New Yorker Fiction Review #194: "Fly Already" by Etgar Keret

Review of a short story from the May 15, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

I'm so far behind on my New Yorker short story reviewing, I'm close to being a full year behind, which is absolutely preposterous. I think if I get a full year behind, I'll have to think about whether or not this project is still worth doing. I'm going on year six after all, and nearing 200 reviews. But...to the story at hand...

I love, love, LOVE an Etgar Keret story. This guy is my kind of writer. He writes lean, direct, strong prose under-girded by a dark sense of humor but also by the persistent notion that, like Hemingway once said, "the world is a fine place and worth fighting for..."

Nothing could exemplify Etgar Keret's sort of cynically hopeful attitude more than "Fly Already," a short story (very short story) in which a young man and his son encounter a man standing on the ledge of a nearby building, ready to jump. As the main character tries to persuade the man not to do it, the little boy, not understanding the situation adequately enough to be alarmed, keeps yelling, "Fly already!" because he thinks the man intends to fly.

Thus, in an interesting twist, it is the adult who is full of hope and the child who is cynical. Granted, the child doesn't actually know what he is telling the man to do, but on a symbolic level, one can't help but see the irony of the reversal.

The story ends much as do the other works of Etgar Keret's that I've read, with nothing really "happening" but with life just going on as it was before. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. In fact, many times it doesn't work. But Keret can pull it off because his stories are so immediate and full of life in every sentence, that you actually feel like you've been entertained the whole way through.

The world may be worth fighting for, but for Etgar Keret the world is not worth dying for. He is far too self-centered for that, and thank g-d. Etgar Keret is kind of an eternal teenager; funny, cynical, depressed, mistrusting of authority, and yet a romantic at heart, forever doomed to hope that life might one day match his expectations.