What do You think about Natasha And Other Stories (2005)?
Jeremy Scheuer(Tin House Magazine Intern): Last night I revisited David Bezmosgis’s Natasha: And Other Stories, which I first came across as a senior in college. I was writing a thesis and looking for a competent, edited-to-perfection, model short story. The title story Natasha blew my mind. Natasha, an emotionally numb, inscrutable fourteen year-old recently moves to Toronto from Russia with her mother. The teenage narrator, Mark Berman, is living in his parents’ basement getting high and watching television and reading Socrates. Mark’s uncle has married Natasha’s mother, and Mark inevitably develops a crush on his cousin-by-marriage. They mess around. He obsesses over her, and we watch the narrator grow and find himself in the shadow of Natasha’s precociousness. Without wasting a word, Bezmozgis packs a novel of a story into twenty pages. The voice and the character development are so carefully shaped, the dialogue so sharp that when I first read Natasha, it sliced my unadulterated eyes into pieces. Revisiting the story this week, I saw how well Bezmozgis understands and cares for his characters. He makes them work to understand themselves. The other stories in his collection are phenomenal, but Natasha is just so good it makes me envious.
—TinHouseBooks
Jonathan Cape: OK, so you’ve got this real good story and we really really like it. But you need more than that for a book. What else do you have?DB: Well, I have another one here that’s pretty good.JC: OK, so that’s two. But we need more.DB: Hmmm…..well, here’s a bunch that aren’t so great, but they’re okay, I guess. Can we use them to fill up the pages?Hmph. The title selection is great. There’s another (perhaps two) that are alright. The rest wasn’t worth it, but at least they were short. I rated this book a 3 instead of a 2 only because the title story was good enough for the bump-up. And because of that, I would also give this author another chance and read more of his stuff. This is his first book….and there is potential. But in the meantime….Next!
—Donna
I’m too close to David Bezmozgis, in age and geography, to assess his work objectively. We’re from the same town; we hung out in the same malls and got high in the same suburban basements (more or less). We share a particular kind of provincialism and aspire to a particular kind of cosmopolitanism. In his short stories, I glimpse a distorted reflection of myself, and I don’t always like what I see. Who does? So maybe you should chalk up my animus to self-loathing, though again it’s a very particular kind of self-loathing to which Bezmozgis, in his Canadian iteration, no doubt has access.In any case, my beef isn’t with Bezmozgis so much as with the school of writing he represents. No, ‘school’ isn’t the right word – more like ‘firm’, an international literary firm specializing in genteel, New Yorker-friendly fiction, with branch plants in London, Toronto, Mumbai and elsewhere. It’s a respected manufacturer and puts out a quality product, no question. But I just wonder if the product is still relevant, if it didn’t perhaps fade into obsolescence with an audible squeak some time around 1914. After all, the basic design has hardly changed since it was first introduced over a century ago by the Messieurs de Maupassant and Chekhov. The gentle irony, the blurry realism, the ho-hum epiphany: it’s all the same. It’s the penny-farthing of the fiction trade. Why are our best writers still riding it around?I’m not advocating relentless avant-gardism for its own sake. I don’t even know what I’m advocating. I’m not smart or presumptuous enough to tell writers what they should be doing or to do it myself. But I mean, Christ, look around: we live in a hugely complex, extremely dangerous world, full of technological wonders, political savagery, horrors of all kinds – and these guys are trying to capture it all in their careful little daguerreotypes. Well, I haven’t even talked about Natasha directly and I guess I’m not going to now. Forgive the rant. It’s my thing and I just have to learn to deal with it.
—Buck
