Double Feature: "Why China?" and "The Stylist" by Jennifer Egan

I feel bad for Jennifer Egan.  "Black Box" is one of the best short stories of all time.  It's the Hope Diamond of short stories.  It's a powerhouse.  It's like nothing else you've ever read.  What's it like to write something like that I wonder?  I really liked the two short stories I read for this post, but they'll never be "Black Box."  Odds are nothing will.  I have a feeling she's not too broken up about it though.

"Why China?" begins with the inciting incident of running into a nefarious person from the past in a foreign country.  Egan's talent for using her setting as a character unto itself is evident here.  As the yuppie Lafferty family moves further into the Chinese countryside, to what feels to the reader must be the ends of the Earth, I couldn't help but wonder if a scene from Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" was about to be reenacted.  Writers: you want a master class in setting?  Start here.

I chose the second story from Egan's Emerald City collection because of the title: "The Stylist."  I sort of covet the entire fashion world.  Bernadette is a 36-year old woman who travels the world with a circulating cast of photographers and nubile young models.  She is, in some ways, a supporting character in her own life, not at all memorable, not at all special.  Watching her connect to a man is sad and fleeting.  In Bernadette's tryst, in her closeness to another person, her true loneliness is revealed.

While no "Black Box," Egan still pulled me completely into the lives of her characters and created a fully-realized world in the span of only a dozen pages.  Powerhouse or not, that is always an amazing thing.