That's how they getcha: "The Meeting" by Alex Olhin

"The Meeting" by Alex Olhin is about three ways capitalism can kill you. The first is slow and figurative, the second slow and literal, and the final immediate, literal, and terrifying.

Death number one in the story is announced at the eponymous meeting that gives the story its name. The small company run by James Halladay--what does it do? Health care or something?--is being bought out by a media conglomerate. Almost everyone is losing their job, meaning they've been putting up with the buzzwords and the boredom for nothing. Bryan just put money down on a condo and now he's stuck with it. Mallory has some kind of illness that's very serious, and she could barely afford it with health insurance, let alone without it. But there are margaritas to wash the pain down with, and since they're all alienated labor anyway, they'll probably find something else and not care much in the long run. The first way capitalism kills you, then, is small and petty and kind of a death by a thousand paper cuts. It mostly just kills your soul. This part of the story is familiar and probably part of every office-based story in the last 25 years. 

The next two ways it kills you are a little less well trodden. Both Mallory and James have serious illnesses. James got his when his mother, a social activist in Peru, carried him through a forest fire as a baby. His lungs have never been right, he coughs all the time, and he'll eventually need a new lung. Mallory as a child played in a river downstream from a paper factory, and she wonders if that's the reason she's got the problems she has now. Capitalism kills our souls slowly, but it also kills our bodies slowly by damaging the environment. Ironic, then, that they both work for a company whose brand has something to do with wellness. 

Finally, capitalism can kill us quickly and brutally. James and Mallory go to California to meet the CEO of the company that bought them out. During their trip, they run into a forest fire that kills them. This is the second forest fire in James' life, and this one finally did him in. Instead of one soulless job killing an office of a few people inside, now the combination of all soulless jobs had cooked the planet until it is killing all of us. 

"The Meeting" is a darker entry in American office-based fiction of the last generation.

Two kinds of CEO

The story contrasts two CEOs. There's James Halliday and there's Arthur McClellan. James is--there's no way to see it any other way--a good person. He was raised by charitable parents and he continues to be charitable as an adult. He is courteous. He gives away umbrellas to old ladies in the rain when nobody is watching. He keeps Mallory on during the transition because he senses she is sick and needs the job. He's earnest and he cares. Most of all, he thinks he's part of the solution, not the problem: "He believed it wasn't too late to change the world."

There are a lot of people like James among the CEOs of the world. I recently did a year and a half at one of the biggest corporations in the world, and I can tell you that the top executives in that company really believe what they're saying when they say the company is going to make the world a better place. A lot of CEOs are still philanthropic in a not completely cynical, for-photo-op-only way. That's James.

But James, in spite of having good looks and charisma that make people naturally want to follow him, ultimately loses control of his company to Arthur. Arthur is just evil. He's the stereotypical weird corporate magnate, full of idiosyncrasies and weird habits and phobias. He's probably brilliant, which is why his company is succeeding so much, but he's evil enough that when Mallory arrives at his headquarters, it reminds her of nothing so much as a supervillain's secret lair. 

Maybe the asshole is destined to triumph over the enlightened capitalist/philanthropist. Maybe Jeff Bezos conquers Bill Gates. Or evil Elon Musk takes over good Elon Musk. Mallory wonders at the end if James' charm, rather than being "integral to his success," is instead "a detriment; or, what seemed somehow sadder, an irrelevance." 

Lack of options

So what's a struggling worker to do to escape the bad options? Not much, it seems. The only real plan out of the hapless schlobs in the story are to become a lawyer and make a lot of money so you can buy land to live on when the apocalypse comes. That, and drink watermelon margaritas at Nacho Mamacitas to dull the pain. One plan is probably an "Of Mice and Men" kind of plan that will never work out, and the other is just another way to die slowly.

In last year's Best American Short Stories, we also had a wildfire story, "Paradise" by Yxta Maya Murray. That one also ended with people finding each other in the chaos, although in Paradise, they only lose their belongings, not their lives. "The Meeting" has several meetings in it: the opening meeting, the meeting with the new company, and then Mallory and James holding a final meeting of two as the flames engulf them. Perhaps one can say that the soul of "Paradise" was, like James, to think the world could still be saved, but "The Meeting" holds no such hope. 

All I had was myself: "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor

For a story that's all about absences, "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor sure begins with a lot of presence. "We were all there that day Mr. Man came to town, driving that blister-colored tin car." With those words, the narrator, Mbiu Dash, seems to be fully a part of a community. We're about to find out how isolated Mbiu Dash actually is, but for the moment, Mbiu seems to suffer from an embarrassment of riches, socially speaking. It's a lively scene. It's "Epitaph Day" in Mapeli Town, Kenya, a day of remembrance for the dead. The townsfolk (the "we") are drinking mead, getting drunk and happy, dancing, and telling stories about departed people they miss. Mbiu Dash isn't just around a lot of people; as a "we" narrator, she's part of them. This is the second story in Best American Short Stories so far that's had a first-person plural (we) point of view. At least at the start, anyhow.

The old saw comes to mind about there being only two stories, one about a hero going on a quest and the other about a stranger coming to town, but the story doesn't follow the path it teases early on. Although Mbiu thinks that "we" thought to ourselves, "A man like this must have a good story lodged beneath his tongue" and so "we" wanted to get it out of him, that's not what the bulk of the story is. This isn't the Ancient Mariner telling his tale of woe. We do eventually get to what Mr. Man has to say, but for most of the middle acts, Mbiu Dash is going to steal the show.

Mbiu steals it so much, in fact, that the "we" disappears. She shatters the second person plural when she switches abruptly at the beginning of a section first-person singular. Mbiu Dash wants to go out with the townspeople to dance the chini-kwa-chini with them, but the townspeople refused, telling her, without explaining why, that she had "best sit here and keep our guest company." Thus rejected by the town, the narrative switches from "we" to "I/me." "Me, I always thought of my mama on Epitaph Day." She gets both the object and subject form of the first-person singular in right from the start, as if to emphasize how much she's on her own. 

There are a dizzying number of songs out there that appear to be named "Chini Kwa Chini." This one is obviously from way after the time period of the story. The Swahili "china kwa chini," if the Internet can be believed, means "incognito," something that perfectly describes how Mbiu Dash is getting through life.

As soon as Mbiu Dash switches to "I/me," we start to get a whole different view of the town. It's a place where so many abandoned teens wander the street, nobody bothers to keep track of them. It's a place where men shove their fists down the mouths of teen girls they are raping, presumably so the girls can't scream. 

Mbiu Dash became one of these orphans when her mother robbed a bank and was killed by the police afterwards. It was something of a Robin Hood robbery--she threw the money to the townspeople--but the police killed her anyway. They kind of had no choice, since she was pointing a Kalashnikov rifle at them. 

How did the mother come to have this rifle? She'd studied in Moscow. This was common for a number of African countries back during the time of Soviet-U.S. global competition. What was also common was that the African nation would change sides in the global competition. That's what happened in Kenya, and Mbiu Dash's mother went from being lucky to have studied and become a dentist to being suspected of communist sympathies. Her life was spent under police watch, and she eventually snapped and went on her one-day bank robbing spree.

Absence

Mbiu Dash is obsessed with things that aren't there. Her surname, Dash, is self-given. It stands for a surname that used to be hers but that she didn't feel fit her after her mother died. Now, only the dash stands in its place, a glyph for what isn't there anymore. She wanders through the town after her mother's death, looking into windows. She needs reassurance that the whole town hasn't disappeared. Looking into the empty houses on Epitaph Day, she thinks to herself that "absence was just as meaningful to observe as presence." The story itself, taking place on Epitaph Day, is surrounded by absences that are making themselves felt.

In a way, Mbiu's mother kind of set her up to think of absences. Although a dentist, her mother didn't worry about Mbiu eating sweets that would give her cavities. Instead, she "never once made me brush my teeth before bed. We had an understanding: I could ruin my teeth, perforate them with holes big enough to lose five-shilling coins inside, and she would patch them up for me with silver amalgam someday." In other words, Mama has taught Mbiu that her absences will be filled. No wonder Mbiu cannot move on from her mother's dead body, riddled with bullet holes. No wonder she is still living in the "bullet-riddled Volkswagen that my mama had laughed her way out of this world in."

I imagine some readers would look at this preoccupation with absence and immediately read French philosopher Jacques Derrida into it. Derrida kind of had a thing with messing around with absence and presence. Derrida's interest in absence, though, was primarily linguistic, whereas Mbiu's is existential. For Mbiu, the absences in her life are like when the power goes out and you find yourself hours later still stupidly flipping switches every time you walk into a room and find it dark. The absences only make her more acutely aware of the thing that isn't there anymore. If you want to do a reading a la Derrida, go ahead, but I always found it like jerking off with sandpaper, somehow both onanistic and painful at once. 

