Greater empathy or immunity from it?

A friend of mine was telling me the other day that over a weekend, he and his daughter were sitting on the couch when the movie Dead Poets Society came on. His main reaction to re-watching it was that it hasn't aged well, but his daughter was moved by it. When I think back to when I first watched it, I think I was moved by it, too. Nowadays, my thoughts of the movie tend to be closer to those of Kevin Dettmar or Stephen Marche. It's a lot of schmaltz with a few superficial ideas about the humanities or how literature can affect our lives.

When I first started to study literature in a semi-serious way, I checked out a poetry anthology from the library on base where I was stationed. I have forgotten what anthology it was, but I remember reading a justification of why poetry mattered in the introduction. That essay argued that learning to read poetry well could help us to separate the truly moving from the "mawkish," a word I learned for the first time reading that essay. Its meaning is close to James Joyce's definition of sentiment, which was "unearned emotion." And this really is one of the better uses of not just reading poetry, but of close reading of any kind. People who are easily swayed by emotion can be manipulated, whether it's by the people in their lives or the companies that advertise to them or the governments that ask for their compliance. Learning to read in a way that withholds your emotional responses to characters until they have earned it can also teach you to make real people in your life earn your love and loyalty.

But doesn't this sort of clash with another oft-cited benefit of reading literature, especially literary fiction, which is that it increases our empathy? People who defend the value of reading literature will often cite studies that suggest those who read fiction, especially literary fiction, have a higher level of empathy than those who do not. So how does that square with the idea that literature also teaches us to be more discerning about the things we give our emotion away to? Wouldn't being more discerning mean the claims others make to you emotionally have less sway?

After I started reading seriously, I remember one of the things I lost interest in was country music, which I had only just been introduced to by friends in the Marine Corps. Whether because I really started to know what fake sentiment was or because I wanted to appear to, the emotional register of country music didn't interest me anymore. Some people think reading literary fiction--which, let's face it, is just an industry term for "serious" fiction or maybe even "worthy" fiction or "quality" fiction or something like that--makes people discerning. Some think it makes people into snobs, too good to sing along to "Friends in Low Places" or to enjoy the kinds of movies that don't qualify as "films."

You think you're too good to cry at this, Jake? Do you? 

Not too long ago, I dumped all over a story about a young child with a brain tumor, because I thought the story relied on a false appeal to emotion. Was I being too harsh? Have I become so skeptical about the possible existence of bathos I'm now unable to recognize genuine pathos?

There are two dangers for those who read a lot of fiction seriously when it comes to empathy. One is the same one that concerned Saint Augustine: that we will become so enthralled with our vicarious empathy, we fail to care about the real suffering person in the real world. The other is that we can get desensitized to pathos, the way too many action movies can make someone desensitized to violence. Nothing moves us anymore.

For me, I think the latter is a real danger, but it's probably a danger even without being a discerning reader or film viewer or music enthusiast. For everybody, life makes it harder when we're older to become emotional about the same things that make us emotional when we're young. "Win one for the Gipper" might work on college athletes, but it's not likely to work on 35-year-old cornerback just trying to survive one more season. Discerning reader or not, life has a way of taking the sentimentality right out of us.

The ennui we get from excess of empathy from literature is a disease that brings its own cure. By inoculating ourselves early to the false promises of cheap emotion, we help preserve our limited supply of empathy throughout our lifetimes. We also learn to focus our care on proper objects. Literature teaches us to be more disciplined about giving our love away, so it doesn't become too diffuse to have an effect.

We ought to remember that everyone is going to have their own empathy level. Bridge to Terebithia is the saddest thing in the world if you're eleven. It was sad to me when I read it with my son a few years ago, but not as sad as it was to him. We all change as time goes by. It really is okay to be moved by Mr. Keating standing on the desks if you're sixteen. The sort of person who finds that satisfying at sixteen is the same sort of person likely to find it no longer satisfying at forty, because she needs something more enriching and less sweet to keep drawing nourishment from narratives about made-up people.

In other words, yes, literature should make you more discerning the more you read. That might mean you like fewer things. But narrowing your own empathy to a finer point shouldn't mean you lose so much empathy you forget what it's like to experience emotion more broadly. When it starts to do that, I think that's when literature actually becomes destructive, and maybe it's time to take a step back and do something else for a while. There's likely never been a time in history when there is a greater danger of this kind of emotional eating beyond our ability to digest, because we now live in a world where we can stream hours and hours of high-quality fictional stories in our homes. We're building our own empathy-resistant super bugs the way we're creating antibiotic-resistant diseases. Superfluity of emotional response-causing narratives might be making us less empathetic overall.

Equality means everyone is free to have a dull life: "Omakase" by Weike Wang

This story frustrated me. It's about a woman who talks herself into being taken advantage of, talked down to, and to playing second fiddle in her relationship. Which is all fine grist for a story, except it doesn't cover any ground that hasn't been covered a thousand times already, and is rather straight-forward about bringing these elements into the story. Our--sigh--unnamed narrator, a.k.a. "The Woman," is in a relationship with a tool, but it's hard for her to see that he's a tool, because that would require her to have a sense of self-worth. She doesn't have this sense because she's a woman who's been taught to be silent and to go along and not be hysterical or imagine people mean something when they don't. Those are all normal issues women deal with in our society, but "the woman" has it worse, because she's a daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants. They made sure to let her know how lucky she was to land a white guy like "the man." So did all her girlfriends. So it's very hard for her to trust her instincts when her instincts say the guy's acting like an ass.

While he's acting boorish and dismissive of her on their sushi date, which makes up, along with two flashbacks, the entirety of the story, she's not able to gather up the self-respect to demand he stop acting like a dick. The narrator gives us a long list of self-damaging character traits the woman has, all of which have been well covered in feminist literature, psychology, and pop psychology. Here are some of the easy-to-find passages:

-"She got nervous looking at a list of options and would second-guess herself." (Meanwhile, he "enjoyed going with the flow," because men are rewarded for seeming to be carefree. He tells her many times that she worries too much or that she's overthinking it.)
-"She felt that she was constantly in danger."
-This is too long to copy all of, but when she was moving in with him, she made an Excel list of everything she owned so they could make sure not to have two of anything, unless there was a good reason to, but it was too much work for him to look at. Basically, she puts more effort into everything than he does, and he benefits from it but also criticizes her for being high-strung.
-"She did not want to take up too much space."
-"She would frequently wonder, but never ask, if he had looked for a job as diligently as she had." (They lived in different cities when they started dating, and agreed they'd both look in each others' cities for the best place to live. She found one in New York, where he lived, and moved there.)
-"The woman, however, did not want to offend the chef and held her mug until she felt her hands go numb."
-"...it made her feel good that the man was desired."
-The man picked all the movies on their Skype dates, which were basically watching the same movie on Skype together while drinking wine. Some of them, she didn't really want to see.
-She realized that when the man was making an ass out of himself because he'd confused the chef with some other Asian person, she would have to point out his error in such as way as not to embarrass him or hurt his feelings.
-"The woman didn't want to make a big deal out of nothing. She didn't want to be one of those women who noted every teeny tiny thing and racialized it."
-"What's wrong with me? the woman thought. She was getting riled up over nothing."
-She makes more money and pays for their sushi when they go out, but tries not to make a big deal about it.
-"She didn't want to sound insane, yet she also didn't want to be a quiet little flower."

