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.