June 18th, 2018 - Omakase

Dear TNY,

I was shocked to find out that the last big dump of stories you published were for something called “The Fiction Issue.”  Like, that was the best you could come up with for a issue dedicated to fiction? I consider the minutes I spent both reading and reviewing those stories to be a waste of precious life and you had the audacity (or maybe the ignorance) to fly that level of work under the banner of special issue?  Sad times at Ridgemont High, TNY.

Enough of that.  I’m here to talk about “Omakase.”  Giant agenda story.  But, I wasn’t angered by this. In fact, I found it to be a modern version of something the minimalists of the 70s and 80s may have produced.  The glaring outlier in that comparison is the annoying summary/exposition.  This story is proof that (moderately) good writing can convey an agenda and not piss off the reader at the same time.

What worked for me?  The tension. A common complaint I have with most of your stories is that nothing happens.  Now, it’s okay if nothing happens if the conflict carries some kind of tension, and the tension is carried well. In this story, a chef makes omakase for a couple.  That’s it. But so much more is boiling beneath the surface. I felt the author carried that tension well, giving us small tastes of a few ongoing conflicts, but not dragging them all the way out into the light (race, family, relationship, finances, etc...well, minus race; that was pushed up our collective noses pretty hard).  Using the chef’s story of being fired to draw that tension out was also well played. The encapsulating conversation is what made me think minimalism when I read this, and how the chef moved the tension forward was a big part of that. Also, so was the way the man character played against the woman.  Something not talked about often is psychic distance, and the author’s strict adherence to the same POV and our distance inside the woman’s mind created a nice, clean picture, for this reader anyway.

Now, what didn’t work was the summary.  Especially near the end. I think readers are astute enough to understand there are a number of issues being discussed in this agenda piece.  So why force-feed us the family dinner and he pays/she pays bullshit? You disrespect the reader when you do this. Here’s a suggestion. Why not use the scene to present the information you gave us in summary.  Then stay in the scene the whole time, and see if you can get us to the same implicit destination without using summary and jumpcuts to build your payoff. The way they are shoehorned in now makes their purpose obvious, that being to ensure the weaknesses of the scene’s information delivery are bolstered.  Why not strengthen the scene and ditch the summary?  For a great example of this, try nearly anything by Raymond Carver.  Or "The Killers" by Papa H.

This story wasn’t phenomenal.  But it also wasn’t infuriating.  It is a pity to see things so close to exceptional with no input from an editor to make those final changes to facilitate the ascension to glory.  But, whatevs. The taste in literature is dying anyway; maybe what more people want is incomplete artwork. Or normal TNY garbage. The Da Vinci Code 3:  Codebreakers. Fifty Shades of Shit. Who knows?  Certainly not me.

I’ll see you when I see you,

Nick