Have DiCaprio play Colonel Unger and it'll be a perfect bookend to his career: "Privilege" by Jim Shepard (Best American Short Stories 2024)

I love to read a good trade history book. A talented historian tells stories as well as most fiction writers, but the stories are true. Reading it feels, to use the Christian word, edifying somehow. I know that when I'm reading a trade history book (meaning a history book that gets sold to the general public instead of for other serious historians), I'm not really doing history. A good historian writing a trade book will summarize the conclusions of real historians who did archive crawls. They're the real historians. Still, some of favorite history books, like Theodore Rex or Battle Cry of Freedom or Team of Rivals, feel satisfying somehow, in a way that even a good novel isn't. Like a novel, they layer anecdote with larger-scale narratives to make the big story and lots of little stories intersect, but unlike with a novel, there isn't some lingering doubt about whether the catharsis reached by the protagonist could survive contact with the real world.  

Layering close narratives about real people with large narratives about society is also how Jim Shepard approached "Privilege," which retells the story of the 1889 Johnstown flood. It follows three different groups of "characters," one of which is made up of people whose role in the flood is well known to history and a few who are less so. For the less prominent ones, Shepard had to imagine more of what happened, but throughout, he mixes in known history with his own imagined one, and in the end, lots of people drown or are crushed by the flood when the dam breaks, just like every reader knew it would. 

It's basically Titanic but on land. 

I really liked Shepard's "Our Day of Grace," an epistolary story of the Confederacy in the waning days of the Civil War. It had a looser frame to it, because the letters were free to make up a lot more, and it only had to conform to some very broad historical facts. "Privilege," however, often felt like reading a history book, one that interweaves personal and broader narratives. It would have been good as a history, but as fiction, I kind of couldn't help just wishing it would just be history. There are already large sections of the story that break away from character-driven story telling and just give the facts from history about what happened, so I didn't feel like the other passages were really fiction. It felt like a reenactment, which sometimes strikes me as being not as satisfying as either history or fiction. 

The title pretty much gives away the drift of the story. It's taken from an editorial at the time aimed at the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, which included some of the wildly rich robber barons of history whose names we still remember, names like Carnegie and Frick and Mellon. And privilege makes sense as a framing concept, because it was the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club's alterations to the lake and the dam, done to make it a sportsman's paradise for the wealthy, that caused the flood. Afterwards, the club was not forced to pay damages, which led to changes in U.S. tort law. The privilege of the ultra-privileged members of the club is the most obvious privilege in the story, but there are others.

John Parke, Jr., the engineer of the club, got his job because of his connected family, even though he struggled to complete only three of four years of engineering school. He's the classic rich white guy who succeeds in spite of being mediocre. He is self-reprimanding, though, and perhaps this redeems him a bit for the reader. He's privileged, but he knows it, and he knows he doesn't deserve his own good fortune. He and his boss, Colonel Unger, are the privileged people in the story who aren't complete jerks, because at least they put effort into trying to avert the disaster. 

There is Jenny Bergstrom and her friend Alma. Jenny is privileged to have good health, and Alma is privileged to have a father who can give her enough money to buy what she wants on a trip. Alma ends up dead. Jenny, whose mother thought she was impervious to sickness, also ends up being privileged enough to survive the flood. 

Then there's James Singleton, who lives with his wife, Lucinda, and his sister Flora. He is a black man who came out of the south after a hard-luck childhood made worse by racism. He still considers himself privileged, though, because he has a Bible and other books at home to improve himself with, and his children will attend school with white children. Everyone in his family dies but him. He just misses out on hearing how, which means he never gets to tell his wife he'll never let go. 

It's a study in varying meanings of privilege, which, again, is kind of what Titanic did with its story of a bunch of people drowning when the boat the rich people who built it said would never sink did just that. It's evocative of the time, bringing the images to life with its shirred waists on dresses, and yet I really didn't feel like I'd been anywhere by the end I wouldn't have found more interesting by reading David McCullough's book about the whole thing. 

