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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Sunday, November 10, 2013

Current New Yorker story - remind you of a story by Alice Munro?

Story in this week's New Yorker by Ch Okparanta, apparently a young writer making her first NYer appearance with her Nigeria-set story, Benji - and it's a pretty good story, has a lot of the qualities I look for and appreciate in short fiction - an actual plot centering on a single event, a small set of sharply delineated characters, a vivid sense of scene and location, and news from another consciousness or culture. This story set in Lagos, focuses on a wealthy 42-year-old man who's unmarried, to the worry of his mother; a church friend visits the mother, and over time begins a long a complicated relation with the young man, the eponymous Benji - and Benji, with a weak self-image because of his almost dwarf-like physique and his pale skin and because of his guilt about his own (inherited) wealth, begins helping the woman w/ medical expenses for her husband - and pays her a lot of $ over a long period of time - and with results that honestly any reader of this story will see far, far before Benji does - a kind of novice's mistake here, in that Okparanta seems to think she can pull the end off as a surprise, in other words, that her readers are no smarter than her characters. The Nigerian setting certainly helps keep us interested in the story - without the setting, had this taken place in the U.S. with a guy named Ben or Dave, would the story be possible? successful? published? in the New Yorker? No, probably not - it would see all too famliar - because - alas! - didn't Alice Munro publish a very similar story in the New Yorker less than 10 years ago - albeit w/ a gender shift, in which a woman is duped into paying money to her lover in order to fend off a blackmail attempt, or so it at first seems. Anyway, there is certainly promise in this story, and I would guess we will see more from Okparanta in the NYer and elsewhere.

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