“Bozo,” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, is featured in the 8 April, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Told from the perspective of unnamed, first-person female narrator–-the details of whose life we are told very little (more on this to follow)–-the story opens in a nondescript bar in a nondescript city as the narrator contemplates a male bartender, for whom she possesses a mild infatuation that even she cannot fully explain. This bartender is handsome, professional, and reticent. Much of the story is set in the bar, but it is in the narrator’s head where much of the story truly unfolds. As a semi-regular at the bar, she thinks about this man who she has scarcely exchanged words, except to order drinks–who he is, whether he is single, and how she’d like to rescue him, in a sense, from the banality of his job and life as she envisions it. The narrator finally works up the courage to ask him out on a date (a rare romantic risk on her part, we sense–a leap of faith), but is rejected–he has a girlfriend; she takes it with grace but then turns to imagining his girlfriend and what kind of relationship they share. She concludes that their relationship is one of convenience, one of settling (despite knowing scarcely anything about the bartender and nothing at all about his girlfriend); but in the story’s conclusion, the narrator finally witnesses an expression of true love between the couple that belies her jaded sense of wishful thinking. The story ends with the narrator’s admission to herself of wanting what they have; in a laying bare of her vulnerability that obliterates her own jadedness, she expresses a longing for connection, a longing for love, a longing for that most human of desires: she longs, painfully, for what they have. A poignant ending, and one of universal relatability.

It is precisely the narrator’s fear of rejection and fear of being vulnerable, combined with a countervailing need human connection and love that, we argue, makes this story so relatable and so compelling–and modern, and touching. Modern, in the sense of a narrator who thinks too much, who is too much in her head, intellectualizing; touching, in her vulnerability, in her taking a risk, and in her true expression of longing. But the story’s relatability goes beyond the narrator’s human wants, needs, and fears; it is also a beautiful manifestation of the author’s adept minimalism. Like Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory of omission, much more here is left out than overtly stated; we are left to imagine, as readers, many of the details about the narrator (her job, her exact age, her past romantic experiences, and so on), the setting, and the bartender (he’s handsome, yes, but what color is his hair, for example?) This reminds us, in contrast, to writers such as Ivan Turgenev, who, George Saunders points out in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, describes virtually everything about many of his characters.

And it is precisely these omissions–beyond its universal themes–that is what, we think, make this story a true masterpiece. As readers, we are forced to fill in many of the details, and, as such, become a part of the story’s construction. In effect, we become the narrator, see through her eyes, feel her fears and the sting of rejection and her want and her longing, and we relate, viscerally, those feelings and experiences back to our own lives–because we have all been there; we have all been her.