The limits of literary fiction: a wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2020

I believe this is the eighth year I've read Best American Short Stories now, and I'd put the 2020 edition in the top three of those eight in terms of quality of stories.  One of the unique merits it had, which I'll credit to guest editor Curtis Sittenfeld, was something I alluded to in my post on the last story in the anthology, "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique. That is, the volume worked better as a whole than any other edition I've seen. It was amazing how much the stories, none of which were written with the other stories in the volume in mind, responded to one another. Nonetheless, in spite of the excellence of many stories individually and how well they worked together (in fact, perhaps because of how good a volume it was), BASS 2020 also kept reinforcing for me a number of limitations of literary fiction that have more or less been in the back of my mind since graduate school. Sittenfeld's own introduction to the anthology served to crystalize a few of these limitations in my mind:  

1. Literary fiction moves slow: BASS in any given year looks at stories published in the year before. The basic model seems to go something like this: series editor Heidi Pitlor picks 120 stories from however many stories she starts with--likely several hundreds that were originally published between December of the year prior to November of the current year. Pitlor then gives those 120 stories to the guest editor in several batches between November and March of the next year. The guest editor finishes picking twenty by the end of March, the proofs get ironed out, and it gets published in October (COVID-19 made it late this year). 

That means the 2020 BASS featured stories originally published as far back as December 2018, which means the stories themselves could have been written as far back as 2017 or even earlier, since once a story is written, it can take over a year to find a market to publish it, and then another several months for it to be published. 

Both Heidi and Curtis mentioned COVID-19 in their remarks on this year's anthology, but because both wrote those remarks in the early spring, by the time BASS came out, their thoughts were completely overtaken by events. Naturally, none of the stories in Best American Short Stories 2020 is aware COVID is a thing, which means the short story anthology bearing the name of the year the pandemic struck doesn't address the pandemic. That will have to wait until the 2021 anthology. Or maybe 2022, since most of the stories published in literary magazines in 2020 were written in 2019, also before the pandemic, meaning nobody was aware of it in those stories, either. (I wrote a pandemic story in the first weeks of the outbreak. Four of the journals I sent it to have not yet looked at it, to give you some idea of the speed at which literary journals work sometimes.) 

Roxane Gay, writing in a BASS introduction a few years ago, defended fiction writers for not being able to crank out the definitive story on the meaning of the Trump election in the months after it happened. She pointed out that fiction writing doesn't work like that. You can't just say "here is crisis X" and expect writers to produce work on that crisis. Great work takes time to process events. Sometimes, it takes a very long time, in order to get enough distance to get control of the subject. (Here, I think of the first chapter of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, where he discusses how his anti-war novel was the first novel he tried to write, but he kept failing at it for decades, until he'd written many other books, before he finally knew how to write it. It's worth noting that BASS 2020 had one story in it about the fallout of the 2016 election, "In the Event," reflecting somewhat how long it can take for art to reflect changes in reality.) 

I understand all of that, and maybe it is enough to be able to point, in an emergency, to a book written earlier though the slow-cooking process that seems to respond to something similar. Maybe there was no great novel in 2020 about the pandemic, but there is The Plague by Albert Camus. 

Still, it feels sometimes like how long it takes to create work that responds to current events is a huge limitation of literary fiction. There are TV shows now that work COVID into the story lines. If a TV show, with all the massive logistics that go into it, can respond on that fast a timetable, why can't literature, which really just requires the ability to transmit text? 

Journalism relies on a two-tiered approach. It does both breaking news and longer-term, in-depth reporting. Both are needed to give a democratic society the information it needs to make good decisions. I can't help but feel that literature could also benefit from stories written from the gut in the middle of a crisis, stories that have limited editing and are turned around quickly. 

There are some places where this exists, some journals that turn things around on a dime. But with so many journals out there, it's difficult for any one story to gain enough traction culturally to have an impact on the public psyche. Fiction writing is failing to inject itself into public discourse meaningfully. For better or worse, anthologies like BASS are required to give a busy public the essential reading they need. Even I rely on the anthologies, because there are thousands of journals, and I'm not going to read through them all or even more than maybe a small handful of them, although I likely read more literary fiction than about ninety-eight percent of the general public. But the time lag with anthologies means the stories people read in them are always going to be unaware of today's events. It has the effect of making literary fiction always feel behind the times, maybe even a little irrelevant. 

I have no doubt editors are always working hard, but books get published on slower schedules than the ones used by general contractors. 

2. Literary fiction as a business suffers from both hegemony and post-hegemony. Sittenfeld wrote in her introduction about being "disenchanted with the so-called literary industrial complex," even while admitting she benefitted from being on the inside of this complex. She felt the industry has a penchant for producing buzz not in line with the quality of a work. Everything is supposedly spell-binding or mesmerizing, while Sittenfeld often finds herself bailing on these supposedly spell-binding works early on. 

The reason every work must be praised to absurd levels is because the supply of quality literary work far outstrips the demand. There are still a few gatekeepers with the power to sell enough books for a work to succeed commercially. Oprah. To a lesser extent, Roxane Gay. High-profile reviewers still have some influence, although not nearly as much as they once did. Awards also tend to give book a much-needed shot in the arm. Outside the few lucky writers blessed by these gods, there are hundreds of finely crafted novels every year languishing for the attention they deserve, along with thousands of short stories. It's like an electronics market in Seoul where everyone is selling the same things; the only thing to distinguish them is how loud the person hawking his wares is. 

BASS is definitely inside the literary-industrial complex. It tends to feature more big-name authors than, say, the Pushcart anthology does, and the guest editor is unfailingly a big name. Being in BASS is one of the few gifts the industry can still bestow on an undiscovered author to give her career a shot in the arm. (Although some of the writers I follow on Twitter were published in BASS and now still seem to be struggling.) BASS helps overcome the lack of hegemony in publishing by providing one place where writers can rise above the noise of the marketplace somewhat. It's hard to sell your work as a writer, but if you've been in BASS, you have a somewhat better chance. In that sense, the power of the few remaining outposts of literary establishment strength are of great value to writers. Hegemony is helpful. It might not be great for those outside it, but at least there's a goal to strive toward that, once achieved, will provide writers with some semblance of what they were hoping for. Without an establishment, there could well be a sort of law of thermodynamics of the marketplace in effect in which there are thousands of writers, none of whom can gain enough notice to sell more than a handful of books. 

Or would it? Are markets really not able to self-regulate? Aren't there always a few outsider books that succeed without the help of the establishment, through word of mouth? 

The establishment's effect on aesthetics 

Sittenfeld listed, as most guest editors do, a sort of "what I look for in a story" summary in her introduction. It's pretty similar to what I'd have said while I was an editor with The Baltimore Review, or what I now say as a fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House: "My favorite feeling as a reader is the confidence that the writer is in control, is one step (or more) ahead of me, possesses a knowing sensibility that he or she is unfurling as the narrative demands." In other words, as readers, we like to have a feeling we're in good hands. I completely agree. 

There's something else I look for in a story, though, that I would describe as the feeling the writer could not help but write this story, that it was eating a hole in her gut, and that she is personally invested in it in much more than a professional sense. Occasionally, this leads to a story, or at least parts of a story, where it seems to me the writer is not totally in control, where it seems the narrative has become so full of fury or passion that the writer is now throwing punches with all his might, heedless of technique or the need to keep his own guard up. Writing with no technique and all passion is unreadable, but writing that's all technique and no passion is unmemorable. 

The literary establishment is useful in that at least some writers can succeed commercially nowadays, but it comes with a cost. The cost is that there is a way to write to get into that establishment and a way not to write. I don't think it's true, as some people charge, that everyone with an MFA writes the same, and I don't believe all the stories in BASS sound the same, but there must be some real thing people feel that makes this such a common statement. 

Maybe it would be accurate to say there is a general center of gravity for the "literary establishment aesthetic." There are certain things a writer does to give editors the feeling of being "in control" of the story, and there are, perhaps, certain political viewpoints that are considered safe, certain topics one is at least advised to stay away from, if none that is specifically recommended. 