None of this is covering new ground, and the punches are all delivered through an unending series of straight jabs. The list above isn't really a story, it's just a list of well-known attributes women have that prevent them being assertive of their own rights. But that list occupies a lot of real estate in the narrative. Reading this story was fairly similar to the experience of listening to a female CEO talk about how women need to be more like men. I agree with some of the thoughts expressed, but that doesn't make them any less dull just because I agree with them.

There were a couple of apertures into a story I wish the narrator would have told. One was when the woman sees a teenage, Asian waitress with purple hair. The woman wishes she herself could have been as outgoing and confident when she was young, but she'd been prevented by her own upbringing. She thinks to herself that the young waitress doesn't know what the generation before her had to go through so that she could have purple hair. Now that's an interesting story, and one the narrator is in a unique position to tell. Instead, we have a list of problematic attributes women are coerced to acquire all the way up to the end. The small surge of anger she starts to feel near the end--"She imagined taking two toothpicks and sticking them through the man's pretty eyes to stop them from rolling"--is too little too late.

Had the story been about the woman seeing a younger version of herself and wanting to help guide the younger version, but finding the younger version actually didn't need help, and so trying to figure out what her role in life might be--that's a story I'd get into. But the story that's there could have been a flash and been just as effective: omakase means "I'll leave it up to you," and that suits both the man and woman, but for different reasons, and that's all their problems in one sentence.

I also would have been interested in the woman following the trail of anti-Japanese sentiment her older Chinese relatives felt. The narrator tells us that,"Thankfully, that history was not part of the woman's identity." That would also have been something worth exploring. Maybe feelings of guilt, like how letting go of the grudges of your ancestors feels like a betrayal, like you're forgetting about them.

Maybe there is one interesting aspect to the story, but it's a matter of serendipity. Because the story comes right after "They Told Us Not to Say This" in the BASS anthology, a story in which the only white man is a hyper-idealized white savior, it offers an interesting balance. Some white men are well aware that they are being graded on a curve by moms and girlfriends of the Asian women they are in relationships with, and they take advantage of it.

I have to admit, the most I've ever felt the existence of white privilege wasn't when I was here in the States, it was when I lived in Korea for a few years. Speak any Korean at all, and you'll get unfailing pats on the head. Speak Korean like I do--which is far from perfect, but enough to get the point across usually and even a high-fallutin' vocabulary word thrown in now and again--and you'll have ajumas fanning themselves to keep from passing out before your brilliance. I once listened to my landlord praise my intellect for five minutes in front of my real estate agent, who spoke English far better than I did Korean. But he was an ethnic Korean who grew up in L.A., while I was a white man. To my landlord, Koreans are supposed to learn English, but for a white man to learn Korean means he's a genius.

It's easy to get used to taking advantage of a system like that. It's probably good I came back here after a while and later decided to start writing stories that mostly got rejected so I could realize I'm not special. I'm sure Asian women do end up in relationships with those guys. But if that's what went on here, I would have liked to see a little bit about how the man in the relationship was beguiled by all that into maybe being a bigger jerk than he would have otherwise been. Maybe some near epiphany for him to go along with the dawning epiphany for her would have given this story a rounder flavor or taken it in a direction I haven't seen before.

Anyhow, that's BASS for 2019. I usually wrap it up with some kind of assessment of the collection as a whole, but I don't think I'll do that this year. It was a safe, standard collection. Lots of big names, which means there weren't many surprises in it. It didn't really take risks, except maybe in "Wrong Object." It was the appropriate mix of genders, ethnicities, and nationalities. All of which means it was kind of boring. I don't think I'll remember more than a handful of the stories more than a month from now. That probably showed in my analyses, which I don't think were as strong this year as last year. Roxane Gay's tweets infuriate me sometimes, but she picked a great anthology last year.

I'm not sure I'm going to keep doing this. It's been good for me as a writer to read with the level of attention I've been giving it, but I'm really pressed by other commitments now, and I may have to take a break from it.

I will make this offer, however, to the folks who run BASS, who've been very kind to me. Especially editor Heidi Pitlor, who has occasionally re-tweeted or liked some of the tweets I've sent out linking to BASS posts. The last two years, the final story in the journal has been written by someone named Wang. Now, I realize that the Chinese girl isn't at the back because of any bias on BASS's part. It's just BASS's alphabetical-order-by-last-name way of doing things. But does AMERICA know this? Do you want to take that chance? Next year, if you put one of my stories in--and I've got one coming out (I hope) soon--I can guarantee nobody named Wang will be the last story next year. And I certainly won't complain about being last in the 2020 BASS anthology.

Yes, it's normal for a literary journal to ghost on you after they accept your work

Long ago, this used to be a blog about writing fiction and the travails thereof. It's been more of a blog dedicated to analyzing and reviewing short stories for about the last year. In part, that's because it's been good for me as a writer. Forcing myself to pay close enough attention to what some of the year's mostly highly regarded short fiction is doing, enough that I can write about it without making a fool of myself, has really helped me develop as a writer of fiction myself.

Proof of this came about a month ago, when I got notice that a journal I really like wanted to publish a story of mine. It's not the New Yorker, but it's a solid journal. I was actually surprised they picked me, because I kind of thought they were too cool for me. The great thing about it was that they wanted to publish a longer story of mine. It's very hard to get longer fiction published, so the fact they were willing to publish my story must have meant they really found it appealing.

The acceptance letter mentioned that I should sign the contract attached. That's pretty normal stuff, except there was no contract attached. I sent an email profusely thanking them for believing in my story and explaining that there had not been any contract attached, so could they please send one. I got no response for a week, so I emailed again. Two days later, I got an email that said, "Here you go," along with the attachment.

That was a little curt, but it was what I wanted, so I signed it and sent it back, along with the other things they asked for, like a photo and a bio. I later realized that one of the attachments I'd sent them was the wrong one, so I sent another email explaining everything and including the right one.

I didn't get any response on that. Two weeks later, someone responded in Submittable, the online website where a lot of journals handle the business of accepting submissions for stories. That person said "Sorry!" and attached the contract again, seemingly unaware that I'd already gotten it and responded through email. Whoever answered the email for the journal obviously hadn't seen my response, or hadn't forwarded it to the person who answered in Submittable.

