Love and trespass: "The Houses That Are Left Behind" by Brenda Walker

First things first: this story is set in Australia. I was confused both times I read it, because the writer used "boot" for the "trunk" of the car, and seemed to be describing places that are not in the U.S., but at the same time, when the narrator went from one side of the country to the other, she crossed a "continent." I couldn't tell if the story was set in the UK or America, and then I read the author's bio and remembered there's a whole other place in the world that was once part of the British Empire.

I wasn't much smarter trying to figure out the setting of the story.

Okay, I solved one mystery. The story's other mysteries are much harder to crack. That's not entirely my fault: the story wants to both keep its secrets and give them away, just as the narrator both wishes to conceal herself within her home and also to be seen. There is a tug-of-war going on between the narrator and the people she fears are trying to invade her privacy--she senses them trying to spy on her, but she is also trying to spy back. The narrator is a writer, and her outward circumstances of dealing with a stalker who may or may not be looking into her window is not unlike what a writer deals with in a story. Writers rely on readers trying to pry into their secrets, but also want to keep some things hidden. At the same time, writers have to struggle to unlock the hidden inner lives of the people they write about, and often those subjects will not keep the shades open so writers can see in.

Trespass

From the first moments of the story, surveillance, trespass, and invasions of privacy dominate the narrative. The narrator is cooking dinner for her husband and her "husband's children"--a phrase that might just be there to let the reader know in a verbally economical way that this is not a first marriage for him, but might also tell us something about the emotional distance the narrator is keeping the children at--when someone buzzes the intercom in the lobby of their apartment building. They look at the security camera feed, the first appearance of surveillance, and see a distraught young woman. They go down to investigate--because no way is she coming up to their place--and she's got a crazy story. She bought a phone from someone she says lives in their apartment. Now the phone doesn't work and she's out a bunch of money. The husband tells her to call the cops and the phone company, and they seem to get her to move on. The woman notices in passing that the upset woman caller has dirt all over her fingers, and the narrator wonders what the woman lost that has her digging in the dirt so much.

The narrator and her husband have different theories why the distraught caller ended up in their apartment building. Maybe she confused it with another place, since there are a lot of similar high-rises in that part of the city. The narrator thinks the visitor lost money. He has another idea, though. The woman was the mistress of someone in the building, someone who gave her the wrong apartment number. He had given her a cellphone, but now it's cut off and so is she.

And then comes the line that really pulls us into the story: "We had some experience with this kind of thing."

What she means is this. They haven't lived in their apartment that long. When they moved in, they bought some of the previous occupant's furniture for convenience's sake. There are long, fair hairs on the couch. They clean the couch, but the hairs keep appearing until one day the man changes the locks and the hairs stop reappearing. Maybe they've had a stalker of the previous resident, someone who had a key and came in to lie down on the couch where she once met for rendezvous with him? If so, it isn't the woman they saw in the foyer, because she had dark hair.

The narrator imagines this woman meeting up with her lover  in the apartment that is now her home:

Sometimes I wonder about the woman who met a man in our apartment. How they must have rushed past our things, hand in hand, how she flung herself beneath her lover, overjoyed, laughing, both of them laughing at love and trespass. 

We soon realize that the narrator has a stalker. He's someone from the life before she moved into this place with her husband. At first, all we know is his name is Neil and he's waged a "long campaign of threats" against the narrator. The narrator goes to another room to escape being seen, but also refuses to hide: "I was always slightly afraid, but I was also defiant, determined to be seen, even if the viewers were barking men or solitary lying girls or sad alcoholics, and I never drew the curtain."

Just as she is torn between hiding and being seen, she is also both victim of surveillance as well as perpetrator of it. She imagines her stalker "like a military officer on duty," but she, too, is "vigilant about all witnesses." She realizes that in daylight, nobody can see in, but she can see out at them.

Love

The story's twin subjects are love and trespass, and while the creepy tones of trespass make themselves heard right from the beginning, love takes some time before its melody starts to make its way into the main theme. Loves comes in as the narrator is looking out her window, taking advantage of the clear view she has. She notes a few species of birds, but begins to wax philosophical when she gets to parrots:

Parrots fly in pairs, and so do small brownish-gray birds fast as darts, one leading and the other following a wing beat behind, gliding or climbing and dipping very fast. The second bird lags slightly, so if the first flies through a gap in a moving obstacle--traffic, for example--the second might not be quick enough to follow. Then the first climbs, bewildered, circling back over a mate crushed on the road.

She compares this situation to herself following her husband's car, how she almost ended up in a dangerous situation on the highway. The idea seems to be that it's unwise to be too heedlessly in love. The narrator contrasts this kind of love to crows, who woo each other cautiously and with great ceremony. Crows "are not easily led" and "don't take passionate and fatal risks."

I mean, that looks pretty passionate to me, but what do I know? 

No sooner has the narrator indulged in these thoughts than she arrives again at the subject of Neil. Why does Neil follow so soon for her after thinking about love, especially heedless love? Moreover, Neil is a gardener, we find out, linking him psychologically to the woman with the dirty hands and desperate story from the beginning, the one who had been digging in the dirt for something lost. There's more to Neil than the narrator is letting on, but she's not saying. The only words we get about him are intensely prickly and one-sided in their dislike. He keeps a P.O. Box for angry correspondences with women and a burner email account to send hate mail from an Internet cafe. He is quick to hold a grudge, and will stalk down and threaten people who cut him off in traffic. If you tell him you won't sleep with him, you need a good reason, or you'll get hate mail from him for years.

We wonder, was this why he stalked her? We don't know. She sees Neil when she goes back to the old neighborhood to get mail from a P.O. Box, and she is gratified when he looks away to avoid eye contact with her. She can't decide whether she hopes it's shame or fear.

She also sees Juliet, who has recently been let go from her long-time role as a rich man's plaything, who bore and raised his children. Yet another second bird smashed in the traffic that closed around her mate.

Love and trespass together

Suddenly, the entire story changes. The narrator tells us about the last three houses she has lived in before moving in with her husband in the new apartment. One was a house made entirely of wood that burned down. She somehow rescued a wooden dining room table from it, though. There is also some reason to wonder whether the fire didn't have foul play as a cause. The narrator's lesson from her time in that house was that she has "been protected by (her) own stupidity" her whole life, "unable to see malice until it was directly in front of (her), on paper, in (her) hand, unable to see flames until they formed above (her), creeping along the rafters." It could just be that she failed to heed warnings when friends told her the house's foundations were rotten, but is that "malice"? We never really find out, and the narrator moves on to the next house.

This is apparently in a tough neighborhood, where boys try to kick in the windshield to her Volvo every night and find they can't. She is working on a novel here. The neighborhood smells vaguely like jet fuel due to its proximity to the airport. The house is also haunted. The narrator's only explanation for this is a cold feeling she would get at night in bed. "Something in that house didn't submit to being dead," she says, without further explanation.

She introduces the third house almost as an afterthought: "I haven't mentioned the third house..." This is indeed a strange oversight, because this is the house where Neil was. Interestingly, her first thought when she moved into this stone (and therefore unburnable) house was one that would seem to increase her privacy. She wanted to plant a hedge of gardenias. Neil helped her to plant them. Eventually, a painter who kept her window open at night (suggesting openness the narrator does not share) got the gardenias to come down, but we learn, interestingly, that Neil was "somebody's husband, polite and handy, at first, willing to hang paintings and lift tubs of house plants from the boot of my car." There was apparently some intimacy between Neil and the narrator. I am tempted to believe the mention of him being "somebody's husband" is rather pregnant. We've had several affairs hinted at or openly acknowledged already, and it's not too great a leap to think the narrator has been displacing her thoughts about Neil's affair with her onto others.

The third house ends with the smell of the painter's turpentine, the thing she uses to clean up paint, urging the narrator to "clean up, start again." What has happened she needs to clean up and start again from?

She finally comes to live with her husband, where the two are generally private and happy not to know their neighbors. But after having lived there a while, the narrator takes her old dining room table, the survivor, out of storage and brings it into the new house. After locking out her old life, she is bringing some old piece of herself with her.

In the final page of the story, we get love and trespass coming together, as the narrator finally gives us something about Neil. She feels occasional dread, she admits, but so does Neil, who was given up for adoption as a child. She muses on how old houses carry so much of our old lives with them, and then she finally opens up to the big admission in the closing words:

...women--and by this I mean myself--fly across a continent, about to begin a long period of solitude, not realizing that that solitude will end and they are just one move away from lying on a sofa with their own hair untied, and laughing and talking softly to a man while the light fades with the traffic noise far below. 

What the hell does that mean?

The narrator's sudden turn halfway through the story to telling us all about the houses she's lived in is, in many ways, a huge turn toward her opening up. After all, it's her house she's been nervous about her stalker looking into, and now she's letting her readers look deeply into every place she's ever lived. That is, into all the past lives she's lived. But she only gives us an emotionally charged look into each place, not a factual one. She isn't out to tell us all the things that happened in each place. She wants to tell us what feelings she has when she thinks of those former homes. We know she's a writer and almost nothing else about her. The biggest fact we know has to do with Neil.

