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.