Literary court, juvie edition: "Little Beast" by C Pam Zhang, Best American Short Stories 2021

I've played "literary court" a few times before when looking into entries from Best American Short Stories. Once was with Mary Gaitskell's "Pleasure" and another was with Danielle Evans' "Boys Go to Jupiter." It's an idea I stole from my son's middle school English teacher. One year, they had the class divide up into prosecution, defense, judge, and jury and argued over whether a character from a story was guilty of murder, based on the text. I thought it was lame then, but I guess I've come to change my mind, because I keep raiding the idea over and over. 

This year's going to be a little different, though. There's no arguing that our protagonist, called "Girlie" by her father, is guilty. At the very end of "Little Beast," we learn that she has apparently poisoned her father with an overdose of sleeping pills. It's going to be a charge of manslaughter or reckless negligence, rather than murder, because she didn't kill him on purpose. Instead, she needed to drug him in order to carry out her other crime, which was faking photos and evidence that suggested her father had sexually assaulted her. 

She's definitely guilty. It seems she's already confessed to the crime of lying about sexual violence and waiting for her punishment when the authorities bring her the news that her father is dead. 

What drove her to such a rash, reckless, and perhaps "beastly" action? Even though the death was accidental, the staging of a sexual crime wasn't. Let's assume we are the person assigned to determine what to do with her, and we are using the text of this story--how did it come to us? I don't know. It just did--to determine how "beastly" Girlie's actions were, or whether we can understand what led her to her fateful decisions. 

Motivating factor #1: "slopping"

The opening line is something of a head-scratcher. "At thirteen, I felt my body slopping." How does a body "slop"? When I think of slopping, I think of a bucket full of water that's being carried, and the movement of being carried makes the water slap and slosh around and spill over the sides. How does a body "slop"? Doesn't a body come with skin to contain all that slopping? 

Reading on, "slopping" is Girlie's word for two character traits she abhors. One is oversharing, in which sense the thing "slopping" out would be too much personal information, particularly of an uninteresting nature. "I spilled into conversations and overshared the banal." Girlie's father is an oversharer extraordinaire,  "He laughed too loud. In public, he was fond of asking what had clogged our toilet, what size training bra I wore." 

That's one half of what "slopping" is to her. Of course, there are two parts to water in a bucket slopping. It goes forward and back. The second half of the meaning of "slopping" for Girlie is being too interested in what others have to say. It's being too eager to please, which Girlie sees as a kind of weakness. "My posture was liquid and my spine nonexistent," she criticizes herself, then uses the same weak spine imagery for her father leaning forward to hear her speak. "I mumbled, which made him bend closer. In his soft spine, in his supplicant's pose, I saw and despised myself." 

Girlie is mortified at how much of her father's natural, affable weakness has invaded her. An avid biology student, she thinks about how his "DNA ran riot through my cells...his shamefulness breaking out, like acne, over me." 

Girlie sees this over eagerness to both know and be known by others as "supplication," that is, begging. Begging for approval, begging to be noticed. She dislikes begging, because, as the scholarship student at an uber-rich girls' school whose father is the janitor, she already feels like she is too much seen as a recipient of charity. 

Motivating factor #2: the desire to be unknowable 

The opposite of an accommodating, "slopping" personality is someone who is a complete enigma, someone who tries neither to understand others nor to be understood. Girlie is not interested in being friends with most of the girls in her school, because none of them contain any secrets. She has already learned their secrets through her father's janitorial work: "...because my father was Alta's night janitor, he knew their secrets by way of secretaries and cafeteria ladies, by way of lockers and trash cans." Girlie isn't interested in these knowable, sloshy girls.

What does interest her are the four "a bit strange" girls at Alta. "Not glowing but shadowed girls, skinny wraiths with bitten nails, dark circles, dry hair." These "shadowed" girls are wrapped in mystery and keep their secrets. "Under Alta's bright lights, these girls' lashes drew vertical bars over their eyes. More than anything, I wanted to know what inside them needed caging." 

Motivating factor #3: longing for control

Girlie ends up becoming one of the strange girls when she develops an eating disorder. She sees her father's obesity as an outward sign of his inward sloppiness/slopping/slovenliness, and Girlie views her anorexia as "the discipline to shape" herself differently. In other words, as many researchers of eating disorders have found, her eating disorder is about her trying to gain control. The same seems to be true of the other four "strange" girls. 

Girlie stumbles into anorexia almost by mistake, but she studies the other girls and tries to mimic their other attempts to control and to push away the world. She pretends to be a cutter, but can't. Girlie has obstacles in her path to becoming like the other girls, precisely because she has been given so much love by her father. "I was poor in neglect, in that cold, instructive pain...I'd had dinners of chicken and mashed potatoes, dutifully stirred halfway through heating so that they neither burnt nor froze my tongue." 

As a result, Girlie fails to truly become one with the "clot" of other girls. She becomes what she has always hated, a desperate, fawning acolyte of the girls, trying to get them to like her. "I spoke from the edge of my seat, spit flying, my spine curving toward my audience of four." It's this failure to be seen as damaged on the level of the other girls that forces Girlie to her ultimate expedient of pretending her father has molested her. She wanted to be mysterious, aloof, and in control, but she is none of these things, which forces her to her last resort. 

Motivating factor #4: The news

Girlie has time on her hands while her father cleans the school at night, and she often occupies it watching the news. There, she finds all the lurid, barely euphemized violence against women that seems like it's been the lead of local news for as long as I've known what local news programs were. "Late at night the coverage gave way to the faces of girls and what was done to their bodies. Staticky clips from dispatcher calls. Teary interviews. But loudest of all, the silence. Newscasters resorted to euphemisms even as the screen showed photo after bloody photo." 

Girlie finds the same type of stories in the backs of magazines at the library. Stories of women being abducted, imprisoned, raped, and terrified by men. Girlie associates these stories of women being trapped with her own predicament when her father is knocking on the bathroom door, wanting to make sure she is okay. The women in the news were made captive by males intent on evil; Girlie is made captive by her father's all-too-present love. This association makes her lash out at her father, calling him a pervert for wanting to see her. This accusation makes the father leave her alone, fleeing from "the thing inside me." It's her frequent contact with the violence in the news more then anything that puts the "beast" inside her. It's the news that awakened her to the "clot of violence" which she ends up wanting to join.

How mitigating are these motivations? 

Is Girlie a beast, or is she a victim of a society that fetishizes neglect and violence? Should we send her to the juvie slammer, or should we try to help her with therapy? Is she someone to fear, or someone to pity, as much as she would hate our pity? 

Had she not accidentally killed her father with an overdose of sleeping pills, she would probably have straightened out on her own. She was planning her own acts of contrition while waiting for her father to arrive, and it seemed like she had come to terms with accepting his love as better than whatever misguided adulation she could get from faking abuse. If only he hadn't died, things probably would have worked themselves out. 

This story somewhat follows the logic of horror, in which the universe tends to give people the punishment they deserve. I think a juvie judge could probably afford to go easy on girlie. If the punishment is too lenient, the universe will probably take care of it. 

Speaking of horror, it's rumored that Hollywood types read BASS, trolling for ideas. "Little Beast" probably makes the best movie/series crossover of all the winning stories this year. I mean, I wouldn't watch it. Horror movies scare me, and not in a good way. So do goth girls. But I can see how this story is a rich vein that could be tapped visually. I hope someone's got sense enough to mine it. Sounds like Karen Carlson would watch it.  

Being timely by not trying: "Biology" by Kevin Wilson, Best American Short Stories 2021

I remarked when looking at Best American Short Stories last year that it's really hard for fiction to be an art form that comments on the issues of the moment. Fiction takes a while to write, a while to get approved for publication, a while to edit, and finally a while to be published. For an annual anthology that then adds its own added selection, editing, and publication time cycles to the process, it often means that fiction responding to an issue of the present is actually responding to an issue of years ago. That's the case in this year's anthology with George Saunders' "Love Letter." While "Love Letter" could still be read years from now with profit for the way it frames difficult questions of how much of one's personal life it makes sense to sacrifice for the general good, it is not responding to a national issue of the present as an artifact of an annual anthology. As an entry in the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology, it isn't responding to an issue of 2021. Well, not 2021 after January 6th, anyhow. 

It's not anybody's fault that fiction doesn't provide immediate responses to issues of the moment. Social media makes the conversation shift almost daily, if not even faster. One of the reasons it's so hard to accomplish anything politically is that voters are constantly following a new shiny object every day, preventing them from the kind of slow and methodical labor on one issue that's usually necessary for progress. For fiction, that means that if you try to write a story about the issue of the moment, it might not be an issue of much concern by the time your story is published. 