Did she have an affair with Neil before he began stalking her? Is his stalking psychotic, or is it somehow mournful and sad, like the girl in the lobby who had lost something? She has a lot of intimate knowledge of him, and it's questionable whether that all came from him hanging pictures for her. But we also have that line about him being angry at women who didn't sleep with him, which seems to come from first-hand experience. But how is he able to go on stalking women like this if he is (or was) "someone's husband"? What is (or was) his wife doing during all of this?

Women, meaning the narrator, end up on a couch with a man after flying across the continent. She did this twice, once before the second place and again before the third home, the one where she lived near Neil. That final happy image of the woman lying on a sofa isn't her with her husband now, because that wasn't preceded by a cross-country move. Remember, Neil is close enough she can see him when she goes to check her old mail.

I think she's remembering a happy moment with Neil when she was the mysterious other woman who left her hair on somebody's sofa.

The author said of this story that it's "about the strange alignments of different lives, about love and refuge, watchful judiciousness and, finally, unexpected happiness." But I don't think that final unexpected happiness is her with her husband. That initial "my husband's children" leaves me to think there is some coldness in this relationship. I think the narrator is pulling her memories of Neil out of storage, like she did her table. He might still be a stalker. He might be an asshole. But there was something she saw in him once, back when she was still foolish enough not to know malice before it burned her. It doesn't make sense for the man she's on the couch with to be the husband, because she hasn't spoken an affectionate word about him in the whole story.

Or not 

Or maybe the period of solitude was when she was living in place number three, and then she made her "one move" after smelling the turpentine, and it's the husband she's now lying with on the couch. Maybe she's erasing the hairs they couldn't get rid of by adding her own. Maybe her apparent lack of passion toward her spouse is just crow-love, her not being unwise and passionate but "watchfully judicious" about whom she now loves. I have to say, I find that reading a little duller, even if it allows us to think our narrator was always wise enough to have never gotten involved with a man who ended up stalking women. Either way you read it, there are some loose ends. If she's on the couch with her husband, what is the point of the dirt-on-the-hands connection between the girl and Neil? What with all the affairs and the "we have some experience with this"? But if she's actually remembering Neil with some kindness, how do we reconcile that with the fact she knows he is sort of crazy, and sends hate mail to women and chases down people who cut him off in traffic?

Either reading is a little fraught, but I favor the first. I'd guess the author probably feels that figuring out the details isn't the point, but rather the feelings associated with past lives we've lived and how they affect the present and future. But I need my stories to have a little more concrete in them. I'm not a big fan of wood.

Maybe the real journey was the friends we failed along the way: "Up Here" by Tristan Hughes

One of those quotes about writing you hear everywhere but which nobody can determine the actual origin of goes something like this: there are only two plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. (Read one attempt to find the origin of the saying here.) In Tristan Hughes' "Up Here," we somehow get both plots squeezed into one fairly compact short story.

The unnamed narrator has had some small failures--he wrote a couple of books nobody read and he's had at least one relationship that didn't work out. But none of that seems to matter now. He's moved "up"--somewhere in the vast northern stretches of Canada, I might guess, although the setting is never named--and it agrees with him:

What a wonder it was, this magic trick of distance, that could conjure you so effortlessly into another existence. In a different far away my other life stuttered and failed, and here it meant nothing. It was no great fall, hardly a topple really (though up close it might have felt that way). I'd published a few books and not many people had read them. 

"Up here," with a naturalist girlfriend who teaches tourists about the habitat of the gigantic national park she works in, he's so happy he has to sit down in the middle of a neighborhood gathering to collect himself. That's how strong the feeling of joy is for him in his new life, far from everything.

As an outsider who loves it all, he's anxious to learn to fit in and act like the locals. He lists with pride the characteristics of life "up here," both to distinguish this life from the one before and also to set goals for himself for the kind of person he wants to be. Up here, the summers are short. Up here, even mosquitoes do what they have to do. He embarrasses his neighbors and himself gushing during a cookout about how much he respects them:

I told them I was very keen to learn these things. I told them I wanted to share in the kind of stories they told...I told them I admired and envied them for having such a practical purchase on things, for being so solidly enmeshed in the world. I think that may have been the phrase I really used. The firefighter smiled indulgently, and surreptitiously put the beer he was about to hand me back in the case. 

So he loves it here, and the neighbors mostly accept his enthusiasm, even if it's a bit over-the-top and filled with the kinds of verbal excesses that kept people from reading his books. But it's not his presence as the stranger in town that most of the story is about. It's about his journey.

He has agreed to shoot his girlfriend's dog. Why? Because the dog is old, it is in pain, and because his girlfriend knows she has to act now or she will never be able to put down the one thing that's been consistent in her life. More to the point for our narrator, putting a dog down for your girlfriend strikes him as the kind of thing you do for your lover "up here." Since he failed in his old life to do the things that were expected for one's lover, like give her "twenty-thousand dollar bills," he decides to do this for her now. It will show him that he is "getting better at being in love." That's why this city slicker writer sets off in the morning with a rifle and a tottering dog to find a place out of earshot of the girlfriend where he can put the dog down. The stakes of this journey for the narrator are that shooting the dog is necessary to prove he belongs in his new location and in his new relationship.

He really needs to come through, because even though her issues are not in the foreground the way the narrator's are, the girlfriend has some weighty problems of her own to deal with. Through breadcrumbs in the story, we can piece together some important facts: she takes anti-depressants, she was homeless for a year as a teenager. At her job, she has to wax rhapsodic about the harmony of nature while as a naturalist she is all too aware of how one small change in nature can have terrible consequences all over the food chain. Using two allusions, the narrator says she has to present "a more upbeat Ecclesiastes," but in private is aware that nature is more like Shakespeare's "wanton boy with a fly."

So losing the dog is going to hit her hard, and the boyfriend/narrator needs to get it right.

There are a number of obstacles in his way: he's not that good with a gun, he's a sucker for sad dog eyes, but the biggest obstacle, ironically for the book-writing narrator, is his inability to tell what kind of a story he's in. He's obsessed with viewing life as a story. Besides telling his neighbors he wants to be able to tell stories like they do, he also complains about it being hard to "live between different stories, ones that will not fit together." He means this about his girlfriend, who sometimes makes wild love to him and sometimes locks herself in the bathroom to cry. But his problems solving the ambiguity of life-as-a-story fits his larger reality: is he in a world where things work out, more or less, or one where randomness rules?

We ought to have some idea of which story we're in when the narrator admits that his girlfriend "tells better stories" than he does. That is, she has a better sense of what kind of story they're in. At the happiest moment in the story, she kills the mood by pulling out that old Alcoholics Anonymous cliche about not being able to run away from your problems: wherever you go, there you are. This gives us an ominous sense that the narrator wasn't just getting a new start after bad luck when he came "up here." He was--to use another Biblical allusion--more like Jonah, running from God. If he doesn't change, he's going to have the same problems here he did where he came from. Right now, that means rising up to meet the emotional needs of his girlfriend. Put the dog down right, then tend to her.

The narrator fails. He kills the dog, but doesn't bury her right, leaving her to be scavenged by birds and foxes. And while we don't learn what happened, it is clear that his failure to follow through with the dog was a sign of things to come in the relationship, which didn't last, either. It's left ambiguous whether the couple just broke up or if the girlfriend maybe is gone for good after self-harming, but in either case, he has failed, and now finds himself without new journeys he can go on, without new towns he can come to as a stranger: "How did you learn to live with a decision like that? What was it that you had to do? And what here was there where you could do it?"

He's out of options now. It's a failed narrative cycle, one in which the protagonist comes to his moment of truth, is weighed in the balance and found wanting. It's also a really powerful failed hero cycle, one that is all the more emotionally tough for its tenderness and humor along the way to the ultimate heartbreak. This story ought to satisfy the kind of old-timer who hates youngsters for their participation trophies they supposedly get all the time, because this is about how there are some moments in life where trying to do your best really just isn't enough. It's also the sort of story that sits well with cynics like me, who have a hunch what kind of story we're all in.

Wikipedia as a literary short story: "The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies" by Jo Lloyd

Somebody was doing research and came across a late 16th century-late 17th century pioneer in exploitation of England's mineral wealth. This guy's name was Humphrey Mackworth. He was semi-well-connected, and had some success translating his wife's inherited mineral rights into a successful operation. He pioneered some technical advances, including using wind power to drive the carts that shipped the coal and silver his company mined. The poet Thomas Yalden wrote an ode to Mackworth, which includes, among other lines quoted in the story, the title.

That person doing the research wrote a story about a slightly fictionalized version of Mackworth. The story occasionally shows some sympathy to the highly self-pitying Mackworth, but mostly looks at him as a harbinger of things to come, of much more ruthless and efficient capitalists who are far better at "removing the smiling offspring of nature's womb," as Mackworth's admiring poet put it. There is a dream sequence right at the end where Mackworth sees a vision of this future in which the whole Earth is constantly being denuded of its wealth, a vision Mackworth seems to approve of.