So I attached everything again in Submittable, then sent an email just asking to be sure they'd gotten everything, explaining what seemed to be redundancies in replies I'd gotten from them. I asked to get a reply just so I knew they had what they needed. I've not heard anything in another two weeks since.

If you are a new writer who just got accepted for the first time or is hoping to get accepted for the first time soon, I want you to know how normal this is. I've now had eight stories accepted for publication. Six of them were like this. So if you struggle and struggle to get that first acceptance, and as soon as you acknowledge their acceptance you stop hearing from them, that's normal. If you end up freaking out and worrying that they forgot about you, or came to their senses and decided they don't want to publish you, that's normal, too. If you don't hear from them for seven months and then finally find out your story was published three weeks ago, that is also normal.

The people who run these journals are not getting paid. They're squeezing in time between life and work and their own writing to put your work out. They don't usually find time to hold your hand and make sure you know everything is going to be alright. But if they said they'll publish your story, they'll publish it eventually.

It was hard getting this far, I know. That doesn't mean the next steps are really any easier. But hopefully, if you at least know that it's normal for the next steps not to be any easier, that'll make it easier to deal with how it's not any easier?

Larry Bird teaches us all a valuable life lesson: "They Told Us Not to Say This" by Jenn Alandy Trahan

We like to thinks of sports as a great equalizer, a realm in which the limits of race and class that exist in the rest of society don't hold anyone back. Of course, this isn't true, although it's not a terribly popular thing to point out. 93% of NHL players (that's hockey, non-sports people) are white. In spite of some really exciting breakthroughs by black swimmers in the last Olympics, most top-level swimmers are white. When's the last time someone won a major marathon who wasn't from Ethiopia, Eritrea, or Kenya? And, as everyone knows, the NBA (pro basketball), even though it is pulling players from all over the world in an attempt to get the very best, is still three-fourths black players. (True story: I walked into a bar in West Virginia in 2011, and someone turned on a basketball game. One bar patron, I think sensing I was from out of town and saying it to test out my reaction, yelled, "Turn off that shit...why do I want to see a bunch of n****rs running around?" So it's understood, although not always talked about outside of West Virginia, that basketball is played mostly by black athletes.)

So when Jenn Alandy Trahan starts off her short story "They Told Us Not to Say This" with the line "The few white boys in our town could ball," we all know what she's referring to, even though it's something, like her title alludes to, that we're not supposed to talk about.

Well known, but seldom discussed in polite society.

The first-person-plural narrator (Karen, another category in our BASS drinking game?) is the group voice of young Filipino women in high school in a California community. "We" have a lot to complain about. "Our" brothers get treated indulgently, while the girls are either ignored or treated like they are a liability, a liability best managed by keeping them far from any boys until "we" are grown. The only exception is if one of "us" manages to find a rich white boy to date. "Our" parents idolize whiteness and wealth ("anyone with a four-bedroom in Glen Cove was automatically a good person"), and this has led "us" to dislike our own brownness.

There are two things that shake up the self-loathing of the girls in this community. One is Brent Zalesky. He's one of those "few white boys" in their town who's good at basketball. He's not like the white people most of the girls' parents work for. He's like the people in their community in that he has to work for what he gets, and he's not afraid to do it. He's from the poorer quarters himself, and "doesn't flinch from the sound of gunshots." Unlike the rich white boys, for whom using street language and wearing the same clothes as kids from the poorer quarters was just a high school phase, one they'd grow out of when they decided to grow up, Brent really talks like that and dresses like that.

Brent is the one who inspires the girls to find the other outlet in life besides himself that helps them deal with their lack of voice. He inspires them to play basketball. On the court, they are not quiet and well-mannered. They throw elbows. They dive after loose balls. They stand up on the court to the daughters of the same white people who order the girls' parents around. It's empowering. It will serve the girls later in life to find a voice when other white women try to ignore them or talk over them because they are brown, "the color of their nannies."

It was actually Brent who inspired the girls to play basketball, and this is the part of the story I find fascinating. Brent is very clearly an example of the white savior trope. Brent is the one who makes them feel good about being Filipino. He's the one who lets them know about Filipino dance-pop singer Jocelyn Enriquez (although I don't really believe her music is the kind of thing a tough kid like Brent would have been listening to). He thinks Filipino chicks are cool (and is a perfect, bad-boy gentleman while on dates with one of them), and that's enough for the Filipino girls in the school to start loving themselves. Even when they start playing basketball, "We played for him." Brent is the entire impetus for the girls to find self-realization.

Speaking of white saviors, Larry Bird used to sometimes be called the "great white hope," because he was one of the few white superstars in basketball. I used to really like him when I played basketball, and I wore his shoes, but that also made me feel strange. Was I looking up to him because I liked his play, or because he was white and I was white? At fourteen, sports made me more aware of the existence of racial issues in America rather than make those issues go away. 

I don't find any evidence that the story is observing Brent's white savior-ness ironically, just as I don't find any evidence that the story is tempering in any way its view that sports are empowering.

What's wrong with the white savior?

I don't necessarily think every white savior story is a bad story.  Some of the examples cited as abuses of the genre in film, like The Help, Green Book, hell, even Lincoln, seem absurd to me, because they're based on real-life examples, not just the white savior fantasies someone came up with in their white imagination. And I think sometimes, writers of color create stories with white saviors in them (think Tyler Perry) and it's not treated like an offense because it's coming from a writer of color. (Perry does get an inordinate amount of criticism from black culture writers, but not always for having white saviors. It's a complicated relationship between him and black intellectuals.)

Whether this story is good or awful has a lot to do with the identity of the author. If I wrote it, I'd be flayed.  And I'd deserve the criticism, because this would be a story coming straight from my white imagination about how the way for minority females to feel good about themselves is just to find themselves a good white man who loves your sexy brown skin just the way it is, mama.

But is the knee-jerk resistance to the white savior always really justified? If there is no role for white people to play in the restoration of minorities to full sociological and psychological health, then why should white people read stories about minorities?

The fact is that the "we" of this story have, whether they've meant to or not, ingested some of their parents' need for validation from white people. So Brent's validation matters to them, and is part of a process for them in what will later become them validating themselves. They may have started playing for him, but they kept playing because it did something for them they liked, something they found empowering.

The title "They Told Us Not to Say This" refers, on the one hand, to how these Filipino girls were taught to keep quiet. But it could also refer to how this story is telling a truth about white savior stories that's not a very popular truth. White saviors can sometimes exist. In fact, sometimes only a white person can perform the role that's needed, because the problem has everything to do with white people. The girls' feelings of inferiority are locked into their skin color compared to white skin color. Much like I can tell my wife how pretty or smart she is a million times, but it somehow means something more when she hears it from someone else, Brent's validation means more, even though it shouldn't. A white savior is the only kind of savior that can meet the need, just as a writer of color is the only person who can say this uncomfortable truth.

