The quest for a better kind of lie: "The Last Voyage of The Alice B. Toklas" by Jason Brown

One of the best things about The Pushcart Prize anthology every year is the way the editors choose works which compare or contrast well with other selections in the anthology. By doing this, the anthology isn't so much seventy to a hundred separate, individually-wrapped treats as it is a real snapshot in time of what bright, literary minds were thinking about, arranged in such a way that the stories call unto each other, each to each. There's a conversation. There's even something which is lacking in actual literary society, at least online anyway, which is meaningful divergence of thought. 

The big three anthologies--Best American Short Stories, The O.Henry Anthology, and Pushcart--all strive for diversity. BASS and O.Henry usually accomplish it in a rather rudimentary way, it seems, trying to make sure the identities of the authors meet a number of the intersectional markers: race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. This partially succeeds at its goal of displaying a wide variety of compelling voices, but sometimes it's a little light on the "compelling" part. Pushcart features writers who are usually somewhat less established and less big-name, writers who are still figuring out what they want to say and who therefore might say anything. It's exciting. Pushcart aims for compelling writing first and tends to get diversity in the bargain, while the others aim for diversity first and struggle sometimes to also get something compelling. The writing in Pushcart reads like stories the writers HAD to write, things they'd die if they didn't say. Some writing in the other journals comes across as what a professional writer felt she OUGHT to write. 

Jason Brown's "The Last Voyage of the Alice B. Toklas" did not have Malerie Willens' "Scandalous Women in History" in mind when it was written, but juxtaposing the two, as Pushcart has, makes both stories more interesting. By mining what American literature produced in a given year, the editors have added value to both stories for the reader by making the reader aware of how two stories were in unintended conversation with one another.

So what was this conversation?

Like Willens' story, "Last Voyage" is about that time-honored idea that we have some control over our own realities through the stories we tell ourselves. John Howland is a fifteen-year-old kid living on the coast of Maine with his grandparents. His lives with his grandparents because his mom left for no more apparent reason than she was bored, and his father is gone for reasons the family won't talk about. His family are the stubborn kind of New Englanders one hears about, the kind who refuse to even mention certain words:

"In our family, if you wanted to speak of John Updike, you spoke of “the stove,” not, as Uncle Alden sometimes called it, “the Aga.” Likewise you could say “Lewiston” but nothing about the dowel factory my great-grandfather had bankrupted. Nothing about China Lake, where my father spent most of his time, nothing about my mother, who had gone to live among the Rarámuri of Copper Canyon."

In other words, his family deals with things they'd rather not exist by pretending they don't. It's a fascinating and often somewhat effective human adaptation to an unfriendly reality. John is working a summer job bringing the mail from the mainland to Howland Island, named, you'd think, although it turns out the reason it's named Howland Island is another one of those things the Howland family doesn't talk about. His grandparents spend most of their summers on the island hating the tourists who live around them for driving up their property taxes. 

There's a writer living for the summer in the small house in the back of John's grandparents' place. He gets a letter from his publisher, which starts the action in the story. John is at an age where he's trying to learn for himself how to adapt this habit for re-making the world as he'd like it to be by making things up. He's starting with telling stories about himself, but he's not that skilled at it yet. He tries to convince the writer that he's bonded for the mail he delivers by skiff from the mainland, but the writer's not buying it: "No, you're not. You're a kid. Kids don't get bonded." 

Throughout the story, John learns the art of remaking himself through artful bullshit. He doesn't learn it from the writer. He learns it from his grandfather. Grandpa's got a couple of good, time-tested classic saws he keeps coming back to. John already knows not only how Grandpa tells the stories and that they're fake, he knows how Grandpa tells them. One story is that the giant stove in the kitchen used to belong to John Updike. Another is is that Grandpa went to Harvard with Updike. Others have to do with the boat they take the writer for a tour of the island on, the eponymous "Alice B. Toklas" from the title. 

Grandpa also pulls some new bullshit out of his pocket John hasn't heard before. He convinces the writer he's some kind of bucolic literary scholar. He does this by fobbing off especially insightful phrases concerning Don Quixote to the writer. John later learns that these are all cribbed from Nabokov. The writer is so blown away by Grandpa's literary insights, he encourages Grandpa to write a book. Word then gets out all over the island that Grandpa is writing a book, when in actuality, he's just writing an old-man-crackpot letter to the Tax Assessor of Georgetown, Maine, complaining about how his property taxes keep going up. 

John eventually learns a few tricks from Grandpa. He takes the Ray-Ban sunglasses given to him by the writer and puts them on at the end. They make him feel like a different person, and he decides to actually become a different person, too. When a girl he's been eyeing from afar notices him and asks, "John, is that you?" he responds with: 

"No," I said in a voice I didn't recognize, and voice I'd been waiting to hear. "It's not." 

"Finding your voice" is a pretty common narrative arc for characters, but for John, it's important that finding his voice means actually finding a new one, one that will allow him to break free from his provincial boundaries while still cherishing them. He's learned to re-make himself into what he wants to be by simply believing his own bullshit. 

I could end it there with what is a pretty simple narrative arc, but that doesn't do justice to the story, which is a lot like Updike with its cast of quirky characters interacting with unintended humor and regional flavor. Every line of it oozes with such charm, I felt like one of those annoying tourists reading it, oohing and aahing over every little idiosyncrasy that, to these characters, would have just been their normal life. There's a reason Karen Carlson loved this story so much. I don't usually write much about how enjoyable a story is to read, but the enjoyment and fun of this story was so much up front while reading it, I can't ignore it. The reader gets as swept away as the writer in the story does by Grandpa's tales. It's great regional fiction that can stand with the best American short stories we're all raised on in 10th grade American Lit. It can stand with Twain or Updike or Irving. 

