New Yorker Fiction Review #241: "Two Nurses, Smoking" by David Means
Now that I've given up any semblance of ever being "caught up" on all my New Yorker fiction reviews, and just review the latest short stories as they come to me through the mail slot...my reviews can at least be somewhat timely again.
I knew I had heard of David Means before somewhere. As it turns out, I had heard of him in the pages of The New Yorker, and his story "Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother," from May 1, 2017 (reviewed on this blog on Dec. 21, 2017; clearly, at that point I was trying to get caught up on back issues in a last, hopeless attempt to get caught up on all the issues I had missed. I think I remember this period). Anyway, I recall being amused by the form and experimental nature of "Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother," if not exactly the short story itself. In "Two Nurses, Smoking," David Means also plays with form in an interesting way, but delivers a somewhat more compelling story-line and, in my opinion, a story that "works" a bit better.
In a third-person narrative, composed of paragraph-length "bursts" or "steps," David Means tells the story of two nurses -- Gracie and Marlon -- falling in love over the course of two seasons, as they take their smoke breaks together and get to know each other through the act of telling each other their personal stories and stories about their work lives. Each paragraph or burst uses the first few words of the upcoming sentence as its title. Gotta give high marks to David Means there, as I've never, ever seen this technique done in a work of fiction.
The characters are a bit thinly drawn, in my opinion, partly because we never get to hear them actually speak. There is no dialogue in "Two Nurses, Smoking," only that third person "then he said...then she told him..." kind of dialogue. Which is fine in order to move the story along, but I find it very heard to flesh-out my inner picture of a character if I never hear them speak. Furthermore, in stories in which an author is playing around with form this heavily, I've often found that other aspects of the story suffer a bit. In this case, it's the vividness of the characters. They seem a little "Mr. Potato Head," as though David Means created them by lumping together a bunch of characteristics and calling them characters.
But what David Means does really, really well in this story is to illustrate the process of two people getting to know each other better and, eventually, falling in love, gradually, as the process of sharing their stories with each other creates familiarity, trust, and then something deeper. Most of us (I hope all of us) have been lucky enough to go through this process in some form or other in our own lives, and therefore there is something deeply resonant and timeless about this story.
It's not a fantastical, hard-to-believe story. In fact, at some points David Means even steps further back and views the two characters as from a distance, like you might see them as you were driving through the parking lot on the way to visit a relative in the hospital; views them as though at a passing glance. The story actually starts out that way:
"From a wide vantage, two hospital workers, somewhat lonely looking figures...if you paid close attention, driving past--you might've seen desire in the way she pointed her toe and dug it into the dusty concrete..."
This is one major reason why this story succeeds. David Means takes the process of two people falling in love and renders it down into its much less cinematic and much more realistic stages and phases. In the movies, people run after their lover through the airport (not anymore, I guess), or kiss magically on Ferris wheels, or in the rain, or whatever. But in real life they mostly fall in love by getting to know each other pretty well first and then kind of just ending up together, and in ways that don't make for good cinema, but, in the hands of an author like David Means, playing with short story form, can be turned into an engaging and even sacred sort of process.
Another thing I like about this story is that, in a very meta way, it speaks to the power of "story" itself. I once heard it said that "you can love anyone if you know their story." "Two Nurses, Smoking" reminds me of that quote. This is not love at first sight, but instead it is a sort of "love by mutual storytelling." Which, again, is much more true to life. When you fall in love with someone -- yes, you are falling in love with their physical form (to whatever degrees) -- but what else are you really falling in love with, in fact what are we, when it really comes down to it, but a collection of stories?
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