BASS drops today, so why aren't I writing about it?

All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog. It started out with it being all about me, but I discovered after not too long that even I didn't find myself that interesting, so I switched to talking about what I was reading. That was a good change, and I've mostly stuck to it. I'm happy to insert my own life into a discussion of what I'm reading if I think it'll make it more relevant, but I try to only make a post all about me when my own life is getting in the way so much of blogging about literature that I can't avoid it.

Now is one of those times. Today is the day Best American Short Stories 2025 comes out. For the last seven years, BASS is the one thing I've been consistent about doing. Even when I've quit on BASS, I've gone back later and finished it. Last month, I started working on the O.Henry Anthology, hoping I could finish it quickly enough to get to BASS today. I didn't. I'm only about halfway through O.Henry, and I'm not moving in any great hurry. I think I owe readers an explanation of what's going on.

Job front

I mentioned last month that I was about to start a new job, and that it was possible this job would keep me from being able to move forward with blogging. That job was as a 911 dispatcher. After more than six months of looking for work after leaving my job at NSA, I wasn't finding anything. For the most part, I wasn't even getting responses. There had been numerous instances of being completely ignored I found especially humiliating. I applied for an admissions counselor job at my alma mater, Walsh University. I was their honor graduate in 2000, and I feel like my resume since that time is nothing to sneeze at, so I thought I might at least get a call, but I didn't. I applied for a Korean language administrative job near Youngstown, about 45 minutes away. I was rejected for that without an interview, even though they're still advertising for it. How many Korean-speaking applicants do they get in Youngstown that made them so sure they didn't even need to interview me?

There have been many more indignities such as these I've had to face. Entry-level open-source intelligence analyst positions I didn't get past the first round with. Others where I've received responses that said, in coded language, that I was overqualified, no matter how much my cover letter and resume tried to account for that by explaining the unexpected change of life I've had and why it meant I was now applying for entry-level jobs. 

So when the 911 job only took into account my score on a civil service exam and my stated willingness to take it, I thought I'd better try, even though I had my doubts I'd be able to do it. I'm not a great multi-tasker, and midnight twelve-hour shifts sounded like they'd be a lot for me. They were. I've already quit that job. It seemed unlikely to me I'd ever become good at listening to four things at the same time, and I go to the bathroom more in 12 hours than all the other dispatchers I was watching did combined. So I'm back to no job, no prospects, and feeling like garbage. I still think I did the only morally permissible thing for me when I left the government, but it's gone even worse than my low expectations anticipated since early March.

Law School

Because I don't think my prospects are great, I've thought of going back to school. I took the LSAT in the beginning of October, and I'll find out the results on Friday. When I was taking practice tests, I wasn't doing that great, but on the actual test, I felt like I did amazing. That also had something to do with my decision to leave the 911 job. That job requires about 4-6 months of training before you're a real dispatcher, and after taking the test, I felt like I would have probably just gotten paid for those months of training before leaving to go to law school. That didn't feel like a fair thing to do to a kind of poor city that needs every dollar it has. 

Maybe I'm overly confident here, and maybe my LSAT score won't be that great, but if it is about where I think it is, I only intend to apply to one school, and I only intend to go if I get a full ride or something very close to it. I don't need more student loans at my age. If I can get this deal, then law school seems like the best bet for me. Even with all the doomsday prophecies about AI taking entry-level law jobs, I think this is a better choice than anything else I can come up with right now. I don't need the top job at the top firm. I just need a job. 

So close to retired and yet not quite there

I'm very lucky, and I know that. I have a pension now. Because the government drawdown included an offer for early retirement, I am now getting paid every month to do nothing. I get paid about as much as a technician at Jiffy Lube has to work 40 hours a week to make. In addition, my parents, who are beyond thrilled to have one of their children living near them, have helped us out financially with the move back. Without them, I wouldn't have been able to absorb all these months without work. I have a lot to be grateful for. 

With all that good fortune, though, I'm still not quite able to really retire, at least not if I want to live more than hand-to-mouth from now until I die. We got a late start on our 401K savings, and shaving off the last five years of my government career when I was making my highest salary really killed any hope I had of making up the ground. I'm going to have to leave what I have saved there for a long time and hope it grows if I want it to help when I really am too old to be able to work. That means I have to find something now.

When I first started looking for work, I wanted a real career like the one I had just before retiring. I was looking for something challenging and interesting. The longer I went without getting something like that, the more I started to think I'd be happy to do anything. Maybe, I thought, it'd be better to have a kind of ordinary job, one that didn't require me to learn anything new, because that would leave me free to blog and read and write. I don't need much in terms of salary. I just need a job of some sort. But when I apply for those jobs, no matter how much I try to dumb down my resume, I don't get calls. 

If I were really retired...

If I were able to really retire, I wouldn't go to law school. Law is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing I can think of. In fact, I'm not sure I'd even spend any more time than I am spending currently on literature (unless I somehow got paid to do this blog, and that was the thing making it possible for me to stop working, but that is never going to happen). 

When I left my job, the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do with my life was return to studying one question: Does God exist? Since I was sixteen, it's been the question I've been most interested in, although for many decades of my life, I had to put that interest on hold while I did dumb things like join the Marine Corps, go to grad school, get married, have kids, and work to support a family for over twenty years. 

Lately, I've found myself listening to podcasts and looking, at a beginner level, into philosophical discussions about God's existence. If I didn't have any responsibilities with my life, I can easily see that being what I'd do with most of my day every day. 

Of course, the question of whether God exists goes beyond philosophy and requires an understanding of science, math, history, linguistics, and literature, all of which I could dig into as much as my old brain could handle if I didn't have to worry about working. And maybe my current background in literature and even literary theory might be useful in thinking about the God question. Since most prominent thinkers involved in the discussion surrounding God's existence don't have backgrounds in literature, I might even be useful to such a discussion. So if I were really retired, I probably would continue to read literature critically, but all the other stuff I'd be reading would definitely change my output. 

"Isn't the ontological argument just a modus ponens argument that can be undercut using a modus tollens argument in response?"

Put it all together

To sum up everything I'm thinking in one run-on, stream-of-consciousness sentence, which is, it so happens, more or less how I actually think about my life at least once an hour, it would run thus:

I don't want to work anymore but I still need to work but I can't find much of anything so I should go do something that will help me find a job but that will require a lot of work and even thought I might enjoy that work I wouldn't enjoy it as much as other things and for the time being since I have some time maybe I should keep blogging about literature since I've been doing that for a long time but also maybe I should be getting ready for law school or maybe I should be studying the philosophy of religion since that's really the thing I'm most interested in in all the world but then again that's a pretty big subject and I'm new to it and probably too old to ever become an expert in it so maybe I should just read about it on the side and focus mostly on literature since I do sort of know about that already or maybe I'm dumb and I should quit thinking about stuff that doesn't matter and only think about a job and taking care of my family and what's wrong with me that I can't find a job. 

So to sum up, I may or may not be blogging on BASS this year, or ever. 

