New Yorker Fiction Review #282: "My Wonderful Description of Flowers" by Danielle Dutton

Review of the short story from the Dec. 5, 2022 issue of The New Yorker...

Quite simply one of the most interesting short stories I've read in The New Yorker in a long, long time. Danielle Dutton takes a few otherwise mundane weeks in the life of a suburban mom and manages to craft short story that touches upon many themes of modern day existence, and just human life in general. Some of those themes include the simultaneous alienation and loss of privacy wrought by technology, environmental degradation, the dissolution of romantic relationships and how we process them, sexual temptation, violence, and the very "shadow" nature of our existence. "My Wonderful Description of Flowers" tugs at us to ask what is real, what is a dream, and to look at how do we process our own internal realities. 

That's a lot to squeeze into a three page short story, but Danielle Dutton does it well and injects an overall feeling of darkness, uncertainty, and foreboding that characterizes modern day life at its worst. In my opinion, some of the greatest art is that which makes you uneasy, to varying degrees. Danielle Dutton's story here is not heavy on plot, but what she does is to throw so many different bits and snapshots of the anxiety-ridden world that many of us navigate -- on a daily, hourly basis -- that it adds up to a picture of one person's life (mirroring many of our own) lived alongside the shadow world of mass-communication and the internet. 

The main character in the book is pursued by a nameless man who somehow (she cannot remember how) has her phone number and continues to text her. The man shows up at her house at one point and, despite going to the police, there is really nothing she and her husband can do to stop these visits or prosecute the man. During the same time period, she is accosted and groped by a man on the train, leered at sexually by another. The overriding specter of male sexual aggression and violence follows her.

This, while her daughter is consumed by a virtual reality video game -- one might add -- instead of living in and acting in reality itself. Is her daughter (whom, it should be added, uses they/them pronouns) drifting away into a cocoon of isolation and dysfunction? Even the video game itself seems ominous and foreboding, emblematic of some deeper unconscious drive or need:

"In Daphne [the video game] you're on an island. You're a man who has lost something, and you wander around the island muttering to yourself...Turn right through a doorway and descend a flight of stairs. There's something else there: moaning...To get closer to the source, you enter a dark cave. The farther you go in, the more you're able to see; the walls of the cave are glowing with something alive or dead. The moaning grows louder..."

First of all this sounds like a creepy AF video game but as a metaphor for the inner mind, our often blind search for our inner, suffering selves, could it be more appropriate? 

One of the most intriguing elements of this story is the prose itself, the form. "My Wonderful Description of Flowers" is almost like a prose poem. The narrative works much like our inner thoughts work, slipping from thought to thought as the main character tries to make connections among all the things that are happening to her, attempting -- as we all do -- to draw some meaning from it all, to construct some kind of a greater narrative, while it is all rushing at her faster and faster. Sometimes, as the reader, I was not sure whether the main character was thinking about the video game or her own life, and I am sure that narrative confusion is intentional. 

For me to properly investigate everything I found interesting about this story, I would have to write a blog post longer than the story itself. I don't have the time or the will to do that right now, but I do have the time and the will to read more of Danielle Dutton's work, which is -- at the end of the day -- the best review I can give.