Stories I like so much, they made me sad: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God by Etgar Keret

I don't like most of the flash fiction I read. A lot of writers out there swear they love it, but I mostly find that what I've seen feels like one frame of a story board. There's often some interesting and evocative scene-setting, but overall, there's an incompleteness. There's no reason flash fiction has to be this way. The first flash I ever read in my life was probably the short stories of Borges, which never, ever feel incomplete. Rather, those are always miraculous in the way they seem to cram a whole novel of emotion into three pages. 

Borges didn't waste much time in his short stories with descriptions of scenes. There aren't elaborate metaphors for what things look like, no picking out of significant details of all the main characters and the surroundings. There are a few words to set the scene, then a few things happen, the story comes to a quick head and then it's done. There's a plot and a theme, and both can be summarized.

I once defined literary fiction as "fiction in which plot is not a central concern." Much of the literary fiction world almost mistrusts plot, considers it more a part of genre fiction, dismisses it as nothing more than "a what and a what and a what," in Margaret Atwood's phrase.

Rather than strip away all but the barest essentials of a story in order to get through a beginning, middle, and end in a few words, most flash I read instead ONLY focuses on the elements other than plot. It often reads more like confessional poetry, except that the words go all the way to the end of the lines. There's much more focus on metaphor, voice, imagery and the like than on what happens. That's a shame, because I really like the effect that a condensed, no-nonsense story gives you. It's more like the way people naturally tell stories when they're talking about a thing that happened to them. In Vonnegut novels, I almost like the mini-stories, told as summaries of novels by Kilgore Trout, more than the novel itself. 

To be honest, before I got serious about reading literary fiction about ten years ago, I was the kind of reader who'd tend to skip over a two-page description of scene. "They're in a desert. Got it. That's all I need to know."  

It's strange, then, that it's become so natural to me to read work that focuses so much on something other than plot. The kind of reading I've been doing, though, is all about taking what I used to think of as the filler and making it most of what's there. If you try to write a synopsis of a literary fiction story, you often find yourself struggling. There's a spectrum, of course, with some writers leaning more toward a discernible plot, but none of them is going to write a story that's exactly full of details in its plot. 

Enter Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God

Keret is undoubtedly considered part of the literary fiction world. He's been published in The New Yorker a few times. All the people who would have to call you a genius if you're going to be thought of as a serious fiction writer have called him a genius. When I finally shamed myself into reading something of his lately, though, I was shocked to find that his stories don't sound anything like what I've become used to. They're short, but still things happen in them. I could summarize any story in the collection with a synopsis of events, rather than having to describe the language or the narrative approach. There's hardly any art to the narrative, and that's the whole art of it. 

I think whole stories sometimes went by in which not a single character's appearance was described, nor a scene set. I could probably count the metaphors in the whole book on both hands. These are all fireside stories told the way an entertaining friend would tell, even if they're weirder than your friend's stories probably are. 

I enjoyed the stories very much, but I also found myself getting upset, wondering how he gets away with it. I'd like to write stories like that, too, but I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I didn't think if I wrote stuff like that, anyone would ever read it. I still don't believe they would. I doubt I could publish a single story writing like him. Yet it was undeniably a breath of fresh air to read. 

It's not just the style where he's getting away with things I didn't think you could get away with. His stories involve people getting high or trying to score with girls. There are a lot of stories of bros doing bro things. There are also plainly parabolic stories. The best story is the novella that closes the book, about a half-dead after life for people who've died by suicide. None of these are things I see in literary magazines. Hell, some magazines outright tell you not to do these things. 

Every story is a simple read, but every story can also leave you thinking for a long time afterward, trying to unravel what kinds of themes were lurking in the simple story structure. 

Have I talked myself into writing what I don't like?

I recently submitted a story to the Coolest American Stories anthology. Their feedback kind of took me back: 

We found ((the story)) solidly written and polished well. We're saying no because: 1) its overall premise is too murky for our readership (a wide audience from all walks of life); 2) it probably has too many characters for a COOLEST story--i.e., it allows characters to arrive and go (particularly in its 2nd half) as a memoir would, and our readers have let us know they've read enough autobiographical (and thus sometimes meandering) fiction pieces in university-affiliated lit mags (they want *story*).  

I was taken aback because my initial reaction was that hey, I like stories where things happen, too, unlike those stuffy lit mags. But I've been reading stuffy lit mags for so long, now, I'm starting to write like them. (I was also taken aback because the fiction wasn't in any way autobiographical, but that's a side point.) The worst kind of lecture is the lecture about something you thought you already were doing. If anything, I feel like one of the reasons I have a hard time getting published in literary magazines is because I focus too much on plot and not enough on poetics. But apparently, I'm starting to sound like an art house writer.  