A 1960s existentialist play smashed into a 2025 short story: "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I had two thoughts during the first half of reading "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard. First, what I thought I was reading was something of a mashup between Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot. I thought I was going to read about a salesman wandering from house to house in search of someone who might take pity upon him and buy what he was hawking. This was, in my imagination, going to be some kind of metaphor for the human condition, in which we wander in a cold rain looking in vain for someone to empathize with us. My guess, until Kevin meets the Madsen family, was that he would continue wandering and never finding anyone to connect with, and that this would all reflect his early reflection that "There were so many people you would never meet. Most, in fact."

The second thought I had was that the style was very much similar to Raymond Carver or other highly stripped-down, bare-prose-style writers, the kinds that introduction to fiction writing books or many graduate writing programs of the 2000s favored. Most of the language is describing only what Kevin sees, what he says, what he does, and what others say and do to him. There are only a small number of trips into Kevin's head, and even those are short-lived, although they do get a lot done in terms of filling in gaps.

Surprises everywhere

While the second impression held throughout my reading of "The Spit of Him," the first one didn't. It turned out that Kevin's decision to head to the next town over to sell Christmas sticker in spite of warnings from his old man wasn't about the journey, it was about the destination. This is true even though Kevin was unaware of what the Madsens meant to his family, and seemingly remained unaware even after his meeting with them. 

The whole story gets turned on its head when Kevin shows up at the Madsens. In most short stories that appear in an anthology like O.Henry or Best American Short Stories, there are plenty of surprises, but not really what you'd call a "twist." Twists--the girl in the boat was the escaped convict, the apparent victim was actually the thief, the main character was dead the whole time--are for movies or plays, not literary short stories. Meg Wolitzer's introduction to Best American Short Stories in 2017 warned against the use of "unearned surprise for a surprise's sake" in short stories, and it seems most literary stories heed this warning.

But the twist in "Spit" is completely natural, possibly because the story itself feels more like reading the script of a play than a short story. There are actually two surprises revealed during Kevin's interaction with the Madsens, at least for me. I was thinking Kevin was in his twenties, perhaps, and possibly a person with special needs who had been tasked by an organization responsible for helping him with going out and selling the stickers. I did not realize this was a nine-year-old kid, and I was surprised when that fact came out. The second surprise, of course, is that Kevin's father used to live in the town he warned his son to stay away from but left when he hit and killed the child of the town's candle-making big employers, the Madsens, in an automobile accident. Henrik Madsen, the father, seems pretty convinced that Kevin's father was drunk when the accident happened, although if that's true, one wonders how Kevin's father has seemingly been present for Kevin's whole life instead of in prison. 

So it turns out the story isn't an existentialist tale of wandering, but instead about this interaction between the child of the guy who killed a young man and the parents of the dead child. In addition to being the kind of pared-down prose fiction primers like, it also uses dialogue in the way that those same introductory texts call for. The mother and father don't agree with one another about how to deal with Kevin, and every word they say contradicts each other. They are also talking past Kevin the whole time. 

Symbols and theme

Just because the prose and the settings are plain doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on to think about. All of the three houses Kevin visits have changes of lighting. The first one has lights on until he knocks, at which point the lights go off. The second house's lights are off, until the owner approaches Kevin from behind and, seemingly knowing who he is, gets angry and goes in the house, turning the lights on as he does. 

The Madsen house ought to be the very symbol of light. They make candles, a business that they say employs half of the town. And, in fact, when he rings the doorbell a second time, the lights come on, and mother Birgitte answers. She's a little stand-offish, but seeing a child out in the cold rain badly dressed for it, she takes pity on him and decides to buy his stickers. It seems that his journey to find a sympathetic soul is over after only three houses. But when Henrik arrives at the door, he recognizes the boy because he's "the very spit of" his father, and that leads to a longer interaction. 

Right after Kevin mentions Thailand, where his father's girlfriend's son lives, and adds that he has never been there, one of the candles on the chest of drawers in the Madsen's hall goes out. Birgitte re-lights it. 

One of the few entries we have into Kevin's head gives us the line about there being more people in the world you don't know than you don't. The mention of Thailand as a place Kevin has never gone, and likely will never go to, adds to this original line. There are also more places in the world you'll never see than there are places you will. Because of this unavoidable lack of experience, none of us really receives much light or knowledge in our lifetimes. We're all kind of provincial, tied only the the small number of experiences even the most cosmopolitan of us can ever have. Kevin is an extreme example of that kind of insularity, because he's never even been as far before as this one little town not far from his own. His father isn't exactly going to open up the world to him, either. One house he's been to turns its lights off when he approaches, literally refusing to share its knowledge with him. The second turns its lights on only after it has told him to leave. The third turns its lights on, and the mother, at least, makes an effort to keep them on when they threaten to go out. But it's only the sputtering light of a candle, and even Birgitte's care can't make it much more light than that. 

At one point, Kevin literally attempts to allow in more light. When Henrik says that Kevin looks like his father, Kevin points out that he has his mother's eyes, and he "widens them so that both Henrik and Birgitte could see." But Henrik ignores this and points out Kevin's nose, which is exactly like his father's. Kevin has traveled in search of bettering himself, but the world seems not to want to answer when he knocks. The scant light from a candle that the one sympathetic person he finds lights for him is scarcely enough to help him to see with. 

In addition to light that is unavailable to him to see with, there are also signs he cannot decipher. He sees a sign at the first home offering appointments to shop in the store attached to the home, but no phone number. The Madsen home offers a candle showroom, but Kevin, although he knows about the candles, is not brought in to see them. Finally, there is graffiti-scratch on the bus stop he is waiting at near the end of the story when he is ready to go home. The graffiti sort of offers several versions on it of microfiction, tiny stories told only by the smallest of hints. "torkild lund is a joke" is one. A "for a good time call" phone number and subsequent commentary on the number is another. These microfictional stories further emphasize the theme of how many people there are in the world, each with their own story, and yet we will never be able to enter in to those stories.

Even the few openings we have into Kevin's interiority are kind of like microfictions themselves. We get a paragraph about his father, spitting his phlegm into the sink. We get the heartbreaking look at his party box under his bed and his hope that he'll be able to add the Madsens to his list of invitees. Last, we get him remembering his father's commentary on the moon in Thailand, and how by comparison, the moon in Denmark where Kevin lives is small and pale. Again, this last little peak into Kevin's mind emphasizes how small his world is and how little chance he has for enlightenment living in it. 

Nod to the translator, Martin Aitken 

I don't speak Danish, but I've been a translator for most of my adult life. I know how hard it can be to get certain phrases translated well, especially when there's a play on words in the original. I don't know what the Danish original was for "Cow-hoof trimmer? Age's no beginner!" but I'm impressed by how it came out in English. 

