Choose your own analysis: Is "Didi" by Amber Caron dull or terribly clever?

Depending on how you read "Didi" by Amber Caron, it might be a dull feminist morality tale that leans too heavily on the cultural and political tropes of recent feminism at the expense of character development, OR it might be a very clever commentary on how people can fail those around them when they lean too heavily on theories about the world to understand people who need help rather than observing the people themselves, OR it might be a no-fault story about how scary it is that the situation can change so quickly when caring for a child. As Val yells at Evan at one point in the story: "We have three options!" 

The first five and half lines above were all one sentence. Korean might be having an effect on my English prose. Let me explain in shorter sentences. 

Synopsis

Didi is a teenage girl in trouble who goes to stay with narrator Aunt Val and her husband Evan for a month one summer. Didi's father thinks their boring life in Westport, CT might be the antidote to the trouble Didi's getting herself in, sneaking out and wearing suggestive clothing that seems to suggest she's gotten promiscuous. Since Val used to do similar stuff when she was Didi's age, the father perhaps thinks she might be able to relate. For a while, things seem okay to Aunt Val and Evan, although Didi seems a little calculating, a little manipulative. Still, they seem to be having a good time together until Didi disappears one night. Didi's father leaves their home in East Texas to come to his sister Val's, and they wait. Didi eventually returns without explanations. Based on the details from the narrator, I see three basic ways of interpreting this story: 

Reading One

1) Didi is a troubled child because she falls victim to some of the pathologies recent feminism has highlighted that our culture creates specifically in young women. One point of emphasis in recent feminism has been to show how young women are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to not occupy more space than is strictly necessary. It teaches them to be small, both in physical and auditory volume. Here, let me Google it for you...the first three hits that seem to me to more or less explain this belief are here, here, and here. This causes women to censure their actions, their words, and their thoughts, to be calculating about everything, and to worry constantly about how they are perceived. 

The first thing Aunt Val notices about Didi is how fully she is falling into this trap. 

The first thing I notice is that Didi is small, makes herself even smaller by curling up on a single couch cushion. She crosses her arms even when standing in large rooms. Tucks her legs under her body when she sits at the kitchen table, pushes her silverware under the lip of her dinner plate to take up even less space. Everything about her is scrunched, compact. 

So there it is, a pretty overt link between a character's issues and well-worn feminist theory. It gets returned to a few times in the story, showing us how little Didi eats (so she will be as small as possible), how she doesn't move at night while sleeping, how she even sleeps on top of the covers. At the end of the story, Aunt Val, who maybe understands Didi's underlying psychology better than the others because it was also her psychology, takes action to try and arrest Didi's habit for making herself small: "So I do the only thing I can. I pull her hands out of her pockets. I push her shoulders back. I am not gentle." Sort of a Marine Corps solution: quit slouching and get your hands out of your pockets. 

In this reading, narrator Aunt Val has correctly diagnosed Didi's ailment, and her final act in the story is the first act in Didi's healing process. Women, go ahead and take up space, this story is saying. 

To me, this is the most boring possible reading. While I think there's a lot of validity to the point raised by feminism about how women are taught to make themselves small, I also don't think there's a simple link between that tendency and the particular bad behaviors of struggling young women. You can't Marine Corps this shit and tell people to stand up straight and fix them. That hope kind of reminds me of the scene in Parenthood, where Grandma comes in and tells Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen a story about life's ups and downs, and just when the audience thinks this is the wisdom the two characters needed, Steve Martin shows the audience how wrong they were to expect such an easy solution to real problems to come from Grandma's story: "You know, a minute ago, I was really confused about life, and then Grandma came in with her wonderful and affecting roller coaster story, and now everything's GREAT again!"  

So reading one, which is a straightforward diagnosis of a problem and a solution from a more or less reliable narrator, doesn't interest me much.

Reading Two

2. The narrator's own misreading causes her to apply the wrong solution, or to misdiagnose the problem. The narrator is very quick to read a popular feminist interpretation of the problems of young people into Didi, but how closely is she really paying attention? She does, after all, miss a lot of clues that Didi was about to bolt right before she disappeared. And Evan, although he doesn't see everything, is the one who picks up on how she walks around with "mirrors" around her, like she's evaluating herself all the time and being extremely calculating and even manipulative. Aunt Val didn't see it. 

Val has a job studying shrimp. Part of this job involves cutting out the eyes of the shrimp in order to study their unique vision. Val confesses to being something of a voyeur. She's clearly obsessed with vision, with being able to observe. But she's willing to cut the eyes out of the shrimp to get at their secrets. She doesn't love the thing she studies. She only loves the power of being able to observe. Val doesn't even realize how twisted this is, because when Didi asks if the shrimp feel pain from her experiments, Val can only prevaricate and say that they're "getting better at controlling for that." 