And that's the story.

I'm trying to figure out why I didn't really connect to this story the way I have with other historical fiction. It does succeed to some extent with doing what all good historical fiction does by fully entering its time period. There's a certain charm to the language of this story, from its use of "by-our-lady" where modern people would say "fucking" in its disapproving adjectival form to its frequent use of now nearly defunct words (cozener, blemmye, hornpipe). Mackworth, called "HM" throughout the story, is pathetically believable as a beleaguered entrepreneurial sadsack. He thinks to himself, with hyperbole we appreciate but he does not, that "Not Hercules, not even Job himself, has had to overcome more obstacles." I did chuckle when he tried to save face in front of his employees while on his horse and determined that, "A righteous man  rarely needs to canter, but the importance of his affairs justifies a trot. "

Lloyd even gets right, I think, what HM should represent: a foretaste of the industrial age and the now post-industrial age, with its environmental degradation, its interruption to organic modes of life, its shady business practices. HM is not stupid. He may have gotten himself into a mess by taking unwise loans and then dipping into the company accounts for his own sake too often, but he was a "master of the elements." His optimism--and the poet's equal optimism--at the prospect that nature's bounty is endless and ours for the taking is a Utopian view. They believe they will find a "second Eden," but their "second Eden" is contrasted with the "second Adam" in the nature-wise "Tall John" who guides HM toward a possible new vein they are scouting for. Lloyd's instincts were right about what HM means.

But somehow, it just didn't feel real to me. It felt like a highly researched story where the research overwrites the fiction. Most of the details can be found on Mackworth's Wikipedia page. When I watched Madmen, I was lost in how fully the characters were living in a different time. I actually felt pangs of anxiety for them when I realized they were getting close to JFK's assassination, because I sensed that people who thought the way they did would not be able to handle something so profoundly challenging to their world view. But that's because Don Draper and Peggy and the gang weren't real historical people. That left the writers free to make them real fictional people, people who felt more real than real.

I never had that sense with "Exchequer." Maybe calling him "HM" instead of his full name was an attempt to distance the writing from the real person, to make the character feel like a supercilious monogram of a real historical person, but I felt like it wasn't enough. Especially because with all the quoting of the real poem about Mackworth, it was nine seconds of Googling to find the real person (which I did early on). I think this would have been a better story if the main character had been someone like Mackworth who did some of the things he did, but also had a different name and was more fully fictional.

It was skillfully crafted, and I'd be happy to read another story from Lloyd. Freddie Mercury covering "The Great Pretender" isn't worth many listens, but you can still tell it's Freddie by-our-lady Mercury singing it, and you know that given another vehicle, you'll hear something special. If I come across Lloyd again, I'll probably go out of my way a bit to check it out.

Sonder: "More or Less Like a Man" by Michael Powers

John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows tells us that "sonder" is "the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as our own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it."

One thing I know for certain about that definition is that for most people, it's quite different from learning a word like "zugzwang," where to learn the word is also to learn about a thing you didn't know existed before you heard the word. That feeling sonder describes is something almost all people experience, sometimes deeply, before getting too far into our teen years. We know the feeling, we just didn't know there was a word for it.

Michael Powers' "More or Less Like a Man" gets much of its considerable appeal from playing with the notion of sonder. The protagonist, whose name we do not know, is on a flight. It's not an international flight, but it's more than long enough at nearly six hours, going from New York to San Francisco. While on this flight, our narrator does what he says "all normal people do," which is to "go to great lengths to avoid striking up conversations with strangers on airplanes." He looks intently at a book, he listens to music on his headphones. He fears any kind of contact with the people adjacent to him on a plane, because "who knows where that might lead?"

The narrator fears being dragged into a conversation, but even more, he fears starting a conversation and then not being able to continue it. At that point, once the two of you realize you have nothing to say to each other, "You are two human beings who have been forced to admit, without even being able to say so aloud, that you have no interests in common." This is a corollary of sonder: sometimes, you are a bit player in someone else's life, someone not interesting enough to play a key role. While you're observing others, they're observing you.

Sonder can make us feel linked to others when we realize the world isn't one big solipsistic computer simulation meant for our consumption. But it can also be uncanny when we realize how different those other people might be. If "they" are people like us, that means they are also people with agency to be people not like us. It can make us feel in communion with others or terribly lonely.

Our narrator seems to be a person who struggles with isolation. His cousin has invited him out to San Francisco to join a landscaping business, not because the two were close, but because "I think he knew I didn't have much else going on at the time." But he is protecting on his flight his isolation by trying so hard not to have a moment when he will have to recognize that he is surrounded by real people living real lives.

The setting for this story is perfect. An airport is a pretty normal place to feel sonder. You look around, and you wonder why all these people are going the same place you're going. You wonder what their stories are. Not, I emphasize, that most of us actually want to hear the story of our seat neighbors, but we do wonder.

Sonder is sort of the reverse of what happens in The Truman Show: instead of realizing everything around you is fake, suddenly you are overcome by how real everything, and more importantly everyone, is. 

The narrator's isolation is broken by a seat neighbor who insists on breaching norms among strangers on planes. Without being invited, she blurts out to the narrator that she is "fleeing." There is then a somewhat pedantic exchange in which this neighbor notes the etymological relationship between "fleeing" and "flying." I found this dialogue so unnatural, I almost lost interest, but the story, like the plane in which the narrator was flying, righted itself after a little turbulence and kept going.

The woman both wants and does not want to share. This is one of the many ambiguities in this story. Besides the title, "more or less" like a man, we get, in the very first sentence, that the woman looked up from the "book she'd been reading, or pretending to read." She has an accent that is vaguely central European but which the narrator can't place. The narrator, describing her, sees her ponytail as "guileless," but that does not help him to decode any of the external clues he sees in her:

"She might have been married or not, might have had children or not. It might have been her husband or her children she was fleeing.
The outfit she wore looked almost American but not. I don't know what it was exactly. Her boot-cut jeans maybe, a little too artificially distressed at the the hips and the backs of the knees.
She was fleeing New Jersey, and she wanted to talk about it but did not want to talk about it."

The airplane experiences turbulence, diving down a pocket of air and then righting itself. This is, if you think about it, a rather terrifying and incredible thing to happen--hundreds of people are stuffed into a metal tube flying above the Earth that dips and then goes back up. But nobody even blinks. "All of this was routine. No one that I could see looked even slightly alarmed."

Isn't this external phenomenon a mirror of what goes on internally every time strangers ride a plane together? There are hundreds of people, each with a fully developed interior life, each with hopes and dreams and terrible secrets and huge successes. We are in the presence of all these HUMANS--in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a God! And travel is often a key component to some of the strongest demonstrations of their agency: they are moving, taking a new job, visiting a loved one, seeing something they always wanted to see. It's too much.

But the narrator soon realizes that this woman might also be the worst kind of human. He just read about how some Bosnian immigrants who snuck in with refugees during the humanitarian crisis in the 90s were actually the torturers everyone else was running from. He calculates that this woman is the right age to have been one of those who forced Bosnian Muslims to drink gasoline before shooting them. Because he has just read this article, and because the woman sitting next to him is vaguely central European, he cannot resist linking the coincidences. He thinks that this is because we all want to believe that "the world outside ourselves corresponds with whatever is going on in our minds."

He is trying to prevent feeling the fundamental terror that comes with sonder. It destroys our solipsistic selves. It intrudes upon our carefully created internal realities with the brutal and undeniable reality from outside. There is a person here. Is it more terrifying if she really is a pyschopathic killer, or if she isn't, because if she isn't, then that means she has her own reality, one the narrator did not create and over which he is powerless. She might have been victim as much as perpetrator.

He finally learns her story, which she gives up in one gulp after seemingly both wanting and not wanting to tell it for so long. She came to live with her sister and sister's husband from Slovenia. The sister was a successful geologist, which meant she was gone often. While studying English with her brother-in-law (which at last justifies those pedantic observations at the beginning about "fly" and "flee,) the two fall in love and have an affair. When it is discovered by the sister, she drinks Drano and nearly kills herself. The woman in the seat next to the narrator has decided to remove herself from the man she loves and her sister by going to San Francisco to "sit beside an ocean she had never seen before, and to be far from those she loved."

The coda

The story is nearly done at this point, and yet in the last thousand words, it suddenly transforms into something totally new. We get a glimpse of the narrator's life in San Francisco. He has returned to the safety of treating anonymous people without differentiation, summing up the whole city with, "It's crawling with assholes."

But he's now seeking some kind of connection. He's on Tinder, or something like it. "My phone shows me the faces of women who are physically near me, and I decide whether I like these faces. The owners of the faces decide whether they like my face. If we like each other's faces, we type messages to each other." How terrible this is for him, now that he is keenly aware of the reality lurking behind each profile. He wants to disassociate the face from the person, but he can't now. Each day of swiping left and right is a deluge of faces he knows signify a fully realized person who is doing the same things he is doing, seeking the same connections as him. He is a blip on their screen, as they are on his.