This isn't the first time I've had this concern. I don't actually hate literary fiction's focus on language. I've developed a style by reading this kind of fiction that's sort of a hybrid literary-popular story-telling mash-up. I think I'm better for it, but I also think I've sort of lost my way in terms of knowing what it is I really love about writing. Maybe because I've also gotten a little lost knowing what it is I love about reading. I've been reading things I think I should read for so long, and getting used to not really loving it but forcing myself to "get something out of it," as they say, that when I naturally and instinctively do love something, I forget how to even react to it. 

I don't even know what to do about this. I've kind of developed myself as a writer of a certain sort, and if I tried to change now, it would probably sound like pop artists who suddenly decide the real money's in country music. I also don't even know what I'd change to. I just know that I feel like I've drifted from the kind of story-telling I love. Like most writers, I think my primary motivation in writing is that I don't see the stories I want to read out there in the world, so I have to create them. Part of that, though, should be remembering not just what stories I love, but what kind of story-telling I love, also. 

The Alex Perez interview at Hobart was many things, but it was not boring

I was recently in a conference with about a hundred participants. The event organizers decided, for some reason I'll never understand, to start the conference with all hundred or so of us giving self-introductions. Part of the self-introduction was to include the answer to the ice-breaker question, "What's the best job you ever had?" With so many of us, it ended up taking a very long time. Attentions waned early. I stopped paying attention about 1/3 of the way through. I don't think I even listened when it was my turn to go. When we had finally gotten near the end, a guy near the back named Eddie got up. Eddie was not content to stick to the formula, and Eddie did not know how to read the room, which clearly just wanted the introductions to be over. Eddie proceeded to not just tell us his favorite job (he'd been a cop in Philadelphia), but his favorite story about being a cop. It involved a man he'd pulled over on the street who ended up having a sock full of chicken wings in his pants. As he went through his animated telling of the story, which he'd obviously told many times and enjoyed telling, he used a voice that might have been a semi-racist caricature of the person he'd pulled over. At the end, we all kind of laughed nervously, and the event leader, who obviously was familiar with him, said, "And that is everyone's introduction to Eddie." 

What this has to do with the latest literary brouhaha on Twitter 

The latest Twitter culture-war-inspired literary spat (meaning all of like .002% of the US population noticed it) has to do with an interview Hobart editor Elizabeth Ellen did with Cuban-American writer Alex Perez. In his interview, Alex kind of reminds me of Eddie. He makes me uncomfortable at times, and he obviously has his take he wants to get through, and there's really nothing to do but get out of the way until he's finished. But at the end of it all, I honestly did have a few laughs, was challenged a few times, and found it hard to not like the guy. At the conference, Eddie was never alone during breaks, and he was at the center of a few groups during drinks in the evening. I'm sure most everyone needed to walk away now and then to get a break from Eddie, but you also didn't want to miss out on a few minutes with him completely. 

That's not the way most people apparently feel. Many of the editors at Hobart quit over the interview, leaving a statement on their way out the door. They called the interview misogynist and white supremacist, but they also called it "boring." A LitHub article on the subject called it "tedious." It was many things, but I don't think "boring" or "tedious" were it. 

In short, Perez, who went to the very exclusive Iowa Writer's program, feels that the high-brow world of literature to be taken seriously (as opposed to literature for the masses) has been infected by "wokeism." It's run by a cabal of rich white women in Brooklyn who push an agenda of diversity, but whose real interest is to stay in power. They mouth conformity to certain woke principles and demand the writers they grace with publication to do the same. So does the majority of the literary community. 

Yes, that sounds boring when I summarize. I'm tired of articles ranting about wokeism, too. But Perez somehow isn't boring. He has a unique background as the child of Cuban immigrants who were disappointed their son chose writing over baseball. This isn't your typical Praeger University claptrap. There's a sense that Perez has earned at least some of his gripes. I don't think his critique of rich whites and his perception of how the baseline political take of a rich white has changed in the past ten years can be completely dismissed. From his perspective, I can see how he'd think that.

There are reasons to think that the current ideological majority surrounding writing--the kind of  ideology you'd see assumed at places like the AWP conference--isn't entirely sound. Surely, no ideological consensus is ever fully correct. Surely, any political consensus always needs critiqued. 

Some of the same white writers I see on Twitter lambasting Perez I've also heard in private expressing their own doubts. They've sent in stories using fake, person-of-color-sounding names. They've complained that they didn't fit the right demographic to get into a collection. I'm sure a lot of that is white fragility and sour grapes, but I don't think it all is. We all sense something isn't quite right, but it's hard to say exactly what, and it probably isn't altogether safe to ask the question.