That doesn't mean we have to indulge in the worst parts of the white savior trope. Brent doesn't need to run a victory lap looking for cheers because he was just a decent human being the way everyone should be. And ultimately, even though he's important to the story, the story's not about him, but about what happens to the girls partly because of him. Nonetheless, there is a role for white people to play in making society what we wish sports were. Even though we're not supposed to talk about it.

So open, I need a wall: "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson

At the beginning of reading "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson, I had the same reaction to the story that the therapist-narrator does to her patient, "K": bored, with a side order of contempt. But my interest perked right up at the same moment the therapist's does, which is the moment K, after months of beating around the bush about why he's really there to see a therapist, finally comes clean. He's been saying he doesn't love his wife like he should, but it turns out there's a reason for it, and it drops all at once:

"I'm a pedophile, he said. the problem with my wife isn't...I've never been enchanted with anyone my own age. Which is to say my age."

Boom.

But wait, there's more! Just as you're ready to close the book in disgust, the therapist warns K that hey, you know I have to report this, but here's the real kicker.

"Don't worry, he said. I've never touched a child. I never will. That's not why...he shrugged. Not a possibility. I have too much to lose. And, he paused, it'd be wrong. I get that. I have three kids."

(If my lack of quotation marks around the dialogue is confusing, that's how it is in the original.)

So we have, in his own words, a "nonacting minor -attracted person" who, realizing it would be wrong to act on his attraction, refuses, through sheer willpower, to carry out his feelings. He doesn't even let himself be alone with his daughters (young boys, apparently, do not trouble him).

Now that's an intriguing plot. The therapist feels the same way. Her entire attitude toward K changes. Before, she was bored by his rich person problems, feeling like he looked down on her for coming from poverty and looking down on him in return. The change comes across in how she sees him ("All of a sudden his look entered the lexicon of handsome") and how she sees other people ("People in my coffee shop appeared heroic; I began to believe that many carried damage and made it their purpose not to pass that damage on").

More troublingly, she leaps past her disdain and immediately swings to the opposite pole: "It seemed not only that I could fall in love with this person (the the way therapists fall in love, with the poignancy of renunciation) but that whatever that motion was, like a rope being shaken, it had already begun."

Don't worry, this isn't that story. I thought for a minute we might be headed there. 

Therapist and patient begin to seek a reason for his attraction to young girls, some possible sexual trauma in his own childhood, but they cannot find one. "If it's buried, it's buried deep," he concludes. The desire, if anything, seems to be linked to a kind of Peter Pan syndrome (this is my analysis, not the therapist's). The one girl he ever felt anything with was his sister's friend when he was thirteen. He kissed her in the ocean when they were all on vacation together, and it was perfect, and he's never wanted anything as much since then. He grew up after that moment when he was thirteen, but the girls he wanted didn't. There's a moment when he reveals that he never learned to do laundry. He may be emotionally stunted from having lived a privileged life, or from idealizing a time in his youth, or from both.

The therapist has to resort to the few therapeutic options she can think of. There's arousal conditioning. He can try having sex with his wife, and he can think about his sexual fantasy with a young girl in order to get aroused, but near the end, when it's too late to stop, he should stop thinking about the fantasy and focus on his wife. Each time they have sex, he should try to stop focusing on his fantasy at an earlier point, until he hardly needs to think of it at all. There is also satiation training, which involves masturbating over and over to his fantasy until it no longer satisfies him. K opts for arousal conditioning, but his wife gets tired of having so much sex, and he has to stop.

The therapist's problematic comparison to aversion therapy

The therapist compares herself to a past generation of people who sat in her chair and tried to get gay people to stop being gay. That older generation told gay men they were focusing their drive on a "wrong object" (ROLL CREDITS!) and they tried to get those men to focus their desire on a right object. The therapist realizes she is trying to do the same thing with K, but she wonders if it's possible, because the only thing she's learned from studying that chapter in the history of psychology is "that you could scare people and make them celibate, you could maybe stop them from doing what they had the urge to do, but it was nearly impossible to implant an alternate desire. The arc of gay liberation had a good ending, at least in California. But K's problem never could."

This is probably where the story gets really uncomfortable for a lot of people, including me, as if having a character who is attracted to young teen girls isn't uncomfortable enough already. Comparing homosexual desire to a desire for thirteen-year-old girls is fraught politically and morally. I get why the therapist is doing it--she's really only comparing the two because the past attempt to turn gay men straight teaches us how hard it is to recondition desire. By saying K's story can't have a happy ending, she realizes that desire between two consenting adult males is on a fundamentally different plane from desire by an adult man for a young teen girl. But she doesn't let the comparison go. She continues to think about how therapy in the past let men down, how it did far more harm than good, leading the reader to think that she thinks she is is also doing more harm than good by trying to move him from a "wrong object" to a right one. In other words, by comparing a sexual desire society currently disapproves of to one it used to disapprove of but which has now become normalized, she's moving toward normalizing sexual attraction toward young teen girls.

There are plenty of reasons to suspect the therapist's judgment is clouded. Beyond her own admitted sudden feeling that she might fall in love with this patient, she's keeping it a secret. She says that all therapists cheat on confidentiality a little bit when they need help talking through how to help a patient. However, she also thinks that, "I couldn't tell anyone about K; I didn't want to. I felt pretty sure no one would understand." This is the language a young girl abused by an older man might use. "It's our secret. The world wouldn't understand." Is K working her?

There's reason to suspect he is. She's a new therapist, meaning she may not have developed the keen instincts that come with hearing bullshit from a thousand people. She's also got a sore spot about having grown up poor; she feels hostile to those who grew up wealthy, which is a way of hiding how she also needs their acceptance. She feels comforted when her boss, who went to Stanford and now takes nine-week vacations to Scotland to write novels in verse about his dead wife, tells her he doesn't think less of her for where she comes from.

There's an open ending, and then there's this story

By the end of the story, there are so many possible readings open, it's almost like trying to drive from New York to Los Angeles through a country that is all one giant paved surface. The possibilities are so open, it's actually harder than navigating limited roads with their traffic. I don't mean that as a criticism so much as a description of the story's character.

These open roads are a result of the various ways we might apply the notion of a "wrong object." Since this "wrong object" is the title of the story, I think it's the key image. But who, at the end, is really the one focused on what wrong object? I can think of so many possibilities, I'm left driving in circles.

I really need boundaries sometimes.

