"The Board" by Elif Batuman in One Sentence
How to conjure a fantastical landscape to match your story's vibes
This past Monday — June 3, 2024 — was the 100th anniversary of the death of writer Franz Kafka. To commemorate the occasion, indie publisher Catapult released A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, an anthology of Kafkaesque short stories by contemporary writers. We ran my favorite story from the book —
’s “The Board” — over on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.I love this story for one of the same reasons I love another story I wrote about recently — Elizabeth McCracken’s “Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark” — which is that the physical setting doubles as a visual metaphor for aspects of the main character’s journey. But while McCracken aligns a real-world setting — a German-themed indoor waterpark in Texas that actually exists — with a character perfectly poised to be transformed there, Batuman conjures an imaginary landscape that gives her the power to play with the fantastical.
When you can imagine truly anything into your fictional world, how do you make choices that are on-vibe with everything else that’s happening in your story? “The Board” is a masterful illustration of this, so let’s look at its superstructure then use that as a lens onto what Batuman does.
The Emotional Superstructure of “The Board”
Needing to stay in the city, a middle-aged first-time buyer must convince a board she’s qualified to live in their absurdly inaccessible basement apartment.
How to Conjure a Fantastical Landscape to Match Your Story’s Vibes
When you read “absurdly inaccessible,” what do you think of first — physical inaccessibility or social inaccessibility? I think of physical first but both are valid reads: a residence could certainly be inaccessible in terms of the wealth and social class needed to live there.
I don’t want to give too much away about the second half of “The Board,” where Batuman’s main character is actually speaking to the board, except to say that’s where she plays with absurd class inaccessibility brilliantly.
I do want to spend some time exploring how she sets us up for that in the first half of the story, by playing with the absurd physical inaccessibility of the unit just as brilliantly.
There’s no reason these two things have to go together. A unit you could enter easily might have a lot of bureaucratic red tape around buying it, while a unit difficult to get into physically could conceivably be less desirable and therefore easier to buy.
But Batuman makes these two flavors of inaccessibility brush very productively against each other by taking us through absurd physical inaccessibility for the first half of the story before delivering us to the social absurdity for the second half.
The unit in question is both a fourth floor walk-up and about three stories deep in the basement. That’s because to access it from the street, one must cut through a rich person’s fourth-floor apartment, under the wood-beamed ceilings and past the working fireplace with the custom stonework. The back panel of a bathroom closet retracts to reveal an iron ladder that leads six or seven stories down to the studio apartment. This might be the only way in and out because, well, the fire code is strict, of course.
The odyssey to the unit vibes with indicators of social class, from a man who looks like a dirty heap of rags camped on the front steps and pleading for help with the board, to an expensive-looking stroller in the foyer.
The protagonist is of modest means. She suspects she only got an appointment with this particular well-regarded broker because someone powerful intervened on her behalf. She needs an affordable apartment and deftly rationalizes every inconvenience, including the possibility that the ancient and emaciated seller might be unable to physically leave the unit any way other than by dying (probably soon, at least).
Batuman uses the lightest touch to establish befittingly vague, absurd, and somewhat charming stakes for this apartment hunt. We know only that the narrator considers it imperative and that her family would be disappointed if she were unable to remain in the city, on which so many of their hopes depend. Otherwise, we know that the happiest time in her life was the five years of her childhood when her family had the means to keep a standard poodle, and that being forced to leave the city would be worse even than the loss of that dog was. That’s it, just that this is what she can afford in the city and leaving the city would be worse than the loss of the creature who has so far made her happiest in life.
A story needs stakes, but it’s perfectly fitting that for a story of this vibe, these stakes are enough.
But making her peace with the physical absurdity and inaccessibility of the unit is less than half the battle. You’ll have to read “The Board” for yourself to find out what happens next. And you’ll be rewarded with the most pitch-perfect visual metaphor as the story’s final image.
Key takeaway for story creators: To create a fantastical landscape that vibes with the rest of your story, make it a visual metaphor for an element of the superstructure that is also important in a second, less-easy-to-visualize sense.