New Yorker Fiction Review #205: "A Refugee Crisis" by Callan Wink




Review of a short story from the August 20, 2018 issue of The New Yorker...

While I liked Callan Wink's voice at certain points, I've got to give this story a great big "meh." Seems to me like Wink is just taking some scenes from his life that are lying around and turning them into "fiction." In fact, his main character even says as much in the story.

You see, not only is this story about a writer, but it's about a writer writing about a writer. How mind-numbingly post-modern and navel-gazy can you get? The writer in this story is living in Montana, working (or trying to work) on a book while his former girlfriend, just returned from working at a refugee camp in Greece, languishes around his house cooking curries, watching movies on her laptop, and taking it easy before she gets an abortion (she was pregnant by a refugee she met in one of the camps).

I suppose this kind of story has to exist, but sometimes I don't understand why. I think a lot of writers, early on, get infatuated with those Hemingway-type autobiographical short stories in which he goes on a hike, catches a trout, thinks about his girlfriend, and then goes home. Maybe this is what passes for Literature these days but unless there is some really, really good technique (Hemingway) or some deep exploration into some aspect of human nature or psychology, I just don't think it works. It ends off coming off like a "look how decadent and interesting my artsy life is" kind of story.

At the same time, I can't say I wasn't a little bit interested in Callan Wink's world, even if I didn't exactly know what the point was. There is a place -- a big place -- for writers of literature like this who catalog and bring light to certain aspects of the modern condition and at least attempt to deal with the higher-order emotions of life: love, regret, hope, etc. I just don't think the main character cared enough about what was happening in his own world for any of us to care about it either, and also I'm not sure the prose or technique was that outstanding.

What was interesting was the conflict between the writer and his ex-girlfriend, but the two remain at too much of a remove for the first 90% of the story. Essentially it feels like Callan Wink buried his lead, leaving it till the very, very end to get to the good stuff he should have explored more directly in the rest of the story.

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