Me, myself, and I

So Mbiu is truly all alone. Well, is she? She has her "darling," another teenage girl without parents. Her darling's name is "Ayosa Atarxis Brown." Atarxis is an interesting middle name, meaning something like "the absence of stress or worry." Ayosa might seem like someone who could make Mbiu feel less alone, but even her solace is a solace of lack--absence of pain and suffering, which is mostly what the whole town associates death with.

Mbiu and Ayosa don't talk to each other. They're soulmates, so they don't have to. They're not the only soulmates in the story. Turns out, when Mr. Man finally catches up to Mbiu, who's been running from him since Act One, thinking he was another rapist trying to stick his hand in her mouth, we learn that he was the soulmate of her mother since they studied in Moscow together. They weren't lovers, just soulmates. 

And speaking of souls, Mr. Man is lugging one around with him. It's his son Magnanimous. In Mr. Man's case, when the government came for him, they shot his son instead, and Mr. Man can't let his son go, so much that his son's soul is a tangible presence about him others can see. You could say that where Mbiu Dash is all absence, Mr. Man has too much presence. Mbiu thinks she is all alone, while Mr. Man can literally never be alone. Maybe this is why Mbiu lives in a still-shot up Volkswagen, while Mr. Man has pieced together a car from scraps. The departed don't leave Mr. Man. 

There are some telling symmetries between Mr. Man and Mbiu. Obviously, they are both linked by Mbiu's mother. Morever, with Ayosa, Mbiu has also put together a Frankenstein vehicle, in their case, a bicycle. But the symmetries are offset by the differences. 

One wonders if in a sense, Mr. Man is supposed to continue his role as the mother's soulmate by providing companionship to Mbiu. It briefly seems like it might happen. Where the town has refused to give Mbiu mead, Mr. Man makes her a sweet tea from lemongrass. It seems like he might be able to offer her something, but for the moment at least, Mbiu is unwilling to let Mr. Man any closer. 

Mbiu is both obsessed with absence and also longing for connection. After the "we" disappears, it briefly returns again at one point. She can't extinguish her longing for connection, to be filled, but when Mr. Man seems to offer a kind of connection, she refuses him, at least for the time being. What might be most interesting about the story is how it refuses to come to a resolution. Maybe this is because is Mbiu's world, the only real resolution is death. 

When the O bolt won't go in: "Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner

We've had to buy a lot of crappy, assemble-it-yourself furniture over the years. That's what the budget allowed. I'm not the handiest guy to begin with, but I think most assembly guides that come with this kind of furniture are intentionally meant to confuse even competent self-assemblers. It's a sort of middle finger from the manufacturer to everyone too cheap to buy better furniture, like we deserve this hell for not being richer. 

The thing about assembling Ikea or similar is that even though I tend to assume the problem is me, it's not always me. Sometimes, the manufacturer actually didn't include everything it was supposed to in the bag. Sometimes, the pre-fab holes really don't line up in a way that allows you to get the bolt through. Because I kind of suck at understanding directions, it's usually my fault when something isn't working out right. It isn't always my fault, but because it usually is, the hell of assembling furniture is that I can never be totally sure. I end up wondering if the manufacturer knew it could gaslight me like this.

There are some movies and stories that seem to me like Ikea furniture. They've got a lot of parts that sure look like they were meant to go together to make something aesthetically pleasing and functional. Parts of it I can get together, and maybe looking at the pictures in the book, I can get a sense of what I'm supposed to do, but damned if I can get the O-bolt to go into the G-slot. And is that really an O-bolt? I assume it is, because it's the only thing that makes sense, but what's in my bag doesn't look quite like the picture...

Let's lay it all out on the floor

"Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner is one of those stories where I can't quite get everything to fit together. I'm going to use the same strategy I would use with shit from Ikea. I'm going to dump everything out on the floor, look at the picture of the finished product, and try to work backwards from what it's supposed to look like at the end to get a better sense of what each step is trying to accomplish.

The main pieces:

Furniture assembly books start with a page that shows you all the parts you're supposed to have. There are generally big pieces--the things getting stuck together--and fasteners--the things that hold those pieces together. The fasteners are either bolts and nuts or screws. There's also usually a tool to turn the fasteners.  

In "Soon the Light," or really in any story worth thinking about after the second it's over, the main pieces, the matter that forms the backbone of the whole thing, is the plot. In the story, siblings Jaska and Kaari are double immigrants. Their parents first left Finland for the United States, then the siblings left again together when they were grown from Minnesota to Oregon. They now live in Astoria, where the Colombia River empties into the Pacific. Jaska used to fish in boats, but he's lately taken to fishing in a weir, a sort of walled fish trap that takes advantage of the tides. Kaari used to cook in a logging camp, where she once took up with a logger named Bucky who got her pregnant and then left her. The baby died a day after it was born. Kaari now works in a store. Both siblings are single and in their fifties now.

I found this photo of a weir at nautil.us. I really didn't know what one looked like. Jaska's seems a lot simpler than this and includes nets. 

They live sort of like a married couple. Kaari cleans, cooks, and gives advice. When someone makes fun of Jaska for doing "women's work" and asks how he can live with himself, he says he doesn't live with himself, he lives with his sister. It's an intentional misreading of the putdown, but it also shows that Jaska looks at his relationship with his sister as the thing that shows he has value, the way many people look to marriage and children as the thing that justifies their existence.

The siblings take in a child Jaska found abandoned to die in his weir. At first, the child seems sweet, perhaps even a blessing. Kaari and Jaska both recover their physical health when he is around, suggesting the boy is some kind of angel. But then unexplained tragedies start happening all over, and the child shows an uncanny knack for finding it all funny. As the story goes on, the possibility that the boy is more demon than angel emerges, and the couple struggles to decide what they should do about him.

The bolts

So those are the armrests, the back, the legs, and the seat of this chair we're trying to put together. The success of an assembly project, though, comes down to whether you can get it to stick together. What are the fasteners of this story, the nuts and bolts? 

One bolt is mythology. In fact, there might be two different sizes of mythological bolts here. One is the Clatsop myth that opens the story. The Clatsop are a branch of Chinook. In the myth, God made mountains from mud and bloodied his hands in the process. That's why working the harvest is so hard. The other mythological bolt type comes from Christian mythology. Jaska reads Bible stories to the boy. Since the Clatsop myth opens the story and gets much longer treatment, one would have to assume it's going to carry more weight and assume a larger role in holding the story together than the Christian stories, but both play a part. 

Another bolt is "mother." Both siblings still send and receive letters with their mother. The letters they receive include a strange mix of advice, typical motherly inquiries, humorous anecdotes, and occasionally overbearing prescience. There is something of a Psycho/Norman vibe to their relationship with mother. It wouldn't be too surprising to find that "mother" has actually been dead in Minnesota for decades and that the siblings murdered her before they left, and they've actually been answering one another's letters to "mother" ever since. Mother's letters are occasionally whimsical, wondering why the ballet dancers in Minneapolis aren't taller so they don't have to keep rising up on their toes, and occasionally dark and Calvinist, warning of an "excess of cheer" and noting that suffering is the reward for hard work. Both children often wonder how they will tell mother about things that happen to them, meaning to some extent that they have never left childhood behind.

Various images form fasteners to the meaning of the story as well. The most obvious images are the light/dark references. The narrative alters between Kaari and Jaska's perspective. Both get alone time with the boy, and both interpret him differently. Kaari's portions of the story are invariably tied to darkness. Only a few lines into her first POV section, we find, "The darkness brewed within them--that was her meat, her milk. Her music. Darkness, she wrote, made a clean heart in her." Jaska, meanwhile, seems to dwell on the light. In one letter to mother, he writes of "how at low tide sunrise pooled in the litter of clam shells glowing wet and pinks...He wrote of the freckled globes of the violet foxglove, how they held an interior light of their own." 

The title of the story is "Soon the Light," which seems a clue--the way the picture on the box of an Ikea chair is a clue--that light is critical to assembling the story correctly. In addition to the depictions of light and dark in nature, there is the question of light and dark in the boy himself. The boy is unquestionably light, almost unnervingly white. Jaska thinks of the prophet Jonah, bleached white from three days in the whale, when he first sees the boy. He sees the boy's whiteness as a sign the boy is from God, but Kaari, who is tied to darkness, sees it differently. 

Kaari is influenced by "Indian Jennie." Kaari looks out for Indian Jennie, even though Indian Jennie is the woman Bucky left Kaari for. Kaari can't help herself. Jennie's mental faculties have declined, and she is "so simple these days, childlike and forgetful, and it seems wrong to hate a child." Jennie still wanders around looking for Bucky, although Bucky died long ago in an accident. 

In a sense, Kaari and Jaska each has a child to take care of. Jaska's is a child of the light and Kaari's of the darkness. Jennie sees the boy and immediately thinks he is evil. "The devil is white, white," she says. This will, of course, immediately make many readers think of some strands of black nationalism that believe the "white man is the devil" or something like that. That might be what's on Jennie's mind, but I think there's more to it than that. Whiteness holds more than modern political overtones for Jennie. Whiteness is tied to light, and while Western civilization has been nearly unanimous in preferring light to darkness ("And the light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it"), Kaari and Jennie seem to mistrust light. 

