So my point isn't to try to force some unifying theme out of these twenty stories, but maybe to offer a quick observation on good and bad applications of diversity. It's been decades now since Best American Short Stories, following trends in American intellectual circles, began to see diversity as a legitimate aim of its anthologies. The stories should not just be written about a diversity of subjects, but the actual demographics of the writers themselves ought to be considered in putting it together. This can mean different things to different editors. Last year, Roxane Gay included only four cis-men in the 2018 BASS. Just under half the writers were white. She isn't the first guest editor in the Best American universe history to take this approach.
Anthony Doerr, meanwhile, took a more conventional approach. The demographics of the writers he chose is a little more in line with the demographics of America, or at least as much as that is possible with a pie that can only be sliced twenty ways. There's at least some representation from pretty much every kind of group that "ought" to be there. The only exception might be LGBTQIA+ writers. I don't look deeply into the biographies of the writers, typically, so I might be wrong, but I don't think there were any LGBTQIA+ writers this year. There might have been, and they just chose to write about something other than queer/gender identity issues. But otherwise, Doerr gave us everything we've come to expect in terms of the range of stories and the range of writer identities.
You'd think that Doerr would have produced the better collection. Since Gay had a political axe to grind and Doerr was not aiming as specifically to promote writers from traditionally neglected groups, you'd think that Doerr would have found more compelling work. That's because Doerr would have: A) Had a larger pool of work to choose from, and B) Been more interested in quality of the work than in the identity of the writer.
But it didn't work out like that at all. Gay's anthology felt fresh, with an outsider kind of angry energy. Doerr's collection felt staid and flat. It felt establishment. The stories all had artistic merit. Some were outstanding. But there wasn't much novelty in most of the stories, nothing that isn't already a prominent feature of the American literary landscape.
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| Posting this is possibly the most normie thing I could do, but it gets the point across |
There's a term I've picked up from my son through Internet culture: normie. It's a derogatory term used by various niche cultures on the Internet to describe those who will lazily accept what is mainstream. Normies will eventually embrace elements of outsider culture as they inevitably tire of the same fare over and over, but only after they have co-modified it and homogenized it to meet mainstream tastes. Normies will never innovate. Normies will be suspicious of whatever is outside their experience up to the moment when they find a version of it they like, at which point they will ruin whatever was unique about it as they consume a bastardized version of the once-edgy thing.
That was BASS 2019. In 2018, Roxane Gay gave us a raw version of diversity, which means she explored some of the weird and unknown manifestations of diversity that truly undiscovered voices can give us. Doerr picked enough stories from non-white authors and enough stories about subjects with topics related to diversity that he wouldn't be accused of being racist or sexist.
But while the stories he chose from white authors were very strong, he didn't pick great ones from non-white writers, with the notable exception of "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley. And I don't think the stories from non-white writers are the kinds of stories the communities those writers come from would have picked to represent themselves. It's like if YouTube wanted to honor meme culture in a "Best of YouTube" clip and picked "Behind the Meme" as its choice. Yes, a lot of people watch that channel, but they're not the people who create the memes in the first place, the ones always pushing the envelope of the weird and the creative. Gay, in other words, picked interesting stories precisely because she was deep enough in certain outsider cultures she found something that wasn't already played out in the mainstream. Doerr picked outsider things that appealed to his mainstream perspective, which ended up feeling nearly the same as just picking mainstream things.
The concept of diversity is fantastic. It's an attempt to channel the best of democracy by ensuring we are listening to all the great ideas, not just the mainstream ones. But we have to recognize that we are several decades into diversity as a concept itself becoming mainstream. Alongside truly outsider diversity is a co-modified establishment diversity, one that isn't really revolutionary or trail-blazing or even very interesting. Like establishment religion, it can be faked, with equally tepid and unconvincing results.
I think the best way to avoid falling into establishment diversity in future volumes is for the editors to feel freer to choose what really enchants them. The diversity in stories should be a function of diversity in editors, which means some years are going to focus more on traditionally marginalized voices than others. Gay chose nearly all stories from traditionally marginalized voices, and the results were phenomenal. (Interestingly to me, the two weakest stories I thought she picked were the two stories by white men. This parallels how the weakest stories Doerr picked were those not by white people.)
Having been picked to guest edit BASS, I think editors should honestly pick what fascinates them. If you're an angry, black, bisexual woman and you pick eighteen stories by something other than white men, great. At least there's a good chance I'll be reading the best of what you love produced that year. And even your choices from traditionally heard voices will be interesting, even if they're not great. By the same token, if you're a stodgy, white guy who went to Brown and you produce a stream of 800-page novels on the hypocrisies of white middle-class America, feel free to pick seventeen stories by white men. At least those might be the best stories by white men that year.
That's not to say a white guy couldn't pick eleven stunners written by Latina feminists. It's certainly not to say Doerr knowingly made his selections cynically. But the result was similar to what a cynically chosen list would have produced. The only way to ensure that the stories any editor picks really resonate is for the editor to feel no obligation whatsoever to satisfy any sort of establishment, even an establishment that was created to support as beautiful an idea as diversity.
I hope you are glad you did the wrap-up. I use it, not to unite the stories, but to look back on the experience.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment. It wasn't a banner year in my view, though I found it still worth reading. But some readers of course will think it was great, and that last year was awful.
Thank you for adding so much to my reads for these past 2 years, ad intermittently before that. I'm still hoping you'll be ready for more by next fall, but who knows what any of us will be up for by then.