"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.