New Yorker Fiction Review #195: "A Love Story" by Samantha Hunt

Review of a short story in the May 22, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

For the first time since I started reviewing the short stories in The New Yorker (back in the winter of 2013) I am nearly a full year behind. How has this happened? Sigh... The weeks keep coming and they don't stop coming. Meantime, you get occupied writing about other stuff, reading other stuff, you slip further and further behind, so far behind it doesn't even seem like you should take-up the project again at all. But I don't know...something always draws me back to it.

Anyway...

"A Love Story" is not so much a "story" as it is a stream of consciousness piece from inside the head of a middle-aged mother of three under-going a mid-life personal, marital, emotional, and sexual crisis. The first part of the story reads as a bunch one-off observations and scenarios from her life. But gradually, the scenarios and observations get more complex until we get a much better and clearer sense of what she is going through.

This is one of the most honest and powerful pieces of fiction I've read in The New Yorker in quite a while but, let's face it...it's one of the only pieces of fiction I've read in The New Yorker in quite a while. Seriously, much credit is due to Samantha Hunt for doing what I think is one of the most difficult and yet greatest achievements in fiction, writing that sort of "emptying of the subconscious mind" story.

This is a special category of fiction I've not yet explored. Samantha Hunt might want to kill me for saying this, but it reminds me a little of Portnoy's Complaint, by Phillip Roth. It's almost like the literature equivalent of good stand-up comedy, except -- and especially in Hunt's case -- the intent is not necessarily to make you laugh. It is as though the writer has completely opened their heart, mind, soul, and emptied everything onto the page. When done properly, as I said above, it is to me some of the best kind of writing there is.

If I had world enough and time, I would properly dissect all the themes Samantha Hunt explores in this story -- identity, relationships, motherhood, nostalgia, sexual frustration, friendship, shame, lack of shame -- the list goes on and on and on. This is the kind of story I fully intend to come back to, but probably never will. Still, Samantha Hunt is absolutely going on my "To Read" list after this irresistibly engaging effort.