It's not like anybody gave me a choice: "Sickled" by Jane Kalu (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I once knew a co-worker who shared a gene with his wife that meant they had a one in four chance of passing along a very debilitating condition to their children. They found this out when their second daughter got it. That daughter died young, but the couple, believing in God's goodness, continued having children. They had one more without the disease and then finally one more who had it again. My co-worker poured all the love he had into that child, making huge alterations to their lives to try to make life less painful for their child with the disease while also keeping life semi-normal for their others. Nobody could say he neglected his duties as a father of a special needs kid, but people could (and I was aware of some who did) fault him for having a child with a one-in-four chance of getting the disease in the first place. I haven't heard from him in a while, since I abandoned Facebook about four years ago. His daughter would now be older than the age their first sick child was when she died, so I wonder if she is still with us. 

Do parents have a right to have children when they know there is a chance they'll pass on a painful condition to their child? If not, how great a chance must there be before they should refrain from having kids? Is one in four enough of a chance, as it is any time both parents are recessive carriers? How bad must the disease be for it to mean the parents should not have children, and how would you even measure that?

These are the questions I wanted the narrator of "Sickled" by Jane Kalu to interrogate. The ingredients are there. We have parents who knew they were both recessive carriers of sickle cell, who were told by a church that they shouldn't get married, so they went to a different, more extreme church, one that believed fervent prayer can fix anything, and got married there. They had one daughter without sickle cell anemia and then one with it. The story mostly takes place in the months soon after the daughter with the disease, Ije, finds out about her parents' choice. 

Instead of delving into the philosophical issues the story brings up, "Sickled" is more interested in how those months affected the psyche of the narrator, Ije's older sister Adamma. Adamma is narrating the story from sometime years after it happened, which was in Nigeria in 1994, not long after the military coup of General Sani Abacha. Adamma's family refers to Ije's worst outbreaks of sickle cell-related sickness as "crises," but the family itself is in a crisis. Mother has lost her government job because of the coup, and father seems unable to do anything besides go to church and pray for divine intervention rather than do something himself to improve his family's life directly. 

Ekwensu, an Igbo deity who represents chaos. Or, if it's easier, just translate it as "the devil." That seems to be how Adamma's family uses it when they compare Abacha to it.

Gap between narrator at time of narration and time of events of story

Having an older narrator look back on events from when they were much younger is a very time-tested technique to story telling. It has the advantage of allowing two different narrators, the one that the narrator once was and the one that the narrator now is with the benefit of hindsight and years of wisdom. "Sickled" makes use of this, invoking the "I know now" formula on more than one occasion. 

There is some confusion, though, between Adamma before and Adamma after, and to me, at least, it makes it so I'm not really sure what kind of psychological journey the narrator has been through and what kind of growth it's caused. When we first get a look into the younger Adamma's interior landscape, it seems like her attitude is distinct from that of her devout parents when it comes to the care of Ije: "I was the one who listened to what the doctor said, give her paracetamol when the fever starts, and put a cold cloth on her head...During those hospital visits, my father was often preoccupied with praying the crisis away, and my mother, well, she followed his lead." 

That seems to be the older Adamma thinking back on herself as the younger version, and while it doesn't necessarily paint the younger version as an outright skeptic about her parents' faith, it does show her to be more pragmatic, wanting to focus on concrete steps to take to help Ije rather than praying and hoping God will heal her. There seems to be a distinction here not between the older Adamma and her parents' faith, but the younger Adamma. It seems like even when she was sixteen, Adamma had a least a strong suspicion her parents didn't have the right approach to life. 

Again, when looking back, Adamma summarizes that "Our father, instead of getting a job, took on more duties in church, insisting that we needed God's intervention. He remained adamantly unemployed, despite my mother's failed attempts at finding work..." This sounds like we are getting the attitudes of the younger Adamma, and that the younger Adamma is cynical about her father's devout prayers when he could have helped his family situation by just getting a job. If this were the older narrator looking back, we would expect to get a hint, like "Looking back on it now," which the narrator does inject in other parts of the narrative. Absent some clue, we assume that the clues about attitudes are those of the younger version of Adamma, and early on, we have these two clues that she is somewhat skeptical about her father's religious approach. We also see her viewing her parents as a unified front representing this approach.

There is more evidence in the first half of the story that the younger Adamma is not part of the unified front her parents present. She has pieced together the story of her parents having children against medical advice sooner than Ije has, by listening to the whispers of nurses about "how irresponsible our parents were." 

But then there are contradictions

The younger Adamma isn't always opposed to her parents beliefs, though. "I, on the other hand, did not disagree with our mother. I believed that there was a reason God allowed her illness," the narrator claims, clearly speaking here of her younger self. It's possible that younger Adamma's reasons for believing God gave Ije this disease are different from those of her parents. They believe God allowed it so they could pray and allow God to show his greatness by healing her. Adamma, continually worn out by worry about her sister, thinks more that if nothing else, the disease keeps Ije's wild spirit in check. So perhaps this one passage isn't enough to show that Adamma sides with her parents.

In two other passages, though, Adamma seems far more in line with her parents' philosophy. When Ije asks if her suffering is her fault, Adamma "wanted to tell her that it was. That if only she followed the rules, that could keep her from having a crisis."  Later, when recalling her New Year's resolution from early 1994, Adamma says, "Hers was to do whatever she wanted, sickness or not; mine was to bring her closer to God. I believed in the undefeatable power of God. I believed in miracles. I believed that God could heal her if only she believed." This just doesn't sound like the version of her that was introduced at the beginning of the story, the one focused more on practical steps to take than on prayer. 

I think the story itself has some technical mistakes in it. It has tried to take advantage of the ability to have two versions of the narrator--an older, wiser one and a younger, naive one--but failed to make the distinction clear in parts. Yes, it's possible to be too pedantic about what a story "should" do or about accepted craft, and yes, other world traditions might part from Western standards, but to me, the lack of clarity about which version of Adamma is thinking what, or possibly the simple mistake of having two different versions of a character running into each other, makes it hard for me to see what the narrator's journey has been. Even if I ascribe the snarkier thoughts to the older narrator and the more pious ones to the younger, I'm still left without a clear link of how we got from one to the other. When Ije has a crisis near the end of the story brought on by pregnancy, she (the older version, probably) seems to suddenly understand her father: "It must have all been from fear. The desperate need to exert his power over the disease, his insistence on keeping himself detached from our world in order to remain resident in one that relieved him of the consequences of his actions. It was all fear. All of it." 

From whence cometh this understanding of her father? We see the mother in vulnerable situations that allow us to view her as a complex character of her own, but we never see this for the father. He's a pretty dull, stock character throughout, droning on about faith over fear. There's no moment when the narrator is given sight that would allow her understanding that he acted out of fear. If the older version of her is trying to forgive her father in some way, I fail to see where the step in her development came. 

This is also true of how the narrator sees the relationship between her parents. Earlier in the story, she is resigned to her mother "going along" with the father. Later, she is frustrated, wanting to know "how could she let him humiliate her" and wishing her mother would do something to defy him. This desire for defiance shows, in the first place, that again, the younger Adamma wasn't really on board with the faith of the family (in contradiction of some passages), and also it demonstrates a desire for the mother to defy the father that violates her wish that people would "follow the rules." 

