Brave New World meets Catcher in the Rye meets 1984 meets....okay, it's got a lot of elements that resemble other stories, okay?: "The Era" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Best American Short Stories 2019 starts off with a selection that happens to be included in what might be the most hyped short story collection since Jhumpa Lahiri. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black managed to make the NYT Bestseller List as a short story collection, which is, in many ways, harder to do than topping that list with a novel. The collection lives up to the hype, although I have to say that "The Era" wasn't one of my favorites in it. Still, I don't think Adjei-Brenyah is capable of writing a bad story if he tried.

There are moments the tight narrative drive of "The Era" starts to unravel for me, because the science fictional aspects of it are a little diffuse and told in a less than exacting style. But those centrifugal forces are more than offset by the centripetal ones stemming from the story's core about a young man trying to find his way in a strange world, dealing with alienation and love. That's a perennial story human beings live out over and over, and the greatest hope in the semi-dystopia of "The Era" is that Ben, the 15-year-old protagonist, is still living this story in spite of all that has changed.

What's different about the future? 

As I've said, the loosest parts of this story are its science fictional aspects. Normally, when we learn about a futuristic society in sci-fi, there are a few salient features of that society that make it different from today the narrative focuses on, and we examine the effects that imagined change in society has on humanity. For example, Brave New World examines a world in which a technocratic group of oligarchs plans every aspect of human existence. But "The Era" has no one single characteristic of its future world that really forms the most important "delta" from today.

Normally, the rule in sci-fi is to keep it simple, stupid, when you're trying to show how the future is different from the present. 

One important difference in the future of "The Era" is that the majority of parents use some CRISPR-like technology to pick traits for their children, with the richest parents getting the better packages.

Another difference is that society values a sort of anti-emotionalism. They link the existence of emotion and the corollary fudging of truth to the two great wars that came before "The Turn." Being emotional isn't "proud," and pridefulness, along with truthfulness and intelligence, is viewed as the summum bonum for a citizen to pursue.

Furthermore, society in "The Era" uses a different kind of language, one stripped of much of its color and variety. When something exhibits characteristics between two words, people merely stick those two words together with a backslash. Ben sees a girl wistfully write in her diary that she might have been "pretty/beautiful," for example. Alternatively, people can add "plus" between two related words: "I wanted her to keel over plus die." Then there are all the rough descriptive versions of words that exist: "brain-healer" for "psychiatrist," "clear-borns" for those born without the use of genetic technology to improve their traits, "HowItWas" for "History class," and the wonderful "shoelooker" to describe those who drift through the world without a purpose, subject to the bullying of all those fortune and technology have favored.

Finally, there is the presence of a drug to make everyone happy. This drug, called simply "Good," is given out to school children in the mornings. Ben's inability to feel better from Good and his pursuit of more of it is one of the major plot drivers in the story.

So we've got major changes from technology, which makes this like hundreds of other sci-fi stories. We've got a philosophical change toward emotion, which is similar to The Giver or the planet Vulcan from Star Trek. We've got a whole new relationship to language, one that evokes Orwell on every page, and we've got drugs to pacify a population that might not be entirely happy otherwise, which is reminiscent of the soma given out in Brave New World. That's a lot of changes to society, meaning it's hard to locate the control element we're testing for in this experiment.

But maybe that's okay

Somehow, the story doesn't totally unravel under all this excess of variables. Instead of being a story where one key characteristic in society is changed and we follow the ramifications of that change, we're watching a whole different kind of experiment here. Society has changed on so many levels in the future of "The Era" that things we now think of as the natural way for society to behave and think have lost their resonance. They've been lost to such a great extent, in fact, that history classes of the future can't even accurately reconstruct the thinking of a human from the time of the reader here in our present. In the middle of this society of the future that has almost so completely wiped 21st century assumptions off its intellectual map hardly anyone can even understand what those assumptions were, a boy sets off on a journey so grounded in basic human desire it could have been understood two thousand years ago. That's the experiment. Take an old story and put it in the new wineskin of a human society that's almost not even human anymore.

So what happens?

It's clear "The Era" is making some kind of assessments about what is constant in the human condition, what might stay no matter how much everything else changes, but what is that? Our narrator, Ben, is easier for readers of the present to understand because, being a "clear-born," he's living a life similar to what we would be living if we suddenly time-traveled into this world. He's  a key link to our world, because his genes are our genes. Choosing Ben as a narrator instead of one of the "optimized" or even "sub-optimized" (people whose parents elected gene therapy but for whom the therapy somehow failed) characters  means we are looking at the world the way an outsider would, not seeing it from inside.

But Ben isn't totally an outsider. Picking him as the point-of-view character works wonderfully well. Instead of the point-of-view character being, as often happens in sci-fi, an insider with a Disney-princess-like secret wish for something more that leads him to end up making friends with the outcasts, Ben is an outsider who wants in. And he is in, to some extent. His parents are well off. They live in a nice house. They only chose not to optimize him because of the failure they had optimizing his older sister, whose entire optimization ended up focusing on only one trait: ambition. His parents now say they regret having him, and his teachers use him as an example of what someone who isn't smart is like, but none of this has shaken Ben's desire to belong in this world. He enjoyed the occasional affection his terrible sister gave him when he was younger and trying to live up to her expectations. Twice in the opening four pages, Ben describes himself as "proud," thereby identifying himself with the prevailing ethos. Ben wants to belong to a society that will never see him as anything other than stupid, and this desire to belong gives the narrative most of its emotional authenticity.

