Three kinds of alienation and the 2016 election: "Taco Night" by Julie Hecht

A brief digression: I'm back from a few days off from being "literature Jake," and I've resolved to at least finish analyzing the short stories from the current Pushcart Anthology before deciding if I want to keep doing this. Often in my life, I feel like such a dilettante. While I might be able to pull off an analysis of a short story better than your average college freshman, I'm not really an expert in the sense of being someone who devotes his whole life to literature. But whenever I start trying to become that person, I start to get pulled in the other direction--the other direction being my day job--in which I also do not feel I am a sufficient expert for the responsibility I have. So I vacillate back and forth between making literature my real passion, with the intent of one day also making it how I make a living, or thinking I ought to just, as Yoda would have it, keep my mind on where I am and what I am doing in my current career.

For now, as I said, I'm at least going to finish Pushcart, so on with "Taco Night"

An upgrade from BASS's election night short story

I review stories from the Best American Short Stories collection and the Pushcart Anthology. The most recent edition of BASS was called the 2018 edition, while this version of Pushcart is called the 2019 anthology, but both are actually pretty close to each other in terms of the time periods in American literature they cover. The 2018 BASS picked stories for its anthology that were first published during a time that almost lines up exactly with the calendar year 2017. Pushcart is a few months later off this schedule, so it's not exactly lined up with a calendar year, but it's close. What I'm getting at is that this is the first edition of both anthologies that had a real chance to include a story that confronted the reality of Donald Trump's election in 2016. The last edition of both was too soon after the election.

BASS 2018 had an "election night 2016" story in it, that being "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esme Weijun Wang. I wasn't a huge fan of the story, largely because I thought it focused too much on the hurt feelings of groups of people who were opposed to Trump, leaving it open to the frequent conservative criticism that liberals fetishize victimhood.

It's awfully hard to write a story that really hits Trumpism on the nose. It's a phenomenon most people did not see coming, and it's still playing out. Non-fiction writers are struggling to figure out what it is, what its roots are, and where it is headed. So it would be a tall order for a fiction writer this close in history to the phenomenon to write a story that really did justice to what the advent of Trump as president means in a deeper, spiritual sense for the nation.

I'm not sure Hecht hit it out of the park, but she definitely took a better swing at it than Wang did. Our narrator is about as stereotypical a liberal woman as a character can be. She lives in New England. She believes her intelligence sets her apart from ordinary people. She has no apparent job but still lives well, likely from the proceeds of the job of her husband, who is in New York on election night. She puts a lot of effort into buying the right plants and being a vegan.

This characterization is one of the reasons Hecht succeeds more than Wang: if ever there was a time for liberals to be introspective and examine themselves a bit, it was after November 2016. I don't know if we've done that enough. At least a good part of this story is holding the mirror up to the losing side and asking them to see what role they played in the loss.

But the narrator isn't just a caricature of liberal hypocrisies and weaknesses. There are things about her to admire. The factors that brought us to where we are aren't all just due to liberal hubris; we've all made this bed we're lying in. Parsing through the events of "Taco Night," I can see three types of social alienation that brought us to the boiling point.

Alienation #1: Alienation from our work

Almost the only working people who appear in the book work in some facet of the lawn architecture/landscaping industry. Most of the narrator's interaction in the story is with the owner of a nursery. This man seems to feel mostly regret about his work. He's sort of a smaller version of Trump himself--gifted a business by his family--but he spends most of his time peeved over losing the larger family business, a tree farm, to his brother during a family squabble. This insult has left him hyper-competitive: "...he wanted to sell only tress and massive quantities of plant material in order to compete with his brother." His inventory even gets described in what I have to see as a winking version of Trumpian language: "He did have good plants, and every year there were bigger and better plants and trees."

He hates his job, and he also hates everyone else he knows in the industry. When the narrator pushes him for a recommendation on someone to prune her trees, he tells her that "none of them are good."

