Will’s Reviews > The Assignation: Stories > Status Update

ONE FLESH

I’ve never liked vignettes. Not really a story. Has no characters or plot. Definitely emotionally evocative, something about being simultaneously attracted and repulsed.

Meh.

SLOW

Same as ‘one flesh’. The man and woman in the story could be anyone and the plot could concern anything. Again, emotional evocative and well written, just not very interesting.

Meh.

THE BOY

Love the style. She fits a lot in a little. The tactile details—“I blew in his ear and got him giggling”, “it felt like something little that’s been skinned, naked and velvety like a baby rabbit”—contribute a lot to a feeling of physical discomfort in addition to the conceptual discomfort the story evokes. Like the ambiguity of the ending.

7/10

SHARPSHOOTING

Less explicitly than ‘the boy,’ but also, I think, a story about pedophilia. Makes great use of double meanings (title, last lines). Inspired me to write, which is always a good sign.

7/10

TICK

The descriptions of distress are super evocative, but the story just isn’t super interesting to me. The ending really hits tho and saves the whole thing.

6/10

PHOTOGRAPHER'S MODEL

Amazing. One of the best stories I've read in a while. Very subtle, extremely poignant.

Its excellent use of tragic irony makes it read like a classical drama. The unnamed girl is given a paradigm of success by Billy and she flourishes within it; as he says at the end of the story, "you got it all now." While Billy is probably a pedophile, he seems genuinely to believe in the artistic merit of the photograph, as does the unnamed girl. The irony is that the reader can see just how empty the paradigm actually is. Billy tells her she has everything, when she in fact has nothing, not even a name.

The story is also full of smaller ironies: she hates being painted because she thinks the artists distort her image and make her ugly, but doesn't, at the same time, realize photos are also distorting.

The story feels especially poignant today, where more and more children are being taught that their value as persons stems from how good they look in images and digital spaces more generally.

She is also sometimes the subject of a third-person narrator and sometimes herself the first-person narrator. Not really sure why Oates choose this, but it's very well executed.

So so much to say about this story and I haven't yet taken the time to work it all out, but I hope these cursory thoughts communicate at least some of what struck me about this story.

9/10

ACCIDENT

Pretty good. Didn't really strike me, but I liked the portrayal of delusion and lying to one's self.

6/10

MULE

Another great one. I love how Junie becomes her mother at the end, making the titular mule not the one Buddy dives into in the river, but Junie herself: she is the mule carrying forward her mother's bad habits with men. This is also why the story is so cavalier about the mother's suicidal tendencies: even if she does kill herself, Junie, like a mule, will carry all of her defining traits into the future.

Just a really great story about how the present is carried forward into the future, how the present suffuses itself into people, spaces, words, feelings, etc and is never fully lost to the past, only changed and reborn, as it is very literally in this story.

The language is also just amazing. Oates captures a vernacular American speech without being self-conscious or judgemental.

8/10