New Yorker Fiction Review #264: "The Winged Thing" by Patricia Lockwood
I feel like like I ought to be familiar with Patricia Lockwood, but I'm not. After about 30 seconds of Wikipedia research (literally performed between writing that last sentence and this one) I see that she's under 40, from Indiana (my second home, so extra points there), and has at least five books under her belt.
From the 30 minutes I spent reading her short story "The Winged Thing," I get a bit of a Lorrie Moore feel: funny, snarky, jaded, but in the end tender-hearted and ultimately hopeful. I'm sure that revisionist description of Lorrie Moore's oeuvre would manage to make a true Lorrie Moore fan want to puke. But, I'm doing my best. My point is, "The Winged Thing" is the story of a real human crisis shot-through with dark humor and some not-inconsiderable snark, but behind (almost) every jaded snarkster is, in my opinion, someone who has been hurt or had their own hopes dashed at one point. Maybe I'm projecting.
Taking on no-less a weighty topic as Abortion, "The Winged Thing" puts a pregnant woman and her family in the cross-hairs of the morally-ambiguous dilemma (ambiguous to some, I should say) of whether -- and then how, exactly -- to abort her pregnancy, as her unborn child is revealed to have serious deformities. Really, the woman and her sister are not confused as to whether to abort the pregnancy, it's just a matter of fact that they live in Ohio, a state which (in real life or just in the story, I'm not sure) has recently passed a law making it impossible. The woman ends up having the baby.
The thing that makes the story interesting, more interesting than the politically- and morally-charged debate surrounding abortion in our society, is the actual form the story takes. "The Winged Thing" is written in little 100 word bursts (sometimes shorter) kind of like as if the author were changing through the channels, stopping at each channel for about 15 seconds or so. Sometimes the author advances the actual plot of the story, sometimes she remembers something from her own past, sometimes it's something else to provide context. Frankly, in our ADD society -- and for me personally, being a severely impatient and easily distracted fiction reader -- the convention works very, very well and made this story a fast and easy read.
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