The critic is evicted: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, Best American Short Stories 2021

For a blogger trying to come up with 20 interesting takes on 20 stories, the best fodder is a Goldilocks kind of story: not too hard and not too easy to understand. The perfect story would stretch me to my exact limits of comprehension, synthesis, analysis, and explanatory powers, and no further.

Stories like "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque don't leave a whole lot of room for a critic to work. Nearly all readers will find it easy to understand and relatively easy to know what you're supposed to "get out of it," to use the phrase plain-speaking folks who don't do literature for a living often use. 

In a lot of ways, there's nothing really to "get" about the story. Unlike "Boyz N the Hood," which it celebrates, it doesn't attempt to dissect the origins of urban blight. The story is meant more as raw data than as a grand attempt to make sense of raw data. It exists to say "we were here," to tell the story of people quickly being forgotten as the neighborhood they once lived in is gentrifying. It does this well, with plenty of humorous or palpable details that made me believe the story's authenticity, but once I'd read it, I had a hard time earthing up layers beneath the story to dig up. It's like a basketball analyst trying to come up with something interesting to say after a good team beat a bad team by fifty points. 

I still quote this line sometimes when I'm trying to get amorous with Mrs. Heretic. 

One notable characteristic of this story is that feels a lot more like a creative essay than a short story. It has the logic, chronology, and vocabulary of creative non-fiction more than fiction. That isn't a negative criticism; it's just how the story feels, and that feeling has a lot to do with the reader's emotional engagement. I found myself more nodding my head as I read to say, "I have heard you" than I felt like crying or wanting to race back through the story to pull on interesting threads. 

What this story does, it does well, but what it does well doesn't leave much room for me to try to do more with. 

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As an complete aside, I would note that BASS has an interesting trend going on. Most BASS anthologies for as long as I've been reading them have sought--consciously, I would guess, whatever the judges may say about their methodologies--to bring about "diversity," understood in the way our current culture understands it. There will be stories by both men and women, and, if possible, trans/non-binary writers as well. There will be white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous writers, and stories about white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous characters. There will be gay and straight characters and writers. Which is fine. The collections usually come out fairly interesting with this approach, partly for the way they allow of compare and contrast exercises within single anthologies. But for some reason, the "Latino" entry in BASS seems to be on a roll of giving us stories full of the "Dickensian aspect" of the American experience. A brief history:

2021: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, about a group of Latino boys in Chicago who grow up to become drug dealers. Some are killed, some go to prison.

2020: "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana, about a group of kids living on the streets in a Caracas slum. 

2019: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Munoz, about illegal immigrant workers (and some who might possibly be legal) and their travails

2018: "Everything is Far from Here" by Cristina Henriquez, about the border and immigrants being held in prisons.

That's not really enough to consider it a tradition. (And to be fair, the 2018 anthology that had "Everything is Far from Here" also had Jacob Guajardo's beautiful coming-of-age story "What Got into Us," so it wasn't all Latino trauma in that edition.) But I will be paying attention to next year's anthology to see what comes out of it. (And yes, I wrote basically the same thing last year when talking about "The Hands of Dirty Children.) 

Karen Carlson found more to say about this story than I did here.