One final nut to try to use to hold this all together is the image of the bear. When Kaari tells Jennie that Jaska thinks the boy is a prophet, Jennie says she has met prophets before. They always come back telling stories about bears, because Heaven is full of bears. This is an interesting observation, as nothing in the story is as reminiscent of a bear as the boy himself. The boy is irreformably wild, for one thing, refusing baths and shoes. One scene all but calls the boy a bear:

The boy, naked and dripping wet, now sat at the kitchen table stroking the shiny scales of a salmon Jaska had been keeping alive in the kitchen sink. Spellbound, they watched his hands. Flick. Flick. His long fingernails, sharp as knives, flashed. Scales flew through the air. They could not take their eyes off him, even as he boiled the fish, its body jackknifed in the water and the head sticking out of the pot. He ate it like that, one half of the fish cooked, the head still alive.

Eventually, whatever evil is plaguing the town kills Jennie as well. Kaari, convinced the boy at the very least does not belong with them, convinces Jaska to take him to drop him off at an orphanage. But the boy runs off and is playing in the water near the weir when the tide is coming in. Jaska tries to rescue the boy, who keeps dashing off. Kaari makes a decision to rescue Jaska and let the boy drown. 

This chair is still kind of wobbly

I've used up all the parts, but the chair still isn't sturdy. I must have done something wrong, or the thing is defective. This is where I go back into the box to make sure I'm not missing something. And sure enough, there's a piece that's so weird, I mistook it at the beginning for packaging, but maybe it's actually important? It's all this stuff about Bolsheviks and a strike at the cannery and hints that World War II is on the way. It seemed irrelevant at the time, like when you occasionally just get an extra bolt that doesn't go anywhere, but maybe it actually does matter. 

I think everything I ever put together from Ikea has at least one piece that's smashed from where I rage stabbed it.

Kaari and her "child," Jennie, are both tied to the past. Jennie still thinks Bucky, who died in a logging accident, is coming back. Kaari might have decided to care for Jennie because Jennie, as a sort of child herself, reminds her of the child she lost. Kaari had to move on from Bucky, but because Jennie can't move on from Bucky and keeps looking for him, Jennie allows Kaari to hold onto the past vicariously. The darkness with which Kaari allies herself is the world as it was. 

The boy and the light that comes with him represents change. It represents a world that is coming. He burns letters from mother, their link to the old world. Twice, Kaari laments that "we are changing," once in a letter to mother and another time when the boy is burning the letters. It's not a good change for her. Although the light of the new world brings some good things with it (like curing of physical ailments), it also will erase things that will never come again. Light means destruction along with creation. 

Jaska also senses that the boy means change. He dreams of the town shaking "loose from its moorings." He dreams of its canneries, houses and docks all sliding into the muddy water. For Jaska, though, the change isn't as terrifying. His particular interpretation of his Christian background allows him to assume these changes could be for good. He has something of an "If God sent it, it must have a purpose" mentality.

The title is "Soon the Light," which only raises the question, "Soon the light what?" The story doesn't say, but one can perhaps assume that the natural continuation is that "soon the light will rise" or "soon the light will shine" or something like that. The light of change is coming, and it can't be held back any more than the dawn. With it comes the end of many things. The future is never without loss. We think of the march toward a more civilized world, but the future is at least half a wild animal, eating its prey half-cooked and half-raw. 

Kaari sees what the light destroys, and this is why she choses to stay behind in the darkness with her brother for as long as they can. Is the boy, who brings with him light and the future, evil? That's an open question. The future does bring in problems not dreamed of before, but Kaari is perhaps overly enamored of the darkness of her past and therefore unable to see what good it might bring with it. It's not clear whether the boy is evil or Kaari's own attachment to the past is.

Not a chair, after all

So we've used up everything we had, and we've tried putting it together in as many ways as we can. What we have seems better than our first try, but it's still not totally solid. Maybe that's because it wasn't a chair, after all. It's more like a hammock. It's supposed to rock. This story is Gothic. It's horror. The identity of good and evil in it is supposed to be a bit unstable. What seemed its weakness might be its strength, and the ambiguity is intentional. "Soon the light what?" isn't a riddle to be solved. The open-endedness of what comes after is actually the whole point. 

Something trying to claw its way out: "Bears Among the Living" by Kevin Moffett

There's a lot of overlap between the work of comics and the work of fiction writers. Both entertain, both observe the every day in a way that can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and both tell stories. Some comics are less narrative than others. The less narrative ones tend to have kind of abrupt transitions from one subject to another. Jerry Seinfeld's "what's the deal with lampshades?" was meant to be a joke lampoon of bad comedy, but even good comics who meander from subject to subject will sometimes abruptly introduce their new topic. "Hey, anyone in the audience have young kids?" they will ask, and then we know they're going to riff on the adventures of parenting for a little while. We might get a little story here and there about something that happened to the comic recently, but they're likely to soon switch to something new. 

Other comics, though, will use a more or less continuous narrative throughout an entire set or through a long part of a set. Even if they move from one story to another, there is sometimes a theme holding all of the act together. Pete Holmes did this in his Netflix special "Dirty Clean." 

From its opening line, "Bears Among the Living" reads a lot like a comedy act. Its first line is a tautological joke: "They call our town the City of Trees because of the trees." That's the kind of material Steven Wright or Bob Newhart might have used. As the "narrative" continues, we are getting stories, but they seem to be coming rather spontaneously, rather than building in a carefully controlled way toward a single goal the way most narrative does. Nearly all of the little episodes are comedic or contain comedic lines. The style feels almost spoken rather than written, with some exceptions. ("The summer he died is a smear of wildfires and hostile fauna" is an example of a more "writerly" passage.) 

One result of this comic-on-stage delivery is that I found myself wondering as I read whether the story was largely auto-biographical. Usually, I find this an annoying and irrelevant question. Whenever a writer does a reading somewhere and someone in the audience asks whether the events in the story really happened, I feel peeved. It shouldn't matter. In this story, though, the very specific nature of the anecdotes felt somehow different from normal fiction. I was going to actually Google the writer and this story to see if I could find anything about whether this was auto-biographical (which I almost never do), but then the penultimate line of the story pretty much gives it away. "Do you think this is a game, Kevin?" when written by an author named Kevin is pretty much inviting us to read this auto-biographically, even if he made parts of it up. 

"What a nice night for an evening" fits the comedic vibe of much of "Bears Among the Living."

What holds it together

As with the best comedians, the seemingly random and spontaneous stringing together of amusing anecdotes has something holding it all together. Most of the characters in the town are living fairly parochial lives. "The limits of my language," the narrator/Kevin says, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, "are the limits of my town," and much of the story is confined by the city limits of the "City of Trees." When Kevin goes jogging every day, something that might be thought of as a chance to break free, even his jog is circumscribed by the town's streets, which he compares to both lines on a page and to algebra problems. He runs "Seventh to Mountain, Mountain to Baseline, Baseline to Mills, Mills to Bonita." 

He and everyone else in the town seem to voluntarily keep themselves pent up in the town. Maybe it's because life is scary. Kevin's son worries about creatures at the bottom of the sea or a planet filled with monsters. Kevin reassures him that he'll never go to these places, and it's better for him to worry about the DMV. The son, though, isn't as comforted by these reassurances as Kevin intends, because the son's "sense of danger is prehistoric, wiser than words." When Kevin tries to get him to brush his teeth, his son asks if tigers brush their teeth, seeming to ask what good our civilized norms are in the face of the savage universe.

Indeed, "something prehistoric" seems to be breaking out all over the manicured confines of the town. There are coyotes that invade the town that only become meaner when someone tries to poison them. 

Much more than the prehistoric things trying to break into the town, though, the thing that threatens the peace seems to be what's trying to get out. When talking with his mother, Kevin finds that there was something in her attic that she thought was "trying to claw its way in--turns out something was trying to claw its way out..." On closer inspection, it looks like the town is full of things trying to claw their way out, to go investigate the dangerous wilds beyond the town. One is Kevin's dog, who, if not for the "orange leash clipped to his collar," would go off "sprinting toward the foothills, never to return." 

The thing that is most trying to break out of the quiet of the town, though, is Kevin himself. From the beginning, we find that as he is sitting in the park reading, he is unintentionally causing a disturbance among the town's proper ladies because his fly is down. He admits this is happening a lot. Is it really unintentional, or is something primal in him trying to "claw its way out," to break beyond the limits placed on him? Is this why Kevin sometimes finds himself saying out loud things he meant to keep to himself? 

Kevin also admits guiltily to sojourns out to the "Top Dogs," a fast-food joint just beyond the limits of town (because the town has outlawed such places). Why would the town outlaw them? Is it because the "dog" in "Top Dogs" reminds people of their primitive urges to escape? Is this why the place just beyond the limits of the town is in a shopping center with so many other seedy and primitive-urge satisfying establishments? 

