Working class tourist: "Audition" by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Said Sayrafiezadeh's "Audition" is kind of like Michael Jordan, whom the narrator is a fan of, driving to the basket. It goes one way, crosses back, fakes again, pulls back, and before long the would-be critic's ankles are as broken as Craig Ehlo's.

I started off thinking this was going to be a story about class in America. The narrator is the wealthy son of a developer, but his dad wants him to learn the value of a buck when he graduates from high school, so the narrator ends up hauling dry wall for his dad at eight bucks an hour. It's the mid-90s in some mid-sized, middle-of-America city, so that's enough to live on, but the narrator's got bigger dreams. He studied acting in local classes growing up, has done a few small-town theater plays. He wants to fill up his U-haul and head off to LA to make it big as a star, like Seinfeld.

He doesn't want anyone he works with on the construction sites to know he's the boss's dad, so he has to act. His whole work is a role he settles into. He studies the speech patterns and actions of his fellow workers. He imagines he is studying "real life," and this will help him as an actor later. Over time, he convinces himself that he envies his co-workers, because "their problems were immediate, distinct, and resolvable; mine were long-term, existential, and impossible." He is romanticizing his working-class colleagues, using the same language as a well-meaning but pretentious American tourist abroad. When he visits the home of a co-worker, he notes that the inside is much nicer than the outside, and he congratulates himself for having discovered "the kinds of detail that would have eluded a person who had merely driven through the neighborhood without bothering to stop, like the passenger on a cruise ship who thinks he knows the island from the port."

While in that house, the story does one of its changes of direction. The narrator tries crack cocaine with Duncan Dioguardi, a co-worker so hard-up he doesn't have a car to get to work. At this point, it seems to be more a story about a young man's fall than it is about class.

When the narrator gets cast in a play, but starts to realize community theater is, well, community theater, he goes back to Duncan's house to "party" a second time. After smoking crack this time, he goes through three consecutive emotional states: euphoria, panic, and then peace. The euphoria is because he thinks he is "the passenger on the cruise ship who has become acquainted with the island." He feels close to Duncan. He feels optimistic about his prospects. It is early in the evening, as nineteen years old is still early in life. But panic follows euphoria as he is watching an episode of Seinfeld while high:

"Suddenly I was in possession of that thing called clarity. I was watching the most vapid show in the history of television—it had always been vapid and we, the viewers, had always been duped. I could see straight through it now—solipsistic, narcissistic, false reality, easy tropes, barely amusing. The clarity that I thought I’d had moments earlier had not been clarity at all but, rather, its opposite, delusion, which was now being usurped by an all-encompassing awareness, horrible and heavy, through which I understood at once that I was not talented, had never been talented, that my life as a general laborer was proof of this lack of talent, and that being cast in a role with zero lines was not a step toward fame but a step into obscurity in a midsized city. Who but a fool agrees to move through space for three acts without saying a word?"

At this point, I felt like the story was a coming-of-age story of painful yet needed shattered illusions. But the story does one last juke before sticking the jumper. The narrator regains his sense of calm. He is young. The night is young. "It would be night for many more hours to come. I was nineteen. Nineteen was young. I would be young for many more years to come." He goes off to get money for more drugs. So I was left thinking this was the story of a young man's self-delusion, leading him into drugs and a long detour from happiness in life.

Where is the narrator? 

Part of what makes the story so elusive is the uncertain stance of the narrator. From the opening words of the story, "The first time I smoked crack cocaine..." we know that the narrator is older now than he was when the events took place and is looking back on them. But it's unclear how much distance there is between the events and the telling. If we assume he's now twenty-some years older, because we're reading the story in The New Yorker twenty-some years after the time of the story, where is the narrator now? Is he telling this at an NA meeting? Recounting his memoirs as a famous actor? Recollecting to himself the moment when it all went wrong?

As the young man in the story is pulling off his act, spoiled rich kid playing at working-class drone,  the narrator is working with Shakespearean negative capability. He hints at a number of attitudes, but never quite tips his hand as to which one he sides with. Does he think of his younger self with pity, with bemusement, with anger for having messed up the life of the man the narrator now is?

I think it's some of all of those. The younger version of himself has some good reasons to be confused about life. Teens are told to follow their dreams, but also to stay grounded and be realistic about expectations. The narrator's father gave him mixed signals in this vein, sending him to acting classes, acting proud when his son performed in a play, but then immediately discouraging it when he realized his son wanted to do more with acting than make it a hobby.

The narrator as a young man also is stuck in a tough calculus, one I'm still working out in my own life. How do you know when you're dealing with the adversity on the road to accomplishing your goals, as opposed to just holding on to a dream that's never going to happen? How do you know the difference between tenacity and foolish hope? The young man sees Michael Jordan drive to the basket and thinks he never had to wonder these things, that Jordan never heard, as the narrator has from his theater peers, that "it takes as long as it takes."

He's wrong, of course, Jordan famously faced a setback in high school that left most people thinking he'd never even play in college, let alone be considered the best pro of all time. But it's easy to see how the young man could have begun to think that those who've "got it" should be starting to show it by the age he is. He isn't, and he's starting to feel less like a tourist and more like he's actually where he belongs.

Of course, drugs offer the possibility of not thinking about these things, at least for a while longer. By the end of the story, the young man has, somewhat ironically, ended up giving himself one of those "immediate, distinct, and resolvable" problems he used to envy.

Ultimately, the story's not really about where the narrator is now as he tells his story. It's about the moment when it all starts to be too much for him. It's less about how he tried to face the problem and more of a statement of how profound the problem is.

I am whatever they wish to make of me: "Black Corfu" by Karen Russell

If I don't love this story, it's not Karen Russell's fault. It so happens that this past weekend, in addition to preparing to write this post on "Black Corfu," the fourteenth story in the 2018 Best American Short Stories volume, I also saw Parasite, the Korean movie directed by Bong Joon Ho that won the top award at this year's Cannes Film festival. Although Parasite is focused on class almost entirely while "Black Corfu" is about racial prejudices first and class prejudices second, they're in similar territory thematically. They even both make use of an up/down topology for the setting that dramatically and viscerally represents the psychologically different worlds the two classes inhabit. And while "Black Corfu" is a strong showing, Parasite is one of the five best movies I've ever seen. I already loved Memories of a Murder, also by Bong, and this is on that level. So it's hard for me to gush about "Black Corfu" when my heart is so full of Parasite.




The main character is an unnamed "posthumous doctor" in the early 17th century. He was a smart lad, but he has dark skin, and the social stigma associated with that means he can never be a doctor like he wants to. The "real" doctors (who are so ineffective their patients often die of pneumonia and "throat rattle") live at the top of the hill on the island of Black Corfu in the Adriatic Sea. Our hero can climb no higher than to become a "posthumous doctor," cutting the hamstrings of corpses so they don't turn into werewolves. It's not what he wanted, but he has learned a lesson that nearly all minorities who face prejudice learn: "fit yourself to your circumstances." He also dreams that if he does a really good job, the island's elders will see his valuable contributions and promote him. "Wasn't it possible that a posthumous surgeon might one day be promoted from his abyss to the upper world?" he dreams.

Alas, his dreams are not to be. After decades of never allowing a corpse to turn into a monster, he is assigned a student from another town. This student, Jure, is from the upper class, but is generally unpromising in life, so he has been assigned to learn the trade of posthumous surgeon from our protagonist. Jure is terrified by hacking at the dead, too stupid to learn the trade, and insulted when the old werewolf doctor comments that Jure also has dark skin, so Jure comes up with a scheme to get out of training with the old man: he says that the old man messed up a surgery, and now the red-headed girl he was supposed to have prevented from becoming a werewolf is roaming the island.

It's an absurd claim, but the island shows itself all too willing to believe it. His decades of "never losing a patient" mean nothing. The island swallows the boy's lies, largely because it has barely repressed its instinctive prejudices against the "moor" posthumous surgeon all these years. The "real" doctor who lives up the hill is one of those most strongly against him.

