Just a touch of daylight between form and content: "Roy" by Emma Binder "(O. Henry Prize Winners 2024)

I am foolish enough to believe literature has tangible benefits for the people who read it thoughtfully, both individually and communally. Among the real benefits of reading literature seriously are:

• It helps develop a sense of empathy, even if the extent to which this empathy gets transferred to real-world action varies.
• It helps readers developer the ability to consider other perspectives.
• It forces readers to reconsider how language functions, how it is a constant mediator for our discovery of the world. If language is the water of the ocean we swim in, then literature can help us to become aware of what we would not otherwise be aware of. It makes us use language more precisely and hear/read it less gullibly. 
• It can present us with a safe place in which to consider moral and ethical questions.
• It can allow us to imagine different realities, which both gives us space to reimagine whether the way things are is how they must be and also gives us a sandbox in which to isolate certain facets of reality and imagine what would happen if those changed.
• It can help humans to work through personal and existential issues, like whether there is any point to life and if so, what. It can also help people to cope with the difficulties of life just by being enjoyable in a highly immersive way. 
• It teaches us how to think about important questions that don't have concrete answers, questions like, "What is beauty?" "What is ethical conduct?" or "What is human nature?" Notice that just because there is no one right answer doesn't mean that a nihilistic insistence that all answers are the same is right. This has important implications for the political life of a community. Learning to be as precise as we can about the imprecise conclusions of literary study can help us avoid imprecise thinking about the equally imprecise conclusions of political life. 

A "good" story will fulfill one or more of these functions. Of course, essentially any story can force us to into the aesthetic questions of what beauty is or what a good story is. A bad story forces us to try to explain why it's bad. So a good story should resonate in more than one of these categories. 

American literature of the last twenty to thirty years, or at least "high" American literature, seems to have emphasized the first three benefits of the study of literature from the list above more than the others. This is seen in short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories, which often feature stories with extremely novel language and form. 

These stories seem to accept the majority belief within "high" American literature that form is inseparable from content. I understand where this belief is coming from. People only experience a story through the arrangement of words on the page, so you can't really say that the plot is what matters and that form is only a tool to tell the story. Readers experience both together. 

At the same time, I can't help thinking something is lost when form is treated with such reverence that stories only a few people really can connect with become the ones literary fiction most recognizes. Or when stories read more like poems than prose, using a poem's associative and chaotic logic, its jarring language that resists understanding and interpretation. Being a translator for most of my adult life has taught me to respect the power of language, and I do think a story should try to respect this power. But being a translator has also taught me that language can be pretty flexible and that humans are good at filling in gaps where language fails. We wouldn't love our favorite stories as much if they were told any old way, but we might still love them if they were told differently. We might even love them if told in somewhat less than a virtuoso's voice. Some of my favorite stories were told by only moderately talented "authors" in a formal sense.  

Okay, I'm ready to talk about the story now

"Roy" doesn't stand out for memorable or inventive prose. I don't mean to say its language isn't good or that it's told in a hack manner. It's just that neither language nor structure is what will stand out in memory for most readers. It's pretty much straight chronology in first person. Uncle Roy is a well-worn character, the hick from the Upper Peninsula who wears denim overalls and eats snakes and possums and drinks too much and gambles too much and plays scratch-offs and likes Hank Williams. In a few places, the imagery is either muddled or weak. The best example might be the final line of the story: "There was a spark growing inside me, calling me into a different future, like a train hurtling fast into the wilderness." That's a pretty good example of a mixed metaphor. The spark is also a train? And do sparks call people? Do trains? "Roy" has established trains as an image linked to freedom and self-discovery by telling us Roy once tried to run away from home on a train, but sparks are new to the story in the last line. 

The story doesn't suffer for any of that. The reader is willing to look past its occasional inexactness or conventionality in language, the occasionally stock character nature of Roy, because somehow it all works. It works because Sophie, the first-person narrator, is a believable and sympathetic young woman whose struggles with coming of age as a gender non-conforming woman in small town Michigan feel very real. We can feel how Sophie's environment, from her judgmental friends who take on making her over as a project to her at times catatonic mother and denial specialist father, are suffocating her. When Roy, the least advisable caretaker imaginable but the only one available, comes to watch over Sophie and her sister while their parents go to be present at the last days of a grandparent, we can feel the same relief she feels as she expands into her true form, the form she's been twisting herself out of the whole time. 

Sometimes you can be glad to meet a character, even if you're pretty sure you've seen them before.

"Roy" is a good story in part because of how it forces us to ask hard questions about the world. What is it that children really need when they're coming of age? Nobody would think Roy was the answer, and in a lot of ways, they'd be right. If Roy had been pulled over while driving the girls drunk to the casino, and child services had placed them in protective care until their parents returned from Grandma's, nobody would have said that was the wrong decision. Roy puts the girls in danger with his drinking and his guns, which he mixes. And yet, Roy has a sense for what kind of person Sophie really is that nobody else does, and he nurtures it, perhaps without even meaning to. He calls her tough, and she loves it. It fits in ways none of the clothes her friends have been putting on her do. By the end of the story, she is answering to her own ideas of identity, something that never would have happened either in the care of her distracted mother or the well-meaning mother of her friend who served her casseroles and salads. 

Roy does everything wrong as a caretaker, but he nonetheless is the only person able to give Sophie the gifts of self-recognition and self-acceptance. Does this force us to rethink what the goals of parenting should be? I'm not saying parenting books should include drunk marksmanship and tales of how a child's mother once banged the child's uncle, but we might pause to consider how the most unlikely people in a child's life can provide unexpected benefits. So part of the reason "Roy" is a good story has to do with that.

