I'm unqualified to write this post, but who isn't? A wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2021

A few months ago, I offered a defense of those who try to educate themselves about fields in which they are not experts. That defense went so far as to suggest there may be some topics where it is appropriate for lay people to question experts, or in which there is no one field of expertise central enough to the question that any one type of expert can claim plenary authority. 

I'm about to offer a critique of the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology. I've already analyzed every story in the collection. Every year I've done BASS (this is my fourth), I've debated doing a wrap-up. In one sense, it's kind of pointless, because the collection itself is made up of stories that were never intended to go together. Editors who choose the twenty winners aren't under any kind of compulsion to pick stories that work well together, and it's quite possible that if they did, it would make the collection as a whole weaker rather than stronger. So evaluating the twenty stories that happen to have been chosen together as a whole is a little like ordering twenty different items off the menu from twenty different restaurants and then critiquing them as a single meal. 

Nonetheless, BASS is the best-selling of the many annual short story anthologies that come out every year, and as such, it's an interesting and revelatory artifact, one that tells us something about the American literature and culture that produced and consumed it. Twenty menu items from twenty different restaurants might not deserve to be critiqued as a set, but jointly they do present an interesting subject for study of American food culture. That's how I intend to look at BASS.

But I'm not qualified

I'm not an expert in literature. At best, I'm a well educated lay person. I got an M.A. in English in 2003, and I originally intended to go on for a doctorate and professional expertise in literature, but I changed my mind. For the past eighteen-plus years, I've been focused on other subjects. The one that's taken up most of my time has been the Korean Peninsula. In the few weeks since I read my last BASS story, I've been reading a Korean collection of short stories called Inconvenient Convenience Store (불편한 편의점). Like all Korean literature I read, it's taking me a long time to finish. My point here is that even though English language literature is still a passion of mine and something I like to do, my professional life doesn't even leave me much time to be a devoted amateur critic. I might not read ten books in English in a year. So I hardly qualify as an expert in American literature. 

There's another subject relevant to discussion of an anthology like BASS I'm also not an expert in, which is what most corporations would refer to as "diversity and inclusion" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion." One hardly needs to be an expert to realize that BASS and every other anthology like it strives to provide a diversity of voices not just aesthetically, but in the sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, and national origin of its writers. Given that this effort to achieve diversity is so salient a goal in each volume, it would seem like a critic seeking to describe what this effort achieved would need some deep grounding in the field of diversity and inclusion in order to analyze the accomplishments. In this subject, though, I'm even less qualified than I am as a literary expert. I try to read at least something on D & I topics, and maybe in a random group of ten people at any given workplace who are forced into an awkward D & I discussion hour together, I might have less stupid things to say than eight of them. But even though I've occasionally allowed myself a foray or two into posting on D & I-adjacent topics, I usually feel a lot of doubt and anxiety when I post on them. The most likely possible outcome seems to be getting myself canceled for being stupid. Which is a dumb concern, given I'm not even enough of a thing to be canceled, but I worry about it nonetheless. 

Then again, nobody is really qualified

If the only kind of literary analysis worth writing is an assessment of a work qua literature, placing it in its literary context and assessing its worth by the esoteric rubric of literary professionals, then I'm not the right person for the job. But then, I don't think that's the only kind of literary analysis worth producing or reading. Seeing as how anthologies like BASS continue to be marketed to, bought by, and read by people doing all manner of work for a living other than literature, then it seems only reasonable that there could be critical analyses of those stories also produced by and meant for a lay readership. 

I've always seen the sermon as my model for literary criticism. While a preacher may borrow academic approaches to sacred texts learned in seminary in order to orient listeners to the meaning and context of passages, the preacher's goal isn't academic. It's practical. It's to change the way listeners think about and live their lives. 

I believe good literature works the way religious people believe sacred texts work. I think it makes its readers better, challenges their assumptions, or at least helps readers to feel less alone. That's how I approach writing about fiction. I assume the reader goes to fiction for similar reasons, and I try to open up texts to help stories do these things for the reader. As part of that process, I have just enough "seminary" learning to manage the necessary intellectual part of reading in order to enable the "spiritual" aspects of it, if I can use that word. 

