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.