Even the old man's wife ends up believing the lies. She is willing to forgive, but this only enrages the old man, who just wants to be believed, not forgiven. He is unable to fight the "other man," the version of himself everyone thinks is the real him. This "other man" is as monstrous as the werewolves he is supposed to protect them from. "I am whatever they make of me," he observes, so impotent to fight the lies about him that even he is unable to fight the "other man" within his own mind.

Finally, the old surgeon performs the hamstringing surgery on himself, then commits suicide, hoping to prove that he would never fail in the surgery by succeeding on his own body. But his corpse rises from the grave. His werewolf wonders if he has made a mistake.

It's all a metaphor, of course, and the mistake he has made is in believing that society could ever see him as anything other than a monster. He thought he could accommodate them, assuage their fears of monsters, but he never realized that the same people afraid of monsters put him in the same class.

In one of the possibly too-on-point omniscient breaks from the limited point-of-view of most of the story, we get this tie-in to prejudice in the 21st century:

"In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it."

I'm not quite the alarmist some people are about racism in the age of Trump, but it's clear it's not dead. It's not dead in Europe, either. And those who are still hanging on to the old prejudices are dug in now, hard to get out of their foxholes. In some ways, this short story reminds me of the movie Kingdom of Heaven for the way it invites the reader to see the present alive in the past. Really, the story has a lot going for it. The use of setting and the imaginative connection between the prejudices of the past, which now seem like silly superstition as much as a Monty Python skit about witches, and the prejudices which survive today--all of it is good stuff. It's a good story.

It just isn't Parasite. In conclusion, if you get anything out of this review, it would be to make sure you see the movie Parasite.

Reva's Cat: "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva

For an American like me who doesn't know much about Ukraine other than as the current center of Washington's three-ring circus, there are two choices when reading a short story like "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva (available from Granta here). I can spend hours trying to learn about Ukraine, at least enough to have some deeper understanding of the story, or I can just take what the story tells me about Ukraine and accept and read it on that level. I'm opting for the latter.

I did have to cheat and use what little bit I do know in order to get the time down. I believe the story is set when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, because there is still a KGB and it is still possible for Ukrainians to think they might be sent to Moscow for special duty. It's later in the Soviet Union's life, because there is now a kinder, gentler KGB that wants to convince political thought criminals of the error of their ways rather than just throw them in jail.

What the narrator needs to convince someone to do

The story opens with a joke. Konstantyn Illych Boyko, a popular Ukrainian poet, has told a political joke after a reading. Mikhail Igorovich is the KGB agent assigned to coax a letter of apology out of Boyko. We don't actually get to read the joke, because it's so offensive, it has been proactively expurgated from the file Igorovich gets. The KGB likes it when people apologize on their own, within thirty days, rather than having to put the screws to them. They still use the threat of repercussions to get the apology, but they prefer to dangle the threat over the political offender's head rather than actually use it.

Boyko, unfortunately, is stubborn. Although Igorovich usually gets an apology letter out of the people he is assigned to well before thirty days are up, Boyko insists he has nothing to apologize for. He's a politically pure communist, he says, and he quotes Lenin to prove it.

Igorovich's self-delusion

As Igorovich hounds Boyko, he is in turn hounded by Boyko's wife, Milena Markivna. While Igorovich is following Boyko, meaning to deliver the message that this will not go away until Boyko apologizes, he finds that Markivna is following him. It turns out that Markivna's entire family was erased by the KGB when Markivna was a child. The reader realizes she's probably plotting revenge against the KGB by taking it out on Igorovich, but Igorovich manages to miss the threat because of the extraordinary self-delusion he practices.

Both his mother and his father were also disappeared by the KGB when he was a child. However, unlike Markivna, Igorovich chose to believe the lies people told him about what happened to his parents. He believes his mother was chosen for special duty guarding Lenin's tomb. He later believes his father got to go join her. He is aware that something doesn't quite add up with what he's been told-- "I could not reconcile the immense honor of the invitation with the grief that plagued the family"--but he has managed his whole life to push these doubts down.

One of the characteristics of Igorovich that helps him to repress his own doubts is a common logical fallacy many humans believe, the "just world fallacy." His parents were good people, he thinks, so something good must have happened to them. He suffers from the particular delusion that the world works in an orderly way. It's why he assumed everyone will willingly sign a letter of apology:

"Most people fail to grasp the simple logic of the situation: that once a transgression occurs and a case file opens, the case file triggers a response--in this case, a letter of apology. One document exposes the problem, the second resolves it. One cannot function without the other, just as the bolt cannot function without a nut and a nut cannot function without a bolt." 

It's a moral version of Newtonian physics. Everything is operating according to well-ordered rules. But Igorovich also has a quantum physics-inspired moral stance. While watching the Soviet animated movie Hedgehog in the Fog, because Boyko is also watching it, he considers the meaning of the Hedgehog character wondering whether a white horse would drown if the horse fell asleep in the fog. This triggers a chain of thoughts in the narrator:

I suppose what Hedgehog means is: if the white horse stops moving, we would no longer see it in the white fog. But if we no longer see it, what is its state? Drowned or not? Dead or alive? The question is whether Hedgehog would prefer to keep the fog or have it lift to discover what is behind its thick veil. I would keep the fog. For instance, I cannot know the whereabouts of my parents because they are part of me and therefore part of my personal file and naturally no one can see their own file, just like no one can see the back of their own head. My mother is standing proud among the Honor Guard. My mother is standing elsewhere. She is sitting. She is lying down. She is cleaning an aquarium while riding an elevator. Uncertainty contains an infinite number of certainties. My mother is in all these states at once, and nothing stops me from choosing one. Many people claim they like certainty, but I do not believe this is true – it is uncertainty that gives freedom of mind. And so, while I longed to be reassigned to Moscow, the thought of it shook me to the bones with terror.

Much like in Schrodinger's Cat experiment, Igorovich believes that if he simply never finds out what happened to his parents, he can go on believing anything he wants. He can preserve his belief in a just universe. He can think the KGB isn't capricious, doesn't punish people arbitrarily or wrongly. He can keep doing his job.

The cat eventually gets out of the bag...or box

Igorovich's self-delusion is so strong, he convinces himself that the reason Markivna is following him is because she is a powerful official vetting him for an important job, like the one he thinks his mother had. He thinks the difficulty he is having getting the letter is just part of the test. I won't give away the ending, but his delusion is finally broken. The "letter of apology" we get is his own, apparently told in the form of the short story we have just read. Ultimately, we cannot forever willfully refuse to find out the truth. We cannot leave the cat in the box indefinitely, thinking that as long as we do not observe what happened to it, we can believe whatever we want.

The story has, I imagine, special meaning for Ukraine now as it tries, like so many Latin American countries, to uncover the truth of what happened during decades of state security running amok. The state's KGB archives were opened in 2015, meaning the country has a long slog through paperwork to find out a lot of secrets many want to know.

What meaning does this story have for an American reader? I suppose the notion of resisting state security has some resonance today. Although we aren't living in a police state like 1970s Ukraine, we do have a threat from technology that makes state security potentially far more invasive than at any time in American history. For non-technical citizens like myself, it is tempting to just not pay attention to the issues, to let the cat sit in the box and assume things will work themselves out. But of course, this kind of abandonment of democratic responsibility won't do, and we all have to try as best as we can to watch the state that watches us.

But there's a more direct reading, one that's almost not even political. We all face the temptation to practice the cognitive fallacies Igorovich practiced. We all can be made fools, unable to process data we face if that data wasn't in the files we were given. "Reva's Cat" stresses that the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment shouldn't be applied wantonly to moral questions.

Crime and Punishment, the Reader's Digest Version: "The Plan" by Sigrid Nunez

There is a rather telegraphed moment of foreshadowing in the second paragraph of Sigrid Nunez's "The Plan," the twelfth story in the 2019 Best American Short Stories collection. As it begins, Roden Jones, whose name we do not know yet nor anything about the fact that he is planning to kill his wife, is hanging out outside the Lincoln Center. He is resolving to "get more culture" once "it" is done, although, again, we don't know what "it" is yet. He is looking at the fountain and sees rainbows in the spray. "He had started to walk closer to get a better view, though, of course, as soon as he did that the rainbows disappeared."

