New Yorker Fiction Review #275: "The Boy Upstairs" by Joshua Ferris

 Review of the short story from the June 6, 2022 issue of The New Yorker...

It takes a lot to get me out of retirement to read and review a short story from The New Yorker these days. There are various reasons behind that which I won't get into right now...but what did get me to take notice was a short story by Joshua Ferris. 

Ferris is one of those authors (like many) that I would only know about because of monitoring The New Yorker fiction section faithfully as I did for about 5-6 years. In a way, I feel like I've followed his career and that we've even "grown up" together, in a way. I've watched his fiction take on topics and themes more related to late 20s / early 30s life... and now, predictably, he's shifting his gaze toward middle age, as with "The Boy Upstairs."

What's always intrigued me about Ferris's fiction is the slight bent toward magical realism. There are no floating houses or time-traveling rabbis or talking lizards or anything like that in his fiction, but he does play with the idea that perception and reality are not fixed; in his fiction, the normal accepted laws that govern the world are a little more porous. Might the main character in this story have wished back to life a young boy who committed suicide, and might that boy be trapped upstairs in her attic? In Joshua Ferris's universe...perhaps. 

To me what was more memorable than the -- kind of uninteresting -- plot about the main character's marriage, was Ferris's portrait of what it's like to be middle-aged. The main character, after all, finds herself at age 40, in the middle of a lackluster career and in a "mail-it-in" kind of marriage. Regardless the status of your career or your marriage, it's impossible to be middle-aged and not feel some kind of existential weight upon your shoulders, pulling you to an almost standstill at times, as is the case with this character:

She had eight credit cards. She could remember applying for maybe two of them. They all had different interest rates and payment due dates and fee schedules, and one day it occurred to her that she could quit her adjuncting job and dedicate herself entirely to managing the payment of her monthly debt. And managing her debt was child’s play compared with keeping her house clean. The minute she folded the laundry, which was like one of the twelve labors of Hercules, another slag heap of dirty clothes appeared in the bathroom hamper. Overnight it appeared, and here she would think of a second mythical figure, Sisyphus, and of Camus, her hero. She could never find a fucking stamp when she needed one.

I've not had much luck reading Ferris's long-form fiction -- to this point it's all been short stories -- but after reading this story I may look up his latest and try again.