Short-a-Day: Tea Obreht's "Blue Water Djinn"

[One of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40]

Originally published in The New Yorker, August 2, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 30.

Obreht loves the sea, and therefore spends much of this story describing it with a lush and magical voice: "All around him stand small towers of coral, gray breathing things. The retreating water has dragged the starfish from their moorings, left them red-backed and raw in the sand, reaching for their hiding places. Sea urchins cluster together, spines shining. Twenty feet out on the crenellated alleys of the reef, the underwater forest begins." It is, fittingly enough, another world, and it's true that there's much that we don't know about the wet underbelly of the earth. And yet: so what? Obreht hints at a connection between the boy (Jack, our unclaimed narrator) and the Frenchman, whose drowning--perhaps the hands of the water djinn--is the impetus for this tale. But it remains liquid, so the "revelatory" climax, with the boy watching the Frenchman calling out for help, lacks punch.

The ending doesn't help much, either. Throughout the story, these mystical djinn represent a fantasy explanation for terrible things, a story told to scare children away from dangerous waters, and a monster that he dreams up to cope with the horrible death that he's witnessed. But Obreht doesn't leave it at that excellent use of magical realism--nor does she expound upon the plastic case of pills found in the Frenchman's room, which hint at suicide and other unspoken regrets. Instead, the boy journeys after the Frenchman and sees one of the djinn for himself, but who knows what this means? It calls back this earlier line: "He did not seem to care, as Jack did, where they [the djinn] were taking him [the Frenchman]. Jack wanted to know where. Jack wanted to know why." So why don't we get any answers?

What does work about this story is the way in which Obreht jumps from the present to the past, with the boy serving as a slightly unreliable narrator both because he omits so much of what he knows about what he's currently witnessing and because he doesn't necessarily understand what he's seeing. The story ebbs and flows with the child's attention span, so when he glimpses a drawing in the Frenchman's room, we flashback to an anecdotal encounter with that drawn turtle and, from that, further back as the boy recounts a story Fawad, the hotel owner, has told him about what's really cracked the turtle's shell. (Not sharks, but djinn.) But this is a weakness as well: our attention is held by the mystery of the Frenchman's disappearance, but not by any of these momentary stories, stories that don't add to the momentum or build of the short or of the mood. By the end, it's hard to tell exactly what we're being told, or why, so we're left making nothing out of nothing.