All we know at that point is that the story is called "The Plan" and that when the main character looks closely into something, it isn't what he thought anymore. A perceptive reader is already going "best laid plans, something, something gang agley" by now.

Not too much later on, we find out it's a murder story. Not a mystery, but the psychological chronicle of a murder as the murderer plots it and carries it out, much like Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky or "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe. Generally, a story like this can go one of two ways: it can try to peel back the veil over the mind of the murderer, offering some insight into the human psyche through the example of a mind that is broken, or it can try to thrill or frighten us by minimizing explanations, like in Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.

If we take Dostoevsky and Poe as illustrations, we might find there is kind of a spectrum here. Dostoevsky dwells deeply on the rationale of his killer. We may not get to any final cause for Raskolnikov and why he kills the pawn-broker and her half-sister, but it's not for lack of trying. The enjoyment of the novel is in its ability to sink deep through its imaginative and sympathetic power into the mind of the killer. "The Cask of Amontillado" is not at all ambivalent about its killer's motives. It's a revenge story. "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge." It's right there in sentence number one. We apparently love this kind of story, because they can't seem to make enough movies like this. We might be a little shocked at the method of death the killer chooses, but we secretly love it. 

The same can't be said for "The Tell-Tale Heart." We get attempts at an explanation: something about the old man's eye bothered the killer. But that's not really much of an explanation, is it? We want to know why it bothered him so much. But this half-explanation defies more peeling away. It's more terrifying than no reason at all, because no reason leaves us to assume we are just missing information. A reason like that makes us think the real reason is ineffable, and that human behavior and thinking is not rational and therefore beyond our control. That's the same territory as Child of God. 

The Plan of "The Plan" 

Nunez kind of pulls from all of these models. There are plenty of attempts to give us a motive for the killer, and we get a lot of deep looks into the mind of the killer, Roden Jones. But the sheer surplus of possible explanations almost serves to leave us with none, or possibly one that isn't really all that interesting. What are the possible explanations? For most of the story, we are led to believe his victim or intended victim will be his wife, Harley. This changes at the last moment, so most of the thoughts Roden has don't really apply to his eventual target. 

1) Explanation Number One: He's just a born killer, and it was only a matter of time before he did something like this. 

He has a hard time pinning down the exact moment he decided to "subtract" his wife, and he thinks that "sometimes it seemed as if the idea had always existed." Later, as he is running down his list of reasons he wants to kill her so he doesn't get distracted, he ends with this: "And there was something else, something that had started long before he'd ever met Harley. By high school, it had already become a habit. He'd pick out a certain person because of something about her, maybe the way she talked, or the way she dressed or wore her makeup or her hair...And he'd feel a flood of venom and think, She is a candidate." 

This is the closest the story comes to going the "answer that is no answer" route. He wants to kill because it's just always been in him. He thought he'd grow out of it, but he didn't. And when he thinks about how much he wants to kill, "the wildness of his own imagination shook him to the core." This possible reading moves the story from a thriller to a horror story. The reasons people do terrible things are ineffable, even to those who do them. 

2. Explanation Number Two: He thinks Harley is in the way of him developing as a person. 

This is actually the first reason he gives himself. He is trying to keep his mind focused on "the reason Harley had to die," and the first thing he puts out is that although he is "on the verge of an important discovery," he also feels that "Harley was in the way. Her very existence was holding him back, preventing him from being who he was meant to be."

3. Explanation Number Three: His own pride dictates that he murder her. 

But he so sooner proposes explanation two than his mind overwrites it with what he claims is the real truth: "The truth was, he couldn't bear to live with the mistake he'd made, the humiliation of it." That is, he realizes he shouldn't have married her, but it would be humiliating to get a divorce, so it's better to kill her. That's narratively a lot more interesting. It would get us into ineffable territory--it's a humorous reason to an outsider to kill someone, because it's such absurd overkill to solve a small problem of embarrassment through murder. However, it's also so hard to imagine how he could actually take action based on this reasoning, we're left with a scary, inscrutable mind. But this explanation is also, like #2, wiped away as soon as it is proposed. The final explanation he gives is #1, that "he'd pick out a certain person" habit he's had for a long time. Maybe he was just born that way. 

So far, we have three explanations, none of which the killer himself is quite committed to in his own psyche, as the narrator has presented that psyche to us. Ultimately, he ends up ambivalent to what his reasons are: "She has to die because he has to kill someone, and she is the obvious candidate. He isn't going to waste a lot of time thinking about whether or not she deserves to die." 

I can think of someone who would have been really good at guessing the end of this story. It's about the same script he sees every week.  

4. The boring explanation: he's a misogynistic atheist. 

We have a number of interesting possible explanations, all competing with each other. But I'm afraid there's a much less interesting explanation that seems to outweigh them all from a textual evidence standpoint, one the killer himself isn't so aware of, but which the reader picks up on through a multitude of thoughts and actions. Roden hates women, hates them so much he's only focused on them as his targets. There are a number of passages in the book that highlight his hatred of women.

From the moment we meet him, sitting alone outside the Lincoln Center, he is worried about whether a man by himself looks suspicious. He's got the incel unjustified male martyr complex down. On the train, he and a number of other men are watching a girl's thighs as she sleeps while wearing a short skirt. She wakes up and gives him a dirty look for leering at her, which he immediately chalks up to what hypocritical whores women all are. "Wearing a skirt that all but exposed your crotch when you sat down, being outraged when men took notice--that was women." It's like I'm reading a version of men based on an angry person's Facebook page.

There are a number of other cliches. He's ashamed of having sex. He visits a prostitute. At his wedding, he is warned that women stop putting out when the wedding happens. He only dreams of killing women, not men. At a friend's wedding, he thinks about the conspiratorial nature of women huddled together.

Add to this that he is an atheist. "He was not a child anymore, the fear of God has long left him. He hadn't believed in God since he was ten years old."

Maybe I'm just a little miffed from comments of the Attorney General the other day, another tiresome "Atheism is to blame for social ills" diatribe, but I found this detail about the killer annoying. It's commonly believed that atheists are more likely to be serial killers, but it ain't true. (That last link also suggests "spiritual" people are more likely to suffer from certain mental illnesses than atheists, although Barr suggested the rise of mental illness stems from abandoning religion.)

Roden ends up killing the prostitute he's been visiting, along with the old man who is in the reception area. That's because Harley leaves him before he can kill her, and he's got to kill someone. The closing lines could have come from any third-rate crime drama on TV:

"He didn't think Marilyn deserved to die. But he didn't feel bad for her, either. She was a whore, and whores got murdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for."

That's some straight SVU shit right there. We had three interesting possible motives, but ultimately it dissolved into the guy's a woman-hating asshole. It's fine for a character to be something other than likeable, but he shouldn't be contemptible. Someone we feel contempt for isn't scary. His motives aren't ineffable, they're just not well understood by the narrator, which is different and much less interesting for a crime story. After teasing us with a character who might be worth considering, we are left with someone who isn't frightening or challenging or thought-provoking. He's just sad.

I guess you could argue that there really are sad people like this, and that the story is just presenting a real case of a murderer. They're not people to admire. They're just sorry pieces of crap who bide their time waiting for an opportunity, justifying themselves however they need to. Maybe that's true. I don't know. I'm not an expert on serial killers. But whether it's true or not, a story about a person who barely even rises to the level of meriting my hatred makes for rather dull reading, especially when the writing resorts to a couple of cliches along the way to try rather cheaply to excite my hatred.

My semi-annual crisis over whether literature has any social utility: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz

If it's true that fiction can get around the prejudices people carry with them and subtly change hearts and minds, then our culture now ought to be full of the best, most empathetic people in history. We have more literature available to us than any culture in history, with many of the great works available for free online or on Kindle. There are resources to help understand that literature. And then there's the Golden Age of American Television, with streaming services giving us quality programming to challenge and stretch us. (Yes, there is plenty of good stuff to go along with the straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies.)

