I’m sure expectations for some sort of profound revelation are building with each passing day, but for now I’d just like to try and get back into an executional groove with this blog so I’m going to start out with one of our recurring features and a promise to make it more recurring than history has thus far indicated.
Friendly Fire by Tessa Hadley is the first New Yorker story I’ve read in several months, and while it went remarkably quickly and had some charming details, there’s simply no plot to speak of – the main character is a middle-aged woman named Shelley who’s earning extra money by doing some work for her friend Pam’s cleaning business. The two clean a warehouse in the middle of the night. The end. Shelley also has a son in the British army stationed in Afghanistan, which is an interesting wrinkle given our (understandable) preoccupation with American soldiers overseas but the perspective ends up being under-utilized. While visiting Karan in New York last summer I vaguely remember having met a literary girl who cited Tessa Hadley as a favorite author, and there are indeed some nicely observed moments here – the soldier son now kisses his mother goodbye “as if he were putting her aside, kindly but firmly” – but there just isn’t enough here to hang a hat on.