Critique: “Silver and Gold”

What Alex Johnson gives his reader in this story seems to be a simple plain evening party in New York City. My mind produces one question over and over in my head while reading this, which is: “Why am I reading this?” Amongst the exaggerating descriptions that are mainly lists of objects and senses, which do portray a good picture, yet at the same time can be too much because they bore the reader with nonsense if they do not have nay relevance. I found Johnson’s story a reminder of how crucial the questions, “Why are people reading my writing? Why am I interesting?”, can be.
The reason why this story addresses these questions is because the story fails to answer them. The main plot of this story does not give the reader any interest to drive the story other than the curiosity of having something that might happen at the end. Perhaps, I am disappointed in a story that Johnson writes about and it is not exceeding out of the ordinary. However, that is what gives him the drive for the reader. Having a party and a mild friendly connection certainly brings truth to the story, but that is not enough to make the story interesting. What Johnson has to work with here is nothing more than a few friends getting together and a girl that almost attempts to have sex with the narrator, but does not because of a really great friendship. Although that is nice, it does not give the reader any reason to read this story for that ending.
Other issues with this story are that the descriptions of things are trying to portray an image that does not need to be so graphic. Instead of it making it entertaining, the excessive lists of details cuts into the plot and sometimes loses the reader in the process. Such an instance is when the narrator is putting on his heavy clothes to go outside. There does not need to be such a huge list of things he needs to put on in order to give the reader the idea that he needs to dress up in warm clothes on. By saying instead, “I put on my heavy warm winter gear and went out the door.” would suffice.
Some details gave great insight to particular situation. Such as when the character Lesley enters the party and hugs the narrator as though she has not seen him every morning on her jog. That draws an interesting perspective to the party and it can be used to send hinting messages about how excited she is to be there, or that there is something more going on behind this narrator than he lets us know. However, nothing of the sort supports this explanation and Johnson fails to use the detail.
This story simply needs something out of the ordinary to it. There is too much plain uneventful stuff going on that eventually lead to nothing very exciting. I also find that it has too much going on outside what is being said than in it, that is due to the mistake of putting too much focus on the details and not on an interesting adventurous plot that drives the reader through the story. There is much here already laying out it just needs something more interesting to happen.