When I read a story like "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz, my first thought is whether a short story is actually good for anything in the face of a massive social issue. This is the second year in a row Best American Short Stories included a story from the point-of-view of illegal immigrants. Last year, it was "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez, which I didn't care for, largely because it didn't seem to say anything about the border and incarceration that hasn't already been said a million times. (Incidentally, most of the traffic I get on my site seems to be from students who are assigned Best American Short Stories in school. I can tell which stories are the ones they want to write about by following which of my posts they click on. Henriquez's story is by far the least-clicked link from 2018 BASS.)

This year, "Anyone Can Do It" is a solid piece. It's not clear whether the protagonist is actually illegal. She claims throughout to be from Texas, although, because the characters in the story talk about Texas as though it were still part of Mexico ("the Matamoros side of Texas" as well as the "Texas side of Mexico"), it's not clear that her claim would be recognized by the INS. (And I do mean the INS rather than ICE, because this seems to be set a few decades ago.) What the story does right is take a big social issue like illegal immigration and the socially useful work done by immigrant labor (picking fruit, in this case) and look at it from an intensely personal lens.

Delfina's husband doesn't come back from the orchard one night. Nobody's husbands in the neighborhood do, and everyone is worried they've been rounded up. A woman named Lis from down the street cons Delfina into using the family car to take the two of them to go work in the orchards while Lis's daughter watches Delfina's son. Delfina is suspicious, but eventually gives in. Lis steals Delfina's car, takes their joint daily wages, and runs off.

It's full of suspense for the reader as we watch the bad thing happen to Delfina in slow motion. We listen to her slowly talking herself into it, even though she is right to be suspicious, because what are her options? If she doesn't take a chance with Lis, she won't be able to pay the rent in a few days.

We see the "law" contrasted with "justice," as Delfina's son steals a toy car from a store while she is on the phone with her family. We know he shouldn't have done it, but given his life, who would want him to take it back? Even a reader who has particular political views about illegal immigration shouldn't fail to empathize with her as she struggles to take care of her kid. And the possibility that she might actually be from Texas, meaning she might be legal, means that at least that one objection can be held at bay.

For that matter, because Delfina is cheated by another member of her own community, while the only person who is kind to her is an old white man, a white reader can read the story without feeling personally attacked. So if any story is going to change how a hardcore send-em-all-back immigration hardliner feels, it would be this one.

But I don't think it will. The actual human cost of our current social policy isn't hidden. There are signs all around of what it means. Even if "change" from this story isn't measured in people changing their political views--because I can believe someone might feel genuine empathy and still think it's important to secure our borders--at the very least, the story ought to challenge the comfortable belief that immigrants are lazy and soaking up our social services. The title "Anyone Can Do It" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it's what Lis tells Delfina about work in the orchards, that it's both "easy and hard." Which it is. It's a simple thing to learn, but repeated thousands of times in the heat. The other meaning of "anyone can do it" is what skeptics of immigrant laborers might say, that their lives aren't really that hard, that they've actually got it easy.

Will this story make anyone stop saying that? Because I feel like with the advent of this surplus of great stories our culture is currently experiencing, we're also experiencing a sudden stubborn refusal to be emotionally moved by stories. Maybe we're so used to stories that stimulate empathy in us, we're actually building up an immunity to empathy.

If you're a student looking to this blog for help with meaning or theme or whatever from this story, I doubt you even need my help much. This isn't a difficult story to understand. The meaning is all right there. It's about the tough lessons experience teaches us, about how you can't survive without trusting someone but it's also a great risk, and about the real human cost of abstract political policies. Nobody could read this story and miss those things.

But even if we set the bar incredibly low for what "changing hearts and minds" might look like for a story like this one--if we say, for example, that it's a success if just one person reads it and does not, in his next conversation about immigration, immediately assume the lives of immigrants are easy--will this story succeed? Or is it just written for those who already believe?

It's not the fault of an individual fiction writer that we now live in an age where people can so insulate themselves against beliefs they disagree with that they become impossible to convince. But that's our age. Given how difficult it is to change anyone's mind, what am I actually hoping to accomplish when I write a story? What is anyone?

I don't believe in giving up. We have to keep trying, because to stop trying, to give in to some nihilistic impulse, is to be okay living in a world where nothing we do matters. So people should keep writing, if only to not live in that world. But I don't want to support the false hope that if someone can only write the right story, things might get better. While we have to maybe give ourselves that hope in order to get on with our daily lives, I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that it's probably a fool's hope. It just that it's a fool's hope that's about the only hope we've got.

The Life of William Cowper: The Musical...."Pity and Shame" by Ursula K. Le Guin

The world loves to pander to the nostalgia of my generation, at least while my generation currently comprises the top earners in America. One of the products of this pandering to our nostalgia has been the proliferation of musicals based on the greatest hits of bands people my age tend to like. There's been Steppin' Out, featuring the works of Mr. William M. Joel, Head over Heels, featuring the works of The Go-Gos, Mamma Mia!, and, oh, just a ton of so-called "jukebox musicals."

They aren't good. They wouldn't get green-lit if people my age weren't such saps, but we are. We're indulgent of things that make us sentimental.

If you write great literature over a long lifetime, maybe one day you will have an idea that isn't that great. Something like, "I'll take some key lines from the poetry of William Cowper, then try to work a story around that." And, if you've had a truly exceptional career, like Ursula K. Le Guin has, Tin House will publish your bad idea, because the magazine is about to go out of print, and it's the last thing you wrote after not writing for a long time, and everyone wants another chance to hear from you before you die. Which you will do in early 2018.

Tin House will publish your story a few months after you die, and then the year after, still full of nostalgia, Best American Short Stories editor Anthony Doerr will pick it, even though there were doubtlessly more deserving stories published during the period in question. But you know what, you're Ursula K. Le Guin, and you've earned a little indulgence.

So I'm going to treat the story with the same indulgence. It's too long, has at least two dull expositional blocks, and it uses the word "pity" six times and "shame" or "ashamed" eight times, just in case you missed what the title was. It's August one minute, and then it's July (I can prove it), and not because we flashed back. But there's something worth cherishing at the bottom of this story.

Necessary background

One of the two main characters is William Cowper. Not the British poet of the 18th century, although his work is often quoted and the character is deeply aware of Cowper's works, but a William Cowper in California at some undetermined period late in its gold mining boom. William gets smashed by a cave-in at the mine, and he spends a lot of the story hallucinating. 

While hallucinating, he drifts into some of the poetry of the British Cowper. In particular, he is thinking of "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity." The poet Cowper was temporarily put in an asylum, during which he wrote of feeling like he was sinking beneath the Earth. In the poem, the poet Cowper alluded to Abiram, which brings us to another key allusion in the story. In Numbers 15, Abiram challenged Moses, and Moses basically asks God to make Abiram and his entire family sink into the Earth to show how mad God is that they challenged Moses and God. God obliges. Hence linking Abiram to the feeling of falling frighteningly beneath the Earth.

Finally, there are references to Cowper's "Light Shining Out of Darkness," from which we get the oft-quoted phrase that "God moves in a mysterious way." The first two stanzas of that poem go like this:

                  God moves in a mysterious way
                  His wonders to perform;
                  He plants his footsteps in the sea
                  And rides upon the storm.

                  Deep in unfathomable mines
                  Of never-failing skill,
                  He treasures up his bright designs,
                  And works his sov'reign will.

Now you pretty much have the soundtrack Le Guin is going to work into a story, including turning those "mines" into literal gold mines.

Pity and Shame...and pity and shame and pity and shame

The story never touches on another Biblical moment, the story of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but it could have, because that is the original moment of shame and pity mingled. Adam and Eve eat the fruit and are suddenly ashamed. God becomes angry and casts them out of the garden, but not before he takes pity on them and clothes them to cover the very nakedness of which they have just become ashamed. There is, perhaps, an intricate link for humans between these two emotions, with shame on behalf of one person engendering pity in the other. 