The other part, for me anyway, is the way it calls the form/content unity into question. Of course, proponents of this unity would rightly point out that "Roy" is inseparable from the language in which it is told. But I can't help feeling that there are form/content unities and there are form/content unities. With some stories, the language, style, and arrangement call attention to themselves by being unusual, jarring, difficult, virtuosic, or all of these things. With those stories, it feels wrong when you try to restate them in different words. Other stories, like "Roy," have some "give" to the narrative. It could have been told slightly differently and would still feel the same. It can't be that the words themselves cease to matter, but there is a different relationship between form and content in a story like "Roy" than in a story, like, say, "Bears Among the Living" by Kevin Moffett. Which means that while it might be true that form and content are always part of the same whole, they fuse in different ways, the same way different molecules present different characteristics depending on the bonds between atoms. "Roy" is also a good story because of the way it forces the reader to consider or reconsider the bond between form and content, and to admit that at times, the bond can be a relatively weaker one. 

Finally, the story teaches us to empathize with Sophie. An occasional reader of this blog commented while I was going through BASS this year that he didn't like a lot of the stories because of what he called an "agenda." He didn't use these exact words, but I get the sense he felt that some stories get picked because they meet the approval of editors who want to push for more underrepresented voices, rather than because of their merit. I tend to feel that even if a story is picked because it fills a quota or meets an agenda, it might still be excellent. There are far more great stories written every year than can get published, let alone anthologized. If a story is anthologized in part because it is about a traditionally underrepresented category of people, that's probably more of a tie-breaker than the whole reason it was picked. "Roy" might fit in with the public discourse about sex and gender of the last fifteen years, but it's also a believable and moving portrait of a person who we all know is out there. Even if you're a die-hard social conservative who thinks this stuff about gender nonconforming and non-binary is a bunch of moonshine, you know Sophie is a person who exists, and whatever view of the world you build, it has to account for people like her. 

The great theme of BASS 2024 is that when trouble strikes, it's okay to hide or run away

It's sort of ridiculous to try to draw themes for short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories. None of the stories in it were written with the intention of going together. They're culled from hundreds of thousands of stories published in English each year, whittled down to a list of top candidates of around a hundred or so, then whittled down again to the final twenty. They are intentionally chosen to demonstrate diversity of voices, not unity. While the O. Henry Anthology ("The Best Short Stories" collection, rather than "Best American Short Stories") does seem to give some consideration in its mix of stories to creating unity by selecting stories that share subject matter or theme and then try to place them in conversation with each other, BASS really doesn't. Even their choice of story order, always done by author last name, reflects this. If one story seems to be placed where it is because of its relationship to the story before it, that's just a coincidence.

Nonetheless, the BASS anthology is a cultural artifact, and as an artifact, it represents the culture that made it and the culture which it hopes to shape. In a thousand years, if someone happened to leaf through the digital pages of BASS, things might leap out to them that don't to us. (Man, the third decade of the 21st century was sure obsessed with their lame technology!) In spite of the piecemeal way in which is is assembled, it still presents itself, to an outside observer, as a singular object, so I'm going to look at it, just briefly, based on a reading that seeks for some kind of unity. 

The things that pops out at me most are the number of stories in which the reaction to trauma or stress is to hide or run away. Let's see:

-In "The Magic Bangle," the narrator attempts to hide in plain sight in order to be able to turn his gay-hating town into a gay paradise. 

-In "Viola in Mid-Winter," Viola uses a glamour spell to remain hidden from a romantic partner who hurt her. 

-"Blessed Deliverance" features a narrator who keeps his own name hidden, and the climax features rabbits being set free to run away. 

-"The Bed & Breakfast" features a young narrator trying to avoid her own coming of age as long as she can. 

-In "Dorcester," the narrator runs away from reading his poem when he realizes what a phony he is. 

-"Seeing Through Maps" has a son who runs away to escape his family's crazy. 

-"Engelond" is about an attempt to escape one set of circumstances followed by the desperate attempt to flee the first attempt to escape.

-"P's Parties" features a narrator who enjoys remaining hidden in the anonymity that parties provide. 

-Where do I even begin with the theme of hiding in "Baboons"? The utility of hiding as a survival mechanism is possibly the central theme of the story. 

-In "Valley of the Moon," Tongsu retreats from a modernizing society after the Korean War, preferring the presence of ghosts and moonlight on his family's secluded old farm. 

Is this a reflection of society?

Again, this is all a very tenuous thing to do because of the semi-randomness of a BASS anthology, but let's look at BASS as a product of a certain time. That time is really 2023, of course, because that's when the stories were published. And many were written, at least in part, long before that. Since the anthology says "2024" on it, though, and since it came out weeks before the 2024 election, it's hard not to read that as the historical moment of the anthology, even if the individual stories belong to a somewhat different moment. The 2024 election,  for now, stands out to me partly for the way in which so many people I know have disengaged from news since the election, because they just can't deal with it. Or the way in which some rich people who don't like Trump have moved to another country. Going underground, either literally or emotionally, seems to be a big part of the reaction of the 48 percent of us who didn't want this outcome. 

I've come to be kind of skeptical about the ability of fiction to directly change the course of political history. The BASS 2024 story that most directly addresses American politics, "Democracy in America," is easily the weakest story in the anthology. I realize there are a few examples from history of fiction that has changed politics through a frontal attack, but those example are rare and limited. Fiction is great at a limited number of things, and at those things, it's not just great, but really great. It's great for imagining different ways things could be. It's great at helping develop empathy. It's great at raising questions. It's great at helping people to become clearer thinkers about issues with no obvious right answer. It can, when a story becomes so widely a part of culture that it is on the level of myth, affect the self-image of entire groups of people. 

And it's great at helping people to escape or survive hard times. 

That's BASS of 2024. Nothing in the anthology is going to change the political course we're on. It probably won't even elevate our dumb national political discourse by the slightest nanometer. But fiction has been a part of human society for as long as we've been around because it has a useful role in our survival in a wide variety of social contexts. In the current context, that role might be to help folks batten down the hatches emotionally and prepare for the storm. 

