Likes

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Likes are nine superb stories, from the titular “Likes” about a father analyzing his 12-year-old daughter’s Instagram posts (which you can read here), to my personal favorite, “Many a Little Makes,” about the friendship of three girls falling apart in high school. In each story, there’s an element of the otherworldly and magical — there’s one story about an ancient king — but each stays firmly rooted in astute observations of our reality: of how a teenage girl acts on social media; of how a Black writer on a crime show has to navigate his identity and his desire for a promotion; of a mom wanting her child to have a good education. Every time I got to the end of the story, I wished it would keep going.

There’s an element of the magical, as I wrote, that underlays her stories. In conversation with Karen Russell in LitHub, she explained, “Language can become a straitjacket. A problem of enormous complexity and urgency gets boiled down to #representationmatters. The limitations of language, the inescapability of dominant narratives… this deeply worries me as I write. The urge to resist norms, to imagine alternatives—for me this urge is always accompanied by the fear that language or story will somehow betray me as I attempt to voice my objections. I keep thinking about what James Baldwin wrote in response to Richard Wright’s Native Son: ‘Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.’ And here is where the fantastic enters in, this mysterious and defiant grammar given to us by Kafka, Morrison, García Márquez, Kawabata, so many others—it offers a means of leaping over, or leaping free from, the trap that conventional language and logic threaten to spring on us.”

The fantastic, she continues, is “necessity when one is writing about our shared, or not-so-shared, reality,” that is weighed down by heaviness and awfulness.

What struck me the most what how well Bynum understood how to craft a story. This is a storyteller at her peak, and we are lucky to witness/read it.

Rating: ★★★★★