As I've already said, the text does not let the reader forget either the title or the thematic core of the story, as both "pity" and "shame" are written many times each. When the ideas appear, they are typically paired. That's the way it is from the beginning. Rae is nursing William Cowper and comforting him when he has night terrors, when William is still not able to understand what has happened to him. Rae is pitying him. Meanwhile, he hears himself crying, but cannot even tell what the sound is. "He heard something whimpering like a dog. It made him ashamed."

When Doc hires Rae to care for William, he tries to tenderly bring up the subject of how she will have to help him use the chamber pot, meaning she'll have to deal with his genitals. Doc gets embarrassed, and Rae's reaction is measured because of this: "She might have been angry or embarrassed except that he was embarrassed..."

We tend to think of pity as a terrible consolation prize for someone when they are in love and hoping to be loved in return. But Rae discovers that pity can be a stronger emotion than passion: ""...holding and handling the hurt helpless man all the time, she was as close to him as she had ever been to Pete, but in a different way. There was no shame in it. There was no love in it. It was need, and pity. It didn't sound like much, but when you came to the edge between life and death where he was, and she with him, she saw how strong pity was, how deep it went."

She then realizes that when she was making love to Pete, her bum of a man who mercifully takes off, leaving the story free of him soon after William shows up, the infatuation made her care less about other things. But pity makes her care more.

Moreover, pity for William has driven shame away. She has felt shame for much of her life because her mother spent some time as a prostitute. But with William, her pity for him has taken away the sting of shame. She actually loses track of her shame too much, and flaunts in front of one of a nasty visitor to William that although she had been living with Pete, but wasn't married. She gets all red, and thinks that "it didn't make any difference if she wasn't ashamed. Other people were. They were ashamed for her, of her, that she lived among them. They blushed for her. Their shame was on her, a weight, a load she couldn't get out from under." (SEEEE!!! It's like Cowper's load that buried him!!! Parallelism!!!))

We get some sections from Cowper's point-of-view, and he's feeling a lot of the same things about pity and shame: Much of what she had to do for him was embarrassing to him, shameful. It would have been unbearable if she'd felt the same way about it. She didn't. She took necessity for granted. She was grown up."

Somewhere in this onslaught of observations about pity and shame, we get introduced to the final allusion." MacIver first mentions the "God moves in mysterious ways" idea, although he's not aware of it coming from Cowper the poet. It's just something he says when he hears Cowper's life story.

But Cowper the miner is intimately familiar with Cowper the poet. He's got his book of poetry in his chest, along with a copy of Dickens' Little Dorrit. Rae reads Dickens one night, because they're tired of her reading from the Biblical story of Abiram, which brings on one last shame/pity pair as the doctor falls asleep listening to Rae read to William, then cusses as he wakes up.

Oh, also, somewhere in there Rae feels guilty for having looked in William's trunk, although she did it for good reasons, but her shame makes William feel "pity so sharp, so urgent, pity like a knife stab." Just to make sure everyone knows why the story was named thus.

The story comes to a close as William hears the local church singing hymns on Sunday morning. He can't stand it, so he sings Cowper's "Light Shining Out of Darkness" to a tune of his own devising.

What to make of all this pity, all this shame, God working mysteriously, and gold, gold, GOLLLD?

It's clear the story wants to say something about pity and shame. And why not? They're both incredibly strong human emotions. Shame, in particular, doesn't get enough credit for being socially useful and an unbelievable motivator. When asked why they didn't run away under fire, most Civil War soldiers gave some version of not wanting to feel ashamed as their answer. And pity is very close to empathy, which is quite possibly the single most basic human emotion, without which no other emotion worth having is possible.

But I'm not sure what the story wanted to say or make us feel about pity and shame. The story felt like it threw a bunch of strong elements into a stew and hoped they'd make the reader feel something. The most obvious passage where I felt this was when William was thinking about the mine collapse that maimed him: "Men dug tunnels after gold, he thought, but they didn't build them right. If they'd take pity on each other and themselves, they'd build right. At least shore up their ratholes with timber you could count on." This was a rather awkward attempt to bring together disparate elements in the story: gold and God's mines, pity, the mysterious ways of God, etc.

In the end, this is a story with three very skillfully drawn and likable characters, characters who interact in some way and think thoughts about pity, shame, and God's will. It gives us a happy ending, as if to agree with the notion that God is working all things out according to His will for the good of those who love Him.

I don't know if it was an earned ending. But it was an earned ending to a career and life for Le Guin. This story would never have seen the light of day if it had been written by an unknown, but I'm willing to accept it as the imperfect last attempt of a great mind to say what was still unsaid as the end drew near. Pity, shame, empathy, strong binds that seem to apply even when we meet strangers...there's something there, and if we don't get a story that quite unearths the gold of what that something is, we can at least enjoy knowing that treasure exists somewhere.

The Schwartz is in you, Lonestar: "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss

Best American Short Stories doesn't group its selections by topic or theme. They go strictly in order of the last names of authors. If they did group by stories that pair well together, like the O.Henry Anthology does, I can pretty much guarantee that "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss would have been right next to "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott, which we've seen already. Both stories feature young women making questionable choices in men, women who then have chance encounters with art that change their entire trajectories. Both women spend a good chunk of the story trying to decode the meaning of the art they've come across, and both come across answers that were unexpected to them, but obvious in retrospect.

For "Ershadi," though, I wasn't sure throughout the story that the meaning was going to become apparent. Krauss bailed me out at the end by having a character straight-up tell the reader what the story meant, more or less. I love when writers do that.

The narrator (Karen, if you're reading, I think we've got another round in our BASS drinking game, because I didn't notice a name for the narrator) starts off in an unhealthy relationship with a man. It's not a romantic relationship, although the narrator's dedication to the relationship is just as strong as the craziest of crazy loves. She's dedicated to a ballet choreographer, whom she's wanted to work with for a long time. "I'd sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training" to make it into the company as dancer. Once in, she is as devoted as any teen in love: "I felt I was constantly on the verge of discovery. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical--that what I had taken for devotion had crossed the line into something else." She even allows her devotion to the choreographer's vision for the ballet to invade her own body. She does not go out into the sun, although she'd like to take advantage of the beach while she stays in Israel where the ballet is headquartered, because the choreographer wants the dancers' bodies "to be as white as the skin on our asses." She eventually develops painful tendinitis in her ankle, forcing her to down Motrin like candy.

It's while she's laid up that she has her encounter with the film that will change her life. It's Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). The way she describes the film, it sounds like a Farsi version of The Brown Bunny, but she apparently likes it. It's a lot of uncomfortably long shots of the actor Homayoun Ershadi, who wasn't really an actor but someone Kiarostami found on the street for the role. Ershadi drives around looking for someone to bury him. He's already dug the hole, and he's planning to take pills and kill himself. He just needs someone to bury him. 

She finds the film intriguing and says it "did something to me," but she doesn't declare what, because watching the movie isn't the real jarring encounter she has that changes her life. That happens when the ballet troupe goes to Japan. She's all lost and disoriented and ends up mistakenly in the middle of a temple somewhere, when she swears for all the world she sees Ershadi in the temple. His body has changed, but she can't forget his face after seeing a whole movie that was little else but his face. She finds herself, when faced with the hopelessness of his face, the hopelessness she takes to be genuine because Ershadi was not a practiced actor, "filled with such an overwhelmingly tender feeling that I can only call it love."

"Love: I can only call it that, however different it was from every other instance of love that I had experienced. What I knew of love had always stemmed from desire, from the wish to be altered or thrown off course by some uncontrollable force. But in my love for Ershadi I nearly didn't exist beyond that great feeling. To call it compassion makes it sound like a form of divine love, and it wasn't that; it was terribly human. If anything, it was animal love, the love of an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and realizes that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.
It sound far-fetched, but at that moment I had the feeling that I could save Ershadi"

No sooner does she feel love, though, than she gets derailed by a large group of women, and she can't find him again. When she flies back, she starts to think it was silly to think she found him there, and she doubts the whole thing.

