New Yorker Fiction Review #254: "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss

Review of the short story from the Sept. 21, 2020 issue of The New Yorker...

If there's one thing I've learned over the past six years of reading and reviewing the short fiction in The New Yorker, it's that the modern literary scene can produce new writers and new books far faster than I'll ever be able to keep up with them. Hell, most of the time I can't even read and review a short story a week let alone get my arms around every literary heavy hitter out there writing books in the English language. The best I can do is, well, what I do: just read whatever comes across my transom and be open to recommendations and hope that covers it. 

What I'm saying, more specifically, is that I'd never heard of Nicole Krauss before reading this dark tale of adolescence and sexual awakening. How? I'm not really sure. She's written four books. Her list of short story publications is basically a list of the most prominent literary magazines in the country. And she was married to Jonathan Safran Foer. Not that that last one actually means much. It's not like the lives of novelists are covered by the paparazzi or anything, but even by association I figure I'd have heard of her.

Anyway, it's not about me and what I've heard of (actually it is; see the title of this blog), it's about the work at hand, a short story called "Switzerland." In this story, a 13-year old American girl goes to Switzerland to live for a year with her family and attend school in Geneva, where she stays in a boarding house with other teenaged girls, a few of them much older than she. One of the girls, Soraya, ends up dating a married man and getting into an abusive relationship with him. We're not sure quite the details, but we are sure she's being used and gives everyone a good scare by disappearing for a while. Spoiler alert, she turns up after a few days. 

What's at work here are some themes related to sexuality, sexual power, who has it, and the delicate balance of danger and excitement it can carry with it, especially for the young. Soraya, for example, is clearly in over her head when she begins dating the much older married man and becomes (we presume) his plaything. Is this the first in a series of episodes that will end in tragedy for the girl, or is it just part of Soraya's journey into sexual adulthood? We don't really find out but therein lies the point: we don't really know in life either. Soraya, after all, is 18 in this story, legally an adult. Does that mean she's in control of her shit? Clearly not. 

The main character herself also gets confronted with some of the more unfortunate side effects of her own burgeoning sexuality, being confronted by men on the street, even threatened by them. She learns that her looks have a certain power, a certain effect on men, even if it's not always the effect she wants. Is it even power then, or a weakness? Is it something dangerous, to be hidden, or something to be used to get what she wants? Maybe it's all of that, and maybe the thing she has to learn in life is when and for whom it is all of those things. 

To me, the story is best summed up when, toward the very end, the main character -- many years later -- reflects on her own daughter's blossoming good looks and the effect she has on men much, much older than she. The woman observes, with great trepidation, that her daughter seems to show no amount of fear or shyness toward men and the attention they give her, even at her young age.

"It's her curiosity about her own power, its reach and its limits, that scares me. Though maybe the truth is that, when I am not afraid for her, I envy her."

This tangle of emotions might seem a little bizarre, but sexuality is rarely simple, especially for the young and especially -- in Nicole Krauss's eyes -- for attractive young women. In this story she taps deeply into a very complex subject and leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but it works.