"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