New Yorker Fiction Review #296: "The Ferry" by Ben Lerner

Review of the short story from the April 10, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

Before reading this short story I had only ever just heard of Ben Lerner and not actually read any of his stuff. But after reading "The Ferry," it came as no surprise that Ben Lerner -- author of three novels and a three-time New Yorker fiction section author -- got his start as a poet. The story itself at times reads like a prose-poem, as Lerner uses phrases and images over and over again, all the while the narrator and main character (ultimately Lerner, after all) marvels at the world and at certain turns of phrase the way only a poet could do. 

From the first paragraph I got the sense that this story was not going to be a snoozer, or one that I was going to be able to read "passively," so to speak. As a reviewer, you can never really read passively. "The Ferry" is one of those that you have to read with a pen in hand, like a detective, to make sure you take not of everything lest something slip by you. 

Take for example, two paragraphs in, when the narrator is confronted by a question on the screen of an MTA ticket dispenser: 

"...the machine asked me if I wanted to add value or add time. It was too much, too beautiful: the bright red, the curbed cracked mirror, the deepest question in the world."

A few paragraphs later, the narrator marvels at the questions his young daughter asks him. Questions such as: 

Why is falling a thing? Do I still have zero siblings? How real are stars? Is a flower a good example?

This is a narrator is highly attuned to the underlying meaning in everything that happens around him, everything that anyone else says or does. We find out, as we read further, that he suffers from some kind of anxious or depressive disorder, even perhaps psychosis, which makes sense given how sensitive he is. This prompts me to wonder which one follows the other? Is someone hypersensitive to the world around them because they have a mental illness? Or do people develop mental illness because they are hyper-sensitive in a world that does not reward or respect that? It may be impossible to say, as it is for this narrator. 

As for the plot of this delicately layered and intensely meaningful story... the main character is the father of a five- or six-year-old girl - Ava - living in New York City with his possibly estranged wife, Camila, with whom he still co-parents the child. It is not made perfectly clear if the main character and his wife still live together, but we get the clear sense that something -- a psychotic break or episode by the narrator -- has caused his wife to distance herself from him and, quite possibly, has caused or will cause their marriage to dissolve. 

When the main character gets a wrong-number voicemail from an unknown man attempting to apologize to a woman, it disrupts something in the main character's delicate balance of daily effectiveness and mental clarity, and causes him to become distracted. While most of us would probably delete the voicemail, block the number, or take some other kind of action that did not cause us to engage with the mysterious person, the main character texts him back to tell him that he has the wrong number, triggering an ugly exchange back from the mystery person that even threatens to turn in to a real-life confrontation. 

This short story put me in mind of another recent New Yorker short story: "My Wonderful Description of Flowers," by Danielle Dutton. In both stories, the main characters are harassed by mysterious callers/texters. In Dutton's story, unlike Lerner's, the harassment ultimately takes a physical form, as the unwanted caller eventually shows up at her door. But in each story, the intrusion into daily life by a mysterious caller -- seemingly coming from out of the sky -- serves to highlight the sheer absurdity of modern technology and its ability to alienate us while making us more connected to each other. In fact, a powerful theme in both stories is the alienation wrought by life the modern world. 

Lerner's narrator in "The Ferry," whose discourse on voicemails alone shows us how hyper-aware he is of his own actions and feelings in daily life, is someone who -- we are left to believe -- is burdened far too acute a faculty of perception, and far too introspective, to cut through the static and confusion of modern day life with ease. Perhaps he will not even be able to cut through it enough to function effectively as a father, or continue to be married to the mother of his child. None of this is his fault, of course, but it is what it is. 

One of the most haunting parts of this story (and from where, rightly, the story gets its title) was when the main character describes a voicemail he has kept on his phone. In the voicemail -- a butt-dial phone call from his wife -- his wife can be heard having a conversation with a man amidst the whooshing sounds of high winds. The character assumes that she was on the ferry to Governors Island when the call happened, and he paints a picture in his mind of what was happening: his wife is leaning on the railing of the ferry talking to a man, possibly complaining about him to the man, because he can distinctly hear his own name being spoken. In this scenario, the narrator imputes a sort of sexual tension into the interaction. He also allows for the possibility that his wife was talking to him (the main character himself) in the voicemail, and it just took a while to arrive to his phone, as sometimes happens. 

This whole issue of the mysterious voicemail -- alongside the current mysterious voicemail situation, with the unknown, contrite man -- illustrates how Ben Lerner is able to make this story resonate with symbolic meaning. The voicemail from his wife sort of looms out there, on the surface. Another mystery he will never be able to unravel, but to which he clings far longer than is healthy. Does the character just need to learn how to let things go? It sounds like he would be better off doing so. It's clearly not that simple for the main character, or for anyone else suffering from mental illness. 

The way that Lerner causes the "mysterious voicemail caller" situation to parallel events in the main characters own life is masterful, almost leaving us -- the readers -- to wonder if the main character were making it all up? We know he's not, because he asks his wife to listen to the voicemail, and she does. But the way Lerner plays with the narrator's version of reality, his inner world vs. the outer world, almost put me in mind of the film Inception; you don't know quite what is real, or whose version of events to believe. 

Lerner has achieved something pretty remarkable in this short story, something which will likely go unnoticed. After all, it is a short story, not a book, or a film, or a Netflix series, and because we're in 2023 the impact of any short story -- no matter how good -- will be necessarily limited. However, I believe there is enough happening in this story that it could stand up to further examination, from angles I did not even begin to approach here.