Val also mostly pushes aside her realization of how the life choices she's forced on Evan have made him mostly unhappy. He's had to follow her around and to take whatever work he could find, because the couple was prioritizing Val's career. Val knows this, but manages to keep it mostly out of her line of vision, because it's uncomfortable for her. She'll observe anything, as long as it's what she wants to see. 

Val thinks she's a great observer, but she actually sucks at it. She replaces her theories based on whatever feminism she's read for actual observation. In so doing, she harms the person she's trying to keep an eye on. 

This is the most interesting possible reading to me. One kind of intriguing result of reading the story in this way is what it does to a direct address to the reader the narrator does at the end of the story. After Didi reappears, the narrator, speaking both to and for the reader, asks a series of questions: "And what is it you want to know? Whether my brother hits her?...Whether she is crying?...Or do you want to know where she was, what she was doing?" I didn't really want to know any of these things, but in this second reading, this series of questions can become a kind of projection onto the reader of the narrator's own failure to observe faithfully. She is criticizing the reader for being unable to interpret what happened because she can't bring herself to blame her own lack of observation. 

Reading Three

3. There really isn't anyone at fault here. Parenting is hard. Val once observed an overworked mother who accidentally locked herself out of her home while her toddlers were inside. It went from being a situation she had under control to an emergency in the blink of an eye. Maybe that's what parenting is, mostly. 

One of my favorite short stories ever, "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken, covers similar thematic terrain. That's also a story of parents who try a summer change of scenery to reset their daughter's troubling behavior. They also think it's working until they find out how terribly wrong they have been. 

"Didi" isn't as instantly and obviously a story about parenting I'll love as "Thunderstruck." I felt like with "Thunderstruck," I immediately felt it was a story that explained why parenting is so terrifying. "Didi" is a little harder to immediately file away as a story that revealed the truth about kids or teens or people who make bad life choices. But it is a story that rewards a second reading and a little further consideration.  

Unexpected jerk: "The Import" by Jai Chakrabarti (O.Henry Anthology)

Early on in reading "The Import" by Jai Chakrabarti and nearly until the end, I thought I knew what kind of story I was reading. I thought it was a "banality of evil" sort of story. We have Raj, who wants to do the right thing by not taking advantage of Rupa. When he finds out that Rupa, who has come from India to be the nanny to his child for six months (paid for by Raj's mother, who apparently has some amount of wealth), has her own child back home, he knows he ought to tell his mother to send her back right away. It isn't right to care for his child by making another child lose his mother, even if the money Rupa will make as a nanny will allow her to pay for private school for her child. But Raj is ultimately kind of a pliable man who enjoys ease and comfort. "Do enough" is his mantra at work, and it seems to be the same in most things. He isn't ambitious, and  he is prone to the sins of the flesh, as his occasional dalliances with Molly Choi demonstrate. He ought to send Rupa home, but her being there is so convenient. It makes his life much easier, so much more comfortable. So he falls into a "gentle forgetting" of Rupa's situation and chooses instead to enjoy the freedom her presence gives him. 

Raj is contrasted with his wife, Bethany, who is highly ambitious, which is why she stayed on as the full-time earner after the birth of Raj and Bethany's child. Bethany is opposed to hiring Rupa, and one of the reasons at least seems to be that she is uncomfortable with being one of those people who hires a girl from a poor village, taking advantage of her circumstances. When Raj finds out that Rupa has a daughter, he doesn't tell Bethany, and we, the readers, sort of figure it's because she'd say Rupa can't stay once she finds out. 

As the story got near the end, I was sure I knew what was coming. They'd already set up the boy loving the water and Rupa being unfamiliar with it, the lack of cell phone service. I was certain that we'd end up with a drowned child and husband/father guilty for it, not because he was greedy and rich and went taking what he wanted, but because he was essentially lazy and weak enough that he was unable to turn down what made him temporarily happy. Kind of like how we all aren't that great about living in an environmentally friendly way, even though we know it's important (something hinted at in the story by the heat wave in Iceland when Bethany goes there for work). Ultimately, although we think banal evil is less of a sin than active and ambitious evil, it still leads to tragedy. 

That's the story I thought we were getting until the very end. 

The twist

I wasn't quite as surprised by the twist in "The Import" as I was by two young people dancing to a fifty-year-old song in Spider-Man III, but I was still pretty surprised. 

At the very end, Bethany and Raj come back from visiting with friends who are about to get married. When they left their child with Rupa to go spend time with their friends, their child was asleep in a cabin by a lake, but by the time Bethany and Raj return, the cabin is empty, and the couple soon goes to look for their child frantically. They eventually find Rupa with their son on a canoe on the lake, and it seems like all is well, but Bethany loses her shit, and we suddenly find out that Bethany isn't really that nice of a person. She tells Raj to retrieve the child, but as for Rupa, she says, "I don't care if you leave her there." When Rupa is explaining what happened to Raj in Bengali, which Bethany doesn't understand, Bethany shouts, "What is she saying?...What did she do to my son?" In the end, Bethany and her friends pull Rupa to shore "as if she were their prisoner," although Raj feels that "it was not like that at all" because "she (Rupa) had come of her own intent." 