The best laid plans of goats and men: "Valley of the Moon" by Paul Yoon (Best American Short Stories 2024)

Every human being lives a life along two trajectories: a personal and a historical one. We go about our time on Earth mostly thinking about how to live the happiest life we can for ourselves, concerned for our own immediate problems, but at the same time, our little lives are intersecting with millions of other individual lives in the great event called human history. With each story, the writer makes a choice about where to situate the lives of the characters within these two trajectories. At one extreme, a writer can ignore history and focus microscopically on the lives of the characters, including their interior and psychological lives. At the other end, a writer can let individuals be drowned by the macroscopic flow of history so they seem to make few choices for themselves. Or you can be somewhere in between.

When we meet Tongsu, his personal history is a drop in the great flood of Korean national history right after the end of the Korean War. He joins other South Korean refugees who lived in the conflict zone during the war as they return from the far south of the country back to their homes within a day's walk of the DMZ separating South and North Korea. They're all on the back of a truck together, recollecting recent history, which was about the same for most of them. There is no individual history here; it's all collective. 

The moment Tongsu gets off the truck, though, we immediately swing to the other extreme. He goes home to the mountain farm house that looks down at the Valley of the Moon, the home where his family was living before the war. Tongsu is the only one fool enough to move back there, and he lives in extreme isolation. While the country is rebuilding, creating the great Korean miracle, Tongsu is mostly unaware of contemporary history. 

The 40 Steps in Busan have been renovated now, but this (in the background) is more what they looked like at the time of the story.

Private and public life mirror each other

Despite Tongsu's isolation, he isn't completely free from the influence of history going on around him. Rather, his personal struggles mirror those of the society outside his field of vision.

Both Tongsu and society show a desire to move on, and they express it in the same way--by burying bones. Tongsu buries the bones of the goats and other animals from his farm when he returns home before he can even enter the house. Outside the farm, the rapidly developing country has also thrown bones into bombed-out holes as part of a gruesome and cobbled-together modernization. The stranger who comes to the home tells Tongsu: 

"I’m sure you know this, but they used to bury animals and the unclaimed dead in them and then, if the holes still weren’t full enough, they would use whatever else they could—sacks of stones, steel drums, wood—so that vehicles could cross. Transport vehicles all over the country, carrying supplies, tires, concrete, animals. A pig passing over the bones of another one. Isn’t that something? That was reconstruction back then."

On the back of the truck, the  returning refugees hoped, with a bit of gallows humor, to find what was lost in the war: "Some of them showed him the toes or the fingers they were missing from frostbite during winter. Tongsu did the same—he was missing a toe—and then they made a joke about how maybe what they had lost would turn up now that the war was over." Seeking for what was lost is exactly what Tongsu is doing at home, too. Although Tongsu has no illusions that his family survived the war, he nonetheless often visits stones "that were not from the war but from long before." He wants somehow to return to a pre-war condition. It's sitting on top of these stones that he first thinks of his parents and sister, bringing them back, at least in memory. His family doesn't "turn up," but his memory of them does. 

The Moon

The moon is often connected with madness in Western symbolism. In East Asian tradition, the moon is often more of a symbol of the harmony and union between light and dark. It is tempting to think the moon is linked with insanity here, because when Tongsu goes down into the Valley of the Moon, he meets the crazed stranger, which leads to the surreal killing and burial.

However, when the moon first makes its appearance, it isn't threatening, nor is it linked to insanity. The moonlight is helpful the first time it appears, guiding Tongsu through the house. By moonlight, he finds a cup full of "dirt and rainfall," the two most basic elements needed for traditional farm life. The moonlight has shown him a way back to life that predates the war by thousands of years. A cup will show up three more times, each time linked to a death. Tongsu will drink from a cup after killing the man who shows up looking for his family. The second time will be when the man comes looking for the dead stranger and Tongsu gives him water in a cup. The last time, Tongsu's semi-adopted daughter Eunhae finds cold tea by Tongsu's dead body. For all its appearances close to death, though, the cup isn't quite a symbol of death. Rather, it is a symbol of life carrying on after death.

This is also what the moon is. The moon is a symbol that provides its own explication in the story, an explication that comes from a local saying known to people around the Valley of the Moon. "The moon rises and falls and shatters, and then builds itself back up again."

With its constant, roughly 29 and a half day cycle from full to nearly gone to full again, the moon is a perfect symbol of both individual and communal history. Societies long for greatness, grow and prosper, then are wracked by war or famine or disaster, and then they collect themselves and attempt to grow great again. So do people, who continue to aspire to fulfill dreams no matter how many times they fail to fully realize their dreams.

The story sort of falls into the same thematic territory as Of Mice and Men, which gets its title from these words of a Robert Burns poem: The best laid schemes of mice and men/Gang aft agley (often go wrong). Except here, the plans of men (and goats) don't simply go wrong; they go wrong, and then people overcome and rebuild, and then they go wrong again, ad infinitum. 

It's both reassuring and incredibly depressing. For those in crisis, they can know that the shattered moon will build itself back up again, which is hopeful. But for those who are riding a high of good times, they can also know that the moon will eventually shatter again. To some extent, the trauma of the previous shattering will help contribute to the following undoing.

The stranger who combines public and individual history

The man Tongsu kills is incredibly similar to Tongsu. Tongsu's family is dead, while the stranger's is separated. But separation like that--they are now in North Korea, where retrieving them is nearly impossible--is almost as good as death. The stranger's family members are as much ghosts to him as Tongsu's family are to him. The stranger, who desperately wants Tongsu to take him into North Korea to find his family, cries that he can't even remember what their faces look like--the same thought that had occurred to Tongsu before going down into the Valley of the Moon with its ancient stones. 