I've tried from time to time on this blog to question what it is I find troubling about the assumed ideology I find around literary journals and publishers. I don't know that I've ever succeeded.  The closest I've seen anyone get was this love letter to the profession of literature by Mark Edmundson from a few years back. I was hoping Perez would knock it out of the park a little more, and I was disappointed that at times, he used the lazy shorthand "wokeism" to describe that difficult-to-pin-down something that makes so many people feel uneasy. The closest he got was this: 

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

I tried to write something similar when I summarized the most recent Best American Short Stories a few months ago. I also did it four years earlier, again summarizing BASS. One Asian Tweeter responded to that part of the interview by saying, "cool unfortunately my existential despair comes from the fear of being stabbed in the street as an asian woman." I totally understand that, and I don't want to put my existential despair that I'm privileged enough to feel in front of real existential (as in, will I live or die) fear. I just know that the writing I remember and that provides solace to me in my life usually is responding to that. 

Even Jonny Diamond, writing his piece for LitHub, acknowledged that "like all clichés, there is some truth to it." That's sort of what The Economist said about Trump's critique of the world order. My problem with Trump wasn't that he was assailing ideas I found too sacrosanct to assail, it's that he did such a shitty, illiterate, incoherent critique of it. Perez wasn't Trump-level incoherent. He seemed kind of like one of the Eddies of the world. I'm sure I'd find having a few beers with him to be more enjoyable than dull, even if I might find some of his ideas confounding.  

Perez and others who are trying to critique what they're calling "wokeism" because they can't find a better word yet are trying to do something very difficult. I'd like it if, when they did an imperfect job of it, the conversation focused more on that "truth behind the cliche" that they are trying to get at than it did on rage about one's beliefs being questioned. Auto-naming things "misogyny" and "white supremacy" is just about as lazy as calling something "wokeism." 

Hardly anyone reads serious fiction now. Novelists have very little voice in public discourse, or at least discourse that affects anything. To tell the truth, I'd never paid any attention to Hobart before yesterday. (I don't write fiction under 2,000 words, normally.) Clearly, something is off the rails. It's off the rails enough that we ought to be willing to hear just about any spaghetti-at-the-wall idea out there for what's wrong. Perez's ideas were off in a lot of places, but I'd rather see subsequent analysis of where the wheat beneath the chaff might be than burning the field to the ground. 

My rules for half-believing the universe is a simulation without becoming a lunatic

I think I'd been toying with the notion that the universe might be a simulation for a while before I heard it was actually a respectable idea and that some scientists, including Neil DeGrasse Tyson, think there's good evidence for it. It wasn't science that led me to toy with the possibility that the universe was a simulation; for me, it was something that emerged after a lifelong attempt to try to understand how the universe could have been created by a conscious force that wasn't evil, when so much in the universe seemed to be evil. 

Sometime last year, Amazon, probably using some kind of mind-reading algorithm, advertised to me the Kindle version of a book on the subject. It was The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk. I guess I should have figured there was a reason why the book was only $3.99. It wasn't edited very well, and a lot of it was somewhat tiresome reiterations of material written by others, likely to pad the book into something long enough to be published. (The publisher, Bayview Books, seems to exist only to publish Virk's work so far.) Still, I don't think the author is lying about being an MIT computer scientist, and for me, who had never really read any of the scientific rationale behind the plausibility of a simulated universe, it was a decent introduction. I didn't really care for his paper-thin explanations of how the various religions of the world might have actually been talking about a simulated universe all along. That felt like hooey. But he presented the main arguments being put forward by scientists to support a simulation idea. The best two are:

1. Even as primitive as we humans still fundamentally are in our scientific advancement, we're not that far away from being able to create alternate realities that humans can't tell from the real world. And if we can do it, that means others can, too. It's an ability that would be ubiquitous, which suggests that it's very likely, just from a probability standpoint, that we are in a simulation. So are the programmers who created our simulation, and so on.
2. The universe displays properties that we would expect it to if it had been programmed, such as limits to how small (or "pixelated") space can be, as well as limits to how small a unit of time can exist. These limits help explain the answers to Zeno's paradoxes, but they also are what we'd expect if the universe had been set with parameters by a programmer. 

It's universes created solely to provide power for the spaceship battery of their creator all the way down. 

My own moral reasons

I'm glad to know that science doesn't think I'm an idiot for the things I more or less came up with on my own, but those aren't the main reasons I find a simulation-type understanding of existence to be appealing. Both the DeGrasse Tyson interview I linked above and the article from Scientific American concluded by saying that if we are living in simulation, there's nothing we can do about it, so it "might not make much difference." But to me, it makes a whole world of difference.