The only person who comes close to seeming to enjoy his work is the pruner whom the narrator once hired. He would "spend two days in a big old cherry tree...and then there was always one more twig he wanted to prune." He might seem like a man with exactly the right job, but in fact, his attention to detail isn't love for the work, it's obsessive-compulsive disorder. He has a veritable pharmacy in his car, a pharmacy which the narrator comments is not enough to keep him sane. Ultimately, the OCD pruner took so long doing one job, the narrator couldn't keep him on.

While commenting on the oddity of the OCD pruner, the narrator wonders why he doesn't use "Hispanic slaves" like everyone else in the industry. She quickly qualifies that she means the term as one of sympathy, but at the same time, she'd have, it seems, been happy to have one of the "Hispanic slave" drivers do her work. Or at least she wouldn't have been shocked by it, which says about all one needs to know to realize we're living in a world where nothing about work matches any kind of natural arrangement.

I'm ashamed to admit I ate cauliflower tacos the other night, and even though they were the most hipster thing I've ever eaten, I though they were good as shit. 

Alienation #2: Alienation from nature

Speaking of nature, people in the story are struggling to find a relationship with nature that works. The narrator certainly appreciates trees and bushes, having the ability to describe and name many of them. But her relationship to nature is entirely circumscribed by capitalism. Nature to her is the parts of nature she can buy. Not just buy, but buy as much as she can: "I keep trying to buy every beautiful plant I see." Eventually, she can't fit them in her house, and she has to return them. As for the nursery owner, nature is a commodity to sell and compete with.

Alienation #3: Alienation from each other

This is the most profound of the three alienations in the story. The narrator happens to hear a man in a restaurant off-handedly ask, perhaps rhetorically, "Why is it so hard to talk to people?" This could have been the whole story in one line. Everyone is constantly failing to communicate in the story. In fact, as soon as the narrator hears this line, she wants to ask for clarification of what the speaker meant, but she is unable to make herself even ask the question.

The narrator shares veganism with the nursery owner. There appears to be nothing disingenuous about their veganism; they're doing it for humane reasons, not to be seen as virtuous. But she can't explain this to the nursery owner's mother when they happen to meet one time. After trying to make the case that they aren't doing it to make the mother unhappy, but out of concern for animals, she eventually gives up. She tells the owner that she "just had a conversation with your mother. I'm all worn out."

At the titular taco night, the narrator is unable to even carry on a conversation with the owner's children, who spend election night looking at their phones. "There wasn't even a conversation I could follow," she complains.

This inability to speak to one another probably describes America now better than any part of the story. The story ends with a reference to a song by another vegan, Paul McCartney: "How can you laugh when you know I'm down?" There was, I recall, no shortage of smugness from Trump supporters in the face of liberal dismay. Could some of this smugness be because we simply could not figure out a way to explain why we were so sad? When we heard, "We survived 8 years of Obama, you'll survive this," did we fail to explain that this was more than just thinking a president might spend public funds on programs that didn't have much benefit? Was their laughter a result of our failure to communicate?

In "Taco Night," the whole world is failing to communicate, because nothing about anyone's relationship to the surrounding world is organic. Even the rituals society follows--in this case, having a semi-regular taco night--don't really make sense. The nursery owner is buying fake sausages nobody likes and giving his kids eskimo pies he himself does not eat. The young people watch their phones while time passes.

Escape

Unable to enjoy natural or happy relationships to one another, the characters retreat into various forms of escape. The nursery owner drinks. The narrator watches classic movies. She starts with Turner Classics, a choice that could be seen as reminiscent of a Trump supporter's nostalgia for an America of some hard-to-pin-down past. But even that ends up being too on-the-nose, and she has to switch to the BBC, binge-watching Downton Abbey because it's both British and from 100 years ago, so Trump isn't part of it.

Essentially, the narrator has given up trying to communicate. She can't even talk to her husband, asking him only not to mention the election when he calls from New York.

The narrator never really seems to make a turn or have an epiphany that might turn things around. This is one of those stories that's not about finding a solution so much as defining what the problem is. It does that fairly well, which is why the story is mostly a success.