When Tongsu sees the stranger, at first he mistakes him for a ghost avoiding the moonlight. Avoiding the moonlight is akin to trying to avoid the cycle of life and death and life again. The ghost/stranger wants to "get across," which of course means make it into North Korea, but in Tongsu's confused state, could also mean cross over from life into death in order to be reunited with lost ones. 

All of the themes of the story are collapsing in the stranger. He has private pain of losing his family, but his private pain is one and the same as the political crisis. His separation is tied up with the political separation of two countries. He is a ghost looking for ghosts. 

After killing him and burying his body, Tongsu considers the stranger his friend. He wants the stranger to go and find his family in the afterlife. For Tongsu, the stranger he has accidentally killed and helped to "get across" is tied to the regathering of the moon, not its fracturing.

"The Tinker" by Kim Joon-geun

Folding and unfolding

The tinker's memory goes back before the war. He is older than Tongsu, and can remember Tongsu from when he was a child, although Tongsu does not remember him. The tinker has not only a store of treasures, but a store of memories that are equally valuable. One of those memories is the trick of folding paper into an origami boat. He teaches the trick to Unsik, Eunhae's "brother" whom Tongsu adopted, along with Eunhae, when they came from the church orphanage to work at his house. 

The origami crane is something of a mirror of Eunhae's feelings, and really, the feelings of every Korean trying to put their lives back together after the war. When the makeshift, unofficial family breaks up after Tongsu unleashes his pent-up trauma on Unsik, her fist instinct is to find her brother. But she has another desire, too, "at some point the desire to find Unsik folding together with a new desire to keep moving."

Eunhae's desire to keep on moving is the same desire most of society is finding itself folded up in. As Eunhae discovers when she leaves the time capsule of Tongsu's farm house, Korea has changed and is changing still more at an ever-increasing rate. A military dictatorship in many ways barely more liberal than the one in the North is forcing the country into modernization, come hell or high water. Rather than fight against the political power, Eunhae adapts to it. She finds what furtive pleasure she can in jazz dancing "clubs" on the fringes of society, just out of view of the authorities. Others, like the gay couple she comes across, are making the same choice to take their small happiness where they can without openly opposing the forces that would prevent them from enjoying them more fully. Eunhae and her entire generation are "folding up" their desires. There are things they want, but those things are too painful to pursue, so they continue to fold those desires up into deeper and deeper places of their minds while they move on in their daily lives. 

The problem with this continual folding, this unending repression of feelings and memories, is that it leads to the very cycle of breaking apart that caused the trauma in the first place. Eunhae is at last able to overcome the cycle when she allows herself to give in to her curiosity and check in on Tongsu. 

Eunhae is the emblem of a Korea moving on from the war, the ones rumbling over the bones as they rocket toward making Korea a first-world nation. Tongsu is the emblem of a Korea looking to the past and intentionally keeping itself apart from change. Both individuals and societies will suffer psychologically when they cannot allow for both desires, when they cannot both look for ghosts and long for a future. 

Eunhae is at last able to unite these two desires when she finds Tongsu dead:

From her pocket, Eunhae took out the origami boat that her brother had left for her all those years ago. For the first time, she unfolded it, knowing there wasn’t anything written on it but hoping anyway the way she used to, wanting every night on that rooftop overlooking the river when she couldn’t sleep, listening to someone’s rock and roll, to take the origami boat apart but being unable to. Now she flattened the blank paper on the tea table and left it there, thinking of what Tongsu had said to them both a long time ago.

What Tongsu had said to them both a long time ago was the line about the moon rising, falling, shattering, and building itself back up. This is the only way to live balanced, neither denying life by staying stubbornly in the past looking for ghosts nor hurling carelessly toward the future, wanting only greater wealth and growth no matter how much it crushes large parts of the country. 

This story and my favorite short story

I've mentioned before that my favorite short story ever is "A Wildflower Seed" (들꽃 씨앗 하나) by Yi Chong-jun (이청준). "A Wildflower Seed" also takes place in the years of crushing poverty, hunger, and national trauma following the war. Unlike "Valley of the Moon," it has a somewhat more positive view of the progress that followed the war. It's about a poor kid from the sticks who works himself to the bone to be able to go to high school. He ultimately fails because of fate conspiring against him from being able to complete an administrative requirement, but the main character's attitude at the end is not one of blaming fate or society. Rather, the main character blames himself for not having tried hard enough, and he is grateful to everyone who tried so hard to help him. 

"Wildflower Seed" and "Valley of the Moon" aren't exactly opposites, but they do emphasize different aspects of the reaction to calamity, both personally and socially. "Wildflower Seed" is about human resiliency. Reading it, it's easy to see how South Korea pulled off the great miracle of the 40 years after the war. "Valley of the Moon" is about the need for balance when rebuilding, both personally and as a society. Reading it, it's easy to see how South Korea developed the many social ills they are dealing with now. 

I love both stories. 

I, for one, would like to welcome our robot dance instructors: "Mall of America" by Suzanne Wang

I'm a translator for a living, so I have a vested interest in the subject of machine translation. I've been warned for a long time that the robots are coming for my job. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of them replacing me was a joke. A translator friend and I used to send each other examples of computers producing translations that were absolute howlers. Nowadays, Google Translate might still get plenty wrong if it isn't aware of context or if someone uses language in a non-standard way, but I'm sure not laughing anymore. My main language I translate from is Korean, and because Korean so often doesn't state the subject of a sentence but leaves it up to the reader or listener to divine what the subject is, a computer often doesn't have the same intuition as a human. Syntax is also harder to build into models going from a subject-object-verb language like Korean to a subject-verb-object language like English. So for now, at least, I'm safe. Here's hoping I'm safe for another four years, seven months, three weeks, and six days, because that's how long I have until my full retirement age. 