In short, if the goal of reading is to become a better person and not to know more about literature as a subject--and that should be the goal--then a literary preacher doesn't need to be the most erudite person in the room. In fact, literary experts might be so inured to an academic way of thinking about stories that they've lost something of the ability to be personally transformed the way a banker or clerk or mechanic or computer programmer who reads might be. The fact that I work at something else that demands my attention most of the time and can only occasionally turn my focus to thinking about literature might make me better able to talk to normal folks than literary experts can. 

So here goes

That apologia for the hubris involved in my critical efforts behind me, there are a few things that stand out to me. 

In 2018, after my first full BASS blog-though, I talked about how Harold Bloom had such derogatory words to say about the Best American Poetry anthologies of the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s because of how winners were chosen based more on the identities of the poets than on the quality of the works. I haven't really changed my opinion since 2018 of the effect of identity as one of the criteria for choosing stories (although I don't think it's the only one, and maybe not always the central one). I would still say today that while Bloom saw entries that were identity-based and bad, I see stories that are identity based and actually quite good. But this goodness itself might present a problem. 

In a recent article on how we might finally have really reached peak TV, Linda Holmes wrote this about "good" and "great" TV:

"What resonates the most, though, from that talk in 2015, is the way Landgraf talked about the good and the great. A lot of people who heard those "peak TV" numbers from critics — 400 shows! — groused back that it didn't really matter, because most of it was terrible. Landgraf, on the other hand, was careful to point out that this was not the point he was making. He didn't think the problem was too much bad TV; he thought the problem was largely too much good TV. Or, maybe, too much good enough TV. The head of FX, after all, doesn't care about total garbage shows or about how many of them there are; that's not the competition, either for viewers or awards, or for critical attention. (There was a lot of speculation at the time that this part of the speech reflected in part FX's frustration at a lack of awards recognition for The Americans.)

Here's what he said about too much good TV: "There's just too much competition, so much so that I think the good shows often get in the way of the audience finding the great ones." 

I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think American arts have become great at creating good work, which makes it rare and difficult to create, find, and support great work. I think BASS is an example of this. There is a lot of imagination in the stories, but not much capital I Imagination. There is light, but seldom thunder. I enjoy most of the stories, but can remember little from most of them not long after reading them, even when I've taken the time to read and re-read them carefully enough to write seriously about them.  

Perhaps the thing I'll remember most about this anthology will be how many stories featured an unnamed central character. If I counted right--which I doubt I did, but I think I'm close--only seven of the twenty stories featured a main character whose real name was given. The rest either gave no name or used a nickname/title, like "Girlie" or "The Teacher" or "the son." This isn't a new phenomenon, although I don't think I've seen a collection of BASS stories that displayed it so fully. It immediately called to mind Stephen Marche's critique of a Sally Rooney novel, in which he introduced the concept of the "literature of the pose," which has replaced the literary voice. The literature of the pose is, above all else, about being "right," or more appropriately, not being wrong:

Each sentence passes quality assurance...The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes...One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.  

This unwillingness to name characters seems related. Names come with baggage and meaning. We can often tell something about the sex, gender, race, and social position of a person from the name. To give a character a name is to invite a whole host of criticisms of that character, so it's better not to name them. Mary Gaitskill recently described an aversion her students had to describing the way faces looked:

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude. Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards. This second statement is completely untrue; conventional beauty standards can be made irrelevant when describing a face if you want to focus on how the person’s nature animates that face.

The reluctance to assign names and the reluctance to describe faces seem related. Writers feel that to describe something or name it is somehow an act of colonial violence. Better to avoid it and so avoid criticism. 

A few things I will say about the focus on diversity and its impact on literature 

Literature really only does two things well. It can make us see the world through someone else's point of view, and it can make us question our assumptions about the world. The diversity-forward literary anthology excels at the first and sometimes is a little wanting on the second. 