The narrator is trying to think of something to say the potential dates haven't heard before. He tells them about the time he met the "Jersey Devil," which is apparently some folkloric Bigfoot-like thing from which the hockey team gets its name. The story ends with this unforgettable passage:

I tell them that I grew up in New Jersey, that I've seen the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens. It was late at night, and I was eating a hamburger with a friend at a diner, on this long stretch of empty road where there was nothing else around but the dark woods growing out of the sandy soil. I looked up from my hamburger and saw him through the window, but he was pretty far away. He was naked, covered in short, stiff hair like the hair of a dog, but shaped otherwise more or less like a man. He was standing at the edge of a beam of light from a streetlamp, at the border between the woods and the parking lot, just staring in at us. I could tell by the way he held his tail in his hands that he'd been alone a long time.

It's possible to see this as the narrator projecting himself into the figure of a half-man, half-dog (his own best friend, as one Spaceballs character might have said), his loneliness central to this image. But it's also possible this Jersey Devil is his way of imagining himself outside of the feeling of sonder, his attempt to return to the stabilizing ability to treat others as something truly different, which allows us to treat them with indifference. The devil, the ultimate "other," is the narrator's attempt to hold onto a belief in something that is unlike him, something isolated and not fully human, meaning he can also remain both happily and yet unhappily isolated himself.

Humility as a secular value: "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King

In my evangelical teen youth group I attended faithfully while in high school, there was a chorus we often sang:

Make me a servant, humble and meek
Lord, let me lift up those who are weak
And my the prayer of my heart always be:
Make me a servant, make me a servant, make me a servant, today

There may be no Christian value that more directly clashes with modern, secular values than humility. It's so alien to our culture, in fact, that I'm often tempted to write it off as one of those values that simply does not translate from an old-world, God-makes-the-rules mindset to a possible secular set of values. It seems close to honoring the Sabbath or resolving to have no other gods before Jehovah: there just is no analogue, no modern updating of this value that makes sense without a religious framework for it.

But the fact is that humility can be good for us. More than that--it can actually be good to be humbled, or even the related but distinct word humiliated. Our natures seem set up to refuse this idea. People will spend their entire lives fighting the notion that they've been wrong or that they need to change, even if this admission might do them immediate and tangible good.

Joe Meecher

The protagonist of Dave King's "The Stamp Collector" is in need of just such a moment of abject humiliation. He's an alcoholic, and has been fighting a mostly losing battle with it for two decades. In a way, those decades have been nothing but the search for that elusive experience addicts talk about as their turning point: rock bottom.

Not that rock bottom

"Rock bottom" is an interesting notion. There may be nothing in the real world that is as much an application of literary thinking as this. It's close to a real belief in the notion that people need to reach a catharsis in order to change. In "The Stamp Collector," Joe has already had his share of what might be "rock bottom" experiences. He blew a windfall in his twenties when he won $237,000 in a lottery and then ran through it in a little over a year. After that, he broke up with Louis, his boyfriend who was the only long-term relationship he'd ever had. (At age forty, Louis still seems to have been the only long-term relationship Joe has had.)

Joe managed to do one thing right with his money. After using it on a European vacation for Louis and himself, Joe gave Louis, with whom he had only been in a relationship for a short time, $55,000 to open up a hair salon. Since then, Louis has continued to give Joe dividends from the salon, even though they broke up less than two years into their relationship. Because of their business partnership, Louis has continued on in the margins of Joe's life. They meet for dinner a few times a year, and Louis even helped get Joe into treatment at least once. It's not much, but it's the closest thing to a long-term, stable relationship Joe's got.

The whammo

Unlike the last story in the O.Henry anthology, this one gets to the moment when the status quo is upset very quickly. The moment Joe's life is upset is one of the best passages in the story:

When the phone rang, I was wondering what small tidy gesture might make the place clean. I'd been struggling to stay dry, but I'd had my slips, and it was weeks since I'd closed up the fold-out couch. On the night table, perched like a tea bag on the handle of a coffee mug, lay the wrapper from a condom I barely remembered using, and when things reach this point I start to get worried...
The man on the phone said, "Mr. Meegan, Officer Lee McCabe of the Rhode Island State Police. Regarding a Louis Prevala, of Boston, Mass?"
I said, "Yes, sir."
There's a notion that such moments bring you to your senses, but the effect on me was to turn up the static. Louis had once called me a sports car with a headlight misaligned, and as the trooper explained the nature of his call, that crooked, unpredictable beam was hard to resist. I went around the kitchen and poked around for Excedrin, and as I knocked back the tablets I noticed my hand was shaking. I opened a Dr. Pepper and wondered if I'd fed Mr. Navy, and through it all, the cop described the collision. He said Louis's mother had turned in the wrong lane, and I pictured East Duffield as it was when I visited: the shingled storefronts, the chunky green window boxes. How inconspicuous I'd felt there! The officer said Mrs. Prevala had not survived--but she never thought I was right for her boy.

It's typical to slow the action down during a key moment in a story, similar to slow-motion or an extreme close-up in film. This passage does this, but by interrupting the phone call to fill in background and letting the scene move forward in jumps and starts, it also avoids being too predictable. There are a lot of stories with "the call from the police" in them, but this one is like no other, owing to the skill with which the scene is rendered.

It turns out that Louis had, for whatever reason, left Joe's name and number in his wallet as his emergency contact. So Joe drives from Boston to Rhode Island, where he finds Louis unconscious, but--he is told--probably about to wake up sometime soon.

The Stamp Collector

What's all this got to do with a stamp collector? Although the stamp collector is referred to in the first sentence of the story, the meaning of this person, like so many of the story's secrets, is wonderfully kept off stage until needed. Louis is a kind person. He gives his time to his mother, who is also an alcoholic. He is talkative with the "developmentally disabled" (as Joe calls him) man down the street. This man, whose name is Stevie, is the stamp collector. Louis sends him stamps during his European vacation with Joe and carries on a long relationship with Stevie. The mother is annoyed by Stevie, but it's in Louis's nature to be kind and to at least chat pleasantly with others. Joe assumes it's part of being a hair stylist, but it's really because Louis is just kind. When Louis and Joe broke up, Louis told Joe he had nothing left to give, and while Joe replied that he had felt the same ever since he ran out of money, this is just Joe not realizing what really matters. Louis is a giving person, and this has more to do with why he sends stamps to the neighborhood "developmentally disabled" person who is cared for by his father than with Louis's habits of small talk.

This stamp collector becomes important, as the title would suggest. But first, Joe has to go through a few more false epiphanies. When he comes to Rhode Island, he spends the day in the hospital with Louis, then rents a room at a cheap hotel. As he is leaving Louis at the end of the day, he maybe sees some kind of redemption in helping his old lover out: "In the silence of the ward it was easy to imagine what a fine nurse I'd make; to dwell on my chance for regaining what I'd lost." He goes to a bar, but immediately leaves. The next day, he feels "like (he'd) conquered something."

But when he goes back to the hospital in the morning, April from the salon, who Joe know thinks of him as a "nuisance," is there. Someone from the funeral home shows up, wanting them to help make decisions about the funeral for Louis's mother, Carole. Two things about Carole, though: she always hated Joe, and she was a drunk. In fact, since "no one knows drunkenness as well as a drunk," Joe is certain she caused the accident by driving under the influence. He flies off the handle, "caught in the beam of (his) wayward headlight," forcing April to get him in line. It doesn't matter what Joe thinks, she says, Louis would want a good funeral for his mother.

Joe ends up spiraling downward after this. He goes back to Boston, gets his cat, and then returns to Rhode Island. He ends up, on a whim, going to the house where Louis had lived with his mother. Naturally, the mother has alcohol around, and Joe can't resist this time. He ends up plastered and laying underneath Louis's Miata:

The ground was a bit soft, and I inched myself under the trunk, putting my arms at my sides and getting in tight behind the rear wheels, until I was pinned there and could no longer move. I pressed my face to the ground and rubbed my nose back and forth until it seemed I'd abraded the skin, then I picked my head up and slammed it against the undercarriage, and though I wasn't quite sobbing yet, I started to heave. I knocked my head around until stars fluttered before me and all I could manage was a few whimpery squeaks, then I opened my mouth and bit the soil, scooping up all I could with my tongue. I've done this before, this wallowing in abasement, and it always feels good. There's a theory that a drunk won't clean up until he hits rock bottom, so each new incident might perhaps be the one.

There it is: the quest for rock-bottom, for the life-changing humbling. Joe has tried many times to manufacture this moment, but it's not a moment you can really make yourself. It requires--Secular Jesus help me for saying it--some kind of grace.

Why Joe receives this grace and Louis's mother doesn't

Joe is a drunk. So is Louis's mother. But they handle their alcoholism differently, and that affects how others treat them.  When Louis's doctor sees that Louis responds to pain stimulus, Joe jokes that, "So he's miles ahead of me." The doctor grins. He grins because this is a self-effacing, humble way to respond. Louis's mother, Carole, meanwhile, demonstrates nothing but pride, or "hauteur," as Joe sees it. During one awkward evening at Louis's house, when the mother was drinking and Joe was not, he noted that "even three sheets to the wind, Mrs. Prevala acted as if she was only high-strung, and Louis never acknowledged his mother's alcoholism the way he did mine." Joe notes that she softly closes the door to her room at a time when he would have been waving the bottle in Louis's face, because "once (he's) drinking (he) can't pretend that (he's) not."