Capitalism might not be the worst thing ever: "Scandalous Women in History" by Malerie Willens

My expectations about this story were wrong twice. First, the title lead me to believe it would make some kind of strong feminist statement, but that's not what the story was at all. Secondly, once I realized it was about a young woman who works at an upscale makeup counter, starting with her first day as she learns the business, I thought it would be a scathing critique of the industry, and maybe of capitalism itself. 

This second possibility hangs on much longer, as "Scandalous Women" doesn't shrink from depicting the false hopes, false claims, and phony science that hangs like fog over the makeup counter. Even the characters' names are false. Kim, the protagonist, is rechristened "Kendra" for her job, while her mentor Dane was actually once Douglas. At the outset, the Remy counter at Saks Fifth Avenue is a place to tell gullible people lies about "intrepid ribosomes and their unctuous promises," to hawk "the soothing emulsion, the stalwart pentapeptide, and the light-deflecting pearl." 

The cast of characters is basically three, with Jade, the manager, thrown in as a stock character. There's Kim/Kendra, who has come to the job after a summer off and a past full of petty theft she learned from her mother. There's Douglas/Dane, who has gone from closeted gay to over-sexualized gay to now semi-balanced gay who is the star of the makeup counter. He always makes customers believe the crap he's saying. Kendra wonders whether they aren't taking advantage of the suckers who come to them, but Dane doesn't give it a second thought. His attitude is that if they walk away feeling better, then they got what they paid for. Dane believes in "whatever helps," and it's clear he thinks that he is, in his way, helping. He himself claims to take anti-depressants, although he's not depressed. He believes in not overthinking things. 

Then there's Nadia, who is from Romania but hates it when people hear that she's Nadia from Romania and think of gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Nadia's mother is the closest thing to a "scandalous woman" the story really gets to, unless we consider Kendra's mother scandalous for the way she stole things. Nadia's mother is a poet and a bit of a political activist in Romania. 

Shopping therapy...works?

So I thought we were all set up for the fake world of the makeup counter to come into conflict with the "real" world, the one Kendra tries to speak up for when she goes out to drinks with Nadia and Dane: 

"Do you ever feel bad?" Kendra asked him.

"About what? Why should I feel bad?"

"I think she means about lying to the people," Nadia said.

"Lying, schmying. The people feel great when they leave me. Everyone knows confidence makes you prettier."

But selling something awful and expensive that you know doesn't work?" said Kendra.

"Please. Nothing works. Name one thing that works."

It's interesting to read a story that sort of takes the side of the dispensers of untruth at a time when so many people are worried about the Barnum-like manipulation of voters right now. 

So I thought we had a triangular relationship between Dane, the apostle of bullshit, and Nadia, who might have enough grounding in the real world to not get sucked into the bullshit, and Kendra, stuck between the influence of the two. I thought the conflict would be about which way Kendra would go. But it wasn't that at all. 

Instead, a note Kendra receives changes the narrative completely. It's a weird note someone left on the counter for her, possibly a secret admirer, although the note is kind of strange as admirer notes go, so it's not really clear what the intention was. The note says things like, "I am the indentation on the pillow just after you've left bed." Or, "I'm the cowlick you comb down, the cleavage you hoist up, the wart that keeps growing back on your thumb." 

Kendra isn't sure what to make of the note. She thinks Dane might have sent it to her and made it look like it came from an admirer just to mess with her, so she repackages it and gives it to Dane, also disguised as a secret admirer note. Dane doesn't seem to react to it, but later, it turns out he gave the note to Nadia, mostly to make her feel better. Which it does. Kendra notices a marked changed in Nadia's behavior: "Her posture seemed straighter and she moved even more briskly than usual. She even spoke more assertive English with her customers." 

Dane confesses to Kendra that he secretly gave the note to Nadia, not knowing (unless he's playing an incredibly brilliant con) that Kendra first gave it to him. Which means Kendra really did get a note from an admirer. (One could, I suppose, concoct a reading in which Jade, the unnoticed manager, is actually the one who wrote the note, because she is playing six-dimensional chess with her employees' psychology, but I don't think that reading adds much to the action.) Kendra realizes that this has been a positive experience all around: 

"Kendra's relief felt like a tropical breeze. She really did have a secret admirer who was not Dane; neither Dane nor Nadia knew the note was originally hers; Dane was kind and generous for giving the note to Nadia: and she had made them both feel desired. They had all three been given the same note."

Kendra, in other words, realizes that it doesn't matter what the truth of the note is if it has the desired effect, which is pretty much what Dane has been saying. When a second note arrives, one that is somewhat incoherent, making Kendra realize her admirer is probably deranged, it doesn't make her value the experience less. Instead, it strengthens her realization that truth is what we tell ourselves it is.

The final scene is Kendra helping an older customer get ready for a date. Kendra makes the woman feel far more ready for her date than she would have been, helping her to overcome feelings of intellectual inadequacy. The woman leaves feeling "dangerous." Kendra has just been told by her manager she's doing a good job. She feels she might have found her calling. She has suffered for a long time from feeling not so much vain, but guilty about her vanity. Her job has taught her that everyone has this problem. Like alcohol in Homer Simpson's proclamation, marketing's promises about beauty are both the cause of, and solution to, all of Kendra's problems.

It's not unlike Joshua Ferris's And then We Came to the End, which seems for much of the novel that it's going to be a harsh critique of advertising, but in the end, makes the most sympathetic character the manager of the advertising agency who decides to keep working at her job through a terminal disease. The narrator says he set out to write an anti-advertising book, but in the end, found that sympathizing with the industry and those in it felt truer. That seems to be the arc of "Scandalous Women in History," too. The name of the story comes from a line of makeup the main characters have to push to customer. The line has colors named for women like Jezebel and Delilah and Eva Braun. It's commercialism at its crassest, using transgressive icons to reinforce conformity to commercial values. But dammit, it works. It makes 58-year-old Bea feel "dangerous." 