Comforts, looking the other way, and belief systems

The whole town, it seems, is troubled by the fact that the world is actually a terrifying place. We have built a town (which could stand for any civilized corner of the world) in which we can pretend the world isn't full of terror, but it still is. In order to keep ourselves from running off to face the terror or worrying about being eaten alive by it where we stand, the citizens of the town rely on three coping mechanisms: comforts, looking away, and belief systems. 

Comforts

Nearly everyone in town seeks comfort. This is why the ice cream man has a job. The ice cream man "tunnels into our town, solves our streets, turns on his music, and waits like a spider." This "solving" of streets recalls the earlier metaphor of the streets as algebra problems. Is the ice cream man a benevolent figure, though? Kevin has compared him to a "spider," another primitive threat invading the town. However, he also compares him to that paragon of protection for civilization, the fireman. "If we let him, the ice cream man would notice even the faintest tremor of need and drive toward it at once. What a fireman is to a burning building, and ice cream man is to our desire for ice cream." 

The ice cream man isn't a spider because he eats us alive; he's a spider because of how finely he feels tremors. When people in town are worried about the terror of the world they live in, the ice cream man is there to bring us the food we probably most associate with eating our feelings. He's there to make us forget about it with ice cream.

Kevin's mother is the ultimate example of someone who uses consumer culture to comfort herself. She could "never shed her unblinking faith in products she saw advertised on television." She romanticizes a moment of her life with Kevin's father because it reminds her of something two celebrities did, recalling for us as readers of people in our world who bury themselves in tabloid news in order to not think about their own lives. 

Kevin's own son seems drawn to comforts, too. He argues about bringing more toys (comforts) with him to bed than his mother wishes. He wants to be reassured that the lyrics to the song "Superman" by R.E.M. say "I am Superman/and I CAN do anything," rather than "can't." Kevin does his best to reassure his son, but something in his son rejects this reassurance, perhaps reflecting the unsettled part of Kevin that still isn't fully civilized. This is why his son asks about whether tigers brush their teeth. 

Looking away

When Kevin's father died when Kevin was still young, a well-meaning friend came and took all his father's clothes to The Salvation Army. She did this because she "thought she was doing us a favor, scrubbing our closet of unwanted reminders." One way of dealing with tragedy and the reminder that none of us is really safe in the world is to try to move on, to clear up reminders of the unhappiness. However, the plan completely fails. "Years later we'd still see his golf shirts all around town. On a man pumping gas into a motorcycle. On a supermarket bag boy." No matter how much we try to suppress knowledge of our mortality, it always keeps "clawing out." 

Belief systems

A third way people try to deal with the uncomfortable facts of the universe that threaten the "bedroom community" Kevin lives in are belief systems. In some ways, these seem a little more hopeful. They do acknowledge the uncomfortable facts of life instead of trying to hide them. Kevin recalls one "wannabe Amish guy" who showed his daughter pictures with "crying dwarves" on them. He wanted "to teach her that the world isn't as uncomplicated as she thinks it is." This is the beginning of belief systems in Kevin's world. They accept that the world is actually terrifying as their first step. 

However, the problem that Kevin keeps facing is that these belief systems never quite make sense to him. His mother tried being a born-again Christian for a while, but it didn't take. Kevin never quite understood basic ideas like what prayer was supposed to be, but he still found that "the idea that I was born incomplete and that my natural inclinations are faulty, damnable even, has always rung true to me." He senses there might be some truth there, but it doesn't make enough sense that anyone can be more than a "wannabe" member of any belief system. 

When Kevin sees that someone has scrawled "Black Sabbath Rules" on a bus, he thinks it is a reference to an actual system of rules. He earnestly wants to know what the rules are. He is seeking a system that will make the world make sense, even with all the horror in it, but he is continually operating under mistaken assumptions that undo his ability to find such a system.  

When Kevin's mother went on her one singles' outing after his father died, she ran into a karate instructor. She thought the instructor was hitting on her, but he was actually trying to sell karate lessons. His pitch appealed to the belief system his dojo taught. It was founded on "four pillars of respect," (which somewhat recalls the four noble truths of Buddhism). We never find out what the four pillars are, but his mother misreads one of them as "custard." I tend to think the real word was "courtesy" or something like that, but his mother, who clings to comforts and pleasure as her coping mechanism, wants instead to read it as ice cream, the ultimate symbol in the story of drowning your worries with materialism. 

Kevin feels that as a father, he should have passed along some kind of bedrock beliefs to his son, but he simply couldn't. "I know there are other things I should be showing him--truths, values, important concepts--but how can I if I'm still not clear on the particulars myself?" 

The central image

How to read the "bear among the living" that gives the story its title? I think it's meant to say that all of us has the potential to remind others of the terror in the world. 

"We are bears among the living, agile and fearsome. We range and rut. We hunt. We return to our dens to sleep and let torpid winters seal our wounds. When we die our pelts are stripped from our bones, draped over plausible likenesses, nailed to pedestals in telltale poses. Children still flinch at the sight of us..."

To lessen our potential to frighten others, even our memory is banished to the "garage" and afterwards, that memory is shrunk down to a teddy bear, the type of toy a child brings to bed to comfort them from the primordial fears we all have at night. 

This story, which seems on the surface to be a wandering comedic bit, is actually one of the darkest stories I've ever read. At times, it seems like the comic is randomly bringing up subjects. (Lately, I've been thinking about the ice cream man.") But this seeming randomness is all arranged with incredible skill. It's one of the most sophisticated short stories I've ever read. Like Kevin's phone conversations with his mother, it's not just the wandering, chaotic, disconnected series of conversations it seems to be. It's a "punishing labyrinth." 

If there is any comfort in this story, it's that we are "navigating (this labyrinth) together." We are "careful not to lose our way, careful to measure where we're going against where we've been." I don't know how many of us succeed in that, but the story certainly does, as much as any I've ever read. 

"Post" by Alice McDermott? More like "Shit Post," amirite? Up top!

The other day, Andrew, a writer who has kindly been reading both this blog and my buddy Karen's blog for years, posted in the comments that he was having a hard time getting into the stories from Best American Short Stories this year. This isn't new for him; although he's a writer himself, he generally doesn't connect much with a lot of the short fiction that is most heavily praised. In the comments, I was telling him that I, too, often don't connect with a story much the first time I read it, but that I sometimes end up deciding after reading it a second time that I can see what made other readers like it so much. 

From time to time I wonder, though, whether I'm not talking myself into liking something because it's simply easier to write about a story from a positive perspective than a negative one. I don't know why, but for some reason, it seems much easier to explain why you like something than why you hate it. Hate criticism is much harder, so maybe I'm subtly talking myself into thinking I liked a story. Or maybe I don't want to totally alienate potential publishers out there, because maybe part of me hasn't totally given up on being a professional writer yet. Maybe still it's simple cognitive dissonance resolution in which since I've already put the time in to read a story twice, I want to believe I've done it for something good.

Whatever the case and whatever defense mechanisms might be in play, none of them kept me from hating "Post" by Alice McDermott. I'll do my best to explain why, but since my heart is hardly ever in dunking on a story, this might not be much.

If you can come up with three reasons for something, people have to take you seriously, right? Of course. Three is very official. So I'll try to come up with three reasons.

1. Nothing new here. It's a pandemic story. Every writer has written one, which has prompted some of the journals I submit stories to to explicitly ask for no more pandemic stories. This one doesn't do anything new or unexpected with a pandemic story. It's all the same tired observations you could get from any social media scroll in 2020: gaining weight, wearing facemasks changing the way we interpret one another, the strangeness of not living our normal lives, facial hair, it's all there. There's not a single fresh observation in it about pandemic life or life in general. Nothing was surprising. There's an attempt to make it feel fresh by making it about a couple that rode out part of the pandemic together when they were already broken up. Something, something, longing for attachment and I don't care. Is it supposed to feel edgy because it opens with the woman, whose name I already forget and don't care enough to look up, was worried COVID had made her no longer like the smell of weed? If so, it failed. 

The title is supposed to refer to post-pandemic life, which is just starting when the story begins, but even with some perspective, time-wise, there isn't a single pandemic-related thought in the story I haven't already heard or read dozens of times. 

Mira. Her stupid name is Mira.

2. The language is dull. There are no exciting turns of phrase, no electric descriptions. I can turn to any page and find the same ditch-dirt-dull narration that's on any other page. Here: "He had bought her as well an oversized box of Advil, a four-pack of Gatorade, and a little white pulse oxygen meter that he offered to her rather sweetly." This is stuff any beginning writer taught to look for details could write. None of it is the kind of stuff that makes you think, "How did she ever come up with that?" Because none of it was hard to come up with. A bot that's been fed the outcome of six workshops at Iowa could have written it. 

3. The two main characters don't feel interesting in any way. Maybe the dullness is the point. COVID was being lived through by dull folks who are attached to their dull lives, and we should care about those dull people because we're all kind of dull in the end. But I felt nothing for them. They're decent people who care for each other, but that's not enough by a long shot. 