A crisis has brought out some bias in Bethany (and also her friends, for what it's worth) that up until that point, I had mistaken for principled concern. But Bethany didn't really care about Rupa; she cared about how it looked to have someone like Rupa working for them. Once we see this bias come to the front at the end, it's easy to look back and see how it was there all along. Bethany had called Rupa a "village girl," and Bethany was also the one who first depersonalized her by naming her "the import."

Just before the couple starts off to look for their child, Raj gets a familiar feeling in his belly, which is a sixth sense he's always had, warning him of trouble. As a reporter, he'd used it to duck out of protests just before they got really unruly. Of course, one could say this is another of Raj's faults of ordinariness. Shouldn't a dedicated reporter want to be there when the protest gets out of hand? Isn't that when the real news starts? This is another spot where I was all ready for a "banality of evil" ending, but it wasn't. Because really, it's Bethany, with her ambition, who perhaps ends up being even more evil than Raj. 

I like this story because it sort of differentiates between banal evil--which, let's face it, is pretty much all of us--and active evil. Active evil is the domain of society's Type A's. A lazy evil person will never take over a continent or commit genocide. Only someone with big goals and a lot of gumption will do that. It doesn't excuse banal evil, but it does show it as of a different kind and degree than active evil. It's like the old Catholic difference between venial and mortal sins. Raj is a venial sinner; Bethany might be a mortal one. 

Backing this up is the conversation Bethany had with her friends Helen and Rob just before the final scene. They are talking about Rupa, and although each of them says only a few words, they all reveal a lot about their attitude towards her. Rob calls her "the refugee," although she isn't one.. Helen rebukes Rob for calling her this, and then she mouths some words about how even if she is a refugee, we "shouldn't close our doors to everyone." Raj points out that she is in the country on a work visa, but then Bethany says something interesting. She says that Rupa is here to take care of their child, Shay, but then she adds that, "Plus, she's being paid for by Raj's mother, so cheers to that." 

This sort of sounds like Bethany is herself a banally evil venial sinner, just like her husband. She had objected many times to the whole arrangement of Rupa coming, but what had convinced her, ultimately, was that Raj's mother was paying for it. I imagine here someone who refuses to get a chemical treatment for their lawn because it's bad for the water supply, but then suddenly, they move somewhere where lawn treatments are free, and they say, "Well, if it's free, I won't say no." 

Is Bethany an actively evil person, or just a more ambitious level of banal evil than Raj? Rupa seems to have picked up on something when she tells Raj he ought to be more worried about "a woman who doesn't love you," and suddenly, the reader thinks of her many business trips and whether she has her own Molly Choi somewhere. 

In the end, the reader is left with several questions. Who was worse to Rupa, Bethany or Raj? Who is a worse person? And is Bethany's hard-working exterior hiding her venial sins or her mortal ones? 

The last line of the story is remarkable in its ability to maintain all the ambiguity without dispelling any of it. We have six characters in the final scene--Bethany, Raj, Shay, Rupa, and their friends Rob and Helen--all together. Rob and Helen are hauling Rupa back to shore in their boat, and Raj, Bethany, and Shay are all in the boat with them. Only Rupa is alone in the canoe, being treated like a prisoner, like the worst thoughts Bethany had about what she was doing with her son were all true. The last three sentences, from the third-person narrator, are these: "It was that you could know a person only so well. Then their own ideas would muddy the water. Then you'd have to return them to where they belonged."  

I don't always like ambiguous endings, but this one is really impressive in just how many ambiguities hang in the last few sentences, even at a linguistic level. Who is the "they" in "their own thoughts"? Is it the people in the boat? The people in the boat other than Raj, who doesn't think Rupa is the monster she's been made out to be? Or is it people in general, following the people-in-general meaning of the "you" in "you could only know a person so well"? The narrator has often followed Raj's consciousness with statements like these, giving us Raj's interior monologue without labeling it as such. But this might be a few lines in which the narrator is separating their voice from Raj's. 

Then in the last sentence, who is the "they/them" in "you'd have to return them to where they belonged"? Is it Rupa? Reading through the whole ending, there are a number of ways to interpret the whole thing:

1. "You can only know a person so well," was what Bethany, Rob, and Helen were apparently thinking of Rupa. Rupa's own weird, village ideas have muddied the water, literally, as we are out here on the lake because of the mess she made. We'll have to send her back where she belongs.
2. "You can only know a person so well," Raj thought, thinking of the cultural differences between Bethany, Rob, and Helen on the one hand and Rupa on the other. But Helen, Rob, and Bethany will all add their own ideas to read into whatever they don't understand about Rupa, and then they'll send her back to India. 
3. "You can only know a person so well," quoth the narrator, now fully separating from Raj, and thinking of all the people now in the scene. And all those people in the scene will use their own, imperfect understanding to fill in what they don't know, making mistakes as they try. I guess now I will have to put all these people and their flawed understanding back where they belong by ending the story. 