That's why it's so remarkable that Kevin Wilson's "Biology" seems to be commenting on an issue that's come up in the news lately, although it wasn't an issue on anyone's radar back when he wrote this story. It wasn't even on the radar when Best American Short Stories 2021 came out last fall. I'm talking about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill. I can't even summarize this bill, because it's so full of vague language, nobody agrees on what it says. But what it will probably do is make teachers less likely to discuss issues of sexual identity with students. 

Along comes me with my tardy read-through of BASS 2021, and to my surprise, the next-to-last story is about a teacher who connects with an awkward, troubled, gay 8th grader, partly by discussing sex and sexual identity. You can't get more timely than that, although the timeliness is completely serendipitous. It's a reminder that while you certainly shouldn't avoid writing about the topic du jour as a writer if that's what moves you, you shouldn't feel like writing about other things is somehow escapist. If you write the story that's stuck in your brain and won't come out until you create it, in time, it will be of pressing interest to somebody. 

Why "Biology"?

This story could well have been called "Death Cards," the game that Patrick, the awkward gay kid mentioned above, invents. The game is a compelling and critical element in the story, and thematically relevant. A big part of the theme has to do with the randomness of the cards we get dealt in life. Instead of using the game's name as the name of the story, though, it's called "Biology." The simple reason it's called that might be that Kevin's teacher-guide, Mr. Reynolds, is a biology teacher. But biology itself takes on a meaning in the story that's parallel to that of the death cards.

Patrick's Death Cards game involves a mix of cards he has created. Each card holds a hypothetical life event on it, belonging to one of four stages of life. There are nice things that can happen--first kiss, first job, win a contest--but also "death cards" featuring "people dying in horrible, graphic ways." The game, as such, involves little more than drawing cards to see what kind of life experiences you get before you die. It's all luck. 

Patrick's card game is not unlike the biology Mr. Reynolds teaches, "where the babies fight each other to the death in order to be the one who gets the food from the mother. One time he brought in this weird slug and told us about how its mouth was like sandpaper and it could tear out the eyes of a baby bird, or something like that. He talked about egg wars where different bird species tried to fuck each other over." Or, as Patrick then puts it more succinctly, Mr. Reynolds teaches about "the horrible shit that all living things did just to keep themselves alive." 

Patrick is a boy obsessed with the "horrible shit." It populates his game that he has to play by himself because nobody will play with him. Patrick has nobody to discuss these thoughts with, and he's probably on his way to either hurting himself or someone else. "If I'd had a gun, if I knew how to get a gun, I would have murdered everyone in the classroom," he recalls, thinking back on his junior high school years from his perspective as a grown man. 

Bad teacher, but good for Patrick

We had a good teacher story earlier in BASS 2021 with "A Way with Bea," but Mr. Reynolds isn't a very good teacher, by his own admission. He's kind of mousy, and suffers from Vietnam War-induced PTSD. Patrick discovers, however, that Mr. Reynolds is able to withstand the insults the students throw at him without it affecting his own self-image. "This might help you Patrick," Mr. Reynolds tells him when Patrick starts spending lunch period in Mr. Reynolds' room, "If people think you are strange, different, they can be cruel. They look for instability, and opening. My car, it's not me, is it? It's just this piece of metal that I drive to work every day. But people can look at it and laugh, and they think it hurts me, but it doesn't. Because it's not me." 

Patrick is temporarily turned off to Mr. Reynolds' biology when Mr. Reynolds doesn't affirm his belief in evolution. Evolution had been a consoling theory to Patrick, because it represented the "idea that you could be something but turn into something else." Mr. Reynolds doesn't offer Patrick any great hopes for the future, though. He thinks life is like Death Cards. "You just pick cards and you can't really control it." That might not seem like the inspirational message Patrick needs, but it turns out it's the exact realistic kind of advice he needs. Mr. Reynolds gives more hard truths when Patrick comes to his house to see him: "Life does not always have to be bad, Patrick, but maybe right now it has to be for you. But get out of here, go to college, a college in a big city or with a lot of students, and then maybe you can figure this out. Maybe you can find happiness." When Patrick wonders if he might not ever find happiness, Mr. Reynolds acknowledges that this is possible. "Maybe...but just try, okay?"

Mr. Reynolds doesn't hide the cruelty of the world, not in his lessons nor in his private conversations with Patrick. It's evolution. It's biology. But by allowing Patrick to imagine a world without so much cruelty, without "death cards," he gives Patrick the space to keep breathing long enough to get past the worst of it and survive childhood. 

Mr. Reynolds isn't this bad, but he's probably not winning any teacher of the year awards. 

They talk about sex

Mr. Reynolds does not shy away from Patrick's questions about sex. Although Patrick noted that Mr. Reynolds was somewhat squeamish talking about human bodies, the teacher still delivered answers with scientific precision when asked. He's kind of asexual. He might have been gay once, but that time has kind of passed, and now he's just not interested in sex. He had sex once, with a prostitute in Vietnam, because he was being harassed by members of his unit to, and he hated it. When Patrick says he might be gay, Mr. Reynolds tells him that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with him. 

Patrick got what he needed to survive junior high and high school. It wasn't by much, and all his issues aren't behind him as an adult. But Mr. Reynolds, by his willingness to answer the questions Patrick had and to share what little wisdom he had, likely saved at least one life. That wouldn't have been possible if Mr. Reynolds had thought that he'd get fired for answering Patrick's questions. Mr. Reynolds needed freedom.

Hell, if you think about it, Mr. Reynolds was probably taking an unwise risk when he let Patrick come alone into his bedroom. Patrick asked if he could kiss Mr. Reynolds. That all might have gone south. But it didn't. 

It's hard to change minds. That's my entire lesson in democracy I've learned in the last 30 years. But minds do change. I don't think advocates in Florida will make many inroads by preaching about the dangers LGBTQ youth face when they can't talk about their sexuality with adults, because the people pushing the laws often believe the sexuality of those youth amount to an immoral life choice. But a story about a person, told in intimate detail, might alter the amount of rigidity with which someone holds their views. It might not pop the lid off the jar, but it might loosen it. 

I understand that parents want to prevent outsiders from influencing their children in ways parents object to. But why would parents think they alone can provide all the guidance a child needs? Sometimes, kids are just very different from their parents, and the answers they're looking for aren't at home, they're out in the wide world. That never happened for me, personally. I don't have a teacher I look back on and think they changed everything for me. But I can see how it would happen. This story is a believable, sweet account of a teacher having an unexpected positive impact on a student, and it's also an argument for why teachers should not be muzzled when interacting with students. 

The story's also a great example of how to be timely without trying. 

Other looks:

Karen Carlson looks at the story's envelope structure, something I did not discuss. 

The ceremonies of connection: "Palaver" by Bryan Washington

One question that might occur to a reader while observing the interaction between son and mother in Bryan Washington's "Palaver" might be: why are these two people even still trying to maintain a relationship at all? There are obvious, long-standing resentments between the two, enough that the son had to take off and flee to Japan, where he now teaches English to juvenile delinquents, just to get away from it. The two barely seem to be speaking the same language, hence the title, which refers to a sort of meeting between peoples of differing tribes who don't share the same language or culture. 

The son is having his palaver with his mother at the same time as he is constantly having to palaver his way through his life in Tokyo, where he does not speak the language beyond perhaps survival level. (The mother is holding a "magazine neither of them could read," presumably because it's in Japanese. He's lived there for three years and doesn't seem to know much Japanese, which is forgivable, because Japanese is one hell of a difficult language. It's not something you just pick up by living there.) Meanwhile, the mother is also unable to speak the language. She may be in Japan for the same reason her son is. She and the boy's father are "going through it," meaning having relationship troubles. Those troubles seem to have been endemic to the marriage. She reads, but does not respond to, the father's texts while she in visiting her son. 

These overlapping palavers might seem to be even more disorienting for son and mother than just having to work out their own issues would be, but it seems that having to navigate the confusing streets of Tokyo actually helps the son and mother to make progress in their own relationship. As mother and son move about, they find themselves partaking in a number of non-verbal ceremonies, almost transactional in their nature. They involve a simple gesture that is then met with a simple gesture in return. I count five total such ceremonies:

1. They are waiting for a train and a mother brings along a set of twins. "Both of her kids waved. So the mother and her son waved back."
2. The mother goes exploring while her son is at work. She sees some women in front of a shrine in a park. The women "asked the mother to take their photo, so she did. When they asked the mother if she wanted one of herself, she smiled as they snapped about forty."
3. In a bar, while waiting for her son, the mother "realized that the bartender had been watching her. They made eye contact, and the bartender nodded, reaching for another glass."
4. In a different bar, the mother orders a glass of wine, and, "Another woman sitting alone made eye contact, and the mother nodded, and she nodded too." 
5. In the final scene, the mother watches a bride taking newlywed photos. "When the woman looked up, they made eye contact. The mother smiled at her, and the woman smiled back."

