New Yorker Fiction Review #279: "Princess" by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Review of the short story from the Nov. 7, 2022 issue of The New Yorker...

I just realized it's been since August that I've reviewed a short story from The New Yorker. What exactly have I been doing with my time? Sometimes I don't even know. Especially considering there was a time I used to review these stories weekly. Anyway...

In this 2.0 phase of my New Yorker short story reviewing career (maybe more like 3.0 now, IDFK) I only review short stories from authors I recognize or when there's a story that manages to catch my attention and interest within the first two paragraphs or so (extremely rare). So what happens is I end up reviewing only short stories by the same handful of authors whose work I'm already familiar with. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's not really in synch with the reason I started doing this, nearly 10 years ago.

All existential whining aside... a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle (or T.C. Boyle as he's known normally) always gets me to at least take a look. And I am sure good ole T.C. will breathe a sigh of relief to know that this week's effort "Princess" was good enough to make me want to get off my keister (or rather get my keister into a chair, in front of a computer) and write a review.

Usually I loathe the "updated fairy tale" premise for a short story. I think it's trite, juvenile, and cutesy. Three things, especially the latter, that I cannot stand when it comes to literature. Here in this short story "Princess," Boyle manages to incorporate elements of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" into a sort of modern day retelling of a fairy tale without being boring or cute. 

In the balance he almost tells a really compelling story about a day in the life of a young woman battling a severe drug addiction, living her life out on the streets, with a level of gritty detail and interiority that does not seem to fit with the (flimsy and frankly superfluous) "fairy tale" undercarriage of this story. I cared far, far more about the main character than I did about the uninteresting second POV of the well-off woman whose house the main character keeps breaking into. In fact I was a little disappointed to find out this was one of those "revolver" stories in which the POV switches every so often; thankfully, there were only two characters to revolve between.

What is with the "modern day fairy tale" thing and why do authors feel the need to do it? It seems this is a mode -- myths, mythology, fairy tales, etc. -- that Boyle works in frequently and far be it for me to cast aspersions on the metier of one of the most successful literary writers of our time. But what is the reasoning for giving the story the "Goldilocks" underpinnings? The story would have been more interesting and more compelling without that.