The Best American Short Stories 2018 is a lot like the fifth season of BoJack Horseman

Find any two talking heads for hire on any news network in America, and put them in an argument with each other where one argues a liberal position and the other argues for a conservative point-of-view. It's a good bet that at some point, the conservative will start arguing from a belief in an objective moral code and a concomitant personal responsibility to adhere to that code. The liberal, meanwhile, will come from a place where values are more fluid, more of a subjective value at the heart of a complicated matrix of socially determined forces.

Liberals have a good time poking holes in conservative arguments by showing how antiquated the foundations of their supposedly enduring values are, how the things they claim to be objective are really subjective. They will deconstruct with glee. But slowly, over the last six decades, liberals have been slow to realize the extent to which we've been undermining our own arguments thereby. By arguing that there are no values, we make it difficult to argue against selfishness or greed or outright hijacking of the country's political processes. By saying nothing is absolutely wrong, we make it hard to explain why we object to mass cultural sexual violence against women. By arguing against the notion of objective truths, be it through French schools of philosophy or their dumbed-down pop-culture echoes, we make it hard to criticize a president who shows a disregard for the truth.

Hoisted by my own petard, the one petard I thought would never hoist me! 

It seems liberals--and beyond liberals, anyone who has joined in what is called the "liberal consensus" that has reigned since the end of the Second World War--have begun to see the quicksand they stand in and started trying to pour in mortar to firm up their own foundations. The Best American Short Stories anthology of 2018 reflects this move to answer questions on behalf of the liberal consensus, questions like what is right, what is wrong, and why? 

This isn't an easy project for anyone who is looking to take part in this latest dialectical evolution of the liberal consensus. We're not going to be able to go back to the old systems. Nothing is more flaccid than liberals invoking the old sacred texts, reinterpreting them to show God really wanted a modern liberal democracy all along. By far, the weakest entry in the 2018 BASS collection was Ron Rash's "The Baptism," in which the woman-abusing villain is foiled by his own stupidity in such a contrived way, the reader if left thinking it really is a deus ex machina, that God has actually shown the timid minister how much he hates abusers by killing one Himself. One wonders why the almighty Himself never thought of such a stratagem for dealing with the millions of wife-abusers in the real world outside of the story when the solution seemed to come to Rash so easily.

Trying to turn religion on its head to serve the same liberal consensus that has always been inimical to it is cheating. I do not mean by this to deny that there is a real and beautiful social justice thread in the Old Testament, or to deny the very tangible good done in the world by millions of liberal religious people. I heartily encourage Unitarians to ring their bells and light their candles and then go register voters. But liberal religion will not be able to treat religious texts like they are foundational in the same way conservatives do. For those who support the liberal consensus, religious texts can never be more than one narrative among many, at least in a political sense. They can personally inspire, but they cannot universally prescribe.

The job is much more difficult. Without reference to any kind of ultimate authority outside humanity, the liberal consensus needs to rephrase itself to where it can say with some authority not just that we believe it is wrong to use power to sexually harass, but why. It will never be easy. It is as much an act of persuasion as it is of strict logical argumentation. It is like aesthetics: nobody will ever fully agree on what beauty is, but that does not mean there is so little agreement on terms that the whole discourse is rendered meaningless. The job of the fiction writer is to make a particular moral judgment appear beautiful enough that it gets assent from readers.

BASS 2018 has some great stories living in this difficult reality

Any analysis of 20 stories that were put together by one guest editor (Roxane Gay this year) is going to say a lot more about that one editor than it will about American literature as a whole. That's particularly true this year, as Gay's choices show her particular interests much more than most volumes show the interests of the guest editors. Also, any attempt to sum up the volume will lead to producing themes that some works support better than others. Nonetheless, I think that there are some themes I can assert exist in the 2018 BASS that are supported by many of the stories that comprise it. Moreover, those themes are supported by the best work in the volume. More than any other theme, the one I see emerging is the attempt to assert that right and wrong still exist, although determining what they mean and the bases for determining that are a never-ending struggle to uncover.

These themes are mostly examined using a very close up lens, by looking at the political and public ethical issues of the moment, rather than by examining the ethical issues abstractly. The approach is basically inductive: look closely at the life of a character, and let the story draw its own inferences about the larger, philosophical issues. This is, of course, not new in literature. But it is unusual these days to make the inferences so manifest. So if it's not new, at least it's new again.