The mother also engaged in a similar action-for-action ceremony with her husband. She has mostly been reading, but not responding to, his texts while she is in Japan. But when he sends just an emoji, "she responded immediately, without even thinking about it, just as a reaction. She thought about how there are some things we simply can't shake." 

That's kind of how all of these social transactions take place. They're instinctive reactions. Someone smiles at you and you smile back. Someone nods their head, and you do the same. Someone takes your photo, you offer to do the same for them.

People are sometimes critical of "transactional" habits in relationships, perhaps because it might seem like transactions involve calculations about gains and losses. That would mean people only engage in actions that benefit them, rather than out of a sense of devotion or love. 

But the simple transactions of "Palaver" are actually a key to unlocking communication for mother and son. Having learned from the simple transactions in the many "palavers" he negotiates every day, he now proposes another transactional arrangement to his mother. They will alternate telling stories. If he tells her one, she will tell him one. By swapping stories that are really about their lives, but told in a third-person "once upon a time" way, they are able to learn about each other and ultimately somewhat bridge what has been an unbridgeable gap between them. The mother resists telling her stories for a while, and instead we, the readers, get to hear the stories she would have told her son if she'd been willing to. Eventually, though, she opens up to the game, and the two seem to have gone beyond a palaver to real communication by the end.

We get a sense that the mother might have been using this method for getting through tough times in her relationship with her husband for a long time. She mentions to the son at the end something about "when you've been in a relationship with someone as long as your father and I," and her retelling of how they met suggests theirs in not simply a toxic relationship, but a loving relationship with troubles. 

The answer to why the son and the mother continue to struggle to have a relationship in spite of how difficult it is to communicate is the same as why we nod back at someone who nods to us. It's natural to do. And perhaps just the simple gesture of trying can sometimes be enough of a healing ceremony to bring a breakthrough when least expected. 

Other readings:

As usual, Karen Carlson does a more thorough job than I do of explaining background, in this case background to the word "palaver." 

Inheritance: "You Are My Dear Friend" by Madhuri Vijay, Best American Short Stories 2021

I barely convinced myself to blog through Best American Short Stories this year, and I may never do it again. I've already listed several reasons why, and this next story reminds me of another one: I end up saying the same things year after year. 

In this case the thing I'm about to repeat is how different American letters are from those of most other countries on Earth. The big annual Korean anthology of best short stories that comes out every year--to use one counterexample--comprises almost entirely stories written by people born in Korea about people born in Korea. Understanding deeper, connotative meanings of most stories requires cultural knowledge that the readers of the stories will all share in common. 

Because the United States is more much ethnically and culturally diverse, though, our literary canon is constantly being filled with stories written by people from all over the globe and featuring characters from all over the globe. This year's BASS alone has stories in which significant action takes place in Nigeria, China, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and now India. 

Korean literature isn't like this. Much like Korean film, which was heavily government subsidized for years in order to guarantee the development of indigenous movies the country could be proud of, the support for Korean literature is generally there in order to strengthen and expand the influence of specifically Korean culture. The country sees to need to apologize for this. 

The prerequisites to be considered in Best American Short Stories, as series editor Heidi Pitlor reminds us every year, are:

1) Original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals. (This stretches the meaning of "American" to "North American," but not including any other North, Central, or South American countries besides Canada.) 

2) Publication in English by writers who have made the United States or Canada their home.

3) Original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). 

That seems like a reasonable way to define what an "American" story is. It was written by someone living in America for an American audience. Since that's the case, it is not only appropriate, but necessary, that a significant number of selections in a representative anthology of American short stories be by people from and about people who live somewhere other than the U.S. and Canada. We're a nation of immigrants, and the cultural heritage these immigrants have brought with them becomes our cultural inheritance as well. American arts are enriched by the nutrients the cultural tides of the world bring to us. 

At the same time as it is enriched by the stories from people all over the world, American literature is also made more complicated by this mélange, just as American democracy is both stronger for its diversity but also more challenging in many ways than democracy in a more monocultural, monolingual society is. It's one reason many conservatives suggest we upend the complexity by enforcing linguistic and cultural homogeneity. That's not the right solution, and it kills all the benefits of a diverse society for a small gain that will probably never even really result in meaningful unity, anyway. But it's understandable it would occur to some people when they look at the complexities involved in running a society like ours, where our culture is something of an amalgamation of all the cultures of the world. 

What this has to do with "You Are My Dear Friend"

"You Are My Dear Friend" doesn't require any special knowledge of India to understand what is happening on the surface. Geeta's parents died when she was young. She was then raised in a Catholic orphanage, after which she became an au pair to foreigners working in India. She is working as an au pair for the Bakers when she meets Srikanth, who is much older than her and who has already been married and divorced. He has a grown daughter somewhere. Geeta marries Srikanth and spends her days as aimlessly as she spent them as an au pair when the children were in school. Srikanth, mystified by her lack of direction, suggests she have a child. She is unable to get pregnant, so she ends up adopting Rani from a sketchy adoption center where they don't ask too many questions. Rani is a traumatized child and ends up being too much for Geeta and Srikanth, who send her away to "people who understood her...people used to dealing with girls like her." 

I get all that with no more difficulty than I would understand a story about people in Ohio. (And maybe with less difficulty than I followed the people in Louisiana in Stephanie Soileau's "Haguillory." Parts of the U.S. have always been half like a foreign country.) But I feel like I am probably missing significant levels of the story because there are connotations to place names, personal names, and cultural practices that I miss. Jharkand, Odisha, Bangalore. I can look these places up, but I don't know what they might mean to the average Indian without needing to look them up. Bangalore is the big city and Jharkand and Odisha are the sticks, I get that. But is there more I'm missing? I can look up Naxalism and have a sense of it, but I'm sure it has a much deeper meaning to someone in India than it would to me.

One of the main functions the narrative is fulfilling seems to be a critique of Indian society, but in what sense am I the right audience for this story? Even if I understood better what the critiques were aiming at, what could I do about it? Write my member of Congress? That doesn't even do any good for issues in America, so what good would it do about an issue in India? It can serve to educate, of course, and since India is a country of such importance in the world, it wouldn't hurt me to learn a thing or two by reading a story told that gets a little bit into the Indian weeds. But the effect of the social critique is probably lost on me and many other readers in the Americas.

So what can else I pull out of the story?

There is something else at the heart of the story, though, and I don't think it requires a whole lot of specific understanding of anything Indian to pull it out. The life options of the characters in the story are limited or expanded based on the resources, emotional and material, left them by their parents. The Baker girls have love from their parents and Geeta both, as well as riches from their families, and we never worry for their well-being. Srikanth is able to live comfortably off the house he has inherited from his father, a house his father did nothing more to earn than win a lottery. Geeta's parents were poor and died when she was young, but even that brief time with them left her an emotional inheritance that, "despite their curtailed presence in her life, had at least encased her in the solid outline of their love." I know someone close to me who has said something similar. She was raised by her grandmother until she was seven when her grandmother died. But she's told me that things her grandmother told her sustained her through years of being sent from one relative or group home to another after that. Sometimes, even little attempts to share love go a long way.

That's how it is with the maid. Geeta bought her several trinkets when they both worked at the Bakers together. One of those trinkets was a fake silver pendant engraved with the words "You Are My Dear Friend." Geeta only bought it so the maid wouldn't be jealous of Geeta's freedom during the day when the kids were at school. It's cheap and not at all heartfelt. But it means a lot to the maid, who never takes it off and is still wearing it after Geeta leaves the house. 

Even a small emotional inheritance can be powerful in providing the necessary resilience and self-esteem necessary to survive. Nobody in the story is more lacking this kind of inheritance than Rani, the girl Geeta and Srikanth adopt. Geeta doesn't get the full story, but it's clear there was trauma, something involving "a weak, protective mother, an absent, unpredictable father, poverty, the looming threat of outsiders, the fear of corrupt authorities." 

Rani acts out against Geeta, attacking her first verbally and then physically. One particular obsession for Rani is Geeta's jewelry. The girl wants Geeta to send her jewelry to Rani's mother. Rani thinks Geeta is a rich woman and that she can use her riches to help her mother. "Always it was the same demand. She wanted Geeta to send jewelry to her mother. Geeta lived in this big house, she was rich, so there had to be jewelry. Where was it?"

Geeta tells Rani that she may one day give Rani jewelry, but if she does so, it will be for Rani, not for her mother. 