This all has a lot to do with why Carole Prevala dies of her own hand in a drunk driving accident and Joe survives to have the humbling he needs. Joe is a drunk, but an honest drunk. Carole hides her drunkenness. To use New Testament terminology, Joe is "poor in spirit." Carole refuses to admit her spiritual bankruptcy, and so no grace is available to her.

How does grace arrive to Joe? He spends the night under Louis's Miata. The neighbors--Stevie and Stevie's father--come up in the morning to see who is at Carole's house. Stevie's father instinctively treats Joe like he treats his own son--that is to say, like someone who needs help. This is the moment where Joe realizes that in the "years (he'd) spent looking after (himself)," he "didn't do a good job." It's only when Stevie's father encourages Joe to get cleaned up, to think of what Louis would want, to go to Carole's funeral so he could tell Louis when he wakes up what it was like, that Joe makes what change he is capable of. This is his rock bottom. This seems somewhat insulting to whatever community of disability it is Stevie suffers from, that Joe's ultimate humiliation is that he is sort of taken for a "developmentally disabled" person, but it turns out that's what Joe needs. The humiliation isn't that he is "treated like he's retarded," to use the phrasing Joe would probably have used, but Joe's realization that he is as in need of help as others whose need is more obvious. Stevie's father encourages Joe to get cleaned up in the same patient voice he uses with Stevie, and Joe complies, both humbled and, maybe, on the road to whatever recovery he is capable of.

Joe's "cleaning up" scene is a literal baptism.

"The old man said, "You ought to have some clothes on (Joe ended up without a shirt while spending the night underneath the Miata)," and reached for the screen door, and I pushed past him and rushed to the kitchen and put my mouth under the tap, and the water that came out wasn't nearly wet enough. It poured into my mouth and burbled down my face, and I swallowed as much as I could, then turned and let it wash over my head and ears, finding sensitive zones all over my scalp. At last I let go, and my face hit the bed of the sink...Then the tap was turned off, and someone was patting my head with a cloth.
"Good idea," the man said. He moved the cloth to my back and went on patting, gently patting, and said nothing about my heaving and sniveling or the way I rocked back and forth and dug my chest with my nails." 

Once he has reached his humiliation, there is no need to humiliate him more. We can look past his lack of a shirt and the mud all over him and the fact he obviously had a bender the night before.

The denouement

Usually, a denouement looks forward to how the catharsis is going to change the way things were. After Joe Meecher meekly endures the guidance of Stevie's father, though, the final scene isn't Joe going to the funeral or going back to the hospital. It's him looking back to the vacation in Europe right after he won the lottery money.

I really was puzzled by this. It's not looking to the future, but the past. Joe maybe gives us a bit of a key to this puzzle. As he thinks back to how absolutely perfect the vacation was, and the moments he shared with Louis, he admits that "I'm not good at imagining the future, and all I wanted was for everything to go on forever: the vacation, the money, the amazingly relaxed camaraderie that was just beginning to become love."

Joe isn't capable of fully rounding the bend. There is no rock bottom. There is no moment after which everything turns around and goes only in one direction. His denouement is not to look forward, but to the past, to the last time he can remember when everything in his life wasn't shit. Maybe this is the best he can do. Maybe life for Joe isn't one rock bottom, it's finding the bottom every day, it's being baptized every day, it's making small movements toward better every day.

This story was just a knockout. I loved everything about it. It's not an easy story for Westerners to take, accustomed as we are to avoiding humbling and humility at all costs. There are some obvious religious overtones to it that you'd think I would not like, given that my agnosticism is a big part of who I am. But Christianity was so successful for so long (and continues to be successful) because parts of it really answer problems that people need help with. I have no problem with trying to find a way to adopt these parts of Christianity into a secular life. Humility is one of the trickiest virtues to adopt, because it's inimical to our radically democratic notions. But some people need it badly, and almost everyone needs it at some point in their lives. I love the way this story gets at how irreplaceable humility is.

Dump all over a story about a four-year-old who dies of a brain tumor? Sure, I'll take that action. "Queen Elizabeth" by Brad Felver

It seems like every "best of" short story anthology has at least one entry that makes me wonder what on Earth the editors were thinking when they picked it. For the 2018 O.Henry Short Story Anthology, that story is "Queen Elizabeth" by Brad Felver. Part Nicholas Sparks and part compendium of the kinds of philosophical ramblings a mildly precocious college freshman far too enamored with his own learning might share, this story has nothing to offer and much that annoys.

One of the reasons I blog about award-winning short stories is that I hope to be able to open up interesting readings that might not occur to readers without specialized education in fiction or literature. But there's almost no hidden secrets in this story. The images are all there on the surface, screaming to be heeded, no matter how shallow they are. What theme there is could perhaps, without doing too much damage to the story, be summarized as: death is a hard blow, especially when it happens to your child, and there are no easy answers.

That's this whole story. It postures at having something deep to say about the timeless subject of death, but fails on page after pompous page. The only potentially useful analysis I might offer is why I dislike it so much. I'm sure some readers read it and enjoyed it, maybe even found it moving. They might be confused why I didn't like it. After all, it's got all the elements of a moving story: a love story with a stand-up guy and a girl dazed by how awesome he is; their romance is interrupted by the death of their daughter. So I'll try to offer an explanation of why I found the story failed, which can sometimes be as interesting an analysis as that of a story I read with profit.

1. The Garcia y Marquez opening: Gabriel Garcia y Marquez's novel 100 Years of Solitutde, which belongs in any time capsule of human artifacts meant to show future civilizations who discover our rubble what our best looked like, begins with the line, "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." It's such a famous line, I can't believe writers try to start their stories with "years later" and think they're being clever. It's not even a clever line if you're intentionally drawing comparisons between your story and 100 Years. Yet this terrible story begins its terrible journey with this: "Many years later, knots of grief cinched intractably within her, Ruth still urged her memory back to their first evening together..."

2. A chronology so straight, the protagonist Gus could have used it to measure angles when making one of his stupid desks. So Ruth supposedly studies stochastics as a Ph.D. student at Case Western. Stochastics is math about randomness. But the plot line is the opposite of random. It starts with their first date and moves with the most unimaginative directness from that moment through dating to marriage to miscarriage to finally having a baby to losing that baby to divorce to a final meeting years after the divorce. Rather than beginning the story as close to the moment when the status quo is altered, we spend half the story building up the status quo before we finally have it changed. And what a dull status quo it is. There is nothing interesting about Gus and Ruth. He's from Ohio on a farm and she's from a well-to-do family in New England! Her family looks down on him! They're such a plucky couple! Who cares? 

3. Lots of the types of pseudo-profoundities you get from someone who just took  all his 101-level courses. There are a number of places where the narrative shoehorns in a concept where the only point seems to be for the author to say, "Hey! Look! I know basic concepts about a subject." Gus plays the ukulele for the child. We read that "D-minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D-minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out of reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G." Is this really something a father would do? Or is the point here for the author to say he's learned about tonal and atonal music, and knows that in tonal music there is a concept of suspended chords? I don't see how this is really an organic notion for simple Gus to be putting into practice. Ruth the mathematician might be endlessly fascinated by the mathematical relationship between chords and their effect on human perception, but not Gus. And it's not a reference that's picked up again anywhere else. 

Most of these "I have learned some basic facts about a subject and will now use that to create images in my story" are of the science and math variety. There is a tendency in the humanities to do great abuse to STEM when translating STEM ideas for mass audiences. This goes back at least as far as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the many imitators who tried to claim modern physics undid the rational underpinnings of the enlightenment and subsequent intellectual movements. The book Fashionable Nonsense presented the views of a group of scientists about how European philosophers of the post-structural variety abused scientific ideas in the service of trying to give an aura of credibility to specious arguments about language and culture. Every bloated Andrea Barrett story presents an unconvincing portrait of a scientist whose entire way of looking at the world, down to how he eats, sleeps, and goes to the bathroom, is somehow a reflection of the theory he is best remembered for. 

This story is STEM name-dropping gobbledygook in that same vein. 

