Did Best American Short Stories 2022 move me?

I never went beyond getting my M.A. in English, but I was a serious student of literature long enough that some of the ethos of the profession has stuck with me. It still seems strange to me to talk about literature from a personal standpoint. It's fine to talk about what literature means, but not so much about what literature means to me. 

As I've been considering how to wrap up my read-through of Best American Short Stories 2022, it occurred to me that maybe I'd ignore the impulse to repress my personal feelings. To use a Bible-reading metaphor I've employed before, this is more of a "devotional" reading--meaning one in which I read to find out what the text tells me about my life--than a hermeneutical reading. 

Isn't what literature does to us internally why we read literature in the first place? A scholarly approach is useful because it deepens what happens to us internally, but ultimately, reading happens alone, completely within our minds, and we read because we are hoping something will happen there inside us that will--what? Make us smarter? More resilient? More philosophical? Less judgmental? Give us smart things to say at parties? Give us useful things to say to loved ones who are struggling with life? All of these? 

For me, a story has succeeded when there is something that happens in my life after I've read it and I'm reminded of the story. The story somehow seems to inform the way I think about whatever it is I'm facing. It might offer a solution. It might simply frame the problem in words like I never would have been able to. It might make me more aware of something that had never gone beyond the level of unconscious acceptance before. 

Will any of these stories come to mind later in my life?

I guess the only way to tell if a story is a "personal classic"--meaning a story that frequently comes to mind later in life--is to live your life and find out. But you can kind of tell right away sometimes. I knew when I read "The Breeze" by Joshua Ferris that I would keep thinking about that story forever, and also with "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken. Those are probably the two modern stories I think about the most. They join older stories like "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and a handful of Borges shorts--just to limit it to short stories--as frequently used furniture in my brain. Will anything from 2022 do the same?

I did think that the 2022 collection was one of the better ones I've read in the now ten years I've been reading BASS. I liked nearly all the stories. Even the ones I didn't like, I mostly recognize that I can see why someone would have thought they were good. 

Yet as good as these stories were, I think it's highly unlikely I'll think again much about more than a few of them. The ones likely to stick in my brain are: "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette, "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken, "Bears Among the Living' by Kevin Moffett, and "The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan. So six. And in reality, I doubt it will be that many. (This list doesn't mean I necessarily thought those were the six best, but more that they will be the most memorable.) 

Honestly, I had a hard time remembering some of the stories two weeks after I blogged about them. Karen Carlson was a little behind me this year, and when her posts would come out on the same story I'd already blogged about, I sometimes had to think really hard to even recall what story she was talking about.

What does that say about literature? These are twenty stories that cleared enormous hurdles, both in their original publication and in their selection for a best-of anthology. They're all top-notch from a craft perspective, and many of them have the feel of being truly felt in their creation, not just cynical works that meet the expectations of literary fiction readership. But I won't remember most of them, and that's after having spent the time to read them all twice and think enough about them to write posts others would read. Most people likely won't spend nearly that much time on them. Does that mean most literature, even good literature, has a very short shelf life and a very small cultural impact? 

Clearly, literature has been a big part of making me who I am. Anytime I'm alone and thinking about my life and my place in the universe, thoughts that have their origin in literature make up a big part of the noise in my head. It's largely a useful noise, one that is a little bit clearer and more beautiful than some of the other sounds--the ones made up of how much I hated public school or how much the Marine Corps messed with my head or how bad I think I am at being a grown up. But reading literary fiction isn't, maybe, a very efficient method for culling useful information. If I'm only going to remember at best 30% of the stories I read a year after I've read them, and if maybe less that 2% are going to have any lasting impact on who I am and how I think about the world, then that means I'm kind of wasting a lot of my time when I'm reading fiction. 

Sure, I might be changing unconsciously from stuff I don't remember, but I think the real change comes from the stuff you're constantly chewing over. If even the best of what's being put out doesn't mostly make its way deep into the psyche, then what am I really accomplishing with all the reading of stuff that doesn't knock me off my feet?

