New Yorker Fiction Review #283: "The Other Party" by Matthew Klam

Review of the short story from the Dec. 19, 2022 issue of The New Yorker...

This story is similar to what I once dubbed (on this blog) "metro fiction." Metro fiction is fiction about urban or suburban, educated, bourgeois, and almost always white people, who have dysfunction and angst but don't really have "problems," per se. However, what saves "The Other Party" from being purely metro fiction is that it deals with cancer (even tangentially) and life during COVID, the one thing that everyone -- regardless of class status or race or geography -- had to deal with over the past three years. But in the end, it's still a less-than remarkable story about well-off suburban white people in which nothing actually happens, per se, but is instead a cataloguing -- to an almost obsessive, boring degree -- of the details of one particular evening in December: the evening of the neighborhood Holiday Party.

Not to say there are not some genuine, heart-felt moments and insights in the story. The main character -- a middle-aged writer who lost his job during COVID and is now relegated to (essentially) house husband -- is close friends with his neighbor Terry, who is waging a (presumably losing) battle with cancer and tries his best to be a comfort to him, even telling him that he loves him at one point. But in the jaded, cynical, emotionally sanitized world of the story, the sentiment is not received or acknowledged, and the character coldly plays out the end of Terry's life in his head an in conversations with others.

I read this story once, then felt like I missed something. So I went back and listened to it on The New Yorker's website. As it turned out, I did somehow miss part of this story; maybe I was tuned-out or maybe those particular pages were stuck together or something when I read it over break. I really don't know. But, listening to the story read aloud did not help, it just seemed to drone on and on.

The details and inner dialogue of a person's life can be made to seem dramatic and interesting; however, in this particular case, it all just seemed a bit too realistic, so much so as to be boring. Why do I need to read a story -- without a real beginning, middle, or end, or a plot, mind you -- detailing a life and lifestyle, and characters, that I (and probably a lot of other New Yorker readers) am basically living, or know someone who is living, or -- even if not -- is so mundane and normal as to be unremarkable and unentertaining? Anyone can look out their window or over their garden wall and start writing about their life and their neighbors lives, but that doesn't necessarily make it literature.