New Yorker Fiction Review #180: "Quarantine" by Alex Ohlin

(Photo from: Mooske & the Gripes)

Review of a short story from the Jan. 30, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

It's difficult to encapsulate a person's entire adult life into a short story, perhaps the most difficult thing to do. It is the act of squeezing the entire horizon of someone's view -- their whole context for being alive on this planet, for understanding their own existence and all their experiences -- into 4,000 words or 30 minutes. So it's forgivable if the result -- the story -- makes for less-than-compelling reading material at times; there is just no way to make it interesting the whole way through. The only hope is to cover the important and most poignant emotions and experiences and hope to tie it up properly at the end, which Alex Ohlin does extremely well.

This particular short story follows the adult life of Bridget, a young Canadian woman living in Barcelona in her early 20s. Much like most people's actual lives (hope I'm not sounding to jaded here but let's face it) the most exciting and part of Bridget's life is this early 20s period when she's broke, underemployed, drifting between friend's couches, having love affairs that don't go anywhere, smoking cigarettes, and with no direction or responsibilities. When her father becomes ill, she has to return to Canada, and then starts her "real" or adult life. She cares for her dying father, goes to law school, starts a family, etc.

It is a really incredible thing to watch someone go from a Bohemian carefree life in Barcelona, to the bedside of her dying father, to watching her teenage daughter play soccer, to caring for her dying friend in later middle age. A reader cannot help but feel a special attachment for such a character, because -- at best -- one can see oneself reflected. We have all -- anyone who has lived past the age of 14 -- had the opportunity to look back at ourselves and try to process all of our experiences and make sense of them.

I'll cut right to the chase because, in my opinion, the real meat of this story, the "crux," the payoff, comes in the last paragraph, as Bridget returns from a visit to her sick best friend, and realizes that her children will soon be leaving for college and then for their adult lives:

"Bridget would soon be stripped back to herself. Sometimes she thought of this aloneness as a luxury. Sometimes she was afraid of it. Sometimes she saw her life as a tender thing that was separate from herself, a tiny animal she had happened upon by chance one day and decided to raise. It was terrifying to think how small it was, how wild, how easily she could fit it in the palm of her hand."

What I like so much about this paragraph is that I can understand it, but I have not yet experienced it. This is the reason why I read literature. To find phrases like this to keep in my pocket for years and decades in the hope that one day I can pull them out and they will help me understand my own life.