You could say that this is all brilliant narration, because people are psychologically complicated and contradictory, but when a narrative is going to show contradiction, it ought to have a level of separation between the narrative and the narrator. We ought to be able to see that we have a contradictory character, unless we have some kind of obvious narrative experiment going on. This story doesn't seem to accomplish the needed distinction between complex narrator/character and clear (even if it takes some work to make it clear) narration. It allows conflation of the thoughts of the earlier Adamma as a character and the later as a narrator, and even when the voices are clear, the development from one to the other isn't.  

Epicurus

The best part of this story is the unexpected introduction of Epicurean philosophy into it. We often think of Epicurus as having espoused raw hedonism, although that wasn't really his point. Ije, at one point, seems to think that's what Epicurean philosophy is, because she has open a book about Epicurus and she quotes "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," which is actually from the Bible (Ecclesiastes), not Epicurus. (Which makes it ironic that Adamma tells her sister to read the Bible rather than Epicurus.) Ije's introduction to Epicurus is third hand: she is getting it from Bube, the boy next door who gets her pregnant, who got it from his philosopher parents, who presumably read the original. So it's certainly possible Ije has a bastardized version of Epicurus, one that more or less reflects her own predilections. 

However, when we hear Bube's exposition of Epicurus, he doesn't seem to have it that wrong. He says that "Death was not the main event, living was. If you live your life constantly afraid of dying, you have allowed death to win twice." That's maybe not a complete bastardization of Epicurus when he wrote: "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." 

Epicurus is an apt philosophy for Ije, who has limited control over her disease. Bube encourages her to find small pleasures where she can in order to minimize her suffering. It seems like Bube's philosophy he inherited from his parents is a sensible alternative to the radical faith Adamma has inherited from hers. For a moment, it appears that the story is making a clever reinterpretation of Epicurus in a setting that Epicurus himself would never have imagined. 

Only when the real crisis comes, and Bube learns that he has impregnated Ije, putting her in the hospital, he runs. That sure seems like an indictment of the philosophy he espoused. (Ad hominem attacks are allowed in fiction.) 

Two versions of philosophy have been discarded, one denying the present in favor of eternity (extreme Christian faith) and one denying eternity in favor of the present (whatever version of Epicureanism Bube has passed on). So what are Ije and Adamma left with? 

The mother ends her life. Her alternative she takes is despair. Ije, who has been fascinated throughout the story with an owl in the backyard, an owl the rest of her family saw as a harbinger of demonic forces, perhaps sees a different alternative. The last time Ije and Adamma see the owl, it has two eggs it is nesting upon. Adamma's reaction to the eggs is to exclaim, "Poor Daddy!" because this means the owl he has tried to pray away is about to lead to even more owls. The rejection of daddy's world view allows the girls to find their one moment of unity, holding hands just before they go in to find their mother dead. That moment represents the brief moment of life we have before death takes us. That's the moment we all live in. Perhaps the girls haven't rejected Epicurus, but their misunderstanding of Epicurus, and what they've done at the end is independently arrive at a conclusion more akin to that of the original. 

The shot still lands even if it's not a knockout

I didn't find this story to have quite the power punch it might have had. I wish it had spent more time focusing on the issue Adamma raises when she dreams of what it would have been like to live in a family with fewer problems: "It's not like anybody gave me a choice." With its irresponsible parents clinging to faith, the story could have asked a lot more direct questions about the meaning of life in a world where we all kind of get dealt a hand going in that we wouldn't have chosen for ourselves. It didn't, which left me a little disappointed. I was also struggling to enter into the narrator's mind because I couldn't trace what her journey actually was. But just because the story wasn't a knockout doesn't meant it had no impact. It was still an inventive blending of ideas and worlds into something worth thinking about. 

Maybe this story could be a little bit sweeter, but I'm not sure how: "City Girl" by Alice Hoffman (O.Henry 2025 Anthology)

The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading. I write for the intelligent, curious lay reader, so these stories feed into what I'm trying to do perfectly. I find a thread worth pulling on that might not occur to most readers, and I pull on it. The hardest stories to post about are the ones where I either dislike them so much I don't see anything worth further appreciation (although once in a while, it can be instructive to write about why I don't think the story is worth this kind of consideration), or stories that are so obviously good and easy to appreciate, any reader can see why they're in a "best of" collection. 

"City Girl" by Alice Hoffman is in the latter category. Although its subject matter, concerning a teenage girl who decides to drop out of school and get high with a drug addict in her rich father's New York condo, is pretty normal for an anthology like the O.Henry, the sweet and --dare I say--happy ending isn't. This is more the kind of story you'd find in the Coolest American Short Stories series than in O.Henry or Best American Short Stories. Normally, in a high-end literary short story collection, I'd expect the girl to continue wandering toward her own destruction in a quasi-nihilist way. Instead, all the bad things that happen in "City Girl" only serve to treat the reader to the dopamine-producing kindness of the girl's father-in-law, Gig. 

There's not much to add to that, but I will note one characteristic about the story that might not be readily apparent. There's a diversity of opinions among writers about how much of a character's motivation to show. I think most writers agree that's it's possible to either show too little or too much, but I feel that with a majority of stories in contemporary short story collections, there's a tendency to agree with Aatif Rashid and err on the side of showing too little rather than too much:

"And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience."

Iago from Othello is often held up as an exemplar of a character without a fully explained motivation. I Googled Iago, and I assume this must be who they're talking about. 

That's kind of where the narrator/protagonist of "City Girl" begins. She confesses at the beginning to not listening to her father's warnings. She gives only surface motivations for her recklessness: "We loved the city, even though it was dangerous," or "I only felt alive when I was dancing" as an explanation for going to clubs while underage. Both of these only take us one level into motivation, and they invite further questions, the answers to which we are denied. Why do the father and daughter love the city in spite of it being dangerous? Why does she only feel alive when dancing? 

Most of the girl's true motivations for the first half of the story can be summed up in her own profession of ignorance: "I don't know what I was looking for." However, there is a point, soon after she brings Cooper, an older drug addict, into her family's home, when she has what in therapy would be called a breakthrough. She has just gotten done letting Cooper take her virginity, and she is cleaning her blood off the couch, when she looks at herself in the mirror and says that "all at once I knew I had done this because I could never be a dancer." She's too tall to go as far in dancing as she wants, and since she's denied what she really wants, she's decided to go ahead and ruin herself.

Once we get this confession, others follow. "My own real father hadn't wanted me; my mother loved her baby boys." We get a full backstory of a father who abandoned her and a mother who was distant from her. When her father-in-law rescues her and puts her in a detox clinic, she meets with therapists, and there, a whole torrent of motivation comes gushing out after she tells the doctor she thought she saw a little girl beside the pool she jumped into in despair:

"My doctor said it was me, me before Gig, when my mother would leave me alone when she went to work and I sat in one place, terrified, until she came home. And then one day I walked out the door, tired of being terrified. I decided I wouldn't be a child anymore, I would do as I pleased. I would step out of the world and make my own way."

