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.