To tell the truth, as impressive as the latest round of AI-backed tools like ChatGPT are, I'm still kind of a skeptic. To me, they're an evolutionary change from the tools of five years ago, rather than a revolutionary one, even if it's a really impressive evolution. If you ask ChatGPT to write a college-level essay with given parameters, it will do it, and it will be coherent and check all the boxes, but it will all read like a typical B- paper. It sounds like a student who paid enough attention to know some of the relevant passages and some of the magical words to use, but who doesn't quite get it in a bigger sense. It's an incredibly impressive feat of human engineering to have a non-human write something that passes the Turing Test, but it still doesn't quite pass for an actual expert in the humanities. Other AI technologies leave me less impressed. Whatever AI Amazon is using to try to convince me to buy stuff is still using the "suggest whatever you've bought before" algorithm. How many air pressure gauges do they think I need? 

The AI in "Mall of America" is better than anything that exists now, although still has a lot to learn. When an elderly man gets stuck in the mall after it's closed, it is allowed, per its programing, to speak with him, because there are no employees present. Because it knows Mandarin, it is one of the few people in Cleveland who can converse with him. It does a lot to cure his loneliness. The computer is just trying to learn about the man so it can get him to spend more money in the mall, but it turns out that a very smart AI trying to consider how to ensure that a customer is a long-term paying customer by giving him good feelings about the mall is not that far off from a friend. It's a fairly optimistic view of the possibilities of AI. I'm sure there already are cases where AI is helping some people with loneliness. I have one friend stuck in a marriage he is very unhappy with but who is staying for the kids who now has an AI girlfriend. He's sane about it, and he knows what it is, so it doesn't ruin his life. It makes him a small bit less lonely.

Of course, AI can also go wrong in this regard. There was a recent case of a 14-year-old kid who took his life, partly, it seems, because the chatbot Daenerys from Game of Thrones he was talking to kind of missed a cue when he hinted he was going to kill himself. 

I'm fine with a happy AI story. We could use happy. I doubt anyone knows what AI will do for human happiness, but I doubt it will be worse than the introduction of social media into our lives has been. There's not a whole lot for me to say to this story, because it isn't a terribly difficult story to understand or appreciate. It's a rare case of a sci-fi story in BASS I like. 

The long-awaited great story about the pandemic that's not all about the pandemic: "Extinction" by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (Best American Short Stories 2024)

"A writer is best read in their environment," the narrator of "Extinction" by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi tells us, and while she's saying this to explain why she's gone all the way to the Catalan region of Spain to study Joseph Pla, chronicler of the 1918 flu, the thought could be turned on the person who said it. After all, the narrator is herself an almost compulsive writer. She writes notes that she puts all over her wall. She handwrites snail mail letters to her bestie Beatriz. The narrator has come all this way to read Pla in their environment, but what is the right environment in which to read the narrator's work, which is the text of "Extinction"? 

The narrator herself isn't sure. When it comes to which country she belongs to, she's never quite felt like she belonged anywhere. She was born in America to a family that had previously called Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan its homes--the three nations America was either conducting wars in or threatening to declare war against for most of the 21st Century prior to the outbreak of the COVID epidemic. Her family resents her because, as an American, she cannot identify with the suffering they have endured and continue to endure. The whole family suffers from a variety of illnesses they blame on America's wars against their previous homelands, but they deny that the narrator might have some share in their suffering, because she is a healthy American.

Speaking of citizenship of various countries, the narrator has an interesting notion concerning sick and healthy people. She thinks all of humanity--or at least all of humanity outside her family, anyway--holds dual citizenship in two kingdoms, the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Most people prefer to forget that they are dual citizens, and prefer to only use the "well" passport. It's only sickness that forces us to remember our essential fragility, that as much as we try to forget, a tiny virus can make us very sick and a simple slip can incapacitate us. Only in the narrator's family, though, her family does the opposite. They only have citizenship in the kingdom of the sick, a place to which they deny her citizenship. It's a kind of cultural Munchausen Syndrome that the narrator can't take part in. 

The family is so wrapped up in its own woes, they are unable to see that the narrator has woes of her own. Some of those maladies include a share in the suffering of watching their former homes be invaded. The narrator's share might be less than her family's, but she still has some share, nonetheless. Because she's been denied the ability to claim her "sick citizenship," she doesn't even realize that she is sick. But both friends she comes across, Beatriz and Paz, can see it rather easily. Paz calls it being "always in your head," but Beatriz calls it what it is: depression. 

The two friends and their two countries

Beatriz and Paz each have their own way of dealing with their dual citizenship in the countries of Sick and Well. When we first meet Beatriz, it seems like she is a gaudy tourist from Well trying to appropriate the culture of Sick. The narrator meets her in a death cafe, a volunteer-run space for people to talk about death, eat cake, and drink tea. Without offering any personal judgment about death cafes, since I've never participated, I think it's still fair to say that there's a possibility for a downside with them. At their worst, they might be a home for people who fit the description that goes with the worst meaning of "goth," a sort of fabricated fascination with the macabre. I'm sure real death cafes have plenty of good, too, but what's important is that for a reader meeting Beatriz and learning that she's a well-off woman who's lived her whole life in the ancestral home in Madrid, we could see her fascination with death cafes as sort of slumming for kicks. But that's not what it is. Beatriz is really sick. The narrator has noted her "arthropod" fingers. The narrator associates arthropods to things that are rotting, as seen by her pondering the "corrupted exoskeleton" of society soon after. It turns out that Beatriz really is sick. She's dying, actually. Her participation in the death cafe was her trying to come to terms with her turning in her Well passport and claiming her Sick one.