"City Girl" has come up with a different way of resolving the too much motivation/too little motivation dilemma. It began the story by withholding it, and by the end of the story, it was brimming over with it. This parallels the way the story begins with a character who is mired in nihilistic indifference to her own suffering, then begins, little by little, to be open to the possibility of happiness.

Narrative theory might prefer that stories refuse to give too much motivation. We can have hints about why Iago hates Othello, but ultimately, Iago should hate Othello because he just does. And that's all fine for plays, and yes, in some ways, it is reflective of how the human psyche is incomprehensibly complex. But for human beings living our lives, we do kind of need to understand our own motivations if we're ever going to find any level of happiness. "City Girl" begins in narrative purity and ultimately defects to human kindness, and in the process, it refuses to continue to kill its darlings and delivers us a teenage girl with hope for her future. I think most readers will approve of the rebellion.  

The pícara as parent: "Shotgun Calypso" by India Finch

(Personal update before launching into this: Obviously, my new job has slowed down my pace of posting here. I don't know yet if it will end my pace completely. I'm so tired right now it's hard to see how I'm going to keep pushing in posts, even delayed ones, but I've been doing this a long time and don't want it to just end yet. So I'll keep pushing forward slowly, even though everything below is probably fatigue-induced gibberish.)

The picaresque story is one of the great, ubiquitous forms of Western storytelling. In a picaresque story, there is a person (the pícaro, variously translated as "rascal" or "rogue" or something like that) who is typically at or near the bottom rung of the social ladder, cynically using the contradictions of society to survive. The pícaro doesn't worry overly much about right and wrong; he is pragmatic, and he thinks only of what works and what will help him to live another day. Using his wits to make his way in the world, the pícaro highlights society's absurdities by understanding it on a more fundamental level than those who are doing well do. Pícaros tend to move from one master or sponsor to another, and they wander somewhat in their quest to survive.

The picaresque novel originated in Spain, but there are a number of classic American examples. Huck Finn might be the both the best-known and the clearest example, but there are many more. What there aren't a lot of are picaresque novels with a female protagonist, which I guess would be called a pícara. Moll Flanders might be one, but it's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. 

"Shotgun Calypso" is kind of a picaresque story with a female pícara, only the pícara isn't the main character. (Even though the main character, like Huck Finn, doesn't like to wear shoes.) The story is narrated by Calypso, but the pícara in it is her mother, known only as "Ma." Her mother is cynical about using sex to get men to help her out financially. She may or may not feel some affection for the men she uses, but the affection is by the wayside. Ma is a survivor who uses the affection or just plain horniness of men to get what she needs, and she passes her knowledge of how to do this on to her kids. 

Judging Ma

It's possible to read the story and feel only contempt for Ma, because she is physically abusive and puts her children in danger by getting them close to a pervert, which is her latest boyfriend Lonnie. Lonnie and his wife apparently have some arrangement where he is allowed his dalliances with Ma, but only if his wife doesn't have to witness any of it. Ordinarily, Ma, Calypso and Calypso's younger sister Clio drive from Huntsville, Texas, to Houston and pick Lonnie up, but today, they stay at Lonnie's house, because his wife leaves for the weekend, so it's okay for them to be there. While in Lonnie's house, Lonnie tries to teach Calypso about how to perform fellatio by using his finger. 

So yeah, if a social worker were to read this story and if it were about a real family, Ma would lose her kids immediately, I'm willing to bet. But I don't think she's entirely bad. She's just what happens when a pícara tries to have kids. She's got nothing to pass on to them but the tricks whereby she has survived. (She literally calls the men she's with "tricks," which is what a sex worker calls her clients, but also what a pícaro plays to get by.) Calypso seems to understand that her mother's physical abuse is a limitation she has, but when she says of Ma that "she didn't mean anything by it," the phrase seems somehow more self-aware than when most abused people offer justifications for their abusers. Calypso isn't justifying; she's observing. Moreover, there is a bit of raw wisdom in Ma's advice to her kids that they should become lesbians, because then at least they'd have someone to perform cunnilingus on them, which is "half the battle." As an indirect kind of sex worker, Ma has to worry more about the pleasure of her tricks than her own, but she wants better for her kids.   

Because the pícara makes her living by taking advantage of falsities in society, Ma has a hard time passing on anything authentic to her children. She is invading Lonnie's wealthy neighborhood by bringing her kids and beat-up car into it, and there is a concern about how it all looks. Because there is so much concern about how things look, Ma finds it hard to separate appearance from reality. She doesn't want Calypso to act uncivilized in front of others so "people wouldn't call her an unfit mother." Similarly, white people make Ma nervous because she is "too busy thinking about what they're thinking" around them. The pícara is supposed to survive by taking advantage of the hypocrisy of those around her, but motherhood has taken Ma by surprise and forced her to become hypocritical herself. 

Yet there are moments when Ma transcends her transactional thinking, and those moments have to do with her genuine affection for her children. Calypso and Clio overhear Ma reminiscing about how she almost hooked up with the bass from Boyz II Men. The question comes up about whether this might not have led to the ultimate sugar daddy, but Ma doesn't regret it. Her reasoning, essentially, is that she'd have ended up with kids other than the ones she had. It's at this moment that Calypso realizes that her mother actually likes her and her sister. She knew they were loved, but not liked. There are a lot of kids with "better" parents who might never feel that. 

Boyz II Men, Girlz II Women

The day of the story, the girls head straight to the bathroom to start stealing small items from Lonnie and his wife while Ma and Lonnie start making out. The girls are obviously pros at it, but they get a little distracted and start putting on lipstick and makeup. Soon after, they put on the dresses that belong to Lonnie's wife. Once the dresses are on, the change is immediate. "So suddenly, we were women." 

The change isn't a good one, because it's a change from a kind of innocence to shocking awareness of the danger of being a sexual object. Changes in "Shotgun Calypso" are never good. Ma changes from one type of person to another when Lonnie is around, as do the family's rules and traditions. Although the girls are able to put the bathroom back to its "virgin" state after they "deflower" it, Calypso cannot go back to her innocence once Lonnie sees her in his wife's dress and puts his finger in her mouth. The scene in which the girls are forced to pretend they enjoy the trampoline Lonnie got them, a now inappropriate child's gift for these suddenly grown women, is a horrific dramatization of the trauma they suffered. 

Power

Calypso is given her name for the powerful nymph in The Odyssey who holds Homer against his will. Ma wanted to impart to her daughter the power that comes from using sex to control a man. "My birthright was women who trapped love and took it by force even when men cried." Ma tries to pass on the skill she has learned for survival, which is to find a man who will pay your rent when you're short. 