On the other hand, the editors of the Pushcart anthology have expressed that a certain unpolished rawness is something they actively seek out. Stories in Pushcart more often seem to speak to issues that affect me on an existential level. They feel more like they were written by people thinking things I think and living the kind of life I live, whereas BASS sometimes has a more rarified feel. (NOTE: This year, Pushcart and BASS overlap on FOUR stories, something I've never seen before.) Not that BASS never allows in outsiders. Clearly, they do. I think every editor strives for balance when putting together a volume, and part of that balance is picking new voices. But the very careful selection of that balance sometimes feels a little contrived, and I might actually prefer something a little unbalanced. The best BASS I've read yet was that one put together by Roxane Gay, which was the one that made the least effort to spread around the demographics equitably. 

Sittenfeld spoke of a middle ground between wide-eyed wonder at the excellence of stories and cynicism about the marketplace. I think there is also, maybe, a middle ground between the well-polished, industry-approved story that makes no impact in the lives of its readers and the written-in-a-coke-addled-weekend raw story of existential dread. Of the stories I thought best from BASS 2020, some fit my "story that felt like the writer had no choice but to write it" criteria ("Godmother Tea," "This is Pleasure," "Rubberdust," "Kennedy," and "Octopus VII") and some did not ("Something Street" and "The Nanny"). Just like a writer can have a burning existential issue and seek to find the fictional technique to fit it, a writer can feel a story come to them from a more aesthetic than existential place, but find the existential importance of the story while writing it. All the stories in BASS 2020 that didn't work for me, though, (and where, unlike Sittenfeld, I don't think it's just a question of the story not being for me, but the story actually not being worth reading) felt like they were written by a professional writer straining to find a story to write about, "The Apartment" being chief among those. ("Liberte" I can chalk up to my own idiosyncrasies, as well, perhaps, as "Enlightenment.")  

I can indulge a writer in almost anything she wants to try, but I cannot abide a writer who does not consider that a reader comes to her work looking for answers to certain burning questions of how to make sense of the world, nor writing that seems as if the writer has left all those burning questions behind her, like only naive and pretentious freshmen like those in "The Special World" ask such questions. I don't have time for writing written by someone who isn't made dizzy continually by being in a world that ultimately makes so little sense. 

Perhaps these two limits of literary fiction, the lack of timeliness and the way establishment fiction sometimes fails to address the central-most questions of its readers, are related. The need for emotional distance needed for art always risks becoming a little too distant, much like the pastor who spends so much time preparing his sermon he is not aware that half his congregation was just laid off. There is both a prophetic role for authors as well as a pastoral one, if I may use that analogy, and in the best writers, the ones who matter most to me, the two roles work together. 

I do not write to indict the literary fiction establishment (which, let's be honest, struggles so much with commercial viability it's a little hard to think of it as an "establishment;" in the big picture, even the giants of lit fic are indie darlings). Obviously, the big names of literary fiction speak to me often enough I spend time every year carefully reading Best American Short Stories, responding to every entry. I mean only to suggest as a reader with existential needs that "establishment" stories tend, when they fail, to do so because they leave me a little cold when I consider why they matter, whereas "outsider" stories, if they fail, do so because the writer has not gained enough control over the thing that matters I learn anything new about it.  

The story I thought would never get published

Although I've been fond of this story since it came off my fingers two years ago, I really thought it would never get published. As a friend of mine I shared it with told me, even though it seems like I'm not making fun of #metoo, it's not so clear that an editor can be sure, so they're just going to be safe and reject it. I finally found one editor at the Maryland Literary Review crazy enough to take a chance on it. See what you think. Wonderfully fabulist tale of wrongs that can't be undone, or white guy spewing nonsense: 

I give you: Collision.  

Hero's journey for the black man: "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique

Every year, when I read through Best American Short Stories, there are at least a few coincidences that make me think the order of stories was chosen on purpose, even though I know that the stories are put in the sequence they're in based solely on the alphabetical order of last names of authors. This year's collection has probably set a record for the number of times I've felt like the stories are doing a call-and-answer with one another, and the final story in the collection, "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique, does it more than any other story. Not only is it a story about a black character struggling with trying to understand what authentic blackness is when surrounded by white norms, making it a perfect bookend to "Godmother Tea," the opening story in the collection, it also contains a reference to a Mahalia Jackson song, like Carolyn Ferrell's "Something Street," and it plays with the notion of invisibility, much like Kevin Wilson's "Kennedy," the story just before "The Special World." If guest editor Curtis Sittenfeld intended to pick not just twenty stories she liked, but twenty stories that somehow actually worked well together in spite of not having been written with the collection in mind, she succeeded mightily.

This final story is playing throughout with a well-worn way of looking at classical literature known as the "hero's journey." Concocted by Joseph Campbell, it's an attempt to find common traits in many heroic stories in world literature. You can Google it and find a number of graphic representations of the stages of the hero's journey, but I'm going to use the one that seems to be the closest to that which "The Special World" is playing with. 

 

Obviously, some stories fit the model better than others. I first learned about Campbell's model in college when we were discussing Star Wars. It fits well for stories like The Odyssey or The Hobbit. As Yanique will point out in her story, though, it doesn't fit everything, and you probably wouldn't want it to, because "anything that follows a formula is useless anyhow." 

The basics of the formula are that someone is living their normal life, then there is a call to go on an adventure. The hero resists the call before finally answering it. Once on the journey, the hero faces a series of trials that begin to change the hero. Finally, he faces one, singular defining trial which changes him so profoundly, the old him dies, leaving a new, resurrected version of him in its place. This resurrected version then goes back to the ordinary world, but as a changed man, meaning the ordinary world around him is changed, too. 

I have to admit, I was a little leery of the story at first, because it seemed to be making more out of college than I think it deserves. College does, certainly, forever change most people who go, but it's also a rather ordinary part of life. To give college epic status seemed a little overstating its importance. (Also, it just reminded me of "A Different World," an 80s/90s Cosby Show spinoff about students at an HBCU.) 

But once I got to the end, I realized that this story was trying to appropriate Campbell's model for black men, to bend it and break it until it fit a little better, and the experiences of Fly, the main character, do fit this new model. Or, rather, they show why it's so hard to make a model for black men. 

The story is split up into nine sections, all of which fit some version of Campbell's model, with one exception. I'll follow that order while analyzing the story. 

Section One: The Ordinary World

In Campbellian theory, this is the status quo for our main character. In The Hobbit, Bilbo lives a life of quiet content, although he has adventure in his blood and doesn't realize it. His life is made up of peacefully moving from one meal to the next, punctuated by smoking his pipe. This is the world that will be upset and which the main character will have to leave. 

For Fly, the main character of "The Special World," his ordinary world has been the life he's lived with his parents prior to the first day of college, when his parents drop him off at the dorm. Unlike other students, Fly doesn't want them to come in. He goes to his room and skips orientation. 

Fly's ordinary world, his status quo, seems to involve an indelible loneliness. The night prior to coming to school, he'd felt "nervous, and alone in that feeling." His loneliness seems to be re-inscribed, rather than erased, by the situation in the dorms. Whereas many college freshman find themselves living for the first time with people unlike any they'd ever known, Fly has a single room. He's one of the few students who does. His RA, Clive, struggles to figure out why. He assumes it's because Fly has some kind of serious allergy.  

Section Two: Call to Adventure

Fly's real call isn't just going to college; it's being asked to go to church off campus. Suzie and Arthur, two white people, ask him to go. They're apparently very into their church. This doesn't seem like much of an adventure, either, on the surface: for many people, going to church is very much part of their "ordinary world." But we'll learn later why it's part of the "special" world. 

Section Three: Refusal of the Call

Things are going well for Fly at college. He's hanging out with people from his Intro to World Religions class, smoking pot at parties, listening to typical freshman pseudo-profundity and spouting off some of his own. He's got no time for church, because who needs it? 

One of the stoned comments of freshman insight bears looking at. It's the notion that religion provides a socially acceptable avenue for male homo-erotic behavior. This is going to come up again. 