She tells the story to her friend as a joke, and finds, beyond all belief, that her friend has also seen an apparition of Ershadi. This begins the second half of the story, which comes in at just about the geographical halfway mark of the text. There is an echo at this point in the musicality of the text to indicate that it is also a psychological new beginning. In the story's opening lines, the narrator says, in a doubled sentiment that "...I devoted myself...without reserve, applied myself without reserve." When Romi, the narrator's friend hears about what the narrator saw, her "large eyes became larger." We know we are entering a new phase of the story.

Romi is an actress, and she's a lot like the way the narrator thinks of Ershadi: "She was an actress but not a performer, the difference being that at heart she believed that nothing was real, that everything was a kind of game, but her belief in this was sincere, deep, and true....in her films she was only ever herself." So she's just a natural actress, not really dissimulating in her work as much as just revealing herself. 

Romi's encouner with Ershadi was this: she was staying with her dad in the final days of him dying with cancer after she'd recently been reconciled to him. She took a break one day when the hospice nurse was there to see a movie, and she picked Taste of Cherry. She felt the same intensity of Ershadi's gaze upon her, but it opened her up to the audience around her: "Romi felt aware of herself watching, and the others also watching." She is crying by the end, but happy. 

She gets in an unhealthy relationship with an ex after her dad finally dies, because she is numb and the rough sex--not the good kind of rough sex--at least makes her feel something. She is spinning through the channels one night after the rough sex and she sees Ershadi for a second. She mistakenly spins past him, and when she goes back, she can't find him. But that one second of his face is enough for her to realize that it's time for her to leave the bad relationship. 

The narrator is actually jealous of Romi's encounter with Ershadi, because Romi seemed to know what it meant, while the narrator is still trying to grasp at straws to figure out what it meant for her, what she was "supposed to do with it." 

The next day, she is sick, sick of taking so much Advil, and kind of sick of killing herself for the ballet. She leaves the company and goes back to NYU. Romi starts dating a rich man, whom she eventually marries. The two friends stay in contact, though the frequency wanes over the years, until one day, the narrator sees Ershadi's face on an ad for the movie that was playing at some art house somewhere. She contacts Romi, who replies a few days later, because she's busy with kids. She's getting divorced. And then she gives away what the whole story is about:

"How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths."

Romi has realized this after re-watching the film and seeing Ershadi's character wasn't as saintly as she had first thought. But she kind of knew this realization all along. So did the narrator, really, although she thought she was missing the point. But she did, in fact, realize she needed to quit the ballet. "Sooner or later....I would have had to admit that in the blaze of my ambition I'd failed to check myself. I would have had to face how miserable I was..."

I've never seen Taste of Cherry, but I have seen this movie, in which the main character has an epiphany that's more or less the same as the one experienced by the narrator of "Seeing Ershadi." Also, I think this movie is probably just about as good as Taste of Cherry. 

The point

I've spent nearly this entire analysis just recounting the story rather than actually analyzing it, but that's because in this story, the key really is right there in the story itself. The secret isn't hidden. People fool themselves by going through life thinking the tools they need are some great secret, only unlockable by a magic talisman, but in fact, most of us probably know most of the answers already.

It is tempting to view this story primarily as a critique of the male gaze or of men who control women, since Ershadi's gaze takes such a prominent role in the story, and each woman is controlled by a man at some point. But I think that's just part of the story, not the main event. Men are one of the ill-chosen obsessions the women get into that derail them from their happiness. The other is art. Specifically, they have been distracted by a particular aesthetic, one which romanticizes a Byronic sensibility toward death. This romanticism tends to also idealize Byronic men. But by the end, they've seen through the romance of that ruse. They've chosen life, both of them having children now. The Byronic charm of men depends on women who, like the narrator, want to save them. But the antidote to that is just to watch the movie a second time, at which point its defects become apparent and the whole appeal wears off.

What are you virtually rebelling against? "Protozoa" by Ella Martinsen Gorham

The first line of Ella Martinsen Gorham's "Protozoa" should not be possible. Two fourteen-year-olds are taking a Lyft to the girl's house from school. According to Lyft, children under 18 are not permitted to take a Lyft without an adult present. I suppose it's possible that Lyft drivers sometimes don't care, and as long as the fare is paid for, they just drive the kids. Maybe it's an open secret, and maybe kids are always making fake accounts where they claim to be eighteen. It's hard for me to believe a driver would pick eighth grade kids up at a middle school and not wonder if they're really eighteen, but what do I know?

It doesn't really matter, anyway, because a Lyft ride that shouldn't be happening is the perfect way to start this story. Nothing happening in it should be happening. That's really a lot of the point of "Protozoa," which weaves in and out of real life and online life, just like kids do. Following the story requires some multi-tasking, which I did with about as much success as most kids do when they watch YouTube and do their homework at the same time. I ended up feeling like this was sort of a familiar, "What's to be done with the children of America these days?" story.

Not that the story isn't right to critique modern youth culture and the parents who enable it, or that it doesn't execute its critique ably. Many of the prime suspects for the fragile mental health of teens are on display: the diss-tracking boyfriend; sexual over-stimulation at too young an age; the mob frothing at the mouth as it follows controversy online; kids let loose into the world well before they know how to avoid calamity. One interesting element of the story are the parents who subtly undermine each other, with one trying to be "cool" by letting her daughter dress in fishnet stockings while the other one tries to keep a close watch and convince her to stay in touch with the "real" world. The mother is a cook whose favorite dishes are all made with rabbit, meaning she literally slays symbols of childhood innocence for a living. It's a good portrait of the evils of modern times, but that isn't enough to make it memorable.

Two things about the story make it stand out for me as more than just an after-school movie, or maybe, to be more charitable, a somewhat less edgy version of "Rebel Without a Cause" remixed for a new generation.

First, there is the image of the title itself. "Protozoa" is the name the idiot diss-tracking boyfriend comes up with for Noa, the protagonist eighth-grade girl. It's just one of his stupid rhymes, and he doesn't attach any particular meaning to it. But Noa "savors" the name, meaning we, the reader, are invited to read something into it as a clue to her identity.

Protozoans, in case you've forgotten, are one-celled organisms that can move around. There's a lot of diversity to protozoans (and no real agreement, given how messy taxonomy has come, about whether they are a kingdom, phylum, or something else). The most important thing about a protozoa for the purpose of reading the story is that the name means "primitive animal." They're one-celled, but very complex, and they do a lot of things we associate with animals.

Noa is a primitive animal in many senses. She's fourteen, so she's just developing as an adult, She's also getting a lot wrong because she lacks life experience, meaning she has a lot of development to do. For that matter, nearly all the humans in the story seem lost in life on Earth, meaning they're almost all primitive animals.

But Noa evolves, which is the second interesting aspect of this story. Step one in her evolution was her relationship with the suggestively named Aurora Waters, a girl she only ever knew online, although they both live in the same city. Noa and Aurora Facetime each other in order to cry together. Aurora came up with the idea after hearing of Japanese men gathering to cry in front of each other. The girls have a longing for some kind of authentic sentiment in a world where it's barely possible to even know what that is anymore, and they are stumbling to try to fulfill that longing in whatever broken way they can find.

This reminds me of the Korean practice of the "mokbang," a live-stream channel where someone eats while an audience watches. It's not a sexual fetish thing. It's just people who no longer have a family at home to eat with looking to share the experience of eating together. Noa is temporarily made too happy to cry with Aurora when douchebag boyfriend "Paddy" almost has sex with her, and her relationship with Aurora is in trouble from then on.

But Noa is going to go a step beyond crying with Aurora in a private room. After sneaking out to spend time at a construction site with some kids in real life, she comes home and immediately goes to her room, where she cries in front of the camera. She posts a gif of herself crying uncontrollably, and it immediately starts to pick up a following. She has touched a nerve and started a trend, a trend she seems born to have birthed: "It was as though they'd all been waiting for Noa, full of feelings that no one else wanted to deal with. They were right behind her. So many that the echo of sobs was almost unbearable. Gathering momentum, they pushed outward like a tide."

