Marisa Silver’s story appears in the September 28th issue of the New Yorker. I liked this story; in part because I couldn’t make up my mind of what I finally thought of it. The Guys usually get comments on their reviews of New Yorker stories. So I’m hoping that some of our fans will come up with alternative readings.
Shelly and Vivian, roommates of convenience, share an illegal warehouse space in LA as their residence. It’s attached to a ribbon factory. Shelly is dominant…she invited Vivian to occupy a small room in her large space. They met at a temp agency.
“Temporary” is the evolving metaphor. Shelly comes from money. Her last name is almost identifiable and she is living off it. She doesn’t do much except drift around and have serial boyfriends stay over. Vivian is the straighter arrow from Oklahoma where she did two years of community college. It’s cool the way Silver wastes no time in typing her characters…or leading you to expect a certain type.
Silver also sets the scene with exceptional skill. This industrial space has a bathroom without a door. That doesn’t matter so much if the women are alone but is more awkward if Shelly has a guy or a woman over. There’s no mention of Vivian having someone over. The bathroom without the door…this reminds me of Lubitsch. As a director he loved doors. He could peel open a narrative like an overripe fruit by having his actors use the door, make entrances and exits as part of a sexual play. See what I mean by renting Trouble in Paradise.
MS is a gifted technical writer. As in Updike, the body language of her characters is telling when it needs to be. When one of the women sleeps with a guy, specifying his narrow shoulders and his body shaped like a log; this is just enough information to allow the reader to visualize the night-over for themselves. And anyone who eats a yogurt knows that if you put your spoon in the empty cup it will tip over. But Silver pulls this yogurt trivia out of her head when she can make it go to work in her story. And then the empty yogurt cup becomes a prop, how to dispose of it? Read the story to find out why the layout of the apartment, and who’s in it, makes this a problem.
Perhaps you can tell that Vivian is the monkey puzzle that you have to unwind in Temporary. She works as a temp in an adoption agency. She is adopted herself. I just reviewed a novel, Coetzee’s Summertime, which used interviews to move the story forward in an original way. And here in Silver’s story, I find this technique used effectively again. Vivian transcribes the interviews of couples who are applying for an adoption. She doesn’t see the couples herself so she has to imagine what they look like. She takes it upon herself to decide if they are good candidates to adopt a child. She writes evaluations in the margins of her transciptions. She’s not supposed to.
There’s a wicked literary joke in Temporary. Vivian has a solo encounter with Shelley’s boyfriend, Toby, in the warehouse apartment. Shelley has taken a powder. (Are you wondering already what’s going to happen? You should be.) Toby, the brainy type, is reading Nabokov’s Pnin. Vivian asks him if it’s good. This is, book-wise, so uncool. You don’t ask someone reading a Nabokov classic if it’s good. You ask them what they think of it. But Vivian doesn’t really care about the book. She just wants to use the john. Silver gives us wonderful lines about caring. Maybe Toby and Shelly are guilty of a false carelessness. But perhaps Vivian engages in a false caring. So don’t think that MS is all technique. This is a thoughtful story.
What will you read into this? I want to know because I had misgivings about the last part of the narrative. The story walks away from Shelly and Toby and re-centers itself on Vivian’s family, on her being adopted and her adopted mother’s battle with a fatal illness. Up to this point, Temporary has had the all surface glean of a smart Ed Ruscha print. But now I feel like I’m looking at an Andrew Wyeth canvas. I found the transition jarring. My own take was that the material was autobiographical. But for me, it didn’t work as an art form although I respected it as a feeling. And I have to tell you that I went through this with my own mother. But it’s certa
inly very difficult to express intense emotionality on the page. For me, this came off as bathos; the closing metaphors being trite.
So that’s why I especially want our Three Guys readers to look into this exceptional work of fiction in the New Yorker. I would appreciate hearing another take on the story.
-DH
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