Some possible answers to this occurred to him. One was simply, "Yes." Or, more broadly, "Yes, I hear you." After all, the only actual question he had been asked was whether he had heard the insinuating statement about the handwriting. He had heard it, so strictly a "yes" was a full and fair answer. But "yes" alone could be interpreted as meaning "yes, I wrote that." Even "yes, I hear you" without more could be interpreted as something like, "yes, I wrote it and I'm glad you appear to have enjoyed the wit of it." That would never do. He also thought quite briefly of a response that would be suitable for a math class. He could go to the blackboard, grab a piece of chalk, and draw two circles, labeling them A and B. They would NOT intersect. He could then explain to her and to the whole class that set A consisted of everything he had ever done or contributed to in any way whatsoever, and set B consisted of al...
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The old man thought, looking back on his life, that there had only been five moments when he had managed to say just the right thing, just the thing that needed to be said just when it was, in a cogent and concise way. Only five. What was of course far more common were memories of the many times when he had said the wrong thing and lived to regret it. Or when he had said the sort-of right thing, but in an unnecessarily verbose or ambiguous way. Or when he hadn't really said anything: when he had stammered or sat or stood in silence until the moment passed. But there were at least those five times. That was something. The first of them came when he was in a geometry class in high school. Way back in a decade well into the previous century, even well into the previous millennium. His teacher had something she wanted to say to everyone [or maybe not, but everyone should be there as a witness to it] that had nothing to do with conveying the genius of the Pythagorean theorem....
I'm looking again at the March issue of Harper's . It includes a story by Lesley Nneka Arimah, about a Nigerian immigrant to the United States named Glory and her relationship with a man, Thomas. The Nigerian-immigrant community in the US is, I gather, fairly traditional in its views on marriage, sex roles, etc., and Arimah's story plays on that. I wouldn't call Glory an anti-hero exactly, but the narrative voice's view of the protagonist is, at best, ambivalent. We're told, "It was also true that her parents put pressure on her. Yet theirs was the sort of hopeful pressure that would have encouraged a better person." In time, the parental pressure comes to a point on this: Glory should find a nice Nigerian man and settle down. That leads to the following neat passage: "But the more he said 'us' and 'we,' the less quickly she deleted that 'Mom, I'm seeing someone' text. One day, instead of sending it, she poste...
Ozick has a well-wrought story in the February issue of Harper's. "The Bloodline of the Alkanas" introduces us to a protagonist, Sidney Alkana, who grew up as the daughter of a poet. Sidney didn't in the process become an admirer of poetry as an art. Nor did she come to admire the 19th century poetic diction that her father would employ in certain conversations. In her voice we learn: "I did not understand my father's talk. I sensed only that there was some undeniable connection between these enigmatic outbursts and the mundane truth that we were always worrying about money. I was by then a demanding fifteen, shamed by the way we lived in a three-room flat of the fifth floor of a Bronx walk-up." I'll leave it there, 'lest the IP goblins pursue me. With such a de minimis quotation, I am surely guarded by the shield of "fair use." I like the story in some small part because Ozick dares do something experts routinely warn aga...
One of my Facebook friends posted this exchange recently. I like it so I'll simply repeat it, with thanks to Leon Gettler and, behind him, to the Paris Review . Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you? Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.