It's not the fault of the writing, I think

I often run into people who spin some version of, "all the writing today is shit." I don't think that's true. By any measure of what makes good literature, most of what's in BASS is good. Every year, I pick out one or two that I think don't belong, but mostly, it's not that the quality is bad. Maybe that's just the way literature is. Maybe for people who read a lot, the impact of each story tends to be less. When I was a kid, I thought Wendy's was the best food in the universe. Now that I'm grown and I've eaten other things, I realize it's not good at all. A more refined palate can be harder to please. Maybe that's why every survey of "the best five novels" always tends to lean toward the kinds of novels people read in junior high or high school. As we grow, it becomes more difficult for literature to affect us deeply, so when we are groping for a novel that really moved us, we have to go back to a time when we could still be easily moved. 

I suppose there might still be some value in reading stories that others might value. If I'm not an unusual reader, and most readers who take reading seriously will only remember a small percentage of what they've read more than a few months after reading it, then I can probably also assume that the stories others will remember are likely to differ from mine. Maybe someone else will long treasure "The Wind" by Laruen Groff or "Foster" by Bryan Washington. Is it valuable to me, as means to understanding others, to at least be exposed to what might move someone else, even if it doesn't move me?

I'm sure it has some value, but I don't know if the value justifies the input of effort and time. Literary Twitter and the literary community tend to talk often as if everything they read is devastating and leads to eternal psychic wounds from which the reader will never recover. I think that's unlikely. I can't believe everything everyone reads is really that unforgettable. Which is pretty humbling. It's a pretty natural tendency for writers to write because they want to be remembered. But given the churn of stories that are out there, writing might actually be a really bad way for most people to be remembered. 

I don't deny that among the reasons I have for writing, the desire to be remembered is among them. It's very sad to me to think of it one day being like I never existed. It makes me wonder what the point of even living is if I can't leave something behind that will outlast me. I guess most people think of having kids as their legacy, but I think of whatever my kids do in their lives as their own legacy. I want something more. And it's enormously frustrating to me that I haven't done more to increase the readers I would need for the kind of legacy I want. I write the stories I want to read, assuming that what I love others will love, but I'm constantly disappointed to find there aren't many others who love what I love. Still, I've kept going, because if I wanted to be remembered, what, really, was my alternative? 

But thinking about BASS 2022, I'm maybe left with the feeling that leaving a legacy as a writer is even harder than I've thought it was. Getting into BASS is very, very hard. Even if I personally hate the story, nobody gets in there by accident. But even if I did keep persevering enough to one day accomplish that milestone, would it even matter? I recently was reading about the "bad art friend" controversy, and the article mentioned that one of the people embroiled in it had been published in BASS several years ago. When I read that, I couldn't place the story at all. I had to go back and look at it again. When I read it again, it was like reading it for the first time. I'll remember her more now for the stupid controversy than her story. 

What this all means for me for next year

I know I keep promising I'm quitting writing or quitting literary fiction or quitting whatever, and then I keep going back on my word. I'm the kind of guy who needs a purpose in life, and when I ditch the one I've got, it ends up being so frightening looking for a new one, I quickly end up right back where I was, sure it'll be different this time. But thinking about it in the cool, objective light of day, maybe the concern I've always had for whether literature is good for you is in some ways justified. So I'm at least going to start 2023 doing other things. If this is terrifying to me from a raison d'etre standpoint, I can look at it as diversification from my main goal, rather than outright abandonment of it. 

What I maybe walked away from BASS this year with more than anything was the feeling that although many people can write a good short story, only the greatest of a generation can write an unforgettable one. Elizabeth McCracken can write a story I'll never forget, but I'm no Elizabeth McCracken. For most people, that wouldn't be a reason to give up. For me, though, I'm not sure. I think I need a little more time away. I need to do things other than literature so the effect of literature has time to become new to me again.