It's not a new theme, the idea that humans have a unique ability to shape our own reality by what we tell ourselves about the world, but it's told in a fresh way. (Karen Carlson has more to say here about this theme.) Moreover, it's nice, when the whole world is zigging with "capitalism is killing us" messages, to get a story that zags a bit in the other direction. Whether it's saying capitalism is actually somewhat good and there's a reason we choose to live this way or simply that it's possible, given the inevitability of the system we live in, to find happiness within it, is a matter of interpretation, but either way, it's at least a message not being broadcast much these days. It's the Pushcart Anthology at its best, showing an intellectual independence the other anthologies rarely exhibit. 

Two kinds of fool: "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins

America has a long racial history of wanting minority groups to entertain the majority. The cliche, which remained prevalent in acceptable American discourse up to the mid-20th century, of the black minstrel is an example of this. According to the cliche, black people are intrinsically good-natured, happy, and ready to sing and dance, which white people encouraged them to do for the enjoyment of white people. Given this long history, I assumed, at the beginning of "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins, that the protagonist was a person of color being asked to entertain a rich white family:

"Mrs. Billingsley asks Rachel's mother, not Rachel, if Rachel would like to accompany them to the beach for two weeks. 'There's no television, no A/C. It's almost embarrassingly primitive, but Rachel is just so entertaining. Such a delight. I know she'd make my girls happy.'"

But this is different kind of minstrelsy being forced on Rachel here, one based in class, rather than race. Rachel has come into contact with wildly rich teens Devlin and Davenport Billingsley at a tennis camp--a camp Rachel's mother had to pay for with a credit card--and apparently, Rachel did something there to catch their interest, or at least the interest of their mother. We don't learn exactly what it is she did, but it's clear the two rich girls enjoy experiencing Rachel's "normal" life vicariously. Rachel, who did not want to go but was forced into it, understands her role as a "jester to the elite," someone who can "introduce the joyless to the concept of joy--if not in a way they can experience, at least in a way they can witness." 

The jester, or fool, can work in two ways. The fool can be the butt of jokes, but the fool can also "punch up," as we say nowadays, speaking truth to power through humor in order to get away with saying what needs to be said. The fool can have an important social role by subverting the social order and questioning power structures. 

Rachel doesn't seem to have much power over whether she is going to be a jester, but she might have the ability to control what kind of jester she becomes. Will she be the object of jokes or will she be the one doling out the punishment?

It turns out Rachel's not the only joker in her family. Her father left in order to follow his dream of being a comedian. He seems to be largely unsuccessful at it, working on catch phrases in front of small audiences, some of whom heckle him to "give it up, man." But her father has stuck to it, believing "he deserved--his word--applause." Her father, then, aims to be the kind of jester who punches back, but usually ends up as the punching bag. 

We only see the first day of Rachel's trip with the Billingsleys. They fly by private jet to a private Caribbean island. The Billingsley girls are terrrible--think Kardashian or Hilton-level of decadent and wasted. 

"Devlin and Davenport lean across the narrow aisle to punch one another in the upper arms for a time, back and forth like papier-mahce marionettes, until their arms are red and welted from shoulder to elbow. It's as if both have been grabbed and shaken by a middle-aged lover who's discovered he's been jilted for a pool boy.

'Trucey-trucey?" Devlin asks.

"Vodka juicy," Davenport answers.

Rachel isn't sure how she is going to fulfill her role as designated entertainer for the girls, but her first success leans in the direction of being made fun of rather than making fun of others. She eats while the girls, who are starving all the time so they can one day marry rich men, practically achieve orgasm watching her. After polishing off a huge lunch, Rachel takes three bows as the girls watch.

It looks like it's going to continue like that, with the girls playing a game where they try to say things poor people would say, and Rachel judges whether the things they say are accurate, eating Skittles for their entertainment if they get it right. Then the girls ask what Rachel's father does, a question she dodges by saying he's an entertainer. The girls say that their own father also likes to entertain, throwing parties with magicians or piano players. Once, he brought an owl. Davenport remembers being stunned that the thing was so beautiful. 

The girls then pass out, drunk and high, but Rachel can't stop thinking about the owl. Did it get startled and start to fly around the room? This is the moment of Rachel's transformation. (Karen Carlson looks at this transformation in terms of intrinsic and instrumental values here.) She doesn't want to be like the owl, giving the rich their money's worth while she gets her feathers petted. The denouement has Rachel speaking to Mrs. Billingsley, who is getting hammered in Rachel's bed and trying to tell Rachel to do whatever it takes to marry well. Mrs. Billingsley also asks Rachel to teach her girls something--anything--useful. Rachel, now just annoyed and seeing through the ruined rich for who they are, says she can, then imagines the surf sounds like applause. It seems to me at this point that she's imagining herself one day eviscerating people like the Billingsleys and being applauded for it, turning herself from object of joke to the one dishing it out to those currently laughing at her. Even though it's not a first-person story, one could potentially read the narrative as her origin story of how she came to be the Robin Hood of derision, stealing esteem from the rich to give to the poor. 

A few quibbles

It's a tight story, well-conceived and well-plotted out. The main theme, which asks the reader to answer the question of what kind of jokes you're going to tell to those with everything, is good stuff. There were a few small issues I had with the structure, which I point out more as an example of how hard it is to write a perfect story than I do to suggest the story isn't solid. 

First, the story is cut up into sections separated by line breaks. There's nothing unusual about that, but two of the first three sections have an omniscient POV, navigating between Rachel's mind and her mother's mind. After that, it's all third-person limited from Rachel's POV. Given that we don't keep coming back to Rachel's mother and she's not a character who undergoes any change in the story, it feels a little like cheating to jump inside her head at the beginning in order to flesh out Rachel's world a bit more, only to abandon the mother once she's no longer needed. 

