So far, this year's BASS is, in fact, knocking me down, and Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter" is just another story that's got me crumpled on the floor.
The set-up, which takes very little time
I love a story that gets right to the conflict, and this one gives us nearly a straight line to it. Claire is down in Florida from college in Vermont to see her father and the woman he married after Claire's mother died. Claire hates her stepmom and, because the stepmom's name is Puppy, the readers are invited to hate her, too. Claire is dating a dirt bag while down there to annoy Puppy, and the dirt bag gives her a Confederate-flag-themed bikini, which she wears partly because she doesn't own another swimsuit and partly because it annoys Puppy. Quite without a plan, the dirt bag takes a quick pic of her in the bikini against his pickup truck and posts it to his social media, tagging Claire.
The next day, a black student in the same dormitory as Claire re-posts the picture to her own social media, expressing anger that a student in her own dorm would wear something like that. Add 8 million tons of slacktivist, online righteous anger, and Claire is in the middle of a psycho-billy freakout social media shit storm.
Claire in the docket
Last year, when my son's class read "Lamb to the Slaughter" in language arts, the class had a mock trial to determine whether the woman should be guilty for killing her husband. It was kind of corny, but it might actually work really well for this story. Is Claire guilty? If so, of what? There are two ways to look at what happens to Claire and what her responsibility is.
Claire is just misunderstood and we should sympathize with her
At the heart of this story is its strong-willed pro/ant agonist, Claire. It's hard not to like Claire. We sympathize with her for the same reason a lot of people sympathize with the Confederacy: as Americans, we have a natural respect for people who don't want to be told what to do. "Don't tread on me" has a lot of instinctive currency for us. That's Claire in a nutshell. Her reaction to finding out the photo of herself in the bikini is going viral isn't, as one would expect, to rush to make explanations for herself. She has a couple of avenues open to her. She could go the route a lot of white people do when something like this happens. She could say, "But I can't be racist, I have black friends." It's not an approach that usually works out well, but in Claire's case, she might plausibly gain some traction from it. She could also go the route suggested by the campus Libertarian who comes to visit her: she could say she's just proud of her heritage (although her heritage isn't really Southern, as only she seems to notice).
Claire doesn't initially want to take either of these routes. Her instinct is defiance for all of it: "She distrusts collective anger; Claire's anger has always been her own." The funny thing is that the girl who wore the rebel flag bikini is, in a sense, right. Much of the bluster surrounding the incident is utterly false. She sees it for what it is, and rather than cower to it, she's ready to give it the finger. It's hard not to root for her.
As people continue to throw accusations at her, Claire tries to keep her own sense of self. What stood out about the bikini for Claire from the beginning was its distance from her, how it made her feel like someone other than herself. Those are actually the opening lines of the story: "The bikini isn't even Claire's thing." When she puts it on, she feels "hot," but also "like someone she's not." When white supremacists contact her to voice their support, she rejects a link between them. Their "thinking they are the same doesn't make them the same." Claire is determined not to be defined by the bikini.
Claire is a wonderfully stubborn girl. It's very much in her nature to refuse help offered to her. She's certainly not going to apologize when she doesn't think she's done anything wrong. And in a sense, she hasn't. She wore the bikini to piss off her step-mom, which makes it doubly difficult for Claire to understand the "aggrieved reaction" of her black hallmate, since the step-mom, Claire thinks, "is half-racist anyway." She sees this as "doubly hilarious."
And it is, in a sense. One could read this story as one long series of tragicomic misunderstandings. (One of the best parts of this story is that Claire doesn't fall in with white supremacists who come to her aid; she falls in with Libertarians who are more obnoxious than they are dangerous. When Claire sees one at her door, she thinks that he smiles "like he's just won second place.") If we were to trace the events of this story back to their roots, we could say that it all started when Claire's mother got sick with cancer. We could say Claire had no control over most of the main events in the story.