To briefly summarize the end, K reports that he has looked at child porn once, and found it awful. The girl is obviously being hurt in it, and the guy is obviously happy about that. "That was never my fantasy," he says. The therapist eventually trusts her boss enough to tell him what is going on with K, and he reports K's viewing of the child porn to the police. The police investigate, find nothing, and K's wife comes to complain to the therapist that she violated K's trust. So K's wife now knows the truth, which the therapist had been hoping for all along, but the therapist also feels like she did actually betray K.

The obvious application of the concept of the "wrong object" is the one that is overt in the story: K is attracted to the wrong kinds of people. How, then, do we interpret what happens in the story? He did the right thing by seeking help. But is he, in the way sociopathic sexual predators are, really good at manipulating people? Did he bring the therapist into his trust, rigging it so that he could look like he was doing the right thing while all the while not doing the right thing? Does he end up looking like a wronged victim with his wife instead of a monster because of how things worked out? Might he have wanted to do that the whole time?

Or is the wrong object the way society is focused on hating someone like K? If it's true that you can't help whom you're attracted to, and the best you can do is try to control it, isn't K's resolve something to admire? He KNOWS it's wrong, even if he can't bring himself to feel it, and his entire life is a process of logic over emotion, of willpower over giving in to what he wants. Shouldn't we get past our "ick" factor and face the reality a person like K presents us in all its inexplicable, human problematizing of our accepted truths?

Or is the wrong object the way the therapist herself focuses on K? Has she picked up a wrong object?

Or is it the way the therapist is focused on getting the approval of others, instead of finding approval within herself? Isn't she too interested in approval from her boss, who is himself focused on a wrong object in his dead wife?

Or is the wrong object the way the wife at the end is focusing her anger at the therapist, instead of her husband?

Then there's what I fear might be the most likely scenario. The wrong object is when I, the reader, empathize with K more than with the children who are at risk from him. It's wrong when I suddenly became interested in a story I wasn't that into because of the big revelation. When K is saying that he finally had to come into therapy because he was--through no fault of his own--teamed up with a fourteen-year-old girl (the boss's daughter) during her internship at his law firm, shouldn't my main concern be for the girl's safety? The fact that the story ends with the therapist thinking about the girls leads me to believe that this is the "right object" for our empathy in the story, not K. And he did, after all, look at child porn, even if we believe his story that he only did it once and he didn't like it. So he's not deserving of our empathy.

This last reading is socially acceptable, and it satisfies the "ick" factor the reader feels throughout. The first priority is to make sure the innocent are not harmed. Nonetheless, I feel like it's a betrayal to what made this story something I wanted to read in the first place. Sexual relations between adults and teens are so objectionable, we have a reaction to the attraction that's as strong as being asked to swallow human waste. But we do need to get past that gut response to be able to talk about it and figure out how to fix it. The story, by giving us K, at once attracted to young girls and also fighting the impulse with everything in him, allows a space to open up in which to get past the gag reflex and talk about the issue. Is there something we can learn from past failed treatment of homosexuals that can teach us what might work and what won't in this case?

But ending on the moralizing "Won't someone please think of the children" note seems, while certainly never a wrong concern, to take something of what made this such a compelling story away at the end. Not totally. Not even close to totally. It's still a great story for the way it throws the uncomfortable at us and makes us puzzle through the hard choices of what the right thing to do is along with the narrator, all the while doubting our own motives like the narrator should doubt hers. After going through the entire story in a place of empathy for K, not even the end removes that. If K has just fooled us all, we've spent long enough under his spell that now we can't go back to the world before we empathized with him. If we've been tricked along with the therapist, we now have to sit and think about what it means for us to have been tricked.

 

When the political clearly trumps the personal: "Our Day of Grace" by Jim Shepard

About six weeks ago, I went to Antietam National Battlefield for the observation of the 157th anniversary of the terrible battle there. I've wanted to go on the anniversary for years. Antietam is one of my favorite places to be on the entire planet Earth, and the anniversary is a special day. Rangers take groups on hikes across a good chunk of the battlefield, and you get pretty good explanations of what was going on relative to the terrain you're standing on. Meanwhile, 157 years ago on that very spot, one soldier was being killed or wounded every two seconds for twelve hours straight.

At sunrise on September 17th, Antietam's lead ranger Keith Snyder led the other rangers on about a 90-minute walk/reading. The words they read were entirely written by the soldiers who fought there, often in the form of letters they wrote to their loved ones after the battle.

Anyone who has studied the American Civil War in any depth cannot help but be startled by the richness of insight, the sharpness of prose, and the vividness of imagery these soldiers wrote with. It's utterly astounding. Farmers and factory workers tossed off missives as profound as some of the finest American literature ever produced, and they did it during the moments of boredom that broke up the terrifying climaxes of the most destructive fighting the world had yet seen.

As Keith put it, there are hundreds of thousands of cornfields in America, but only one "The Cornfield." 

Shepard's epistles

Given how wonderful Civil War letters are as a literary form in their own right, Shepard's instinct to write an epistolary story in the manner of Civil War letters seems like a sure bet. And Shepard really nails the form. Had the letters in this story appeared in a book with the title "Civil War Letters" on it, I'd have simply thought these were some fairly poignant examples of the genre--although probably not the most poignant I've ever read. There's the same humor without even meaning to be funny ("Your mother says she worries about my superintendence of our home, but I know you will not find fault with it"), the same mix of the quotidian with the eternal, the sacred with the profane ("A house in town containing the bodies of smallpox victims was burned. Asa has still not gotten his duck.") There's the longing for home and the hope that all this sacrifice must be for something.

A reader cannot possibly fail to grasp, reading this story in 2019, that the writers and readers of these letters are all Southerners. It's the last week of November in 1864, right before John Bell Hood leads the last serviceable Confederate Army west of Virginia into disaster at the Battle of Nashville. Hood's entire campaign in 1864 ranks among the most ignorantly fought campaigns in history. Jefferson Davis relieved Joseph Johnston in favor of Hood for no reasons greater than Davis never liked Johnston and did not grasp how appropriate Johnston's strategy of sticking to defensive trench warfare and retreat before a larger force was the exact right strategy for the South's predicament. Hood came in with the intent to bring aggressiveness back to his army, and he did--he aggressed them right into disaster, attacking a larger, better equipped Army his troops had no hope of defeating and squandering what troops he still had left. In December of 1864, Hood's army disintegrated, many of the soldiers not stopping after their retreat until they made it home.

But none of that is known to the characters writing letters in "Our Day of Grace." The last letter is the day before the battle starts.

The personal and the political

Any college-level literature course will at some point encourage students to investigate work from the lenses of the personal and the political. These aren't exactly diametrically opposed lenses, but they do work in tension with one another. All humans are living purely private and personal lives in which they follow their own interests, and the world presents itself to them only through the aperture of their own subjective senses. At the same time, we are all living in the great flow of history, and we will all, while trying to follow our own, personal interests, also contribute in smaller or lesser degree to the wars, famines, depressions, inventions, laws, elections, and trends that change the world for everyone. No life, no matter how much one may deny the political, can ever really be apolitical, and no political event, no matter how grand, is anything more than the sum of the millions of individuals creating that political moment, many of whom created the great political event without much caring about politics.

