Fern and Liv were always trying to decide who was prettier, hotter, who could bypass the line to et into Le Bain, who looked more elegant drinking cortados at a cafe with crossed legs. The answer flickered, depending on whether they were assessing themselves from far away or up close, and what each was wearing, how her hair looked, how much rest she'd gotten and, of course, who had recently been hit on hardest by tall guys with MBAs.
I had a hard time even remembering which was which for a while, although the story does its best to differentiate between the two early on. Before too long into the story, though, it's clear Fern's story is the central one. Not necessarily because she's the more interesting of the two, but because her needs are deeper.
Fern is depressed. Her parents are both dead, the second one in the last few months. The first look into her interior life we get, she is wanting "to be ground down." Fern has suicidal thoughts, and she is, as they say, "acting out" her feelings in increasingly dangerous, mostly sexual, ways.
She has become numb to most of her life. She has become "a person who didn't care who sat down beside her." The only instinct that survives in her is the one to be desired sexually: "The only thing that had lately survived in Fern was a desire to make men want to fuck her. All men. Every single man she saw. Hot dog vendors. UPS drivers across the street."
There are two remedies offered to Fern in "A Suburban Weekend": psychotropic drugs/therapy and love. The first one seems unlikely to work; the therapist is kind of a dick ("He wore knit ties on top of flannel shirts, like an executive who lived in a tree"), and Fern doesn't take the drugs they give her, anyway. So if there's a remedy that's going to work, it's got to be love.
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| Can love save our hero? Stay tuned to find out! |
The primary source of love, as opposed to sex, Fern gets is her best friend, Liv. Liv is a flawed friend. She's jealous of Fern. When Fern talks about her plans for suicide or says she feels like life is pointless, Liv deflects with humor (she's a comedian). Liv has plenty of issues of her own to work on--we find out she takes Adderall, although we don't know for what--and she's a hopeless romantic who spends her life in bars waiting for love to come along and fix all her problems. So it's going to be hard for Liv to be up to the challenge.
But Liv's also got a lot going for her as a friend. She honors the memory of Fern's parents, speaking to Fern in Fern's mother's voice, saying things she thinks Fern's mother would say (even if it's to say Fern looks like a slut in what she's wearing), and forcing food on her too-skinny friend like an Italian mother would.
Fern tells Liv about her plan to kill herself. Fern's been eating one of her mother's exotic Italian candies, lacrime d'amore, every time Fern does something stupid, like having sex with an Argentinian investor in the same room Liv is in. When Fern has gotten through all the candies, she's going to kill herself.
During the discussion where Fern reveals her plan, Liv, in a seemingly off-point comment about her desire for a husband, says she believes that "people can be saved by people who love them." This is the central conflict of the story: can Liv, with all her flaws, love Fern enough to save her? The meaning of lacrime d'amore is "tears of love." Liv, with all of her shortcomings, needs to somehow fill the bowl of love for Fern before Fern can exhaust it.
I usually don't worry about "spoilers" in a review/analysis of a short story. I figure people reading this have usually already read the story and are looking online for what someone else thought of it, rather than looking for a review to know if they should read it. But this once, I'm going to withhold giving away the ending, mostly because I found it to be something rare: a surprise ending that really worked and was genuinely moving.
There aren't a whole lot of girl-girl buddy stories out there. This is one of the best ones I've seen. It's up there with Danielle Evans's sort of accidental girl-girl buddy story "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." When telling a story, one has to take into consideration how much specificity an audience can handle. Do you batter your audience with little details of the life of your character, even things they may not be familiar with, or do you try to keep it to things everyone can understand? What's great about this story is that it doesn't shy away from specificity. It trusts that the readers will be able to handle details they may not be familiar with. Much like The Wire had universal appeal precisely because it dove so deeply into the local reality of Baltimore, this story succeeded by throwing everything about the life of a twenty-seven-year-old woman in New York City at the reader. It turns out that people really can relate new information to things they already know. I felt no obstacles to accessing the interior life of Fern because I'm a man in my forties.
It was a great story with a powerful central theme. Answering the question of whether love is enough to save someone is a story that will likely never get old. It certainly won't get old if it's handled with the skill this one was handled with.
On first read, I hated this story by the third paragraph, and as a result I did a very poor job of reading. If it were not for your post, I would've missed it, but I did a more careful second read. It's still not my thing (I loved the Evans story, put this more in the category of that Los Angeles story), but I see what you found in it. So thanks!
ReplyDeleteI was also inclined not to like it because of the title, which made me think it was going to be some trite critique of suburban culture, but once it became apparent that wasn't what it was, I was on board.
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