New Yorker Fiction Review #268: "The Crooked House," by Jonathan Lethem

 

Review of the short story from the March 8, 2021 issue of The New Yorker...

It's hard for me to write this particular review because it's going to be a bad review and I actually really like most of Jonathan Lethem's work. This particular story -- as I learned from the accompanying interview -- harkens back to a Robert Heinlein short story "And He Built a Crooked House," that Jonathan Lethem apparently read when he was a kid.

There's my first problem right there. I get that Jonathan Lethem is super smart and super well read. Even just in the aforementioned interview he name-drops at least 30 writers, 90% of whom I've never heard of. Not to say that in itself isn't super pretentious and annoying (it is), but in my opinion when authors start relying on all the works they are referencing in their short story or novel, to explain or justify why it was written or why you should be super impressed with it, the work itself often sucks. I once heard Lauren Groff say that her novel was influenced by Shakespeare and The Odyssey; I have not and will never touch that book.

Such is, sadly, the case with "The Crooked House." All due respect to this giant of American letters, the short story in question is so inscrutable as to be distracting. A writer doesn't need to spoon feed the audience everything they need to understand a story. But -- at least when we're talking about a short story -- they do need to write something that can be readily understood and interpreted by a reader on the first go-round. This is not a Graduate Fiction Seminar. We are not going to be studying this story and reading it over again six times. Perhaps that's what Lethem intends and, simply because I just wrote that, I'm 100% sure some graduate school will one day teach this story. However, as they say in Spaceballs: "We're in now now," and this is an almost completely unreadable story in a weekly magazine that will soon be forgotten by most of the people who could get through it, and I doubt there were many.