Some of the most compelling literature interrogates this tension between the political and the personal. War and Peace is one well known example. To keep it closer to America in the mid-19th century, Dickinson and Whitman are often seen as prophets of the primacy of the individual over society (or the private over the public, to use another terminology pair often used in place of personal/political). Having just re-looked at Whitman a few months ago, I think he may have just as often been interested in merging political and personal into one as he was with putting his own self ahead of the body politic, but in any event, he certainly did not seem to think that politics came first.

Or did he?

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying,

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

That was Whitman's reaction to the Civil War. Nothing you had going on in your personal life was anywhere near as important as what was going on politically, he thought. At least in this one poem, Whitman saw no conflict between public and private, because the critical public moment mattered more than the private moment anyone could be living. Shepard's Civil War tale is going to announce its stance on public/private tension with far fewer bugles and drums than Whitman did, but I think it'll be equally strong by the end. 

Lovable and frustrating correspondents

I said a reader in 2019 cannot fail to notice that the letter writers are all from the South. That's because the South has political resonance again here in 2019, thanks to the resurgence of folks suddenly loud and proud again about their Southern heritage. The letter writers in "Day of Grace" don't talk a lot about politics. They aren't very loud about their cause or their way of life. Their interests are almost entirely provincial. They are concerned for their loved ones. They think about the cold and whether their loved ones are warm. They worry about whether their loved ones have eaten--a very valid concern, as by this time, the entire Confederate pantry was close to bare. 

Just for clarity's sake, here are the letter writers in order, along with the person to whom they were writing, and when:

Letter One: William, an enlisted man in Hood's Army in Tennessee, where he is in the same unit as "CW," writes to Lucy, his sweetheart back home he hopes to marry when the war is over. November 21st.

Letter Two: Hattie, the wife of CW (whose letters William thinks are a little dull when CW reads them out loud), writing from Virginia to CW. November 21st.

Letter Three: William to Lucy again. November 23rd. 

Letter Four: Lucy to William, writing from North Carolina. November 22nd (the letters are not arriving with any reliability, so them being out of date order for us is how the characters themselves would often have to deal with them).

Letter Five: William to Lucy. November 26th.

Letter Six: Hattie to CW, November 25th.

Letter Seven: Lucy to William, November 25th.

Letter Eight: William to Lucy, November 28th

Letter Nine: Hattie to CW (distraught that she gets no letters from him; we know he is alive, because William writes about him, but CW is getting near his Apocalypse Now! moment of abandoning all civility during war, and so it's no wonder he doesn't write the missus much). November 28th.

Letter Ten: Lucy to William, November 28th.

Letter Eleven: Hattie to CW, November 30th (the day before the battle starts)

Letter Twelve: William to Lucyy, November 30th, getting ready to head off for a useless and losing battle. 

It's easy to forget about the terrible casus belli of the South and want the letter writers to find food, to find a warm place to ride out the winter. It's easy to laugh when they are being witty and to admire their fortitude under trying circumstances. It's also easy to forget there is only one mention of slavery in the entire story, and that is just an oblique complaint about Northern refusal to return escaped slaves. 

Maybe that's to be expected. Most southerners didn't own slaves, of course. In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson traces how Southern politicians managed to convince poor southerners that slavery was in their interests, because if blacks became free, that would degrade the value of poor white labor. They also played to the white terror of black men and what they would do to the virtue of white southern women if freed. It worked, at least at the beginning of the war, although over time some poorer counties in the South began to support the war less and less. In any event, the point is that William, Lucy, C.W., and Hattie weren't unusual if they didn't own slaves. But it does seem unusual that they don't talk about slaves or slavery, since that's the real cause of the suffering they're enduring. 

So how do the characters come off?

There are basically two ways we could read this story, in which so much of what the characters have to say while the Confederacy is in its death throes is focused on their daily, private lives. We could read it as a statement of the basic primacy of the individual, private life over the corporate, political realm. C.W. is quoted as saying that someone who can make you smile is like bread and beef, and to some extent, the characters do realize through war that the people around them are more important than political causes. Or we could read the focus on the private as an indictment of these characters for not realizing the meaning of their actions within their larger context. William jokes at one point that he and his companions are like Belshazzar, the Biblical character from whence the phrase "see the writing on the wall" comes. But they don't seem to see the writing on the wall.

One key to unlocking how to judge the characters comes from the few political-leaning statements they make. We aren't getting full treatises of the political views of the characters so much as indirect reflections of their political assumptions.

William: William got into the war for the same reason most soldiers on both sides did: it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened, and he didn't want to miss out. However, he was also goaded on by "fire-eaters," those who had been anti-compromise with the north and fiercely for independence. Now, he's got a typical soldier's cynicism about the war. He thinks that "if the question were left to the contending armies we would restore the peace tomorrow & hang both Presidents' cabinets at our earliest convenience."

William is deeply influenced by C.W., who has gone a little feral during the war. C.W. killed a young Northern soldier who was asking to surrender because that soldier had killed a young Southern soldier. C.W. then desecrated the body by laying it on the road for the ambulances to "turn into jelly." C.W. believes the war has made virtues scarce, and that "it requires the faith of a prophet to see any good resulting from so much mayhem, & that perhaps both nations must be destroyed when we consider how much corruption runs riot in high places, & that it may be that our country's day of grace is passed."

On the eve of the battle, as he dashes off his last letter prior to the campaign from which he may not survive, he starts to see the writing on the wall that has eluded him: "I see that Hope calculates its schemes for a long & durable life, & presses us forward to imaginary points of bliss, & grasps at impossibilities, & so ensnares us all."

Lucy: Lucy is a smart young woman who castigates herself constantly for being educated but not useful. She complains of a conversation she takes part in one evening, "Since at the close of the debate we each retained our original positions." This could pretty easily be seen as a comment on all political discussions ever in all periods of history, but it could also be seen as a sly reference to a few characters in the book. Here we are at the end of the Civil War, and the South is suffering mightily for choices it made a few years earlier, but nobody in this story seems to have greatly changed their minds. William is less ardent, but he still thinks they were right to join.

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, suggested that perhaps the nation's suffering was God's justice for centuries of slavery:

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"

This guy gets it. 

