Literary Analysis · The New Yorker, March 30, 2026
"Floating" by Souvankham Thammavongsa
A short story of desire, economics, and quiet grief
Character relationships
The story is structured around relational distance. The narrator stands at the center of an asymmetric web — emotionally present but consistently held at arm's length by each figure in her orbit.
Key relational dynamics
Every relationship in the story follows the same asymmetry: the narrator is the one who wants, watches, and grieves, while the other figures remain opaque. The Man's feelings are reported secondhand through the Friend; the Girlfriend exists only as a projection of the narrator's imagination. Even the Sister — the most intimate loss in the story — is named only once, fleetingly.
The narrator is surrounded by people yet structurally alone. The web of relationships is dense, but nearly all its connections are either broken (ex-husband, sister), temporary (brief lover), or mediated through a third party (the man, via the friend).
Fabula vs sjuzhet
The fabula is the story's chronological spine — what actually happened in sequence. The sjuzhet is how Thammavongsa chooses to arrange and present those events on the page.
Each point below is a narrative event. Its x-position shows where it appears in the text (sjuzhet order); its y-position shows where it falls in real chronological time (fabula order). The diagonal represents a perfectly chronological telling. Points below the line are analepses — they appear in the text later than they occurred in time. Hover over any point to read the event.
The bus-stop section interrupts the winter-to-autumn arc with childhood poverty, the marriage, and the pizza-place fight — events from decades earlier
Shows the present loneliness has deep prior history; the past never fully recedes
Ellipsis
Four months of the man's solo travel are compressed to a brief paragraph
Enacts the narrator's experience: waiting feels airless, then suddenly over
Summary
Months of summer, autumn, and recovery are reported as secondhand gossip via the friend
The narrator is always one remove from events — she receives reports, not experience
Scene
Only the party and the bus stop are rendered in full scene detail
Grants weight to the moment of almost-connection and to private grief
Proleptic closure
The story ends with a childhood memory — the lake — that the fabula places at the very beginning
Creates a closed loop; suggests nothing has changed; the narrator has always sunk
Order inversion
We hear the floating declaration before we learn the man has a girlfriend
Reader shares the narrator's hopeful moment — then her deflation — in real time
The story's deepest formal choice is to end with its earliest event: the four-year-old narrator sinking in the lake. The sjuzhet arrives at the same point the fabula begins, creating a closed loop — the story of a life in which the fundamental condition has not changed.
Plot analysis
Thammavongsa writes lyric fiction in which very little "happens" by conventional standards. The plot's drama is almost entirely internal — a sequence of hopes, analyses, and quiet defeats experienced by a narrator who watches the world with forensic attention and protects herself with understatement.
Note: the arc is deliberately deflated — the climax (the floating revelation) arrives early and then slowly slopes into silence, mimicking the story's emotional shape.
Exposition
A social gathering. A woman preparing to speak. A man approaches. Their conversation is easy, mutual. He runs to hug her goodbye. The narrator quietly calculates whether he might be single.
Rising action
The bus stop: a past marriage, financial resentment, a humiliating argument. A brief lover who moved on. The narrator's meditation on aging, desire, and the shrinking market for women over fifty.
Pseudo-climax
The friend tells her: "He said he was just floating." Love at first sight — but he lives with a woman, pays the mortgage. The revelation arrives already compromised. Hope and disqualification in the same breath.
Falling action
Four months of absence. Summer gossip about the girlfriend. Autumn silence. The knee surgery; practical men choose whoever is already there. An e-mail about a naturopath confirms his love for the girlfriend.
Anti-resolution
No reunion, no confrontation, no catharsis. The narrator reflects on the word "floating" — then the childhood lake, sinking, the tadpoles she reached for and could not hold. The story ends where she began.
Central conflict
The external conflict — will the narrator connect with the man? — is a red herring. The real conflict is internal and structural: the narrator lives in a world where her qualities (financial independence, emotional intelligence, self-sufficiency) are the very things that make her undesirable as a long-term partner. Dependence is coded as loyalty; self-possession is coded as risk.
Themes
Economics of love
The story is saturated with financial language. Mortgages, salaries, the cost of shoes. Men choose partners they can control financially, not ones they love.