Secondly, Rachel notes at one point that the Caribbean "sounds different from other oceans." If Rachel is, in fact, from a family struggling a bit, so much that tennis lessons set them back, I wonder how many oceans she could have been to and how often in order to be able to compare the Caribbean to them. 

Last, while I understand the principle of punching up, and the Billingsleys, as the worst form of America's debauched rich, deserve it, the story seems to rest a little too easily in the notion that rich people turn out to be morally reprehensible. My own experience is that while it would be nice to think the rich are always repugnant, the fact is that rich people often turn out to be really wonderful people. When you have the luxury of not worrying about how you're going to make ends meet, you have time and space to develop things like empathy. It's us who scrap for everything with each other who have a hard time being magnanimous sometimes. Rich people aren't the ones who are astounded owls even live somewhere other than a forest in Germany. They're the ones using their wealth to save the owls, because they went on some amazing vacation as kids and have never forgotten their encounter with the owls there. 

Those are minor things, though, and don't take away from my admiration for how the story said so much with so little space. 

"Reading other writers will affect my voice while I'm writing" is a baseless fear for most of us

This blog used to be full of either complaining about the difficulties of advancing as a writer or occasional advice to developing writers on the rare occasions when I felt like I'd figured something out. In the last few years, it's tended to lean more toward my own idiomatic version of literary analysis, one inspired by literary theory, literary criticism, and the genre of Protestant sermons. Occasionally, I've looked at movies, TV, or novels, but mostly, I've been focused on short stories. 

I don't know if my readings of short stories are good, but I know this much: the deep concentration on the stories that's necessary to write something at least halfway sensible about them has made my own short stories better. I know this from the empirical evidence, such as writing provides. I've been accepted in more journals and a few more highly regarded journals than I used to. I've also gotten far, far more positive feedback from the elite journals than I used to. (They completely ignored me for years up until a few years ago.) But I also know it because my own inner reader looks at what I write now, especially after I've had time to get away from it, and is just a lot more satisfied with it. Sometimes, I've even surprised I wrote it. 

I could really sum up everything I've learned about writing in the last seven years with some really obvious advice. If you want to be a writer, read a couple of books on how to write, then read a lot of whatever genre it is you want to write in. More importantly than reading a lot, read closely. 

And I could leave it there, but there's a concern a lot of writers have. Some really good writers even have mentioned it. They're concerned that if they read a lot of other writers, especially while they're deep in the process of writing something themselves, the voice of the person they're reading will bleed into their own writing. Some writers have said they completely cut off input once they start writing for this reason. 

It's an understandable concern. Writers want to have their own style, not just imitate someone else's. Certainly, when I'm writing, I tend to cut off input, although for me it's more because when I feel the urge to write something, I don't want to interrupt it with anything else. It's more about striking while the iron is hot than it is about keeping my voice pure. I've only got so much time, and when I've got words to put down, I tend to make that my priority. 

But let's grant it's a valid concern. I still don't think it's a reason to keep developing writers from reading broadly and deeply, even while writing. (In fact, if you're going to follow the advice some give to write every day, that would mean you could never read if you wanted to avoid reading while writing.) 

There are two reasons. First, while developing, it's unlikely that accidentally picking up influences from the best can do anything but good for your writing. It's a lot like how you suddenly play tennis better after watching Wimbledon for a couple of weeks. As long as you're not flat our trying to transcribe Pynchon into your own auto-biographical-based story, the influence is probably a good thing. It's not going to magically make you Pynchon, but it can help you unlock new levels. 

The second reason is that even after you've started to develop your own style and voice, you didn't develop it out of nowhere. It's always been a mix of what you've read and the unique impact that had on your psyche. It's always been a tension between what's inside you and what's coming at you, trying to change what's inside of you. That tension doesn't stop while you're writing, even if you avoid reading. Reading just makes it more overt. At least you'll know where the voices in your head are coming from.

All writing is a lot of hard work that you hope serendipity somehow takes a hold of. That's why it's so devastating to lose something you've written. People might think, well, you wrote it once, you can write it again, but it isn't like that. It's like how Sauron couldn't make a second ring because he'd put too much of his own power into the first one. Once you write a thing, you've kind of emptied that part of you into the work, and the things that were coming together to make the you who wrote that work will never coalesce in that same way again. Reading while writing might mess with your voice, but it's possible it will mess with your voice in a way that's interesting, that the new hybrid will be something you never thought was in you. Because it literally wasn't until the second you wrote it. 

Of Mice and Men until the end: "General: Unskilled" by Ryan Eric Dull

Ryan Eric Dull pulls off something rare in his short story "General: Unskilled." Many stories have images, metaphorical language, or bits of dialogue that are central to understanding the themes of the work, but Dull goes one step further: he actually provides a key within the story of how to read it. Mikey H., the central character, is going about his day industriously picking up as many odd jobs as he can through the app "Taskr." He's the fourth highest-rated freelancer on Taskr in the "General: Unskilled" category, and he's working as hard as he can to move up to third. 

The reader is already expecting something to go horribly wrong. We've been set up for it from the opening paragraph. He's carrying around an incredibly delicate statuette of a saluki that he's got to keep safe throughout his day of running around, meaning the reader has to sweat out the whole story knowing there's a Chekhov's gun on the table. Also, he listens to podcasts of questionable validity telling him to be positive at all times. He's a true believer in the notion that you can make your life better through hard work, which means, we've all been taught to believe, that all his hopes are about to get dashed. I was actually reciting the line about the best laid plans of mice and man aft ganging agley as I was reading. I was expecting an angry treatise on the impossibility of making it in American capitalism for the working guy stuck in the gig economy. (Karen Carlson does some interesting things with the saluki as symbol in her reading of this story.) 

A saluki. I had to look it up. 

