I mean, if you say so: "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell

My first and most enduring reaction to "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the third story in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, is to recall "Post" by Alice McDermott from last year's BASS, and for all the worst reasons. Like "Post," "His Finest Moment" seems to me to be inspired by a type of story that dominated the news for a few years, one that probably every short story writer during that time took on in some way. (Here's my effort.) "Post" was a failure to me because it did nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of other COVID-19 stories that went out, and Bissell's story, at least on the surface, seem an awful lot like just one of many "Me Too" stories. It doesn't do anything that would make the reader think differently the next time some famous and beloved man is taken down by accusations of sexual assault. It's sort of a formulaic, ripped-from-the-headlines morality tale, full of cliches: the upset and betrayed spouse, the girl about to lose all respect for her father, the plucky and intrepid reporter getting to the heart of the story.

Unlike "Post," it's at least mercifully short and written at a pace where the momentum never slows. It's clearly a paint-by-the-numbers done by a master, but it's still paint-by-the-numbers. I tried very hard to look at this story in some way that would make me understand what Zyzzyva saw in it to publish it to begin with or what BASS saw in it to second that motion by putting it among the year's best, but I have failed. 

The story is about a writer who likes to include morally complicated characters in his novels, although the stories themselves aren't formally complex. The writer ends up mirroring his own characters' moral ambiguity in his own life, becoming a rake. Among his many escapades is one particularly shameful, alcohol-fueled incident involving non-consensual touching and kissing. He knows it's not excusable and he knows there's no way to explain it to his wife or his daughter, although he's trying to in the last hours before the story comes out. Other than a few flashbacks to tell us what he's done and to review how the reporter kept after him until her story was complete, it stays in the moment of the night the story breaks, as he bumbles his way through telling his family what's coming. 

I kept trying to figure out if the story "His Finest Moment" was an attempt to do what its own main character does, to write a morally complex person. But it's not. The night of his assault, which was the "not his finest moment" that completes the thought of the title, he'd just attended the launch of his very successful latest book. "It just wasn't a night he wanted to hear no, in the end." This isn't the Lolita of Me Too. 

"His Finest Moment" doesn't do what the author in its narrative does. It doesn't grant its characters complexity. The author is pretty much a bog-standard cliché of a libertine rake. The author congratulates himself for being complicated, but the text of the story he's in does not. And that's likely the point. The story seems to want to deromanticize the solitary author, depraved in the name of his art. It's the anti-Lolita. The man is a sexual predator and not worthy of ennobling by crediting him with complexity. He might seem complex, but "formally," he's not. 

This treatment of sexual predators kind of mirrors a shift in moderate leftist thinking on this in the last ten years. It used to be that conservatives were the ones to say that if someone rapes a woman, he should be castrated or murdered. Liberals were sometimes wont to say that you had to look at how predators themselves had often been abused or how they had mental illnesses or generally, how it was more complicated than conservatives thought. But liberals have simplified their thinking on sex crimes. They're not calling for castration and the death sentence, maybe, but they are unwilling to let powerful men off the hook when it comes to maintaining their careers in the public spotlight. We've come to accept that there is no excuse for sexual assault. It's not complicated. 

Which--okay. I agree with that change. And I can see that the form of the story follows the function. It's a simple story that tells a simple truth. If this had appeared in the Maryland Literary Review, I'd have thought it was more than good enough to be there and that the writer had a gift for keeping the momentum of a story moving. I'd have hoped the writer had tried other, more ambitious things. But I don't really see this as a great story, one worthy of coming back to over and over. The effect, I think, is supposed to be something like that of all morality tales: by watching the main character go through the painful process of knowing he's destroyed his family and his fortunate career, men should contemplate the wages of sin and not repeat those sins themselves. That's useful, I suppose, but I didn't need a story by a talented author to make me consider this. If I'd ever dreamed of putting unwanted hands on a woman, the last ten years of news headlines would already have scared me straight. (I haven't, by the way. I'm chicken about even approaching women. I've had sex with two women in my life, both of whom I married.) 

This won't go down as one of those BASS stories I really actively dislike, like "Post" or "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It's an okay story, and if BASS editors say they love it, well, if you say so. Maybe the real reason I'm not in love with it is because it violates what Peter Rabinowitz called a "convention of notice." That is, in a BASS story, you kind of expect stories to be packed full of things you only notice after coming around to them again on a second or third reading. Certainly, "Do You Belong to Anyone," the story before this in the collection, met that convention. A few years ago, Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure" met that convention in spades with her MeToo-ish short story. Maybe my whole objection here is nothing more than me being a guy who tries to read BASS in a way where I notice things and then write cleverly about them. A story like this doesn't give me the chance.