Section Four: Traversing the threshold

In this section, Suzie, a.k.a. Sue, a.k.a. Suzanna, depending on which version of herself she's being, is walking away, and Fly is literally at the threshold to his dorm room, watching her leave for church without him. Fly's happy to let her go, but when Clive specifically tries to warn him that this church is a cult, suddenly, that is the intervention that spurs Fly to go. If Clive's against it, then Fly is for it. 

As soon as Fly enters the special world, the world beyond the threshold to the normal, he finds, somewhat Matrix-like, that the world he thought was the "ordinary" world was actually hiding secrets. At one point, while still in the ordinary world, Fly saw people of color eating together in the school cafeteria and wondered where they were all hiding all the time, because he hardly ever saw any. Once at church, though, he realizes that Suzie and Arthur were also people of color. In fact, the church seems, suddenly, once his eyes are opened, to be full of people of color: "All the people of color were camouflaged. Maybe they had been around Fly all the time, and he'd been too self-absorbed to notice. Maybe he was camouflaged too."

Perhaps Fly's essential loneliness can be cured, now that his eyes have been opened. He's not alone. There are others like him. Perhaps this is why Clive, the white dwarf who had tried to guard the threshold to the special world, wanted to keep Fly from attending. Clive pretended to be Fly's "brother," although not in the jive sense, but in reality, he may have been part of the white power structure trying to keep Fly feeling isolated. 

Section Five: Tests, Allies, and Enemies

Immediately after going to church, two things happen to fly: he is in love with Suzanna, now that he knows she is black, and he is tired all the time. We will learn in a later section that Fly had porn at home. The porn collection was magazines of black girls on the top and white girls on the bottom, as though he was secretly attracted to white women, but had to cover it over with an attraction to black girls. One of his first thoughts when he thought Suzie was white was that he couldn't bring her home to his parents. 

Suzie seems to solve the riddle for Fly of how to resolve his attraction to both black and white girls, because Suzie, the lightest-skin black girl he's ever seen, can be either. 

The "tests" in "Tests, Allies, and Enemies" are actual school tests. The allies are his new church friends. I was momentarily a little disturbed trying to figure out who the enemies are, because it seemed like the only possible enemies in the chapter are the Jews who claim they aren't really white. There's Clive, of course, but he's one enemy, not enemies, plural. Which means the only other possible enemies seemed to be the Jewish kids. However, once viewed from the end, it's possible to read the Jews as allies, albeit unexpected ones Fly can't quite get his head around, while Suzie and Albert are the real enemies in disguise. 

Section Six: Approach to the Innermost Cave, or, The Meeting with the Goddess

Any nineteen-year-old would take talk of an "innermost cave" in a sexual way, and that's exactly what it means here. Suzie, turned on that Fly is starting to be into God, first starts giving him oral sex and then, after he is formally "saved," allows him to partially penetrate her. It seems like typical evangelical hijinks, the kind of stuff that gets skewered in HBO's Crashing, how evangelicals will split hairs between vaginal sex and things like hand jobs or blow jobs. Maybe Suzie really just does want to maintain some kind of technical virginity out of a sense of Christian virtue. We don't learn until later that there was something truly awful about her refusal to let him fully inside her "innermost cave." 

Within this section, we once again get a hint that church is linked to homo-eroticism. After getting saved, Fly is hugged by a number of men, receiving "more male affection than he'd ever received." He's far more fascinated by the female hugs, but still, the idea that religion allows for male intimacy in ways that nothing else does is reintroduced. 

Section Seven: The Ordeal

Fly thinks he's found a solid answer to both his loneliness and also to constructing identity in church. He doesn't stop to think that his parents also met in church, that it was also the beginning to their sad story. 

Clive, the one who never wanted Fly to go to church and discover the place where all the colored people could appear as themselves, is the one who puts the seed of doubt in his mind. He says he's seen Suzie romantically involved with freshmen before. Clive, thinking he's finally figured out that the reason Fly had the single room is because he's gay, suggests that maybe it's some kind of conversion therapy, trying to turn gay men straight through Suzie's enormous sex appeal.  

This is the third time someone has linked the church to homosexual or homo-erotic behavior, but Fly is very clearly not gay. Clive has failed to understand that the real reason Fly got the single room is that for any black man who wishes to live as himself, loneliness is unavoidable. 

The cumulative effect for all this linking church with homo-eroticism is to cancel its appeal for heterosexual black men. What could have been a place for much-needed intimacy, a place to undo the loneliness that is the "ordinary" world for a black man, is negated by making it seem it is only for people not like him. 

Section Eight: Atonement with the Father

This is the section title that doesn't really correspond to Campbellian theory, although fathers are an archetype Campbell does discuss. Fly's father, we find out, has been dealing with mental illness his whole life. His father also, for some reason, kept a sex tape with a former girlfriend, a tape that ended up in the inner sanctum of Fly's porn collection. 

Fly has apparently had a lot of resentment built up against his father, and it comes to a head when the father decides to leave his mom. But when his father hands Fly Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, there is suddenly a truly holy moment, the moment when the father is giving his son the real esoteric knowledge that the secret world was supposed to reveal to him, because he is presenting his son with the sacred text that can explain all the reasons for Fly's essential loneliness. There are limits to the applicability of the Campbellian formula for a black man, because the formula was never written with black men in mind. Rather than a cycle that can help relieve Fly of his loneliness, the hero cycle for a black man is more about understanding why that loneliness is somewhat unavoidable. 

Just as the story has altered Campbell's steps to meet Fly's needs, though, it has no intention of sticking closely to any model, even a model as revered as Invisible Man. As we'll find out in the next section, ""Anything that followed a formula was useless anyhow," so Fly needs to find a new template for the hero's journey, one that fits his experience as a black man in America in his time. 

Section Nine: The Road Back

Turns out his sleepiness was mono. Turns out, Suzie gets engaged to Arthur, the man she was saving herself for, the man God created for her. So maybe her "sluttiness" with Fly really was missionary sluttiness after all. Far more damaging to Fly's heterosexual black male image than Clive thinking he's gay is the fact that Suzie only was having semi-sex with him because she thought he might be. Fly has returned to his ordinary world, which is to say, to his fundamental loneliness: "So Fly was alone again."

Is he changed? Has he come back from the special world a different man, such that he can change the ordinary world around him? An important part of the Campbellian cycle is resurrection, the moment the character comes back from the special world, reborn into the ordinary one. We are told there is no resurrection possible for the father, but is it possible for the son?

It's hard to see how. Fly's self-image is even worse than it was before. It isn't that some people have thought he was gay, it's that being authentic and vulnerable and intimate is so automatically linked to homosexuality; since Fly knows he's not gay, he feels like all the other things that are assumed to be part of homosexual identity--things Fly really needs--are not for him. Fly has been made to think that his loneliness is because he longs for an unmanly intimacy, when in fact, it's got nothing to do with sexual identity. "Just because I was lonely doesn't mean I was gay. And was lonely what gay people were anyway?" 

If there is redemption for Fly, it isn't that he'll be able to escape being lonely. It's that he might have a greater understanding of what it causing his loneliness. 

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense paid more attention to something I only alluded to, the importance of vulnerability in this story. For her take, go here. 

Why we homeschool our son: "Kennedy" by Kevin Wilson

Like a lot of people, I had more time in 2020 to watch television than I've had in past years. We're supposedly living in the Golden Age of American Television, and every week there's another series on all the four main streaming services that gets rave reviews, so there ought to be a lot to interest me. But I sort of feel like the Golden Age has already passed. Most of the shows everyone is praising seem to me now like a reiteration of some earlier show, an attempt to recreate the magic that has the form but not the soul that made the original worth watching. 

Some of the exceptions are shows about adolescents, like Netflix's Big Mouth and Hulu's PEN15. Adolescent shows have always been built around humor that takes advantage of the awkwardness of being a teen. These shows aren't an exception, but they also don't overlook how deep and lasting the psychological damage of teen years can be. Particularly the fourth season of Big Mouth, which just came out this month, is equal parts sex/scatological humor and also a sensitive portrayal of how what we tend to write off as routine nuisances of youth can lead to long-term psychological disorders. 