The penalty of independence
Because the narrator earns her own income and cannot be dependent, she is "safe" to feel things for — but not "safe" to commit to. Her freedom is her prison.
Time and the aging woman
"Now that I am fifty, they all tell me they want to get married." What was once urgently discouraged — marriage talk — is now what she is excluded from entirely.
Language and the unsaid
The story is built from things not said: she doesn't tell him she does this all the time; she doesn't say she is lonely; she never says she is heartbroken. Restraint is the story's grammar.
The closing symbol
The tadpoles: the four-year-old narrator reaching with both hands for something alive, slippery, impossible to hold — "I was greedy. I thought I could have them all, and I grabbed and grabbed, but I had nothing to put them in." This is desire rendered as a child's instinct: abundant, unashamed, and futile.
Undergraduate discussion questions
These questions move from close reading toward broader thematic and formal concerns, suitable for a first-year or intermediate literature seminar.
Close reading
The story opens "I had not noticed him." What does this choice of opening line establish about the narrator and the story's power dynamics?
The opening line immediately reverses the expected gaze. Rather than a woman being seen, we have a woman who was not looking. The man enters her visual field uninvited, which subtly positions him as the one who seeks, at least initially. Thammavongsa also uses it to signal the story's larger irony: the woman who "did not notice" becomes the one who notices everything — who analyzes his every gesture, motivation, and omission with extraordinary precision. The reversal is quietly feminist: the narrator's interiority is dense and alert; the man, despite his declarations, remains opaque.
The narrator shares that her sister died from pills in a single sentence, then moves on. What is the narrative effect of this brevity, and what does it tell us about the narrator's voice?
The technique is characteristic of Thammavongsa's prose: devastating information delivered without ceremony. "My sister died. Pills." The period after "died" performs a finality that a comma would not. The narrator uses this disclosure as evidence of a calculation — she'll tell this stranger intimate things because she assumes she'll never see him again. But the sentence also reveals the narrator's relationship to grief: she carries enormous losses that she does not narrativize, does not explain, does not linger on. The story as a whole is an exercise in this kind of compressed sorrow. To acknowledge the sister more fully would be to break the emotional armor the narrator requires to function.
The bus stop scene interrupts the main narrative arc. Why might Thammavongsa have placed this extended flashback here, and what does it add structurally?
Placed immediately after the narrator's hopeful departure from the party (she likes him; is he single?), the bus stop section deflates any romantic momentum. It returns her — and us — to a neighborhood she inhabited during her marriage, and the memories triggered are all of financial conflict and humiliation. Structurally, the flashback establishes that what the narrator is hoping for now is not new longing; it is the same longing she has always had, with the same obstacles in different form. The ex-husband who resented her income prefigures the man who will choose a woman without one. The past keeps explaining the present. Narratologically, it is also an analepsis that violates chronological sjuzhet — Thammavongsa uses the formal disruption to signal that this woman's interior life cannot move forward until it has accounted for what came before.
Thematic
How does the story use economics — money, mortgages, salaries — as a metaphor for romantic relationships?
"Floating" is deeply preoccupied with what can and cannot be afforded. The narrator's parents together earned what she now earns alone, yet they were "poor." Her ex-husband made almost six figures and still experienced her lower income as a burden, an inequality, a threat. The man with whom she almost connects pays his girlfriend's mortgage — and this, the narrator understands, is precisely why the girlfriend is "safe." A person who depends on you financially cannot leave easily. Love and economic control become inseparable throughout the story: the girlfriend's lack of a job is simultaneously troubling (she has no independence) and advantageous (she has no exit). The narrator's self-sufficiency — her pride — is the thing that makes her romantically expendable. The story diagnoses a system in which financial dependency functions as a substitute for loyalty, and in which women who refuse that dependency are structurally excluded from its "rewards."
"Now that I am fifty, they all tell me they want to get married." How does the story critique the different timelines imposed on men and women in heterosexual romance?