I don't want to act like doing the first thing well isn't hugely important. Of all the attempts in the last twenty years to change the way our culture talks about D & I categories, I think the improvement in the diversity of stories and voices available to readers and viewers has been the one of the most practical benefit. I saw this benefit when Mrs. Heretic, my very white wife very much from majority-white Ohio, started teaching in 99% black schools in Baltimore in 2007. About the only bridge to her kids going in was the fact she had read a fair amount of contemporary literature by black authors in college. I thought she was going to get eaten alive. But to my wonder and amazement, just that literary introduction really was extremely useful. She walked into schools where students openly told her how much they hated white people and somehow connected enough with those students that there are still dozens of former students every year who go out of their way to tell her how much she meant to them and how she was their favorite teacher. Literature more than did its job of helping her to see the world through the eyes of other people. That forever changed how I think about literature's potential utility in a very real-world and pragmatic sense. What literature did for Mrs. Heretic, I believe it's also doing for many other people, even if it seems like part of America is becoming less interested in hearing what people different from it has to say. 

It does seem to me that the diversity-forward approach does job number one extremely well, but probably at the expense of not doing job number two very well. If you wanted to respond that I'm a white male with the privilege to care more about thundering soliloquies that question cosmic justice than the stories of black boys suffering from unfair human justice, I won't defend myself. My background and the privilege that comes with it has a huge impact on what I want out of a story. Bloom wanted Truth (capital T) and beauty in art and felt anyone who wanted anything else was a fool. I want Truth and beauty in art but realize art can do other things besides that. 

Still, I can't help but be disappointed sometimes in how anthologies seems to take cues from the Democratic Party. There is a coalition to keep together with a large number of constituencies, so it's important to try to keep as many of those constituencies as happy as possible. It leads, sometimes, to collections that feel like a Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden campaign: full of competence and utterly devoid of excitement or vision. Maybe that's what you want in a technocrat, but it's not what I want in the few stories I have time to devote myself to in a year. Or at least, it's not what I want most. 

Perhaps in a hundred years, historians of literature will look back and find our era's focus on the primacy of politics in literature, with identity issues composing a major chunk of that political concern, to be natural, given our political reality. Even living within the current time, I can see reasons why that would be true. But I also see how the focus on politics is making even the political thought in fiction less daring, more concerned with not making mistakes than with imagining new realities. I can see how much anxiety there is surrounding correct thinking about identity, and how this anxiety--like anxiety almost always does--has the ironic effect of making insightful thinking about identity more rather than less difficult. The water of D & I thinking is so stirred up in 2022, it's very hard to see anything through the churn. 

Haguillory

If you ask me what my two favorite stories from BASS 2021 were, I'd say "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss and "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes" by Jane Pek. "A Way with Bea" by Shanteka Sigers would probably take honorable mention. But the story I might remember most, the one that most seems to me to speak to the political moment, might be "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau.  

The white title character is incensed that black people in New Orleans seem to get all the news attention after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He thinks there are white people struggling, too, and that their struggles are being overlooked because all the attention is focused elsewhere. Haguillory is mean and hyper-protective of his turf, but he also shows a spark of human decency. 

We could write Haguillory off as another white man unaware of his own white privilege. We could see him like one of those people who claim "all lives matter," missing the point that black lives are statistically more threatened in American than white. I'm very confident that's what the text of the story wants us to see. I do see that, but I also see something else.

In 1970, economist Milton Friedman wrote a hugely influential article entitled "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." He essentially argued that businesses should be indifferent to their social impact. An oil company should drill oil as cheaply as it can get away with. If society wants to reign the oil company in, then it's up to society, through the apparatus of government, to force them to do so, rather than incumbent on the oil company to do what's "right" on their own. 

I think Friedman's way of looking at things has had influence way beyond business. I think that all the various political factions in America believe it's their responsibility to fight as hard as possible for the interests of their constituents, and if that results in them getting more than their fair share of limited resources, well, then the other factions should have lobbied harder. Americans tend to believe that this free market of ideas and the competition between interests will somehow lead to the right balance. One thing it won't lead to, though, is solidarity. It won't lead to a belief in shared interests or mutual prosperity. Instead, it leads to a belief in a limited pie of resources where a bigger share for someone else means a smaller share for you. 

Within such a system, is Haguillory wrong to resent the fact that a rival for aid is getting more press? He is wrong as a human being, but not in the twisted moral experiment of a Friedmanian political landscape. His job in this dystopia that also happens to be the real world is to push for the maximum advantage of his group. If the other group doesn't get enough, they should have fought harder.

