WIHPTS: Danielle Evans' "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain"

It's the return of "Would I have published this story?" which is a game I play where I try to imagine if I'd have voted "yes" on a highly acclaimed short story if it had come in as a random, slush-pile fiction entry at the magazine where I'm an assistant fiction editor.

It's impossible, of course, for me to really know how I'd have voted, since I really do know that this is acclaimed fiction, but I do the best I can.

This isn't really criticism or a review, although my views on the story's merit do tend to come out in the wash as I play the game.

With that out of the way, here we go...

Would I have published it?

I'm 80% sure the answer is yes. 

Synopsis


This is a great story. I'm almost halfway through the 2017 Best American Short Stories anthology, and this is my favorite yet. It's the story of Rena, a woman who travels the world photographing the traumatized, the war-torn, the dying and the destitute. Back at home, she's left a sister in a facility to care for her, because the sister's husband shot her in the head over an imagined affair, leaving her permanently impaired. This leads Rena to conclude that her line of work isn't really that dangerous, because you can get shot in your own home by the kid who grew up next door, the one who used to take out your parents' trash.

In spite of that dire backdrop, the story itself at times is borderline screwball comedy. Rena met a man on her travels once named JT, a man who has been finding reasons to delay marrying the girl back home. It just so happens that girl back home is a pastor's daughter. She's invited Rena to her wedding, although not as a bridesmaid. Dori, the pastor's daughter, has been suspicious of Rena since Rena and JT were stranded in a hotel in West Africa for several days once because of a quarantine. It's not clear why she invited Rena, except possibly as a passive aggressive means to force Rena to watch Dori marry JT and win a contest Rena hasn't been playing.

For wedding colors, Dori picked the whole rainbow. Each of the seven bridesmaids is one of the seven colors in the ROY-G-BIV spectrum (the title of the story, "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain, is an old mnemonic device for remembering the colors of the spectrum). Rena self-selects black, so as not to steal the show from anyone. Dori is white.

Long story short, Rena bangs one of the groomsmen, but on her way out of the room, she catches JT running away from his wedding. The next day, Dori and Rena drive off together to find the groom after Rena lies and says she knows where to find him. It's a little bit "My Best Friend's Wedding," a little bit "Thelma and Louise."

What might have kept me from voting yes

Three things:

1) As everyone who knows me is aware, I tend to get triggered by depictions of evangelicals, because I almost always think they're wrong. Dori starts off looking like she's going to be a cut-out of an evangelical, or the author's second-hand imaginings of what an evangelical might be like. Dori ends up as much more than that, but I'd have had to get far enough to find that out.

2) The opening lines. By the end, I was okay with how it started, but when I first read them, I wasn't sure. "Two by two the animals boarded, and then all the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way." Well, actually, a lot of people tell the story that way. It's not a new objection to the story of Noah's Ark.

3) There are a few passages early on that seem to break third-person limited. For example: "Rena is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party." That's nearly an analysis coming from outside Rena (so is the opening paragraph). Or again, describing how Rena met JT: "When they met, most of what they had in common was that they were Americans, but far away from home, that could be enough." That evaluation "that could be enough" sounds like an omniscient narrator, not Rena. But this kind of thing soon dissipates, and I'm pretty sure I'd have kept reading through it.

Coda

If I'm right that I would have persevered, I'd have been so glad I did stick with it. The ending of this thing really knocked my socks off. I'd been kind of disappointed in this year's anthology up to that point, but this one was one of those stories I read stories for.

Still, it's a little troubling to me that I'm not sure. When I first started editing, it was a little bit comforting to me as a writer to see how many good stories come in. It made me feel like when I was getting rejections, it wasn't that what I wrote wasn't good. It was just that there was a ton of good competition. Over time, I started feeling like that was no longer such a consolation. I started to feel the weight of the number of other good writers, and feel like I was trying to push into a glutted market.

Lately, I've been starting to feel discomfort as an editor, not just as a writer. The quantity of good writing has overwhelmed me, and I'm getting to a point where I just can't give stories the attention needed to tell which of the many good ones is the best. New stories keep coming in every day from earnest people giving us their best shot, and I'm still trying to get through the slush pile from three months ago. I do my best. I really do. But would I have seen this great story for what it was? Would I have been the reader this story deserved?

Like it or not, I've become a gatekeeper of sorts. That's a big responsibility. I'm not sure I'm living up to it.