A story so good, I'm skipping it: "Just Another Family" by Lori Ostlund (Best American Short Stories 2024)

There are pretty much two reasons why I skip analysis of individual stories in Best American Short Stories each year. Either I dislike the story so much I can't even motivate myself to look at why I don't like it, or I like it so much, I have nothing to add. Lori Ostlund's "Just Another Family" is one of the latter. 

To put it a little more accurately, the reason I'm refraining from looking at it in depth isn't so much that I liked it as that I don't think the story presents any major obstacles to a lay reader that would impede understanding and enjoyment, so I don't have much of a role here. As a novella more than a short story, it's also a little bit difficult to treat it as I normally do. Because of its broader scale, individual words and phrases don't carry quite the same weight as they do in a short story. There's a really humorous section where Sybil, the main character, discusses the characters at the nursing home of the mother of her partner, Rachel. In a short story, all that good material would have had to be excised. Because meaning doesn't have to be hidden or encoded as in a briefer story, I think most of what a normal reader needs is right out in the open. So I can move on, which is good, because as I get near the end every year, I start to lose the gumption to do this. 

I wouldn't want to tackle a collection of 20 best novellas every year, but I don't mind one being snuck in. 

Nobody cares, David: "A Case Study" by Daniel Mason (Best American Short Stories 2024)

Since my purpose here is to help illuminate how to interpret short fiction, I tend to like stories that hit a sweet spot between too easy and too hard. An impenetrable story might give me fits trying to pull apart, but a plain-as-day story doesn't give me much to say. That doesn't mean either might not be a good story, just that it doesn't fit the purposes of my BASS-blog-through.

Daniel Mason's "A Case Study" is a good story, but also a borderline transparent one in terms of figuring out "the point," if I can be so inelegant about the purpose of reading as to call it that. A young man in medical school starts visiting a therapist when he's going through a rough patch. We don't know what the rough patch is, only that there is one. The young man finds the therapist helpful, and he sticks with it for a few years. When he moves away, he thinks the therapist might share some secret about the young man at their last meeting, some summarizing "here's your deal" kind of statement, but nothing comes. This leads the young man to a lifelong obsession with what the therapist really thinks of the narrator. The narrator feels like he has given away something he shouldn't have, like the therapist now has in his possession something the man wants back. He both wants and does not want to know what the therapist really thought of him. He gets his chance when the therapist asks his permission, years later, to write up notes about him in a book. They'll be anonymized, but the man will recognize himself in the pages. The narrator gives his permission, but afraid to know what the therapist really thinks about him, he never reads what was said. He keeps seeing the book everywhere, but he still never reads it. It starts to drive him a little crazy, until finally, his daughter asks for his help with a report about the book. He reads it at long last, only to discover he's not even in it. Either the therapist anonymized it so much even the man himself couldn't recognize where he appeared, or he just didn't include the man in the book at all. 

A friend at work and I sometimes discuss the notion of therapy. I've never really gone and I don't want to, because I've known so many people who did go and I don't think it did them any good. My friend does go, and she always wants to convince me to go, mostly because she gets worn out dealing with my anxiety over how people will perceive things I do. She tells me to repeat to myself the words of Alexis Rose from Schitt's Creek: "Nobody cares, David." People tend to think everyone is scrutinizing us all the time, but in reality, most people are too wrapped up in their own shit to spare time and effort to analyze us too deeply. This is true of doctors as well. They might kvetch about us to their families or even make fun of us to let of steam, but even then, they're probably not thinking too much about us, and they're definitely not thinking of us years later. The man in the story thought his mental health issues were shameful and profound and unique, but they were so boring, either his therapist could easily anonymize them so well even the man didn't know it was him, or it wasn't compelling enough to make the cut. Nobody cares, David. 

I've seen this show, so I think I'm basically good, emotionally.

I tell my friend her advice is so good, I don't need therapy.

That's not all there is to find in this story, but that's a good chunk of it, I think. At least this was a quick write-up, if not an interesting one, because Mason wasn't thinking about me when he wrote his story. In a good way, hardly anyone ever is.  

