A Strange Fascination by Zack Savitsky Of course. “A Strange Fascination” is a short story by Zack Savitsky, originally published in The New Yorker in October 2023. It quickly became a widely discussed and critically acclaimed piece of short fiction. Here is a breakdown of the story, including its plot, themes, and why it resonated with so many readers.
Plot Summary
- The story is narrated by a man in his thirties who is grappling with a deep, unsettling sense of alienation and a feeling that his life lacks a coherent narrative. The central event that triggers the plot is the death of his former college professor, Julianna.
- The Protagonist: The narrator is adrift. He works a mundane remote job, feels disconnected from his wife, and is generally passive about his own life. He describes himself as having a “second-rate mind” and a life that feels like a “rough draft.”
- The Fascination: Julianna wasn’t just any professor; she was a brilliant, charismatic, and notoriously harsh critic of his writing in a single fiction workshop. He develops what he calls a “strange fascination” with her—not a crush, but an obsession with her perception of him. Her brutal criticism (“This is competent… but it’s not a story”) becomes a defining, wounding memory.
- The Inheritance: After Julianna’s death, the narrator is shocked to learn that she has left him something in her will. He travels to her remote home to collect it. The inheritance is not money or a meaningful object, but a heavy, cumbersome trunk filled with thousands of pages of her unfinished, abandoned manuscripts, notes, and drafts.
- The Burden: Instead of feeling honored, he feels burdened and confused. Why did she give this to him, the student she seemed to hold in such low esteem? He hauls the trunk home, where it becomes a physical manifestation of his own anxieties and creative failures.
- The Discovery: As he reluctantly sifts through the chaotic pages, he makes a startling discovery. Scattered throughout Julianna’s lifework are fragments—sentences, paragraphs, even entire pages—that he recognizes as his own. They are from the story she criticized so harshly years ago. She had plagiarized his work, or more accurately, absorbed and repurposed it into her own failed magnum opus.
Key Themes
- Artistic Insecurity and Validation: The story is a powerful exploration of the writer’s ego, the need for validation, and the corrosive effect of harsh criticism. The narrator’s entire adult life is shadowed by one professor’s opinion.
- Identity and Authenticity: The discovery that Julianna stole his work shatters his understanding of their dynamic. Was her criticism a form of jealousy? Did she see a spark in him that she herself lacked? It forces him to question who he is as a writer and what constitutes original art.
- The trunk full of unfinished work is a monument to failure, and the narrator must decide what to do with this heavy legacy.
- Parasitic Relationships: The relationship between teacher and student is reframed as potentially parasitic. Julianna, the supposed mentor, was feeding on the raw material of her student’s youth and talent, which she herself could no longer access.
Why the Story Was So Notable
- The Twist: The revelation of plagiarism is executed masterfully. It re-contextualizes the entire story and the narrator’s life, delivering a profound emotional and intellectual punch.
- Relatability: While the scenario is specific, the feeling of being judged, of carrying the weight of past criticism, and of wrestling with one’s own sense of inadequacy is universally relatable, especially among creative people.
- Sharp Prose: Savitsky’s writing is precise, introspective, and often darkly funny. He captures the nuances of anxiety and self-doubt with remarkable clarity.
deeper Character Analysis
The Narrator: The “Second-Rate” Mind
- A Strange Fascination by Zack Savitsky His remote job, his emotional distance from his wife, even his choice of reading—it’s all a way to remain in the “rough draft” stage, where nothing is final and therefore nothing can truly fail. The trunk is the antithesis of this; it is a definitive, heavy, and judged object (as a failure) that he cannot ignore.
- The Wound of “Competence”: Julianna’s comment that his work was “competent” is the core of his trauma. “Bad” can be passionate, interesting, flawed. “Competent” is dismissive; it suggests a lack of genius, a safe mediocrity. This single word becomes the lens through which he views his entire existence.
Julianna: The Failed Genius
- The Critic vs. The Creator: Julianna built her identity on being a sharp, discerning critic—a “gatekeeper of talent.” However, the story suggests this was a defense for her own failure as a creator. The trunk reveals she was not a curator of genius but a thief of competence. She could recognize a workable, raw material but could not shape her own.
- The Inheritance as a Confession and a Curse: By leaving the trunk to the narrator, she is performing several acts at once:
- A Final Critique: It’s a backhanded compliment. You were so “competent” that even I, the genius, used your work.
- A Burdensome Apology: It’s her way of admitting, posthumously, that he had something she needed.
- Passing the Torch of Failure: She is saddling him with her own artistic burden, forcing him to confront the same chaos and potential for failure that consumed her.
The Central Metaphor: The Trunk
The trunk is the story’s most powerful symbol. It is:
- The Unconscious Mind: It’s chaotic, filled with half-formed ideas, brilliant fragments, and utter nonsense, much like the creative process itself.
- The Weight of the Past: It’s physically heavy, just as the memory of Julianna’s criticism has weighed on the narrator for years.
- The Tomb of Potential: It represents a life’s work that never cohered into a finished product. It is the tangible form of “what could have been.”
- A Puzzle Box without a Solution: The narrator initially looks for a single, clear reason for the inheritance—a masterpiece to publish, a final message. Instead, he finds a mirror of his own fragmented self.
Literary and Philosophical Underpinnings
The story engages with several profound ideas:
- The Anxiety of Influence (Reversed): Harold Bloom’s famous theory describes how poets struggle with the influence of their mighty predecessors. Here, The predecessor (Julianna) is anxious about the influence of the successor (the student).
- What is Originality? The story ruthlessly interrogates this concept. If Julianna repurposed the narrator’s “competent” sentences into her own failed, grand project, who does the work belong to? His raw material, filtered through her sophisticated but broken sensibility, creates something new yet derivative. It blurs the lines of authorship.
- The Parasitic Nature of Certain Pedagogical Relationships: The story exposes the potential dark side of mentorship. Instead of empowering the student, the teacher can sometimes feed on their youth, their unjaded creativity, and their potential, using it to fuel their own depleted reserves.
The Ending’s Ambiguity
The story does not provide a neat resolution. The key question is: Is this discovery liberating or further imprisoning?
- A Strange Fascination by Zack Savitsky The god has fallen. The authority who defined his limits was a fraud. He can now see that his “competence” was, in fact, a genuine raw material that a celebrated intellectual found worthy of theft. He is free to write his own story, unburdened by her judgment.
- The Imprisoning View: The trunk has simply replaced one form of weight with another. Now, instead of carrying the weight of her criticism, he carries the weight of her failure and the bizarre, unresolved collaboration. He is now the curator of a shared, failed legacy. The fascination has mutated, not ended.
Why It’s a “Strange” Fascination
The word “strange” is perfectly chosen. It’s not love, hate, or admiration. It’s a complex, obsessive fixation on:
- The person who saw you most clearly, and perhaps, most incorrectly.
- The source of a wound that came to define you.
- A dynamic that was never understood, only felt.