A sense of an ending - in crime stories - and a fine story by Ed Park

Who wouldn't like Ed Park's cool story in the current New Yorker? I don't know anything about Park, don't think I'd read him before this one - perhaps he's a crime novelist, as that's the theme of this fiction issue, but this story stands up well outside of any genre - at first it seems like a pretty clever "shouts and murmurs," in which a guy rattles through his brain all of his many passwords, all of the variants we create all the time, the instructions to change the password, the parameters of every damn site that asks for a pw, our weird mnemonics, our feeble attempts at safe storage, all the worry this entails - it's very funny because every one of us shares the experience Park depicts - and it's equally funny to see, hey, he uses the same tricks I use to create a password? I guess mine's not as "secure" as I'd thought - and then the story take a rather dramatic turn, which I won't give away, and becomes more than just an amusing spree and a real story with an arc and a plot and perhaps even characters. Interested to see the Buffalo setting of the story - streets I know well - and wonder what Park's Buffalo connection may be - I don't think we were contemporaries there, in any case, but we probably know people in common. On the subject of New Yorker stories in the current fiction issue, Annie Proulx's story is pretty good, too - if you are a fan - she is not for everyone's taste and not my taste in particular, but I admire her very strong prose style. She's done quite a few frontier-myth stories, and in this one taking a turn back toward the New England sites that she had written about earlier in her career - again a sort of backwoods tall tale, this one about Main and Canada and the Penobscot. I find her fiction somehow cruel and misanthropic, but for those who are not put off by that view, or who don't see it in her work, this story is pretty powerful - like all the crime stories in this issue, in fact like all crime stories, it has and they all have much more of a "sense of an ending" than the typical literary story, with its often open and ambiguous ending, a stuyle first honed by Joyce and made universal by the New Yorker itself.