• Gus doesn't know much fancy book-lernin', but he does know about Euclidean planes requiring three points, and he makes his desks with three legs because it's somehow, I don't know, a symbol in the story for how Gus and Ruth won't make it because they can never find the third leg to build on or something. It's not a symbol that makes sense, and it's really forced, both with the reference back to Euclid and in the making of a three-legged desk nobody would want. 
• The specialist who looks at their daughter and avoids directly giving a death prognosis talks about how her physicist father forbade grieving for the doctor's dead mother, because "According to the Law of Conservation of Mass, she was still with us." This is a layperson's stupid paraphrasing of science, not something a scientist himself is likely to say. 
• As Ruth and Gus are breaking up, the breakup feels inevitable to them, but they will also, we are told, look back one day to find the moment they pivoted away from each other, because "...if they could isolate the fulcrum, the singularity, perhaps some wormhole would sprout and revive a conduit to the past." It's got STEM! STEM plus arts is STEAM, and that's very in right now! We must cram more STEM into the narrative! Never mind if it makes sense, or if it's whatever Wikipedia version of STEM a writer concocted for a story, put it in! Hang those who talk of less!
• "He stared at the note. It demanded that he develop a fresh emotional response, one that hadn't yet been charted and classified by scientists." There was no set-up to this science imagery, but SCIENCE IS A CENTRAL MOTIF IN MY STORY, SO MORE, I SAY, MORE!!

4. Passages that are meant to be lyrical and beautiful, but come off as hackneyed or cliche. It's a pretty cliche story overall, focusing entirely on well-trod territory of falling in love and having kids: the bedtime stories, the loss of identity for the parents, the child drawings on the wall. But there are a few passages where these cliches become more concentrated. Examples:

• "The pain from this encounter was real, and yet so was the excitement."
• Describing the troubles between them as "civil war."
• "Without noticing it, they had created an entire country with its own language and customs and mythologies and even defensive perimeters. Their own lines allowed few breaches."
• "A growing swell of energy between them, they each felt it, the way it lashed them together."
• When trying to put their arms around a giant tree, named "Queen Elizabeth" (because it's been alive since Elizabethan times), we read that "even together their arms were swallowed up by its girth." But their arms are around it, so how are they being swallowed up? Because the cliche is for something to be swallowed up, and this story can't be bothered to rework cliches, that's why.

5. Gus is a great guy! Such a great guy! Gus has one or two small stumbles, but mostly, he's insanely great. He reminds me of the father from the NBC show This is Us. In fact, this whole story reminds me of that show, because it's cry porn disguised with just enough seriousness to allow people to feel like they earned their cry. (It's like The Shack or a number of other recent stories in this regard. If something bad happens, then the audience is allowed to think it's not watching something sentimental, so the emotion is earned. It's not.) Not every character has to be deeply flawed, but there were a lot of "he's great" passages. And those passages all seemed to be written specifically for the Hallmark-Special-crowd to appreciate his greatness. After Ruth's miscarriage, her sadness comes in waves. "The waves came suddenly, and he learned how to recognize them. He didn't understand them, but he knew it wasn't important that he did." Ooooooooooh, I just had such an empathetic orgasm reading that. (Gus also gains twenty pounds on purpose because Ruth feels bad he's skinny and she's not. Sooooo thoughtful! Soooo dreamy!) 

It can't be cheesy if bad things happen in it! 

6. Old-school sage author. This story is in third-person omniscient, giving us, the readers, access to the thoughts of both Gus and Ruth. This isn't used as much anymore, and while there's nothing wrong with using it, one has to be careful while using it not to come across like the kind of sage writer of 100 years ago, the one who knows all and is graciously allowing the reader access to his wisdom. Omniscient shouldn't mean acting like God, in other words, in the sense of talking down to reader about the way the world is. 

This story slips into this mode twice. Once comes with an "of course." Ruth is calculating the odds of their daughter having the brain tumor she gets (because she's mathy, remember?) Gus doesn't get why she does this. The narrator tells us that "What he didn't understand, of course, was that (her calculations) allowed Ruth a respite, precious moments." 

You can use "of course" (of course) in a narrative, if it's the character's own interior monologue. For example, "Jenny searched the house for her keys for hours, before finally remembering that she'd left them dangling from the deadbolt on the front door, of course." That's her talking to herself. But when an omniscient narrator says "of course" like this, he's talking to us, the reader. It's a direct address, like "gentle reader." It's a hack move. Soon after, after telling us the two characters had chosen anger over sadness, the narrator wonders: "Perhaps this was not a conscious decision." Again, that perhaps is addressed directly to the reader, because it can't be either person thinking to themselves. The reader is therefore now brought into the story in a way I don't think is really intended. 

So why did the editors love this story?

I'm not really sure. Laura Furman, in her introduction to the volume, raves about how this story reminds us that as bad as our own mortality is, "there are losses that are worse." She claims that this story is "as lovingly crafted as the furniture Gus makes, and Felver leaves the reader with a haunting and bittersweet truth." What bittersweet truth? That sentimental stories about children dying can make us cry? This is a lazy review of a lazy story. Furman saw the easy opportunity to write that sentence linking the story's crafting and the desk's crafting and took it. In an otherwise challenging and pretty well thought-out anthology, this story strikes me as one that both the author and the editors phoned in, and then the editors tried to hide it early on the B side of the album. 

There's nothing wrong with writing a story that isn't all together. Not every song is a hit, or deserves to be. Some are just part of the process of trying things. Felver's apparently a highly regarded writer, and I'm sure I'd like some of his other work. But why waste space in one of the few anthologies focused on short stories out there with a weak story like this? Why pretend sadness equals depth? Every one of the twenty spaces in this anthology represents a responsibility on the part of the editors, because those stories can be a huge shot in the arm to the writers who get them. Giving this spot to a melodrama like this was a missed opportunity. 

Something to pretend belongs to you: "An Amount of Discretion" by Lauren Alwan

Seline was a good choice to be the executor of the estate for her recently deceased artist husband, Jonathan. Not only is she an artist herself (Jonathan's former student and about thirty years younger than he was), she's fastidious, she notices small details, and she pays attention to the rules. Since  Jonathan had achieved some renown before shuffling off this mortal coil, it was a comfort to him while dying to know his work would be cared for and appreciated. Seline's carrying out his wishes to the letter was part of that consolation.

What Seline's personality doesn't make her well suited for is caring for Jonathan's surviving son and her step-son, Finn. She did okay as a part-time mother to Finn when Finn was a kid, although she had no real maternal instincts herself. It helped that Finn had been an "even-tempered, pleasant child," and it helped even more that she only had him on weekends and for a couple of weeks in the summer. After that, they could send him back to his mother's house, Jonathan's former wife, and it "was always a relief when the visits were done, and, released from having to care for a child not her own, she could return to her life with Jonathan and her work in the studio." 

Nonetheless, here after her husband's death, Seline finds herself wishing she'd gotten closer to Finn. They've had a few conversations just between them that have gone well, now that Jonathan isn't there to mediate everything between them, and it's got Seline thinking she's longing for a closer relationship with him. When she finds eight of Jonathan's notebooks, she decides to offer them to Finn so he has something to remember his father by. Because she doesn't feel confident explaining her need to be close to him outright, she hopes the gesture might express "what she could not--her regret at the distance she'd put between them when Finn was young."

Finn's on his way to visit her, and this presents an opportunity for her to give him the notebooks and have that conversation she's been wanting to have, but it's obvious right away it's not going to go well. Finn is dating someone at San Francisco State University, and she'd got a kid. Finn's bringing both to meet Seline, because he was going to be in the area anyway for his mother's birthday. So already, her private moment she was hoping to have with him will be interrupted.

Much more than that, though, as Seline prepares for her guests, anyone who has ever spent five minutes with a four-year-old can see disaster looming. There is a lot of time given to the description of Seline's house and the things in it. She sets the table with a blue madras cloth, pottery carried back from a trip to Portugal, heavy goblets bought secondhand in North Hollywood. She purchases a complicated cake called a sacripantina from an Italian bakery. She has heavy linen drapes lined with cotton duck. She spends a lot of time dressing and thinking about her accessories, especially one piece of jewelry she feels sentimental attachment to, but cannot put on because she needs help with it. And then, there's Seline's studio, with all the tools of an artist along with her art she'd been working on laid out carefully.

I foresee nothing going wrong with this visit. 

From the moment Finn's girlfriend Anna arrives, Seline finds fault with her, thinking her "close-cut dark blond hair gave her a severe, unforgiving look." Seline tries to be lenient with Chole, the four-year-old, ignoring the first several transgressions of the child. When Chloe insists on holding a nutcracker at the table herself, then drops it and breaks a plate (not one of the good ones), Seline actually "felt relief--as though the inevitable had finally occurred." The reader is tempted to share this relief, but more tension is about to be piled on.

It turns out Finn has something he wants. He's come to ask about a particular painting his father made, one that, unlike the usual aesthetic his father employed, was very personal. It includes a rabbit Finn and Jonathan had seen while out walking together--a fact that even Seline was not aware of. She takes Finn to her studio to see the painting, and is considering using the discretion afforded her as executor to perhaps find a way to let Finn keep it, when Chloe comes into the studio. She draws by herself for a while, but then drop the pencil and spills brushes while trying to pick it up, lightly damaging Seline's works-in-progress along the way. Seline reacts just a touch harshly, grabbing the girl's arm and telling her that "things break if you're not careful" in one of those really over-the-top double-meaning lines.

From then on, it's obvious Finn and Anna are angry at Seline for the way she treated Chloe in the studio. One could read this as standard old generation vs. new generation stuff, the old generation insisting children need boundaries and rules while the new refuses to discipline their kids, but there's something going on that makes the reader think that even while Seline has a point, she's wrong.