Until her mother got sick, Claire seemed headed for happiness. She certainly didn't seem like a candidate for most likely to invoke the wrath of the Black Student Union. Although she was raised in a home where she felt a little frightened of herself, there were always Angela and Aaron next door. These are the black friends Claire didn't cite as proof she's not a racist, although she could have. They had an uncommonly tight friendship, one that's described in terms that are exactly the right amount of sweet. Just before everything goes to shit, Angela and Claire get drunk at camp together and are dreaming of the future. They are in the grass, and Claire turns to Angela: "It is a love that requires touch, and so Claire snuggles against her, nuzzles into her neck to say it out loud against her. Love love love. Angela is her best friend, her other self."
But then both Angela and Claire's moms get cancer at almost the same time. For a while, it just makes Angela and Claire closer, and Claire also becomes closer with Aaron, the brother who used to just be a target for Claire and Angela to torment. She has sex with Aaron once, although to her it doesn't mean they're falling in love but just finding a new level of intimacy in their friendship. But then Angela's mom survives and Claire's doesn't. Claire resents Angela and Aaron for still having a mother.
From there, the series of unfortunate events goes something like this: Claire's dad gets married again almost right away to someone Claire hates; Claire self-destructs; Claire goes to a party trying to get drunk and taken advantage of; Aaron tries to take her home to keep her safe; another person at the party sees a "large black man" carrying passed-out Claire to her car and rooting around in her purse for the keys and misunderstands; this leads to a car chase that kills Aaron; Nobody believes Claire when she tries to say Aaron wasn't doing anything wrong; Claire loses the friendship of Angela; Claire goes off to school in Vermont hating everyone and pretty much using "don't tread on me" as her one operative principle; which leads to wearing the bikini to piss off Puppy and setting off the whole firestorm.
In a sense, although it's a long chain of events, Claire isn't the one responsible for them.
About that night with Aaron, though. Claire's mom had been dead for four months, and Claire was still angry with Angela about it. She hadn't been talking to her friend, which made coping with a bad situation far worse. When Aaron finds her at the party, he can see she's headed for something bad: "You're messed up right now, I get that, but at some point you're going to have to stop making it worse."
Instead of getting her shit together, though, Claire dives headlong into "making it worse." Only it's Aaron, trying to help her, who bears the brunt of her actions.
In fact, it's Claire's own solipsistic view of her suffering that is the proximate cause of a lot of the suffering in the story. While it's easy to admire Claire's independence and her keen nose for bullshit, there's a telling little line early on that clues us in to her tragic flaw. When she realizes that the black girl in her dorm has objected to a "hallmate" of hers (Claire) wearing the rebel bikini, Claire is her sarcastic self: "she wasn't really aware that hallmate was a thing, a relationship carrying some expectation of trust of camaraderie."
It's a funny line, and it's easy to see Claire's side of it, but she's missing something. As sympathetic as we might be in America to "don't tread on me" kinds of thinking, living in society means that at times, you really have to allow others to tread on you. You have to modify your own choices for the sake of others. The libertarians might be right that at the heart of it, Claire has a right to flaunt the Confederate flag all she wants, but that's missing the point. The point is that there are people in society who will be aggrieved--hurt, offended, scared even--by Claire's actions, and Claire can't be so anti-social as to pretend that's got nothing to do with her.
As a matter of fact, Claire seems utterly surprised to realize that her actions have real consequences for others. When Carmen, the black "hallmate" who has objected to Claire's choice in bikinis, gets interviewed, "there is genuine fear in her eyes, which startles Claire." The entire outcry over the photo, in fact, is a mystery to Claire. Because she can't see what started the uproar in the first place, she doubles and then triples down in disastrous ways, first slipping a printed-out Confederate flag under Carmen's door with the note "Hope you had a nice vacation," and then posting the flag to her dorm window.
One thing that's a little bit ambiguous is how much she is to blame for what happened to Aaron. We can probably forgive her for the accident. In a different world, a young black man in Virginia wouldn't feel he had to floor it to get away from a car full of white kids pursuing him. But also in a different world, a good young man wouldn't have to carry a drunk girl away from a party to keep bad things from happening to her. So Claire can't really be blamed for the accident itself, even if her self-destructive behavior was part of what put Aaron at risk.