If we read it according to this last sense, then the story becomes less about the banality of evil and more about misunderstandings that are based on how we all have secrets and ulterior motives. Whichever way you read it, there is more to the truth of the story than any of the characters realize. 

On being an unsuccessful writer two weeks before Trump takes office a second time

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'" - from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Early in 2020, The New Yorker published a George Saunders story entitled "Love Letter." It's an epistolary tale of a grandfather and his grandson in a much-closer-to-a-totalitarian-state-than-before in the aftermath of a then-theoretical second Trump term. Trump is not mentioned, but it is very clear that's the context involved. The grandfather is conflicted. Part of him wants to counsel his grandson to lay low, to make his way in the dangerous new landscape of America the best he can, because doing this and putting himself in a stronger position socially and financially is his best chance for being able to help the people he cares about. Open resistance is not a good strategy, because it only leads to one becoming weak. At the same time, the grandfather knows that what the government is doing to the people his grandson cares about is wrong, and he wants there to be some way to fight back. There is an underlying current in the story of the grandfather feeling he needs to explain to the grandson how older people allowed the world to get like this. His explanations are the only ones a culpable generation can offer: we didn't know it would get this bad, we'd have done more if we knew, we did what we could, but what could we really do?

When Saunders reconsidered the story recently, he expressed his hope that it was more than "just an opinion piece dressed up as a piece of fiction." Of course, even if it was a little too "on the nose," as he put it, that wouldn't have necessarily ruined it. There are plenty of stories that come across as direct commentaries on contemporary political situations that are nonetheless masterpieces, from Wizard of Oz to the works of Aristophanes to Citizen Kane to All the President's Men and on and on. Heck, even Ayn Rand's novels have plenty of people who love them, and they're basically political theory dressed up as novels.  

Of course it was a good story. It was George Saunders. But there was still something that bothered me about it. Coming at the time it did, it couldn't help but be an admonition to its readers: In the fateful election of 2020, when democracy hangs in the balance, what will you do? Will you be able to face your grandchildren when they ask you about it? It was much more of a call to specific action than most stories are. That means that part of evaluating it should go beyond normal literary considerations, such as whether the characters were believable and affecting, and include questioning whether the piece was effective at one of its evident purposes, which was to persuade citizens to undertake political action. 

My perhaps somewhat peevish reaction to the story

Now that we have survived the election of 2020 only to lose in 2024, my reaction is not totally unlike that of the grandfather: What could I have done? What should I have done? Or even: I did what I could, but I wasn't in a position to do much, so my involvement didn't help, echoing a line of the grandfather to his grandson that getting involved would not help. If "Love Letter" is a challenge to its readers to do something, then my reaction to that injunction goes something like this:

• I voted for the right candidate, because I did the minimum that a citizen in a democracy can do, which is to fulfill what Lionel Trilling called the "moral responsibility to be intelligent." That is, I did enough work to vote for the right person.
• Of course, in our system, I get the same number of votes as people who didn't do the work. So my vote isn't worth that much.
• You could argue that I have a responsibility to try to persuade others, and I did, but persuading anyone of anything is very hard. Past a certain age, most people really don't change their minds about big stuff more than a handful of times in their lives. 
• And in any event, whom would I be persuading? I don't have much of a platform. I wish I had acquired a platform through my writing, but whether through lack of talent, lack of focus, or bad luck, I don't. 
• Even if I did have a platform, what would I do? If we consider "Love Letter" not as a detached work of art but as an attempt by a human writer named George Saunders to influence an election, what did Saunders really do with his platform? He wrote a story in the New Yorker, where the majority of readers probably already agreed with him.
• That story, rather than offer readers practical advice for how to get the outcome in the election that author and most of his readers alike agree would be the desirable one, did what literature often does. It didn't really propose a solution, but instead did a good job of describing the problem. Which is great for feeling seen, but not so great for getting the results one wants.
• Which is all to say that even if I had succeeded as an author enough to have significant numbers of people listen to what I have to say, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much with it. I can't even convince my sister-in-law in Ohio that Trump is bad for the country; what am I going to do to change the outcome of an election? 
• The story ultimately feels like a human author trying to pass the problem off to his readers, most of whom have far less ability to do anything that he does. It feels unfair.   

So that's one level of reaction I have to Saunders' story. The other level is somehow even more depressing. 

