New Yorker Fiction Review #299: "The Plaza" by Rebecca Makkai

Review of the short story from the May 8, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

Been a while since I've read and written about a short story on this blog. Painting has been taking up most of my time and I've found that the more I immerse myself in visual culture -- painting, drawing, thinking about painting & drawing, looking at paintings by other artists, etc. -- the more difficult it becomes to stay immersed in "print" culture as well. But a man must make time for both...

I would have likely skipped over this short story "The Plaza" by Rebecca Makkai, except that my good friend Mark Cecil just interviewed her on his literary podcast The Thoughtful Bro, which, if you are into books and literature, you need to be listening to. 

Anyway, what was nice about reading this story was that, unlike a lot of fiction in The New Yorker, this is a pretty straightforward "story." As in...there are characters, things happen, and time elapses all at a steady rate. You have the feeling that you're going somewhere. You'd be surprised just how rare this actually is. 

On the other hand, if anything the story suffers from too much buildup to a not very satisfying conclusion. All of which makes sense when I realized that the story was basically just an elaborate version of a fairy tale or a "setup" for the author to re-imagine an origin story for the literary character Eloise, the little girl who (in a series of children's books) grows up in the Plaza Hotel or something. Fair enough. 

As for the actual experience of reading the story, it was a fairly easy and engaging read. I would definitely go back to Rebecca Makkai's work, a short story at least. Do I want to stay with Rebecca Makkai for an entire novel, such as the new one she has written, "I Have Some Questions for You," a whodunnit set in an all girl's boarding school? Perhaps. But I'd have to be convinced she is going to write with a bit more insight into the human character and the higher order concerns of life than what I saw in this story. In other words, if I'm going to stay with this author for 300+ words I want her to tackle something of much greater consequence than the subject of this short story.