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.