From Bomb Magazine:
“First Impressions” consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017, all of which are cited below. After collecting every first sentence, I found they fell into a number of patterns, some surprising, others obvious: points of view, different tenses, genre fiction like western and military, stories set in smalltown America, stories set in Montana (oddly there were a lot), etc. I then arranged these patterns into a sequence of vignettes, a short story in its own right.
In writing this piece I wanted to examine the production of prestige fiction as well as the editorial character of The New Yorker fiction section, its idiosyncrasies, biases and imaginative limits.
. . . .
The above is not my real name—the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. This is the truth, whichever way you look at it. I’m not a bad guy.
Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately. My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey.
My Life
My legal name is Alexander Perchov. Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse.
It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled. The nurse had wrapped my brother in a blue flannel blanket and was just about to hand him to his mother when she whispered, “Oh, God, there’s another one,” and out I slid, half dead. Mama said I was thenceforth to be her nephew, and to call her Aunt Dora.
When I was a child, I had a family of doll people. Musa was my older brother. My stepfather wasn’t a big man, not much taller than my mother. We didn’t like him. Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. All he knew, really, was digging.
As a young boy, I learned many things from many wise people. Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort. Cahal sprayed WD-40 on to the only bolt his spanner wouldn’t shift. When I was a hiccupping boy, my mother would fetch the back-door key, pull my collar away from my neck, and slip the cold metal down my back. The pancake suppers were my idea.
One morning, two hundred and twenty-five days after my father left home, specks appeared in the huge blue sky over our house. A year after my father departed, moved to St. Louis, and left my mother and me behind in New Orleans, to look after ourselves in whatever manner we could, he called on the telephone one afternoon and asked to speak to me. My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. It was a very cold day.
. . . .
Our Town in the ‘70s
All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver.
In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. In front of the church, which contained a carved altar brought from Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, there stood a row of six horse stalls. The drum major lived a short distance from my house and could sometimes be seen sitting pensively on his porch wearing his shako—a tall truncated cone of white simulated fur, with a strap that cut across his chin—while folding the Free Press for his paper route. When the old brothel—known as the Butt Hut—closed down, years ago, the house it had occupied was advertised in the paper: “Home on the river: eight bedrooms, eight baths, no kitchen. Changing times force sale.” This happened here in our town.
Drummond opened the shop every morning at seven so he and his boy could eat breakfast while the first drop-offs were coming in. Of course I’d seen them, his customers, walking past the diner and thrift shop and firehouse clutching their oil-stained kraft-paper sacks—dishevelled and outdoorsy, these people, healthy-looking in an unpremeditated way, their skin unblemished and tanned and their muscles toned.
In the morning, at his favorite restaurant, Erick got to order his favorite American food, sausage and eggs and hash-brown papitas fried crunchy on top. Arthurs ordered liver and peas and mashed potatoes in Strode Street. Ann Gallagher was listening to the wireless, cutting out a boxy short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, in a pale-lilac wool flecked with navy.
. . . .
My Second Life
It was a wife’s worst nightmare. I married an ice man.
He was a man shaped by money. He dreamed his brother’s death at Frederiksburg. In his latter days—and even that is now more than thirty years ago—he was always referred to as “the old man.”
So Natalie put me straight. She was only twenty years old but had an old person’s name. She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. When I saw her standing outside the theater the evening after meeting her at a dinner party, her first sentence couldn’t have sounded more reckless. “Tsk-tsk.”
He was at work when it began.
She came back from the island on Friday, August 16th, on the two o’clock ferry. Two rafts were anchored offshore like twin islands. The sun was a wolf.
It began in the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. She knew there was someone else in the room. She had never perfected the trick of moistening the envelope flap with the tip of her tongue so it would stick and lie perfectly flat. It’s not my fault.
Link to the rest at Bomb Magazine