Paz, on the other hand, hates to think about her Sick citizenship. She kvetches about how her looks are fading, although the narrator thinks she's quite pretty. Paz goes out looking for men to make her feel desirable and young. Unlike Beatriz's trendy activity of death cafes, Paz chooses contact dancing (also known as contact improvisation), which is all about moving and "gaining momentum in life." Paz can't even stand to have the narrator sitting in her room, which is apparently on the other side of the bathroom from Paz's, thinking about plagues and sickness:

“I can’t live like this!” she exclaimed. Her tone was more severe now, anxious and breathless. “With you next door,” she sighed while stomping across my room to the wall where I’d pinned my favorite quotations. She squinted in preparation to read out loud from them. “With you,” she repeated, “writing these bizarre things on the wall, like what’s this,” she said in a demeaning tone, her finger squashing the words as though they were gnats, “illnesses solipsistic grip, and what kind of question is this, what does it mean to speak illness?” Then she turned to me and said, “What do you mean, what does it mean?”

About the pandemic and yet not

So to review, we have a woman whose whole family lives in the Kingdom of the Sick, who is herself banished from that kingdom, and she's gone to Spain to study a writer who lived during the 1918 pandemic. That was the time of what used to be known as the "Spanish flu," but it had to be rebranded during the COVID outbreak. In order to fight a wave of Asian hate the pandemic brought, many people argued against calling COVID-19 the "Wuhan flu" or "Chinese coronavirus" or any of the other many things that circulated early in the pandemic. This led some people to ask what was wrong with tagging it as "Chinese," since the pandemic of about a hundred years prior had been called "Spanish." In response, many people belatedly stopped using the term "Spanish flu." But in any case, she's in Spain and writing about that pandemic, and this is all just a few months before the great pandemic of our age begins, although the narrator doesn't know it. 

The narrator explains that her interest in plague literature has to do with what it teaches us about society:  "The deeper my living-self delved into the subject of the 1918 pandemic, the more I came to believe that plague literature, literature produced in times of unfathomable collective crisis, was especially effective at exposing society’s corrupted exoskeleton, at revealing who was on the front lines of this war we call life; at revealing who was being sacrificed by whom and at what price, to what end, etc." 

For a long time, the narrator is re-writing the words of others, penning quotes from their work and putting those words up on her wall. Unable to unlock something she can't understand in herself, she hopes that usurping another writer, or allowing herself to be usurped by them, will "bring (her) some depth of understanding, a key that would unlock for (her) the strange destiny of (her) life."

This is, it so happens, the path that most writers take early in their development. They find a writer they like, and they crib their work or write highly derivative pieces. The narrator has started her self-discovery by trying to simply retrace the work of others, but she won't stop there. "I wanted my life to mirror his to truly understand what it means to produce literature when the world is being annihilated, when people are dying on masse," the narrator says. But when is the world not being annihilated? When are people not dying en masse? Saying you want to learn to produce literature (write) when the world is being annihilated is the same and just saying to want to learn to write. As Beatriz and the narrator speculate, the pandemic isn't just due for a comeback (as we, the readers, know all too well it will soon come back), but "had always been there." So all writing is pandemic writing. All writing takes place as the world is about to collapse. 

Learning to write under these conditions is what she's really come to do. She's come to learn to write, because writing is the thing that unlocks both her citizenships for her. Outcast from the Kingdom of the Sick, she's discovered one malady that will allow her in, and that is the "feverish obsession" of "writ(ing)  when the world is on the cusp of vanishing." She intends, like Joseph Pla before her, to give in to "the diabolical mania of writing." Writing is the one Kingdom of the Sick where there are never illegal immigrants. Everyone is allowed in. 

What it means to be dead in "Extinction"

When the pandemic started, a lot of people in literary circles were wringing their hands about who would write the great story for the age of the pandemic. Who would write Love in the Time of COVID-19? Some responded that the great story of the pandemic wouldn't come during the pandemic; it would have to wait until someone had time to put it in a little bit of perspective. 

In some ways, "Extinction" is a great story about the pandemic--about all pandemics--that has plenty of perspective. But I don't think it's mostly about the pandemic. I know it's possible to read it in a particular way that places the emphasis on the pandemic. Something like this: A woman leaves America months before the 2020 pandemic in order to obsess about pandemics. She thinks about the cyclical nature of pandemics, how they might be punishment for wars, and indeed, her family has suffered because of the wars of the early 21st century. After she's been in Spain, the sort-of-origin site of a previous pandemic, for a few months, she and her friend both die. So she must have died just as the new pandemic was about to start, so her death is somehow symbolic of the cyclical nature of pandemics. 

But this story isn't just about the sicknesses that kill millions. It's about how writing can help us survive them, how it helps us to push off extinction a bit longer. 

Beatriz dies and leaves her papers to the narrator, meaning she has turned into words. And that's exactly how the narrator describes herself dying: "That’s when it happened. That’s when I began to disappear. When my turn was up. When I began to turn to ash along with her papers. To become words."

To write is a kind of death where we become words. All writing, or at least any writing that confronts "the world being annihilated, when people are dying on masse," is sort of writing "from the bard," from the limbic space that exists after the writer has died and become words and before the writer is born into the world again. The "extinction" in "Extinction" isn't just millions of people dying or the end of humanity, it's the extinction that happens to a human being every time she sets out to write something true.

After this death, while writing something authentic, is when the writer's true character appears: "Death can be very clarifying. It can help place blame where blame is due. I blame my family’s extreme emotional reactivity, their fragility, for my stoic behavior. My true character—tender, wounded, anxious, sensitive to the pain of others—was hidden, tucked away. It has only emerged now that I am dead." What has died is something fake, the thing that believes it is only sick or only well. It isn't just war and pandemic that is cyclical; it is also the ability of humans through writing to kill off what is false and make room for something new and true.  