Unlike a lot of non-theists, I'm not certain there is no god. I'm about exactly 50/50 split on this. That 50/50 split changes day-to-day, but I think on the whole, its balancing point is at just about 51% no and 49% yes. Why not just no, like so many non-theists? Because it's just weird to me that anything exists at all. It's weird that we're here. It's weird that we know that we're here and that we are aware of the weirdness of it. And it's weird to think this weirdness just happens and that it might always have been happening. I understand that believing in God doesn't remove these problems. In fact, believing in God just makes the problem more confounding, because you've gone from the notion that the universe, which we know something about, has always been in a constant cycle of creation and destruction, to thinking that an unknown and unknowable being has always existed. That's why I'm an agnostic. It's a simpler kind of weirdness. 

It's not an altogether satisfying weirdness, though. A universe that just happens isn't especially satisfying. There's no reason to it, no point. An entity with a mind who made the universe, on the other hand, might indicate a point to all of this. The problem with believing in a god who made this universe, though, is that the universe is a fairly brutal place. Everything on our planet lives by killing and eating some other living thing. With plants, that's not an issue, because the plants are generally designed to be eaten, and many even need to be eaten in order to propagate. But everything else would probably prefer not to be eaten. Generally, the strong dominate the weak. Human history is full of a lot more people who lived unhappy and difficult lives than ones who've lived lives of ease and pleasure. So if I am to believe that someone designed this universe with a purpose in mind, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this someone is kind of an asshole. 

If the universe is a simulation, though, it might allow some wiggle room that would leave the creator(s) some slack. I say might, because it's still entirely possible that our simulation designer is either sadistic or merely indifferent to our plight, and that's why the universe is the way it is. There are, however, some possibilities about why this simulation exists that might make the suffering seem less cruel. I hasten to emphasize that these are all just possibilities, and I don't exactly hold to any of these things as a belief. These are ideas that make it easier for me to think both that the universe might have a purpose and that the ones who built it for that purpose might not be simply sitting back and paring their nails while the universe suffers. These possibilities are, in no particular order:

1) There is some higher plane of existence that has problems of its own, and this universe was necessary as research to help them solve that problem. Maybe a conflict-riddled universe, under specific conditions, helps others to observe the dynamics of conflict-riddled worlds in order to help solve their own conflicts. We'd be laboratory rats in this situation, of course, but at least if we knew we were lab rats who were helping cure the ills of some other plane, it might help make sense of our suffering. 

2) The creators have a sense of ethics about this experiment, and every sentient being who is in it was actually part of the design team, or at least they are members of the world in which the simulation was created. They have all agreed that, for the greater good of their world and what it might learn from this simulation, they will enter it and play the parts of sentient beings in our world. They either chose roles based on some criteria we can't guess at or the roles are given out randomly. Their memories of having existed outside the game are wiped when they come inside. Everyone knows when they enter the game that there is a chance of suffering, but they believe that when they come back out of the game, it will have produced some result that makes it worth it. This would help solve one of the things that has always seemed the most unfair to me--the fact that nobody who is here asked to be here. Possibly, once we are done with our roles, our memories will be uploaded to the servers of the designers to help analyze the data. 

3) Perhaps--very much modeling some religions--the creators have prepared some region of bliss for those who were part of the simulation. They recognized that the parameters they created for the world made it possible that sentient beings who suffer might arise, and to make up for this, they have prepared a place where everyone can go and enjoy an eternity of joy to compensate them for having participated in the simulation. Less appealingly, perhaps they, like the creators of Westworld, think that merely wiping the memories of participants at the end of the game is enough to satisfy their ethical requirements. 

What a simulation hypothesis does and doesn't change

As I mentioned above, there are some versions of a simulation theory that might not, in effect, be much different from what some religions have been telling us for a long time. Moreover, we're really not in a very different position from where we are with religion, because we're equally unable to know with certainty what the nature and goals of the creators are. We're equally stuck figuring out on our own what we should do with our time here.

When I was an evangelical, someone asked me once how I knew that the universe wasn't the dream of a god, like in Hinduism. I said that if this was true, we'd never be able to know it, so the only thing to do was to make the best choices we could based on what seemed to be real. That might still be the wisest advice when confronted with the simulation theory. 

Because we don't know what the purpose of the simulation is or what ethical rules, if any, the creators apply to it, we are still stuck with the existence of some of the worst possibilities. The programmers might be sadists. They might be indifferent. There's a very strong possibility we're here for the entertainment of our creators, since humans themselves have been creating stories that are, in a sense, their own little worlds for as long as we've been able to talk. Maybe life creating life that creates life is just what life does, and there's a nearly infinite regress of simulated worlds. Like in Calderon de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, even the dreams in our world are themselves dreams. The point is that a simulation hypothesis, in some versions, might not be very reassuring. It all depends on what kind of simulation this is, and we don't know the answers to that. 

