Excellent Danticat story in current NYer about family dynamics and elderly dementia

Excellent story, Sunrise, Sunset, in the current New Yorker ,by the Haitian-born American author Edwidge Danticat (a Soho discovery!) - one of the best depictions I've ever read of the early onset of Alzheimer's disease or at least of some form of dementia in the elderly. The story is tightly encapsulated, keeping well the principle of unity of action, really about a gathering for the christening of a newborn, largely from the POV of the grandmother, who is distressed by her daughter's apparent indifference to the child, with some told from the POV of the mother, suffering from some form of post-partum depression. Part of the effect of the story is to see almost from the inside how the grandmother fades in and out of consciousness; another strength is that, though the story in some ways is universal, it's also a nice depiction of a tightly knit Haitian-American family in Miami. The story builds toward a dramatic, climactic action, as the grandmother enters one of her episodes and grabs the baby and holds him out over the railing in the third-floor condo, putting everyone into a state of panic - and of course part of the beauty of this horrific scenario is how it spurs the indifferent mother into action, perhaps beginning a new phase of her motherhood. Danticat's narrative is swift and eloquent without being overladen, despite the dramatic action with fevered writing. My only quibble: the characters all have short, rather indistinct names (and no surnames) including the names of the mother, father, and baby all beginning w/ J - this allows Danticat to get a nice quip about the "triple-J's," but it makes it hard for readers to sort the characters out in our minds as we're reading (one of the fundamentals of a screenplay, for ex., is to make sure that no two major characters have a name beginning w/ the same letter).

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