​The writer created a very meditative, pure fictional world for us in this short story. Everything went so smoothly and vividly that you may feel as being in a deep blue dream. It was a grown-up telling about his juvenile years back in the nineties, a fanciful period in history, as described by the writer in the interview.

In the earliest stage of reading, I felt confused at the suddenness of Amber’s disppearance. It is a radical rise action as the beginning of a short novel. It was not until the second reading did I found out why she did that. She deliberately slipped out of the boat because of her memory with her step-father, when he talked to her but not realizing she had already gone. That was a sign of his mental illness which shocked both her and her mother, from my perspective. And it also took our protagonist twenty years to figure out the analogy in the two events.

Later on the author described a feeling of being everywhere, when Adam found out that he was in the wrong house other than Amber’s. It is such a transcentental feeling that I thought it was fairly hard to develop this part without careful planning. I particularly sympathize with this excerpt.

Now let’s have a look at the interview on the New Yorker website of the author on this novel. First, he said that the setting went before the scenario in his mind. He wanted to depict the samenss of the tract houses, an alien atmosphere. Second, the collage of perspective which occurred when Adam found himself in the wrong house coincided with the characteristics of the narration, where there was a grown-up Adam looking through the eyes of a teenage one, while the latter, actually imagined being seen by the former. Third, the writer wrote Amber’s words without giving her a quotation mark because he didn’t want unmediated exposure of her conversation with Adam. The scene was in Adam’s memory and it had to be edited by his mind. Fourth, this story depicts the nineties in the memory of the writer, and he said that, “it’s definitely about a violent identity crisis among white men that was taking place at the same time as American Empire had supposedly brought history to a benevolent end.”

The story is about family, unexpected suicide of a family member, and its impacts on other members. It is also about lies and secrets among family members. The author used these motifs to create a tone of melancholy, if not grief. 

The father who committed suicide, were telling others message of death of a loved one before he hung himself. He, as a brain surgeon, dealt with death all the time, and finally, in pursue of a totality of happiness, he kicked off the chair, wearing an adult diaper.

The author said in the interview with New Yorker that the father part of story was written on the later stage of the composition process, but it was still the cornerstone for the content that came afterwards.

The girl grew up and was faced with a bunch of problems that most of us would encounter. The author discussed how her father’s death and her mother’s lie influenced her life. The character-building was quite successful. It’s continuous, from her childhood to her adulthood, even though the years between were not told.

There was no obvious climax in the story. If there was, it should be the beginning part of the narrative, where the father decided to kill himself. The story grew from there, like a stream of river, getting resolved as time went by.

It is a story worth reading, and it really reminds me a Japanese director, Koreeda Hirokazu, and his film, Maboroshi no Hikari. They are both about a sudden suicide of a man and its influence on the wife and the child. The difference might be the tone, apart from the focused character and time span. However, they both resolved into a state of acceptance, and lives went on.

Click here to see the original story: The Presentation on Egypt.