Last Week at Portico: A few weeks ago, I began writing up my responses to the weekly short stories in The New Yorker, and publishing them at here. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that the pieces belong at Portico, but I couldn’t find the time to alter the one or two menus and to create the navigation page that would be indispensable to getting from here to there.  Meanwhile, I let a couple of stories go by without writing them up. If nothing else, working this vein of guilt kept complacency at bay.

On Wednesday, I think it was, I took The New Yorker to lunch and sat in the restaurant until I was finished with Jonathan Franzen’s “Good Neighbors”. (I laughed out loud quite often, but they’re used to that, where I have lunch on Wednesdays). I couldn’t wait to get home and start writing.

Until, that is, I started writing, yesterday morning. The story struck me as so rich and satisfying and classic that I was covered in inadequacy. The first draft was spastic. I took the the now-unusual step of printing it out and marking it up with a pencil. Then I revised it at the computer. This morning, I revised it again. If short fiction in The New Yorker regularly cost this much time and effort, I’d have to abandon the feature.  

Also difficult to write about was Kazuo Ishiguro’s new collection of short stories (written at one go), Nocturnes. The surface of each story eddies uncertainly, like the East River between tides, and seems to conceal a secret or a puzzle. After much nail biting, I concluded that the secret is that the stories are as would-be glamorous as the characters in them. Which is not much of a secret; but then would-be glamour doesn’t amount to much, either. As stories (not puzzles), the tales in Nocturnes are hard to put down.

Up, in contrast, was extremely easy to write up. The new Pixar movie made a direct and unambiguous connection with me. I wish that I had had grandchildren sitting next to me. 

And finally, this week’s Book Review review.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Weekend Open Thread. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.