Yiyun Li: A Razor-Sharp V.S. Pritchett Story

Emotional isolation and making the best of what life’s put in front of you are two themes that get a serious workout in Yiyun Li‘s new short story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, from the opening novella, “Kindness,” to the eponyous short story that ends the volume. The stories might seem cold and distant at first, but give them time to sink in—and they’ll probably wind up sticking with you much like the tale told to the narrator of the short story Li’s chosen to write about for Beatrice.

A couple years ago I taught a story by V.S. Pritchett (an under-read master of short stories, whom, in my opinion, should be read along with Chekhov and William Trevor) in a course of reading short stories to seven undergraduates. The story is titled “You Make Your Own Life.” After my opening, there was a moment of silence, and a student raised his hand. “Professor, we know you love sad stories, but this is unbearable! This is too much! Where’s the hope?”

(Off-topic: “where is the hope” seems to be a question asked often of me. Growing up in a different place, my answer is that as long as one can read and write about bleakness, as long as one can understand it, the world is still hopeful; it would become a crueler and bleaker place when hope puts on a costume of deception and propaganda, which happens only too often.)

The story is short—six pages, written in first person. It opens when the narrator, waiting in a small town for a train that was not to come, spots a barbershop and decides to have a haircut. Other than this one impromptu decision, we learn nothing more about the narrator himself for the rest of the story. But what propels a man to enter a barber’s shop when his should be waiting for the train to leave the town? Already it is described as “a dead place,” and “ten miles from this town the skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago had been dug up on the Downs.”

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17 September 2010 | selling shorts |

Why Did Oprah Pick Freedom?

After several weeks of speculation, the Associated Press has jumped the gun on Oprah Winfrey and announced that her next Book Club selection, which she’s planning to unveil on tomorrow’s show, is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. (I didn’t think it would be at first, in part because Macmillan went to unprecedented lengths to obscure the selection, but I’ve heard from folks who confirm the AP’s reporting.) So immediately folks on the Internet start going, “Why? Oprah and Franzen hate each other!”

(In that vein, I was amused at the Franzen reading at the Decatur Book Festival two weeks ago, when the crowd tittered nervously when an audience member mentioned Oprah in his question to the author. What, did they think he was going to snap, jump off the stage, and rip the guy’s head off?)

Well, look, it’s been nearly a decade; people grow up and they stop wasting time and energy on the stupid things that bugged them nine years ago. It’s the final season of Oprah, and frankly I suspect she’s tying up some karmic loose ends in an effort to create a more uniformly positive universe for herself. But the most important thing is: Freedom is an excellent novel, not perfect by any means but definitely worth recommending to millions. And given that Franzen’s ambivalence towards all the non-literary aspects of trying to be a literary author in a commercial marketplace hasn’t changed, it should make for an interesting hour of television.

16 September 2010 | theory |