Two stories, a short story by J. C. Oates and a novelet (the magazine dubs it a novella, and it's close to being an either-way call) by Carmen Machado, the two biggest names (in terms of literary careers in the U.S.) a decade+ after this issue's appearance as they were (or in Machado's case, was becoming) at time of publication.
Joyce Carol Oates's story is a fairly straightforward account of what's running through the minds of a grandmother and her adolescent grandson, as she goes through some workups and examinations during cancer treatment and he comes along with her to the labyrinthine hospital; the title is a reference to one of the jokes the teen tells her as she drives them to the appointments, after she asks him to tell her something amusing. It gives impressions of how things work in U. S. medicine these years (a decade ago, much as now), and is otherwise impressionistic, recounting the grandson's peregrinations around the hospital, including into the adjoining eating disorders suite, while his gran goes through her examinations...a conversation he has, for example, with an apparently to him beautiful teen girl a few years older than he, even given her starvation, who's disinhibited and slightly abrasive in her conversational style by one of the meds she's been given. The views and concerns the boy and the woman have of and for each other are explored. It's a bit "looser" than many Oates stories, but has the earmarks of her work, and is a solid example thus.
Carmen Maria Machado's story is a metafiction which uses as its skeleton the episode titles of each of the episodes of Law and Order: SVU broadcast up to the time of the story's composition (if she was writing it today, it might have to be at least a short novel, if following its current format), and using the relationship and basic situations between the primary characters Benson and Stabler (in the early seasons of the series) as a springboard for ruminations on how they might find themselves growing increasingly divorced from even their portrayed reality, their lives and jobs, as they navigate the sequence of sex-related and child-abuse-related crimes they are tasked with investigating, detailed by vignettes inspired more by the titles of the episodes of the series than by their plots. It's a clever and often funny approach, even given the seriousness at its heart, which the subject matter of both story and series requires, even as the series can and does manage to traduce that requirement at times via a certain mechanical quality in its scripting...one of the aspects the story gets at, as it also introduces elements such as doppelgangers of the principals, named Hensen and Abler, who seem to be more efficient usurpers of the protagonists' lives and careers. It makes its points, beyond the obvious stunt value of its premise.
For more of today's stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
I always marvel at Joyce Carol Oates's prolific writing. Hundreds of short stories. Dozens of novels!
ReplyDeleteShe is remarkably prolific...I've joked before about how, given both she and Barry Malzberg took their BAs at Syracuse University the same year, the library could set up a bookcase of several shelves each devoted to the works of Malzberg and Oates...and perhaps half a shelf or so to the works of everyone else who was graduated along with them.
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