Kevin Wilson's "Kennedy," the next-to-the-last story in Best American Short Stories 2020, is another in this line of stories about adolescence that take what happens in the teen years seriously. "Kennedy," however, doesn't share the humor of the best shows tackling the subject. (Although much like PEN15, it features two friends, one of whom is Japanese in a town where there are almost no other Asian kids.) "Kennedy" gets dark fast:

John F. Kennedy was a boy in our high school, but he went by Kennedy. For a brief time, he made things pretty bad for us. We’d started our junior year without ever having exchanged a single word with him, had only seen him as he stalked the hallways, his long, greasy hair covering his face, his Coke-bottle glasses. He always wore this olive green military jacket with the name KENNEDY stitched across the right breast. Underneath that, he seemed to have every single Cannibal Corpse T-shirt in existence, a never-ending parade of skeletons and knives and blood and people with the skin ripped off their faces. He wasn’t allowed to wear the T-shirts at school, since they were against the dress code, so he wore the jacket over them, even when it was hot out, and if he sensed your weakness, he’d open his jacket and flash the T-shirt at you as he passed you in the hallway.

You'd think that naming the kid JFK would mean there was some kind of idiosyncratic humor on its way, but it's mostly absent. The story is a recollection of how the narrator and his best friend Ben allowed Kennedy to abuse them, terrify them, and, ultimately, to come between them. It's reminiscent of a lot of stories sexual abuse victims tell, mainly because of the way the victims find themselves too shell-shocked to fight. The narrator, Jaime, thinks it's maybe because he was coddled by his parents, leaving him "without street smarts, with no sense of how to navigate high school." 

Charles Baxter said that hell is full of great stories, and for many people, the closest they got to hell was high school (or junior high). 

Whatever the reason, when Kennedy throws a backpack at Ben and Ben doesn't complain, the psychopathic Kennedy realizes he can have his way with the two friends. There are a number of reasons they feel they can't complain to adults. One is simply that it will "embarrassing." Another is the apathy the adults demonstrate; the teacher in the art class where Kennedy deals out much of his abuse is recumbent on a recliner most of the time because of the pain in her back. As caring as their parents are, they don't know how to ask the right questions to find out what is troubling their children. Ben's mother asks about the first day of school, but Ben and Jaime don't give her an honest answer. "How would we even begin to describe Kennedy? What could be done?" they ask themselves. " And that was that. It was like, in missing that moment when things were still normal, we had given up any chance of controlling Kennedy’s effect on our lives. He had us. If he wanted us, whatever he wanted, he could have us."

There's a lot more of this kind of language in the story, all of it consistent with what many other survivors of abuse have told, the difficulty of explaining why you found yourself unable to resist. I've taken "resiliency training" before, and a lot of it had to do with learning to "get off the X," meaning how to not be a target for this kind of abuse. Abusers are experts at knowing who they can abuse and get away with it. It's actually a very normal human reaction, this freezing up, which is why this story is so consistent with what so many abuse survivors have to say:

Looking back on it, I want to take myself and just shake and shake, like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let that happen? But I can still remember those moments, when it felt like I was paralyzed inside my own body, like I had to pull myself deeper and deeper inside of myself, away from the surface, in order to stay alive. I think Ben felt the same way. We tried not to talk about it.

Invisibility

At one point, the narrator claims that now, as an adult looking back on it, he understands why he was unable to fight back. (He also claims at other points that he doesn't understand, but that's to be expected. Looking back on a traumatic event, you're likely to feel both epiphanies and subsequent undoing of the epiphanies.) He feels that he and his friend Ben had practiced being invisible for so long, they didn't know how to ask for help, because that would have involved trying to be noticed: "Now I understand it: we had stayed invisible for so long that we weren’t used to people noticing us, and so when Kennedy noticed us, shined a light on us, we simply froze, simply sat there and took it, all these little indignities, and hoped that he would fuck up in some other class and get suspended, a temporary reprieve."

Jaime likely meant that most high schoolers, unsure of who they are and terrified of the scorn of their peers, which seems to whirl around with the caprice of a prairie wind, find it safest to just keep quiet, go along, and not make noise. This is, in fact, the safest thing most of the time in high school, which is why it's so hard to realize when it's the thing that is putting you in danger.

But Ben and Jaime aren't the only invisible ones. The word "invisible" appears twice in the story. The second time, it's about Kennedy. "I wondered how he’d made it this far in school when it was so clear how little he cared, how he would dare anyone in authority to do something about it. But it was like he was invisible to people in charge. I couldn’t figure it out."

The narrator allows us to see reasons to have empathy for Kennedy without letting on himself that he feels this empathy. Maybe it's not the job of the abused to feel empathy for their abusers, but through Jaime's eyes, we, the readers, see plenty to pity Kennedy for. He has an abusive father, and he is obviously entirely alone. He desperately wants to connect, but has no idea how. When Jaime suggests killing Kennedy, Ben is there to immediately talk him out of it, but Kennedy has nobody to talk him out of it when he decides to kill his abuser. 

It's easy to see why the boys love video games so much, why the sense of power and competence they feel in their virtual world is so much more appealing to them than the real one. But at least they play together. Kennedy's escape, meanwhile, is to wear a fetishist's leather mask while he is sleeping, something that no doubt makes him feel he can disappear, but also something that increases his isolation.

Bug, not a feature

We decided at the end of eighth grade to homeschool our son, rather than send him to high school. For the last year, this decision has been moot, but before that, we definitely got an earful of gratuitous opinions on whether this decision was good for him. Most of the concerns were that our son wouldn't be ready for the real world, because he would have missed out on the interactions with peers, teachers, and administrators, both the good and the bad, that would prepare him for life. 

I understand this concern, and believe me, Mrs. Heretic and I thought long and hard about what he'd be missing out on. But I think all too often, society tends to treat the bugs of high school like they're features. Schools aren't supposed to be ignorant of abuse going on. Students aren't supposed to feel like they have no good options to stop it. This doesn't teach coping skills for later in life. It gives people pathologies that make it harder to survive later in life. It's like saying the best way for a military to prepare for a firefight is for everyone to practice getting shot. 

Teenage life isn't supposed to be like high school. High schools are insane asylums. We shouldn't act like some of the truly terrible things about it are the way it's supposed to be, like it's great preparation for the real world and that it's really part of the design to high school.

We overuse the word "trauma" in America (especially us political liberals). And even I am annoyed sometimes by how much hysteria is attached to some behavior that is actually normal teenage behavior, calling it "bullying," when in fact it's just annoying. I probably never faced actual trauma in high school, but I did learn unhealthy coping strategies. I vacillated between hiding by trying to be invisible and trying to hide in plain sight by being outlandishly weird, hoping I could become so weird that picking on me would seem redundant, because I did so well at picking on myself. Along the way, I learned some of the same things Jaime did, like how not to speak up when someone is treating you badly. That probably helped lead to other decisions after high school, like joining the Marine Corps, where I also learned that being invisible was a good strategy, and also vacillated between striving for it and trying to hide in plain sight by acting eccentrically. 

Good things can come out of bad experiences, of course. But there's good adversity and bad adversity, and just because high school makes students face terrible behavior doesn't mean it's good for building character or whatever we try to pretend it's good for. 

In the story, Jaime and Ben's friendship to one another is what allows them to survive. They fail each other in some ways, and although as readers, we can forgive their failures and even find they make the small courage the boys show for each other far more affecting, as adults, they've lost touch, possibly because to see one another would be to remember what Kennedy put them through and how they failed. One cannot see their friendship as a silver lining to the abuse, because they were friends before and stopped being friends not long after. It didn't make them become closer. The fire of adversity did not burnish the gold of their relationship.  

Is there hope for Jaime?

