Something Might Fall
By David Flusfeder
Salt Publishing
ISBN: 9781784633714
80pp.

David Flusfeder holds the position of director of creative writing at the University of Kent at Canterbury, an institution that proudly counts two major international Nobel Laureates as part of its legacy — the talented Japanese Kazuo Ishiguro and the Tanzanian Abdur Razzak Gurnah. Canterbury equally proudly lays claim to two of Britain’s most influential classic authors — Geoffrey Chaucer and Christopher Marlowe.

As his recent, brilliant novella, Something Might Fall, indicates, Flusfeder (who is of an Anglo-American background) holds his own against this backdrop, with a grace and sophistication that leaves one marvelling, especially since the novella genre is a slippery and difficult one to cope with.

Released and launched in May 2026, the novella is divided into two main sections. Its time span includes the years 1970 and 1974, and is set in New York, particularly the Upper West Side, where the main female protagonist, Emma Sawyer (her maiden name was Hoffman), resides.

The first segment deals with the inner angst Emma suffers at having to act as the consummate hostess and socialite for her husband, Nicholas Sawyer, an affluent doctor. A deeply loving and dedicated mother to her six-year-old son, Nicky, Emma feels increasingly trapped by a world where the slightest breach of social etiquette, even if inadvertent or a genuine mistake, can result in resentment and consequences that can all too easily escalate into a social crisis.

An upper-class New York wife and mother in the 1970s finds herself suffocated by the demands of social performance and the loss of her own self in a brilliant new novella

More importantly, we sympathise even further with this “poor little rich girl” because she gave up a career as a writer in order to ensure that her husband’s domestic life runs on lines that are smooth to the point of being quasi-military in their efficiency. Flusfeder’s major strength as a writer lies in his remarkably astute eye for detail. Even Emma’s meeting with a friend, Nina Weiss, who is grumpy and peeved at not being invited to one of the Sawyers’ social events, is carefully choreographed. It takes place at a deli and I was impressed by the finely tuned use of language that enables Flusfeder to give clarity to what would otherwise be entirely mundane.

As a customer standing in line before Emma and Nina argues volubly with the man on the other side of the deli counter, reference is made to “lox and tongue” — which ostensibly refers to the meat being ordered — but the tongue-in-cheek joke implied by the author is that everyone (including Emma and Nina, not to mention the reader) hopes the woman will finally see fit to put locks on her tongue and move on. Nina lets go of her grudge and invites Emma to a party she is now deciding to host, but the exchange is socially awkward to the point of being painful.

One sighs as we are introduced to Emma’s life, which has gone from being that of a promising writer to one that consists of carefully calibrated social minutiae, which pile up until the protagonist feels nothing short of stifled. I do not intend to spoil the novella by revealing the escape route taken by Emma in order to free herself from an essentially hollowed existence. Suffice it to say that even her deep love for her son Nicky, a well-raised and sensitive boy, cannot compensate for her utter exhaustion on both the physical and emotional levels.

Sad though it is, one understands why Emma takes leave of her family in a manner that leaves both Nicholas Senior and Nicholas Junior utterly bewildered. But while they might be bewildered, the perceptive reader is not. Both Henry James and Edith Wharton were all too aware of how repressive affluent New York society could be. One only has to peruse The Age of Innocence or The Golden Bowl in order to realise that not only is life that glitters not gold, sometimes it is as dangerous as radium, metaphorically causing a cancer that eats away rapidly at one’s sense of self as well as one’s intrinsic dignity.

Emma must have done something right in raising Nicky, however, because on one of his birthdays following her departure, he befriends a homeless man named Chambers and brings him to his apartment (the pun on “chambers” is not lost on most readers) so that Chambers can take a shower and get something to eat. The building doorman does his job, however, and alerts Dr Sawyer, who sends along a brisk and snobbish nurse named Mary to get rid of Chambers, but not before Nicky learns to appreciate and demonstrate a sense of humanity. His mother would have been proud of him. So, too, is the sympathetic reader.

Regardless of whether he has us view life through the eyes of a mother or those of her child, Flusfeder never loses his grasp on maintaining the authenticity of tone. Emma’s internal monologues (redolent of extended streams of consciousness, occasionally even prose poetry) give one a more accurate sense of her inner frustration than a dozen different external viewpoints might have.

The moment where Nicky, strolling through a park in the Big Apple, comes across a couple of intriguing outdoor chess games, causes such a sense of wonder in the child that he uses some of his birthday funds to buy a pricey chess clock from FAO Schwarz. But both he and Chambers forget about the clock when they engage in a more important set of moves on the chessboard of life.

Densely packed though the novella is, at less than 100 pages, it is a fast and engrossing read. Flusfeder’s prose is tremendously engaging, and his command over character development is nothing short of flawless. Even the detail that Nicholas Senior’s name was changed from the Ashkenazi Jewish “Seger” to the more WASP-ish “Sawyer” is loaded with meaning — since few characters conjure up an image of white American boyhood more vividly than Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

Something Might Fall is a novella that lends itself to repeated readings, because the language kaleidoscopically enables one to view a different set of images with every additional reading. In its own quiet way, the novella is a work of pathos and sweetness, but I shall venture a step beyond that. In an even more subtle way, the book is a work of genius.

The reviewer is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration. She has authored two collections of short stories, Timeless College Tales and Perennial College Tales and a play, The Political Chess King

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 14th, 2026