However, since at least some of the possible versions offer better answers than the ones religion has given to us, or more comforting answers than the ones a world that "just is" provide, I find even this possibility somewhat reassuring. 

My rules for not going crazy half-believing these things

1. Morality still matters. 

One possible difference between this and what most religions tell us is that since everyone who participated in the simulation would have contributed to the goal of its being staged, all would share equally in the reward. The creators needed Hitler as much as Mother Theresa for the experiment to work. Or, in the versions of a simulation that exist for the entertainment of the programmers, they might need villains and well as heroes. They wouldn't fault someone for having played a villain any more than we would fault an actor for having played a particularly wicked role. 

Believing the world is a simulation, then, might tempt some people to think that being good or bad are equally valid choices. Since nothing is real, there is no right or wrong. Those are just part of the illusion. 

To me, though, if the world is a simulation, and the simulation was done with any level of care (which, subjectively, it seems to me to have been), then everything in the simulation is there for a reason. Moral choices seem to be a central element of being a human being in this game. In fact, I more than half think of this simulation as part of a thought-experiment in morality by the programmers. Maybe ethics have always been a central part of human society by design. 

We don't know what view the programmers might ultimately take of ethical behavior, or whether they're likely to punish and reward particular conduct, but since it does seem that morality is a key part of what this whole experiment is about, we at least shouldn't be quick to act like it doesn't matter. 

(I realize that by writing that ethics is the point of the whole theatrical performance, that leaves open the question of why nearly all of the 13.4 billion years of the play that has gone on so far didn't, as far as we know, include beings capable of understanding moral choices. As I've said, none of these things are fully ensconced beliefs for me. They're more ideas that don't sound totally stupid and which maybe make life seem less pointless to me.)

2. Resist the urge to think suffering was done to entertain some god

Writers are often told to "kill their darlings." That is, in order to make a story interesting, something bad has to happen to someone. If we extrapolate this need we seem to have to throw bad things into a plot just to see what happens, we might think that the beings who programmed this world would have a tendency to do the same thing. We could end up thinking that every bad thing that happens to us is being done to further a plot in the very highly advanced Sims game of some coding kid in a higher dimension. 

Maybe it even makes sense of suffering a little bit to think like this, although the reasons for the suffering in this case would be enough to make one literally curse the gods. However, since we don't know the particulars of the simulation, it's equally possible that what's interesting to the designers isn't your individual suffering. At least, it's not interesting enough they'd program in every bad thing that happens to you. Rather, it's possible that what they find interesting is the world they created in which bad things can and often do happen. In that case, your suffering is only generally planned, not specifically. Nearly everyone will have bad things happen, according to the design of the universe, but there is no need to plot the lives of every participant in the machine down to that degree. 

In fact, all the evidence we have suggests that the designers of the universe are happy enough with the broad outline of what they created that they see no need to constantly interfere with it. The laws of physics do not get tinkered with. Early Christianity looked to miracles to prove it was true, but I think the lack of miracles is one reason I tend to think we have a deistic creator, one who set the rules and then left the experiment to run unhindered with. This means you neither need to fetishize your suffering nor feel you've been singled out by the creators. 

3. Treat it like it matters

In Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover goes insane. His insanity is a matter of "bad chemical and bad ideas." The ideas, in Hoover's case, were supplied by the writer Kilgore Trout, who convinced him that everybody on Earth was a robot except Hoover. Hoover became a solipsist, someone who believes that he is the only person who truly exists, the only one with free will. He believed all of the universe was a test set up exclusively for him by the Creator of the Universe.

Hoover eventually started attacking people in his dealership, believing thereby he was obtaining the approval of the Creator of the Universe. He did not care that he had hurt anyone, because he did not believe the people he was attacking were real people like him. 

I just realized there was a Breakfast of Champions movie and that Bruce Willis played Dwayne Hoover in it. 

Hoover's notion is a bit different from someone who believes the universe is a simulation, because in a simulation, we're all equally experiencing the big lie, but in Hoover's case, he believed that the big lie was all for him. The effect, though, might be the same. People who think we are living in a simulation could be tempted to act like Hoover. They might even try to act like Neo in The Matrix, always attempting to see beyond the simulated world into the real one. 