But she might have some responsibility for how the media viewed the accident. Most people seem to have sided with the boys who chased Aaron down and assumed Aaron was up to no good. Claire tried to clear it up:
The media can be incredibly obtuse. It's why Claire doesn't trust them when Bikinigate breaks. She has also learned that the reactions of the public are false. When Aaron died, "the people who give him the benefit of the doubt mostly feel themselves to be magnanimous." Claire is right about how full of bullshit the media and the people who get themselves in an uproar about it are, but she is wrong to give up trying to get her message across. The public might not get it right, but the people involved still needed to hear the truth from her.
Writers sometimes suffer from readers getting the wrong message from what writers create. I'm sure there will be readers who think the point of "Boys Go to Jupiter" has something to do with how full of shit the media is when stories take off, or how phony the fake righteousness of those who hop on the indignation bandwagon is. Danielle Evans has almost certainly been at a reading somewhere where a reader came up and said her story was a great farce about the hypocrisies of social media storms. That's an element of the story, but it's not all of what it's about.
I know a lot of white people who complain that Black Lives Matter (or any person they perceive as linked to BLM because that person is stating that life isn't equal in this here republic) is just "blaming white people for everything." This story ought to satisfy people with that particular complaint. The white person in it who starts all the mess isn't a bad person. In fact, she's pretty likable. This is better than just saying, "Not all white people are bad." It actually gives us a fully realized white person who's a lot better than just not bad. But she still makes mistakes she needs to correct.
I don't like when we talk about "balance" between opposing points of view. Balance suggests that there is some point of stasis between forces that are in opposition. It implies that each are equal in some way, and we could ideally reach a place where the two cease to oppose each other, a place where all the kinetic energy is gone. That's not usually the case in the real world that two things are really equally balanced. Just because Claire is really a pretty great character doesn't mean she doesn't have some serious moral defects to amend. Her good and her bad are in tension with each other, just as the reasons for us to forgive her and condemn her are in tension. The story doesn't offer us a point where we can harmonize the two; it offers us forces that continually push against one another.
That's why the ending is perfect. Claire, coached by the Libertarians, is all set to give a big speech at the end in defense of herself. But the black students in attendance get up and leave. They leave comment cards that are blank. She might have something to say, but they've got nothing to say to her. She's been shunned, which is far worse than a hate storm. It means she's lost her chance to have a voice.
Whichever way you view Claire's arc, whether she's a sympathetic victim or a self-deceiving antagonist who lacks empathy for others, the end works. If she's the victim, then at the end, she is denied the chance to tell her whole story, the one with Angela and Aaron in it, the one that will clear everything up and maybe bring some healing. If she's the antagonist, then she's denied the chance to offer her own self-justification because she doesn't deserve that chance.
The two forces are opposed, but not equal. The story is called "Boys Go to Jupiter," which was a child's chant Angela and Claire said as kids to harass Aaron: "Girls go to college to get more knowledge; boys go to Jupiter and get more stupider." Claire's had a lot of chances in the pages of the story to have her say, but the title goes to Aaron, who had a story of his own he never gets to tell.
It's interesting to me that Aaron tells her she is "making it worse." That's the same line the creepy man tells Alice at the end of "Los Angeles," the fourth story in this anthology. The two stories have a lot in common in what they have to say. It's okay to be messed up. There are plenty of things the world can do to you to make you that way. But at some point, you have to accept responsibility to stop making them worse.
Will Claire stop making it worse? Depends on which force she decides to get behind and push with after the story is over.
FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS, INCLUDING A REALLY GOOD TAKE ON THE MANY "IT IS/IT ISN'T" PASSAGES IN THE STORY, GO HERE.
Claire doesn't initially want to take either of these routes. Her instinct is defiance for all of it: "She distrusts collective anger; Claire's anger has always been her own." The funny thing is that the girl who wore the rebel flag bikini is, in a sense, right. Much of the bluster surrounding the incident is utterly false. She sees it for what it is, and rather than cower to it, she's ready to give it the finger. It's hard not to root for her.