It's always frustrating to fail at writing, but it's especially so now

There is a weird feedback loop of circular logic in America whereby we assume that if someone is rich and famous, they deserve to be, so they tend to stay that way. And if someone isn't, they get dismissed, because if they knew what they were talking about, how come they aren't rich and famous? We assume winners win because they deserve to win, and losers lose because they are losers.

Faced with this kind of faith in the self-evidentiary logic of outcomes in America, the non-rich, non-famous class has only a couple of choices. We can accept our fate and turn inward, trying to focus on self-improvement in small and humble ways. We can practice a form of idolatry toward the chosen class and look up to them, following them on social media and hoping at most to be able to brush near their greatness, to one day get a like from them or to touch the hem of their garments as they pass by. Or we can press on with a quixotic quest to join their ranks, ignoring the odds and focusing only on the outliers, the occasional examples of people who cross the divide from the bungled and the botched into the successful.

Maybe I've been the bad reader all along, and this guy the good reader of the world, even if he hasn't read the book he's holding. 

Of course, many people have no desire to be rich or famous, and they live happy lives ignoring celebrities, politicians, and magnates alike. They are probably the wisest, and I'd be happy to join their ranks, except that what I most want to do in life is write, and I don't consider my writing to be successful if nobody reads it. There is an aspect of needing public cooperation to my goals in life. I don't want to be rich, and I don't need to be famous in the sense of being a household word in every home. I'm sure most Americans don't know who George Saunders is, either. Enough do, though, that he can rest assured his ideas have propagated in the world and will survive him. That may not matter in a political sense, but I do think that once ideas escape into the world, they never really go away. Saunders will live forever. I don't have that assurance. 

I live inside my head most of the time, and my head is full of stories and ideas that seem to me to have value, so I can't rest until I've gotten them outside my head and onto paper in the best way I can. I'm on the other side of fifty now, and it's increasingly unlikely anyone is ever going to read what I've written in sufficient numbers for it to matter. 

I should keep pressing on anyway, assured that even if I don't succeed at my goal, the presence of those stories and thoughts that won't go away is evidence that tending to them is what I should be doing with my time. I should have faith that they're there for a reason. But the election of Trump--again--and the concurrent existence of so many do-nothing celebrities and hangers-on and influencers and social media personalities, all of whom get to share their vapid ideas with so many, makes me think that there just is no reason or order or meaning to anything. The self-evidentiary logic of America is right. I'm not succeeding because I'm not chosen for success. I lack talent or charm or charisma or good looks or the right blood in my veins. The success of someone who seems to me to be so undeserving is proof that I have misread the world entirely. And if I can't read the world right, why should anyone want to read what I've written?  

The failure of the remedy: "The Home Visit" by Morris Collins

In the 2020 O.Henry anthology, one of my favorite stories was "Lagomorph" by Alexander Macleod, which I wrote about here. It was the story about a man and the family pet rabbit, which he still keeps with him after an amicable divorce. The rabbit is both a comfort to him and a source of bewilderment. Rabbits are hard to read, and in a sense, the rabbit becomes something of a symbol of the mystery of life itself. But a comforting mystery that likes its ears scratched. 

"The Home Visit" by Morris Collins has some overlaps with "Lagomorph." (If you're a student stuck with writing a paper, a compare/contrast of these two stories would be a great idea that, once you've read the two stories, almost writes itself.) In "The Home Visit," we have a couple that seems like it's headed toward divorce, rather than already being there. Their cat, Derek, which was a symbol of the togetherness of the narrator and his wife Alex way back when they got him, is now on the brink of death. In fact, the couple really probably should have put him down already, but then they'd have to deal with their own problems. Perhaps to prepare for the moment when it can't be put off any longer, they go to get a new cat, one that will allow them to continue avoiding their problems by focusing on the cat, and that's where they meet Sarah. Sarah is an eccentric shelter manager who thinks animals are naturally attracted to her and who can't quite remember the made-up Buddhist bullshit wisdom she tries to quote. 

Sarah is judgmental of the narrator and Alex during her home visit, obviously relishing her power. She also get progressively weirder. After taking Alex up on the offer to get drunk, they all head off together to put Derek down at a lovely country location Sarah says she knows about. Sarah calls a friend to drive them there, and when they arrive, we find out that the lovely spot in the country is her ex-father-in-law's ski lodge. The narrator decides he wants to call it all off, partly because he figures that once the cat leaves, Alex won't be far behind. 

In a lot of ways, it's familiar territory. "Detailed dissection of a slowly deteriorating marriage" is maybe the most oft-trodden path of 21st-Century literary fiction. But the story doesn't feel worn-out, because in the hands of an observant and wry author, you can make just about anything feel new. Part of the observation, in fact, is the circular nature of relationships, which somehow makes the frequent appearance of this type of story seem justified: it has to keep reoccurring, because the weaknesses of the characters are so baked into most humans, this story can't help but show up over and over. As a matter of fact, we kind of get a hint of recurrence, since Sarah, who judges the couple for their weaknesses, is herself divorced. Alex once tried to make a predilection for hats a distraction from her real issues, and we later see Sarah's ex-father-in-law and a boy who is with him both wearing porkpie hats, perhaps their own version of this same idiosyncrasy. 

