New Yorker Fiction Review #300: "Long Island" by Nicole Krauss

Review of the short story from the May 22, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

Hard to believe, but as of this entry I have read and reviewed 300 short stories from The New Yorker over the past 10 years. I plan to write a separate entry covering my thoughts on what this project has meant to me (and not meant) over the past decade and what I have learned about short stories. But for now, I wanted to review this the latest offering from Nicole Krauss, called "Long Island." 

I greatly enjoyed the last Nicole Krauss story I read in The New Yorker -- called "Switzerland" -- from back in Sept. of 2020. Since then I have not read anything else of hers, which is frankly not a surprise. I always say I'm going to go back and read books by a lot of these authors, but in the words of Andrew Marvell: "If there was but world enough and time..." 

"Long Island" is a seemingly autobiographical recollection or anecdote (you can't really call this one a story) about the narrator's family moving from Manhattan to Long Island, to inhabit a stately old "fixer-upper" mansion. Along the way, the character relates what it was like to grow up in the late-70s and 80s, complete with the at-this-point somewhat trite reminiscences about how our parents left us alone for extended periods of time back then, unlike today, etc. etc. but Krauss stops short of overburdening us with these such details. If she had mentioned anything about participation awards, however, I would have stopped reading on the spot. 

The recollections start to form into something a bit more like a story when she and her cousins find a safe in the closet of their Uncle Zolly's bedroom and attempt -- with eventual success -- to open it and find what is contained inside. In terms of any firsthand action, that's about it. Much of the rest of the story is consumed by placing her family into the broader context of their new Long Island neighborhood -- apparently more filled with nefarious characters than it would seem, at first -- and within the broader arc of the post-WWII world, as hers is a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust. 

The strength of this story lies in the details of Krauss's recollections about her family and the people that made up her world back in those days, the kinds of details you almost cannot make up precisely because they are so varied and yet so mundane. The kinds of things our actual lives -- and not fictional stories -- are made up of. 

Furthermore, Krauss's ability to draw meaning from these characters and their actions, as she sits at the far remove of middle age, is entertaining and thought-provoking to read. Take for example her description of her Uncle Zolly's life on the fringes of the law:

"We had come to accept that Uncle Zolly was criminal in the way of so many: that he operated outside the limits of the permissible because life was an ongoing struggle for survival that one was forever about to lose; that certain versions of morality simply weren’t affordable; that life had to be lived defensively, which required a shrewdness that saw a way around or over or through the obstacles, a way to evade the things that were coming to close you down, put you away, even kill you." 

Whether or not we can relate because we have any characters like this in our own families, Krauss is here making a trenchant observation on life and the human character. These kinds of observations are, at the end of the day, why we read prose and fiction (why I do, at least), and it's pleasantly surprising what Krauss is able to do even in a simple recollection like this about an era in her family's life.

Illustration by Javi Aznarez