I Feel Incredibly Ambivalent

I am really not sure how to feel about this very short story about the final moments and final memory of an amusingly awful caricature of a book critic. I wondered if reading a bunch of reviews would help, but this story seeks to be rather polarising with me bouncing around in the middle.

It is undeniably written with exemplary prose and some genuinely amusing, ridiculous, and thoughtful moments and ideas...but there is also a sense that the writing is overwrought and self congratulatorially smug. This is particularly apparent when coupled with the protagonist himself and how the ultimately the story is about the death of an contemptible (misogynistic, possibly racist) critic and the quaint and incongruous memory they have in their final moment.

Good art makes you feel something and I definitely feel things (I just can't tell how positive they are about the story or not), and works can simultaneously be great, while obviously sniffing their own farts, so...yeah. If I'm honest, I think there are so truly exquisite lines, but the smugness spoils it for me.

The performance is spectacular and it's still well worth a listen if you have Audible. ( )

This is the best short story ever written. It may be that I've been biased by both a TC Boyle reading (on a New Yorker podcast some 10 years back, or so it seems) and a dramatic presentation by Tom Noonan that has haunted me for nearly as long. Even so, the story stands repeated readings and assorted interpretations while losing none of its power and poetry. It is, in fact, a flawless example of the art of the short story. ( )