New Yorker Review #185: "Solstice" by Anne Enright

(photo by Enda Bowe for The New Yorker)

Review of a short story from the Mar. 13, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

Eventually I will resume writing about things other than short stories from The New Yorker...that is...when I get caught up to present day and am not multiple months behind. But I just feel like if I don't stop everything and burn through these stories now, I'll become so hopelessly behind that I will quit this project...and I can't do that. I've been reveiwing the short fiction in The New Yorker for more than four years now. Gotta keep it going! And so...we have "Solstice" by Anne Enright.

When you read enough literary short stories, you start to notice trends or categories that emerge. Take for example my post from July 13th about "metro fiction." This story falls into a category you might refer to as "domestic fiction," or fiction that takes place within the walls of a home and usually explores some theme or themes related to family life, growing older, becoming a parent, etc.

As domestic stories go, I feel that Anne Enright has turned out a nicely-polished gem here. As with all categories of fiction -- whether the stories are about aliens from Mars, old people sitting on the porch of an old age home, people living in a kibbutz in Israel, or whatever -- the trick is to make people care about the characters, the plot, or the setting (ideally all three) and forget, for a moment, that they're reading. And maybe, in the balance, teach them something or relate to them. In otherwords, to provide entertainment with some hidden value. Anne Enright definitely accomplishes this in "Solstice."

In the space of just about 10-12 minutes (a pretty short story) she peeks very intimately into the domestic life of a man who has just lost his mother six months before, and is still working through the grieving period while he continues to live his life as a workaday adult and parent. He tries to find his car (on the shortest day of the year...solstice), he comes home and interacts with his teenaged kids (he is befuddled by his argumentative 16 year old daughter; somewhat less befuddled by his younger son), tries to relate to them, etc. etc.

Mundane material for a short story? Perhaps. But it doesn't matter if the material is mundane as long as the author succeeds in making me care about what's happening. The characters are so well sketched-out and so alive in "Solstice" that I felt like I was part of the family. It resonated with me. And that's the great part about literature and art in general: You never know what will resonate with you, so you have to always keep looking for something new, even if it's just new to you...or...from an issue of The New Yorker that's five months old.