We've already had a couple of short stories in BASS this year that were as much about the formation of an artist as the story itself. Wendell Berry's story with a name too long to write again and Jeffrey Eugenides' "Bronze" both fit this description. This is also the origin story of an artist, although an artist who will probably grow to only temporary prominence, since her medium is the Internet.

Overall, I found it a reasonably thoughtful meditation on what the Internet hath wrought for youth culture. It's a world full of sadness, but so distracted by interesting things to do all the time and unfettered ability to enjoy the excitement of youth, it struggles to even realize its own sadness.

Celebration for the nonce vs. the anguish of ardor: "Bronze" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Quick anecdote: I've had to go through a lot of psychological tests for job suitability in my life. Twice, after taking a battery of tests, the psychiatrist or psychologist going over the results with me mentioned that my profile wouldn't be unusual for a gay man. After dropping this supposed revelation on me, the interviewer would look at me, a gravid pause in the conversation, as if half expecting me to come forward with some secret confession.

The first time this happened, I didn't really do much but shrug. The second time, I asked why the test suggested that. "Well, you noted that you're interested in things that often show up on the tests of gay men. You like poetry, for example."

Well, I don't know who I am to argue with science like that, but this reminds me of a classic Seinfeld episode.

To the best of my knowledge, I'm not gay. I mean, I've never tried to see. Maybe I'd try it and like it. But of the available items on the sexual menu, that one didn't appeal to me enough to order it, and now I'm in my forties and married and I'm not really interested in seeing if I might like other menu items. But I honestly think that if I were to go back in time and try more menu items before settling for what I eat now, the menu items in my current diet would have been my favorite.

Are you gay?

Maybe because I loved sports and was half good at them, I didn't have to face this question much, even though my teeth don't quite come together right, making me sort of sibilantize my "s" sounds. And I like poetry, or at least used to be interested enough in it I went to grad school with the original intent of being a poet. So I have faced the question a few times.

Eugene, the protagonist in Jeffrey Eugenides' "Bronze" has faced a lot of the same thing. It's a much different question for him, though, because it's 1978 and he's in college at Brown, which makes his possible identity as gay more of a physical threat to him as well as less politically and socially acceptable than it has been in my lifetime.

Eugene isn't exactly making it easy for others to read him. He recently got stood up at the movies by the ballerina he's infatuated with and asked out, and it's led him to pick some rather garish clothing, "part glam, part New Wave." Getting rejected has made him see himself as ugly and freakish. He'd like to be beautiful, but now he doesn't feel beautiful, having just been stood up, so he's decided that "noticeable would do."

He's just spent a weekend in New York in his Elton John getup--pink sunglasses, scarf knotted at the neck, white fur coat. During his weekend, he was in the company of gay men going wild, although he doesn't seem to have participated in the bacchanalia himself. On the train back to Brown, he's getting a lot of smug "only in New York" looks. He's high, so he can't quite parse the looks he's getting, as they're blending into a weed paranoia. But it turns out, people were thinking he was gay before he started piercing his ear and unintentionally signifying sexuality through his clothing.

Society has a whole lot of stupid reasons it thinks someone is likely to be gay, both in the story and in real life. Eugene likes poetry. He was in the theater. He dresses flamboyantly. During a time when you couldn't just be out about being gay, dress was an indirect was to signify to others who knew the code what your intentions were. It was a Shibboleth. But what about someone like Eugene who is using that same signifier to mean something else? As a poet, he's going to embark on a lifelong quest to re-work the meanings of words. So it's little wonder he thinks he's saying one thing with the way he presents himself to the world, while the world is looking back thinking he's showing them something else.

Kent

While Eugene is stumbling around high on the train back to Brown, just hoping to find a seat where he can do his Latin homework, Kent sees him and offers him an adjacent seat. Kent, who is twenty years older than Eugene and an established actor, has just spent a debauched weekend of his own in New York, a weekend which included, among other things, climbing onto the back of a meat truck for a lights-out orgy with three dozen men, and a club where the urinals were combined with the desire of fetishists to be urinated on. Seated on the train, he sees Eugene, looking at himself in his reflection in the window, and Kent sees himself twenty years ago:

"That was when he saw the boy. In the Eskimo coat. And the Elton John sunglasses. Staring into the door window behind him like Narcissus into his pool.
Kent knew who the kid reminded him of. Himself, twenty years ago. Grow up queer in the sticks and it's like hearing a broadcast in the distance...so when you finally run away to New York, you end up dressing like this kid, in some wild approximation of flamboyant."

It's funny that Kent sees Eugene looking into his reflection like Narcissus, when it's really Kent who's the Narcissist here. Kent is the one who sees himself in the reflection. His self-centerdness is why he misreads Eugene. He's not only obsessed with his own reflection, like Narcissus was, he's so solipsistic, he actually erases Eugene's true reflection and replaces it with his own.

Kent spends the rest of the trip getting the kid drunk and talking to him about art and the theater. Eugene is fascinated to meet a real actor like Kent, and Kent helps Eugene to work on his delivery of poetry. At the end of the trip, Kent convinces Eugene to get in his car and come back to his house with him. Eugene gets sick and nearly passes out, at which point Kent tries to have sex with him.

Although Kent has been portrayed sympathetically, he's a sexual predator. There's no other way to look at it. And we learn, as something in Eugene screams at him to get out, that the boy's been victimized by older male sexual predators before. These were other men who read what they wanted into the boy and justified getting what they wanted to themselves by saying they were playing the role of an older male mentor who would help show him the way and unlock a door for him. After Eugene leaves, Kent calls his former lover to tell him what just happened, only Kent says that he never touched the boy and has made a resolution to be Platonic with young gay men learning their way. The reader is left with the impression that Kent might even believe his own lie.

Eugene's real quest for identity: sensitivity, ardor, celebration

Often, fiction about young, gay men comes down to nothing more than the simple quest to uncover one's true sexual identity. Lately, I've read some good gay fiction that complicates this basic formula. Matthew Lansburgh's Outside is the Ocean was not so much about the difficulties of a young man discovering he is gay but about the dangers of cutting too loose and living for the moment once he knows. It is also about the troubles of a mother who understands, but is kind of terrible for reasons that have nothing to do with her son's sexual identity. Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," from last year's Best American Short Stories, was about both the sweetness of discovery and the bitterness of mistakes made while making the discovery.

"Bronze" isn't gay fiction, because its main character isn't gay. But it is about identity, including sexual identity. What it does differently is put sexual identity back in its proper position, which is only one piece in the larger puzzle of personal identity. To be sure, for men who had to grow up at a time when it was literally a risk to your life to be openly gay, it was a very important piece of the puzzle, and one that was more difficult than necessary to get right. But solving this one part of the puzzle isn't solving the whole thing.

For Eugene, his search for identity is expressed as his search for the right word to describe himself. Eugene is obsessed with words, and he habitually meditates on the resonances of words to determine whether he likes them. ("Gruel was like 'gray' and 'cruel.'") A friend of a friend asks him to pick from three words which one most describes him, like the words are tarot cards that will determine his future. The words are "sensitivity," "ardor," and "celebration." He originally rejects sensitivity, because he thinks too many people have called him sensitive, and not in a good way. He also rejects ardor, because "it's like odor and armpit." He chooses celebration, both because it is Latinate and because it suits the current version of himself he is trying to create, the one that dresses like Liberace.

I love this alteration to the basic gay coming-of-age story. Rather than a massive hide-and-seek game for a sexual identity that is hidden from him, Eugene's search is more of a game of courtship with various future paths that offer themselves to him. Each will effect how he approaches his desire to be a poet. "Sensitive" is one kind of poetic identity, but he rejects it, perhaps because he sees it as too obvious. It is too much the version of himself that others lazily assign to him without Euguene feeling it is really his true self.

