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Psychobabble

• October 28th 2009: Procedure in Plain Air by Jonathan Lethem

• New Yorker, Short Stories

• hort stories, by their nature, leave a lot unsaid. Perhaps writers who don’t make it in the short story line, but are very good novelists fail to understand the balance that is required between how much the reader wants to know and how much you ought to tell them. In Jonathan Lethem’s short story from this week’s New Yorker, we are left with a lot to wonder about, and by giving us more information, Lethem only increases the number of questions that we have. This is one of the ways to tell a good shorty, to leave open uncharted areas in the map of the scenario you are creating and to make the map bigger with each sentence you write. But those parts that are coloured in need to pull the reader along so that we compelled to imagine the uncharted territory.

  The story concerns an out of work young man, Stevick, who witnesses an strange occurrence whilst sitting outside a coffee shop. The “procedure” of the title is odd and more than a little sinister but it is registered in Stevick’s world as something of a curiosity, something that you wouldn’t want to occur in your neighborhood perhaps but nothing more incongruous than that. Stevick’s own reaction is one of dithering, of being unclear as to whether or not to get involved, of worry about how his involvement (or lack thereof) might be seen by others. This is perhaps a reflection of our own dithering in the face of things that go on in front of us, in our own society. These things may not be “in plain air” but our reaction is similar, “Can I ignore it? Must I get involved?”.

  Lethem builds into the story the wider world of those oblivious what’s going on and those with purposeless anger; the part of the story where Stevick, now a participant in the mysterious event, faces off, umbrella to umbrella with an angry local is somewhat bizarre and unexplained. However, I can’t help but feel that he fails to address any of the questions that he raises in a way that is satisfying for the reader—none of those reacting to operation (including Stevick and his ex–girlfriend who is briefly thrown into the fray) have anything more than half-thoughts about what they are experiencing. As a result, we feel no need to examine our own thoughts towards similar events that may be occurring in our society and that, presumably, Lethem wishes to raise. I’ve had to think hard in order to reconstruct some of the ideas about the mix of ambivalence and anger that individuals may display towards acts that they don’t condone and that are taking place around them—much harder than I would have had I been genuinely inspired by the issues raised here.

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