I suppose everyone is free to come to whatever conclusion seems best, but to me, that's not the conclusion I draw. If the universe is like a big video game, then there should be a lot of freedom to treat it how you want. You can spend your time trying to end poverty or you can fiddle-fart around and try to enjoy yourself. But as far as our relationship to the creators of the game goes, I think our time here is best spent more or less playing the game in the more obvious ways. In Minecraft, you're not given any rules or objectives. You appear and then you move around and figure things out. There's an "end" to the game, but that's far from the only objective. Even though the game doesn't guide you in what you're supposed to do overtly, when you start moving around and figuring out how things work, the design and the intent of the game does become somewhat apparent. 

I think that's how we should treat life if we live in a simulation. We're here. Might as well try to play the game the way the designers seem to have intended it to be played. It'll probably be more profitable that way. Eventually, when you learn a few things, you can decide to play in more exotic ways, and maybe some of those will be ways even the designers didn't guess at. That's all possible, but not unless you at least start by playing it the "right" way. 

Simulation and suicide

Far from making me think life is pointless and not worth living, the possibility we live in a simulation gives me at least some small hope there might be a point. It even helps provide an answer to the question I so often ask of why anyone should keep on trying to live instead of giving up and dying by suicide immediately. 

If the universe is a simulation, then at least there is a chance there is a point to it. Of course, that's true in religion, too, but all religions require me to believe a perfect being created this mess of a universe, and I just can't accept that. If, however, the universe was created by beings somewhat like us, although likely more advanced versions of us, then maybe it ultimately will make some sense in a way we can understand. 

I mean, maybe not. The universe as a simulation isn't a completely reassuring thought. If this is all a big live-action play, then I got kind of a shit part, and I wonder if anyone is even noticing. Maybe I really am just an extra to the Dwayne Hoovers of the world, the ones the creators are actually interested in watching. Maybe rather than giving me a reason to keep living, maybe suicide is the right option because it's the only way to protest to the creators of the game about the nature of their experiment. Mostly, though, I don't feel like that's been my natural reaction since I started seriously considering the possibility the universe is a simulation. 

I don't totally come down on any side, just like I don't totally accept that this is really what I believe about the nature of reality. On the whole, though, I think that that if DeGrasse Tyson (and Elon Musk) are right, then that holds at least some possibilities not open in either religions or nihilism, and I find it more reassuring than not. For now, I, a person who half believes the universe is some kind of simulation or experiment, find enough consolation in the idea that I am still pushing through with a life I'm not totally sure I want and still trying to use that life to do some good. 

Ruined orgasm aesthetic: Impossible Naked Life by Luke Rolfes

Very early in the literary education of most students in America, they learn about narrative arcs. The most typical model students come across uses a diagram that looks like a roller coaster, with a gradual climb upwards, followed by a sharp descent. In the most commonly taught model, we meet a character in their "before" life, witnessing what life is like just before the force that changes the status quo for the main character and gets the story moving enters the plot. In Bridge to Terebithia, for example, we watch Jesse wake up to his normal life on the first day of school, with his indifferent father, annoying sisters, and his dreams of being the fastest kid in school. Then we meet the new girl in school, who changes the trajectory of Jesse's life, which gets the story going. 

Once the story gets going, there is rising action. Eventually, the plot heats up enough that it boils over, giving us the climax, after which there is a change in the main character, leading to a falling action and a new reality, which is where the story ends. 

Shoutout to my 8th grade teacher, Mrs. Stutchel, whom I and everyone else hated. She taught this, but I didn't learn it from her.

The thirty-six stories in Luke Rolfe's "Impossible Naked Life" (Kallisto Gaia Press) aren't interested in any of that climax and change stuff you learned in middle school, though. Over and over, there is a chance in these stories to achieve a climax, but the climax is deferred or avoided. When there is a climax, it's almost invariably a bad one. If the climax in a story is like the orgasm in sex, then these stories are the ruined orgasm fetish of short story collections.

This isn't a criticism. The avoiding and maneuvering around climax is skillful and intentional. Most of us never experience true (non-sexual) climaxes in life, or epiphanies that lead to meaningful change. That's an artifice of literature, and while neither I nor any other reader will ever tire of the formula, that doesn't mean every story has to hold to it. When something interesting happens to most people, they either change only slightly or don't change at all. So Rolfes is playing with a different and interesting aesthetic here. The trick is whether he can be that close to real life and still delight the reader. 

Romantic realist

There are far more stories in this collection that feature a romantic relationship that never fully develops or that falls apart. My rough count yields eleven of these ("Crab," "Day Camp," "Plucked," "Fish Heart," "Siren," "Liar, Liar," "White Landscaping Rocks," "There, There," "Acai Bowl" (maybe), "Time Magazine Person of the Year," and "Common." There are only maybe two stories with romances that seem to be going anywhere at the end, and I wasn't even sure about those two.  