Lucy, and the other characters, for all their self-criticism, are not able to transcend to that level of introspection, the kind that leads to a real repentance. Instead, Lucy passes by the subject of blame, moving right on to her feelings for William: "It may be that this national separation that wreaks its passion in slaughter is proof that what was once the best of all human governments was but an experiment and a failure, but I refuse to concede that your heart and mine are not as linked as they have ever been." So the best government on Earth failed--but WHY did it fail? She is not looking this question in the mouth.

Hattie: Hattie is a loving wife. She thinks C.W. is charming, and that people naturally like him more than her (this is the same C.W. who left a boy on the road to be turned into jelly). Coming back from a neighbor's house, she recalls how, "She compared our Republic to Hercules attacked in his crib, and I said all we sought was to go our way alone, and she reminded me that Dr. H in his sermon this last Sunday gave the most excellent discourse on "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," and we agreed that we liked his views with regard to retaliation very much."

What are those thoughts and vengeance, one wonders? That the north deserves vengeance for what it has done? That the south is reaping God's vengeance? That vengeance is beyond either of them to mete out?

It may be the last. Hattie comes close to the same sentiments as Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address at one point: "We can only hope that the God who shows us how little we know of what's good for us will help resign us to His will." Compare this to Lincoln: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

Hattie seems to understand something of how hatred and intolerance can be taught. When Yankees come to her farm and take a few things from her and lodge there, she hears one of them talk. "The Yankee Captain remarked to us that everywhere he goes he encounters people eating with their hands, and that he assumes the further south he proceeds the less learning he will find. Father said after they left that the majority of the Federals have been recruited from the lowbred immigrant classes and induced to fight by sign language. He sees the breach between us and them as so wide that by the War's end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all."

Nonetheless, her ability to understand has limits. That "go our way alone" was a pretty common refrain from Southerners. It had some appeal--at the beginning of the war, even pro-war Northerners didn't know how to justify war, because the Constitution literally had nothing to say about states leaving the Union. But how could people so intent on going their way alone not see that their human property also would have wanted the same thing?


C.W. We don't ever hear from C.W. directly. But he is the most compelling character in the story. William credits him for deciding to go to war: "We all signed up 2 years & 2 months ago now, goaded on by the fire-eating elements of editors & preachers & politicians. & C.W., who still tells one & all he despises the North for flouting the law requiring the return of fugitive slaves & for making a martyr of the likes of John Brown, who took an oath to murder Southern women & children."

This is the only mention of slavery in the story, and it's to complain about how the North didn't respect the South's right to get their escaped slaves back.

C.W. is brave. He is charismatic. He saved his companions at Peachtree Creek. Hattie says everyone apparently liked him better the whole time. But he also brutally killed someone trying to surrender and desecrated his body. Everyone likes him, but they're also missing something important about him. C.W. is still holding on at the end to the will to fight it out over abstract principles.

I think the weight of evidence comes down on judging them for moral indifference

You could read a line like Lucy's "even though the country is going to the dogs, I still love you" as a triumph of the personal over the political, but I think it's meant to be more of an indictment of her for missing the real point. The point isn't that the "government failed," it's that the people of the South failed. The point isn't that God has judged both countries, it's that God has judged YOU.

The story is weighted toward the importance of the political over the personal. It doesn't efface the personal; it merely subordinates it to the political for the duration of the war, like Whitman did. 

I'm fairly sympathetic to Southerners in 1861. I don't think most people would have behaved any differently. You're only as broad as your surroundings let you be, and it just wasn't within the imagination of most Southerners to consider opposing the war effort. Shirking the war effort, maybe, but not opposing it. So even though the story comes down a bit on the side of judging these characters for moral indifference, I'm not that interested in judging them. "Judge not," as Lincoln reminded us.

Perhaps, however, it is fair to use this story as a reminder of why, here in 2019, we can judge those blithely throwing around their failed Southern heritage as a reason to fly a traitor's flag. The grapes of wrath have been trampled out enough for that failed ideology. I don't give people today the same slack I'm willing to give the characters in this story, who don't have the benefit of hindsight we do to have learned from the war.

Our faith in this narrative: "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin

One of the themes I keep coming back to on this blog is to ask the question of whether literature is good for us. It's not just an important question for those who study literature; because humans so naturally turn everything into a story, the same questions about whether literature is good for us can apply to a number of human cognitive processes that involve us telling ourselves stories in order to understand what is happening to us. 

For literature specifically, at least some of the trade-offs are fairly clear. We sacrifice verisimilitude in order to create stories where most events serve a general purpose, be it a purpose of plot, character development, or theme. There are advantages to this; we can deeply examine a particular problem of the human condition by focusing a story entirely on that one problem. But it can also lead to a faulty belief in those who read a lot of stories that the events in their actual lives are, as in a well written story, all are there for a reason. It can lead us to read our lives like they are stories with an externally determined meaning rather than an open narrative we must fill based on our own sense of values. We can, in other words, misread our lives as being one type of narrative when the brute facts of the case imply something else.

Maybe there are some instances where not insisting too much on the truths of our lives helps contribute to survival, such as the person living under unavoidable trauma who finds a way to believe they are living a different life than the one they are. I'm not an orphan being shuffled from one foster home to the next; I'm a prince whose real parents are coming to get him. I'm not in a concentration camp; I'm in an extreme weight loss camp, and once I hit my goal weight, I can go home.

But these few marginal cases are probably dwarfed by the frequency of the counter-example: the person who is destructively misreading her own life because she continually applies an external story she has imagined over top of it. This makes her misinterpret her life over and over. This was the case with just the last story in BASS 2019, "Audition" by Said Sayrafiezadeh, where the main character kept thinking he was an actor just pretending to be a construction laborer, when in fact he really was a construction laborer. And it's the case with the 16th story as well, "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin.

How the narrator misreads her life

Jen, the first-person narrator, is looking back later in life to the time when she and her former husband moved from New York to Oklahoma. Jen's husband, Steven, has just been sent there by the oil company he works for. As soon as Jen hears of the promotion and the move, she begins to create a narrative into which this new event fits. Jen recalls how this was something she did about everything back then. "You see, I lived then guided by the unconscious notion that the story of my life as I was meant to live it was already written in a secret, locked away text. At the end, I would finally be able to open it and read the story that had been written there all along--its arc, its twists and turns, it motifs and themes, it most evocative lines."

This ability to put her life into a secret story has helped both her and Steven to get through the lean years in New York, when they lived off meager means, accompanied by a variety of "manageably unpleasant odors," like mice decomposing in the walls. Their "faith in this narrative" allowed them to "delight even in (their) frequent arguments," and to "enjoy things that were not, in themselves, enjoyable." So reading her life as part of a secret story has had advantages, but it will also cause her to misread the next part of her life, the part in Oklahoma, because she is still trying to see every event as part of this secret narrative.

There's a little bit of this idea going on in the story, but that's not the only idea being developed.

