The critic America deserves, if not the one it needs

I'm going to blog about this year's Best American Short Stories, although I said I wouldn't. That I couldn't. That I needed to move on from literature and do something more practical with my life. After a year or so of sticking to that resolution, though, I think that all things considered, blogging about literature in the way I do might be one of the less futile things I could do with my time. 

A lot of that has to do with what I chose to blog about, how I approach it, and how few others are doing something similar. I analyze stories based mostly on nothing more than a close reading, a passing familiarity with theoretical approaches, and a heavy influence from having listened to thousands of sermons that were built around textual analysis. My goal is to create readings of stories that intelligent laypeople can understand, enough that they feel their experience of a story was deepened by what I had to say about it. If possible, I try to find some practical application of the reading, just like a Protestant pastor would with a Bible text. If there were thousands of people doing this for collections like Best American Short Stories or the Pushcart anthology, I likely wouldn't be compelling enough to rank high among them. But that's not the case. The numbers on my blog clearly tell me that there are still people in the world reading short stories, wanting to understand them better, and finding the resources out there slim enough they're willing to spend a few minutes with me. 

Literature may not be the most important thing in the world, but if becoming better at reading fiction that tries to capture the essence of life in its exasperating emotional and psychological agony makes people a little less prone to celebrating the maudlin, the mawkish, and the banal, then it's a useful way for me to spend my time. 

So I'm going to get back at it. It's not easy for me to write critically about the stories regarded as the best produced today. On a personal level, as a writer myself, I have two reactions, which are contradictory and come to me in alternating waves. Either I feel that I'm writing stories on par with those being hailed as the best, and my exclusion from them is an injustice, or I feel that I have been left out because I'm an inferior writer and that nobody should care what I have to say about stories I'm not good enough to have written myself. 

To analyze short stories, I have to ignore both of those voices, because whether I'm a good writer of fiction has nothing to do with whether the analysis I create is worthwhile. It's no exaggeration to say that at the very least, in relative terms, my literary analysis of these stories is worthwhile, because very often it's almost the only thing out there. (Although I'm not completely alone as long as my buddy Karen Carlson is still at it.) 

People have been complaining about the death of criticism forever, as one Times Literary Supplement article pointed out recently, but if you'd like proof that I'm not exaggerating, try finding good, professional criticism of the stories I'll be blogging about for the next few weeks or months, the ones from Best American Short Stories 2021. You'll see I'm not making this up.

I can guess at a couple of reasons for this. One is that most readers of short stories are writers themselves, as everyone knows, but since writers now are told that building social networks is nearly as important as writing itself, penning anything remotely critical about another writer is a risk not worth taking. 

It's also just plain hard work. Karen introduced me two years ago to a blogger who planned to try to blog through BASS with us, but he gave up after a few stories. That was just for one volume of BASS. Reading thoughtful, challenging stories in a way that does any justice to them is not easy. Doing it over and over is grueling, and it's not like anyone's paying me for it. If there's any result of it that I hear about, it's just as likely to be negative as positive. 

Nonetheless, this is a niche fate seems to have ordained I somehow fill, though I often feel slow of speech and slow of tongue and like fate should send anyone but me to do it. The more it seems like the world may not have as long a history in front of it as I once thought, though, the more it seems to me like I ought to tend the garden I have and think less about whether it's the one I think I ought to have.