What are the human weaknesses the narrator and Alex suffer from that doom their hopes and happiness? Things like a refusal to move past the way things were and be decisive about the future (narrator), the inability to pinpoint one's own restlessness and sense of unhappiness (Alex), and most importantly the way both parts of a couple look to one another to fix what's wrong with them and get disappointed when it doesn't work (both narrator and Alex). When they can't fill up what's missing for one another, they get a cat. When the cat is about to die, they get another. It repeats within marriages, and it repeats across marriages. 

Death by a thousand similes: "Orphan" by Brad Felver (O.Henry Anthology)

I've had strange moments of recognition while analyzing stories for this blog, before, but this one might have been the weirdest. As I was continuing on with my read-through of this year's O.Henry anthology,  I realized I was going to be critical of "Orphan" by Brad Felver, a story that's about an orphaned teen who makes friends with an old man who lost a young child, and that jogged something in my memory. Didn't I once go hard at another story about a young child who dies? Am I really this big an asshole I'm going to do this again? So I looked through my past posts, and yeah, I did attack a story before about a four-year-old who dies of a brain tumor. The story was "Queen Elizabeth.," and the author was...Brad Felver. 

I swear I have no idea who Brad Felver is, and I wish the man no ill. He's just written two stories I really don't like. In fact, as I looked back on that post from 2019, I realized that "Orphan" is actually a sequel to "Queen Elizabeth." I didn't remember "Queen Elizabeth" while reading "Orphan," but now that I've figured out the backstory, I guess it makes sense that I wouldn't like a sequel if I didn't like the original, even if I didn't know it was a sequel while reading it.  

Both stories focus on a furniture maker named Gus and his ex-wife Ruth who were once in love and then lost a young child and ended up, as many couples do who suffer a loss like that, divorced. Sort of a Manchester by the Sea sort of story, except that Gus isn't a volatile drunk. I suppose what I don't like is that it feels like the story is taking cheap advantage of the high level of sentimentality people attach to children who die--many think of it as the worst thing that can happen to someone--and providing a story that people will love because of the emotion they will supply, rather than because of a unique insight from the story itself. Put another way, both stories seem to me to be heavy on emotion and light on something original to say about either the emotion or the situation that caused it. They're both kind of Lifetime-channel stories.

In the case of "Orphan," I think a lot of that impression is caused by the rather ornate use of figurative language, which called to mind to me some of the excesses of Gothic fiction. I don't usually get hung up on what's called "craft" much, but in this case, there was something about the story that just yelled out to me throughout, something I couldn't get around, and it undid the whole feeling it wanted to create. The first line of the story has a simile in it about a kid "eager as a chipmunk." The last two lines are both similes. And in between are a ton more. I did a rough count and came up with a total of 70 similes in the story. That's just too many for them to be effective. It writes over the reserved feeling of loss the story wants to create with a mawkish and showy style. By and large, the similes are not terribly original, and  most of all, they're also all over the place in terms of the effect they create. As Writing Fiction by Burroway, et. al. advises writers on the use of simile and metaphor: "Separate metaphors or similes that are too close together, especially if they come from areas of reference very different in value or tone, disturb in the same way the mixed metaphor does. The mind doesn't leap; it staggers." 

I'm not just applying some rule from a book here; I really do think all these tropes call attention to themselves in a flowery, too-writerly way. You just can't allow that when you're writing about the death of children, which is a subject so sensitive you have to be careful about abusing that sensitivity in order to get sympathy for your characters they haven't earned. Instead of being cautious, though, this Baroque style throws caution to the wind and is actually trying it damndest to win cheap tears from its readers. It really was distracting, and it also made me feel like the story didn't take itself seriously.

I've compiled a list of what I consider to be the similes in the story below to make my point about how many there are and how different they are in tone from one another. In one case, the same thing (memory) is compared both to heritable genetic traits and also to an embrace. The effect of all these similes is to dull the impact of the story's emotional center. 

In the list below, I realized I had to think a little bit about what a simile actually is, something I'd thought for a long time I understood cold. "A comparison between two things using 'like' or 'as'" would have been my knee-jerk definition. That's true, but it's also true that not every comparison between two things using "like" or "as" rises to the level of a simile. "This tastes like chicken" is being rather too literal for simile. It's saying this meat really is similar to chicken in flavor. "This tastes like a burnt boot," however, is a simile. I realized while making the list below that the line between a simile and a simple comparison can be in the eye of the beholder. I'm not really sure about cases like "I feel like I'm flying." That does compare my feeling to the giddiness one feels when flying, but it's not as concrete as a simile applied to an object. I decided to count examples like that, but I was a little conservative otherwise in making the list, and I left off some borderline cases. I also am not getting into metaphors, which there were also several of. 