So here, I'm about to apply the little bit of Indian cultural knowledge I have, which is probably exactly the right amount of "a little learning" to qualify as a dangerous thing. India is especially enthusiastic about gold. Families hoard it. It has significance in religious ceremonies, but it is also thought to be a secure form of wealth. Passing on jewelry to children, especially gold, is something all parents aspire to do. So when Rani and Geeta are talking about jewelry, they're talking about something of tremendous value, even more than we in the West put on it. When Rani demands Geeta give jewelry to her mother, she is rejecting Geeta as a mother, the person who would pass on the thing of greatest importance. She is saying it isn't fair that Geeta has this wealth, that it should have belonged to her own mother. She is saying it isn't fair that she has nothing to inherit. 

I may be so wrong about this that it would be a huge howler to an Indian reader. As the story itself makes plain, Indian culture isn't one thing. Geeta and her husband have to resort to English as a lingua franca, because there are so many languages spoken in India. There might be people in India who don't care at all about gold. But I think the story is leading us to think that Rani, at least, thinks of it as a thing of enormous value.

Geeta ultimately goes along with her husband's wish that they send the girl away. There was much more Geeta wanted to say to her husband about the girl, but she never did. "She had lost the habit of speaking of herself, and now it was impossible to recover the details that could have made her permanent." 

Geeta's failure is that she does not realize how precious even her most casual acts of kindness might appear to others, what a powerful inheritance she has to leave. That's what happened with her "Dear Friend" pendant. She could have provided Rani with the kind of "encasing in a solid outline" her parents gave her. Geeta was a good au pair but a bad mother, because as a mother, she bore the weight of passing along self-esteem she did not have to bear as an au pair. In this sense, Rani was right to be angry when she learned of Geeta's gift of the cheap pendant. The point isn't that it was so cheap, it's that Geeta didn't even give something cheap to Rani. She didn't even try, and often, just trying makes up for many imperfections in the effort. 

And that is universal. We all have some inheritance of kindness we can pass on, and it might be of far more value to others than we imagine. 

Other reading:

In Karen Carlson's take on the story, she ponders something I pondered after my first reading: am I completely missing what the hell this story is about? Karen ponders the possibility that the opacity is the point. 

Just the way it is: "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau, Best American Short Stories 2021

I commented earlier in BASS this year, when discussing Vanessa Cuti's "Our Children," about how some stories intentionally leave out more than the barest hints about character motivation. "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau does it a little bit differently: we get some hints about what motivates her central character Haguillory, but at the end, we're still kind of grasping for a fuller explanation. Possibly, the ultimate motivation eludes us because at some point, it's impossible to answer what makes people be kind, or cruel, or empathetic, or selfish, or whatever. It's a mystery, and if we knew the answer to that question, we'd have a lot more kind people in the world. 

Synopsis

Haguillory and his wife Dot have settled into the routine of older couples who don't like each other that much. They avoid each other, with Dot staying up late to fret over the news about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then going to bed in a different room from Haguillory, where she sleeps until late. Haguillory is a mean old cuss, the kind who looms large in the mythologies of neighborhoods across America, one who poisons the neighbors' trees and dogs. 

The story is contained in one day when Haguillory rises to go crabbing and Dot decides to go with him. This is the first action in the story that doesn't have a deeply explained motivation. She simply says she wants "to see how things are down there." That might make sense if what she meant was that she wanted to see how bad the damage from the hurricanes had been at the Sabine marshes where they go to catch crabs. But it seems like she's already been there since the hurricanes. The hurricanes, we learn later, were almost a year ago, and Dot was last in the marshes "months ago," so she's seen them since the hurricanes. That's why Haguillory is confused, and suggests they'll look "about the same as last time." 

But she goes, whatever the reason. Haguillory fusses about this and that as they drive an hour or so to the spot where they go crabbing. We get local flavor and see that the area still isn't close to getting back to normal. There are FEMA trailers and trash from the destruction strewn about. Lots of people, including Haguillory, still haven't been paid by their insurance companies for the damage, leading to a humorous local distaste for claims adjusters. 

Eventually, a family pulls up behind where Haguillory and Dot are crabbing. They're looking for a cat the father abandoned in this area a week ago. He was tired of the cat pissing on one of his kid's beds, which is especially obnoxious because the family has been cooped up together in a FEMA trailer for almost a year. The father originally lied and said the cat went missing, and now the mother is angry at him and frantically looking for it. Dot sympathizes with the mother, but Haguillory can't see why anyone would fuss so much over a cat. The family leaves as a storm is approaching. As Haguillory is packing up, he sees the cat. He throws the cat into the canal, possibly thinking he is being merciful, although it isn't clear to whom he is showing mercy.

The names

There are a number of clues about underlying meaning in the story. The first is in the names of the two main characters. The title character's name is apparently one still in use in Cajun country. It means "active" or "dynamic" or something like that. "Dot," on the other hand, is sort of the opposite. Not the real meaning of the name "Dottie," but the connotations of "dot," which would suggest a static point somewhere. Haguillory is restless and roving, but Dot is fixed. This might explain why Dot is more capable of empathy, more welcoming of others. She feels more secure in her place, while Haguillory feels like he always needs to defend his territory, to the death, if need be (at least the death of trees and dogs). 

What's eating Haguillory

There are a lot of things that set Haguillory off--Dot not being fast with a crab net, maggots costing too much, his son adopting a child of color--but what seems to particularly irritate him are the editorial choices of the news. He complains at one point about the news always showing the same thing: "New Orleans this, Katrina that, like those people were the only ones who'd been hit by a storm." More pointedly, he thinks of "those looters in flooded New Orleans...who seemed to think their suffering entitled them to inflict suffering on others." 

What's got Haguillory's goat is that he feels the news' tendency to focus on one set of people affected by the hurricanes leaves others out. When he sees the family looking for their cat and hears about them having been in a trailer for a year, he thinks, "They'd never show that on the news. It was sad, how they forgot about some people, not about others." 

It's not hard to decode what he means

It's very easy for those of us reading this story post Black Lives Matter to know what Haguillory really means when he's complaining about what he sees on the news. "Those people in New Orleans" means "black people." Haguillory is incensed that the news is focusing so much on their suffering when there are plenty of white people suffering, too. It's the "all lives matter" argument all over again, but put into a event from a decade earlier. Haguillory thinks the news is focused too much on the suffering of black people to the exclusion of white people. 

Why does Haguillory feel this way?

This is the really difficult "why" question to answer in this story. Although Haguillory is a miserable old buzzard, he's not without empathy. He truly feels sorry for the family he sees. He gives one of the children a multitool he won at a painters' union gumbo dinner. (Karen Carlson said in her look at this story that we don't know what he did for a living. Was he a painter? Or is the "painters' union" something I don't understand?)  After giving the gift, he seems to reveal his motivation for having given it: "I feel sorry for y'all." That's a pretty clear example of empathy. 

I think the reason Haguillory feels so incensed about the attention black people are getting on the news is that he sees his own piece of the pie shrinking thereby. If the world is going to tend to their suffering, there won't be enough left for them to tend to his. We don't know why Haguillory has killed his neighbors' tree or dog, but we can assume it's for some kind of encroachment onto his property. Nothing makes him madder than someone invading what he views as his space, taking what he views as his. 

In the parlance of our times, he is objecting to the loss of white privilege, to the end of the long-standing foregrounding of white stories and white grievances over black. 

This is conjecture, of course. The only hint we get about why he killed the tree is that he gathers the pecans it dropped onto his yard and threw them away. But it seems a likely explanation. Or, maybe, he's mean just because he's mean. He did string Dot along when he met her by telling her a fake name "just for the hell of it." He's a "tete dure," a hard head. Maybe he's not threatened at all, but just hates what he hates because he hates it. It would be the same answer Bruce Hornsby and the Range cited hearing decades ago for why there is prejudice in the world: That's just the way it is. (Note that the song itself does not believe in this line, just as the speaker in Robert Frost's "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" doesn't actually believe that "good fences make good neighbors.")

The fish and the cat

In addition to the dog, Haguillory is twice cruel to animals. He mutilates a garfish he has caught and then throws it back in the water, and when he finds the family cat, he chucks it in the water, too. Dot gets mad at him for crushing the fish, but Haguillory is genuinely confused by her anger. "Was it his fault the gar was an ugly fish?" he wonders. It's similar to his logic when he suggests, earlier in the story, that his adopted grandchild of color should go back where she came from if she doesn't like it here. He wonders, "Did she think he had fun saying that kind of truth?"

So Haguillory sees himself as a bringer of hard truths. Gars are ugly. They should be killed, because they're ugly. The cat is a burden and should be killed. This is why, to his mind, killing the cat is a "kind of mercy," the final line of the story. Haguillory actually sees himself as a keeper of some kind of order or good in the world. So perhaps his dislike for news about black people is another thing he files in his mind under this self-image. He's not a miserable old buzzard, he's just telling an unpopular truth. Sounds a lot like the apologia for Trump I often heard. 

