New Yorker Fiction Review #267: "Good-Looking" by Souvankham Thammavonga

 

Review of the short story from the March 1, 2021 issue of The New Yorker...

This is a story that would be forgettable if it were not for one idea the author writes into the story at the very end, which...makes it memorable and therefore a success. It kind of reminds me of that old joke: what do you call the person who graduated last in their class at medical school? A doctor. 

A lot of authors do this, in one way or another. They give you the "key" to understanding the story somewhere inside it. It's almost like what they call the Data Dump in a film: that moment about 20 minutes into the movie in which the characters have a conversation that is critical to you understanding the background of the movie, why the characters are doing what they're doing, etc. In short fiction, authors almost have to put one of these paragraphs in their stories, otherwise they risk the broader point of the story being misunderstood, since most of the time short stories are not long enough for the action of the story to do the talking or for the characters to get developed enough.

Anyway... the short story "Good-Looking" is told through the eyes of a young boy whose father works at a gym and is somewhat of a ladies man. The story describes one particular incident in which the father takes the son out on a quasi "date" with one of his clients. The father, it seems, pulls back from the edge, however, and does not lead the female client on any further than she has already been led on. After that, it seems the father changes his ways.

But the really poignant line comes almost at the very end of the story as the boy describes his feelings toward the woman who his father went on the date with. It seems she made an impression on him and he found himself wondering what her life was like and whether or not she would find love in her life, and all the twists and turns in our romantic lives that are governed by chance. This leads him to make the following observation, years later:

"What do we mean by the love of our life? We think it's the person who's been there, in front of us, all these years. But might it be the near-misses, the ones who didn't take us home, the ones who didn't come back?"

A person can end up mired in these kinds of questions to the expense of moving forward in life, but it is good to ask them once in a while and, of course, this is partly what literature is for.