When the narrator was in her twenties and had "plenty of time to have children," she was careful not to mention marriage, knowing it would frighten men away. She performed patience and casualness at exactly the moment she most wanted permanence. Now that she is fifty, the men around her have reversed: they want commitment, they want children — but they do not want her to provide these things to them. They want to provide for women younger than themselves. The narrator is caught in a temporal trap: she was too serious when she should have been casual, and now she is invisible when they have become serious. The man in his fifties who has "never felt this way before" is similarly diagnosed: he went with whoever was available, whoever did the pursuing, and only now encounters genuine feeling — at a point when acting on it would cost too much.
The narrator says of the girlfriend: "I worry about these things for her, even though it is not my life." What does this moment reveal about the narrator's character and the story's ethical register?
This is one of the story's most quietly astonishing moments. The narrator — who has every reason to resent the girlfriend as the obstacle to her own happiness — instead extends imaginative generosity to her. She worries about the girlfriend's lack of income, her invisibility to his friends, her inability to say anything because she feels she cannot stop him. The narrator recognizes the girlfriend's vulnerability and names it with more care than she names her own grief. This reveals the narrator's fundamental ethical orientation: she is constitutionally unable to reduce other women to rivals or props. It also deepens the story's critique — the girlfriend's situation is not enviable. Being the woman who "stayed" comes at its own cost.
Form & style
Thammavongsa's sentences are short and declarative. How does this prose style interact with the story's emotional content?
The prose style is the emotional argument. Short, declarative sentences resist elaboration — they state and move on, refusing the kind of expansive feeling that would make the narrator's grief legible as tragedy. This is how the narrator survives: by not dwelling. "Mom and Dad divorced. My sister died. Pills." Three facts in four words. The prose performs the same compression the narrator performs emotionally. It also creates a documentary quality — events are recorded, not experienced — which mirrors the narrator's habit of observing rather than feeling. The occasional longer sentence, like the final paragraph about the lake, becomes powerful precisely because of the contrast with what precedes it. When the prose finally opens up, it signals that the narrator's armor has thinned.
The title "Floating" accrues multiple meanings over the course of the story. Trace the word's evolution and explain what it finally means by the last paragraph.
"Floating" first appears as the man's description of his emotional state the night he met the narrator: an ecstatic, weightless sensation, associated with cartoons and balloons and the freedom of being taken anywhere without harm. In this register, floating is romantic — it belongs to him. But the narrator immediately reframes it with a second definition: floating in water, a physical act requiring trust, relaxation, the willingness to give your body over to something larger. Then comes the counter-image: as a four-year-old, she did not float. She sank. She touched the bottom. She grabbed at tadpoles with nothing to hold them in. By the end, "floating" is not a promise but an inability — hers. She sinks because she cannot surrender to something she cannot hold, and she cannot hold any of it. The word's journey from his rapturous self-description to her childhood sinking is the story's complete emotional arc.
Contextual & comparative
The narrator is never named, nor is the man, the ex-husband, or the girlfriend. What is the effect of this withholding of names?
Names individualize and fix. By withholding them, Thammavongsa does two things simultaneously: she renders the narrator universal (every middle-aged woman who has navigated desire under these conditions) while also dramatizing the narrator's experience of the people around her. The man never quite becomes a particular person to her — he is a type, a projection, a set of signals she reads. He doesn't tell her his name until late in their conversation, and she can't pronounce it. His name is given but not reproduced on the page — it belongs to him, not to her. The ex-husband is defined entirely by his function (he made more money; he yelled). The girlfriend is defined by her condition (no job, pays no mortgage). The absence of names is a formal argument: these people exist to the narrator as forces and situations, not as known individuals.
How might you situate "Floating" within a tradition of fiction about immigrant or diaspora experience, given what we know about Thammavongsa's biography and previous work?
Souvankham Thammavongsa is a Lao-Canadian writer whose previous story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, focused centrally on working-class immigrant experience. "Floating" engages this tradition more obliquely: immigration is not named, but several details accrue meaning in that context — the man's name, which the narrator cannot pronounce (an echo of the title of Thammavongsa's collection); the childhood poverty that differs from the poverty of the narrator's adult peers; the sense that the narrator has always been slightly off-register with the dominant culture's romantic scripts. The story's preoccupation with financial sufficiency and its relationship to desirability also resonates with the experience of immigrant women who achieve middle-class stability through their own labor, only to find that this achievement is coded differently than it would be for someone who inherited the expectation of self-sufficiency. The story works on its own terms as fiction about aging and desire, but it repays reading within the broader arc of Thammavongsa's project.