One tantalizing detail in the story is the way Haguillory equates the cat to Dot. Early on, he thinks that when it gets hot, she'll be "spitting mean--mean as a cat with its tail on fire." What does this mean, then, when he can't understand all the fuss over a cat, and why he thinks it's "merciful" to drown the cat? Merciful for whom? The family or the cat? Or both? What kind of mercy does he intend to show Dot?

Guest editor Jesmyn Ward wrote in her introduction to BASS that Haguillory "changes, just a hairbreadth," after his chance encounter with the family and their cat, but I'm not sure he has. If anything, he might have slipped even further into his beliefs. His belief in his "mercy" has some uncomfortable similarities to what a Republican Congressman said in 2005 after thousands of homes of poor people in New Orleans were destroyed: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Haguillory believes he's ultimately showing mercy to those he thinks of as unworthy by putting them out of their misery. 

Teacher does good done good: "A Way with Bea" by Shanteka Sigers

Some of the most mind-opening takes I've heard or read in my life came from something I read or heard in passing. Days later, I'd realize how profound the thing was I'd just been exposed to, but by then it was too late to track down the source. I'm sure you've had a similar experience. That interview on the radio where the speaker said something that opened up worlds for you that you'd only suspected existed, only you didn't get their name and you can't seem to find it when you Google the few phrases you can remember the speaker said. 

One of those experiences for me with a phantom life-changing article came in graduate school. There was some kind of newsletter on writing craft left around a lobby. The gist of the article I read went something like this: the difference between a true poem and mere propaganda was in the attitude the narrator took toward the problem the poem put forward. A true poem and propaganda might both start with a similar problem--say, the inequality of life and how the poor always seem to get the shitty end of the stick--but the poem is willing to look the problem square in the eye, while propaganda knows from the beginning how it is going to answer the question. It's the difference between religious faith that knows how it will end and a human heart open to the experience of reality. A true poem might have a happy ending, but not without first going into the heart of darkness. Because the true poem was willing to do this, though, we believe its resolution more than we would believe the resolution of the propagandist. 

Propaganda, in this sense, need not be actual propaganda, but any art that comes in cock-sure it has the answers and that it wants to preach them to its audience. 

Teacher does good

Earlier in BASS this year, I wasn't that interested in "In This Sort of World, the Asshole Wins," because it seemed to me like a pretty familiar story. It was an addict's story, like hundreds of other addicts' stories, and I didn't feel it showed me much I hadn't seen before. 

"A Way with Bea" is about a teacher who connects with a troubled student, which is also a pretty familiar story. I can name five "teacher does good" movies right now without taking a breath. But "A Way with Bea" still felt justified, like it was a necessary addition to the genre, and in fact a whole new direction for stories about teachers. 

Why? I think in part because Sigers followed the mandate of that mystery article I read all those years ago. This isn't a Hollywood feel-good story about a teacher reaching out, one in which the audience is allowed to bless teachers in their hearts and then feel absolved about how shitty schools and opportunities are for poor people. The story goes to dark places, and there are times when it seems very much like it might end there. It doesn't end with an inspiring song and a text-based summary of future events, like "Bea went on to major in biochemistry at MIT, where she graduated magma cum laude. She is now a teacher in the same school where her own teacher turned it all around for her." 

There is redemption at the end, or at least a hope of redemption, but it never felt inevitable. It felt earned, which is why I find this story to be more than just another version of a story I've already read.

What also helps make this story feel fresh is the sharp observation and language in it. We get a taste of this right at the beginning, when "The Teacher" describes Bea's appearance: "She grows in angles. The broadness of her nose and the wide, sculpted divot leading down to her lips and the deep, delicate hollows behind her collarbone. the disorder of her swarming hair, misshapen and dusty, but still a laurel." 

What a multi-use metaphor "but still a laurel" is! We see Bea's dignity even in her disorder. 

I don't think most readers will have a hard time connecting to this story or figuring out why it's in BASS. What I'd like to take a little stab at, though, is to look at something that might not stand out as important in "A Way with Bea," which is The Teacher's life away from school.

The "B" Story....ahahhahahahah, do you get it? I called it the "B" story, because that's what it is, but also, this is a story about "Bea" and oh, my God, it works on so many levels...

Thanks to Mrs. Heretic, who has been thirsty for Hugh Laurie since I don't know when, I've seen a ton of episodes of the TV show House. House does what a lot of TV shows do in that each episode generally has an "A" story, or main story (like the person with the mystery illness House is trying to figure out), and a "B" story or secondary story line (like House trying to flirt with Cuddy or figure out who Wilson is dating or tormenting his interns). The B story is clearly less important and subordinate to the A story, but if the episode is crafted thoughtfully, the two still somehow relate to each other. They might relate through contrast, e.g. House says he doesn't care about feelings in the A story but we see him caring about feelings in the B story, or through similarities, like maybe House is struggling to figure something out in both story lines. A common trick in the show is for House to say something related to the B story line, and he then relates it to the A-story disease he's been stuck on, and the relationship allows him to suddenly solve the puzzle. Example: "Who keeps taking all the best donuts?" he screams, and then that makes him think of how some cells in the body act selfishly, and it's those cells that have been the problem all along.  

Are you done, Jake? Yeah, I'm done. 

In "A Way with Bea," we spend roughly as much time with The Teacher away from school as we do in it. We see that The Teacher has bougie friends who work much more remunerative jobs than her, that she is in a marriage with a well-meaning, mansplaining dope The Teacher doesn't like, and that The Teacher comes from sensible country stock. Her dope, sandals-wearing husband has a cat he refuses to put down.

One interesting plot point to consider, since this is a written text that can avoid the issue rather than a visual story that can't, is what race her friends and husband are. The Teacher is black, a blackness that has taught her to strictly control her emotions. But her friends say things like "ghetto grape," and her husband wears brown sandals and dotes on an old cat. Of course black people can wear brown sandals and dote on old cats, but if I only knew those facts about them, I might be tempted to think they were white. Maybe I'm stereotyping, but I almost feel like the story is asking us to fill in some gaps like that. Does she have mostly white people in her out-of-school orbit?

I don't think so. I think her husband is a black man who happens to wear sandals and like cats and is a little bit soft. The Teacher might attribute it to his being from the city (which is a reverse from how we usually think of the city-country divide). The question about her friends is interesting. I personally find it hard to believe a bunch of white, educated women would say "ghetto grape" around their black friend. They might say it behind her back, but not to her face. I think they're black friends who feel like they can say it, and maybe they can, but it still hurts The Teacher, because it feels like it's dismissive of the kids she cares about, not just a bit of harmless linguistic tomfoolery. 

The Teacher wishes her husband would cheat on her so she could get out of the marriage. She can't find the feeling she once had for him. He drives her crazy trying to tell her how she should feel about Bea. 

At the end, how are the A and B stories meeting? What is The Teacher learning from one story that helps her with the other?

I think it's this. Bea is interested in biology. She dissects a bird on her own, which other teachers see as evidence of her being unstable and dangerous, but The Teacher understands this is her showing interest. Bea also carries around an eyeball she got from God knows where, which again, The Teacher understands when others do not.

At the end of the story, The Teacher has arranged for Bea to come to her house to get "contraband," which The Teacher says includes a better biology book from a different school. Might it also include something else? There is an a seeming digression in which The Teacher talks about bones and what it takes to make them "so smooth and glossy they seem unreal, almost manufactured." One is to let them lie in the dirt and wait for nature to take its course. The other is to boil them. 

The Teacher witnesses the death of the cat while her husband is traveling for business. The last line of the story is, "The Teacher will tell her husband that she took care of his cat." Has The Teacher boiled the cat? Or perhaps worked with Bea to dissect the dead cat and then boiled it? Is that part of the contraband at her house? 

If so, then we have a B story in which The Teacher can't stand her husband and looks at his hanging-on-too-long cat as a symbol of their hanging-on-too-long marriage. In the A story, she's trying like hell to connect with Bea. The two stories seem to converge when the cat finally dies, leaving the teacher with something she can use to connect to Bea with and also--when she tells the husband she "took care of" it--to get out of her marriage. Maybe she's realized that her passion for teaching is too big to be able to also have room for marriage. 

Are we, the readers, also supposed to be annoyed by the husband? I'm not entirely sure, but I feel like no, or at least "annoyed" is all we should feel about him, not that he is actually malevolent. He's a normie. He wants what most people want, and that's fine for most people, but The Teacher has been called, perhaps, to a more ascetic vocation. Expensive dinners and weekends at Home Depot don't agree with her sensible country mind. She needed to see the alternative of a middle-class, wealth-aspiring American life in the form of her husband and her friends in order to knowingly make the other choice she's made.  

Other takes

Looks like Karen and I agreed on some of our favorites this year in BASS. She liked this one, too. 