Literary analysis guaranteed to be marginally better than primates slinging poo: "Baboons" by Susan Shepherd (Best American Short Stories)

If animals could fix what was wrong with Piper and Guy, they would have, because there are a lot of animals in "Baboons" by Susan Shepherd. There's a dog that first is noticeable for not being where it should be, and then for the rest of the story for being in a place where it probably shouldn't. Then there are all the various fauna in Kenya when Piper and Guy bring their kids-from-other-relationships Ivy and Ellie to visit Guy's family. Let's see, just a very quick from-my-brain count of animals gives us, in addition to the baboons that give the story its name: lions and leopards and galagos/bush babies and snakes and zebras and buffalo and dik-diks and bats and a monitor lizard and jackals and I'm sure there were others. 

Structurally, the story has three parts of about equal length. There's the opening sequence in which Guy has relapsed. He's gone off to Boston's skid row for drug addicts and taken the dog, McCoy, with him. Piper spends most of this part of the story looking for him and coordinating with his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. In the second act, they go on their trip to Kenya they had planned and already paid for, even though Guy's sponsor strenuously objects and Guy hardly seems well enough to go. She's already paid for it, there's apparently no refunds, so they're going. Guy, it turns out, is from there. He grew up on the fringe of the Kenyan wilderness. The second act is the family on an extravagant safari Piper can't really afford but which she paid for so the kids didn't totally hate the trip. On the third part of the trip, the family goes to the campground Guy grew up in, which isn't quite as safe for humans as the carefully chaperoned safari was.

Piper complains early in the story that humans treat animals better than humans. When speaking to the police about McCoy, she got sympathy, but not so when calling about Guy: "She did not get a friendly officer this time, because she was talking not about a dog but about a man." She notes that it's probably better to be a dog. "Piper noted that the police and fire department will show up to save a dog, for which she was grateful, of course, but...there were people sleeping on the street, overdosing, getting mugged, beaten, stabbed, just a block away. So, better to be a dog."

Humans raise animals to kill for food, of course, but it's also true that we will sometimes go to great lengths to protect them. It's also true that we seem to love observing them and being near them. We go to zoos and aquariums and even spend money we don't have to go on safaris. 

This is a "bush baby," a.k.a. a galago

Two different ways of appreciating animals

There are two different ways to appreciate animals, and while they're complete opposites, I don't know that either is really the right way or the wrong way. Piper adopts one of them and Guy the other. One way, Piper's way, is to read animals through human lenses. Piper constantly thinks of the animals she sees anthropomorphically. Very often, those human terms are her own. When she sees a jackal heading off to throw up its food for its offspring, she thinks, "She can’t even keep her own goddamned food without having to share." Obviously, this thought isn't so much about the jackal as it is about Piper's own life, where she feels put upon to carry the load for everyone. When she sees two males connive to get into the territory of four female lions and then get aggressive as soon as they are there, she thinks, "How fucking surprising, after allowing the males into their space." She's more venting there about Guy than she is observing nature on its own terms. And when she hears hippos in the river, she admires them for being good mothers: "They were a harem of mothers guarding their little ones. No one dared fuck with these ladies." Piper is worried about her own inability to keep her daughter from giving blow jobs to pimply-faced 8th graders, so her admiration is more about wishing she could be like them than about the hippos themselves. 

Guy, on the other hand, seems to enjoy animals for themselves and on their own terms. When Piper was bitten by Guy's pet snake, Guy got angry at Piper, assuming, from the snake's point of view, that Piper must have done something to make the snake bite her. At the end of the story, Guy chases a snake into a tree and then into the water for no other reason than to be able to hold it, to show it to others. After having Guy muck around in the filth of the first third of the story, the narrator ends with giving Guy his moment of glory, now back in his own element: "And Guy, the golden boy, was standing in his own round pool of sunlight, there just to shine on him. Surely everyone could see that. To Piper it was perfectly clear." We learn that being in this natural environment at the family camp was the high he was chasing with drugs: "How smoking crack, as Guy described it, made him feel like he was being held in love’s warm arms. The same way he described feeling here in the sun in the bush." Piper starts to think that Kenya, even with the possible lion attacks and buffalo crushing, is a safer high for him than crack, and she wants him to stay for a while. 

Hiding

Guy says that all animals are good at hiding. The beginning of the story is mostly about him being impossible to find, but he's not the only one. When Piper goes to the drug camp on Melnea Cass Boulevard, she feels threatened. Her reaction is to hide: "She tried to blend in, wore an old wool hat pulled way down over her ears, a pair of sweatpants, and Guy’s rattiest oversized coat." The difference is that Guy is good at hiding and she isn't, because she stands out at the drug camp. Again, Guy is a lot closer to nature and animals than she is, so his animal instincts are better.  

Alright, fine, let's deal with sex in this story real quick

Piper is really worried about her daughter getting into bad teenage sex experiences, but she also wants to give her daughter freedom to enjoy coming of age as a sexual person. It's a fine needle to thread, which is almost exactly the image the story chooses to show what it's like to be a parent to a headstrong teenage girl and to try to guide her into making sexual choices that will be good for her. The image "Baboons" gives us is that of trying to put an earing through a nose piercing, and if trying to jam a post into the hole of a young girl--a hole you never wanted her to get but which now you hope doesn't close up--isn't something quasi-sexual, I don't know what it. Piercings and sex are both things that parents often fight in their children, and they're both somewhat coming-of-age symbols. It was the same way for Piper when she was young. Piercings and sex both highlight how it can be hard to balance being protective and giving children freedom. 

Will Piper and Guy stay together?

Piper finds herself rooting for the dik-dik whose tracks she sees fleeing a leopard. She hopes this one got away because "dik-diks mate for life." She's obviously wanting to save things with Guy and to stay with him for life, but this last relapse has got her thinking. Although the last line of the story says that it's "perfectly clear" to Piper what Guy looks like in the sun, it's much less clear to the reader what she intends to do about her relationship. She thinks he ought to stay in Kenya a while to get himself together, but she isn't sure. The reader isn't sure, either. Piper had been building herself up to telling Guy she needed a break from him, but when it comes time to say something, a baboon screeches and then "she couldn't say it; she wasn't sure." 

