The first installment of a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.

Stories discussed: John Updike’s “Outage,” published January 7, 2008, and “Friends From Philadelphia,” published October 30, 1954; E. L. Doctorow’s “Wakefield,” published January 14, 2008; and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Ash Monday,” published January 21, 2008.

To say I’m looking forward to exploring fiction from The New Yorker and sharing my finds with Emdashes readers would be to practice a degree of understatement only the British are really good at, so I’ll just say I’m like a kid in a candy store.

I’ve been having so much fun running through the halls of The Complete New Yorker that I didn’t think I’d start off with recent stories, but here I am, doing just that. When I read the first three stories published in 2008, I found the resonances among them irresistible. (For those of you who haven’t gotten to these yet, there are plot spoilers below.)

Of the three writers I’m reviewing, Updike is the senior man, at least in terms of New Yorker numbers. According to The Complete New Yorker index, which is currently updated through April 2007, Doctorow has had five stories in The New Yorker, beginning in 1997; Boyle has had 17 since 1993. Updike has published 168 stories in The New Yorker over 53 years. (I presume this makes Updike the all-time front-runner in terms of sheer volume, and now that The New Yorker seems to lean on individual contributors a bit less, no one’s likely to catch up to him. While he’s averaged three stories a year, he published nine stories in The New Yorker in 1959, and eight in 1961.)

Considering Updike’s eminence, then, I thought it only appropriate to go back and read “Friends From Philadelphia,” his first story in The New Yorker, published in 1954. “Friends” is about a 15-year-old boy named—surprise!—John, who enlists the help of his neighbors, the Lutzes, to buy wine for him so that his parents can entertain the aforementioned friends. The story’s primary focus is on the kindness of Mr. Lutz, who uses his open-handed generosity to bludgeon the boy with his comparative wealth.

What I found most interesting about the story, however, was that it’s practically a museum of outdated public health policy. Mrs. Lutz smokes like a chimney and allows her teenage daughter to do the same if she wishes (John smokes too, of course); it’s John who is sent by his parents to pick up the wine, though only 15 (he’s foiled when a “new man” at the store requires “written permission” from his parents); Mr. Lutz drives around drunk, protected only by Mrs. Lutz’s mild admonition to “drive carefully”; and Mr. Lutz allows John to drive his new car, though John has little idea how to operate it, as it’s so new that it has “automatic shift, fluid transmission,” and—neat!—turn signals.

“Outage,” Updike’s first New Yorker story this year, is a simpler tale of how a power outage signals (or causes) a temporary interruption in social mores in a suburban New England community. Brad Morris, who works from home while his wife manages a boutique, ventures out after a storm long enough to hook up with a married neighbor he’s seen around at “cocktail parties or zoning-appeals-board meetings.” Well, almost hook up. The power comes back on, and with it, a bit too tidily, their consciences. It won’t do at all, really.

Oddly enough, Doctorow’s “Wakefield” also features a power outage in the opening paragraphs. It’s a largely incidental one, except for its putative effect on the title character’s state of mind—which turns out to be what the story’s really about, because Wakefield, after a spat with his wife, decides to hide out in the attic above the family garage…for a year. Though he has money and credit cards (he’s a lawyer), he sets himself the test of living entirely on what he can scrounge in the garbage while watching jealously over his wife as she deals with the police and the solicitude of neighbors, (eventually) vacations with their daughters, and begins to date again.

The predictable reappearance of a minor character spurs Wakefield’s eventual decision to return to the civilized world, and the story ends with a weak joke. Of the three stories from 2008, this is unquestionably the best written, partly because Wakefield is the most complex character, but that isn’t saying a lot. (Incidentally, don’t miss the podcast of Doctorow reading and discussing John O’Hara’s 1943 story “Graven Image.”)

While Updike and Doctorow’s stories both concern the suspension of normal social rules, Boyle’s story, “Ash Monday,” features thirteen-year-old Dill, who has very personal power outages—moments of inattention, “as if he’d gone outside of himself…another kind of absence that was so usual he hardly noticed it.” Of these three, Boyle’s story—which has the flattest characters and the most exposed machinery—has, surprisingly, the most affecting emotional core.

At one point, Dill asks his mother which church their family belongs to, and eventually observes, “We’re not anything, are we?” It’s the saddest and most deeply felt moment in any of the three stories, because it’s clear he’s talking about much more than what church they belong to: he’s talking about their broken stove, their anonymity, his “piece-of-shit” Camry, and their dead-end, rootless, piece-of-shit lives.

But “Ash Monday” is also the cheapest story of the three—not only do all the characters seem right out of Central Casting (a fault shared, to a degree, with “Outage”), the plotting leaves something to be desired. Dill’s outages of attention are Boyle’s heavy-handed way of trying to make the reader think Dill will be responsible for setting the canyon on fire—oh, didn’t I mention that? Yes, it’s one of those stories, where the curtain lifts, you’ve got a teenage boy standing by a grill with a can of gasoline, the “hot breath” of the Santa Ana winds nosing about the place, and a title that guarantees that baby’s gonna burn, baby, burn.

But as in a cheesy detective story, the true firebug isn’t introduced until the very end; and however much that character hates the setting, the torching is seemingly entirely unmotivated. One wonders why it matters—the point seems to be that it doesn’t. Which is an unrewarding place from which to start or finish a story.

No matter, though; every writer has creative brown-outs like these. We just need to wait a bit, and they’ll get the juice back on.