Your involvement will not help: "Love Letter" by George Saunders, Best American Short Stories 2021

Paula Fox said that a story begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one. Some theorists of narrative feel that "theme" in fiction isn't really about an answer, but about phrasing the problem in a powerful and novel way. That's certainly how the logic of "Love Letter" by George Saunders operates. The premise of the story sounds like something I would hate. It's a grandfather in the late 2020s writing a letter to his grandson. The grandfather begins trying to answer specific questions the grandson has asked about three people the grandson wants to help, but ends by trying to answer a bigger question: why didn't he do more before the 2020 election to prevent an eventual Trump-initiated dictatorship in America? 

The story was originally published in The New Yorker in April 2020, about six months before the 2020 presidential election. It sounds like the kind of story you'd read in a creative writing 101 class, something a zealous, middle-class liberal would have written after getting their "writing prompt" from social media. "How will you answer your children when they ask you what you did when the world was in trouble?" was a pretty typical meme in 2020. It still is now.

Saunders manages to somehow make it not bathetic and painful to read, mostly by focusing not too much on the political aspects of the future, but on the human aspects of the family to which the grandfather and grandson both belong. The grandfather is keenly aware of beauty in life, the geese flying overhead and the grandson's generosity toward his sister. Normally, a keen sense of beauty and a belief that the small experience of beauty is what matters most in life is a good thing. But grandpa didn't live in ordinary times. 

It's a disservice to the story to take what was made into a very human narrative and dissect it back into its bare facts, but I'm going to do it anyway. I know Wordsworth warned that "we murder to dissect," but I'm hoping I can break this down in order to learn more about how it works, then put it back together still living, but with a greater understanding of how its biological processes work. 

A letter received and questions asked

Grandpa has gotten a letter from his grandson Robbie. Robbie has asked three things. First, what should he do about his friends, whom Grandpa, for security reasons, calls only G and M. (Monitoring of citizen communications has become prevalent in the near future.) G is in the United States illegally, and although M is here legally, she knew about G's being here illegally and did not report G. Second, Robbie has asked what to do about his friend J, who seems to be in prison for some kind of political objection to the current administration. Third, Robbie has asked what Grandpa and Grandma were doing in 2020, back before everything went to shit. Why didn't they do more to stop the U.S. from sliding into this state? We don't see Robbie's letter. We have to infer what it said from Grandpa's reply. Grandpa has written his letter by hand, because he thinks it might be less likely to be intercepted by the government that way. 

Grandpa's replies, simplified

Relative to the first two questions, Grandpa believes Robbie should be pragmatic and not get involved. He qualifies this belief by saying he understands why Robbie would feel he ought to get involved and that he isn't saying Robbie should "stick his head in the sand." But if Robbie does get involved, it won't do any good, and Robbie will end up being hassled by the same people who are harassing his friends. Moreover, some of the repercussions might rebound onto Robbie's family. In sum, Grandpa feels that "Wisdom, now, amounts to making such intelligence accommodations as we can." 

Grandpa does understand how difficult it will be for a caring person like Robbie to do nothing, and he hints that, if the worst happens, he and Grandma might be willing to use the money they have saved to help Robbie help J. But that would not be Grandpa's first choice. 

Grandpa's answer to the third, much bigger question, is more complicated, but I think anyone who's been at a loss to understand American socio-political developments since 2015 as much as I've been will find it understandable. In fact, it's a very good explanation of the dilemma many sensible people feel, meaning Saunders succeeded thematically, if the point of theme is to present the question well. 

Like a lot of sensible people, Grandpa and Grandma DID object to the rise of Trump. They voted against him. They wrote members of Congress. They would have gone to a march, but nobody organized one, and Grandpa was busy with work and dental conditions that prevented him from organizing anything. Grandpa did write a couple of letters to the editor after the 2020 election, but eventually, he got a warning from the police to knock it off. Anyhow--and this is the much bigger point--the letters didn't do any good, anyway. "Those who agreed with me agreed with me; those who did not remained unpersuaded." Isn't that the real predicament we're in now? Somehow, the Internet, with its access to practically all the information anywhere from all human history, seems to have made humans more closed-minded than they were before. No wonder those who opposed Trump "soon grew weary of hearing ourselves saying those things and, to avoid being old people emptily repeating ourselves, stopped saying those things." 

Well, that's the whole rub, isn't it? We who have opposed not only Trump but the whole angry babble of political incoherence in which he arose have been nothing if not baffled. We've made our arguments. We think we're right. Nobody has changed their minds. What to do?

Two questions Grandpa's reply leaves us with

Grandpa excuses himself for not having done more in 2020. It all caught him by surprise. The overthrow of democracy didn't look like what he'd expected it to look like based on history. To have had any chance of stopping it at all, he and Grandma "would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period....And our lives had prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focused and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noticed." 

It's easy for most of the people who were probably reading The New Yorker in April 2020 to see themselves in that description. When Grandpa asks Robbie, "What would you have had me do? What would you have done?" most of us probably don't know the answer, either. 

Given when the story appeared, the primary question it was asking its reader was what responsibility they had to act prior to the 2020 presidential election. For me, now reading this story as part of Best American Short Stories more than six months after the anthology was published in late 2021, I can look at that election as history. Trump showed himself more willing than I even believed to jettison laws to achieve his aims, but he was stopped. He was stopped, in part, by people who had enabled him while he was in office, like Mike Pence and William Barr. To me, that refusal of key figures in his circle to collaborate with him was at least somewhat reassuring that the system hasn't collapsed yet. We now have a whole other set of issues to worry about here a year and a half after that election, some of which include good, old-fashioned threats from without. 

Was Saunders' warning in April 2020 overblown? Hard to say. It was fiction, not an editorial, so nobody in the story was telling us to do anything. In fact, Grandpa is excusing inaction. It's up to the reader to determine how wrong Grandpa is and what we should do to be different from him. Whether any of us did enough, the election is now past, leaving us only the future in which to try to make the best decisions for ourselves and the future to whom we will answer. 

Because Grandpa lives under a growing dystopia, his letter leaves us with a second moral question about what the responsibility of those living under tyranny are. 

I've been following North Korea for a good chunk of my adult life. Those who don't know much about it have a hard time understanding why the people don't rebel. They seem to think they would if put in a similar situation. But Grandpa's logic when he tells Robbie to stay out of it is the logic nearly everyone in a dictatorship follows. Grandpa isn't inhumane. He simply realizes that Robbie's "involvement will not help." It's better to try to survive, maybe even flourish, as much as the system will allow, then use your status within the system to try to bring what small succor to the suffering you can. 

The terrifying thing to me is that I don't know if Grandpa is wrong. There are some people of very strong moral makeup who believe it is everyone's responsibility to do what is right even if you know the outcome is doomed to failure. Even if you know you will be sent to a prison camp and tortured. I respect those people. I praise them. But I'm not that strong. I know how weak the human body is, how a person skilled in causing pain to it can make you do anything to make the pain stop by applying the right force to just one finger of one hand. 

Moreover, those brave enough to oppose the dictatorship tend to get purged early on, leaving few left after the early days. That's what happened in Russia after the Ukraine invasion: a weekend of protests, followed by mass acquiescence. Dictatorships were always hard to stand up to. They're much harder to stand up to now, because technology has made nearly all dictatorships competent. 

The question for us in the real timeline 

The 2020 election didn't go the way it did in "Love Letter." We still live in a society where I can talk about what an ass Trump is and nobody's going to do anything about it. If anything, it's depressing how little the world we note anything I say, how little good it will do to write a considered essay or a moving story. There's already a glut of voices, a superabundance of discourse. Smarter, more incisive voices than mine go unheeded; why should anyone listen to me? I don't need police warning me to "stay off the computer" to be discouraged from writing like Grandpa did. The lack of effect from all I've written is discouragement enough.

Dictatorships are much better to prevent than overthrow. So what's my responsibility to try to keep ourselves left of the totalitarian horizon event on the timeline? This story provides a small piece of that puzzle. Grandpa remarks at one point on how everyone failed to see what a profound and happy accident our democracy was. They "did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding." 

What we lack now, what is currently threatening to blow this gift to smithereens, is a lack of consensus and mutual understanding. I have tried to reestablish some of that through writing, but given that it seems unlikely I'll ever be widely read, I think the extent of my ability to influence the future will have to be through interpersonal contact at an individual level with other members of society. In that contact, I will need to "see things through their eyes," not, like Grandpa did, in order to gain advantages when dealing with them, but in order to build "consensus and mutual understanding." 

It's easy to talk about consensus, but one thing I think most people overlook is how hard it is to achieve. Abortion, which, if Saunders were to revisit his letter-to-the-future project, would be the letter he'd write this week, is a perfect example. About one-third of the country believes that a book written by dozens or hundreds or authors over centuries of time long before humans knew what a cell was or where the Earth was relative to the Sun tells them that abortion is a sin. That's not written in a declarative way, but they believe it's a shadow command based on what's there. How do I achieve consensus with them on abortion? I've tried, but it's not easy to do. 