I'm no expert on trauma, but it seems to me that there are two things that might help Jaime, at whatever point in time he is looking back on this story, to heal from it. One is finding empathy for Kennedy and maybe forgiving him, and the second is coming to some kind of closure concerning Ben. The first might actually be easier than the second; Kennedy might be dead by now, or at least not living a happy adult life, and wherever he is, he can't hurt Jaime anymore. In Jaime's own recollection, we, as objective readers, see all we need to see in order to feel some empathy and forgiveness for Kennedy, so the seeds are there in Jaime's mind. But the final words of the story are about how much Jaime misses Ben. The reader wants to kick Jaime in the pants, much like while reading all the scenes of his abuse. Just do it! There's social media now! People are usually easy to find! Reach out! You're writing this story, so you must have some part of you that wants to find him, that's ready to remember. But Jaime still seems unable as an adult to get off the X, to take action, even when it's clearly what would make him happier. He's still so trained by the warped microcosm of society we call high school to not do what he clearly should do. 

I put a lot of myself into this look at "Kennedy," and even though that's not unusual for me, I did more of it here than in any other story I can remember analyzing. This is probably because of how personally and emotionally invested I was in this story. I read it with the same single-mindedness to get to the ending I've heard readers of suspenseful beach reads put into their books, but has never happened to me before. Once I saw what the story was about, I had to get to the end quickly. It's an utterly superb short story. But the fact that the dysfunction of American high schools around the time I was in them led to the creation of a great short story doesn't justify the dysfunction. 

For Karen Carlson's take on this story (she thought it was equally compelling), go here. 

And now, my post of great shame: "Enlightenment" by William Pei Shih

 My blogging pal Karen claimed that I didn't really take a pass on a story earlier in BASS this year when I claimed I was taking a pass, but this time, I really am taking a pass. It's getting harder and harder for me to blog on stories I don't like, and I don't like "Enlightenment" by William Pei Shih at all. I'd actually read it before BASS came out, when it appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. I didn't like it then, but I hoped when I got around to reading it a second time as I was blogging through Best American Short Stories, I would find something a little more to like about it. I didn't. There are some stories where I find trying to come to grips with what I didn't like about them to be nearly as interesting as a close reading of a story I did enjoy, but I'm not feeling that way right now. The longer I'm a writer myself, the more I think how shitty it is to do a negative reading, especially of stories that aren't going to get a lot of other critique written about them. As backwater as my blog is, there aren't many other folks blogging on BASS (or short stories in general), so if I write that I don't like it, that's likely to be what a lot of students of BASS find when they look for help on Google. I'm okay doing that with someone who's already had a successful, long career, like T.C. Boyle, but I really don't want to do it for someone like William Pei Shih. 

Essentially, I think there is a mismatch in the story between form and function. The main character mentally inhabits a world of 18th-century writers who almost all indulged in verbal excess, but the prose is ultra-pared down, like reading Carver or some other hard-edged, no-nonsense 20th century writer. I believe the point of the story is supposed to be that its main character, Abel, studies the enlightenment his entire life, but never achieves his own enlightenment. Instead, he pointedly relives the lives of the cautionary tales from the very texts he treasures. He battled himself to overcome institutional prejudices, but failed to help the next generation to overcome the prejudices they faced. 

Which, fine, but it seemed to me like a lot of the story was a summary of a story. It had the feel of an "Introduction to the Age of Enlightenment" seminar, where there was a felt need to talk a little bit about every major thinker from the period, instead of focusing on one or two key texts. It all left me feeling like most introductory courses do--like I haven't really learned much about anything, but did hear about a lot of things I wish I'd learned more about. 

That's all I can say. It's not fun for me to do this. I'm not Tweeting this post, I'm not talking about it anymore, and I'm posting it here quietly in the middle of the day hoping nobody ever reads it. I feel like I have to at least post something to say I read it, because it was in BASS, but that's really all this post serves to do. 

While it does nothing to remove my feelings of having failed at this story, Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense kind of felt the same way. 

A nice rhythm, a little simple and sad: "Octopus VII" by Anna Reeser

If you haven't already figured it out, one of my patented fall-backs when I'm faced with a tough story to analyze is to present two or more possible readings, summarize the evidence for each, and call it a day without opining much on which is the right one. I usually will try to cover up my lack of spine in picking an interpretation with some blather about how great art often leaves us without certainty. 

For "Octopus VII" by Anna Reeser, I'm going to present evidence for two different readings, but I AM picking a side. 

Brief synopsis

Sometimes, re-stating the plot of a well-told story in simpler terms does some great injustices to it, but a very simple summary with just an emphasis on the raw facts of the plot can help the reader to focus on elements that might have been missed in the more artful telling. 

Tyler is a recent art school grad who has his first show, where he displays his sculpture titled "Octopus VII," a twisted wire and steel piece whose main characteristic seems to be the way it depicts movement. A woman asks if he'll make an alteration, suggesting she'll buy it if he does, but he refuses to make changes to the way he thinks it should look. He doesn't sell the thing, and while he figures his day will come, he was already starting to panic before the show that he had peaked. He feels inferior to his girlfriend, another artist. She leaves soon after the show to move to Los Angeles, and Tyler, feeling lost for direction, follows her, in spite of not being invited. 

He lives a few blocks from her in L.A. He is wracked with guilt about living off his dwindling trust fund, feeling like he's produced nothing for all the privileges he's had. He can't really get himself to create more art, and Octopus VII, which he dragged down to L.A. with him, sits in his living room, making him question himself more and more each time he sees it. Some of his classmates begin to sell their art in miniature form, which Tyler looks down upon as selling out. His ex-girlfriend comes over once, and asks him rather randomly to cut her hair. He obliges. Later, he responds to a billboard advertising for a school to get his license cutting hair. He attends for six months, gets his license, finds himself totally over the ex-girlfriend, and a customer in the salon flirts with him. He throws away the sculpture and gets ready to call the woman from the salon.

This figure is $118 on Etsy, so I don't know what made Tyler think someone would pay $2,000 for his sculpture. 

Two ways of looking at it, and one is better

Tyler worries a great deal throughout the narrative that he is in danger of selling out, or that he won't fulfill his potential, or that he has no potential. He doesn't want to settle, and yet he is frantically aware that he isn't going anywhere. So at the end, when he finds himself settling into a life where cutting hair is "mostly" what he does, one could look at it as a tragic story, in which an artist is giving up on himself and settling for bourgeois American life. It's the story of an artist talking himself into selling out. Conversely, it could be the story of an artist realizing the "lame day job," to use the phrase of ex-girlfriend Kelsa, is actually not so lame. It's realizing that giving up your dream is sometimes how you find yourself, and that if it's what makes you happy, it's not selling out at all. 

The second one is right. 

Evidence for reading #1, that Tyler sold out

Tyler certainly seems to equate anything other than critical and commercial success as an artist on his own terms to be failure at the beginning of the story. He suffers from a kind of obsession with being great. His dad has somewhat contributed to this, ironically, by supporting his art so fully that Tyler feels even more pressure to succeed than he would if he were a true starving artist. Before anything has happened in the story, he worries that he has already peaked as an artist. There are a number of passages where Tyler exhibits shame at his lack of forward progress in art, as well as his belief about the kind of life an artist SHOULD live, mainly that they should suffer:

• "But that's what artists did. Felt terrible and made something out of it."
• "Sell-out art. He wasn't ready for that shit."
• "But he was afraid to look at the idea, because he was afraid it would probably be disappointing."
• "He wasn't supposed to be fulfilled by (cutting hair); he should be dead broke and sculpting out of found metal."

One could see the drive to create real art as the "real" Tyler, and the person he is at the end as the fake Tyler, someone he has talked himself into being. The catharsis, where Tyler is making his choice what kind of life he will live after throwing his sculpture in the trash, sort of sounds like rationalizing: "Was this how it happened to people? How your life gets going, making a living, watching TV at night, the whole thing tapping out a nice rhythm, a little simple and sad--but that's what people did." That sounds like a pretty plain life, not a great or memorable one. 

Evidence for reading #2, that Tyler actually found his way

From the very beginning, Tyler is straining against the way life is trying to push him, insistent upon having it his way. We first find him pushing backwards against the wall he's standing against so hard he's sweating on it. Even the way he creates art involves straining, often to no avail: "With pliers, he bent a piece of wire into a rough shape, which ended up looking like a clothes hanger." Or: "A few times he sat at the worktable, bending a piece of wire with his bare hand until it hurt..." His sculpture snags carpets and sweaters. It's as though Tyler is never able to live in harmony with the way things really are. He'd rather keep struggling for one view of how things should be, even if it makes him miserable, than try looking at something a different way, or maybe seeing if he's better at something else. Clearly, this isn't the right view, and so Tyler's change at the end is the right one for him. 