Moreover, it's perverse to try to talk to Haguillory about privilege. Although more nuanced positions acknowledge that there are varying levels and types of privilege and that whiteness is only one of them, there are plenty of morally zealous people out there more than happy to harangue Haguillory for his white privilege. To someone in his position, falling out of the bottom of the middle class and surrounded by others doing the same, the notion of "privilege" is perverse. Even if his whiteness has been a benefit to him, it violates all laws of logic and decency to talk to someone like him about his privilege. Of course that kind of talk is going to activate his self-preservation instincts. He can only think one of two things: either he has no such privilege, or if he has been privileged, there is something terribly wrong with him to be struggling so mightily even with those advantages.  

The diversity potpourri approach to literary anthologies does some things well and others less well. I'm not arguing that it's the wrong approach for the hour, and Lord love a duck, I'm definitely not arguing, like one terrible and unfairly-privileged-in-every-way old white writer recently did, that old white men are discriminated against in publishing. They are not. 

If I had to try to distill my moderately informed, still-in-progress, and very much influenced by the same anxiety everyone else feels thoughts on this into a few sentences, it would be this: Our current political system relies on tenuous alliances between groups with only partially overlapping interests. The literary model of pushing diversity somewhat models this political system. Both the political and literary approaches require grace, goodwill, and the ability to communicate nuanced and imperfect systems with conviction and the power to convince, but all of those things are in short supply. Which means that the best you can hope for, perhaps, is conflicted and at times ambivalent cooperation with the approach being offered. 

I enjoy BASS. I like most of the stories in each volume. I profit from them. I am seldom mentally and spiritually undone by them. Maybe I've been reading too long. Long-time church members find it more difficult to rekindle the fire they felt early in their spiritual lives; maybe it's like that for secular readers, too, and it's got nothing to do with the literature being written today. But part of me feels, when I do manage to find time for literary fiction, that I'm doing it for the same reasons I keep voting for Democrats: it's not that I'm enthusiastic, it's just that I don't know of a better option.

Haguillory doesn't live in a world where his rights are politically threatened because of his race. He does, arguably, live in a world where people of his struggling economic class get a bad deal from the political system. In order for him to avoid thinking that pushing for the improvement of others is not an unfair threat to him would require a level of goodness and broad-mindedness that I'm not sure most people possess. Haguillory isn't without kindness, but he also only has a normal person's amount of it, not more. He lives in a political system in which not feeling resentment of others competing for limited resources with him requires above-average moral and mental qualities. Which means it's going to be a strained system. The only ways for a system to survive are to make the demands on ordinary people something that ordinary people can actually do or to compel, shame, or inspire them to become better people who can live up to the demands of the system. 

Is contemporary American literary fiction doing enough compulsion, shaming, or inspiration? To judge by America's racial backsliding, maybe not. I suspect, though, that there's something else going on here. Good fiction like that in BASS does engender empathy for others. If it's not working on a social scale, I'd guess it's somewhat similar to how masks work at stopping the spread of disease, but mask mandates don't. People seem to be the problem to the proposed systemic solution. 

Which is why even though it's important to have people slugging away at the scrum of public policy and policing to get us through the pandemic of the moment, it's also critical to have some obsessive dreamer locked away in a lab somewhere. She's thinking of something that seems to have no relevance to the pandemic that's raging, but because she is dedicating her full intellect and imagination to something everyone else in neglecting during all the hub-bub, she makes a discovery with relevance to fields never expected. Her refusal to think about what everyone is shouting is the only concern of the moment is what allowed her to figure out a way out of the mess for all of us. 

That's what I wish BASS had more of. Instead of 18 of 20 entries being about the disease du jour, I'd like more that are about reimagining what a cell is, or how DNA functions, or some strange problem in astrophysics. Instead of mostly being about how to drive a car safely, I'd like more on how we could move society past cars. We can have stories about Haguillory's shortcomings, but I'd also like some imaginative pieces on a world where it was easier for Haguillory to be less selfish. 

James Patterson might find the identity balancing in anthologies like BASS as evidence of "another form of racism," but I don't. I see it as evidence of the modern cultural tendency to apply safe answers to problems that are so intractable, they now require imagination, boldness, and heresy, things that are the opposite of safe.