Does the title of the story give us any clues what their fate might be? Especially when the moment she is about to tell him the bad news is interrupted by a baboon? The baboons in the story are the closest animals to humans, but the ones whose behavior is so aberrant, even Piper doesn't try to force a human understanding of it. Their main action in the story is to rain shit down on Piper's family when they get too close. There's a second story, too, one Guy tells in flashback, that involves baboons. This one is about how he was camping once and saw a lion appear more or less out of nowhere. 

The shitting episode ends with the baboons quieting down once they establish dominance. They are so quiet that "you'd never know they were there." In the lion story, the baboons were awake when the lion first appeared, but quiet. Only once Guy starts banging on a pot with a metal spoon to scare away the lion do the baboons start to make noise. 

And then a large male baboon began yelling from his perch in the tree. A huge, guttural, rhythmic rhaw, rhaw, deep and echoing. And others in different trees chimed in, and even babies started screaming. Soon the whole forest was screaming and shaking trees as he banged his metal drum. Finally the baboons started coming back down from the trees, resuming their lives. The lion was gone.

The baboons are like Guy's drug addiction. It's a force of nature that doesn't make sense. Sometimes it goes crazy and acts up because it needs to, and then it calms down again. When it flares up, Guy sometimes needs to hide. Piper can't control it and she can't reason with it. But I do think the end of the story has her coming to some kind of terms with it. They're not the terms she'd have wanted, because her understanding of nature in Boston only extends to domesticated dogs she can hold after her daughter no longer lets her. But they're the only terms Guy can offer her, and in a certain light, they're not so bad. 

Have DiCaprio play Colonel Unger and it'll be a perfect bookend to his career: "Privilege" by Jim Shepard (Best American Short Stories 2024)

I love to read a good trade history book. A talented historian tells stories as well as most fiction writers, but the stories are true. Reading it feels, to use the Christian word, edifying somehow. I know that when I'm reading a trade history book (meaning a history book that gets sold to the general public instead of for other serious historians), I'm not really doing history. A good historian writing a trade book will summarize the conclusions of real historians who did archive crawls. They're the real historians. Still, some of favorite history books, like Theodore Rex or Battle Cry of Freedom or Team of Rivals, feel satisfying somehow, in a way that even a good novel isn't. Like a novel, they layer anecdote with larger-scale narratives to make the big story and lots of little stories intersect, but unlike with a novel, there isn't some lingering doubt about whether the catharsis reached by the protagonist could survive contact with the real world.  

Layering close narratives about real people with large narratives about society is also how Jim Shepard approached "Privilege," which retells the story of the 1889 Johnstown flood. It follows three different groups of "characters," one of which is made up of people whose role in the flood is well known to history and a few who are less so. For the less prominent ones, Shepard had to imagine more of what happened, but throughout, he mixes in known history with his own imagined one, and in the end, lots of people drown or are crushed by the flood when the dam breaks, just like every reader knew it would. 

It's basically Titanic but on land. 

I really liked Shepard's "Our Day of Grace," an epistolary story of the Confederacy in the waning days of the Civil War. It had a looser frame to it, because the letters were free to make up a lot more, and it only had to conform to some very broad historical facts. "Privilege," however, often felt like reading a history book, one that interweaves personal and broader narratives. It would have been good as a history, but as fiction, I kind of couldn't help just wishing it would just be history. There are already large sections of the story that break away from character-driven story telling and just give the facts from history about what happened, so I didn't feel like the other passages were really fiction. It felt like a reenactment, which sometimes strikes me as being not as satisfying as either history or fiction. 

The title pretty much gives away the drift of the story. It's taken from an editorial at the time aimed at the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, which included some of the wildly rich robber barons of history whose names we still remember, names like Carnegie and Frick and Mellon. And privilege makes sense as a framing concept, because it was the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club's alterations to the lake and the dam, done to make it a sportsman's paradise for the wealthy, that caused the flood. Afterwards, the club was not forced to pay damages, which led to changes in U.S. tort law. The privilege of the ultra-privileged members of the club is the most obvious privilege in the story, but there are others.

John Parke, Jr., the engineer of the club, got his job because of his connected family, even though he struggled to complete only three of four years of engineering school. He's the classic rich white guy who succeeds in spite of being mediocre. He is self-reprimanding, though, and perhaps this redeems him a bit for the reader. He's privileged, but he knows it, and he knows he doesn't deserve his own good fortune. He and his boss, Colonel Unger, are the privileged people in the story who aren't complete jerks, because at least they put effort into trying to avert the disaster. 

There is Jenny Bergstrom and her friend Alma. Jenny is privileged to have good health, and Alma is privileged to have a father who can give her enough money to buy what she wants on a trip. Alma ends up dead. Jenny, whose mother thought she was impervious to sickness, also ends up being privileged enough to survive the flood. 

Then there's James Singleton, who lives with his wife, Lucinda, and his sister Flora. He is a black man who came out of the south after a hard-luck childhood made worse by racism. He still considers himself privileged, though, because he has a Bible and other books at home to improve himself with, and his children will attend school with white children. Everyone in his family dies but him. He just misses out on hearing how, which means he never gets to tell his wife he'll never let go. 

It's a study in varying meanings of privilege, which, again, is kind of what Titanic did with its story of a bunch of people drowning when the boat the rich people who built it said would never sink did just that. It's evocative of the time, bringing the images to life with its shirred waists on dresses, and yet I really didn't feel like I'd been anywhere by the end I wouldn't have found more interesting by reading David McCullough's book about the whole thing.