Still, maybe these fault lines exploding open all over the place serve a purpose. Those who look back to the mid-20th century as a zenith of American life think the country was less divided then. It might have been, but there was also more forced unity through strict enforcement of codes of polite behavior. Those codes included things like avoiding political discussions. Maybe partly because of our long history of avoiding those discussions with our neighbors, we're not good at having those discussions now. A functional democracy is about the slow work of building trust and figuring out how to coexist with one another, how to find matters we agree on, like not wanting Russia and China to be the model for the government of the future, and work on those things. If democracy is an endless succession of "into the breach moments," a series of crises to surmount (as every election ad would have us believe), then it will never become strong. It will limp along until a crisis strong enough to topple it finally puts it out of its misery. It will be all disaster relief and no construction to prevent disaster damage in the first place. 

I don't think this is the moral of the story Saunders would have had us draw. I think Grandpa was supposed to engender a sense of urgency among readers in early 2020 by showing us the results of even a well-intentioned semi-complacency. But I have the advantage of reading the story now, and to me, the lesson is that we managed to survive that crisis, and the most important thing we can strive for is to bring the general tenor of discourse back down from a roar to a lively cocktail party discussion. I could go out and light myself on fire. I could treat every day like a last-ditch stand against what I perceive to be my political enemies. But that kind of involvement will not help. 

I realize I've kind of answered a question that Saunders' story only meant to ask, but that's the thing about how stories work. They take seed in the brains of writers, but grow in the minds of readers, and writers can't control what the native soil in readers' minds might do to the final organism. 

Double Skip: "The Last Days of Rodney" by Tracey Rose Peyton and "In This Sort of World, the Asshole Wins" by Christa Romanosky, Best American Short Stories 2021

I got to reading BASS late this year, because I've got a lot more going on that I have in the past. I still want to blog through it, but I don't feel as great a compulsion to carefully blog every story as I have in prior iterations. When there's a story I don't connect with, I'd like to skip it. However, because some students reading BASS end up on my blog, I want to at least leave evidence that they're not missing my entry on a story. 

I didn't really find much in these two stories that inspired me to take a closer look. "The Last Days of Rodney" is an attempt to fictionalize the end of Rodney King's life, although most of the real-life details are in place. It reminded me of T.C. Boyle's "The Apartment" from BASS 2020, which I also did not care for. It's hard to sell me on a barely fictionalized story, one where all the details from the lives of the characters are conforming to a script given by a biography or a Wikipedia page, but in which the writer attempts to fill in psychological details. There are exceptions. I am loving "We Own This City" right now on HBO. That's partly because David Simon is an expert in his subject--the city of Baltimore--which allows him to tell stories that are richer than virtually any fictional story I know. It's also because it works like a very high-class crime reenactment, one in which we understand what happened better by seeing it played out. It's instructive the way watching a battle reenactment would be. I didn't feel that way about "The Last Days of Rodney." I think I might have gotten more insight into the meaning of King's life from a documentary or an article than from this short story. I don't feel like it really opened much of a window into his psyche that felt real. 

"In This Sort of World, the Asshole Wins" is a familiar drug addict's story. It gains a few points for the way it makes the reader question who the "asshole" in it really is. Tiff thinks it's everyone she comes in contact with, but fails to see that it's also her. Beyond that, though, I didn't find Tiff felt like someone I hadn't seen before, nor did the story feel like something I hadn't read before. 

There. Proof I read these two stories. Sorry if you loved them and wanted to get deeper into them. Karen Carlson shared some of my misgivings about "The Last Days of Rodney" but was willing to interrogate her misgivings more deeply than I was. She also considers Peyton's own misgivings and why she eventually moved beyond them. Karen also had more thoughts about "Asshole" than I did. People who liked these stories--or who are looking to quote someone's words about why they didn't--will need to rely on her. 

Beauty and how it passes: "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes (Unidentified Artist, circa Sixteenth Century)" by Jane Pek, Best American Short Stories 2021

A digression before I even get started

I can't stand almost every movie that's ever been made in which God is a character. In the first place, human beings in those movies never think to ask God good questions, and in the second place, God usually provides a wafer-thin rationale for his actions, the same kind of thin rationales I came to reject when I was a believer. The worst example of this might be Bruce Almighty. At one point, God lets Bruce be God for a while. Bruce grants everybody's wish (to win the lottery). Everyone wins, but because everyone wins, their millions are worth nothing. This is seen as a good justification for why God can't grant everyone what they want. 

There are a million things wrong with that, but let's just pick a few:

1) Bruce grants everyone their wish because he's overwhelmed by their prayers, which come to him in the form of an email flood Bruce can't keep up with. But wouldn't the real God be perfectly able to handle 7 billion prayers at once and not be overwhelmed by them? God didn't actually grant Bruce his powers, only enough power that Bruce would inevitably fail. 

2) God didn't have to let everyone win the lottery, but he could have said, "Hmm, everyone seems to really be struggling to make a living, enough that it gets in the way of them enjoying their lives. I'm going to change things so life isn't like that anymore. Nobody has ever figured out how to make this happen, but I know a way to make it happen, because I'm God." 

3) A lot of people in the real world aren't praying to win the lottery. They're praying their child will survive bone cancer. They're praying their families will be okay after losing a job. They're praying the bombs they hear whistling to Earth don't land on them. They're praying the drug lord who is torturing them--not for information, but just for fun, in a sound-proofed shipping container where nobody will ever rescue them--just kills them and puts them out of their agony. Do you think God might have some kind of prioritized email system set up where he gets to those requests first? Will it really ruin the balance of the Earth to grant those requests? Seriously, God. Get your shit together. 

Okay, now I can talk about this story

This is a story not about God, but about "gods," spirits from Chinese mythology. They don't really let the reader in on a whole lot of secrets about the universe, but they can be forgiven. They're powerful, but not all-powerful. Apparently, these spirts sometimes have to fight with Buddhist monks who have skills in battling spirits. When one of the spirts becomes incarnate, she dies within two years. They're not omniscient, either. It takes the spirit who didn't become incarnate and die nearly 300 years to find a painting she's looking for, the one from the title. 

Pek's story, like "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains," which appeared in last year's BASS, is a reinterpretation of a ubiquitous Chinese myth, one that spread and took on different forms as it did. Karen Carlson did a good job of posting links to the original versions of the myth, so I'll direct you to her. Like she did in "Nine-Tailed Fox," I think Pek gave us all we needed in the story itself to follow along, so I'll skip going into it. 

Two female spirits, a green spirt and a white spirit (whom I shall irritatingly call "Whitey" and "Greenie"), have been companions for hundreds of years, wandering around China and occasionally interacting with humans and changing history in small ways. Whitey decides she wants to become mortal, marry a man, and have a child. Greenie thinks this isn't a great idea, but Whitey assures her friend that her husband will only live twenty-four years and that after that, Whitey will return to the spirit world. Unfortunately, Whitey dies after child birth, only two years into her human existence. ("You were fucking terrible at being a human," Greenie laments to her departed friend.) So Greenie watches over Whitey's human progeny for several centuries until the last one dies in San Francisco around our current time. 

Greenie's interventions in the human realm help fuel the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Oscar Wilde, neither of whom are named in the story, but there are enough clues to figure out who she means. She also inspires the work of an artist whose portrait of Greenie and Whitey when they were both still immortal later ends up in The British Museum (which does, in fact, still have a lot of world treasures the country stole during its centuries of empire). 

Greenie doesn't mention John Keats as one of the artists she's inspired, but she well could have. The main secret of the universe Greenie has to share with us is similar to the one Keats often played with--that death is what makes life beautiful. Like Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Portrait of Two Young Ladies" is ekphrastic. That is, it is born out of and comments on a work of art. 

I don't know what this urn is, but I bet the British stole it. 

The two spirits, both immortal, have two contrasting attitudes toward immortality and death. This difference is best seen when the two come across a Ming Dynasty historian (another myth being woven into the main myth) who has managed to be granted with the power to stay young so he can complete his history of the dynasty from beginning to end. In his place, the historian's portrait will grow old instead of him. (This is the link to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray). The historian swears when his history is done, he will burn the portrait, because he has no wish to live forever, but Greenie doubts this. 

"You don't think being eternal can start to feel tiring after a while?" Whitey asks. 

"It hasn't yet," Greenie answers, "and we have several hundred years on him."

This helps explain why Whitey chose to become human, even though, as Greenie suspects, she might have known she would die. She finds immortality burdensome, while Greenie does not, even by the end, when she reports that she "did stay after all." 