Calypso's family appreciates the ability to grab a man. They respect Miss Winnie from next door for still being able to pull a man at age seventy. They respect the ability for the power it gives, but it's not a power without costs. Odysseus fought to escape Calypso because he wanted to get back to his wife, whom he loved. Lonnie escapes from his wife to be with Ma. Any man Ma can pull is going to come with some downsides. Odysseuses are hard to find. 

The sister's name

There's an explanation for Calypso's name, but what about Clio? In Greek mythology, Clio is a muse, but not the muse of poetry to whom Homer prays. Clio is the muse of history. We can only guess at the significance of this name. Calypso tries and eventually succeeds, for a time, to forget that night, but then the memory comes back. The memory is tied to the night not only when Lonnie forced his finger into her mouth, but also when Calypso first let her sister have the shotgun seat in the front of the car. The redemption in the trauma for the girls is that they realized their value to one another. It's a moment that completes an arc for Calypso. She originally held onto the seat as her birthright as the older sister, but she eventually cedes it to Clio, because she and Clio formed a deep bond when they shared the trauma of bouncing on the symbol of their now-ended childhood together. The bond Calypso now shares with Clio is what allows her to hold on to the memory of the history of that night.  

Journey to the center of the story: "Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch

"Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch joins "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken at the top of my list of great contemporary short stories about the perils of raising children. "Thunderstruck" focused on the difficulties of raising young adolescents, and how the balance between too much parenting and not enough is difficult to find, while "Stump of the World" is about how hard it can be to get a near-adult to buy into work and responsibility, and how the child's objections to these things can actually be quite reasonable. I identify with the mother of this story, because, like her, one of the problems I've had convincing my now young-adult son to do things like get a job and plot a course for his future is that he has very logical reasons why he wouldn't want to. Work doesn't seem like a great deal, and look at all those kids who worked hard to get degrees in computer science who now can't get jobs. What am I supposed to tell him to work hard to become? I don't even know how to answer that question for myself. The world seems to be squeezing young people more and more; how can I tell my son with a straight face that he ought to go try and make his way in it, because the benefits will outweigh the costs?

Like ffitch's "Seeing Through Maps," which was in last year's Best American Short Stories collection, "Stump of the World" is just jam-packed with symbolism, double meanings, and pregnant clauses that lend themselves to multiple readings. Rather than mold all of this into one grand reading like I normally do, I'm going to work through the story based on questions that popped up while I was going through it, hoping they're similar to questions you readers out there might have had.

Summary

But first, a quick synopsis. It's always a good start, when dealing with a slippery story that's hard to pin down, to try to retell what's there. This might be a bastardization of the complex into the simple, but it can help reveal patterns as well as how the difficult parts fit into the whole.

Emma doesn't know what to do with her 17-year-old son Teddy. He's a senior in high school, but he's been skipping class, and it doesn't look like he's going to do well on his statewide assessment exam. Also, he's been shoplifting. His favorite objects to swipe are facemasks, which he claims not only help his cystic acne, but also "behind his face, his brain." Emma finds it difficult to be as hard on Teddy about shoplifting--and everything else--as she thinks she really should be.

Meanwhile, Emma's mother, who lives with them because her hours at her library job were cut and she can no longer afford her own rent, has adopted another grandchild. This grandchild is a sort of doppelganger for Emma, because her name is Jessica, which was the same name Emma used as a child when she briefly created an alter ego. Emma's mother first found Jessica through the community bulletin board at the library. The bulletin board is mostly full of sidehustling charlatans selling questionable goods and services, but Jessica's ad had been only asking for a grandparent or grandparents to adopt her.  

It's possible the world Teddy and Emma inhabit is a somewhat futuristic place with an altered climate. They drive at one point through "the kind of rain previously called a downpour," suggesting that the climate of the story is different from the climate of now. We are frequently told that "there is no city" and also that there is no state, perhaps alluding not only to a change in the weather, but a change in political reality. Otherwise, it's a very recognizable world, though. Emma works in a grocery store stocking produce.

Emma and her mother both try to convince Teddy to straighten up and fly right, to think about how he's going to make a living, but Teddy isn't interested. He thinks making a living is a scam the world foists upon people, and that most jobs, like the ones advertised on the bulletin board, are themselves just scams. The biggest scam is Gallo painting a crack in the road so drivers can see it and then asking for donations to maintain the road. 

The crack turns into a sinkhole, and the sinkhole keeps growing. Teddy goes missing a lot. He finally goes missing for a long time, and Emma asks Gallo, who has now expanded operations to warn drivers about a growing sinkhole instead of a small crack, to put Teddy's picture up. She then discovers that Teddy has been apprenticing with Gallo, and he's down in the sinkhole, exploring. He and Gallo plan to set up tours into the sinkhole. Emma is furious, and follows him into the sinkhole, thinking to drag him home and punish him, but instead, she follows him all the way "to the center of the earth." 

Technically, you can't argue that the appearance of a sinkhole isn't a sign that you have a sinkhole.

Questions that occur to me

What does Teddy mean when he says the facemasks help his brain?

Teddy has cystic acne, so it's understandable why he would want to use facemasks to control his acne. It isn't just embarrassing for a teenager, it's also a little bit painful and uncomfortable. But Teddy claims they also help "behind his face, his brain." 

Teddy might be a full-of-shit teenager, but full-of-shit teenagers have a point. The world they're about to enter doesn't seem like a great deal. Teddy doesn't want to enter this world. His insistence that he not "be interpellated" means he shouldn't be given a social identity. Wearing a mask allows him to hide his identity for a while. 

His habit of leaving the used masks everywhere is curious. It's almost like an animal that has molted leaving its old skin. Teddy's desire to steal things is described at one point as a desire to "exfoliate" them. Teddy's habit might be "annoying" to his grandmother, but he's also literally growing in front of our eyes. Each time he escapes interpellation and removes part of himself, he comes out a little closer to his fully grown form, although it may be hard to see him growing while it's happening. 

Why does Emma find it difficult to be stricter with Teddy? 

In the first place, although Emma is vexed by Teddy's behavior, she is also a doting parent. She looked in on him with anxiety when he was young and sleeping. She thinks of herself at one point as "thousands of roaring fans in an enormous arena and Teddy was the only one on the field." 

She also can relate, because some of Teddy's foibles are her own. She also stole when she was young. Emma's mother made her take the stolen paper clips back to the store and apologize, but Emma, although she intended to explain to Teddy why stealing was wrong, "figured she could do it later." It's possible she has a hard time explaining it to Teddy because she doesn't quite understand it herself. At one point, when she picks Teddy up from stealing, she brings him an apple, and it's an open question whether she paid for that apple or took it from work, since when she stacks tomatoes, she almost "forgets they were for sale." 

Emma and Teddy are alike in a lot of ways. Teddy ultimately seems to find satisfaction in going into the sinkhole, where he can see beneath the roots of grass. Having been dissatisfied with the phony face of the world, he is happy to get to its real core. When Emma first found her love of fruits and vegetables, it was growing a variety of tomato called the "Stump of the World." That's a pretty unusual name for a varietal, and it suggests that Emma, too, was interested in what lay at the bottom of everything.

