New Yorker Fiction Review #309: "Consolation" by Andre Alexis

 

Review of the short story from the May 20, 2024 issue of The New Yorker...

What we have here is a touching, mature, and finely-wrought short story by Trinidadian-Canadian novelist and playwright Andre Alexis about a grown man's attempt to understand his now-deceased parents, through the lens of one particular period of time surrounding his father's infidelity. 

Every once in a while, I encounter a short story that affects me so deeply, it is difficult to write about. I think I could probably sit on this review for days or weeks and still not fully be able to articulate what this story means to me, but...as your loyal (if highly erratic) New Yorker short fiction reviewer, I will try. 

"Consolation" is a story that travels through time, much like our thoughts, and asks the reader to -- along side the first person narrator -- take into account the narrator's life and relationship with his parents all at once. His parents are now both gone, and he has children of his own. But the story puts us into the gyre of time and memory that encompasses his father's impoverished childhood in Trinidad, the family's emigration to Canada, the father's infidelity, both parent's old age and death, and the narrator's middle aged reflections, all at once. In that way, it is a bit sentimental and also deeply profound, as the narrator looks back from his middle aged perch and is actually older than his father in many of the memories with which the story is concerned. 

I'm a firm believer that, in many short stories, and in my favorite ones, there is always a passage or a sentence that reveals what the story is really "about," to whatever extent the author wishes to reveal it. 

For me, that passage comes in the last fifth of the story, near the end. Andre Alexis writes:

"But years of considering these fraught unions have led me to appreciate the small miracle of unhappiness. I don't mean, of course, that unhappiness is desirable. I mean that it is capable of travelling such great distances. For instance, I often felt the impact of Bedford Lane (his father's poor neighborhood in Trinidad) on my father's behavior--his need for validation, his struggle for a sense of self-worth, his shame at his origins. What surprises me is that the lane--the houses so close to one another, the sound of a man beating his wife because he has spent the little money he had on drink, the dogs that rush at strangers--had it's influence on me as well, through my father. 

I understand his feeling unworthy of love. And although I did not live on Bedford Lane, I am affected by the squalor it represented to him. It's difficult not to wonder how far back the misery goes--like seeing light from a distant star and marveling at its longevity--and how far forward. Do my own daughters feel the presence of Bedford Lane in me?"

What I find so deeply touching here is the grand sweep of the narrator's question, a question that -- like all the greatest questions in life -- cannot be answered in words but that can only be lived into. These are things most of us grapple with, in some way or another, all our lives. None of us exists in a vacuum, and none of us spring out of the ground with no context, though sometimes we would like to believe so. Instead we are living inheritors of the dreams, hopes, fears, successes, and failures of those that came before us, and it takes a long time, perhaps all our lives, to understand what this means in our lives and many of us never even come close. 

Illustration by Andre Derainne