I was very happy to see Audition by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in the 9/10/18 edition of The New Yorker. Saïd and Three Guys have history. In the winter of 2013, JR reviewed two of SS’s stories, and that summer I interviewed him on the subject of his debut collection, First Encounters with the Enemy. Since Three Guys archives well, you can still check out those entries on our site, easy as pie.
Saïd is a priceless author because he can write effective stories that include the working class; he knows the territory. I also happen to be reading Grove’s reissue of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal at the moment, which deals with, as you should already know, the criminal underclass in Europe in the 30’s and 40’s. I don’t know what’s happened to many American writers since Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which bites better than the somewhat watered-down Hollywood classic of the same novel. But if training for an MFA and being sent by your parents to Paris when you’re still in high school means you can’t write about a huge chunk of the population without patronizing them or treating them like they come from Mars, then maybe those experiences were a waste of your creative time. I remember a young writer that I knew in my youth who was going to sign on to a New England fishing boat for the experience. I like that better, although I don’t know if we still have fishing boats in New England. Saïd can write about people (can you?) who work at Walmart, eat in the crap-hole employee lunchroom, and make the story stick to your gut. God bless him.
In Audition, in a midsize town indeterminately about 1K miles from L.A., the boss’s son is laboring on a subdivision being constructed by his real estate father. He’s 19, an aspiring actor, doing some amateur theater, who dreams of a move to L.A. which he apparently is afraid to make; he keeps putting it off. Meanwhile he’s hauling sheetrock around, a brutal unskilled laboring job. Hanging out with the guys at lunchtime, he alters his speech code so his co-workers don’t know he comes from the best part of town, Timpani Hills, where they have never been except when they were hired to repair something.
He softens his consonants and drops articles, “No hard ‘k’s, ‘x’s, or ‘f’s”. If he is ever cast as a working class character, he figures he has it down pat.
He makes friends with a co-worker, Duncan Dioguardi, by offering him recurrent lifts because Duncan’s car keeps breaking down. He learns about Duncan’s rather shabby neighborhood where, he notes, car antennas can be abandoned on the sidewalk. I loved the foreman’s line also, “Go enjoy the weather.” when the crew is let off work early because they have run out of key building materials, “…as if he were bestowing good weather on upon us.”
While they’re watching Seinfeld in Duncan’s basement (It’s the 90’s.), the kid confesses his dream of becoming an actor, exaggerating his progress. Duncan offers a bromide about how everyone can fulfill their dreams if they wish/strive hard enough. But Saïd notes that Duncan’s dream of becoming an apprentice to a skilled building trade, which would mean more money and respect, has almost no chance of succeeding. It’s a pipe dream to keep despair and meaningless at bay that he’s been milking for years. How long before Duncan realizes that he has no realistic chance?
And how good is Seinfeld anyway? In a “moment of clarity” stimulated by crack cocaine, the kid realizes that the show is a vapid bore. Or is it? It’s like there’s a pendulum swinging that alternately annihilates life’s delusions and then quickly restores them so as not to drive us insane.
Hey Saïd, it’s so great to have you back on Three Guys!