She recalls that both she and Steven were living in Oklahoma "ironically." This partly means that they were living there like stuck-up New York elitists, having a laugh at the unsophisticated locals. She and Steven get a chuckle out of the fact that their neighborhood is called "Amber Ridge," although there is no ridge. But "living ironically" also means, for Jen, that she will think often while she is in Oklahoma as though she isn't really there, or at the very least, like she is just passing through, doing nothing more in Oklahoma than picking up anecdotes to fill the book of her life's story. She tended this collection of anecdotes "with the vigor of an avid hobbyist, savoring the delicious irony of a place that conformed exactly to my hackneyed expectations."

There are two reasons she is collecting these little pieces of Oklahoma life. One is that she thinks thereby she can get some sense of the essence of the Oklahoma part of her life: "I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that these typifying images converged upon a deeper truth." That is, she thinks the place is nothing more than the sum of its parts. But there's a deeper reason, and this is where the real critique of fiction as a cognitive process comes in.

God help us, she's a writer

The second reason she collects stories is that she's by nature a writer. This isn't a story about a writer, exactly, although the woman is, by her own admission, good at writing. She takes a job writing those little real estate blurbs--you know the ones, "this two-story craftsman is country living at its finest, a real stunner!" She partly takes this job because she's having difficulty adjusting to life in Oklahoma. It's this difficulty that makes her realize, much later, that there's no such thing as living ironically. You might think it's hilarious that you, with your college education and your gift for bons mots, are living in Oklahoma, but you're still there, the same as everyone else who is there. You don't get to escape feeling depressed. When the giant, open spaces fill you with terror, those open spaces don't realize you don't belong there, that you're not like everybody else.

Jen finds working writing these blurbs for a real estate agent helps calm her symptoms of depression. Maybe because they allow her to not focus so much on the wide, open spaces, but on the limited spaces of the houses. It also helps that Bethany, the real estate agent, seems to teach Jen a thing or two about how to be "apart without seeming to keep herself apart." That is, how to live cognizant of the incongruity of being somewhere, but nonetheless with sincerity and without irony.

When Bethany asks if Jen is a good writer, Jen does not hesitate to say "yes." However, she later qualifies this within her recollection: "I could give the impression of meaning and insight, of grand convergence, and if you weren't paying careful attention you might not notice that beneath the rhythms of thought the argument was facile, even specious."

Isn't that the problem with any good writer? That they can tell us a story so compelling-sounding, we don't realize we've been completely bamboozled by how pleasant the words and images are and so miss how much we've been lied to?

The "part of the story I've been working up to this whole time"

Indeed, although Jen gets better at interpreting the data in her life--learning to respect the women around her for their strange, inner strength that comes to them from God-knows-where, she continues misreading events up to the end. The climax comes when Jen goes out to see the fanciest house she ever visits in order to write her blurb about it. It's right on the edge of the endless prairie, and, unlike all the homes she's been to, there's a man inside instead of a woman. And a good looking one, too. She immediately compares him in her head to every good looking cowboy in every movie she's ever seen. His name, Mac, seems to fit the cowboy image.

Mac is awkward in the home, which Jen attributes to "a certain male cluelessness--he didn't have the instinct to monitor and steer things the way a woman did, I thought." When he seems embarrassed by how nice his home is, she assumes that "he was one of those rich people whose good fortune embarrassed him." She starts inventing theories for why he is living out there all alone.

But she's wrong about all of it, which she doesn't discover until a tornado threatens to break right on top of them, forcing her and Mac to run to the shelter together.

While in the shelter with Mac, Jen can't resist resorting to the "secret book" of her life again. The storm is raging outside. He's close to her, and he's so good looking. He could just reach out, brush back her wet hair, and she'd be his. "I had the exhilarating sense that for the first time I was living a page from the secret text of my life."

No sooner does she imagine this than the storm abates and she learns who he really is and why the house is for sale. It turns out that the place belonged to his brother, who was killed recently in a car accident after safely returning from serving in the military in Desert Storm.  She's misread real life again, because she keeps trying to superimpose the kind of logic that works in fiction on real life.

Does Jen get the moral to her own story?

Jen offers to interpret the meaning of her story for us at the end. It's a tentative but convincing attempt to read the events of her life. She's since gotten divorced from Steven, a divorce that should have been obvious all along, if only she'd be cognizant of the signs. She's moved several times since then. She offers this as part one of what she's learned: "a place and its disasters--its fathomless, inscrutable unknows--are not separable. Oklahoma is its tornadoes, just as Maine, even on the mildest of spring days, is its snows, is a caved roof and a woman asleep in her bed, and then gone. The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you."

She notes when she reads about Mac's brother's life in an old newspaper that it "sounds like something from a story, almost too...on-the-nose, to be real." She can't even recognize reality, because reality to her now seems like fiction. That's why I'm not sure we ought to trust Jen a few pages later when she returns to her "disasters" understanding of her life. In the penultimate sentence, she theorizes that "Life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us."

That sounds profound. But is it? By Jen's own admission, she's capable of slipping us crap and making us think, if we're not careful, that it is some kind of deep knowledge. Jen thinks that Oklahoma is somehow not itself now, because by pouring water into the Earth for fracking, it is not suffering earthquakes, meaning its organic disasters have shifted. But does this hold up? Isn't this just another example of Jen trying to force one story onto reality when reality is trying to offer us something else? Earthquakes are very much part of Oklahoma's nature, at least now, because Oklahoma is having earthquakes. So don't come in with your writer's notions of the right and wrong kinds of disasters. These aren't ironic earthquakes.

I'd guess most readers will take Jen at her word by the end. Life is the disasters we carry inside us. She's really overcome her early-life tendency to read a story into everything. She's dropping wisdom on us. But what the hell does "we are the disasters we carry inside us" mean? That sounds like faux wisdom to me, the kind of thing an ersatz guru would drop on his credulous followers. It's Jen now being ironic, or trying to be, about herself as a natural-born writer who relates to the world the way writers do. But she hasn't really transcended this tendency. She's just denied it. Rather than learn to interpret better, she's learned to interpret much worse by falling into even deeper "facile, even specious" thinking.

As if to throw us off the trail that this "we are the disasters" nugget is specious, Jen offers up a strawman interpretation right before her own: "Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret. A girl left the city and learned a thing or two. A silly young woman hoped to be ravished by a man who was not her husband. A marriage fell apart, and afterward a wife was wiser, though in some ways no better, than she had been before." And right after the "life is the disasters inside us line," she harkens back to her writing as a real-estate blurbist: "(Life) is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away." I think Jen really wants us to side with this reading. 

But I think Jen has missed another reading. Life can be a story. It's just isn't a secret story. It's the story life shows us. It's what we experience, not what we wish we were experiencing. When life is showing us something, we shouldn't ignore that data, preferring the story we've created in our heads.