New Yorker Fiction Review #192: "Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother" by David Means



Review of a short story from the May 1, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

This is one of those short stories that's almost too high-minded and experimental for it's own good. And yet in my opinion, it does still "work" and the writer accomplishes what he was going for, even if the second part of the piece (you can't really call this a story) is more of a long, run-on sentence with a seemingly infinite repetition of the phrase, "It's not just that..."

What is really neat about this piece is the way David Means looks at homelessness, or rather a homeless man, from two different perspectives. The first perspective is the lens through which people might see this man on the street and then how it affects them internally. The second perspective is a much closer one, that of the brother of a man suffering from opiate addiction.

I particularly liked the way David Means cataloged the different reactions a person could conceivably have to seeing a homeless person on the street. Means seems to be very good at sort of "refracting" one image or incident through a number of different perspectives.

The second part of the story does have, I suppose, a narrative "arc" giving it shape, as the man watches his brother slip further and further away in his disease, until he is finally lost.

I'm glad that The New Yorker is still a venue where fiction like this can be exposed to the reading public. But it's my opinion that a story like this is written for other writers and furthermore, it smells of something which I detest in fiction which is the heavy feeling of the author's hand throughout the entire piece. At this point in my life, I prefer stories that make you forget that you're reading.

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