New Yorker Fiction Review #307: "Neighbors" by Zach Williams

 Review of the short story from the Mar. 25, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

Zach Williams is a new one on me, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. After all, my New Yorker short story reviewing has been sporadic at best the past (oh jeeze) three or four years now, and also there are just too many emerging authors to keep track of any more and I can barely keep track of the ones appearing in this publication.

Apparently Zach Williams' first published short story "Wood Sorrell House" graced the pages of The New Yorker in March 2022. For someone's first publication credit to be in The New Yorker, they have to be pretty damned good. And, after reading my first Zach Williams short story "Neighbors" last night, I can conclusively say that's true. 

"Neighbors" tells the story of a young family who move to the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco sometime in mid/late pandemic era and find themselves sharing their townhouse wall with an elderly woman named Bing who plays the TV too loud and whose ancient landline phone also rings loudly and frequently. When the dad in the story (the main character and narrator) sort of befriends Bing's middle aged son and becomes Bing's de facto "check in" neighbor, a strange incident ensues. It should also be noted that the couple have moved to San Francisco to get away from the location of the wife's recent infidelity, something which they have decided to work through and keep the family together.

I never know whether or not to put spoilers in these reviews but, in this particular case it's almost impossible not to review this story without spoiling it. In this particular instance, I'm going to refrain from spoiling the plot. I will just say the following:

1.) I really, really like the way Zach Williams exposes details and deeper themes in the story, something which is often difficult to do without seeming heavy handed. Williams appears to be a big acolyte of the "show don't tell" school of writing which, although it's dangerous to abide to closely to truisms and quips ("write what you know" etc.), of all the off-the-cuff, back of the envelope writing advice out there is probably some of the most useful. In Williams's case it makes the story seem organic and helps the prose recede into the background as the tale unfolds. The story had me mesmerized, for the most part.

2.) I do somewhat wish Williams had pushed the story's central conflict a bit further. There is a moment of tension that takes up almost the entire middle of the story as (sorry, I am going to spoil it a bit) the main character confronts an intruder in Bing's house; however, nothing really ultimately happens from this incident, and it seemed like a wasted opportunity. All the same, Williams manages to make the story seem meaningful even without some "whizz bang" type of plot twist. That in and of itself is an achievement.

3.) I have long maintained that, in most short stories or works of art, the author drops -- somewhere in the story -- the keys to understanding what it is really meant to be "about." Of course there are many layers of "about" in any work of art, but without a subtle, sometimes only one sentence key, you run the risk of leaving the story without any real clue to why the author wrote it. In the case of "Neighbors" the key to understanding the story lies in the following lines:

"A paradoxical calmness came over me. And what I felt, then, was that my life was not in me but diffused across the darkness, which was an unbroken field containing everything. Me and him. Anna, the girls. Bing. Everything. And so, no matter what happened next, there could be no consequence, because I had no identity separate from that field. No one did, nothing did. Everything just was, together, without boundaries or names."

No, this is a deep, deep philosophical thought. This is not the kind of thing you write a 2,000 word short story about and then never come back to. This is the kind of thing it takes years, decades, a lifetime to work with and, if this is Zach Williams' material, I will 100% be reading more of his work. 

Zach Williams was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2021-2023. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's. His short story collection "Beautiful Days," is forthcoming in June 2024.