I found myself resenting this story for having been published in the first place and for taking up space in BASS to follow. This didn't feel like a story that was eating a hole in the writer's gut. It felt like a writer said to herself, "I'm a respected writer and COVID is a thing and I should write about it" so she did and she poured dull, professional competence onto the page until the thing was done. I will forget this story before I even start the next one, except I won't forget the resentment I feel for having read a story that never would have been published by an unknown author. 

Solid and mutable both: "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken

Once, as an undergraduate, I was at a party with my English professors and we were discussing what we were reading. At the time, I was trying to force myself to read Latin American literature of the 20th century in Spanish. I told my professor, who I'm sure was deeply stoned because he was almost always deeply stoned, that I was reading 100 Years of Solitude. He looked at me with a manic sort of excitement in his eyes and said, "Oh, it's a feast."

The metaphor of eating a book is at least as old as the book of Ezekiel, and I've never had a hard time understanding it. There are some books you enjoy so much, you want them inside you. You want to digest them and make them become part of who you are. The very best ones really are a feast, because the more you come back to them, the more diverse and rich treats wait for you to enjoy.

There aren't many books that really are a feast, that reward no many how many times you read them. It's a short list for me, but I think Elizabeth McCracken's short stories are starting to join it. 

I've loved  "It's Not You," included in the 2020 Best American Short Stories collection, and "Thunderstruck" is my second-favorite story in the ten years I've been reading BASS. I was excited just seeing her name in the table of contents. Reading her stories doesn't feel like work at all, although I'm exhausted right now and finding it hard to keep up with a BASS blog-through. 

Symphony

A lot of stories can give you a great theme, but this story weaves at least four themes into it, blending them and then letting them stand alone for a time the way a great symphony can. Indeed, much like in listening to Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, I find myself enjoying each new motif as it comes along so much, I'm disappointed when it's interrupted, only to find I like the new one better, until it's interrupted again by an even better one. The experience builds until all the themes are brought together.

In ""Souvenir Museum," there are at least four themes going on:

1. The struggle that coming of age brings between child and parent

2. The illusion of choice

3. The strangeness of time, how it moves both fast and slow and how many different ages all coexist at once

4. How memory and imagination try to bring together the different times existing all at once, usually in a confused way

First Movement, adagio: Mothers and Sons

When the action starts, Johanna's son Leo has already undergone an awakening of sorts. He got glasses. These produced a type of epiphany, an I-was-blind-but-now-I-see moment, quite literally. Johanna was the one who enabled this enlightenment. She'd picked out the glasses for him, because Leo hadn't cared what kind he got. When he puts them on the first time, his whole world changes. "Wow, he'd said, stepping out of the optician's, scanning the parking lot, the parking lot trees, the Starbucks and the Staples. Wow. Just like that, both he and the world looked different." By giving him the glasses, she has given him a whole new way of seeing the world. This is even more evident in the first scene of the book, when Johanna wakes Leo up to ask him (or tell him) about going to Denmark. He holds out his hand and Johanna knows he wants his glasses. He's making his first strides into a larger world, one in which he will eventually grow more independent, but he's still young enough that he needs his mother to enable that movement into independence, which she does. 

In that passage with the two "wows" in it, there is, barely noticeable, the first subtle shift of point-of-view, from mother to son. Most of the story is from Johanna's POV, but occasionally, very subtly, there are moments when Leo's takes over. One "wow" is Leo seeing, and the other is him being seen by his mother. This mirrors the process Johanna notes that is part of all parenting, how children go from only knowing things their parents placed in their heads, to having knowledge they have acquired indendently of them. Her way of seeing (POV) is gradually being replaced as the story goes on by Leo's way of seeing. (As a parent, I agree that this is one of the most unexpected and mind-blowing of milestones.) Leo moves from being only what Johanna can see to being someone with his own agency, his own POV. 

It's not a process without its difficulties. Although this growth into independence is, of course, the whole point of parenting, it means personal struggles along the way as the former sight-giver now has to give way while the child uses his newfound sight to see the world in new ways. Johanna notices anger at mothers from more than just Leo. She sees a teenager working at a historical site who glowers at her, and she understands that "he was mad at his mother, wherever she was, in whatever century, and therefore mad at all mothers." But she also begins to see the resentment of mothers everywhere, too. When she encounters an angry older woman at the same site, she muses that "The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody listens to them, their knowledge, their advice." 

(Lines like these, any one of which would be enough to make a normal story memorable, are on every page. It's one of the reasons a McCracken symphony is so enjoyable. It's just overflowing with virtuosity.) 

This generational struggle is the first of the four themes the story introduces. But others have already been hinted at. 

A Viking historical village. The one in the story doesn't seem to be a real place, but there are places just like it.

Second movement, allegro: The illusion of choice

Johanna presented the idea of a trip to Denmark to Leo like he had a choice, but of course he really didn't. She had already booked the trip. She did it because it was good form, because "you had to give a child the illusion of choice." Was she just thinking here about parenting, or was she thinking bigger? Was she thinking about how life circumscribes everyone's choices, and it's necessary to ignore this and pretend to all children, not just your own, that they have choice?  

There are other ways she limits Leo's choices without making it look like she is. She bought him the bunk bed she had wanted as a child. She picked out his glasses. (Because he hadn't cared, she says, but should she have encouraged him to care?) And she has one iron rule: he's not allowed to play with toy weapons. 

However, Leo easily finds a loophole around the prohibition on weapons. He makes them with Legos, because he is allowed to play with those. Come to think of it, Johanna finds that she's having trouble controlling him in a lot of ways. There's the fact that he now has "thoughts all the time that she hadn't put there." There's the way he is interested in the same boring history that her father was, the boring history that had continually ruined her own dreams of going to amusement parks as a child. 

So Johanna, perhaps, thinks that choice is an illusion, but is choice's evil twin, control over others, also an illusion? Maybe Leo has more choice than she thinks, but it's simply not the kinds of choices she would prefer. She's given Leo much more than the "illusion" of choice. 

Or has she? Leo, young as he is, realizes, when they visit Legoland and hate it, that she can be "grim about expensive fun." That is, Leo realizes they're going to have to stick around for a while, since they paid for it, even though they both hate it. He can find some freedom for himself, but it will always be limited. He can scrounge more than just an illusion of choice. He can frustrate his mother's control. But only up to a point. 

I'm with Leo and Johanna on this one. I hate this place and I've never even been there.

Third movement, largo and presto all at once: The strangeness of time, how it moves both fast and slow and how many different ages all coexist at once

Time is constantly getting mixed up in this story. Leo likes the same boring things Johanna's father did, which reminds her of her past. Those boring things generally have to do with history, meaning her father was always looking for battlefields and museums, relics of times gone by that still exist here in the world of the present. 

Johanna and Leo eventually end up in a Viking historical village, one in which the buildings and clothing and even speech are meant to be somewhat faithful to times long gone.  It leaves Johanna feeling more than a little mixed up about what time she is even in. "She still didn't know what millennium they were supposed to be in," we are told at one point, and soon after, she asks herself "how many timeframes" she was in. Because she has gone to Denmark partly to give the watch her departed father wanted her to give to a former long-term boyfriend/common-law spouse, she has been thinking of many times all at once--"college, midtwenties, the Iron Age, the turn of the last century." 

This confounding blending of eras is made more difficult for her by Leo's early coming of age, because now she is experiencing time through his point-of-view, too. No wonder she wonders often whether she should give the watch to Leo. No wonder she wishes at one point that he might become a 'horologist," or expert in the art of watches, a wish we discover that he will one day fulfill for her. What is a watch but a tool that tries to organize and make sense of the mess of time? 

Even though Leo will one day become a horologist, though, this still does not mean that time doesn't become all jumbled for Johanna. The watch itself proves to be a trick on her, as what she took to be a very elegant and refined timepiece turned out to be a dirty little joke between her father and her former boyfriend. It has a wind-up pornographic scene hidden within it. The effort to control time and make sense of it is, at the end, just a dirty little joke on all of us, a joke that's just a little over our heads. 

Fourth movement, no tempo indicated: The brain tries to make sense of it all

There are overlapping perennial oddities of human experience joining forces to disorient Johanna and, to some extent, Leo, although Leo, as a younger human just beginning to attempt to make sense of it all, might be less beaten down by it all and therefore less inclined to self-doubt. Both Leo and Johanna, though, do find something that enables them to have at least tentative, if not final, relief from all the weirdness of human perception that comes from our experience of time, both on an epochal scale and a daily one. 

The symbol of this tentative resolution is the Lego. For Leo, Legos were always his door to foiling the control of his mother, to making his "illusionary" choice real. Legos are a toy you can make into anything, just as many of us are taught to believe that we can do with our own lives. When his mother forbade weapons, he found a way around her control through Legos. That's why he would rake through bins of the things beneath his bed "as a kind of rosary, to remind himself that the world, like Lego, was solid and mutable both."

Solid and mutable both. That's what Leo and Johanna find all the themes they've been playing with--control, choice, time--are. We try to make time less mutable through things like watches and by purchasing souvenirs--a word that comes from one of the French words for "to remember." Johanna thinks of souvenirs in this way, as a "memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened." 