The portrait aging in place of the human subject is the opposite of what usually happens, something Greenie notes when she talks to a British museum patron after finally seeing the painting again. 

"The ephemerality of beauty is indeed a tragedy," he said, "but surely not in art. The painting will preserve those women's beauty forever." 

Greenie replies, "While they grew old and died...That's even worse. It should have been the other way around."

The British patron's attitude about beauty is very close to Keats' in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

As a matter of fact, I'm not totally convinced that Greenie isn't actually meeting Keats in the museum here, while he was on his way from looking at urns. In any event, Greenie rejects this kind of thinking, this finding beauty in the fact that real humans grow old and die while their representations stay evergreen. Greenie doesn't get tired of immortality and finds the representation of immortality in a world where death is possible quite sad. She didn't cry when Whitey died, but she did when she saw the portrait. 

Whitey chose mortality because she saw beauty in death, like Keats and like much of Western art. Hell, like God in one of those movies I hate, a God who will tell us that unless bad things happen, we'll never appreciate the good things. Greenie doesn't buy any of that. She's got Woody Allen's perspective on immortality. "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying." 

Whitey saw beauty in--in an unforgettably evocative phrase--one brief fuse of human life lighting another until everything went dark. Greenie tried to keep that spark going as long as possible. 

If there is a secret the immortals have to share with us mortals in this story, it's that "the cosmos has never noticed what humans do to themselves or to each other." Death and suffering don't happen because God is wise. The only power higher than the spirits is the impersonal "the cosmos," and the cosmos doesn't care. In this cosmos, we can either see ephemerality as beautiful or something to fight against as long as we can. If I had to pick a spirit to come across in my time of need, I'd hope it was Greenie. Greenie isn't a god telling us to accept the way things are; she's a spirit rebelling against the cosmos.  

What should can do: "Good Boys" by Eloghosa Osunde

He begins by saying he has a problem with introductions--considers them superfluous--because "either you know me or you don't--you get?" Then he launches into a lengthy, five-point introduction. Because our unnamed narrator (whom I'll call "Good Boy," or GB, because I'm sick of writing "the unnamed narrator" over and over) doesn't feel constrained by expectations, even his own. It's his willingness to reinvent himself that allows him to not only survive difficult circumstances, but to thrive. 

Surviving

I'm halfway through blogging about BASS 2021, and this is already the fourth story that's made me want to refer to Joseph Meeker's short book on literary ecology, The Comedy of Survival. The others were "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," and "The Rest of Us." I've referred to this book on this blog several times before, enough that some readers might wonder if I've ever read another book of theory. I have, but I don't think I've read any that I found as valuable or as lucid. 

Meeker argues that books are like large ecosystems "in that they present a large and complex panorama of experience in which the relationships of humans to one another are frequently represented in the context of human relationships to nature and its intricate parts." He then looks at two human mindsets ubiquitous in these literary ecosystems, which he calls the tragic and the comic mindsets. He argues that the comic mindset is closer to nature and the one that is better suited to survival. The comic mindset isn't always funny. It's about recognizing one's own limitations, seeing and feeling loss, and rejoining the flow of life. More than anything, it's about being adaptable. Tragically oriented people aren't flexible. They have ideals and "shoulds" they stick to, even if it means dying for them. 

Meeker's comic survivalists include the heroes of picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes. These heroes, put in a world in which they lack status, power, or wealth, have to show a certain moral flexibility. "The picaresque vision usually discovers early that exalted moral postures can quickly lead to someone's death or undoing. Morality is often dangerous to the picaro, either because it limits his flexibility, or because he runs the risk of suffering from the rigidities of others." 

A professor of mine once summed up Meeker's book by saying "we should all live like Woody Allen," although I guess now Allen's morality has probably been shown to be a bit too flexible. 

In "Good Boys," That's exactly the position GB is placed in. His father has thrown him out on the streets after first beating him severely when he found his son engaged in sex acts with another boy. This leaves a teenage GB to navigate the streets of various cities in the state of Lagos, Nigeria. He survives because of a toughness his father didn't think he had, wielding a "good knife....the moral-less kind, the fatherlike kind," but also because of his extreme adaptability. 

GB has interesting feelings about his name. He never tells us his, and he only gives us the first letter of his lover's. "What do people want to use my name for?" He asks. "It will not buy you anything." He has dropped his surname, the one that belonged to his father. He shows an adaptability to his own name that is similar to the dog in Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," from earlier in this BASS. The narrator of "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," however, resisted changing his name. One could say the narrator of "Escape" had a tragic mindset about his name, while the dog and GB had a comic one. 

GB is a keen observer of human nature. He understands how men feel compelled to spend money as soon as they get it, mostly out of pride. He understands the lies people tell their romantic partners and parents. This keen eye allows him to continually find economic niches and take advantage of them. "Everywhere you look around you, there are gaps in markets. I see them and fill them." He runs an actor-for-hire service for Christian preachers who need someone to fake miracles. He runs a photography shop that will help cheating lovers or lying social media influencers fake having been somewhere they haven't. Perhaps somewhat troublingly, he collaborates with "bad guys that know real bad guys, that know some other guys" to run a prostitution ring. He leaves that because "over time it became too heavy," not because he feels guilty about the people he is pimping for, but because he doesn't like the implicit trust the Johns are showing him. "In life you have to be careful who you allow to trust you; you have to know where to stop before life stops you." 

At that point in his journey, GB was still so busy adapting, he didn't want the rigidity that comes with strong social bonds. He wouldn't stay that way. 

Thriving

What makes GB different from the other picaros we're seen so far in BASS--can a dog be a picaro? I'm saying yes--is that he doesn't merely survive, he thrives. He might not have thrived. To speak in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, if he had only gotten rich out of wanting to prove his father wrong, he would have stagnated and languished. GB does not apologize for his wealth he has accumulated, but he does recognize that his original singled-minded mission "to get a lot of money, so as to prove my popsy wrong" did not represent a "good mind." 

GB feared the trust of others. It's why he left the pimping racket. But he eventually learned to trust and be trusted. He ends up in a community of people that is more family than most people's families are. They all have keys to his house. They have game night together every week. GB tells them he loves them, after first being unable to understand that love between friends is possible without it meaning sex. 

What makes this kind of family possible is ironic: it's the very freedom the rejection or death of their fathers made possible. Had GB's father given him just a sliver of love, he realizes that he would have married a woman and had children just to make him happy. He would have been sucked into his father's entire system of "shoulds." "My father was a well-educated man, a man who had a should-be-so for everything," GB recalls. This Meekerian tragic mindset of a rigid system of right and wrong even meant that GB and his siblings missed school one semester, because his father couldn't pay their fees, and he wouldn't let his wife do it. "That's what should can do," GB wryly observes. 

The very rejection GB received is what freed him from should and enabled him to become part of a rag-tag team of friends with whom he now experiences the kind of love that "changes you...remakes you as you...lets you take a deep breath." GB realizes he "didn't fully become me" until his father was gone. His fatherless friends are "all flavors of free," they are "fatherless boys now and sure there are big griefs in us, but at least we get to be us." 

Rejection is incredibly painful, but it's also liberating. It means you owe nothing to anyone. GB ends up living with friends who live romantic lives he doesn't understand, but he realizes he doesn't need to. 

A literary form in need of a name?

Karen Carlson, my blogging pal who also writes her way through BASS every year, told me she was disappointed I didn't have more to say about "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque when I wrote about it. She felt that story was compelling because it was "like a Latino Good Fellas," meaning it had enormous scope and was about a group of humanized criminals. I felt like the story was hard for me to write about, partly because its scope was so broad, it felt more like memoir than fiction. 

But maybe Duque's story and Osunde's represent some other literary form. As Karen put it when talking about "Good Boys," in this story, "the backstory is the story." Rather than focusing on one moment in time like most short stories do, these are picaresque novels crammed into smaller form. What should they be called? Lazaritos? 

The voice

A picaresque story stands or falls based on whether the audience is charmed by the picaro. It mirrors the life of the picaresque character, who has to charm society in order to survive, sometimes by begging, sometimes as a con artist. In this story, the reader's chances of bonding rely completely on GB's voice. Osunde, in an interview with The Republic, said the entire story flowed out of GB's voice. I couldn't agree more. The voice is pitch-perfect. It's told in Nigerian pidgin, but the pidgin is done sparingly. (I looked up some videos on Nigerian pidgin, and if the whole thing had been done fully in pidgin, I wouldn't have understood any of it.) It's just enough for flavor, and in some places, the pidgin version is much punchier than the midlands American dialect would have been. I don't even know what "secret yato si secret, kink yato si kink" means, but I can kind of feel the meaning, and I think it's more effective even than whatever the American English equivalent would have been. 

I don't know at what point in the narrative GB won me over, but as GB might have said, when you know, you know, and at some point, I knew.