Hanwell Senior

I don't usually get around to reading the fiction in the New Yorker, but somehow last week I noticed the piece was not about doomed love or sex and relatively short so I gave it a shot. Zadie Smith's Hanwell Senior is not a great piece of work but it's tolerable and it has one great paragraph. When speaking of the younger set taping conversations with their elderly grandparents and researching genealogy at length on the internet, she says of children and grandchildren

...so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

It's the sort of paragraph that appeals to everyone. We all have families, we all have problems with our families. We don't like to admit the problems yet here is the author confessing her guilt and so the reader can say yes I've felt the same way myself. And after all haven't we all sometimes screened calls from our mothers? Maybe the question becomes is mom screening calls from us?