When Leo and Johanna visit Denmark, there are several stops that could have been the final and defining climax of the action. It could have been at Legoland, the one place Leo very much wanted to go when he was told/asked about going to Denmark. It could have been at the "Souvenir Museum," the stop that gave its name to the story. Instead, it was at the rather dull Viking village. Why?

Because Johanna learns by that point that the whole world is a souvenir museum. She already knows all too well that we are surrounded at all times on all sides by an open-air museum, because her father and now her son have developed the habit of looking for the past alive in the present everywhere. And the world leaves its memories with us, whether we plan them or no, so we are left with nothing but souvenirs in this museum. 

At Legoland, Leo was disappointed in everything, but his largest disappointment was the gift shop. "He'd been imagining something he couldn't imagine, some immense box that would allow him to build--what. A suit of Lego. A turreted city big enough to live in. Denmark itself." He'd gone hoping for a souvenir, something that would remind him of the way life was both "durable and mutable," but found that the ability to make memories is more part of the "mutable" side of that pair. He'd tried to make Legos something simply durable and found that when he did, he could no more control what imagination achieved than his mother could. 

Virtuosity

I've compared this story to a symphony, and it is. Part of what makes it such an enjoyable symphony is the virtuosity. I don't know if there's a writer who matches McCracken for both the quantity and quality of wit that pours out on every page. There's no way to do justice to it, because the story is just dripping with it. No comedian outstrips her observational powers, and I found myself laughing at one line after another, even if it wasn't really funny as much as it was unexpectedly true. Here are some of the best ones, in no particular order:

1. "In our private Legolands we are the only human people."

2. "When our children love what we love, it is a blessing, but oh, when they hate what we hate!"

3. "To become interested in a boring subject was a feat of strength."

4. "The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody listens to them, their knowledge, their advice."

5. "The blondness itself seemed evil to Leo. A blond child who screeches and steps on your foot is compelled by its blondness; a blond mother who hits you with her stroller--here comes another one, rushing after her child, attempting to climb into the lap of the life-size Lego statue of Hans Christian Anderson--does it out of pure towheadedness."

I haven't come close to scratching the surface of the depths of this story. There is some nice parallelism between imagery of alligators near the beginning and the end I didn't get around to. I didn't consider the layers of the name "Leo," her bold lion/cowardly lion of a son. It's a story you could read a dozen times and keep finding new insights from, and a story that could inspire dozens of essays without beginning to run out of new things to say about it. It's a feast. 

 

Pop song meets high lit: "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you're probably aware that I have an affinity for an old-world view of theme. I like stories where I feel like it's possible to sum up not just what the subject matter of the story is, but what the story's attitude toward a subject is. This runs dangerously close at times to stating what the "moral" of the story is, although the idea that stories should even have a moral has been largely dismissed as didactic for over a century now. Still, it appeals to me. Maybe it's because reading literature took the place for me of religious reading of sacred texts when I realized I wasn't a believer anymore. I might be asking for literature to do something for me it wasn't meant to do, but part of me can't help myself. 

For example, in this year's Best American Short Stories anthology, it might be possible to distill the "lesson" of "The Little Widow from the Capital" as, "There is a difficult balance between community and individual." Now, I'll be the first to admit that's a pretty prosaic, even cliched, theme. The point of a theme isn't necessarily to sound brilliant on its own. If it did sound brilliant on its own, there'd be no need to write a story. This kind of theme can, however, serve as a rough roadmap to take one deeper into the interior of a story. Taking the struggle between individual and community as a suggested means for looking at the details of the story, the straightforward conflict of between characters can take on a more cosmic dimension to it. 

A story like "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette might not seem, at first sight, to appeal to my rabbinic side. It's a quick, wry, perhaps touching story, but there's nary a moral in sight.  I did, however, find it satisfying, if not really applicable to my life. Why? Because of its lyricism.

Two types of poetry 

Some introductory poetry books will roughly divide all poems into two types: narrative and lyrical. There are dozens or maybe hundreds of sub-types of poems within these two very broad categories, but the basic division can usually hold up, with a poem being more or less one or the other. Examples of narrative poems are "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or "The Iliad." As the name suggests, the primary function of these poems is to tell a story.

A lyrical poem, meanwhile, is all about feelings. There might be elements of story in a lyrical poem, but they're primarily there so the poet can work through her emotions. Examples include Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" or "Aubade" by Philip Larkin.  

It might seem like all short stories would necessarily be "narrative." That's what makes them stories. That's true, but there are some stories that are more at the narrative end of the spectrum than others. Some stories, while they do have a plot, are more about the mood or feeling than about what's happening.

The lyricism of Sugar Island

That's "Sugar Island." The entire logic of the story flows from the feeling the narrator is conveying rather than the importance of the events themselves. What is that feeling? Well, it's kind of a feeling that a lot of pop songs love to cover--and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It might sound like I'm calling the story frivolous by comparing it to pop music, but the best pop music manages to work on more than one level. It can be nice background sound on the loudspeakers at the city pool during the summer, but it can also make someone cry if it catches them alone in a car at night during a vulnerable moment. 

This is a "looking back at a romance" story. It's about Maggie and Joan. Maggie doesn't have her life together when she starts dating Joan, which is why so much of the relationship involves Joan "gift-giving" and Maggie "gift receiving." It's easy to write Maggie off as selfish, sullen, and self-involved, but because we're looking back at this story from a time long after she's mended her ways and can be better to the person she's now with, we know there's more to her character than this. 

A good story always is able to answer the question of "Why now?" If it's well crafted, it's evident why it begins and ends at the point in the main character's life that it does. For Maggie, this story is taking place during the middle-late period of a long rut in her life, when she was working as a phlebotomist, a job the narrator more than once points out is "easy to master." (I'm not sure I think all phlebotomists are created equal, and I'd be more than happy if the ones who stick me have been doing it for 50 years and are not interested in doing more.) She had crappy furniture and a job where she was easily replaceable, then along came Joan. Joan was a talented and accomplished artist who put her talent and attention to use on Maggie. 

Most of the action takes place on one day when the couple take a ferry to Sugar Island so Joan can buy Maggie an antique couch, a "camelback." Maggie thinks it's gross to consider how many people have sat on an old couch, and we start to get the idea that Maggie doesn't really appreciate all the love and gifts Joan is showering on her. Maggie has been wanting to break up with her almost since the beginning. When she rehearses her break-up speech, it's, "I don't care what you have to say about anything," and there's no hint she's just saying it so she can get Joan to really leave. 

Maggie is peevish and sullen the whole day, resenting Joan when she interacts with the owner of the couch, who is interested in Joan as an artist and generally cosmopolitan person. Maggie finally pretends to love the couch because it seems the easiest solution. When they are hauling it back to the ferry, she gives up carrying it and lets a man help, then regrets "giving up so easily," an early hint that she is getting tired with her own settling for less in life, her own willingness to easily go for what was "convenient," which was how she viewed sleeping with Joan at the beginning.  

Ultimately, Joan leaves her. In the process, the reader maybe gets a sense that Joan, in spite of being so giving, wasn't perfect, either. Joan left Maggie for someone else, leaving us to wonder whether Joan was also seeing someone when she first met Maggie. Maybe Joan's big production with the owner of the couch had something to do with her own need for validation and attention. Maybe she liked being in a relationship in which she gave everything because it made her feel like the better half. 

In spite of that, Maggie does not look back on the relationship with bitterness. Later on, when she's with someone "well adjusted" and Maggie is also apparently better adjusted herself, she is distressed to find her partner has sold the camelback, which she has held onto the whole time. She thinks back on her time with Joan with fondness. It didn't work out because they were both "in different places," as the saying goes, but Joan--whether she was part of Maggie deciding to strive for more or whether she just happened to be there when it happened--was there during an important transition for her.

Pop 

It's this sweet looking back at a former lover that gives it a pop song feel. There are any number of songs where the narrator is looking back on an old love with nothing but fond feelings, even while realizing they will never get together again. I'd guess most people who read that sentence jumped right to "Someone Like You" by Adele, but there are countless others. The song this story really makes me think of, though, might be "Daria" by Cake, because of the way Maggie is unable to receive all the love Joan is trying to give her and now realizes it later. 

I don't usually do a YouTube-like "leave your thoughts" in the comments, but I'm curious if any readers do find that there's a song this story reminds them of. 

Two miscellaneous thoughts

That's pretty much what I'll remember this story for, but there are two other things I noted about it on the way. One is how there seems to be a kind of easy assumption in it that Maggie is improving her life by getting a better job, one that requires more work. I'm wondering if a neo-Marxist reading might object to the story and find a reading in which Maggie was controlled by Joan because she had less money and so decided to get more money herself. 

