A promising piece of short fiction, You Are My Dear Friend, in current NYer: Should it be part of a novel?

 I liked Mahuri Vijay's story, You Are My Dear Friebd, in the current New Yorker, at least up to a point. It's the kind of naturalistic piece driven by character and event, told in a direct and conventional style, for the most part quite clear and transparent - though I spent a lot of time at the outset trying to keep straight the names of a # of the characters who as it turned out were entirely tangential to the plot. The story follows several years in the life of a young woman from an impoverished background (parents died young, tragically, in a way that is never explained - is that because this may be an excerpt from a novel?), working as an au pair for an English family; one of the guests as a party her employers becomes almost a stalker, following this young woman around, and eventually persuading her to marry him - a widower  about twice her age. Several years into their dreary marriage they decide to adopt a young girl - who turns out to be extremely difficult and belligerent, and who eventually breaks off from her adoptive parents - and the story or short fiction pretty much ends at that point. I found her establishment of character and situation to be strong and compelling, and I wanted to know more about the central character and her fate - and if this is a novel excerpt perhaps I/we will be able to follow this story line a bit farther; as is, with such an abrupt ending w/ little resolved, I felt a bit cheated: as a story, it opts out; as an excerpt, it shows promise. (Readers of this blog will know perhaps that some of my favorite stories are those that seemingly "could be novels," but that work best by leaving us wanting more. This story doesn't quite make that grade: I not only "want more" but need more in order to bring some resolution to the crisis in the lives of the central characters, the mother and adoptive daughter - and even the husband/father, whose adult daughter will have nothing to do w/ him, for reasons we don't yet understand.)