In the moment Chloe dumps the brushes, Seline has rethought giving not just the painting, but even the notebooks to Finn. She sees her near-decision to give the work to him as a "...lapse in judgment. She knew better know. She knew sentiment could not influence her. She would follow Jonathan's wishes and keep the collection together. There was no room for discretion, not even hers." 

In fact, Seline is so closed off, she is wired against the sentimental. She tried to open up that day, even symbolically opening her drapes to let in the sun she typically kept out, but it was too much for her. Ultimately, she likes her ordered life. When Finn tells Seline that Anna is pregnant, she knows he means it as good news, but "she kept thinking of the irreversibility, the obligation it would mean." Finn, speaking only for himself, offers that "a little discomfort keeps you in check," but Seline immediately writes this thinking off as "one of those odd theories" young people come up with that "explain nothing."

This emotional reserve seems to even pervade Seline's work, which is "solemn and enigmatic, and none of it...ready to be seen." Seline spends her days in a studio she has made to be exactly like the gallery that shows her work, meaning she is always in the artificial world, never creating art meant to be experienced by full-blooded people. Even Seline herself doesn't "know what to make of" her own paintings, because it has never occurred to her to connect with them in that way. She is not capable, perhaps, of making a personal piece of art like the one Finn covets.

In the end, Chloe wanders off. As Finn's new family is checking the house to be sure they didn't leave anything, Seline realizes that Chloe has stolen her treasured bracelet. She tries to come up with a way to get it back without accusing the girl, but can't come up with one. Because Anna and Finn are already angry with her, she allows the girl to leave with it. She understands the impulse, having been a hell-raiser herself as a girl. "How irresistible it must have seemed. How unexpected. The child must have marveled at her luck, that she had found something she could pretend belonged to her."

Seline likely feels she deserves this treatment, to lose something of sentimental value to her at the hands of someone pretending it belongs to her, because she is doing the same thing to Finn by pretending her duty as executor means the painting cannot be his.

A masterpiece...that I can't stand

Every once in a while, there is a movie or a story that I can recognize is artistically nearly flawless, but which I still don't like. That's this story. I hated Seline. I know it's considered facile to complain that you don't like a character and use that as a reason to dismiss a story--the "correct" attitude is supposed to be to ask not whether the character is likable, but whether the character seems lifelike. And Seline is very real--this is a type of person I know. Know and don't like. Even while Alwan was brilliantly building tension with olives perched just-so on the table and the cake in the refrigerator, I kept thinking it would be fine with me if a fire just burned all of Seline's things, art and all, to the ground. Seline is a stick-in-the-mud who cares about stupid belongings being kept in a certain way and creates art I can't imagine wanting to look at. She cares about her stupid things--even though in the end, we're all going to die, so we're all just pretending things belong to us--more than the people around her. It's hard for me to get past a story being about a silly person whose life has been one big waste just because I recognize how well the portrait is drawn and how convincingly the tale of her final failure to open up is.

All coming-of-age stories all the time: "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" by Jenny Zhang

I knew when I was writing my last post that I was jumping the gun. While writing about how it had been hard for me to get past the fact that I was reading a fourth straight coming-of-age story in the O.Henry Anthology, I thought to myself, "Surely, they won't go for a fifth?" But they did. It's the year of the bildungsroman, I guess.

Like with the last one, it would be unfair of me to judge the story because it happened to have been anthologized with so many other coming-of-age stories, and I'm going to deal with it on its own merits. I can also see what the anthology editors were thinking. These might have been five stories that were alike in that they featured young protagonists passing through trials into adulthood, but the stories are also profoundly different from one another. We had a wealthy Connecticut family taking their teens on vacation to Italy, a German child growing up during post-WW-II reconstruction, a wonderful Afghan boy-goes-on-a-journey tale, a Russian child in the 90s (I think?) watching her mother and her mother's best friend try to find happiness, and now this story about a Chinese-American girl's relationship to her grandmother.

Zhang's story stands out as different for more reasons than just the ethnicity and location of the narrator, a now-grown woman thinking back over her childhood from age nine to age seventeen. It also stands out for being perhaps the only story in which the climax is not the main character changing, but failing to change. Or does she? The narrator essentially tells us this is a negative character arc, but it's possible that the act of writing the story is more meaningful and more indicative of a post-facto change in the narrator than the narrator realizes.

The story unfolds as four different visits from a Chinese grandmother to the home of Stacey, the narrator. When Stacey is young, she is won over by her old grandmother, who is hard of hearing, entirely too self-assured and unaware of herself, and who re-invents her past from moment to moment. She first says she lost her hearing when a horse ran into her, then later says it happened when she was running away from boys who were throwing bricks.

The grandmother is the one who supplies the question to this second version of the story, "Why were they throwing bricks?" She answers, "Who knows. There was a violence back then no one can understand now." It turns out that Grandma lived through Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution and lost her own parents in the process. This is why she has developed a habit of re-inventing her past; it's a survival mechanism for her. It's also why she is so devoted to her grandchildren. She sees loving them as a way to redeem herself for failing to save her own parents.

We often tend to talk about Mao's revolution now like it's all a joke, which is another way to disassociate from what we find hard to understand.

We don't realize all this until the end. Stacey, after loving her grandmother and missing her when she goes back to China when Stacey was younger, later grows to be mortified by her. The grandmother is a symbol of all the things Stacey wishes she wasn't, all the things that make her standout as weird in America. When the grandmother returns for her second visit, the narrator recalls that, "I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night--I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread."

Stacey begins to resent her grandmother, whose weird Chinese-ness and origins in a time that doesn't make sense anymore remind Stacey of all the things about herself she doesn't like. Stacey works to keep her younger brother from loving Grandma the same way Stacey used to love her, and eventually she succeeds.

We see hints that Stacey, as she is growing into a woman, is also developing the ability to see grandma's own struggles from a mature and sympathetic perspective. Stacey finds the grandmother out late one night after Grandma's senility is beginning to set in, bouncing on a neighbor's trampoline. Through Grandma's dialogue with the ghosts of her parents, Stacey understands more than she ever has about why Grandma chooses to re-invent her own story. And here's where the narrator self-diagnoses herself with a failed epiphany:

"I thought I would always remember this night and be profoundly altered by having seen her this way. But it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake--that if you remember this dream, it will unlock secrets to your life that will otherwise be permanently closed--but when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. And after trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don't change at all."

That's the narrator's diagnosis. Should we accept it? Or is it possible that Stacey has adopted some reverse syndrome from the grandmother's? While Grandma changed the past to make it more palatable, Stacey might have changed her story to make herself feel more guilty than she needs to. It's the story of many "hyphen people": Chinese-Americans feel damned if they are too Chinese and damned if they are too American,and so live with a permanent sense of guilt. 

There are two reasons to doubt Stacey's own self-diagnosis. First, even when she is telling herself she is happy to see the grandmother leave for the fourth and final time, she shows signs that she will miss her. She finds the grandmother's hearing aid on the ground. After first saying, "It's like you just won't go" and kicking the hearing aid away, she immediately runs, picks it up, and tenderly brushes the dirt off it. At her worst, she is torn about the grandmother.

Secondly, she hasn't forgotten the dream, the one that she thought might "unlock secrets to her life." She just told us the dream in minute detail. It's possible that the act of writing this story is the moment when the narrator finally internalizes the lessons learned from her long contact with her grandmother.

I remember in grad school my adviser specifically used the "grandma dying" story as an example of a story we shouldn't write. "Everyone feels bad when Grandma dies," she says. "And everyone thinks everyone else should feel bad about it, too, but the fact is that nobody else really cares about Grandma dying." Zhang picked an uphill battle for herself, but I think she was mostly up to it. I felt like the narrator herself may have been too absent from the story. We get insight into her only through her reactions to Grandma. We never see her interacting with peers or doing homework or hoping for something for herself. The passage above about the many ways she felt inadequate is one of the few bits of internal dialogue we see from her. Since the story is really about the narrator and the effect Grandma had on her, I thought the story was too focused only on the older generation and not enough on the new. It's easy to understand why--Grandma was a great character, and it was more pleasant to focus on her than on Stacey. In the end, I felt like the impact was slightly less than it might have been, but still worthy of its place in this block of five stories written form the points-of-view of five vastly different young people. (I read ahead the first few pages of the next story this time. I really think it's got adult protagonists.)

Okay, fine, let's do yet one more coming-of-age story: "Deaf and Blind" by Lara Vapnyar

Originally, when I read "Deaf and Blind" by Lara Vapnyar, I was going to write an angry analysis about it being part of a culture that is infantilizing readers by giving them too many stories about children. There are plenty of critics who have been suggesting this in recent years, and I could have cited them as part of denigrating this story. I even had a title picked out for my review, one from the story itself: "bland and runny and desperately silly."