As people continue to throw accusations at her, Claire tries to keep her own sense of self. What stood out about the bikini for Claire from the beginning was its distance from her, how it made her feel like someone other than herself. Those are actually the opening lines of the story: "The bikini isn't even Claire's thing." When she puts it on, she feels "hot," but also "like someone she's not." When white supremacists contact her to voice their support, she rejects a link between them. Their "thinking they are the same doesn't make them the same." Claire is determined not to be defined by the bikini.
Claire is a wonderfully stubborn girl. It's very much in her nature to refuse help offered to her. She's certainly not going to apologize when she doesn't think she's done anything wrong. And in a sense, she hasn't. She wore the bikini to piss off her step-mom, which makes it doubly difficult for Claire to understand the "aggrieved reaction" of her black hallmate, since the step-mom, Claire thinks, "is half-racist anyway." She sees this as "doubly hilarious."
 |
| I feel about Claire the way I feel about America; I really love her, I'd just like her to be a little less of herself sometimes. |
And it is, in a sense. One could read this story as one long series of tragicomic misunderstandings. (One of the best parts of this story is that Claire doesn't fall in with white supremacists who come to her aid; she falls in with Libertarians who are more obnoxious than they are dangerous. When Claire sees one at her door, she thinks that he smiles "like he's just won second place.") If we were to trace the events of this story back to their roots, we could say that it all started when Claire's mother got sick with cancer. We could say Claire had no control over most of the main events in the story.
Until her mother got sick, Claire seemed headed for happiness. She certainly didn't seem like a candidate for most likely to invoke the wrath of the Black Student Union. Although she was raised in a home where she felt a little frightened of herself, there were always Angela and Aaron next door. These are the black friends Claire didn't cite as proof she's not a racist, although she could have. They had an uncommonly tight friendship, one that's described in terms that are exactly the right amount of sweet. Just before everything goes to shit, Angela and Claire get drunk at camp together and are dreaming of the future. They are in the grass, and Claire turns to Angela: "It is a love that requires touch, and so Claire snuggles against her, nuzzles into her neck to say it out loud against her. Love love love. Angela is her best friend, her other self."
But then both Angela and Claire's moms get cancer at almost the same time. For a while, it just makes Angela and Claire closer, and Claire also becomes closer with Aaron, the brother who used to just be a target for Claire and Angela to torment. She has sex with Aaron once, although to her it doesn't mean they're falling in love but just finding a new level of intimacy in their friendship. But then Angela's mom survives and Claire's doesn't. Claire resents Angela and Aaron for still having a mother.
From there, the series of unfortunate events goes something like this: Claire's dad gets married again almost right away to someone Claire hates; Claire self-destructs; Claire goes to a party trying to get drunk and taken advantage of; Aaron tries to take her home to keep her safe; another person at the party sees a "large black man" carrying passed-out Claire to her car and rooting around in her purse for the keys and misunderstands; this leads to a car chase that kills Aaron; Nobody believes Claire when she tries to say Aaron wasn't doing anything wrong; Claire loses the friendship of Angela; Claire goes off to school in Vermont hating everyone and pretty much using "don't tread on me" as her one operative principle; which leads to wearing the bikini to piss off Puppy and setting off the whole firestorm.
In a sense, although it's a long chain of events, Claire isn't the one responsible for them.
Counterpoint: Claire has done terrible things and we should hold her accountable
About that night with Aaron, though. Claire's mom had been dead for four months, and Claire was still angry with Angela about it. She hadn't been talking to her friend, which made coping with a bad situation far worse. When Aaron finds her at the party, he can see she's headed for something bad: "You're messed up right now, I get that, but at some point you're going to have to stop making it worse."
Instead of getting her shit together, though, Claire dives headlong into "making it worse." Only it's Aaron, trying to help her, who bears the brunt of her actions.