Tyler also never seemed to have a clear sense of his own aesthetic, something that's de rigeur for an artist aspiring to greatness. He had chosen the octopus for a specific reason, because the octopus represented something to him: "Tyler had chosen the octopus for its constantly shifting shape, and finally he got the sculpture to look like it was twisting, thrashing, changing." But his art professor quickly talked him into a completely different aesthetic, telling Tyler he saw "total abstraction" in his future work, an idea Tyler quickly agreed to, as though that's what he'd meant to do all the time. Eventually, he ended up lugging around the thing that was meant to represent change as a constant symbol of refusal to change. 

It's significant that he called his sculpture Octopus VII, meaning there were six before it that didn't work out. He thinks at one point about making an eighth, which, given that an octopus has eight legs, would presumably be the true masterpiece, the one that most fully captures the essence of the octopus he was going for in the first place. One could read it that the true masterpiece of change is his destruction of Octopus VII, the only thing of note he'd done in his life, the thing he had to get rid of in order to move on to the next phase of his life. 

Tyler, in fact, never had a clear vision of what he was doing as an artist. Even trying to capture the protean aspect of the octopus was to some degree just copying what he imagined was Kelsa's style, whom he saw as essentially "kinetic." When his father asked him why he was moving to L.A., he stole Kelsa's description of it as "apocalyptic." Tyler isn't wrong when he destroys the octopus because it would "remind him of how he'd felt like a boy genius, and how of course he wasn't...How after years of art school, maybe his calling was cutting hair in Van Nuys." 

There's a real difference in working in the medium of hair and metal for Tyler. Working with wire and found metal is all about straining. Working with hair, the scissors just kind of cut through the medium with a satisfying "hssk" sound. I'm not going to claim some mastery of Taoism based on reading a translation of the Tao Te Ching in college, but I do remember how the Tao Te Ching recommends people be like water, flowing where there is room to flow. Tyler's eighth sculpture is even more an embodiment of the notion of change than the octopus; he's water itself. 

I quoted the passage above about the "simple and sad" rhythm of falling into working-class life, but if put in a slightly larger context, I think it's pretty clear there's a crescendo that builds, and picking a life of cutting hair is a good choice for Tyler. After hauling the sculpture to the curb, Tyler finds that:

The carpet was tamped down in places where the sculpture had been, but the space was huge. The smell of the jacaranda trees came in as the air cooled and the traffic died down. It would be good to tell his dad what he was doing. He'd probably laugh in a short bark, the way he did when he heard something idiosyncratic. 

Tyler lifted a mat knife and twirled it in his hand. Was this how it happened to people? How your life gets going, making a living, watching TV at night, the whole thing tapping out a nice rhythm, a little simple and sad--but that's what people did.

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense saw this story as more of a slacker story than I did. To see her take, go here. 

 

"The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana could be, might be, I think it is...

 ...going to cause my third annual "what is the social utility of literature crisis!" Hooray! Happy Question the Social Value of Literature Day! 

Three years in a row, Best American Short Stories has presented a story with Spanish speaking characters. In all three stories ("Everything is Far From Here" by Christina Henriquez in 2018, "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Munoz in 2019, and now "The Hands of Dirty Children" in 2020), the characters are facing poverty, extreme lack of social mobility, insecurity/danger, and general social injustice. (Complete side note: the day after I wrote this analysis, I saw this article on writer Dany Laferriere, who feels there is sometimes a burden placed on writers of color to tells stories of trauma. Perhaps worth considering in the context of three consecutive years of Latinx writers ending up in BASS with stories of trauma.) I object to none of that. All the stories describe a real experience in the world. I'm not the sort of person to complain if a story deals with grim subject matter. Lord knows I've done it myself. I wasn't a fan of "Everything is Far From Here," but for reasons other than the Dickensian aspect of its plot. I liked "Anyone Can Do It," but it gave me pause. When a story begins and ends in the hopelessness of a character's life, what is a reader supposed to come away from it with?

When Dickens wrote about poor children being crushed beneath the boot of industrialism, or when Upton Sinclair wrote in a similar vein about the cities of America in the early 20th century, they had a hope of influencing public opinion. Does a writer of literary fiction hope to do anything similar in 2020? I don't see how that's a realistic expectation. One of the results of having SO. MUCH. of everything, including high-quality literature and television and movies, is that no one single work of art can have that much influence. We're living in a culturally post-hegemonic world. There are good and bad effects of this, but one clear result is that even a very successful work of art, in terms of the public attention paid to it, is unlikely to have much influence politically. 

Both "Everything is Far From Here" and "Anyone Can Do It" dealt, more or less, with issues of the U.S. border with Mexico and the all the continental politics that feed into it. They were something the largely American readership of BASS 2018 and 2019 could have reacted to and helped to cause a change. But the border is still the border. If those stories, written for a U.S. audience about a U.S. issue, didn't cause much change, how much less can Alejandro Puyana expect his story about homeless children in Caracas will? 

Here I will note again that U.S. literature encompasses much more of "world literature" than most other national literatures. That's appropriate, because of the U.S.'s role as a world power (or as close to a world power as there is in a politically post-hegemonic world). But it also means that it's hard to get anyone's attention for long. The moment readers have paused to consider Venezuela for a moment and the impact of its many troubles on children, their attention will be distracted by a hundred other ongoing human tragedies. It's rather similar to how hard it is to get the U.S. to focus on any one foreign policy issue for any length of time.

"The Hands of Dirty Children" is a good story. It's fast-paced, doesn't indulge in Baroque description that would be inappropriate for its themes, and it establishes empathy for its characters quickly and easily. But there is no chance for the central character to go through a transformation that allows him to overcome his conflicts. In common with "Everything is Far From Here" and "Anyone Can Do It," you can fight the law, but the law will win. The narrator of "Hand of Dirty Children" does, perhaps, change enough to value the life of Ramoncito, whom none of the other Crazy 9 pitied as much as he deserved, but that's the extent of transformation possible for him. He can change enough to help his friend die well. The two sides of the conflict--man vs. society--are not equally matched. One was always going to win.

The story hinted early on of being a picaresque tale. Picaresque stories are always about someone on the outs of an unjust society trying to survive. We're always supposed to side with the "picaro," the survivor. Picaresque stories are usually comic and serve to skewer the power structures that oppress the picaro. But it doesn't stay in the picaresque vein for long, because Venezuela is so hopeless, even picaros cannot survive for long. 

If your wits can't save you, how can a story save the real-life children of Venezuela? Even if all America fell in love with this story and decided at once we wanted to help Venezuela, would we ever be able to agree on how to do it? Would any ten Venezuela experts agree on what to do, even if we wanted to do something?

I don't imagine any of these authors dreamed they would somehow change the border or American policy toward Venezuela. I didn't dream when I wrote about the plight of Eritrean migrants I would change world policies toward Eritrea or migrants. Some writing, you do just to bear witness, to say "this is the world as I see it." You do it because you feel like every day someone doesn't call it out, you're being gaslit into thinking the world is different from what you believe it is. 

Such writing can stir our emotions, touch our human empathy to make us want to be better people generally, to show kindness to those we can reach, if we can't reach children like the Crazy 9. Les Miserables has probably done that for millions. The movie Monster did it for me. Most stories that make me feel this way have less of a lasting impact, but having any kind of an impact to make someone care about others is a great function of literature. But that's about all a story like this can do for me. It certainly doesn't make for compelling literary analysis of the "find the symbolism" or "notice the subtle word puzzle" kinds. That might be possible for this story, but it feels entirely wrong to indulge in it. 

Karen Carlson and I agreed to a great extent on this story; to see her take, go here. 