Does the bulletin board represent something more?

The bulletin board is one of the best touches in the story. In our real world, community bulletin boards were kind of the precursor to the informal economy of the Internet, where people hawked goods Etsy-style or services influencer-style to the people in their community. In "Stump of the World," the bulletin board seems to be standing in for all of the tomfoolery that takes place on the Internet. Talking about influencers and Internet scams is overdone, so instead, the story replaces the Internet with something that came before it. When everyone is shouting, sometimes, you get noticed more by whispering, so this story doesn't talk about influencer culture, but an abstract signifier that suggests it. 

Teddy sees the bulletin board as the symbol of how nobody really makes a living and how all work is parasitic, a circular process in which everyone feeds off each other. (Compare this to Emma's complaint about circular logic concerning signs of sinkholes.) The bulletin board could have been something that held the community together, but because "there is no city," it doesn't. It's the symbol of all that Teddy is trying to avoid. 

Speaking of that, what does the repeated claim that "there is no city" mean?

I think we can read "city" and "state" as terms that more or less mean "community" here. There has been a breakdown of community, and in this sense, I don't think the story is set in the future much at all. All that's left of the community are the parts that discipline people. This reminds me of the concerns I've read for the decline in civic engagement. People don't join organizations or clubs as much as they used to. "The city" to us is just the things we call 911 for. It's a last resort when something has gone very wrong. The bulletin board seems like it might fill this void, but other than Jessica, asking for grandparents to adopt her, it's overrun by shady businesses. "There is no city" is a reference to the atomization of our own world. This decline in human relations is reflected in Jessica's quest for "roots" in the sense of ancestors, a quest Emma's mom can only fill by making up ancient recipes like "ethnic stew." 

What's up with missing parents? 

Teddy's father is never mentioned, nor is Emma's father. When Gallo talks about his son, he never mentions a mother. Why is everyone seemingly a single parent? In part, I suspect this is part of the issue above, the atomization of society and the breakdown of traditional familial and community relationships that held it in place. 

It may be that part of what Teddy was missing was the oft-cited "male role model." When he gets to know Gallo (a name that means "rooster" in Spanish and so pretty clearly seems to have a masculine energy), they share a "secret side-hug handshake of men." Gallo seems to awaken something in Teddy that Emma, in spite of her unquestioned love for him, couldn't. A lot of what Teddy (and Emma) were missing was something that only a traditional community could give them. It takes a city to raise a child, because sometimes, it's just hard to find someone on the right wavelength for a kid, so you need a big pool of candidates, but since there is no city for Teddy, it took him a long time to find that person. 

What's with all the fruit and vegetable imagery?

I know I've complained before about when characters in fiction are completely defined by their occupations. I hate when a brewer in a story sees the whole world in terms of yeast and fermentation, so that the author can wax poetic and show off all the research they did about brewing. So why don't I find Emma's frequent references to fruits and vegetables irritating? I think because Emma isn't doing it in any deep and profound way. She works all day stacking oranges, and so she sees oranges in things outside of work. She compares her son's skin to that of an avocado, or Gallo's face to an overripe banana. Emma's occupation affects how she sees things on the surface, not her deep psychological states.

Speaking of fruits and vegetables, there's a nice double meaning in her occupation. We chide kids on the cusp of adulthood that they need to be "productive." Emma works with "produce," pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, but the word is spelled the same as pro-DUCE, meaning to do something that contributes. Her job is symbolic of the adult productivity that she is trying to get Teddy to buy into. 

There is a lot of change in the story, and Teddy remarks on how change is the only constant. Does this story uphold this cliché or challenge it?

The story is probably commenting on change as much as it is doing anything. It's hard to write about this subject without getting eyerolls, because ideas like "the only constant is change" are such clichés, they invoke instinctive revolts from readers. That's why the story introduces the cliché as a cliché by having Teddy mouth it. 

The thing about many clichés is that they're true, though, and nobody comes to accept the truth of the only constant being change as much as Teddy. It's Emma who fights it. When the crack, which "had been there as long as Emma could remember," first begins to widen to a sinkhole, she denies it. "That crack has been the same my whole life," she insists. 

There is an inversion that takes place roughly halfway through the story. Emma began by trying to convince Teddy to find a job, and Teddy insisted that the whole notion of making a living was a farce. But when Emma complains about people getting paid for writing circular arguments, it's Teddy who says that everyone has to "get by." This incites Emma's response to Teddy of, "You've changed." Of course, evidence that he's been changing has been literally left all over the place, as every time he discarded a mask, he was leaving parts of his old self behind, but here, "You've changed" is an accusation. 

Teddy later accepts his own change, when his mother comes down into the sinkhole with him. "People change," he says. 

The story is almost a parable of what it takes for a parent to successfully help a child navigate into adulthood, especially when that child is resisting the change. You work and work to get them to change, but when the change finally comes, it might come from unexpected sources and it might express itself in unexpected ways. Emma meant for Teddy to be "productive," but he's gone one better by getting below the level where produce happens. It's so disorienting for Emma, she ends up completely changing roles at the very end, becoming the child who needs Teddy to lead her into his future. He offers her his hand, and she takes it as she follows "her son to the center of the earth." 

Teddy needed to change to find his own happiness as an adult, and Emma wasn't able to guide him into it. We often talk about the need to send children off on their own in adulthood, but that's not the image at the end of "Stump of the World." Instead, Teddy still needs the company of his mother, but she needs him to show her how the new relationship will work. It's not so much a child going off into the world as it is a role reversal in which the child now needs to show the parent the outlines of the new relationship. 

Aside: my own job troubles and the future of the blog

As I wrote about a few months ago, I left my long-time job in early March. Since then, I've returned to Ohio, where I grew up, found a home, and looked for work. And looked. And looked. I finally found something, and I start tomorrow. I'm terrified of going to this job. It's a stressful job with a lot of responsibility, and if I do it wrong, bad things could actually happen. In my early fifties, I don't know if I'm still mentally dexterous enough or physically tough enough for long hours of a stressful job. I need to do something, and after months of looking, this was the best option I found. It's possible I'll actually like it and be good at it, but it's going to be a tough adjustment. I'm going from a job where I was supremely confident I knew what I was doing to a job where I'll be the dumbest guy in the room as well as one of the oldest. 

With this adjustment going on, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep blogging for the foreseeable future. With twelve-hour shifts that will sometimes be longer, and with having to learn a lot of new material, I don't foresee a lot of time to spare for reading literary fiction and writing about it. 

In spite of all the times I gave up blogging in despair, this has also come to be a comforting constant in my life. Especially since I changed from blogging about the travails of writing life to focusing on literary criticism of short stories, it's been nice just to have a clear assignment to do. Feeling like I occasionally do a good job has been a bonus. 

Since moving back to Ohio, my own son, like Teddy from the story, has sort of been figuring his life out. So like Emma, I'm going to look to him to guide me as I go to a job I'm frankly very afraid to go to tomorrow. I don't know when I'll be back here, but I have really enjoyed posting about short stories for the confused and consternated these past many years. 

