New Yorker Fiction Review #317: "Jenny Annie Fanny Addie" by Adam Levin

 

Review of the short story from the April 21, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

"Jenny Annie Fanny Addie" is a strange story little story but I found its attempt to capture the inner workings of the pre-teenage (tweenage?) mind interesting enough to read it a second time. It also helps that the story is short, weighing in at about 3500 words or so. 

The action of the story follows an 11/12 year old girl named Addie and takes place on one day during the summer. While taking swimming lessons at her day camp, a special needs boy violently gropes her in full view of other members of the camp. The incident is short and a lifeguard neutralizes any danger quickly. Addie's Mom comes to pick her up. They go out to eat. They go to watch "Terminator 2" in the theater. They drive home. Addie takes a nap, wakes up, and goes out for a walk. Those are the barest mechanics of the plot on a temporal, Point A to Point B level.

The real "stuff" of this story, however, takes place inside Addie's head. And there are a few key data points or concepts about the incident and its aftermath that Addie seems to focus on. The incident itself is not that big of a deal to Addie, it seems. What is of more concern to her are the following ancillary paradigms:

1.) The boy who groped her called her by the wrong name during the incident. He called her "Jenny," when her name is "Addie." This case of mistaken identity does not specifically get resolved in the story; however, it relates to another paradigm or anecdote that she remembers about that day. She ties it to a discrepancy in the lyrics of the song "The Weight," by The Band. She recalls that her brother had pointed out most people thought the lyrics were: "Take a load off, Annie," when in fact they are: "Take a load off Fanny." 

Again, it's not clear how these two paradigms (I can't think of a better word) relate to each other or to any broader point of the story. But, it is an example of what I think Adam Levin is trying to do in this short story, to whit...he is attempting to approximate how the mind works on a minute to minute basis. Even more specifically, he is attempting to approximate what it means to come to "intellectual awareness," during adolescence. 

Note the following line, from late in the story: 

"I looked out the window and listened to "The Weight" and had this awful sense of being part of the world in a way that I didn't want to be...This sense that when he [Harel, the boy who had groped her] was out of my sight he still existed...and that...if he thought of me at all he thought my name was Jenny."

2.) While she is not that emotionally disturbed by the incident, it changes the way Addie looks at her mother. A large chunk of this short story is devoted to Addie's perspicacious interpretation of her mother's concern for her. It is too long and involved to reproduce here, and unnecessary. 

What's at stake, however, is Addie's understanding of herself as a (soon to be) autonomous young adult and her understanding of her mother as an individual with her own distinct habits of perception and approach to the world. At the end of Addie's soliloquy in which she speculates about what's going on in her mother's head and how she should feel about it, Addie seems to arrive at a very teenage point of view of her mother: that she is old, out of touch, and doesn't understand the way things are, certainly that she doesn't understand what's going on inside her, Addie. 

What we are left with is a story about the incidents that push us -- whether we like it or not and whether we want to admit it or not -- into adolescence. It's rarely the big, notable, movie-worthy incidents like our first kiss, our first time shaving, some feat of athletic heroism, and more commonly something we never saw coming, do not understand, and spend many years afterwards (if not our entire lives) attempting to process. 

Having read this twice, I can say that Adam Levin's achievement here is substantial. This is much more than a story about a girl getting groped and suffering public sexual abuse. This is a story about how we grow up. How our habits of mind are formed. And how we start to relate to the outside world on our own terms. And his incorporation of popular culture into the stream of consciousness narrative -- "Terminator 2," The Band, and a few other references -- closely imitates the way (especially as adolescents) we start making connections about the world via what we are watching on TV and hearing in songs. I feel like a much, much longer essay could be written about this short story and I hope someday someone teaches this story in a class. 

Photograph by Adriana Nativio