A short story that's basically the same as just listening to me talk on any given day

The Under Review, a newish literary journal whose niche is that everything they publish has a sports nexus, just put out its third issue, and my story is one of the entries in it. I know I've written about Lebron James on this blog before, because there's literally no subject on the planet I can't somehow tie to Lebron. This story is about a father who is chagrined at how much joy his teenage son seems to be getting out of watching a video of one of the more humiliating moments of Lebron's life. This father reacted with a lot more chill than I would have. 

I'm still grinding through Best American Short Stories, and hope to have all twenty stories done in time for students assigned them in the coming semester to plagiarize my work. 

Yellow savior: "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains" by Jane Pek

So far in Best American Short Stories 2020, we've had two stories that were fictionalizations of real historical figures ("The Apartment" and "Liberte"), one story alluding heavily to a myth ("It's Not You"), and one story with a character modeled very closely on a real-life figure ("Something Street"). Now, we come to yet another story that uses an existing model to help form its own framework. 

I doubt most readers will be unaware that there is a Chinese myth involving a nine-tailed fox even before reading "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains" by Jane Pek. In this era of globalized everything, Westerners tend to have at least some ideas of important stories from other countries, but this myth in particular has been successful in sharing its cultural DNA. It's appropriate, I guess, that the nine-tailed fox myth has found success in the global marketplace of stories, because even during the time when cross-cultural exchange tended to be more regional, this myth had a lot of success getting passed around. Japan has versions of it, as does Korea and Vietnam. Western audiences have probably heard of it through one of these versions. The Japanese anime Naruto features a child in whom resides the spirit of the nine-tailed fox. If you Google "Nine-tailed fox" right now, you're liable to get a lot of results that refer to a Korean drama about a reincarnation of this figure, a drama that just concluded its run. 

The story belongs to a long line of "set the record straight" narratives, in which a minor character from one story becomes the narrator of her own story, often providing a counter-narrative to the one from the original. I'm not going to get deep into the founding myths, partly because there are so many versions, and also because Pek gives us the version she'd like us to work with for the purposes of reading "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains." The nine-tailed fox was created by the mother goddess Nüwa in order to seduce and destroy the emperor of the Shang Dynasty. Nüwa created partners in crime for the nine-tailed fox, one a pheasant spirit and the other the embodiment of the musical instrument the the pipa. So the nine-tailed fox is an example of a femme fatale. She's gone down in history as a woman out to do men dirt, someone who uses cunning and sex appeal as weapons. 

One example of a pipa. 

In Pek's non-canonical version, the nine-tailed fox becomes friends with the pipa spirit and refuses to take the tea of forgetfulness after she accomplishes her mission, lest she forget her friend. This prevents her from reincarnating, meaning she's lived about two thousand years. As a near-immortal, she experiences time as "walking in circles, always in one direction, through a vast landscape." Once in a while, though, she comes to a spot in her journeys where her uneventful walking meets something unexpected, meaning she has to "pick out (her) path the way mortals do." 

That's where we are in this story. The fox has mostly been dormant for a long time, so disgusted by the Chinese history of the past hundred or so years, she's chosen to mostly remain hidden. (She has to live with a man in order to maintain her life, and this process sucks the life force out of the men she lives with at an advanced rate. She's rather like a succubus in Western tradition. But we don't know anything about any of the men she's lived with for thousands of years.) She's currently inhabiting a body mortals look upon as a beautiful but otherwise very mortal and ordinary Chinese woman. When rapidly modernizing China finally arrives at the base of her mountain to start yet another major construction project, she decides it's time to leave China. The fox, in her form as a Chinese woman, has come to the U.S. as a mail-order bride. 

Two ways of looking at mail-order brides

When I was in the Marine Corps, I knew a lot of servicemen who married women from other countries and brought them back to the U.S. In the sarcastic, cynical parlance of the military, this was sometimes referred to as "bringing her to the land of the bright, shiny PX." In other words, there was an assumption that the woman had seen the promises of American life through her contact with the military (a PX being the department store on a military base) and chose to be with the American man out of the hope it might bring her a better life. 

That's one way of looking at mail-order brides--that they're essentially mercenaries, using sex to get something, not unlike the fox's reputation in literature. But that's just one way of looking at it. Another perspective, the one that's probably more common now, is to think the man is the one using his power to profit in an unfair way from the relationship. He is using his status as a citizen of a wealthy country--a status he did not earn--in order to coerce an attractive young woman to marry him and gratify him sexually by offering things she is desperate for. 

Both of these ways of looking at it have an assumption in common, which is that the American man ordering the foreign bride is somehow offering her something she needs, that he is, in effect, saving her. In one version, he saves her because he's a schmuck who doesn't realize she's going to leave him as soon as she has her green card. In the other version, he's a lowlife who's saving her from assumed poverty or insecurity, but only for his own ends.  In both versions, though, he is saving her. Both ways of looking at it stem in part from our Western "white savior" mentality of saving the heathens, the same mentality that led us to send missionaries all over the globe, the same missionaries who for the first hundred years or so of America's relationship to east Asia were so influential on our policy there.

In a sense, then, the way her husband's friends are commenting on her when she goes to a house party to be introduced to them after the marriage are all stand-ins for the way America has thought about "starving kids in China" for ages. They either sexualize her exotic beauty or comment that she will be gone as soon as she gets her green card or criticize him for being a creep and pathetic for having taken advantage of her.  

Don't need no stinking missionary

It so happens that the fox has met a missionary before. She corrupted him, apparently, rather than him saving her. (Possibly, he was one of the men she's drawn life from.) She learned English from him, but that's about all he gave her (well, that and maybe some of his life force). She looks upon corrupting him as a form of having saved him: "I liberated him from all that nonsense about original sin." 

The fox doesn't need saved. She's strong. She laughs at the notion that she married her husband for the "prize of living in (his) leaking cruise liner of a country." She actually chose him quite by accident. To the extent there was any missionary impulse, it was hers, not his. When he contacted her, she "could smell the spoor of his loneliness, and...thought, This one. This one I can help." 

The fox identifies with a figure in a painting. The painting is Edward Hooper's "New York Movie," which focuses on a female usher at a theater leaning on a wall just outside the theater, where the audience is watching a movie. Here's an image of the painting:

The fox thinks the woman in the painting is not interested in the movie, because she's seen it a hundred times, but she is instead looking at the "glowing darkness where the audience sits." As someone who's lived a few thousand years, she really has "seen the movie" a few times. She's interested now, perhaps, in guiding others to the show, those who will only have one brief chance to see it. 

She does, in fact, help her husband. She helps him to realize he's in love with his best friend, who is, for the moment, in a relationship with someone else. She also helps others along the way. She helps businessmen to learn Chinese so they can capitalize on the wealth there is to find in China. (Now missionaries teach Chinese instead of English to those who want to get ahead.) She also helps those who want to learn Chinese for various personal reasons, such as to understand their parents or connect with a loved one. Perhaps appropriate for a symbol of Chinese culture that has conquered the world in terms of ubiquity, the fox is represents the inverted nature of China's relationship to the world from how it was a hundred years ago. 

Not that the fox is willingly any patriotic symbol of Chinese ascendancy. She is fully aware of the country's troubled past and conflicted present. To her, perhaps, China's current ascendancy is just another movie she's seen before. In a world (dramatic movie preview voice?) where she is forced to continue wandering in a circle, the fox is trying to do what the pipa spirit recommended to her long ago--find her moorings. She is beginning to find them, for the first time, in pathos for the sorry mortals she hasn't always given much thought to. It's her tears, her pathos, that gives strength to others. 

If you wanted a lot more research into the Nine-Tailed Fox, as well as a deep look at the structure of this story, see Karen Carlson's take here. 

The pink balloon of dreams goes pop: "Howl Palace" by Leigh Newman

Every year, there's an entry in Best American Short Stories that breaks some cardinal rule of narrative, and in a lot of ways, these are some of the most interesting stories to read. "Howl Palace" by Leigh Newman breaks a couple of rules, all in the last few pages of the story. It introduces a ton of new information at the end about the main character's life, which forces a complete reevaluation of everything we thought we knew. Just at the moment we feel we should be building toward the big crescendo that wraps up the symphony, the whole melody changes. It changes in key, tempo, timbre, and what building the orchestra is playing in. 