But it later occurred to me that it's not Vapnyar's fault that her story takes place in a culture that writes a lot of coming-of-age stories. Nor is it her fault that the O.Henry Anthology likes to group stories by themes, meaning it put four coming-of-age stories all in a row in the middle of the collection. It isn't her fault that her story came last in this run, meaning I'd already kind of been worn down by similar stories. My responsibility was to get past all of that and read the story for what it was.

What it was, taken by itself, is a serviceable story about  a young woman learning to accept her mother as a flawed but lovable person. Not just lovable, but deserving of love. This is an important, if not earth-shattering, discovery most people make at some point in their early adult lives (assuming their parents actually do deserve understanding and love, despite their flaws).

The narrator, who is telling the story as an adult, is remembering back over a couple of years of childhood, starting at about age seven and lasting into roughly early puberty. (In spite of reading this story twice, I cannot recall if the narrator's name is ever revealed. I often forget to look for this, and I'm tired of even trying to care about whether there is some significance to a character remaining unnamed. If the narrator's name is in the story, it's not in there much, and I can't find it now.) The father has left the narrator's mother, and the daughter now finds herself acting like children often do in such circumstances: she idolizes the one who left and is hyper-critical of the one who stayed behind. "I loved my father more than I loved her." The girl even tells her mother this, in the cruelly blunt manner of children. But there is also a desperate sort of bond between mother and daughter.

It is the very strength of this bond that makes the daughter so critical of her mother. The girl can sense her mother's hypocrisy not because they are distant, but because they are so close: "I was only a child, but I was very close to my mother, so close that I couldn't help hearing the smug note in her voice." What the mother is being smug about is her friend Olga. Olga and the mother met when they were both undergoing fertility treatment in a Moscow clinic. (Oh yeah, the whole story is in Russia, but somehow that doesn't really matter much.) The mother managed to have a child, but Olga didn't, and the mother voices her "regret" that Olga never had a child as much to gloat as to genuinely sympathize with her friend.

But Olga ends up with a reward of her own. She takes a lover. Her lover is the blind and deaf Sasha, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy like Olga does. Olga leaves her husband, whom she respects but does not love, and stakes all on her love for Sasha. Olga brings her lover to the mother's house to introduce him, where the narrator, the mother, and the narrator's grandparents all go to a great deal of trouble to prepare the best meal they can. They are very excited and nervous to meet a blind and deaf person, treating him like a novelty meant for their own entertainment.

During the dinner, it becomes apparent that Sasha and the narrator serve parallel purposes in the lives of Olga and the mother. Both women are hoping to receive love from their respective counterparts in order to justify the choices they've made in life. The mother hypothesizes that Olga picked a blind and deaf person because she couldn't have a child, so she chose a person who needed help and would therefore fill a similar role. While the grandparents dismiss this theory, the important thing is that it is true for the mother. She sees Sasha as competition. She has staked her life on her daughter's love, just as Olga has staked hers on Sasha's.

What heightens the stakes is that the narrator has always liked Olga more than her own mother, a fact that is not lost on the mom. There are several character developments that happen at once as the story comes to its climax. One is that the narrator turns down an offer to visit her father, the one she formerly idolized although he almost never made time for her. This helps to break one of the spells on her. A second is that the mother seems to be genuinely happy for her friend. She does her honest best to treat them well and make sure Sasha is comfortable. The mother is so intent on her friend's happiness, in fact, that she lets her own guard down and realizes how unhappy she herself is.

The story ends with the mother crying in bed. The narrator climbs in to join her. This vulnerability of the mother finally melts the narrator's walls toward her. "I pitied her. But I loved her more than I pitied her. I loved her so much much that it was hard to breathe. And another thing: at that moment, I felt close to my mother in a completely new way. Not as a child, but as a fellow woman, an equal."

Some might complain that a passage like that is too on-the-nose, too "tell-y." I'm fine with it. The story has a bit of a fable-like quality to it anyhow, so there's nothing wrong with the moral being laid out plain and simple.

Most people who love literature are probably drawn to the stories with the big epiphanies, the cosmic-level conflicts with life-and-death hanging in the balance. But that's not a reason to despise stories about the small epiphanies in life, the ones that bring marginal improvements to our daily existence. "Deaf and Blind" is a story in which one character's lack of two of the five major senses awakens another character to her own inability to sense what is going on around her. I see no reason to be obtuse myself about accepting and appreciating a story like that. 

The time bomb plot structure: "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier

It's common to talk of fiction as being primarily about change. Nearly every "how-to" book or class will tell writers we need to first establish a "before," then introduce action that causes change in the status quo, leading to an eventual catharsis in the character that means his or her life will never be the same.

A typical way to do this, if we were to assume a five-act structure, is:

-Introduce the status quo in act one
-Introduce the change in act two
-Have the character resist the change and try to restore the status quo in act three
-In acts four and five, the character will realize that the status quo is gone, and she now needs to change to adapt to a new reality. There will be a catharsis near the end of act four or beginning of act five and a denouement immediately after, which show what the new reality after catharsis will look like for the character.

Generally, it's considered a weakness to wait too long to bring in the disruptive force. Creative writing instructors are often pointing out that the stories of their students may be full of incisive prose and intriguing characters, but if nothing happens, then the story is dead on arrival. So writers are encouraged to make something happen as soon as possible after establishing the "before," and to set their stories as close to the beginning of the change as they can.

Mark Jude Poirier's "How We Eat" doesn't do any of these things. Nearly the entire story is "before," where we see the present reality of Trent and Lizzie, the two grade-school children of Brenda in 1992 Arizona. And what an awful reality it is for them. On the day of the story, the two children have been pulled out of school to help their mother, Brenda, go shopping at second-hand stores. Brenda hunts for overlooked valuable items she can sell herself at a profit, while she has her kids rifle through pockets for anything of value the donors might have left. She then searches the kids' pockets and even the tops of their underwear before they get back in the car, because she doesn't trust them not to hold out on her.

"How We Eat" joins the company of other excellent tales of the child victims of bad parents.

Often, it's considered a bit sloppy to only paint a character as a bad person. Since most people have a good quality or two, putting only a character's worst into a story seems to lack objectivity. But in the memory of Trent, who is first-person recollecting this day at some point in the future, we do not see a single redeeming characteristic of Brenda. From his physical description of her ("hair like hay because she uses Miss Clairol too often") to his fear of being attacked by a serial killer ("I blame Brenda") to Brenda's pointing out that her son hasn't begun puberty yet when she checks the top of his underwear to Brenda's terrible reasons for pulling her children out of school ("We could have gone to school and Brenda could have gone thrifting by herself, but she hates being alone,") there is just so mercy for this character. She's awful. An awful mother and an awful person. Her kids should be taken from her. And because this is Trent's memory, it's okay that he himself isn't objective enough to find the good in her.

When Trent finds a measly dollar, the family stretches it, along with ten cents from the seat of the car, to split lunch at McDonald's, making this the "How We Eat" scene from the title. It's clear that nothing taking place on this day is unusual for the family. The entire day is the "before" in Trent's life.

I kept waiting for the explosive action, thinking there were hints of what it might be. Trent had a stash at home of $126 dollars he'd managed to keep hidden from his mother by stuffing it in a Ziploc bag and taping the bag inside the toilet, like he'd seen drug dealers do on TV. I thought Brenda would discover it. But that's not what happens.

Instead, the explosive event happens late in act four, leading to a very quick catharsis and resolution in a short act five. Brenda gets in a brawl at the second thrift store and needs to leave before the cops come. She hauls Trent out to the car, wet pants and all (because she has refused to help him figure out where he can go), leaving sister Lizzie behind. Trent, thinking that Lizzie will be killed by the serial killer he imagines in his head, jumps out of the car and goes back to get her. One sentence is both Trent's transformation and the action he takes based on the transformation: "This story, these images of Lizzie and the strange man, take residence in my gut and sit there like a tumor, so when we stop for a red light at Prince Road, I open the door, jump out of the car, and hurry down the dirt shoulder back towards Goodwill." From that point, there are only two more sentences in the story. We're done.

I've spent a lot of time reading fiction "how-to" books over the last few years. I'm always amazed at how much standard advice both does and does not help a writer to create a great story. On the one hand, you'll never go wrong doing things the traditional way. The O.Henry story just before "How We Eat" in the anthology, "Nights in Logar," very much follows traditional advice by starting as close to the disruptive event as possible. In fact, it starts with the event rather than before it, as the boys are already headed out to find the dog from the beginning. We get the "before" filled in for us as they're making plans to go and setting out. But "How We Eat" defies this pattern by instead dropping a time bomb quietly into the narrative and waiting until the end to set it off.

You could, of course, look at this as still being traditional. The "before" is the totality of Trent and Lizzie's shitty lives, the disruptive event is a day at the thrift stores, and acts two and three represent Trent's attempts to continue to make the status quo work, which only fails to be possible when the shittiness of the status quo gets ratcheted up in the finale. But to me, it felt like one, long crescendo to a final explosion.

That put a lot of pressure on the narrative to have a compelling status quo, one that the reader can stay with even while the disruption is being kept at bay. Poirier was very much up to the task.