Secondly, it's interesting to me that this story was told in third person. It felt like a first-person story, like the narrator looking back should have been Maggie herself. This decision had some plusses and minuses to it. It allowed the reader to trust Maggie's transition, because the once selfish girl wasn't now the one telling us she'd changed, leaving us to doubt her own assessment of her transition. However, it also might have lessened the emotional impact at the end to have Maggie's desperation to find the couch filtered through a second consciousness rather than coming to us directly. It probably would have worked either way, but I kept having to remind myself when thinking about how to blog on this story that it wasn't first person. 

Other readings: Karen surprises me by not loving this story as much as I thought she would.

A real dictatorship: "Detective Dog" by Gish Jen

Last year, I was a little underwhelmed by George Saunders' "Your Involvement Will Not Help," which appeared in Best American Short Stories. Partly, I found it a little preachy and a little too certain that the advent of Trump--unsettling as it was--meant a sure path to tyranny unless we all (except for writers who are established enough to get published in The New Yorker, but, you know, other people without as much to lose) rose and and did something.™  The story didn't really offer any helpful advice about what that something was, because there's always the rub, but it did "admire the problem" a lot, as they say in corporate speak. But it was a moot point, anyway. Nobody really did much except vote in 2020. After the mid-terms this week, it seems Trump is losing steam on his own. It took longer than it should have, but it's happening. We have other issues to deal with now, all of which will be met better with sustained, knowledge-based engagement than with the shame-based "do something" attitude of "Your Involvement." But it's fashionable to cosplay like a freedom fighter.

Gish Jen's "Detective Dog" didn't have any more answers, but at least it was about an actual dictatorship. It's the story of a woman who was born in Hong Kong, followed her mother's advice to keep her nose out of politics and into making money, and who was therefore able to buy her way out of Hong Kong before the real crackdown on liberty began in 2014 with the Umbrella Movement. All the characters have Western names in the story, which I assume are their adopted names when they moved to Canada and the United States. 

"Detective Dog" follows the classic question those who face real politically oppressive systems must face: go along, try to thrive, and hope for the best, or set yourself on fire, become a human projectile hurling yourself against the machine, and hope your sacrifice will mean something. Betty, main character of the story, has chosen money over politics, the mantra her mother, Tina, passed to her. Betty's older sister, Bobby, chose politics. However, the system eventually beat her down, and Bobby was trying to live down her radical past when the government arrested her. Betty has taken Bobby's son in, where they now live in affluent circumstances in New York. 

It's the beginning of the pandemic, and there's a lot going on in the present as Betty's kids--her own and her adopted nephew--come of age in different ways, both seeking some version of "the truth" about Hong Kong. Betty's older child, as wealthy children becoming aware of the world often do, comes to hate the choices his parents have made that made them wealthy. He leaves as soon as online poker gives him the means to.

Robert, however, is a more sensitive child, more dedicated to sniffing out the truth, like the dog he eventually pretends to be. He's somewhat dog-obsessed throughout the story, actually. He's on the scent of the past. When it comes out, it's fairly touching, although some of the devices used to get us there feel a little forced. 

If the theme of "Your Involvement" was, "Do something; I don't know what, but something," then the theme of "Detective Dog" is more like, "Eventually, a plan to lay low and go along will self-destruct, because there are something things you just can't keep in." It's a more honest and modestly hopeful statement about life beneath tyranny. 

Saunders was overly grim about the state of America, but the world certainly seems to be flirting with authoritarianism in many places. More and more people will be facing the questions Betty faced. Jen's story is humane to people making the only choices they felt they could make, while still offering a small window of hope. 

Other readings: Karen Carlson feels a little discombobulated by the story, but gives it the old college try.

No easy way in: "The Hollow" by Greg Jackson

If you're visiting this blog, like I suspect a lot of my readers are, because you're a student who was assigned Best American Short Stories for a class, and you're stumped about how to write a paper on "The Hollow" by Greg Jackson, boy, are you in luck. This story might seem kind of impenetrable. You might be trying to make headway thinking about what this story could possibly be all about and why it's supposed to be so good and find yourself, like Jack trying to force his way into the hollow in the story, thinking that "there's no easy way in" to the heart of what the story's all about.

The good news is that you have a very easy-to-write paper sitting in front of you. You can do the ole' compare and contrast with the story's two central characters, Jack and Valente, a.k.a. Jonah, a.k.a. B.A., Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, the Whale, and Picasso. Lit professors love compare and contrast papers. Why? Who knows? They just do. 

Jack and Jonah knew each other passingly in college, but they get to know each other years later when both are a little sidetracked in life. Jack is living upstate in "Trevi," a town with pretensions to a sort of European sophistication, while Valente lives in Rock Basin, which sounds, on two levels, like it's the very bottom of the bottom. (A geographical basin is a depression, while "rock" suggests "rock bottom.") These two locations fit the two men, who since college have had different aspirations. Jack has aspired to be what you might call bourgeoise, while Jonah is a simple sort, unashamed of his naivete and his sincerity, focused on what he loves, which is art. 

Not surprisingly, since the two are so different on a fundamental level, they interpret nearly everything differently, beginning with their recollections of college. Jack found everyone, after a while, to be basically boring and normal, while Jonah "thought that their classmates had been deeply weird and had clung to the idea that they were dull and conventional to keep from sliding off the face of the earth." Jonah remembers that there had been a popular movement among the students to bring him back after he was expelled, but Jack doesn't remember anything of the sort. 

Jack finds their differences in interpretation unsettling. He understands there is likely to be some difference, but "it was vaguely unnerving to see that two people could live through the same experience and understand it so differently." Jonah doesn't find it unnerving at all. He's as pure a spirit as the popular imagination of van Gogh would have us believe. 

Two paths in life

Jack and Jonah represent two paths one can choose in life, paths that are often chosen in college. One leads to a stable career, family, the house in the suburbs Jack is so obsessed with. The other leads to less stability and financial success, with the compensation, supposedly, being that you might get more happiness in return. Jonah gave up football to pursue art. He did it with so much earnestness, Jack found it unseemly. (For the would-be bourgeoise living in a town with pretentions of old-world style, nothing is worse than earnestness.) He sees Jack's willingness to be seen as a fool as "some insuperable grossness in Valente’s character that would never, even with boundless fellowship and care, settle into sufficient self-awareness."  

Their differences are best seen in their attitudes toward two things: the hollow in Jack's house and the idea of freedom. 

1. The hollow

The hollow which gives the story its name is an architectural feature of Jack's home that doesn't make any sense. The home was built, like a lot of older homes, in different phases. It had been "fixed up and expanded over the years." Somewhere in one of those expansions or renovations, there had come to be a walled-off area in the home that Jack couldn't get into and which didn't seem to have a purpose. It's Jonah who discovers the hollow. Jack soon becomes obsessed with it. He begins to feel "a great restlessness growing inside him, something vast and formless." 

However, looking closely, we can see that Jack was already feeling this restlessness before the hollow became known to him. When talking to his future wife Sophie while they are temporarily broken up, he is unable to resist being mean to her. This cruelty "welled up in him like an irresistible pressure, building behind the prim dishonesty that obscured the raw, dark realities of the heart." Jack has learned to "play the game," as he scolds Jonah for not doing, but he also has a yearning to not play that game. The story takes place while he is recovering from getting fired from his high-paying job because he temporarily gave in to "the little devil in" him and said something he shouldn't have. This devil came out because Jack was temporarily unable to hold back what was hidden inside him. This person who knew how to dissimulate to get ahead also "At times...felt so clear about his rightness and other people’s dishonesty that he could scarcely breathe." Like the house, Jack has something deep and unfathomable hidden inside him. 

No wonder the hollow in the house holds such fascination for him. He has just given in to his own hollow, the hidden thing within him. No wonder he becomes obsessed with it and thinks of it almost as a holy place, like "Mecca or Jerusalem." 

Jonah, although he discovers the hollow, soon ceases to care about it. Hollows don't trouble Jonah, presumably because he is pure enough that he doesn't have any. Or maybe he does. Jack's hollow is the honest person inside him he hides in order to "play the game," but Jonah's hollow appears to be sadness. During a drug trip, he sees dancing figures, and goes through a drug-induced logical sequence: "Like they were on a different planet, dancing in outer space. Somewhere you could never get to, you know? And then I thought, No, I was wrong. It was our world, the dancing planet, and I was the one who couldn’t get there.” Jonah doesn't fear the space inside him. He fears the space out there, and he feels there is no place in it for him. Doctors tell him at one point that his main problem is a "lack of a sense of proportion," which seems to suggest that Jonah makes small spaces into big ones. 

2. Freedom

Jack sees freedom as something mysterious that others feel a longing for, but he doesn't. When Sophie breaks up with him, he decides he should "give her space" (that is, give her a hollow of sorts), and that "either (people) came back to you, ... or they disappeared into their own confusion and misery. With people he didn’t like, he thought of it as giving them enough rope." 

Freedom to Jack is nothing but rope someone can hang themselves with. He quotes Sophie's own words to her, "If it's freedom it has to feel like freedom," when he is talking to her during their time apart. He says it laconically, like he's saying the words he knows he should say. Freedom is almost an alien concept to him, a word he can use correctly in a sentence without actually feeling its meaning.