The last days of P: P's Parties by Jhumpa Lahiri (Best American Short Stories 2024)

It's safe to say that the characters in "P's Parties" by Jhumpa Lahiri are doing okay in life. Not just the main characters, but every person the narrator sees or knows of in his orbit, both in his home in Rome and at the occasional parties that form the backbone of the story, has enough income to be essentially free from worry. Couple that with the ample vacation time we always hear Europeans get, and their lives seem enviable. So enviable that the tone of urgency the story begins with comes off as a little self-unaware and unintentionally ironic. "I should note straightaway" leads the reader to think that something terribly important is about to be communicated, but what follows is just an explanation of the timing of the parties the narrator enjoys going to once a year. These parties take place during the "mild winters we typically enjoy in this city," with this city being Rome. The people in this story are so privileged, it even seems like nature serves their whim, tempering its winters just for them. 

It's perhaps strange that the narrator values the parties so much. He isn't especially close with anyone at the parties, including the host, whom he simply refers to as "P." He engages in superficial banter, eats crudite, watches kids play soccer on the lawn, gets a little drunk, and feels smug about the foreigners who are so proud of having come to Rome and adapted to it. He claims he likes that the parties are "an unpredictable gathering" and that he enjoys the "commotion of the crowded house," but during most of his life, he demonstrates anxiety about the unpredictable and he is peevish about his own wife's chattiness. 

The narrator sees the adventurous foreigners as essentially there to take advantage of Rome and enjoy it, but not really part of it. He treats them the same way, ready to tour their lives briefly in order to have a story to tell later. The narrator is a writer and like all writers, he's a bit of a voyeur, enjoying the sites and smells of the women at the party while being himself hidden by the anonymity a crowd provides. He doesn't like that his own son has gone off into strange parts of the world and adapted to a new life, because he feels anxiety about what might happen to him, but he is happy to take advantage of the adventurous types brought to him, bringing stories to his door like Amazon packages.  

Bodies of water both big and small present themselves as a threat in the story. The narrator's wife has been traumatized her whole life by how a man had a heart attack in a pool when she was on vacation with P as a child. The narrator himself is almost hit by a boat that doesn't see him when he is swimming in the ocean. So it's telling that the narrator compares the crowd to the ocean, but in a harmless way: "You’d encounter two distinct groups, like two opposing currents that crisscross in the ocean, forming a perfectly symmetrical shape, only to cancel each other out a moment later." At P's parties, the things that normally make him feel anxious are stripped of their threat. 

Maybe it's the predictability of them that appeals to him. With life's uncertainties that lurk at the back of his mind, the narrator appreciates how the party, which he's been going to for decades, is the same every year. He recites the route there like he could do it in his sleep, and yet like he values it for its predictability. The narrator perhaps admires the adventurous foreigners while also joking about them, but their adventure is not for him. He's part of the settled-in-Rome "current" at the party, who are the "type of people for whom just moving to a new neighborhood in their thirties—going to a new pharmacy, buying the newspaper from a different newsstand, finding a table at a different coffee bar—was the equivalent of departure, displacement, complete rupture."

And yet, adventure still finds them

There are five parties in the story. There are also five times danger rears its head through all the reassuring sameness and privilege the narrator enjoys. The first is the swimmer who died when the narrator's wife was young. The second happened to P and is, in fact, the origin of the parties the narrator finds so reassuring. P had some unspecified health scare and had to be saved by surgery. She started the parties, perhaps as a "life is short" sort of observance. She invites the doctor who saved her to them. Somehow, though, the things she holds to remind herself that life is short and death can come at any time are the very things the narrator enjoys because their reliability make him forget that life is short. 

The third is the feinting of one of the children playing on the lawn during the first party in the story. It turns out to be nothing, but it was momentarily frightening and it leads to the narrator meeting the boy's mother. This is the start of the central incident of the story. The narrator manages to link this to swimming, also, even if only in his mind, by comparing the coats the children have laid on the lawn to "towels left on the beach while everyone goes for a swim."  