"Celebration" fits what he finds appealing in some poets, and it fits how the world seems to him when he goes to New York to be around (but not so much participate in directly) a certain end-of-the-world debauchery:

"New York was dying. But that was OK. It was in dying empires that the greatest poets appeared. Virgil in Rome. Dante in Florence. Baudelaire in Paris. Decadence. Eugene liked that word. It was like "decay" and "hence." Things falling apart over time. A sweet smell like that of rotten bananas, or of bodies ripe from iniquitous exertion, could pervade an entire age, at which point someone came along to give voice to how messed up things were and, in so doing, made them beautiful again."

This is what Eugene sees as his aesthetic philosophy of poetics as he is traveling back to Brown after his weekend in New York. This is a philosophy which stresses the ephemerality of things. It is, it so happens, exactly how Kent, the man he has now bumped into, lives his life.

If you were wondering, this song didn't come out until 1980, two years after the setting of this story.

But ardor, the third of the three words which he originally rejected without much of a thought, finds a way to silently sneak into his consciousness and woo him. As he translates Horace on the train, he is intrigued by by how Horace boasted of creating "a monument more lasting than bronze" through his work. As conceited a boast as that sounds, Eugene thinks, there is no denying that Eugene is there, on a train, translating Horace 2,000 years after he wrote it. Eugene scrawls a few lines of his own as the train passes some poorer homes.

As much as Eugene wonders if it is even possible, at this point in history, to think of someone reading your work 2,000 years in the future, he starts to realize this is what his true poetics should be about. He realizes that getting rejected by the dancer has awoken something in him. "It didn't feel good, exactly, but it was familiar. It felt as if there were a drain inside him, as in a bathtub, and being stood up by the ballerina had pulled the rubber stopper out, so that Eugene's blood drained away. It drained out from a spot right under his armpit and above his ribs--the place of ardor. Maybe that was his word all along. Ardor sort of hurt."

Whatever else choosing ardor over celebration means, it means he is not choosing a life of temporal pleasure over a commitment to what will last. He has chosen "the pain of ardor" over celebration.

"For the Nonce"

This philosophy is the exact opposite of how Kent lives. Kent is, tragically, living how many gay men were living in New York at this time. Kent's former lover, Jasper, gives the reason why. "Age isn't always kind to our kind." Jasper is himself dying when he says this. Given that Kent can't imagine the long term, he lives "for the nonce," or for the moment. He is living the decadent life that Eugene wanted to memorialize.

"That was all there was. The nonce. And then, Curtain," Kent thinks to himself after Eugene has left his home. Kent's reaction to the ephemerality of things is to "play ice," a trick he learned in acting school. He detaches himself. It's the opposite of accepting the "pain of ardor," because ice cannot feel. Ardor is fire, and not just etymologically.

This is the story of a young man who learns to accept the pain necessary to create something worthy of the long haul, and his story is counterpoised by the story of a middle-aged man who sinks further into his habit of making the pain go away by detaching and living for the moment.

Two possible objections to this reading

Objection One: Eugene is really gay and is just in denial

Nearly everyone who comes into contact with Eugene seems to think they've got him pegged. It's so prevalent, it's got him confused about himself. When Kent takes an interest in him, the first thing Eugene thinks is, "not again," because society so often reads him as gay. There is a list of the number of times an older man has assumed something about Eugene he himself is not aware of. Men who pick him up when he's hitchhiking. Men at a party who give him weed by holding it to his mouth instead of passing it to him. He's not sure why they see this in him. "Did Eugene give off some kind of signal or something? Was it his earring?"

The people around Eugene are sure they understand him better than he does. I know there are a lot of people in real life like this. They say things like, "Oh, he's gay. He just doesn't know it yet." Kent takes this approach in veiled form. He touches Eugene's coat and comments that he hopes no polar bears died to make it. Eugene says it's fake and Kent replies, full of double meaning, "Could have fooled me." Kent thinks he can read Eugene better than Eugene can. 

But every bit of evidence Eugene produces for himself suggests he is more aware of his identity, sexual and otherwise, than others give him credit for. When Kent tells him to think of someone he cares about to imagine himself reading poetry to, Eugene spontaneously says, "There's this girl..." And even while drunk and sick, when Kent starts to try to undress him, Eugene is aware of just one thing:

This wasn't at all what Eugene wanted. If he had arrived at (Kent's house) unsure of that, he was unsure no longer.
He didn't like his fur coat all that much. He didn't want to mislead people with his earring. He still wanted to write poetry, but that was about it. 

I think we should believe Eugene when he tells us who he is, especially when it comes during a critical scene where his emotions are raw and he is likely telling the truth. I don't think there is much ambiguity left by the end of the story. He seems to be genuinely interested in the ballerina when he finally gets back to his dorm. 

There's one final reason I think we should believe him, and this one, in keeping with his character, has to do with the resonances of words. I think Eugene is about the worst disguised auto-biographical character ever put into a story. For Jeffrey Eugenides to put someone with his own name into a story, and give the kid a background very close to the author's, leads me to believe we ought to read Eugene's journey of discovery as an artist as a reflection of the author's own.

Objection Two: The story paints an unrealistically ugly picture of gay men

This one's a little harder to reject out of hand. Eugene certainly faces more than his share of sexual predators in the form of older men who see in him someone they can take advantage of while he's still figuring himself out. The gay men in Kent's circle, anyway, are debauched and catty and superficial. Only his old lover Jas seems to have acquired some wisdom, and that has come at the cost of a terminal illness.

One could read the story as somewhat painting homosexuality as a temptation into which Eugene almost falls, one that would have distracted him from his real purpose in life. Homosexuality is tied to the debauchery of Rome and America. It is for people who don't take themselves seriously. Heterosexual love is adult and mature, while homosexual love is for man-children who want to keep partying long past the time they should have grown up.

I don't deny that there aren't really any counter-examples to this in the story, except maybe for Raphael, the gay friend of a friend who tries to give Eugene his fortune in the form of a single word. Raphael objects to being treated "like a slut." But this isn't really much of a counter-example.

I think the best one can say as a response to this objection is that this depiction of New York gay culture in the late 70s might not be totally inaccurate. But it isn't that gay men are incapable of more meaningful relationships, of creating something "more lasting than bronze." It's that in that one historical moment, when gay rights were not yet written into the legal code and the first hints of a mysterious "gay plague" were beginning to crop up, it seemed to many gay men that there was no good reason to think much about the future. There was no ability to start a family or live an authentic "out" existence, so it made sense to live for the moment. This was actually a reason many people put forth in the decades since for why gay marriage should be legal. It would give gay people a reason to care about the long-term health of society, because they stood a shot of enjoying some of the domestic benefits (and, let's be honest, hell) that the rest of us enjoy.

While this might not take the sting off for a gay reader who sees his community accused of being more likely to be predatory or at least shallow, I think the real targets of scorn in the story are those who think they've got sexual identity all figured out. They think that some of the signs we attach to being gay, like "sensitivity" or certain items of clothing, are an infallible guide to knowing the sexual identity of others. As if sexual identity were any easier to figure out or box up than any other part of our identity, as if all the choices on the sexual spectrum were easy "either/or" logic gates to pass through.

I've tried to write a story that played off this notion before. I had a character whom others seemed to read as gay, or whom, I thought, readers might want to read as gay, when I think in reality, the totality of the story made his sexual identity more of a mystery and part of a larger identity issue he was trying to solve. Eugenides, being Eugenides, obviously succeeded at it a lot more than I did.

I think often, while trying to achieve the socially laudable goal of increasing awareness of and tolerance for a variety of identities, we end up simplifying the whole notion of identity until our attempt at understanding potentially does more harm than good. It makes people read their own images into the signifiers others present. It also encourages us to put too much stress on what is a question of secondary concern (at least, we can make it a question of secondary concern once we have accomplished the goal of physical security for sexual minorities). This isn't primarily a story about sexual identity, although I imagine that's what a lot of people will focus on. (Even I have mostly focused on it, if only to say I don't think that's mostly what its about.) The main issue in this story is what lasts versus what doesn't, and why we ought to care about what lasts. Stories that focus on more than just one facet of identity are probably likely to last longer and resonate more deeply than those that only look at that one thing.


Additional reading: Karen Carlson saw this as more of a period piece, like And the Band Played On.