One of the jobs Mikey takes is a research subject at UC Irvine. He's got a bunch of electrodes on his head, and he's supposed to say lines given to him, things like, "I hope that we will work together in the future." Only when he says the lines, he's supposed to imagine he's talking to people suggested by the researcher. Pretend he's saying it to a thirty-five-year-old man identified as Pacific Islander. Pretend he's saying it to a veteran. He asks the assistant what they hope to learn from the experiment, and she replies, "We don't know what we're going to find out...That's why we're running the experiment." 

The words Mikey has said might show you one thing and they might show you another, but you have to let the experiment work itself out before you know what they show you. Which is exactly how to read this story. The same opening might be setting you up for a commentary on capitalism and the futility of the bootstraps dream, but it might also be telling you something else. You have to read and delay your judgment until the end to find out. 

Because at the end, it's not Of Mice and Men. Mikey never gets his comeuppance. Instead, the story is something of a paean to the kind of worker we don't think of much, but who is a critical part of everyone's life at some time. It's a Whitmanesque ode to the laborer, in this case, the one-gig-at-a-time laborer the modern world has created. 

The narrative celebrates Mikey's resourcefulness. It compares him favorably to doctors and lawyers, who are capable of pulling off dollar-a-minute quickie consults in their portion of Taskr, whereas allegedly "unskilled" jobs tend to take a lot more time to complete. (Actually, it's usually Mikey himself who has to sing his own praises, but since he proves himself right and nobody else is going to notice his merits, nobody could fault him for this.) 

Mikey is disregarded by the world. Taskr policy tends to dehumanize him, not allowing him to accept handshakes from clients, which forces him to deflect the naturally offered handshake with a thumbs-up. When he discovers that the research assistant has picked the top-rated people from "unskilled" for her experiment, he asks whether picking the top-rated people might not throw off the data, but she just shrugs and says she doesn't "think it's relevant." To the assistant, being a top-rated unskilled laborer doesn't show any real ability, and therefore it's not even worth considering when looking at the data.

Mikey returns the world's disregard by pitying all of us working stiffs. He congratulates himself for how well he understands human nature, One of his clients has asked Mikey to help him practice for a job interview by asking him standard interview questions. Mikey can't help feeling sorry for "...these supposedly ambitious people, these credentialed, meritorious people, believing they had to beg unworthy largesse from the polished, perfumed Big Time." Mikey tries to help the guy to be more confident, but he runs out of time. 

So our experiment is this: the world sees Mikey as "unskilled," not worthy of treating with respect, not worth considering much at all, really, and likely to get chewed up by the system. Mikey sees himself as free, as highly skilled, and on his way up in the world. Which is the right hypothesis?

I kept assuming the world was right, but just like in sports, where they say, "That's why they play the game," here, there's a reason to actually finish the experiment. In the end, Mikey gets a callback from the guy who did the mock interview with him. The guy's having some kind of a breakdown. Instead of it turning into a disaster, Mikey handles it like the decent stand-in for a therapist he believes he is. Mikey has proved his own thesis: "I know what people want...I have spent over 980 hours helping people. I have studied human psychology. I have a 4.6-star weighted rating and in excess of 115 positive written reviews. Can you get in excess of 115 positive written reviews if you don't understand people?" 

Mikey might eventually be proven wrong. He might get sick, and his lack of quality health insurance may ruin him. He might get in an accident driving all over town. He might get attacked by a lunatic he has gone to help, or his rating might get ruined by an impossible customer. The story's not about how all the promises of capitalism are true. It's about showing the people who are forgotten or overlooked by capitalism their due respect. The advice Mikey listens to might be suspect, but I think we all know people whose positivity really does make up for a lot of other shortcomings. It's not a completely unrealistic portrait. 

Dull couldn't have known, of course, that this story would be read at a time when we've all, I hope, come to recognize how essential many workers we've overlooked are. But no story in the three big anthologies (Best American Short Stories, O.Henry, and Pushcart) this year is more immediately relevant to the society reading it than this one. 

What doesn't kill you makes you bi-curious: "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins

There's a temptation while reading the first few pages of "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins to write it off as another story about a privileged kid living out what will later become their "what I learned on my study abroad about the rest of the world" essay for law school. Megan is a twenty-one-year-old virgin in Spain, clueless in Spanish and clueless in love, whose biggest decision seems to be which of the twin nephews of her host mother she's going to let deflower her. During the year I spent as a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review, I probably saw a hundred of those stories come in. I was quite prepared to hate it and write about why I hated it.

But the story is aware of the privilege of the narrator. Meg is herself somewhat aware of it, and becoming more aware, but the story frames Meg's privilege in context in a way that Meg herself isn't quite yet capable of. Meg meets Elena, a double-expat by way of both America and Colombia. Meg can notice that Elena doesn't share all of the privileges Meg does, although Meg doesn't know the whole story of why. Whatever Elena's circumstances are, Meg interprets them as as a thing to respect: "I sense a point of some terrible loss. It's that intolerance for self-pity, the brittle joy I've only ever seen exhibited by people who have suffered, their optimism not so much an outlook on life as a mode of survival. Unlike me, I decide, Elena is tough." 

One could read this as Meg idealizing those less fortunate than her, seeing them as the world's wretched refuse made noble through suffering. I'd think that, too, if it weren't for the fact I've spent a fair amount of time around the African migrants who make a cameo appearance in this story later. The fact is that I've never met one of these refugees who wasn't unreasonably optimistic. If life has stacked the deck against you and you still want to survive, then you really--to use the title of a quack self-help book from decades ago--can't afford the luxury of a negative thought. Meg's observation that those who have suffered have become resilient isn't just the blinders of privilege. It's a generally true observation, and Meg is a sharp young person to have made it.

I don't want to fetishize suffering. I just know I've met a fair number of people who were on ships like this, and never met one who didn't smile a lot. 