Trad quest for hippies: "Sanrevelle" by Dave Eggers

Let's start with the name Sanrevelle, which is both the title of the story and the name of the woman the main character Hop falls in love with and spends most of the story trying to locate. It's not a traditional name, although it seems to mimic one. Characters in the story comment on the name, unsure if it even belongs to a person. In the real world, there is a Revelle College as part of the UC San Diego campus, but neither San Revelle nor the one-word combination really show up on any map or in any directory. Google tells me that it is a "rare Portuguese woman's name," although its sources are divided on the meaning. The "San" part would indicate a saint, but the latter half of the name is a mystery, and in any event, Sanrevelle herself shows a lack of interest in the history of names when Hop starts to explain his own. In the context of a boat parade of Christmas lights, it might be fair to do a little bit of association and go from "revelle" to "revel." She is the saint of Christmas revelry, and Hop is on a quest/pilgrimage to reach the saint. 

A pilgrimage to a saint is a pretty traditional formula, and so is Hop's hoped-for fix to feeling lost in the maelstrom of life by looking to the love of a good woman. These traditional formulas are in opposition to the new-age gobbledygook that surrounds Hop. His boss, co-founder of one of the largest personal injury firms on the West Coast, has gone a little insane, and has started looking to every phony, hippie-dippie system on Earth to help him make sense of the world. He's started a list of grudges against his long-dead parents, consulted with mediums, and gone off to be part of a cult in Europe. Meanwhile, he's left Hop to man the ship at the law firm, and ship from which one lawyer after another is jumping.

The firm is located in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, a building known mostly for how it began to sink soon after construction was completed because it was built in soft clay. That alone sounds something like a Biblical parable about building your house on rock, and, because it's set in San Francisco, sort of the epicenter of liberal, flower-power culture and its modern descendants, the story comes across as a bit of a rebuke to that culture and a suggestion that answers to life's questions might, on occasion, be better looked for somewhere else. Hop, who eventually starts living in the tower full-time at his boss's request, finds himself looking out of the window and wishing for a way out. He sees the bay, which leads him to try sailing lessons, which leads him to meet Sanrevelle, the sailing instructor. 

Hop's passivity

Part of modernity's endless boring discourse has to do with the manliness of men, with conservatives criticizing weak, passive, "cuck" or "beta" males. Hop fits that description. He assures Sanrevelle that he isn't a "middle-aged thumbsucker" with "mommy issues," but I beg to differ. Her boat is called the fucking Cradle for Christ's sake, and if that's not an indicator that he is looking for a mommy to fix him, I don't know what is. 

By making Sanrevelle Hop's instructor, the story encourages the reader to see her as more than just a mentor in sailing. She is a guide to him trying to figure out his life. He quickly falls in love, but he is too afraid to make a move. She is somewhat guarded, although she does put out some signs that she's open to dating him, but he is too passive and uncertain of himself to take a risk, up until the final act, which makes up most of the story. She's getting ready to go on a long wished-for trip to the Sea of Cortez. She needs a crew, and there have been hints between Hop and Sanrevelle that if he wanted to go, she might be amenable to that. But he hasn't gotten up the nerve to tell her how he feels. 

Traditional narrative within non-traditional trappings

And so we come to the Love Actually-esque scene that, with interruptions for backstory, makes up the plot. Hop has decided to throw caution to the wind and find Sanrevelle on the night that the flotilla of boats with Christmas lights is supposed to cruise through the bay, which is a San Francisco tradition. The setup to this scene isn't exactly clear. She apparently told Hop that she would be on her boat a little before the parade started, and if she wasn't, she'd be in the barge-made-bar she likes to hang out in. It isn't clear if she had asked Hop to be part of the flotilla with her. In any event, she isn't at her boat, nor is she at the "Waterfront Social Club," and she isn't answering her phone, so Hop, suddenly encouraged by Sanrevelle's friend who seems to have had a change of heart about him, takes a canoe and goes out to find her. (She is called "Sanrevelle's skeptical friend Joy," a name as pregnant with meaning, along with a description as on-the-nose as anything Hawthorne might have written.)

Come to think of it, Love Actually, with its attempt to package traditional love stories in hip, modern packages, kind of reminds me of "Sanrevelle." On the one hand, Hop's travails as he goes from one mistaken location to another in search of Sanrevelle are so traditional they could probably neatly fit into a Joseph Campbell-inspired diagram. He accepts his call to adventure, faces trials, and eventually perseveres by showing his steadfastness of heart. It's a very old formula, one that's set against all of the weird, new answers to life that only lead people astray in the big city. 

On the other hand, it doesn't end with Hop becoming the traditional male lead of the relationship. He has just enough agency to go ask Sanrevelle for help, and when he does that, the story ends. It ends with Hop getting what he wants, which is for Sanrevelle to show him the way. The last line is: "And so he let her guide him." Having shown enough agency to have looked for her and expressed his real interest, she relieves him of further need for agency by taking over guiding him. 

Liberals flirting with traditional answers

"Sanrevelle" is perhaps not a complete rejection of hippie culture. Hop does, after all, get his canoe from the communal pile of watercraft next to the social club. It is, however, a story about a man who escapes the spiritual confusion of living in modern San Francisco through heterosexual love, a love that ends with a trip to escape San Francisco and its tottering society built on sand. There is an implied critique there of the answers to life's problems that "San Francisco"--the symbol of all kinds of New Age flim-flam panaceas--offers. 

Hop doesn't declare Jesus Christ as his lord and savior at the end. It's not that kind of traditional. But it does, by bringing in a large number of Christian symbols, and by poking fun at the silliest excesses of New Age thinking, at least re-introduce old answers as possible cures to the ills of modernity.   

I don't think it will be terribly controversial if I posit that the editors who determine what gets published in literary fiction such as the O.Henry Anthology skew toward the politically liberal. The New York-based establishment of publishers skews heavily left in its politics. Unlike a lot of claims of bias, I think this one is pretty hard to argue against. But every now and again, for reasons I don't quite understand, someone--typically an older, white male--is able to sneak in conservative messages that are accepted pretty much whole cloth by the literary establishment. I think Cormac McCarthy was the prime example of this. I have no idea how his novels, which in some cases featured sympathetic characters fighting evil while also railing against modern explanations of evil, were accepted by the literary establishment as they were. 

Part of the answer is probably that people aren't very good readers and they may not even understand the themes of the books they read, but I also think that liberals have had enough time go by to realize that not all of the things they hoped were true two generations ago have panned out. That doesn't mean they want to go back to 1955 like MAGA does, but they do seem, on occasion, to be willing to look to the past for virtues that might be worth salvaging and trying to incorporate into a modern setting. "Sanrevelle" attempts to do this, and by slipping Jesus in among the lights and Dean Martin, it does it unobtrusively. But its implied critique of at least some of the worst solutions "San Francisco" has to offer is hard not to read in at least a partly political sense.