In fact, it's Claire's own solipsistic view of her suffering that is the proximate cause of a lot of the suffering in the story. While it's easy to admire Claire's independence and her keen nose for bullshit, there's a telling little line early on that clues us in to her tragic flaw. When she realizes that the black girl in her dorm has objected to a "hallmate" of hers (Claire) wearing the rebel bikini, Claire is her sarcastic self: "she wasn't really aware that hallmate was a thing, a relationship carrying some expectation of trust of camaraderie."
It's a funny line, and it's easy to see Claire's side of it, but she's missing something. As sympathetic as we might be in America to "don't tread on me" kinds of thinking, living in society means that at times, you really have to allow others to tread on you. You have to modify your own choices for the sake of others. The libertarians might be right that at the heart of it, Claire has a right to flaunt the Confederate flag all she wants, but that's missing the point. The point is that there are people in society who will be aggrieved--hurt, offended, scared even--by Claire's actions, and Claire can't be so anti-social as to pretend that's got nothing to do with her.
As a matter of fact, Claire seems utterly surprised to realize that her actions have real consequences for others. When Carmen, the black "hallmate" who has objected to Claire's choice in bikinis, gets interviewed, "there is genuine fear in her eyes, which startles Claire." The entire outcry over the photo, in fact, is a mystery to Claire. Because she can't see what started the uproar in the first place, she doubles and then triples down in disastrous ways, first slipping a printed-out Confederate flag under Carmen's door with the note "Hope you had a nice vacation," and then posting the flag to her dorm window.
One thing that's a little bit ambiguous is how much she is to blame for what happened to Aaron. We can probably forgive her for the accident. In a different world, a young black man in Virginia wouldn't feel he had to floor it to get away from a car full of white kids pursuing him. But also in a different world, a good young man wouldn't have to carry a drunk girl away from a party to keep bad things from happening to her. So Claire can't really be blamed for the accident itself, even if her self-destructive behavior was part of what put Aaron at risk.
But she might have some responsibility for how the media viewed the accident. Most people seem to have sided with the boys who chased Aaron down and assumed Aaron was up to no good. Claire tried to clear it up:
Claire tells the reporter Aaron was a friend, that she was drunk and he was taking her home, but the bones of that story don't convince anyone it wasn't all, at best, a tragic misunderstanding; at worst, a danger she didn't see coming. Claire tells the reporter some innocuous nice thing about (the boy who chased Aaron down), and the paper calls him one of her best friends, after which she stops trying to explain.
The media can be incredibly obtuse. It's why Claire doesn't trust them when Bikinigate breaks. She has also learned that the reactions of the public are false. When Aaron died, "the people who give him the benefit of the doubt mostly feel themselves to be magnanimous." Claire is right about how full of bullshit the media and the people who get themselves in an uproar about it are, but she is wrong to give up trying to get her message across. The public might not get it right, but the people involved still needed to hear the truth from her.
The right amount of tension
Writers sometimes suffer from readers getting the wrong message from what writers create. I'm sure there will be readers who think the point of "Boys Go to Jupiter" has something to do with how full of shit the media is when stories take off, or how phony the fake righteousness of those who hop on the indignation bandwagon is. Danielle Evans has almost certainly been at a reading somewhere where a reader came up and said her story was a great farce about the hypocrisies of social media storms. That's an element of the story, but it's not all of what it's about.
I know a lot of white people who complain that Black Lives Matter (or any person they perceive as linked to BLM because that person is stating that life isn't equal in this here republic) is just "blaming white people for everything." This story ought to satisfy people with that particular complaint. The white person in it who starts all the mess isn't a bad person. In fact, she's pretty likable. This is better than just saying, "Not all white people are bad." It actually gives us a fully realized white person who's a lot better than just not bad. But she still makes mistakes she needs to correct.
