The story factory strikes: "Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!" by Thomas Paine

The cover to Anis Shivani's Against the Workshop tells you a lot about the book:

Shivani writes persuasively that American literature is currently producing a nearly endless stream of well-written stories, stories that follow all the best practices of storytelling. Nonetheless, most of those stories are dreadful to read. They're dreadful because they really have nothing to say, but they say that nothing so well, it's difficult to realize how little they are actually saying.

That's about my take on Thomas Paine's "Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!" It does everything an MFA workshop would want you to do with a story, but I felt no underlying urgency, no burning passion beneath it. I didn't feel like I was reading a story a writer had to write, a story he ripped from his own heart to tell. Instead, it just seemed like a story that a competent fiction writer thought he could write.

It starts off with promise. We're at a 12-year-old's birthday party where only two of the twenty-some kids invited came. We've got a dad bungling his way through the party. I'm certainly not immune to stories that play on a parent's concern for the happiness of his children, or on the fear of children growing up friendless and alone. But all that tension and fear starts to unravel the moment the dead mother cliche enters the story. It wasn't necessary; there was enough to play with using only the material of a loner child with a good heart nobody else can see. We didn't need the artificial push for pathos that comes with a dead mother.

To make it worse, we've got a mother next door to the widower father who has also lost a husband. Hers, however, ran off with a guy he met online. It's like a romantic comedy you can't quite decide if you want to sit through: They're MFEO in this wacky, screwball comedy, if only they can see it! It's even got the precocious kids seeming to do their sly part to get them together.

The story thinks it's being clever when it ends up not really being a rom-com that gets the parents together. It craftily makes the reader suspect that's what's coming when the mother next door says she had something to tell the father, but can't remember what it was. He tells her she'll think of it eventually. But she never does, and we're left at the end with the precocious girl next door reading the father's palm while everyone is trying to calm her down after the father's ill-advised decision to have the kids try to summon Bloody Mary in the mirror at the party.

I believe the journey, such as it is, is toward a realization that the kids will probably be fine if he lets them be. He thinks this is a story about his son, but it's really a story about him, and he needs to worry more about himself. But he's the wrong hero of the book. Frankly, the kid's possible alienation from his peers is a much more compelling story line than the father dealing with familiar grief is. But that story line disappears the moment we realize that the kid's not really that bothered by his failed party. Which means there's just not much conflict, except that the girl next door will have nightmares for a few nights. There's just not that much to worry about for anyone in this story.

Ultimately, "Bloody Mary" gives in to a dull optimism far too easily, without having earned that optimism by passing through any real hardships. It's pieces of familiar American life mirrored back to readers and stitched together with the surface features of good fiction we've come to expect. It's a simulacrum of a moving story, but it has no real pathos, no real earned sentiment, and it's largely a waste of space in a year's best anthology like Pushcart.