Felver says he's writing a third installment of Gus and Ruth. Will the universe somehow conspire to put it in my path? Who knows, but I'm honestly perplexed about how both stories were chosen for publication by highly respected journals and then subsequently chosen for the O.Henry anthology. I feel like both are weak stories in an obvious way. This doesn't happen all that often. With about eighty percent of the stories I read in BASS or Pushcart or whatever anthology, I can see what made editors love them. When a case like this happens, it makes me question my own taste and skill as a reader. I'd love for someone to make an argument that they're deserving of the love they got. 

All the similes:

1.  A kid eager as a chipmunk
2. The impatience in these kids, visible as a tumor
3. Until this feels like a Siberian labor camp (in dialogue, so forgivable)
4. Rumors still spread like viruses
5. The old man was like the god of patience, like he had some extra organ
6. Ornery as a badger one minute...
7. The feeling of exhaustion earned, as if they'd just donated blood
8. A marriage like defiance of destiny
9. They'd crashed into each other like asteroids
10. They were like escaped convicts who were shackled together
11. Hearing his voice through the receiver left Ruth feeling like Moses hearing the voice of God.
12. Methodical as an orthopedist
13. Like watching an artist at work, one who was just a little bit crazy
14. A fourth leg was like a malignant growth
15. It was like saying an obvious thing at a party (about the same thing as #14)
16. His hands were gnarled and bent like an old boxer's (third sentence in a row with a simile)
17. The furniture they built existed as a sculpture of the old man's mind.
18. The kid running to the workshop, like a lost child running to his mother
19. He stared as a little boy seeing fireworks for the first time.
20. Mentors were a lot like dictators.
21. Can be spotted like weeds in the grass
22. The teacher drew in a breath that felt like a rebuke.
23. Sheepish as a bird dog
24. Gus could feel him coiling up, like a snake that was afraid it might need to strike.
25. Until this remarkable kid showed up like God's own apology.
26. It was like a time capsule.
27. Felt like he was on a ship's prow
28. The old man would dash off to his bedroom like he'd heard the smoke detector
29. The old man...seemed lighter, like he'd been out dancing
30. The boundary line around their relationship was as sturdy as a split-rail fence
31. Memories passed from one generation to the next, like hair color or gait
32. Hope like a lightning strike
33. Sunday came like discovering a new religion 
34. She walked and talked and felt like some young dancer.
35. The kid stayed drawn taut as a clothesline
36. Like the kid was perpetually seeking penance for some awful crime he wouldn't talk about.
37. It felt like he'd been caught shoplifting
38. As if two distinct worlds had just collided, two continent-sized icebergs
39. The kid's presence hung over them like rainclouds
40. Settling into memories like an embrace
41. They had memorized each other, like painters who could recall making each brushstroke. 
42. Took on moisture like a sponge.
43. Like the old house was alive, and it was talking.
44. Like he'd stumbled onto an old battlefield
45. Like a contract they'd both signed
46. Staring at the balance as if he were marveling at a new winter coat
47. Gus paced the barnyard like an old dog waiting on its owner
48. He glared at her suitcase like it was the real culprit.
49. Advancing and retreating like the tides
50. Quiet as an oak tree
51. She held onto him as if gripping a cliff face
52. Moody, like a dog sensing a storm
53. Quiet as an owl
54. Just held the doorknob in both hands and stared at it like it was the most precious thing he'd ever owned. Like he was holding the eucharist. 
55. Stared down the long lane as if it were a telescope
56. It felt true as gravity, and just as inexplicable
57. She held a bench plane under the light and studied it like a jeweler.
58. Held memories mutually like an old married couple
59. Clouds twisted together like dancers.
60. The last of the shadows leaned from the barnyard to the back porch, stretching like pulled taffy.
61. It was like that hollow in the barnyard from an old tree. There and not there.
62. He's pure as dew (in dialogue)
63. She'd started swinging on the door, like a carnival ride
64. She was laughing like a little sprite.
65. He held his body rigid as a totem.
66. Night had come on like a sigh.
67. It felt like they were sitting inside of a silence they'd made themselves. 
68. High green corn on all sides like a palisade.
69. People ordinary as dandelions.
70. It felt like the world had just taken a breath. It felt like they were dancing. 

Preserved: "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz" by Michele Mari (O.Henry Anthology)

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

-From "To an Athlete Dying Young" by A.E. Housman

Whether a short story or a long novel, fiction should be a zone free from moral judgement. The goal is to show a character as they really are, not to show them as they should be. The moral judgement has to be at least postponed until after the reader has first fully immersed themselves in the character's world and seen things through their eyes. 