Meg does what many young people do, then, and looks to suffering as a way to become tough herself, but she'll spend the rest of the story learning about the subtleties of suffering's mechanisms. If Meg is the character showing privilege, and the refugee family that shows up at the beach is the far end of suffering so great Meg can't even begin to imagine it, Elena is somewhere in the middle. Her father died when she was a girl, and she was molested by her father's identical twin uncle. At least, she tells Meg this, although she later says she made it all up, which, whether it really happened or not, makes whatever Elena's current situation is seem worse. Elena flits from relationship to relationship, and is dodgy about all of Meg's questions. (Karen Carlson focuses more on the unreliability of the narrative in her reading of this story here.)

Meg conflates her belief that suffering will make her stronger with her painful desire to get her first sexual experience out of the way. She expects her first time will hurt, but she wants to go through the pain so she can feel wiser and more worldly. While she and Elena share a beach vacation together, Meg gets burned, but the two keep repeating the refrain that "it'll turn into a tan," a mantra that reflects the belief that there is a reward for suffering. 

But Meg will discover two caveats to the "suffering brings rewards" axiom. When she finally has sex, with a waiter she meets at a bar, she anticipates pain, but finds "there is nothing besides a silence in my stomach like a fast-growing ink blot, the last thing I'd expected." Not all experiences she will learn from are going to hurt. They might also not feel great. Most experience is just experience. 

In her obsession with the nobility of suffering, Meg also misses her opportunity to alleviate some of it. She and Elena come close to sexual intimacy on their last night of their vacation, but the moment inexplicably passes. Instead of staying with Elena, whom Meg has just realized she wants badly, she goes to a party with the waiter from the restaurant. The friendship between Meg and Elena ends the next day, and Elena presumably continues on with whatever series of bad choices she's been making.

There's an image that gives the story its title. The Almadraba is the name of a fishing technique used to catch tuna back in the day before commercial rigs ran the traditional fishers away. This technique only caught the strongest fish, while the weaker ones were thrown back and given another chance. 

There's a cliche some religious people like to cite, that "God will only give you what you can handle." This leaves people who haven't had a life that's been all that difficult feeling like they must be weak, because the universe spared them grief. To people like Meg (and me) fortunate enough to not be caught in life's Almadraba net, there can be feelings of survivor's guilt, or the notion that we, too, ought to be given our share of misfortune. But Elena, made wise enough by real suffering, sees through this temptation. She asks of the person explaining the technique what the weaker fish are given another chance for. "To get caught later?" She asks. 

Suffering doesn't come equally, but it will come when it's your turn. You don't have to go looking for it, and there are ways to learn without it. Focusing too much on it accomplishes nothing but make you less able to address the suffering already going on in the world. 

The Marquis de Sade learns to code: "Hi Ho Cherry-O" by Becky Hagenston

When I first finished reading Becky Hagenston's economically told "Hi Ho Cherry-O," I found it fun and interesting, but also difficult to put the pieces of it together into a satisfying "what's it all about" kind of way like I tend to strive for. Even after a second reading, it felt to me like there were a couple of contending readings all at play in the story, competing with one another for primacy, like the noisy children playing twentieth century board games that form part of the backbone of the narrative. Is it a story about alienation, featuring a robotic Bartleby the Scrivener who decides he's prefer not to do the work he's asked to do? Is it a story about how the future may come apart as interactions switch from in-person to virtual, in which board games of the past are a symbol of the good-old days? Or is the commercialization and false happiness of those board games itself the genesis of where it all went wrong? 

The only way I've been able to tease out which of these competing readings is what the story is really about is to do something fairly artless. Rather than preserve the original order of the narrative, if I rearrange the parts, keeping everything there but moving the pieces around in order to form a more obvious but less interesting story, it becomes a little harder for the main theme to hide. 

Our unnamed, first-person narrator lives in a futuristic world in which many people have become so fond of virtual life, some of them have abandoned the physical world altogether. (Karen Carlson talks here about whether we should call this future world a dystopia.) Those who do abandon their physical selves live in a "Home for the Disembodied." The narrator's husband, who is also unnamed, works as a counselor in one of these homes, meaning his commute to work consists of slipping into the virtual reality station in the couple's bedroom. Inside virtual reality, he has another family, where he is married to an actress and they have triplets. He still lives in both the physical and the virtual world, but there are hints he might be slipping permanently into the virtual one. 

The narrator is working on her dissertation, presumably for an advanced academic degree. Against the advice of her dissertation director, she is studying 20th century board games. The director suspects the narrator's interest in the subject stems from her lost childhood. The narrator's parents lived in a Home for the Disembodied, which meant the narrator had to grow up in an orphanage. Although the narrator was able to have some interaction with her parents by going into virtual reality to see them, her parents ultimately deleted themselves even from the virtual world when the world scared them too much.

The director doesn't use these words, but the narrator suspects the director's concern is that this project will do nothing more than force everyone to "be reminded of what we can't get back." This seems to apply to both the narrator, trying to "get back" her lost childhood, but also to society, trying to get back, possibly, to a more corporeal and "real" existence.  

Bartleby the Robot

The narrator has a couple of methods she employs for her research. One is interviewing folks in nursing homes, during which she sometimes will perform brain scans to find traces of memories of playing games. The other is to search through data, although there seems to have been some sort of ecological disaster or series of disasters that destroyed a lot of the old data. To help with her data searches, the university has assigned her Wendell the service robot, who is, significantly, the only character in the story given a name. Wendell is supposedly programmed to make the narrator's life easier, but he seems less than thrilled with his work. Or, perhaps, he is more thrilled by masochistic impulses. He (I'll use the masculine pronoun for no other reason than his name is Wendell) continually asks the narrator to perform painful and humiliating acts on his body. (Or at least they would be painful if Wendell weren't a robot.) These acts crescendo from light to heavy in the story, from, "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour" to, "Cut me with a knife that will leave a mark" to, "Tell me you hate me because I'm stupid. Tell me I should drown myself in a toxic lake."