About the author
Biographical profile
Full name
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Year of birth
1978
Place of birth
Nong Khai refugee camp, Thailand (of Lao descent)
Current residence
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nationality
Canadian (Lao-Canadian)
Gender
Woman
Marital status
Not publicly disclosed; no partner or spouse on record
Education
Raised and educated in Toronto public schools; Bachelor of Arts, English, University of Toronto (New College, 2003). No MFA — she has stated she learned to write by reading.
Influences
Alice Munro, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams
Fiction venues
The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, NOON
Short biography
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in 1978 in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. She and her parents were sponsored by a family in Canada when she was one year old, and she was raised and educated in Toronto, Ontario. She studied at the University of Toronto, majoring in English. She has never taken an MFA course, and says she learned to write by reading.
She began her literary career as a poet, self-publishing and selling her first chapbooks out of her school bag at farmers' markets and small press fairs. She has written three poetry books — Light (2013), Found (2007), and Small Arguments (2003) — all published by Pedlar Press in Canada, followed by a fourth collection, Cluster (2016). Her transition to fiction brought her to international attention: her fiction has appeared in Harper's, Granta, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading 2018, and the O. Henry Prize Stories 2019.
Thammavongsa has now won the Giller Prize twice — in 2020 for her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, and in 2025 for her debut novel Pick a Colour, published by Knopf Canada. The novel, set over a single day in a Toronto nail salon, follows a retired boxer working under the name "Susan." In the jury's words, it is written with "an inimitable style that decentralizes the English language, crackling wit, and profound confidence." She is one of only a handful of writers to have won Canada's most prestigious literary prize twice.
"When I was a kid I didn't know how to become a writer. My mom and dad are not writers. I printed and bound my own books, sold them out of my school knapsack on front lawns, at farmers markets, and at small press fairs. Thank you to anyone who has ever bought a book that I made." — Thammavongsa, Giller Prize acceptance speech, 2025
Body of work
Year
Title
Genre
Publisher
Notes
2003
Small Arguments
Poetry
Pedlar Press
Debut collection; won the ReLit Award (2004)
2007
Found
Poetry
Pedlar Press
Adapted into a short film by Paramita Nath
2013
Light
Poetry
Pedlar Press
Won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2014)
2016
Cluster
Poetry
Pedlar Press
Fourth and most recent poetry collection
2020
How to Pronounce Knife
Short stories
Knopf Canada / Little, Brown (US)
Won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize; 2021 Trillium Book Award; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; O. Henry Award for the story "Slingshot" (2019)
2025
Pick a Colour
Novel (debut)
Knopf Canada / Little, Brown (US)
Won the 2025 Giller Prize ($100,000); set over one day in a Toronto nail salon
Selected stories and essays have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, and NOON, among others.
Awards and recognition
Year
Award
Work
Result
2004
ReLit Award
Small Arguments
Won
2014
Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Light
Won
2015
Commonwealth Short Story Prize
"How to Pronounce Knife"
Shortlisted
2016
The Journey Prize longlist
"Mani Pedi"
Longlisted
2019
O. Henry Award
"Slingshot" (Harper's Magazine)
Won
2020
Scotiabank Giller Prize
How to Pronounce Knife
Won ($100,000)
2021
Trillium Book Award
How to Pronounce Knife
Won
2021
National Book Critics Circle Award — Fiction
How to Pronounce Knife
Finalist
2021
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature — Adult Fiction
How to Pronounce Knife
Honor title
n/a
Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Poetry (collection unspecified in sources)
Finalist
n/a
Griffin Poetry Prize
Poetry
Finalist
2025
Giller Prize
Pick a Colour
Won ($100,000)
Thammavongsa is one of only two authors to have won the Giller Prize twice (the other being Alice Munro). She has also served as a judge for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize, and the inaugural 2024 Montreal Fiction Prize.