The story I thought I was reading

Dutch is one of those I-did-it-my-way kind of gals, but now the end is near and she has to face the impossibility of continuing to do it her way. She's kind of a study in contradictions, because although she's an independent spirt, appropriate to her Alaskan surroundings, she also has a deep-seated desire to connect and to belong to others. Exhibit A of her desire to belong to others is her five marriages and one affair. The husbands, in order, are: Benny, Wallace, RT, Lon, and Skip. In between husbands two and three came Carl, the affair, and maybe the love of Dutch's life. Or if not the love of her life, then at least the "beautiful, bedeviling, heartbreak" of her life. 

Dutch has held onto her house her whole life, although she had to pay through the nose to buy some of her husbands out of it. Her first husband, Benny, the one who died, told her to hold onto the house, nicknamed "Howl Palace," no matter what, and she has. The house is part of her identity, and the house's identity stems from Dutch. Being forced to sell it is an affront to who she is. The conflict seems to be shaping up as something like: can she sell it and remain herself? How can anyone remain themselves in a world that's constantly forcing change upon us?

Much of the story is Dutch meditating on the way times have changed. She isn't entirely negative about the changes--she adores the Costco in Anchorage and the perfect avocados she can get there--but she also feels something has been lost. What she wants most is "everything the way it was before, years before." She can't get that, of course. Is there enough in the world and enough in Dutch to salvage something?

Dutch is an eternal optimist, if a reluctant one. Although her divorces have left her a little jaded, "the thing about having gotten divorced four times and widowed once is that people forget you also got married each time. You and your soft, secret pink balloon of dreams."

Carl was the one who told Dutch about her pink balloon of dreams, by which he meant her indefatigable hope and longing for real connection. Although Dutch feels the balloon has withered over the years, we wonder if there is enough in her to reinflate the balloon as she gets ready for the last act of her life.

Is a balloon in a story like Chekov's gun? Once introduced, does it have to go pop at some point?

The house's ominous name 

The house gets its name "Howl Palace" from the wolf room, the part of the house Dutch loves the most, but which her real estate agent refuses to include in the description of the house and which all her husbands except Benny hated. Even Carl wasn't a fan. We don't know exactly what the room is, except that when a young girl visited it, it made her want to howl. Howling, sounding your barbaric yawp, seems like a symbol of Dutch's independence, especially when one considers that she had to keep the room over the objections of everyone she lived with. 

Two sticks of dynamite in the last few pages

A lot goes wrong while Dutch is trying to get ready for the open house to sell her home, which she needs to do so she can cash in her last asset and avoid going to live in a nursing home. Unless she gives up at least some of her independence, she's going to have to give up nearly all of it.

The first thing that goes wrong is Carl shows up needing her to watch a high-spirited lab. She doesn't want to, but she realizes Carl is dying and about to go try for last-ditch medical treatment, so she relents. Dutch tries to enlist the help of her neighbors to catch the dog when it runs off, but neighbor Candace is a little drugged out. When Dutch finally gets back to her grill, where she intended to cook a ton of moose and caribou for open house visitors in order to give them a feel for the great Alaskan charm of the place, she realizes the dog has eaten all the meat and then thrown it up all over the lawn. 

Still, the story feels up to near the end as though Dutch is going to salvage something. Her balloon is going to find a way to fly again. And then we get to the end. 

Dutch insulted Carl by insinuating he wanted her money to help with medical bills. He tells her the dog is named "Pinkie," after Dutch's balloon, which leaves her "a little more in love with him than ever." Then the open house begins, and suddenly, the narrative fills in all kinds of back story on Dutch it has left out to that point. Generally, if there is something shocking or unexpected in a character's back story, the place to share it is up front. Anything else, and it feels like you've withheld from the reader just for the sake of shock. There are a number of these shocks coming.

Shock number one: Dutch was an orphan. Her parents died at five.

Shock number two: Benny was very old when she married him. He was sixty-seven and she was nineteen.

Shock number three: Benny was romantically involved with his male hunting partner, but also genuinely loved Dutch, and this was mostly okay with Dutch, for whom marriage was "the ability to hold hands and not try to forgive the other person, not try to understand them, just hold hands."

Shock number four, and this is the big one: The wolf room is full of pelts from wolves Dutch killed by hunting with Benny out of of a plane. These were fly-by shootings, hunting for sport, like when the psychotic Marine is gunning down civilians from the helicopter in "Full Metal Jacket," and someone asks, "How do you shoot women and children?" and he answers, "Easy, you just don't lead 'em as much." 

That last one is honestly very hard to take. It's extremely difficult for me to return to thinking of Dutch as an empathetic character. I'm not a reader who thinks characters need to be "likeable," whatever that means, but I do need to be able to feel empathy for them. Another reason it's a good idea to get a character's shocking flaws out in the open early on is because the reader hasn't already connected with the character yet, which means there is no sense of betrayal when we find out their flaws. How can we feel betrayed by someone we don't know yet? If you give us the character's worst right away, we might be able to slowly connect to her anyway. Waiting until the end to drop this on us leaves us with that as nearly our only lasting memory. Furthermore, it feels like we were being lied to all along when we were led to believe the character was something other than what she was. I might deem this the "Khaleesi principle." 

The narrative does attempt to explain the motivation behind the wolf mass murder. She'd just had her fifth miscarriage with Benny, and they'd removed her uterus while she was under. Benny sensed it was what she needed in order to not lose the will to live. She cut her finger pulling the trigger, but something about it did, in fact, make her feel alive: "It was warm blood, at least. And I was alive. Despite any wish I might have had to be otherwise. Which was maybe what Benny was trying to show me." 

What is it about loud animal noises that we associate with a steadfast will to remain oneself? 

Does this work?

Is Dutch's fifth act revelation too great a betrayal? Or can the story claim, as Game of Thrones cannot, that it was really there all along?

Reading it a second time, I think the story can claim with some justice that it was tipping its hand from the start. Right off the bat, the second time through, I noticed how often the lure of wealth, often in the form of natural resources, showed up. Dutch lived along "Diamond" Lake. Her realtor's name was Silver. The house had a clamshell grotto which Dutch suspects had enough pearls in it that a future owner might be tempted to try to jackhammer them out of the concrete. Alaska is the home of pristine wilderness, of "shale-covered peak under a sky so blue you taste the color in your lungs," but it's also a place that has lured those greedy for gold or oil. One of the big changes Dutch notes is that in the old days, there were no contractors to help you build a house, because until the pipeline showed up, there was nothing to lure them to a place like Alaska. 

Dutch notes with some useless hand-wringing her sense of guilt at living in an oil state that is contributing to global warming, but that sense of guilt doesn't keep her from taking part in the globalizing capitalism that's behind the oil boom. She gladly gets avocados from Costco when one shows up in Anchorage. Perhaps Dutch's pink balloon is not that dissimilar, in a way, from America's Achilles' heel, which is its sense of unwarranted optimism about the future. She longs for connection, and believes, no matter how often she fails, that she will find it, much as Americans continue to dream the American dream of wealth but more often than not just cause destruction in their quest for it. 

The final, poignant symbol of this undying quest for connection is the neighbor boy. Dutch has asked him to try to "fish" for the missing dog by tossing a moose rib rolled in tranquilizers at him. But the boy has apparently misunderstood, and is literally "fishing" by casting the rib into Diamond Lake over and over. "So intent was he on his task" that he noticed little else as he "cast again. And cast again." The story ends with him calling for Pinkie the dog, literally calling out for the sense of the dream of connection that has eluded Dutch her whole life. 

I can accept that murdering hundreds of wolves is consistent with a character like Dutch, that the need to howl back at the existential questions she notes are dangerous for people living in the Arctic Circle is so strong in her it might manifest in some mistaken form, just as the boy is looking for his connection in the wrong places. This isn't a flawed story for its ending. It's just a lot to ask a reader to accept its naturalness when we weren't told about it at the beginning of our relationship with Dutch. 

For Karen Carlson's take on this story, go here.