The fourth is when the narrator is almost hit by a boat while swimming when he and his wife join P's family on vacation, and the fifth and final one is when P dies at the end of the story, which leads to the last "party," which is her funeral.

For all the privilege the narrator and his circle enjoy, and for as assiduously as he seeks to avoid anything out of the ordinary, death and uncertainty still stalk them. Nobody is exempt from random tragedy. You can be a healthy-seeming former competitive swimmer, and you can die in the middle of racing someone in a pool. 

The way calamity threatens even the lives of the wealthy in the middle of enjoying their lives reminds me of another moment in Italian history, the kind of Italian history the Roman natives of the story have forgotten. The explosion of Mount Vesuvius in in 79 AD covered the town of Pompeii in ash and preserved many of its citizens as they were. The plaster molds made of the victims stand today as the ultimate memento mori. The novel The Last Days of Pompeii paints a picture of gluttony and life being drunk to the dregs that was going on just before the volcano blew. Those were people caught by death in the midst of life. The narrator calls the host of the parties by the initial "P," and I can't help but link that to Pompeii. 

If this can happen to your child when they're right next to you, no wonder the narrator worried about his son when he's far away

The narrator's fascination with L

The narrator describes the main incident of the story as a "banal disruption" that has remained a "caesura," or an "interruption" or "break" in his life. It's interesting that he describes it this way, because the parties are themselves caesurae to his life that he enjoys. While the narrator claims to be chagrined by his actions with "L," is it possible he also actually enjoyed them?

The narrator doesn't initiate contact with L. In fact, he barely talks to her throughout the story. But he's fascinated by her, borderline obsessed. When he meets L, he's just lapsed into thoughts about his son, who is now grown. The narrator is having a harder time adjusting to his son living far away than his wife is. He has a "hole in his heart," he says, which is sort of like saying he has a "caesura" in his heart. He's kind of in a vulnerable state, child-based-angst-wise, when the son of L has an unexplained fainting spell on the lawn. The doctor writes it off an "just one of those things." When the narrator runs in to retrieve his wife's shawl as they are leaving, he finds L. In her own moment of distress, she is unexpectedly and disarmingly open with him. 

She's perturbed by how unexpected it all was. "A mild shock...what does that even mean?" she sneers. She was afraid her son was "going to die. In the middle of a party, at this house filled with people I barely know." She's afraid, but she's also angry. Death can just come anywhere, anytime. 

I think this is really what draws the narrator to her, what makes him fantasize about meeting her once a year, not to have an affair, but to just be in her presence, to nod at her, to think that she fills the empty spaces in his life in a way his wife cannot and to believe he does the same for her. She noticed that when the doctor was checking out her son, he didn't move away. She figures out it's because he was also thinking of his son, and they soon realize that they share an anxiety over their children. He understands that she has "brushed up against the worst thing that could possibly happen." 

Between parties one and four, L goes through a transformation. By party number two, she seems much more comfortable at the party, laughing and telling stories. By party number three, she is nearly fluent in Italian, and her family has decided--as the narrator thinks all the people from the other circle at P's parties eventually do--to leave Rome and go back where they were before. 

For the most part, the narrator doesn't want anything from L except to glance meaningfully at one another and to share some secret, unspoken knowledge. This holds true until the end of the fourth party. This party is the outlier. P and the narrator's wife used to go to an island retreat every summer when they were children. But this is where the man dying in the pool happened, so his wife has never gone there as an adult. She changes her mind one year, though, saying maybe it's time to get over the past. While on the island, the narrator gets through his writer's block, starts to create a short story about L in which the fictional version of himself actually does have an affair with the fictional L. 

Near the end of the vacation, L and her family unexpectedly show up on the island for a day and a night. When they leave, the narrator drunkenly moves from kissing her goodbye in the non-sexual Italian way to kissing her on the neck. He apologizes, but L is outraged, his wife is outraged and humiliated, and his whole fantasy world is ruined. 

