New Yorker Fiction Review #187: "Herman Melville, Vol. 1" by Victor Lodato

Review of a short story from the March 21, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

Victor Lodato is the author of two novels (one just recently released this past Spring), and three New Yorker short stories. One of those stories was "Jack, July," one of the best short stories I've ever read in The New Yorker, in nearly five years of doing this.

But whereas "Jack, July" had a kind of seductive, woozy urgency to it, "Herman Melville, Vol. 1" just kind of plods along for page after page and feels bloated, interminable, and overwrought, just a swirling mass of excessive detail, memories, and needlessly detailed conversations. I don't know what happened to Victor Lodato between the writing of "Jack, July" and now (maybe success?) but I'm much less compelled now than I was when I first read his stuff.

"Herman Melville, Vol. 1" is the story of a runaway in her late teens / early 20s whose eccentric, enigmatic, and selfish traveling companion, Evan, has abandoned her, leaving her to the clutches of a local woman who sort of takes her in. What ensues is a pretty boring series of scenes and conversations and reminiscences that ends in the woman driving the girl back to her home in Phoenix.

I recall thinking before that Victor Lodato, also a playwright, had done a nice job of synthesizing his background as a playwright with the demands of writing prose fiction, in which you must flesh-out the setting in the actual prose and more fully map the internal lives of characters. In this story, however, I feel that he gets too absorbed in the internal life of his character, the backstory, and neglects to push the story to a breaking point. This is, after all, a short story, in which you've got about 20 - 30 minutes to hold a reader's attention and write a fully-formed "beginning-middle-end" story, and for the most part people are only going to give it one shot. Victor Lodato, however, treats this like one chapter of a novel, and a long, boring one at that.

Oh, and if there's a reason for Victor Lodato's blatant attempt at intertextuality -- via the title and also the fact that the main character carries around a copy of said tome -- I don't see it at all. I don't particularly approve of the mentioning of other books in works of fiction; it strikes me as pretentious academic B.S. But I hate it even more when there doesn't even seem to be any purpose to it.