New Yorker Fiction Review #224: "Dandelion" by Lore Segal

Review of a short story from the Mar. 25, 2019 issue of The New Yorker...

In this rather short story, Lore Segal takes "meta-fiction" to a level I've personally never encountered before, taking a story she herself wrote in her 20s (she is now 91 years old) and sort of re-visiting and re-writing it in order to smooth out what she perceives as over-wrought turns of phrase and inaccurate metaphors.

In the very first line of the story she excuses herself for this by telling us that Henry James rewrote some of his early work when he himself became old. Does one need an excuse or a reason to write a story in a particular way? In my opinion, the answer is No. And the immediate breaking of the literary "fourth wall" here -- both letting us know that this was going to be a story within a story and also letting us know she had "permission" to do this because Henry James did it -- served as an unnecessary prologue to what was actually a pleasant little amuse bouche of a story about a young girl and her father on a walk in the Austrian Alps before World War II.

What I am trying to say is: There was a different and less clumsy way to introduce this story to us, the readers.

The concept of revisiting a story one wrote at an earlier stage in life and going back and "fixing" certain parts of it, revising certain memories, etc. is pretty cool, in my opinion. I have kept a journal my entire life, so I sort of know what this is like, in real-life terms. But I don't think Lore Segal developed this idea enough in the story to make it worth the clumsy intro. I'd have liked to see some more follow-through, some more references to how differently she remembers things now vs. then.