April 22nd, 2019 - Cut

Dear TNY,

On this particular April day, I read “Cut” and I’m going to give you my opinion.  I know you won’t read it or care.  That’s a goddamn fact.  But you’re going to get it anyway.

I really really really wanted to enjoy this story.  This desire was kindled on the first page.  Hell, the first sentence (and paragraph) hooked me hard because I wanted to know where this slit was going.  Alas, it was going nowhere.  This whole fucking story went nowhere, goddamn it.  Which is depressing as hell because it could have been such a rich story.  I loved that it was very…anti normal.  By that I mean you have an 84-year-old woman saying, “Fuck this place.”  You have this perineal tear that’s bothering this woman.  Those things are not normally represented in literature.  And the writing was clean.  No flowery bullshit.  Just non-imposing, non-self-congratulatory writing.

But, there are pages and pages of inner monologue about shit that just keeps chipping away at such a grand start.  The whole middle section about the student with the non-knife that failed to deliver anything interesting.  The fucking poem and the crying.  The whole middle is a fucking trash pile of summary/exposition about shit that doesn’t matter.  And then the ending.  Jesus Christ.  How, TNY, do you read this and say to yourself, “Yeah, this shit ended so fucking well.”  Because it didn’t.  Nothing happened.  It was neither confusing nor ambiguous.  It was just nothing.  It was like someone ripped the last couple pages off the story and got lazy about pasting them back on.  Fuck that, man.  But doubly fuck that shit when the first part of this was so good.  It’s way more upsetting watching a story that you expect to be good die, than watching something, which you know from syllable one will be complete garbage, fail.

You’re a bag of dicks, TNY.

Nick