Benjamin Chambers writes:
A couple of weeks ago, I used the random number generator to find a 2004 story from The New Yorker that I’d never read before by Yoko Ogawa, “The Cafeteria in the Evening and the Pool in the Rain.” This week, it took me to to the January 24, 1994 issue of TNY and Steven Polansky’s story, “Leg.”
In the story (and yeah, there are spoilers coming), Dave Long is a forty-four-year-old whose main trouble appears to be his thirteen-year-old son Randy’s new and implacable anger, a by-product of adolescence, which he spews at Dave every chance he gets. Even Dave’s liking for reading is a target:

If Dave sent Randy to his room or otherwise disciplined him … Randy would say, in his cruelest, most hateful voice, “Why don’t you just go read a book, Mr. Reading Man, Mr. Vocabulary. Go pray, you praying mantis.”

Sliding into third in a church softball game, Dave skins his leg from knee to ankle. Except for basic First Aid, he neglects the injury. It gets infected, leaks pus all over his pants, and he spends much of the story lying on the kitchen floor or on the couch with his foot elevated until the pain is so bad he can no longer stand. Four people tell him to go see the doctor (including the doctor himself, who warns of gangrene, sepsis, and amputation); Dave cheerfully deflects each request. He finally capitulates when his son asks him to go—too late, however, to save his leg.
It’s hard to understand why this apparently normal, well-meaning man would allow a minor injury to fester and keep him home from work, why he’d lie to others in order to avoid going to the doctor. But we get our first clue shortly after he gets home the night of the softball game, hours after he’s hurt himself.
We already understand that the scrape on his leg isn’t ordinary. He’s tried staunching the blood first with a whole roll of toilet paper, then gauze. He’s even applied a dish towel fresh from boiling water to the wound.

Then he sat down on the kitchen floor, his left leg stretched out before him, and prayed.

His praying was rarely premeditated or formal. Most often it was a phototropic sort of turn, a moment in which he gave thanks or stilled himself to listen for guidance. He shied from petitionary prayer. With all he had, it felt scurvy—scriptural commendation notwithstanding—to ask for more. This night, his leg hurting to the bone, he permitted himself a request.
“Father” he said quietly, “please help me to see what I can do for Randy. He is in great pain. I love him. If it is your will, show me what I might do to bring him peace.”

His request is surprising, and gives us a sense of the line he’s going to take: his injury is of no importance, except, perhaps, as a means to healing his relationship with his son and with God.
I can’t prove it, but I suspect Dave’s relationship with God matters more to him than Randy does, though the author, like Dave himself, keeps this fact low-key. For example, I had to re-read the story to catch a second meaning when the left fielder, a pastor, calls to Dave as he’s caught between bases, “You’re dead, man.” Dave smiles at this, and then reflects, “But Pastor Jeff had the straight truth here: Dave was dead. To rights. Dave had been fast, but he was forty-four now, and he was too slow to pull this sort of stunt.”
The awkward syncopation of “Dave was dead. To rights,” is meant (clumsily I think), to call attention to Dave’s real problem. It’s not Randy: it’s the fact that he is in some way, spiritually, or perhaps in the afterlife, dead.
And then there’s the pun wrapped up in the “straight” (or strait) truth. For the very morning of the softball game, Dave and his own pastor had discussed Matthew 7:13-14, a passage that

… Dave had lately found compelling and vexing. “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Dave, pressed by his pastor, defines the “narrow gate” variously as severe, pinched, straitened, exclusive, simple, severe. Hence the extra oomph when the left fielder is described as having the “straight [strait] truth.”
Later, when Dave’s suppurating wound has confined him to the couch, he tells his pastor that he thinks that some of the faithful (meaning himself) need a prescriptive theology: “We’re sloppy. We’re slack. We’re smug. We’re just flat-out disappointing. You got to whip us into shape, or we embarrass ourselves. And each other.”
In this context, it’s possible that Dave sees his son Randy’s constant insults as a kind of necessary “straitening,” a scarifying test. By testing himself in even harsher terms and allowing his infected wound to inflict him with unrelenting pain, Dave is pushing himself through the “narrow gate” into a new life.
Which explains why Dave does not spend his time moaning or complaining. Instead, his wife describes him as “calm and reasonable and in amazingly good spirits.” When his family joins him in the living room to eat dinner and watch television, we are told that “Dave, who was light-headed and running a low-grade fever, was happy.” He has the serenity of the saved.
Dave relies on his faith to resolve his tension with Randy, yet without taking any direct action himself, a device that definitely sets the story apart. After all, it’s not everyone who would address the storms of his child’s adolescence with a strict and self-lacerating commitment to avoiding medical care, completely certain that rapprochement will result.

