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.