Romantic comedies are the best known genre for mixing the character overcoming conflict at the moment of climax with the fulfillment of the achievement of romance. They aren't the only types of stories that do this, though. Coupling the main character working through his main flaw in order to overcome adversity often is shown in the character's ability to achieve the love interest they've been chasing. 

These stories just don't work that way, though. Even stories that end on a note of sweetness seldom end with "boy meets girl" (or "girl meets girl," which is what we might have in one of the few exceptions in this collection). These stories reject both climaxes that change characters forever and romances that lead to happy-ever-after. It's a brutally honest collection in that sense. 

Anticlimactic climaxes 

"This story doesn't have an ending," the narrator of "White Landscaping Rocks" tells us, and that could be said to be true of many of the stories in the collection. Moreover, there is one story after another that seems to portend a big, climactic, orgasmic moment, but that moment never comes. "There, There" teases a storm that never materializes. "Karate Witch Teacher Kickass" has a narrative that build to a fight that never comes. "Showdown" brings up the notion of Mike Tyson fighting an alien to save the human race, but the scene fizzles out like a daydream interrupted. 

This aversion to climax is often literal. There are several sex scenes that begin but are then interrupted. In "Plucked," a struggling college student connects with an older woman on a train. They end up in her private sleeping room, but after kissing that seems to be leading to sex, the woman just runs out of libido:

"After a while, she says, "I'm too tired to keep going." 

 "We can do whatever you want to do," I say. 

 "Sleep. I want to fall asleep."

Similarly, "Fish Heart" has a scene in which a woman is making out but not enjoying it, while "Killer Saltwater Crocodile Killer" briefly alludes to a budding romance that died before going anywhere. A paperboy in "Paperboy" sees a couple naked in their front window, but rather than going at it, he sees that "they seemed to be just standing there, hugging each other as the sun rose across the neighborhood." 

As if aware of its own refusal to give readers the endings they're used to, one story in the collection has a character recall an old story he once wrote, only to have another character offer the critique, "That ending is terrible." The story-teller responds, "It's my story...I can end it any way I want."

Climax is dangerous 

These stories don't always avoid climax, but when there are fireworks (including one story where there are literal fireworks), they're almost always bad. There are two stories about crocodilians, "Killer Saltwater Crocodile Killer" and "Kingdom of Teeth and Scales." Unlike most of the stories in this anthology, the promised monster does not fail to appear. But when they appear, it's not so the hero can conquer them. In one story, a kid gets his arm ripped off. In the other, one person is killed and a macho high schooler gets his fake machismo exposed before someone kills the crocodile in a non-heroic accident. 

We may think as readers that we want Chekov's gun to go off, but the point in the real world is to keep guns from going off, because they tend to hurt people. This might drive readers, used to their normal narrative cycle, a little crazy, but isn't avoiding drama actually what most adults spend a lot of their time doing? 

In fact, there is one story, "Spectacular Regular," that starts with a gun going off, but it's a nightmarish piece of flash fiction that begins with a mass shooter on a bridge and then fades into imagery of spiders. The collection is trying to remind us that as much as we are conditioned to look for explosions, when we get them, we might not actually like them. In "Wendy's Eclipse Day," Wendy is so obsessed with seeing an eclipse that when fireworks (which ironically ruin the climax rather than signal it) keep her from being able to see it, she thinks that she could "kill everybody in the world." Climaxes don't necessarily lead to epiphanies that make us better, the collection is reminding us.

Sex is...bad?

This climax aversion is sometimes literal in the sex scenes. When sex actually does occur in these stories, it's often coupled with something ominous, too. In the opening story, "Crab," which sort of reads like a long dad joke, we do get a briefly alluded-to sex scene: "...she said, 'I can be terrible sometimes' and took off her shirt." The introduction of sex is how we get foreshadowing of her eventual harrowing bad behavior. "White Landscaping Rocks" sees a gay couple's happiness undone by their proximity to bourgeois sexual decadence. 

Sex is more often spiritualized, as in the scene on the train in "Plucked" or the two unlikely teammates huddling together for warmth in "Impossible Naked Life." 

Nature is...bad, too? 

It isn't just sex that these stories tend to eschew; it's also nature and natural impulses. In "Bubbleheads," Sunny wants her friend Jenny to close her eyes and drive by "instinct," but this ends as badly as you'd think it would. "Instinct," in fact, isn't human in these stories. It's animal, and not in a good way. A saltwater crocodile's instinct is to kill and eat: "That's all an animal lives for. The next day. The next meal. The chance to prolong its life."

Because nature's tendency is to kill and eat, much of the natural imagery in the anthology is a threat. There are crocodiles and alligators and spiders. In "Viper," there is a deadly snake at the head of a walking trail, which is perhaps the furthest point the natural world can be said to reach into the manicured world of human development. It's not the only snake that shows up in these stories. "Rubber Horsey Heads" is a story that's little more than a narrated nightmare, full of animals out to get humans.