Benjamin Chambers writes:
Continuing in a format I adopted last week to provide mini-reviews of some recent stories from The New Yorker, I reach slightly farther back this week and throw in a more recent story by J.G. Ballard for good measure. [Again, watch out for spoilers below.]
Let’s begin, in fact, with the J.G. Ballard’s “The Autobiography of J.G.B.,” from the May 11, 2009 issue.
Plot: The main character, B (whom we are invited, because of the title, to associate with the author), wakes one day to find a world in which all other human beings have vanished. With little trouble, he adjusts and prepares for his own survival.
The Story’s Final Line: “Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.”
Verdict: Ballard’s tricky, and his predilection for stories that blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction don’t help a reader feel certain of his or her ground. He’s also very fond of post-apocalyptic worlds. But it’s hard not to read this very brief story, published posthumously after Ballard’s death on April 19th, as a comment about his own impending death. In a characteristically surprising reversal, J.G.B. doesn’t die, leaving teeming billions behind; instead, he alone is left to soldier on in the afterworld, while everyone else dies/vanishes. In this light, the story is actually quite poignant, though not weighty. (BTW, this is Ballard’s first appearance in TNY.)
Bonus Content: Tom Shone, author of a profile of Ballard that appeared in TNY in 1997, is interviewed in the May 11, 2009 issue of The New Yorker Out Loud.
“The Color of Shadows,” by Colm Tóibín, which appeared in the April 13, 2009 issue, also hinges heavily on its final lines, as the Ballard story does.
Plot: Paul, a middle-aged man, returns home to Enniscorthy from Dublin after his aunt Josie, who raised him, falls and can no longer remain at home. He arranges for her to stay in an assisted living facility and visits her regularly until her death. Before she dies, however, she extracts a promise from him that he will not ever visit his mother.
Verdict: I won’t quote the final paragraph at length here, because it’s one of the few moments (if not the only one) in the story where the author allows himself to stray from a ruthlessly-restrained narrative long enough to suggest emotion. It works on Ernest Hemingway’s principle that the core of a story should remain submerged, like the bulk of an iceberg, while the visible portion (above the water, so to speak) should merely suggest the whole. Over the course of the story the back story becomes a little clearer; and though Josie raised Paul and Paul doesn’t remember his mother, his relationship with his aunt is more strongly characterized by duty than by love. You know he’ll keep his promise never to visit his mother, but it’s also clear he’s only beginning to realize what that will cost him. I can’t say the story’s to my taste, but it’s certainly well-made.
Similarly, the ending serves as the fulcrum of Craig Raine’s “Julia and Byron,” from the March 30, 2009 issue. (The image that keeps coming to mind to describe these author’s reliance on their stories’ closing words is that of the “slingshot effect,” where NASA used the gravitational pull of the outer planets to “sling” the Voyager spacecraft ever farther out into the solar system.)
Plot: Julia and Byron have been married a long time; happily, in his view, evidently not-so-happily in hers. At 62, she develops cancer for which she agrees to undertake radical treatments at the hands of a cynical doctor who has no ear for her sense of whimsy or personal hazard. She dies, horribly, in her husband’s arms, and he is undone by grief — for a while.
Final lines: “For two years he was a grief Automat, crying unstoppably at the mention of her name. Then he remarried–a younger woman–and was a difficult husband.”
Verdict: For my money, “Julia and Byron” is a more interesting read than “The Color of Shadows” because it’s difficult, for one, to guess where it’s going (Byron is introduced abruptly midway through, when Julia’s nearly dead); and for another, its surprising references to verse by A.A. Milne (quoted first mischievously by Julia, then by maudlin Byron). Julia’s the one you regret not getting to know, and that may be because Byron is histrionic, simple, while Julia appears unknowable and full of contradictions. Still, the final lines reduce the story to a homily on the impermanence of grief, or the permanent tendency of human beings to forget even their grandest passions. It’s not clear Raine meant for his final line to cast such a long shadow over the story (it’s quite possible he only meant it to be a comment on Byron), but either way, it mars it.
Finally, in “Visitation,” by Brad Watson, which appeared in the April 6, 2009 issue, we have exactly the opposite phenomenon: it’s not the last lines that sum everything up, it’s the opening paragraph.
Plot: Loomis is recently divorced and is in town visiting his young son. His entire trouble is encapsulated in the story’s opening lines: he’s a pessimist, and his depressed outlook saps the joy from his life, leaving him directionless and cut off from others. (Tellingly, he’s the only character in the story who’s given a name by the author. Loomis’ son is always “the boy,” etc.) The story consists of several episodes in which Loomis is threatened by an inexplicable outside world or irretrievably excluded from the happy world of others. The one person who breaks through to him, briefly, is a “Gypsy” woman who reads his palm and his character with the authority of a Delphic oracle, causing him to lapse into … well, pessimism and despair.
That Great First Paragraph:

Loomis had never believed that line about the quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships. Then one day he’d decided that he should marry, have a child, and he told himself that if one was open-minded these things could lead to a kind of contentment, if not to exuberant happiness. That’s why Loomis was in the fix he was in now.

Verdict: I confess that I don’t have a lot of patience with stories whose entire narrative drive is carried by a vaguely unhappy middle-class white man who feels isolated and trapped, and his stasis is the point. The ironic humor of the opening paragraph peters out, unfortunately; and though the “visitation” by the so-called Gypsy is intense and promises some kind of transcendence, the narrator’s left back where he started.

* * *
But check these stories out for yourselves and see if you agree.