But I'm going to skip step one when looking at "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz," written by Michele Mari and translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore. That's because I can't imagine a reader having a hard time empathizing with Bragonzi, the point-of-view character of the story, or with any of the boys at the boarding school he attends. Seeing the world through their eyes is very easy to do. In a sort of Italian version of The Sandlot, the boys' main antagonist in life is a man they've never seen, Mr. Kurz, whose home is over the wall from their soccer field. When a ball goes over the wall, Mr. Kurz refuses to give it back. Just like the imagination of the boys in The Sandlot makes Mr. Mertle and his dog into monsters of legend, so Bragonzi imagines Mr. Kurz as a spider. 

The school and the boys in it are drawn so wonderfully, I can't recommend this story highly enough. I often spend so much effort trying to understand stories that I scarcely notice if I even enjoy them, but "Mr. Kurz" is palpably enjoyable. The loss of each soccer ball is made more poignant by the sense of loneliness each boy has, being sent off as they have been to a boarding school by fathers with more money than affection. 

What makes the story so unexpected is that the teased meeting with the spider Kurz never comes. We don't get a moment in which Bragonzi makes peace with Mr. Kurz and gets back all the balls the boys have lost. Instead, Bragonzi engineers a brave reconnaissance mission at night into the backyard of Mr. Kurz. He gets into a shed, where he finds that Mr. Kurz has been storing all the balls lost over the wall for thirty years in a kind of museum. They are even labelled with the date on which they were launched over the wall. Moreover, there are empty spots on the shelves for more to come.

Looking at these balls, Bragonzi has an epiphany, standing in front of the first ball Mr. Kurz claimed three decades ago: 

...looking at it, and thinking that those who had played with it must have been older than his father by now, he considered how the balls with which an individual plays in his life get lost in thousands of ways, rolling down countless streets, landing in rivers and on rooftops, torn apart by the teeth of dogs or boiled by the sun...he considered how all of the balls touched by those children had thus dissipated, and if he were in their presence and asked them, 'Where are all your soccer balls?' they would shrug, unable to account for the fate of a single one. That ball alone had been snatched from the clutches of destruction; only that ball, from May 8, 1933, went on being a ball...The ball had shot upward, and even before it went over the wall everyone thought, It's lost--goodbye, ball. But no, only in that moment was it saved. And many years later, when those children went down to their graves, that ball would be more alive than them, the last memory of the matches of yesteryear.

He realizes that Mr. Kurz has a chair in his backyard set up to watch the wall and wait for balls to come over, but Bragonzi imagines not only the ball sailing over the wall, but the joy and agony of the game, the boys in the full glory of youth. 

Bragonzi eventually gets the most wonderful soccer ball from his father as a gift, but rather than let it be used in the game, he sneaks out and kicks it into Mr. Kurz's backyard so that the ball never gets a scuff on it and can remain perfect in the shed museum. 

So what do I think of Bragonzi's decision?

Whether you agree with Bragonzi's decision or not, it's easy to relate to it.  Who hasn't looked out on a pristine yard in the winter covered in snow and thought that it would be a shame to trample that perfect smoothness? Yet it's not hard to imagine an argument that Bragonzi is being silly. Trampled snow means someone went out in it and enjoyed it. The story contrasts Mr. Kurz's impulse to preserve things in the moment of perfection with other soccer players who can't wait to scuff up their new balls, in order to make them really theirs. Isn't Bragonzi missing out on the joy of life precisely by trying to avoid the moment of its downfall? Isn't his obsession with the sadness of mortality preventing him from enjoying what moments in life there are to be had? 

I would completely understand that argument, and yet it's hard not to feel that Bragonzi is on to some critical characteristic of human nature here. Why do people so often interrupt the fun they're having in order to take photographs, if not because they want something to remind them later of this moment in time after the moment is gone? I always feel annoyed by photographs, because I want to just simply focus on the moment, but I'm always grateful later to those who insisted on photographs. 

I suspect most people try to strike some balance between enjoying the moment and thinking of the moment in the context of eternity. They'll try to take a reasonable number of pictures, say--enough to remember the event, but not so many that the whole event becomes about memorializing it. Maybe Bragonzi will eventually come to such a compromise position, but in Mr. Kurz's backyard, he is facing the awesome meaning of eternity and death and the fleeting nature of life for the first time. He has no natural defenses to it, you might say. His only possible reaction before the sublime is complete surrender to it. 

If I were Bragonzi's father and found out he'd kicked an expensive soccer ball away on purpose, sure, I might be upset, but as a reader, I think there is value to his discovery. The memento mori is indispensable to a life well lived. No, you don't want to live your entire life keeping soccer balls from getting scuffed and thereby avoiding life, but at the same time, if you don't consider once in a while that all soccer balls end up gone eventually, you might end up playing the game timidly the whole time, never letting yourself be free enough to wind up and really kick, because you're too afraid of what will happen if you send the ball over the fence. 

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.