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

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Sunday, September 9, 2018

Promising piece of short fiction - Audition - in current New Yorker

Really well-written piece - I'm going to call it "short fiction" rather than a shot story - Audition, in current New Yorker by Said Sayrafiezadeh (yes, I had to look up the name to check spelling); I don't know anything about this author although I'm sure I've read at least one earlier story by him in same mag. This piece shows that he really knows how to create a scene, drive a narrative, build the voice of a credible and complex narrator, and along the way get some good laughs and style points. This piece is told boy a young man (19, I think he said), college dropout or maybe never attended, working on a construction site to get a little money together in order to, he hopes, fulfill his dream and ambition: profoessional acting. He talks somewhat half-heartedly about getting a U-Haul and driving the thousand or so miles from his mid-sized (his term) city to LA. Meanwhile, he auditions (and gets) a part in a small regional theater, a role that is on stage through all 3 acts but is silent - no idea whether that's a reference to any real play (other than a kids' play that I remember from youth as friend AW starred in as a near-silent jester). The kick in this short fiction is that the narrator's dad owns the construction site and wants him working there to learn the ropes and come up the "hard way," as he did himself; father is self-made and prosperous. The narrator befriends, sort of, his on-site supervisor, giving him a ride home a few times and twice (amusingly, their dialog on both rides is pretty much word for word identical) sharing w/ him some crack (that the narrator was enticed or duped into buying). There are many simmering possibilities for plot development - most of all, wouldn't (or shouldn't) one of the workers inevitably learn that the narrator is the son of the owner/developer, and what kind of isolation or retaliation or worse would that lead to? Unfortunately, this piece just ends abruptly, without reaching any point of resolution or insight - leading me to think this may be the intro to a longer piece of fiction. I hope so, as it shows lots of promise, even if it feels incomplete.

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