New Yorker Fiction Review #297: "Evensong" by Laurie Colwin

Review of the short story from the April 17, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

I've never really cared for these "from the vault" type stories, but I'm on a streak lately with my New Yorker fiction reviews so I am duty-bound (to whom, might ask? IDFK) to review this not very noteworthy short story by the late novelist and cookbook writer Laurie Colwin. 

How do you make an adulterous affair seem insipid, boring, and matter-of-fact? Well, Colwin certainly manages to in this relatively brief short story. It's not that it's poorly-written per se it just comes off as kind of flat. And yet, I will admit there is a kind of buttoned-up sexual tension that pervades the story. 

The characters live in a neighborhood dominated by an Anglican seminary and Colwin does a decent job of setting the scene. In just a quick paragraph she paints an almost irritatingly-quaint picture of small town life dominated by religion and religious people. The church bells chime the hours. Priests and their families (Anglican priests can marry) play croquet and have barbecues on their neat front lawns and celebrate religious holidays with little parades, etc. etc. Sounds like just the kind of musty, predictable and religious calm that begs to be penetrated (sorry) by an elicit affair. 

Except that, as Colwin warns us in the very first sentence of the story: "This is not an account of a love affair, and it is not the story of a religious conversion, although elements of both pertain."

To me this begs the question: What exactly is it a story of, then? 

The main character and her friendly, much older neighbor begin an affair that starts as matter-of-factly as a game of checkers, and proceeds at about that level of excitement, until it's over. In the process, the woman and her lover -- Louis -- begins taking her to an evening church service called Evensong, because she's lived in the neighborhood for years and still has never been.

One cannot help but be slapped in the face by the symbolism here. A woman and her lover -- both of whom are married -- meet up regularly to have sex and then go to church. Also, the woman is Jewish, what she refers to as a "watered-down" Jew. All sorts of glaring contradictions in this story, none of which seem particularly consequential. 

Or maybe I'm just not reading it closely enough? Perhaps, and perhaps not. But the story ends in the same matter-of-fact way that it began. No one discovers the affair. The main character does not even seem to feel much emotion about the fact she jeopardized the stability of her family for no apparent reason.

This has the feeling of being exactly what it is, namely...a forgot short story by a famous author. One has to wonder sometimes why these works were forgotten. If the story was so good, why did the author forget to publish it? She was so thrilled by this particular piece that she put it under a stack of other stories and then died, leaving it for her son to find it years later...? (I'm not making this up, this actually did happen)

In this case I suppose it's believable, because the author died suddenly (and young); however, when I read stories like this in The New Yorker I can't help but feel like this is a ploy cooked up by Colwin's literary rights agent and the Fiction Editor of The New Yorker to goose the sales of Colwin's recently reissued writings. 

I wouldn't really mind that much, except that I look to The New Yorker fiction section to provide me with the finest contemporary fiction writing, from important, contemporary authors.

Illustration by Xiao Hua Yang