Fine story w/ dark humor and quirky dialog by Camille Bordas in current New Yorker

Fine story, The State of Nature, in current New Yorker by a writer unknown to me till now, Camille Bordas, a portrait of a woman - intelligent, quirky, distressed - facing and dealing with a crisis, and in the process growing, meeting new people, and learning some key information about her mother. The offbeat humor reminded me at times of Lorrie Moore at her best, and the angularity of the writing may be a result in part of Bordas's apparently complex linguistic background - the bio note in the magazine says that she has published 2 novels in French and her newest is in English. I'm impressed! This story is about a young optometrist (get this: I began reading this story in the waiting room of my optometrist, how odd is that?) whose apt is burglarized while she's taking a morning nap. She never even hears the burglar(s) at work; she asks the cops if that's possible: "It happens, not often," one responds - giving you a brief sense of her sharp use of dialog. Another: Her mother: "Don't you watch the news?" Response: "Of course I don't watch the news!" Ha! In short, she goes on a quest in search of the lost items, leading her to the "thieves market," i.e., the flea market where fences move stolen items and where burglary victims are willing to go and buy their own stuff back, no questions asked, accepting it is a small premium to pay for the return of desired objects. In the process the woman crosses paths w/ one of her more eccentric patients - a man who anticipates that the world will soon plunge into chaos and he wants to be prepared to live in a "state of nature," in particular by having Lasik to ensure perfect vision (he's a bad candidate for the process, however). The story is full of dark humor and a distant sense of menace - or maybe that should be a sense of distant menace: Much discussion about creating a "go-pack" of items to carry w/ you in case of emergency, as well as discussions about a "rape whistle" to summon help in event of attack. Throughout we expect the much-discussed whistle (and go-pack) to play a role in the story, and we're not entirely let disappointed, but as w/ much else Bordas surprises us, even in the expected payoff.