The symbols of the pool and the ocean

Pools are generally safer than the ocean. There aren't sharks or rays or jellyfish in pools, and the chlorine keeps the e. coli to a minimum. The narrator's previous sexual fantasy came from a woman he had very fleeting contact with at a pool just before meeting his wife. This is the kind of relationship he wanted to repeat with L:

An ancient, ridiculous memory came back to me then, from just before I met my wife. I was going to a gym with a pool at the time, and every week, by the pool’s edge, the same girl would smile at me and say hello. She swam in the lane that I’d take over. For a few months my entire week revolved around that brief encounter by the pool, to the point where I’d even rush to the locker room to make sure I didn’t miss her. We never talked about anything. She’d just say Have a good swim, or something like that. But every time she looked at me and spoke to me, it felt as if I were the center of her world. We ran into each other in this way for a few months, then she stopped showing up. A couple of months later I met my wife—but early on, in bed, I’d picture the swimmer’s eyes, her smile. That’s all.

The narrator likes the safer version of bodies of water to swim in, just like he prefers the safer versions of relationships. P is a contrast. She doesn't like pools because there's "nothing living in them." P loves life. She loves to throw open her home to guests. When she comes near death, she throws parties. When their home is burglarized, she throws a party. She cries when her husband sings badly for her and he tells her guests she loves them. 

The one time the narrator is adventurous enough to go into the ocean, however, he almost dies: 

One morning I decided to go for a swim, to clear out my head before sitting down to write. The mistral had just moved on, and the water was once again a sheet of glass. I climbed in from a small sheltered cove, first checking for jellyfish. My destination was a red buoy, which I swam toward through a beautiful patch of green sea, following a school of minnows. I was out in the middle of that patch when I saw a motorboat heading straight at me. I stopped and waved an arm, but the boat kept coming. I didn’t shout, it would have been pointless. Out that far, all sounds are swallowed by the sea’s silence. Feeling slow, weak, frightened, I somehow managed to move out of the way, and I made it to shore. 

He has followed the "living things" in the ocean and almost ended up dead. He'll soon regret even the imaginary adventure he was cooking up in his story. He retreats to the pool, both literally and figuratively, going back to his safe ways. 

Of course, tragedy can strike anywhere, even in a pool. That's why P prefers to just enjoy her life, but the narrator likes order and predictability as an obsessive attempt to limit risk. He's sort of like J. Alfred Prufrock in T.S. Eliot's poem, hanging out on the beach and listening to the mermaids, but never braving the waves enough to dive in himself. 

Should the narrator have just had the affair?

The narrator has never had an affair, which he notes is very unusual in Rome. He suspects that his wife, with her full and busy professional life, probably has, but he's actually okay with it, as long as she keeps it discreet and limited. He thinks that by being tolerant and not demanding too much of her, he and his wife have "survived twenty-three years together with no major disruptions, no earthquakes." Again, the earthquake image brings Vesuvius to mind, as there were several leading up to the eruption. 

Being faithful can be admirable, but the narrator spends a lot of time surreptitiously inhaling the smells of other women and noting carefully their skin and hair and clothing. His fidelity is only partly based in believing in it as something noble in itself. He's also faithful because he's risk-adverse. When thinking of his son, off in the world in a new city with a new girl eating new food and going new places, he thinks that his son has become a "version of me I'd never allowed to form, that I'd neglected, blocked out--a version that, even without ever having existed, had defeated me."  

"P's Parties" is a "life not lived" story. The narrator's life is contrasted with P, who did live a full life. The narrator was only able to experience P's happiness vicariously. His life, like his abandoned story, is "a promising start" he'd "tried to finish." But the only happiness he can find is fleeting and in fiction.

See also: Karen Carlson takes a very rewarding "whose story is it" approach to reading.  

Escaping from the destination: "Engelond" by Taisia Kitaiskaia (Best American Short Stories 2024)

There are a lot of wisecracks out there about how there really aren't that many story types. The one I know best goes something like this: There are only two stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. Wycliff Aber Hill wrote about the 37 possible movie plots, which sounds a lot like Georges Polti's 36 dramatic situations. I suppose all of these lists have some truth, if you're willing to put up with a fair amount of essentializing. Whatever list you come up with, I'd guess that "escape from a threatening place in which the main character is trapped" and its near opposite, "journey to a place that offers hope for something the main character is suffering from" would both make it. 

