Every story, everywhere, all the time: "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin

I should love "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin, right? It's got time travel of sorts and a TV cartoon version of one of the four Chinese classics and science and it's about confronting death. It's a slightly less frenetic version of "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," a comparison I'm going to bet I'm not along in making. So why didn't I like it?

While trying to answer that question for this post, I've realized how frustrating it is to do literary criticism as a part-time affair with a day job that's totally unrelated to literature. I spent some time in between my last blog-through of Best American Short Stories and now trying to shore up some of the gaps I have as a lay person, but that has only served to make me more cognizant of all I don't know. Even to do this as a hobby, I don't feel skilled enough or learned enough. 

I feel that lack the most with stories I don't like, and I really disliked "Treasure Island Alley." I will try below to explain why, because I think it's owed, but I am admitting that this attempt at a critique is poor. I just don't have the skills to do more than weakly point to what I want to say. 

What's wrong with it

"Treasure Island Alley" is what people mean when they say that all the stories in lit journals sound alike. They don't, but there are certain types of stories that give that impression. 

There's a formula to this brand of story. We like to think of literary fiction as the kind of fiction that doesn't have follow conventions, but it's got plenty of its own. They might be conventions they teach at Iowa, but they're still conventions. The formula for this type of story goes something as follows:

1) Find some fact about the universe, quirky cultural icon, or profession not many people do. Make sure it's one your audience isn't likely to know much about, so they're sufficiently awed when your character waxes rhapsodic about it for the rest of the story. Science is a good choice, because most literary journal editors don't know much about science, nor do their audiences. If a whole generation of writers could get away with trying to convince non-scientists that physics teaches us the truth of Buddhism or Taoism, you can certainly get away with having a main character who thinks the mitosis he studies in the lab teaches valuable human truths that help him cope with the loss of his daughters in a boating accident. If you're familiar with the history, culture, or language of any part of the world outside the two coasts of the United States, you can also use literally anything you want that's just lying around. Extra points if it will seem exotic to editors, as nearly everything will. 

2) Got your object or icon or unusual profession? Good. Now add some kind of tragedy, and have the main character go on and on for about twenty pages trying to make use of the thing you've picked to help him or her figure out the tragedy and other mysteries of life. No amount of improbable clinging to the thing is too much. It's not overkill; it's narrative unity.  

3) Add a bunch of really specific and esoteric-seeming details. If you can (you always can), render them in staccato sentences. "The metal and oil scent of the armory." "Pungent amines seeping into the wood chairs in the lab." Everyone will call this "lyrical" and they'll say you're making whatever thing you chose to shoehorn into every part of your story beautiful, even though you'll probably be thinking to yourself the whole time that your character's determination to read every phenomena in life through the same lens isn't beautiful; it's Quixotic. Our culture decided long ago to admire Quixote, against the express wishes of text. So go with it.

4) Finally, go on TwitterX and sell it as a funny, whacky blend. When you get interviewed about it and they ask a "fun" question, like how would you describe your story in six words, say, "Vampires, Formula One, and stinky cheese," and then laugh and try to mean it. Literary fiction is so fun! Why don't more people read it? 

Other stories that do this? This is where I know I'm weak as a critic. There was this story several years ago, but one writer who leaps more immediately to mind is Andrea Barrett. Like Da-Lin, Barrett went fairly far down a graduate school path in the sciences before turning to writing, and she's used that background to turn out a series of these kinds of stories. Barret and Da-Lin both know enough science to know more than their audience, which is all they have to know. Da-Lin can add her past in Taiwan to her pool of knowledge most people don't have. A typical Barrett story features a famous scientist making their discoveries and then turning their discoveries in the lab into meditations on life. It will develop a mantra-like summary of a scientific truth and re-use it throughout the narrative. 

That's the formula used in this story. The story takes the Monkey King, Chinese funeral practices among wealthy people in Taiwan circa 1980(?), and some random science-y facts, throws them all in a blender, and comes up with something that is, I guess, supposed to be "a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death," according to the New England Review, which originally published it. But it's not that. It only appears to examine the meaning of death; in the end, it doesn't take death on. It disappears into its cultural tokens and kind-of-science-y stuff, and it lets those icons try to make the story seem to say something that it doesn't actually say. Since most readers don't really know what the hell the Monkey King is or anything about the science of immortality, it's guaranteed that they'll think  it's deep. 

If I were a better critic, there'd be a section here tying in Karen Russell, who I think does something similar. 

The end result is a story that mimics a real spiritual and emotional journey, but doesn't ultimately lead anywhere. It's Western yoga. 

I very nearly quit over this one

Something came undone in me reading this story. I don't know what I'm doing with these blog-throughs any more. I have too much education in literature to do fun reviews, but not enough to do the serious analysis I want to do. We'll see how the next one goes. I might not do this again.