say, ‘Yes, this is all there is.’” It’s almost as if the end of nature is one of Shteyngart’s points. ZZ Packer’s “Dayward” is an exception to the urban trend. It’s a story about two runaway “free” slaves, a brother and a sister, who scratch their way across country, pursued by dogs. Packer shows a bracing awareness of nature: “morning clouds the color of silver fox,” “drops of water as fat as pumpkin seeds.” And consider this beauty: “Herons rose up and over them, a litter of wings, soundless flaps, turning into white rags against a white rag sky.” The story is told well enough, but I confess I found it mild in comparison to, say, Cormac McCarthy’s hair-raising chases and the amazing interior monologues of some of Faulkner’s similarly situated characters. The pearl of the pack is Shteyngart’s piece. It alone has the shimmer of inspiration in its sentences, some of them, anyway; these, for instance: “Take a look at me, diary. What do you see? A slight man with a gray, sunken battleship of a face, curious wet eyes, a giant gleaming forehead on which a dozen cavemen could have painted something nice, a sickle of a nose perched atop a tiny puckered mouth, and, from the back, a growing bald spot whose shape perfectly replicates that of the great state of Ohio, with its capital city Columbus, marked by a deep-brown mole.” As much as I like Shteyngart’s “Lenny Hearts Eunice,” I like his non-fiction better, particularly his wonderful “Teen Spirit,” which was published in The New Yorker (March 10, 2003). When it comes right down to it, I am biased in favor of non-fiction. I seek the “real” in writing, and it seems to me that non-fiction is more adept at catching it. This is why I look forward to next week’s issue and a return of the magazine’s extraordinary journalism.