Am I the only one who thinks the short fiction published in The New Yorker just isn’t that good? Every now and then there’s an exception, but this only serves to increase my general disappointment, as I approach the story in each issue and think, This time, it’ll be great.
Imagine the let-down at the end of a very mediocre and rather aimless story in the May issue, Jonathan Lethem’s “Ava’s Apartment,” when it began with this inspired sentence: “Perkus Tooth, the wall-eyed former rock critic, awoke the morning after the party he vowed would be his last, the night after the worst blizzard of the winter, asleep on a staircase, already in the grip of a terrible cluster headache.” And that was the single sublime moment of the story.
Considering that the other articles in this issue are about the wristwatch market, college lacrosse tryouts, the Supreme Court, frog extinction, Victor Fleming, and various operas and plays that are only showing in New York, I think it’s safe to say I won’t be renewing my subscription.
PS. I think the cartoons are dumb too.
4 comments
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June 16, 2009 at 7:15 am
filthylogician
Agreed.
A few months ago they raised the bar by publishing a story by David Foster Wallace. But sadly, things tapered off quite a bit, returning to mediocrity.
June 16, 2009 at 11:52 am
Jess
And their memoriam spread on DFW was phenomenal.
I don’t think we’re asking for too much.
June 16, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Joseph Grinton
It’s not just the New Yorker. I am usually disappointed by the stories in there and rarely buy it but I subscribe to a magazine called Prospect which has a story every month. It occasionally has a good story but they are very rare. I used to think I didn’t like reading short stories but I was just reading bad ones. (Now I have a whole bookcase with nothing in it but anthologies of short stories.) Maybe the people who are writing good stories just don’t submit them to these magazines. Or maybe the editors don’t publish them because they’re not reading all the submissions. I think the editors are often looking for a name rather than a story because the name attracts the person browsing at the bookstand.
June 16, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Jess
Oh, definitely. With publications like the New Yorker, it seems to be all about the big names. The smaller lit mags and presses are the only ones publishing the good stuff these days.