The narrator's research must be going well, because nothing is more 20th century than a sassy robot who seems to suddenly come to life.

At first, the narrator refuses, mostly because she's a polite, caring person. She's so polite, in fact, she doesn't press her husband too much about the sex he sometimes has with his virtual-world wife, even though the narrator and her husband have not had sex in the real world for a long time. But the more Wendell insists she harm him, the more she realizes it's scratching an itch she didn't know she had. When she chokes Wendell, she keeps going after the robot says she can stop. When she insults him, she says more awful things than he asked her to say.

Not a malfunction

One is tempted to read Wendell as malfunctioning much like Bartleby the Scrivener did when he could no longer handle a redundant job. One could read this whole story as a commentary on how society used to do things like play board games together face-to-face, and now the whole world is virtual, and it's alienating and dehumanizing, so dehumanizing that even the robots who are built for the boredom can't take it. But there are reasons to doubt this reading. For one, the narrator finds that, contrary to the commercials she finds that the children playing the games are "very, very happy children," and also "very white and dimpled (who) mostly wear stripes," the memory scans tell a different story. They recall fights over the games and the correct rules. (Who hasn't had an argument over which house rules to Monopoly are the right ones?) The pre-virtual and pre-ecological disaster past wasn't idyllic. What we've lost isn't a better way of living, it's just a realer way of living. 

Twice the narrator questions the functioning of the robot. Once, she asks Wendell, "Who programmed you?" The robot responds, "I'm programmed to work for you." Another time, the narrator asks the university if she can replace Wendell, and the university is shocked by the request. "The robot was programmed to make your life easier," they say. It's possible to read these as absurd replies that are clearly contradicted by reality, but what if we read them as true? What if Wendell is behaving the way he is because what the narrator really needs is to learn to slash and scream a bit, to get rid of her polite manner, which is itself a form of virtual reality thrown over her truer, more carnal self.

This seems to be supported by the narrator's epiphany. We know it's an epiphany because she all but tells us it is, right after throwing Wendell in the closet for the last time: "Something is happening, a feeling like when my parents taught me math problems and finally, finally, I could solve them." Immediately after this, she tries to have sex with her husband in the real world. When he refuses, she says it's "fine," but then she starts thinking of more horrible things she can do to Wendell. 

I believe the weight of evidence leads to this story being mostly about how the narrator has decided to choose a corporeal existence over a false, less frightening virtual one. She has said in conversations with her husband that she doesn't want to raise kids in a Home for the Disembodied, she wants them "here, in the flesh," but her husband says it's "too dangerous." After giving it another try at the end to coax her husband back out of his virtual life, she takes an internal turn toward a the life of the flesh. True, at that point, it's only planned--she thinks of more awful things she will do to Wendell--but it's nonetheless decisive. Wendell's programming has figured out that this is what it takes to give the narrator what she needs. Through sado-masochism, Wendell has managed to baptize her into the life of the body she always knew she wanted. It may not be a return to some halcyon, Edenic past. Humanity went into virtual retreat because the real world was scary. But for her, it's like she's discovered the rules to the game after only looking at the box for years. The last two words of the story, "I've won," say a lot about how the story is programmed.   

Mostly good with it: "Fat Swim" by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Since this is the first fiction I've reviewed in which the theme had to do with a positive body image, I'm going to try something different. My blogging about the works of other writers has always been a strange hybrid, not quite a popular review, not quite a theory-laden academic analysis, and not quite a straightforward LIT 101 exposition, either. It takes elements from all of those things, but it isn't any of them. It occurs to me often that the genre I'm most drawing from is the one that left the most indelible mark on me when I was young: the sermon. A good sermon draws on hermeneutics, the scholarly side of Bible reading, but it also draws from life, because the point of the sermon isn't to be a better Bible scholar, it's to be a better person. I'd like to believe literature can do that for us, too, which is why I tend to jump between what I learned in grad school and what I learned in Sunday School when I'm talking about my reactions to stories.

In honor of the sermon, I'd like to borrow a page from Jesus, whose golden rule was an attempt to condense all of the law into one sentence. If I were to try to condense what having a good body image means in one sentence, it might be something like this: If you know all the facts, then it's a good thing to feel happy with and celebrate your body, no matter what it looks like or what it can do. 

Just like any good preacher, I'm now going to take that simple sentence and spend a long time expanding needlessly on it, making everyone in the pews hungry and anxious to get their uncomfortable clothes off. 

Modern psychology has long since realized that images of what a "good body" looks like for both men and women isn't realistic for most people, and that being told we ought to strive for it anyway is mentally damaging. Men are supposed to be both slim and also full of muscle, while women are supposed to be both skinny but also curvy with big breasts, girlish but also desirable. The standards are ridiculous. Those trying to meet them face two likely ends: low self-esteem for having a body that doesn't measure up, or a lifetime of obsessive attempts to get their bodies to look how they think they should. Neither one seems emotionally healthy. (Although I'd like to leave open the possibility that some people might really enjoy trying to look like a body builder as a hobby, and that, as hobbies go, it's probably a healthy one, and there's no reason to look down on people who genuinely enjoy it, just like I don't look down on people who enjoy any of the million other hobbies I'm not that into.) 

So it's important to love yourself as you are. However, I'd put a limit on self-love. Consider my son, for a moment, and his troubles with math. I've been working with him on his math for years now, and I'm pretty convinced the main source of his problems is just that he doesn't want to do it. He's convinced it doesn't have any relevance to his future, so he just isn't motivated to do the work. Should I say, "Okay, son, I don't want to mess with your math self-image, so whatever knowledge of math makes you feel good about yourself, that's what you should do"? Or am I right to keep putting a foot up his ass to get him to a reasonable level of math, then let him make his own decisions as an adult about what math is worth to him?

