New Yorker Fiction Review #230: "Motherless Child" by Elizabeth Strout
It's interesting to read a short story -- with zero context going in -- and then find out the author is an enormous success and the story's main character has an entire HBO Mini-series based on her. Apparently, Elizabeth Strout is the author of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge, and many subsequent books afterward featuring the novel's eponymous main character. The latest of which is Olive, Again, a collection of stories to be released this fall and featuring (you guessed it) the story "Motherless Child."
I get a little pissy when authors of this gargantuan level are featured in The New Yorker with fairly mundane short stories which are only meant (clearly meant) to act as advance PR for their forthcoming bizillionth book. I get it. This is the way the publishing industry and the media game work. But I don't have to necessarily like it. I would prefer The New Yorker err on the side of featuring the work of new, younger authors whose work is so good it demands a bit of "blue sky" or exposure to a wider audience than it finds in literary magazines. But I also get that a.) The New Yorker can't do this every week, and b.) they've got lights to be kept on and salaries to pay.
The flip side of all this is that the writing is just really, really good. About three or four paragraphs into it you get that sense of being in the hands of a master, even if the trip you're going on is not in and of itself very remarkable. In other words, it's a well-written story without much of a physical plot, but one which manages, in just a few short pages, to expose some deeper truth or realization about an aspect of the human condition. I doubt a story like this from a lesser known author sees daylight in The New Yorker, but Elizabeth Strout has long since punched her ticket and ergo has earned the ability to have one of the B-Level short stories from her upcoming book published for a million readers to see.
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