Part of wanting to belong means Ben also looks down on "shoelookers" and other outsiders. Pride for Ben is mostly experienced in a negative sense, a sense of not belonging to some group of "others" society has left behind. He is proud to live in the present and not the past. He is proud that even though he isn't optimized, at least he isn't sub-optimized. He isn't a shoelooker.

This ability to look down on those who willingly or unwillingly keep themselves outside of the mainstream of the "New Federation" helps explain one of the questions I struggled to answer: if this society is willing to force its philosophy on others, and it apparently is, judging by what little we learn of how it won the "Big Quick" War, then why does it allow outsiders to continue living? Why does it allow some to refuse to use gene therapy for their children, to elect to try to live in the past when people still made life choices based on emotion and not telling the truth, choices like becoming a comedian?

The reason they are allowed to exist is that they play a critical social role. They give the mediocre classes of mainstream society someone to look down on. The powers that run the future think the threat from a few marginalized romantics pining for a time they don't even really understand is more than offset by the balancing social force they provide merely by giving most people someone they can despise and be grateful not to be. As long as most people can say they aren't shoelookers, they will keep some level of pride and want to identify with the majority of society, even if most of society barely thinks of them as belonging themselves. The lowest rung create, as they do today, a safety valve that helps keep most of society playing the game rather than fighting against it.

But does pride in a negative sense truly satisfy? Ben ends up accepting an invitation from Leslie McStowe to go to her house to celebrate his birthday. He eats cake. They sing the wrong words to "Happy Birthday." Ben continues to think the McStowes are weird, and he is irritated they don't have any Good to give him. But he is drawn to Leslie, who is kind although Ben does not understand kindness, and pretty in spite of not being optimized. For Ben to be happy, he's going to need more than just negative pride. He is going to have to discover that he's better off belonging with pride to a group, even a marginalized one, than he is taking false pride in merely not belonging to the lowest rung on the social ladder.

Because it's 2019, everything can be tied to Trump somehow

There's something of a sly reflection of contemporary politics here. Much has been made of how Trump galvanized a disaffected group of voters who thought society had changed too much for their taste and passed them by. Many of those voters felt contempt from the educated, wealthy, neo-liberal East Coast elites running the country, and rather than trying to gain acceptance from that cabal, they rose up to overtake them. At least, that's one narrative of what happened.

That's what makes the ending of "The Era" so brilliant. The story isn't what I, or probably most readers, were expecting. The McStowes aren't a simple bunch of 24th-century hippies offering a better alternative. They're hucksters, and Father McStowe has enlisted his daughter to help him invite Ben to their house in the hopes of selling him one of their "The Era" packages. These packages offer unhappy people the opportunity to live in the halcyon days of the past, or at least the past as the McStowes imagine it to be. What is provided varies depending on price. The McStowes are selling the chance to make the New Federation great again by making it more like the Old Federation, and they are marketing it to those on the fringes of the powerful classes.

This leaves us with a lot of questions for how Ben ends up. In the final scene, he is cast out by his friends at school, who think he has become a shoelooker himself. He rejects the nurse's offer of Good, and the final line is Ben repeating a joke he heard Leslie's father tell at the birthday party. Ben seems to be choosing to identify with the outsiders. Given the revelation that they were selling the past rather than trying to rescue the best of it for their own happiness, has Ben thrown his lot in with the wrong side? Or is there even a good side to throw his lot in with, since he's got a choice between false prophets of the past on the one hand and the cruelty of "honesty" on the other?

One could try to argue that the McStowes aren't wrong to sell nights in "The Era" in their homes if the time people spend there actually makes them happier. Hippies today selling art in Santa Fe to unhappy but wealthy tourists spending the weekend there aren't dishonest. They're just choosing to make a living by making certain choices that lead to their own happiness, then offering a piece of that happiness to someone who has sacrificed happiness for money.

Furthermore, Leslie seems, in spite of having been used as a pawn by her father to bring Ben to her house, to be a genuinely good person ("good" in our 21st century sense of saying things that aren't true in order to make others happy), and she is by Ben's side at the end trying to help him even after he left the birthday party in a rush.

I can imagine a future in which Ben does use his parents' money to pay for time in "The Era" with Leslie's family. He marries her, perhaps (the official match-making algorithms have already suggested it), and assumes a role in her family's business. But maybe one day, he'll argue with his father-in-law and try to change the family business to more of a broad political alternative to modernity. He'll argue it should be more than just a tent-making operation for the family, that it can be a movement instead of just a small-time business.

In any case, by the end of "The Era," Ben has realized that his former life is not tenable. He has been shaken of his pride, which, as any Bible student will tell you, is probably a good turn. He has salvaged something like a genuine human emotion. He may not have much hope, but he probably has more hope by the end than he did when he started.

FURTHER READING: Karen Carlson did a nice job of drawing ideas from philosophy and cognitive therapy into her reading of this story here.