New Yorker Fiction Review #228: "The Presentation on Egypt" by Camille Bordas

Review of a short story from the May 20, 2019 issue of The New Yorker...

One of the best short stories I've read in The New Yorker for a while, mostly because I haven't been reading many short stories in The New Yorker lately. But also because it's a great, well-structured story. Incidentally, it has almost nothing to do with Egypt.

The story functions as sort of a mini, domestic epic spanning about 25 years in the lives of Anna and Danielle, a mother and daughter whose husband and father, respectively, commits suicide when Danielle is about nine or 10.  Anna never actually reveals to her daughter that Paul committed suicide, instead telling their daughter that he had a heart condition. Thus, Danielle grows up with an excess of concern about her heart's heath, among other mild dysfunctions like those we all accrue given enough time (which is to say, almost any amount of time as a human being).

I always appreciate stories that capture big chunks of time in people's lives like this. Life is so day-to-day most of the time that we forget how elements of our long-distant past come up every day and affect us, one way or another; how we deal with the past, live with the past, every day, for better or for worse.

Also, quite simply, having the seeming main character, Paul, hang himself in the first few paragraphs was a great "trick" by the writer to get me more engaged. Let's face it, even in so-called "literature" nothing hooks you like sex, violence, crime, betrayal, all the good old-fashioned stuff.

The middle of the story is populated by a lot of the daily melodrama Danielle deals with, being a late 20-something...trying to find a career path, trying and failing to find a good partner, struggling to find her direction and place in the world...but the real "point" of the story is the secrets we keep from each other and how -- like it or not -- our real legacy to our children is never what we'd hope it to be or want it to be, but somehow we keep going anyway.