I don't like when we talk about "balance" between opposing points of view. Balance suggests that there is some point of stasis between forces that are in opposition. It implies that each are equal in some way, and we could ideally reach a place where the two cease to oppose each other, a place where all the kinetic energy is gone. That's not usually the case in the real world that two things are really equally balanced. Just because Claire is really a pretty great character doesn't mean she doesn't have some serious moral defects to amend. Her good and her bad are in tension with each other, just as the reasons for us to forgive her and condemn her are in tension. The story doesn't offer us a point where we can harmonize the two; it offers us forces that continually push against one another.
That's why the ending is perfect. Claire, coached by the Libertarians, is all set to give a big speech at the end in defense of herself. But the black students in attendance get up and leave. They leave comment cards that are blank. She might have something to say, but they've got nothing to say to her. She's been shunned, which is far worse than a hate storm. It means she's lost her chance to have a voice.
Whichever way you view Claire's arc, whether she's a sympathetic victim or a self-deceiving antagonist who lacks empathy for others, the end works. If she's the victim, then at the end, she is denied the chance to tell her whole story, the one with Angela and Aaron in it, the one that will clear everything up and maybe bring some healing. If she's the antagonist, then she's denied the chance to offer her own self-justification because she doesn't deserve that chance.
The two forces are opposed, but not equal. The story is called "Boys Go to Jupiter," which was a child's chant Angela and Claire said as kids to harass Aaron: "Girls go to college to get more knowledge; boys go to Jupiter and get more stupider." Claire's had a lot of chances in the pages of the story to have her say, but the title goes to Aaron, who had a story of his own he never gets to tell.
It's interesting to me that Aaron tells her she is "making it worse." That's the same line the creepy man tells Alice at the end of "Los Angeles," the fourth story in this anthology. The two stories have a lot in common in what they have to say. It's okay to be messed up. There are plenty of things the world can do to you to make you that way. But at some point, you have to accept responsibility to stop making them worse.
Will Claire stop making it worse? Depends on which force she decides to get behind and push with after the story is over.
FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS, INCLUDING A REALLY GOOD TAKE ON THE MANY "IT IS/IT ISN'T" PASSAGES IN THE STORY, GO HERE.
I thought this was one of the most artfully written stories I've read in a long time. It's the silence that says so much: the silence at the meeting makes it real, but also the silence of the story, presenting only Claire's view. I would imagine a lot of people will feel this story vindicates them, while others will feel just the opposite.
ReplyDeleteI had a very strong, if momentary, panic reaction when I saw your tweet with the flag image. It took me a second to realize what you were doing (I hadn't read the story, remember) and remember that I trust you (and Evans, Gay, and Pitlor). Still, I thought twice about whether I wanted to retweet. Between that, and the story itself, I had a lot of self-confrontation here.
And I love the trial idea! I remember that story from the Hitchcock series.
This story has so much to give. It gives on first reading. It gives right away. It keeps giving on continued readings. It's a feast.
DeleteI am so glad I am following you now, Jacob. I read the story last night, after a pretty rough day, and I was mainly frustrated by it. Some of the nuances went by me and now I've read your take and Karen's and will definitely reread. That's what a good analysis should do: make us go back to the text. So thank you, and I'll be back.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for that comment, Andrew. I'm trying to write these for ordinary people, people who might have read the story at the end of a bad day and wanted to go somewhere to bounce their ideas against. So this is nice validation of the whole concept.
ReplyDeleteReally enjoyed your analysis of this story. It occurs to me that Clare hates the responsibility that comes with being part of a group, especially a group which she did not "sign up" to be a part of (for example, white people, Americans).
ReplyDeleteI kind of love this story, even though I came away a little frustrated by the soap-opera-y nature of Clare's backstory. I liked the inclusion of Aaron's story, I just wish the drama were dialed back a few notches.
This comment's also me, the person who's been going through and commenting on all your reviews.
DeleteThis was my favorite story of BASS 2018. I wonder how much of my willingness to overlook the "drama" that put you off a little bit might be just from it being early in the anthology? If it had been the 17th story instead of the 4th, would fatigue have set in enough that I didn't look past it? A lot of the reader's reaction rides on that order of stories chosen by alphabetical order.
Delete