"A Night at the Opera" by Janet Frame (June 2, 2008)

Prediction: Janet Frame's posthumously published story "A Night at the Opera" is one of the more unusual pieces you are likely to see in the pages of the New Yorker in the next year. The style is a pretty much inimitable mixture of lovely prose poetically rendering exquisite horrors and a very loosey-goosey plot. Really there is no plot. The "story"—and I use the term freely—reads like the dream version of an individual's experience in a mental hospital. There are plenty of good reasons why people don't generally write fiction like this, but to see something of this style pulled off so well is a rare and astonishing feat. 

I hope I'm not over-praising the piece in the above paragraph, because I do feel kind of ambivalent about it. The thing is, I really admire stories that don't try to be like other stories, that just be what they are. But that doesn't make this a completely satisfying whole. It isn't. It's a lovely, strange and slightly boring mediation. Frankly, because it's a stylistic departure from the norm, I don't think it's held to the same standard of quality as a "regular" story would be. I actually found the piece kind of annoying, even as again and again, I was struck by the odd beauty of the imagery from line to line. I'm not going to pull any examples out and quote them, because I'm feeling a touch of the laziness coming on, but examples are all over. Instead, I'm just going to leave it there with the sincere hope that next week there is something a tad more enjoyable, from a reader's point of view. 

I definitely should mention, though, that the author, Janet Frame, had a pretty interesting life. I read about her on Wikipedia. She came about this close to being lobotomized and went on to befriend Philip Roth. Her doctors said she was schizophrenic, then other doctors said maybe she wasn't. But based on my own research, which consists of me quickly reading one short story by her, I can now say with near certainty that in my expert medical opinion, this lady was straight-up nuts. It's in the white spaces of her prose. She saw the world like no one else. 

4 out of 10. 

Vocabulary you will need to read this story: 

Saveloy: "A type of vividly red sausage served in English fish and chip shops." (From Wikipedia)

"A Night at the Opera" By Janet Frame at newyorker.com

"East Wind" by Julian Barnes (May 19, 2008)

"East Wind" is the first thing I've ever read by English author Julian Barnes, who has written about a million books and won a bajillion prizes and is generally considered to be the man and who also happens to be older than my father. 

In this story, a divorced Englishman begins a relationship with a foreign-born waitress. It is not so much a love affair as an I'm-a-lonely-dickface-and-you're-there affair, so don't go in expecting to actually like the characters too much or to really care one way or the other about what happens. Perhaps this makes the story realistic, but it's not a particularly fun or exciting read, although it is, at times, amusing. It's just not really a "wow" story in the sense of opening your eyes to some wonderful thing in the world that normally goes unnoticed or unmentioned. 

The prose is serviceable, clean, efficient, controlled. Easy to overlook the skill it takes to do that, so I give props to Mr. Barnes there, despite what I consider to be a lack of fireworks. Great prose around the ending, even if the first few lines and the last paragraph could probably bracket pretty much any story at all where something sort of sad happens and be just as effective. 

The most interesting thing about the story in my opinion is the way Mr. Barnes manages the passage of time. In six New Yorker pages, the story covers unspecified months in the lives of the characters and manages this feat with confidence and verve. (Compare the challenges of this temporal structure to the challenges of a typical Hemingway story, say, where the whole thing takes place in ten clearly rendered minutes). 

More problematic is the climax of the piece, in which a secret in a certain character's history is revealed. It's not that the secret isn't surprising or interesting or it has been telegraphed too clearly before hand, but rather that an over-reliance on a dramatic revelation seems to me to be a losing strategy for a story, an unsatisfying form to strive for, no matter how well-executed a particular example is. As opposed to say, "Araby" or "The Dead" by James Joyce to which I return time and time again, there doesn't seem to be any reason for a person to ever read "East Wind" a second time.

But, anyway, I'm not sitting here drinking pure Haterade. I liked the story enough to search the New Yorker's archives for other stories by Mr. Barnes. I found one, "Trespass," which I read and actually preferred, although I probably won't be writing a detailed review of it here, due to the fact that it's brain burning work to be this cogent/funny/honest. 

6 out 10. 

But what does anyone else think? Comments and discussion welcomed. 

"East Wind" by Julian Barnes at newyorker.com.
Julian Barnes on Wikipedia