For Jonah, though, freedom is nearly the central tenet of his life. He recalls having wanted, at one point in his life, to climb to the top of the water tower in Basin Rock (the top of the bottom) and paint something crude on it. He thinks that if he were to climb up there now, he'd "just paint big letters that say ‘You are free.’”

The notable--perhaps even ham-fisted--thing about Jonah's recollection of going to the top of the water tower is that he did it with someone he called "Rope Man." The same rope Jack saw as being useful only for hanging oneself is, for Jonah, a rope that can be used to ascend the heights.

Both Jack and Jonah are mistaken

Of course, Rope Man, we learn, is now dead, and when Jonah decides to live out his fantasy of climbing to the top of the water tower, he falls and hurts himself badly. Jack can never get into the hollow to see what's there, and Jonah's freedom just leaves him broken and living with his mom, hoping to save enough money to go study art in France. 

This leaves Jack, in particular, hoping for some third option. He recalls a time when he went to a church for a concert with Sophie. There was an open space in the church, but he recalls not finding it uncanny like the hollow. Instead, it was "an intimate, tall, solid space." While listening to the music, Jack heard the sound of trucks outside. He found this mix of the church music with the trucks affecting, with the truck noises "accentuating perhaps the simultaneous existence of the disparate realities that hold our fragile world together in its brittle shell. The music tiptoed along the knife edge of its key, its tones, giving the illusion of freedom when there were always far more missteps than safe harbors and nimble plunges into grace." Again, Jack rejects freedom, even when he feels its call the clearest. Freedom is too uncertain. 

Jack momentarily found a place where freedom and safety could almost coexist, the artist and the lawyer, the sacred and the secular. He longs to get back to it. Because he was with Sophie when it happened, he asks her about it, but she can't remember anything about the trucks. 

"Sophie's choice"

Both Jack and Jonah pay a suspicious amount of attention to the name Jack had given to his decision to go live in a farmhouse in Trevi in the first place. "Sophie's choice" had been Jack's name for it. Jonah, trying to remember what the movie (and also book, Jack reminds him) had been about, can't understand what Jack's move had to do with the holocaust. Jonah is onto something, but not quite able to figure it out.

The meaning in the story of "Sophie's choice" is that the original Sophie's choice is actually a catch-22. It's a choice between two bad choices. 

The fact I knew this was a video to look for tells you I've made more of the Jack choice in life than the Jonah choice, I think. 

If one really has to choose between being an artist and being a boujie dull sandwich, the choice of Sophie, the character in "The Hollow," is to be a bad mix of both. She's empty like Jack, but also flighty like Jonah. "Some fire was missing in her, she’d be the first to admit. She bit off more than she could chew, spent months diving deeply into projects, then found herself paralyzed, unable to write a word." She runs away from Jack because for once, she felt something strong ("it had surfaced inside her with a force she could scarcely describe") but by the end of the story, they are married with a child, shopping for antiques (the most boojie and style-aspirational activity imaginable). 

When Jack tries to explain to her about the hollow in the house, she only asks, “Isn’t that . . . normal?” She's learned to just let the unsettled mystery inside her lie still and gather dust. If the choice between two life paths one might consider in college, the one being middle class normalcy and the other being artsy freedom, leads to sadness and emptiness either way, Sophie's choice, her middle ground, seems to be...resignation. Sophie's choice is a real shit choice, in other words. 

It seems to be the choice Jack has made by the end, though. He can't even remember, when he runs into Jonah, the previous jokes they'd made about Sophie's choice, or the whole deal with the hollow. He's buried it, and the hollow inside him is now safely locked away, with no easy way in. He and Jonah both realize for a moment that their separate choices are both equally meaningless. Jack has buried it, while Jonah can do nothing but laugh at the sadness that's left for him. 

Other readings:

Karen Carlson interestingly thinks of Sophie as a hollow herself in her reading, although she was kind of tough on herself. 

There are more questions than answers blowing in "The Wind" by Lauren Groff

Every year, there comes a time when blogging through Best American Short Stories when it seem appropriate to alert readers who might be reading it for the first time that the order of stories is determined based on the alphabetical order of the surnames of the authors, not based on common themes or subject matter. This seems the place to do it this year. "The Wind" by Laruen Groff follows "Man of the House" by Kim Coleman Foote not only in the table of contents, but in that both deal with the generational legacy of trauma left by domestic violence. A reader new to BASS could completely be forgiven for thinking this juxtaposition was intentional, rather than serendipitous. It would have been easy to think the same thing after the first two stories, too, both of which had a Latinx character named Lucy in them. But no, that's just the way it happened. (Unless guest editor Andrew Sean Green actually somehow managed to pick the winners in such a way that he knew their last names and stories would make these themes align, in which case, he is the greatest editor known to humankind.) 

Not much for a critic to do with a story like this

I've never liked stories about domestic abuse much, maybe for similar reasons to why I don't like stories about serial killers. I recognize this is a thing that happens in the world, and so maybe I shouldn't flinch from seeing it analyzed in detail, but I have a hard time seeing what benefit comes from me doing this, either for me or the world. I thought the story was masterfully told, without a single word that didn't need to be there, and so I read it in one go and didn't hate every minute of doing so. At the end, though, I have a hard time knowing what I'm supposed to do with the experience of having read it. I thought abuse was bad before, and I think so now. Perhaps I have become a small bit better at understanding someone who has lived through this kind of abuse, or better at understanding the children of survivors of this kind of abuse. As a critic, though, I have a hard time digging for hidden treasure, because the point of the story is pretty much out there. Abuse leaves a legacy that endures through generations, in ways that are incredibly difficult to identify. So what's a critic to do with a story like this?

Mrs. Heretic's year 

I'll offer two thoughts related to this story, one of which isn't particularly literary. Mrs. Heretic had a past life living in a small town in Canada for several years. While there, she worked for a year in a shelter for abused women. I told her about this story and explained how I was having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it. I asked her what the main thing she learned from her year was. 

"Most women return to their abusers seven times before they leave for good or get killed by them," she said, without needing to think about it much. "We had a lot of repeat visitors there."

Humans have funny brains. They're evolved to be good at making more humans and then not be good at much else. Our brains have not evolved to make us particularly happy. They can make us do terribly irrational things. Not just abused people, of course, but abuse does seem to trigger parts of the brain that interfere with the rational parts. It's important to remember this when considering any person's story of abuse, which nearly always involve parts where a non-abused observer will wonder why the abused didn't behave differently. Why didn't they leave? Why didn't they report it? Why didn't they call the police? Because abuse breaks the ability to do those things. It's why Grandma in the story has a panic attack that ruins the escape right at the moment when she needed to be thinking clearly. 

Nearly every abuse story I've ever seen or read has a happy ending. A good man falls in love with the abused woman and fights the abuser to free her. In this story, all the men are either too afraid of the abuser to confront him or actually on his side. (In this story, the police are friends with the abuser, which greatly complicates the attempted escape. Mrs. Heretic said the police in her remote home in Canada were very cooperative, for what it's worth.) Our brains make happy endings to abuse stories very challenging. 

The title

The only remotely literary analysis I can provide is a quick examination of the title. You may be forgiven if you got to the end and forgot it was called "The Wind." Why that title? The wind is often a symbol with positive connotations. A number of Korean folk songs I won't bore you with talking about look to the wind as a symbol of freedom, wishing the narrator could move freely about the Earth without cares, feelings, or even a name. 

My favorite story from any BASS is Joshua Ferris's "The Breeze." On a perfect spring day in New York when the weather breaks and a warm breeze blows in, a couple is paralyzed by the feeling of responsibility they have to use the day perfectly. It is perhaps another example of the wind as a negative thing, but only because of human brains again working against us. Faced with too many possible good outcomes, the couple is unable to choose any, and the breeze becomes a symbol not of the freedom to choose many great paths in life, but of how every choice means not choosing other things. 

The wind shows up several times in Groff's story. It is threatened early that the wind is supposed to pick up during the day, and as Grandma attempts her escape, it does increase. It beats against the glass of the car, a symbol of the growing threat the family faces. The wind then makes no less than four appearances in the final paragraph:

The three children survived. Eventually they would save themselves, struggling into lives and loves far from this place and this moment, each finding a kind of safe harbor, jobs and people and houses empty of violence. But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.

The wind is a symbol of the trauma that gets passed down from survivor to offspring, even if the survivor tries hard not to pass it down. Which, again, leaves me wondering what to do with this story. Is trying to stop the inheritance of this kind of violence as pointless as trying to stop the wind?

I don't think so. Mrs. Heretic did see some women finally leave. We can do some small part to block the wind for a few people, even if we aren't much more than a car window between them and the threat. The point of a story like this one is neither to call for a final battle to end all violence forever nor to despair of ever ending it, but to remind each of us of exactly what it is we're up against, so when we do reach out to help, we aren't surprised if the people we're trying to help don't act like we expect. 

Other readings: Karen Carlson looks at the way humans perceive time as critical to this piece, and she also provides a link to a guest post from her blog.