Bojack Horseman and taking a stance on the art you make

Many fiction stories published in the best journals of the past 40 years take this approach: they present the reader with "real" characters who feel alive. Those characters make choices like a "real" person in those circumstances would. There's a sort of naturalist philosophy behind the creation of these stories. The author isn't supposed to make things work out how the author thinks things should work out. The author is supposed to let things work out the way the characters make them work out. The author, along with the audience, is left to simply wonder what it all means.

This has the advantage of providing a sense of scientific objectivity to fiction. The job isn't to force the character into actions that fit the author's pre-conceived notions of things, nor is it the job of fiction to tell the reader how to feel about the "experiment" that went on inside the story. It's just to carry out the experiment and record the results in all their grisly detail.

"Tell the truth, warts and all" is such a given aesthetic nowadays that it hardly needs a defense. And I'm not here to attack it. We live in a world with access to too many facts for an artist to try to window-dress a story anymore. The warts are out there, and you have to address them. But when a culture manufactures endless art that shows realistic characters, warts and all, without ever opining on the warts themselves, the culture begins to think the warts are the same as the healthy skin. In fact, the culture sees it as elitism or ableism or even fascism to describe one type of skin as healthy and another as warts.

That's the theme of the fifth season of Bojack Horseman, the animated series on Netflix about a talking horse-man who once had a hit sitcom and has been in a horrible, self-destructive, depressed funk ever since. Bojack's collaborator on his biography and best friend Diane Nguyen decided back in season one not to write the biography of Bojack the way he wanted it. He wouldn't be an icon the public could look up to. She wrote him exactly as he was. And the public loved it, because they saw Bojack as relatable.

Season five examines the problems with this "relatable" approach. Bojack has gotten a new job on an edgy TV series. The series, though, is eerily similar to Bojack's own life. This device gives the writers of Bojack Horseman a tool with which to deconstruct their own, real-life Netflix series (all the while winking at the audience that this isn't what they're doing; at one point Bojack breaks the fourth wall by insisting that his in-show series is not about his real life). Diane, who has been hired to help write the show, is suddenly horrified when she realizes how much gratuitous violence and misogyny is written into the show. Bojack tries to tell her that this is what makes the show great--it doesn't try to hide the flaws of its characters, and by showing its characters' weaknesses, it makes others feel better about their own weaknesses.

Diane decides that if this is what the show is doing, then it would be better if it didn't exist. Because people shouldn't be made to feel more comfortable about their warts if they actually have the ability to get rid of them. Showing "life as it really is" can't be an aesthetic used to justify bad behavior. (Todd VanDerWerff at Vox did a good job of describing how BoJack's season arc is all about taking responsibility for our own actions.)

BoJack calling out sexual misconduct in Hollywood stars is, of course, not going to go well for him.

The neo-liberal consensus and the delicate balance of personal and social responsibility in BASS 2018

The following are the stories in BASS 2018 that most clearly demonstrate this striving toward a new statement of the liberal consensus, one which, while showing a new respect for notions of personal responsibility and individual duties to society, still resists easy answers and places all of those responsibilities within their troubled socio-political context.

• Maria Anderson's "Cougar" examines the balance between self-fulfillment, represented by the smiling, waving cat, and the responsibility to respect the land, represented by the cougar. 
• Tea Obreht's "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure" pits a Han Solo-type smuggling rebel of the plays-by-his-own-rules American type against what happens when that insistence on personal freedom plays out on a society-wide level. 
• Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's "Control Negro" balances the need for black intellectuals to call out racism in society against the need to let the younger generation enjoy the gains the older generation has given it. It acknowledges society's need for DuBoisian confrontation of systemic racism, but also acknowledges that this kind of confrontation can harm the individuals it is meant to help.
• Jacob Guajardo's "What Got into Us" is a coming-of-age story of a young gay man with a title that works in cross-directions. On the one hand, it reflects society's disapproval of a young man coming to grips with his own sexual identity, while on the other hand if acknowledges that there was, in fact, some real kind of sickness that "got into them," even if it wasn't the one society saw. In this sense, the story both excuses the boys' behavior because it is evident society gave them no clues how to behave better, but it also suggests that the damage the boys did to each other out of jealousy is something they owe each other an apology for. 

And now, the big three:

Emma Cline's "Los Angeles" is the riskiest story in this anthology. By questioning the wisdom of the "you're supposed to do dumb things when you're young" school of philosophy, Cline risks being accused of "blaming the victim." But the attitude of the narrator toward Alice is more like that of Alice's absent Mid-western mother than a slut-shaming prude. On the one hand, clearly, it would be nice if the young girls in this story lived in a world where they could figure out their identities, including their sexual identities, without risk of violence. If one of the men Alice sold her panties to actually attacked her, the motherly narrator would have defended her in court and decried any attempt to suggest Alice "deserved it" because she put herself in a risky position. At the same time, behind closed doors, this motherly voice would like to yell at Alice for acting stupid, for justifying decisions she knows are bad because "you're supposed to do that when you're young." It threads a very tricky needle of personal responsibility for one's own happiness against a society that makes happiness for young women very difficult. It does this with incredible success. 

Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter" has an interesting parallel with Cline's "Los Angeles." At the climax of "Los Angeles," as Alice is scrambling to leave the car of a pervert, she keeps jamming the car handle by trying to pull on it before it is unlocked. The pervert, who is actually trying to let her out of the car, tells her she is "making it worse," a double-meaning bit of dialogue if ever there was one. Similarly, at one point in Evans's BGTJ, the unjustly killed young black boy in the story tells Claire that she's got to "stop making it worse." 

This "stop making it worse" formula might be a key to understanding the new statement of the liberal consensus. As liberals having been saying for a long time, there are deep, socio-political reasons behind the apparent destructiveness of individual actions. Cline and Evans both accept this. They do not deny that there are reasons as big as the trans-Atlantic slave trade and as small as cancer in a loved one that make certain actions beyond our ability. We are not responsible for the world we are born into being a messed-up place. But we all have a responsibility, both on personal level like Alice and on a social level like Claire, to not make it worse. 

This is the second year in a row Evans has produced one of the best works in the BASS anthology. Last year, it was "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." This year's story follows the flip side to the "warts and all" theory of story-writing. In this version, we have an unsypmathetic protagonist, but we need to see everything that might justify this character's bad behavior. It's not "warts and all," it "all and warts." Evans gives us this is great detail. The girl who started a ruckus at her school with a post of herself in a Confederate flag bikini once had a best friend who was black. Her life went off the rails when her mother died of cancer. We don't have to think she's evil. We don't have to think she's capital R Racist. We just have to want her to get her life back on the rails ASAP, to "quit making it worse." We also have to make her see her own responsibility in making this happen. 

Finally, there is the most interesting story where this individual responsibility-social context balance plays, out, which is Jamal Brinkley's "A Family." This story is, in many ways, a classic liberal consensus story. It not only gives us the warts, it celebrates the warts. It's called "A Family," because Brinkley wants us to think this family--as dysfunctional as it is-- is as legitimate a family structure as any nuclear-family-dad-works-but-also-respects-mom-as-a-woman-and-does-an-appropriate-amount-of-housework-and-also-supports-his-wife's-dreams-and-then-the-wife-also-works-but-also-is-involved-in-the-kids'-lives-and-also-finds-time-to-give-her-husband-oral-sex structure is. 

Brinkley doesn't shrink from showing us the dysfunction of a family where the woman carries nearly every adult responsibility. He doesn't shrink from showing us society's role in creating this kind of family, mostly owing to the criminalization of black maleness. He also shows great tenderness toward this family in all its dysfunction. 

If "Los Angeles" is saying, "Yes, society makes it tough to be a young woman, but you have to quit making bad choices," and if "Boys Go to Jupiter" is saying, "Yes, life can give you some terrible shit and it can make you not care about how others perceive your actions, but you still have to think about others," then "A Family" is saying, "Society makes some messed-up families, but we also need to see those families as more than just their dysfunction." It's the converse of "It's fine to have warts, but you also have to take responsibility for not making it worse." This is "recognizing the responsibility one has for one's own warts, we also need to accept that we all have them and we can be beautiful in spite of them."

Whatever the liberal consensus ends up being whenever the current global right turn ends, it can't be just an alternate version of conservative moral absolutism. We can't just be saying it is an absolute evil to do use power to sexually molest women instead of saying it is an absolute evil to get an abortion. Morality has to begin and end with humanism. If something is wrong, it is because it makes human beings less happy. If something is good, it is because it makes humans happier. There is both a social and an individual aspect to that happiness, and every decision has to negotiate the two. You are responsible for your own happiness. You're also responsible for how you help or hinder the happiness of another person. 

Good fiction will keep these tensions alive, rather than attempt to efface them in the name of whatever we believe the moral imperative of the moment to be. Good choices are never easy, but they're always imperative to make them. Individual responsibility is never independent of socio-political realities, but our happiness depends on trying to make choices like it can be. 

This was the best BASS of the six I've read because it didn't take either easy way out of the difficult tight rope act all moral decisions are. It was the first inclination I've had in a long time that literary fiction might be relevant to our era's troubled public discourse. 

 

To celebrate this newfound faith in the relevance of good literature, here's Todd Chavez saying "hooray!"a lot.