Obviously, I think the second is true, and I think something similar applies to our happiness with our own bodies. If someone is three hundred pounds and genuinely happy like that, because he's done the work before to be in shape, and he's decided that he's happier enjoying life and weighing three hundred pounds, then great. But it's another thing if the real reason why someone is overweight is just because it's too hard to be in better shape. Sloth and gluttony are still vices worth avoiding, and industry and temperance virtues worth following. If you could really get in shape if you wanted to and choose not to, good on you. But positive body image shouldn't be an excuse for not having self-control or not doing work. 

My ideal body is one that says, "I love life." It says, "This is the best body I could put together with all the other stuff I've got going on." It's not one that says, "I don't give a fuck." 

I'm very happy that ads have started to recognize that different bodies exist, and that people with bodies like these might get the message that their bodies are cool, too. 

And now I actually talk about the story for a little bit

"Fat Swim" by Emma Copley Eisenberg is a sweet story about an eight-year-old girl named Alice learning to love herself. Her parents are divorced. She lives most of the time with her dad, who is fat and in counseling because he doesn't love himself. On the weekends, she visits her mother, who is skinny and lives with a runner. While at her mother's, Alice is nervous and feels hungry, because her mother frets over her portion sizes. 

Through her kitchen window, Alice sees a group of overweight women at the pool every Wednesday, and she joins them eventually. She learns from them about being happy with the body you've got. She also sexually fantasizes about them, which led me down a long rabbit hole of a conversation with Mrs. Heretic about how common sexual fantasies are for eight-year-olds and how many seven-year old girls get breasts, like Alice did. Overall, it's not so unusual as to be unbelievable. The story mostly accomplishes what it wants to accomplish. Generally, I believe that Alice is going to be a happy, well-adjusted adult who loves herself in a good way. 

But there are a few passages that troubled me. First is just how negative a view the narrative takes of the mother. While talking about the various hardships her father has survived, the narrative has this to say about the mother:

"Another thing Dad survived is Mom, who is not gone, only living in the suburbs with her new husband. Alice spends every weekend there. There is little to report because everything is so little. Mom has shrunk. Mom's new husband runs marathons, leaving the house before Alice wakes up and returning halfway through the day, in small shorts and shellacked with sweat. Fifteen miles! Twenty-seven miles! Mom high-fives him and then they both want to high-five her. Alice's chest starts to feel tight hours before dinner time because there is usually not enough food and she usually goes to bed hungry. This feeling sticks around long after the meal has actually happened, the hunger has actually come, and even through the morning when she can eat again. At Mom's house, even the air feels thin."

I think it's easy to believe a mother might put unwanted and even unhealthy pressure on a daughter to be thin, like Tea Leoni in Spanglish. This passage feels almost unfair, though. Maybe I needed to see more of what the mother actually did to make Alice feel the way she does, rather than just see Alice's perceptions of the way things are. Nobody should body shame Alice, but neither should the runner couple be shamed for wanting to live the way they do. 

The only other indicator we get about the mother controlling Alice's weight is when Alice fantasizes about having the women from the pool come to her birthday party:

"She has imagined a birthday party. It is her birthday, a pool party, and the women are her guests. There is cake and ice cream. Everyone eats as much as they want and no one is there to ask them if they really want that second piece. They eat ice cream from the pint cartons because it is assumed that each will finish her own pint. No one has to share, no one has to put the ice cream back with one bite left because she is afraid her mom will notice the pint missing."

I get that it's good, sometimes, to be low key about parenting, to not overreact when a kid wants to shock you, or when the kid genuinely wants to try something you'd rather she not try. The father in the story seems to have this kind of parenting down. When Alice says she wants to get bigger around and not just up, he just says "okay," while at the same time, he's got her eating vegetables from his garden just by letting her follow her natural interests. 

But I've got to ask: how many full pints of ice cream do you let a kid eat before you suggest something else? How heavy do you let your child get before you start to think you need to intercede, knowing how hard it will be for that child to get in shape later in life, how many health risks the kid will be open to if she doesn't get it under control? 

The fact is that this low-key parenting thing doesn't work with every kid. I now wish we'd been a lot less tolerant of our son and his strong inclinations to make unhealthy choices when he was younger. We tried the "let him figure it out with guidance from us if he wants it" school. He was not the right child for that. He was a much better candidate for a no-nonsense upbringing, and I think he'll suffer for our choices as parents. 

Ultimately, I think Alice in the story is going to be okay. Maybe that's because it's a story, and the author can choose to make her kid turn out okay. I don't know that it usually turns out that way in real life, but Alice is going to feel good about herself, and if she's a little overweight and that means some people won't want to date her or be friends with her, she's not going to lose sleep about it. She'll find her people and likely live a happy life. It's a satisfying conclusion to a mostly satisfying story.

Nonetheless, I'm going to submit that it's possible to either A) convince yourself you're happy when you're really not, or B) be content with yourself when you shouldn't be. In Alice's case, she might, if she goes down road A, end up telling herself she's happy being out of shape, when her condition might make her miss out on things she'd like to do, like hike or bike or swim. Or, if she goes down path B, she might actually be happy eating far more than her share of the Earth's resources, damaging the environment, which seems to me one of the best reasons to practice at least a little moderation. I don't mean to be the environmental eating police--we all have to enjoy ourselves a little, or life will be too grim to endure. But all the ice cream you want doesn't seem like a responsible way to live your life. What you eat might seem like a private decision, but is anything really completely a private decision?  

It's not up to me to judge whether Alice should be happy about her body. If I were very overweight, I'd want to change, but I enjoy doing things that require me to be in at least reasonable shape. That doesn't mean I can't see why others would enjoy living a different way. I still enjoyed the story, and I am very happy that the world is now a place where people can enjoy having reasonable bodies instead of worrying about why they don't have unreasonably ideal ones.