The only "instinct" the text approves of in any story is the instinct for self-discipline Genevieve exhibits in the title story, which notes she has "a natural instinct at patience and holding still." Self-control is more important that self-expression. It's an anti-Romantic aesthetic.  

The Ego controlling the Id

It's not so much, maybe, that sex and natural urges are bad as it is that they're associated with what we've come to call the Id. These are the base, reptilian urges of the brain, the raw, animal urges connected with survival and maximizing pleasure. It's the caveman brain that tells us to murder our enemies and ravage their women.  

These stories are leery of following our natural urges to their climatic conclusions because the Id tends to lead to death and destruction. Instead, these stories--at least most of the happy ones--feature characters whose Egos (their socially aware brains) subsume their Ids.  In "Hold your Soul," we find a child urging her teacher to take care of his soul, a rather spiritualized suggestion of prioritizing the spiritual over the carnal.

Salvation isn't found in these stories through diving deep into the psyche to "find oneself." In "Ball Pit," two characters dive deep into a fantastically deep children's ball pit, which serves as a metaphor for the depth of the subconscious. What they find is terrifying, which suggests that perhaps there are some psychological depths better off not plumbed. Self-revelation doesn't lead to anything good, which is why, in spite of the evocation of nakedness in the title of the book, nakedness tends to be something to avoid in these stories. "Killer Saltwater Crocodile Killer" mentions characters and their "amount of nakedness they were ridiculous enough to endure on that particular weekend." Nakedness isn't part of self-discovery leading to wisdom. It's coupled, instead, with ridiculousness. 

In the title story, about a woman on a reality show where contestants try to survive while naked in the wild (similar, I think, to Naked and Afraid), we finally confront nudity head-on. The nakedness is portrayed, however, not as natural, but as artifice. Nothing is more fake than the "reality" show, and Genevieve comes to wonder what the point of all the nakedness is. While "impossible naked life" is a phrase only specifically applied to the last and title story (which might be the best in the book), it could also apply to the whole of the book (as we should think it would, given that this is the title of the collection). It's impossible to live life nakedly, or practicing extreme self-revelation or self-knowledge. A little repression is what separates us from crocodiles. 

The title story is interesting in that it seems to confirm the themes of many of the other stories, but in a reverse way. There is frank nakedness and introspection, and eventually, the two characters do share their inner selves and are emotionally vulnerable. This is only achieved, though, once the two characters come to a place where they are uninterested in nakedness, where it now seems too ridiculous to think of. It's a reverse story of Eden--the characters are no longer ashamed of their nakedness, not because they've decided to embrace their nudity like Romantics, but because they've demonstrated control enough to simply not find it that interesting. 

Manly men aren't the ideal

Perhaps because the Id is shown as something to be held in check in these stories, manly men are generally held up as objects of scorn. In "V Scale" (one of the two stories that might actually end with a romance that's going somewhere), the main character avoids gyms with men grunting as they strain to lift weights, which she is sure is something they only do to show off. There are other insults in the book thrown at weightlifters. In "Puffy Man," a weightlifter at an outdoor gym near the beach is seen as a monster by a young girl. "Man Show" is about two young men who are obsessed with their bodies and how self-centered and unaware this makes them. We are meant to sympathize more with the skinny runner in "Palestine Boy" than with the giant football player who tries, clumsily, to connect with him. The physical ideal isn't a strong man who can push obstacles out of the way, it's runners who endure or rock climbers who patiently work their way through puzzles. 

Living in the midst of our world means avoiding the fireworks

Perhaps the single best image in these stories of how to survive in a world full of death and sadness comes at the end of "The Birds of Joy." In a medical facility where patients are dropping like flies, one dying woman finds happiness in a bird that's snuck into the facility. But rather than fly to the heavens, like we'd expect in a normal narrative cycle, instead we see the bird choosing to "settle into the bedpan, uninterested in flight." 

The narrative arc in these stories could possibly be drawn as follows:

Verily, my MS Paint skills know no bounds

These stories are occasionally weird, but not terribly so, and most tend toward realism. Even the ones that bend realism, however, are still thematically grounded in reality, because they are trying to break the habit in readers of looking for vicarious catharsis. Even at their most fantastic, the point is that we shouldn't look to the fantastic to heal us, because the fantastic doesn't happen all that often. What does happen to change our lives for the better is our decision to control our worst impulses. That's not as fun as fireworks, but it's a lot more effective. This collection deserves praise for its ability to refuse the well-trod path of fireworks.