In the first one, perhaps a young couple experiencing problems in their marriage checks into a resort that promises to fix all marital problems. There is an eccentric head counselor, and at first, she seems able to help the couple. But little by little, the couple starts to see all kinds of weird things about the resort, and they realize that it's a death cult or something like that. They try to run, but are prevented from escaping, etc. In the second type of story, there is an post-apocalyptic world, and mother and her young child are on the road trying desperately to reach a rumored safe haven, chased by mutant vampires the whole time. If those two exact stories don't exist, there are twenty that are pretty close to each.

The pilgrimage that is an escape, or the escape that is a pilgrimage

A pilgrimage, or a journey to a holy place that brings healing or enlightenment, is sort of the opposite of an escape plot. One's got the goal far away and presumably at journey's end. The other has the goal just on the other side of the door or wall or compound, or pretty much any place that isn't where the main character already is. But "Engelond" by Taisia Kitaiskaia is both a pilgrimage and an escape plot.

The escape plot side is a lot more noticeable, of course. There are plenty of on-the-surface clichés of escape movies going on. There's the rich and polite but also evil English landlords who made their money off the blood of others; there's the missing groundskeeper; there's the weird children, one of whom looks like a fairy and talks of witches, the other who seems perhaps inbred and simple. There are whispers everywhere of threats on the ground, and the main character, Marfa, is seemingly hallucinating in her cabin. And the end has sort of a "Fall of the House of Usher" feel in which the evil old Grandcourt family comes crashing down for good. 

But if we slightly reverse the order of the story from the one given to us, we can see that she went to the cabin originally as a type of pilgrimage. Marfa was grieving over the loss of her Russian émigré parents, whose love for her was so fulfilling she never felt the need to start a family of her own. She is as plain a government bureaucrat as there could be, and she has realized that her work relationships, which she had found satisfying previously, are all replaceable, as is she to them. She doesn't put it in these words, but she's lost. She asks the night sky where she should go for a vacation, and the night sky tells her to go to a ranch in her home state of Texas, a sort of glamping experience where she will sit in her child-labor-made robe from Target and eat good things and maybe see a bit of nature. 

Maybe asking the night sky where to go on vacation is already a warning sign, but if that isn't, Marfa's reaction to the ants that bite her at night in her cabin is. She imagines herself as the Queene of the Ants, and her back is the Engelond of her imagination, the one her father turned her on to with his fascination with Middle English. This is where the pilgrimage slyly sneaks into the escape story, working at cross-ends to it the whole time. Marfa needs to get out of the cursed ranch, but she also is there because the universe has guided her to the place that holds healing for her. 

The pilgrimage sneaks in when Marfa imagines that the area on her back the ants are invading is the Engelond of yore which her father waxed romantic about. She thinks of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a story of a pilgrimage taken by a group of travelers. In the prologue, we are told why Canterbury is such a popular destination:

                            And specially, from every shires ende

                            Of Engelond, to Canterbury they wende,

                            The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

                            That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Or, to put it in more modern English, everyone in England goes to Canterbury because they think the martyr whose shrine is there, Thomas Becket, will help them in their need. 

I am already calling it that my blogging pal, Karen Carlson, is going to love geeking out on Chaucer when she gets to this story. She'll probably find traces of it all over the place. For me, I'm content merely noting that for Marfa, the impulse to go to the ranch started with a hope for help, but will change to a need to escape to save herself. 

I'm plotting my own pilgrimage-escape mashup. When, uh, Zephyrus eek with his, yo, sweete breeth...

About the ants

Karen has told me that my approach to magical realism takes all the fun out of it, but I do tend to look at the magical parts in a very non-magical way. I think of them much like the song-and-dance routines in a musical, or the cut-to-confessional-camera in a fake documentary like The Office or Modern Family. For that matter, it's also kind of like a soliloquy in a play. Unless the music is diegetic, it's not really going on. It's just a way of capturing what's going on in the character's head. There's not really a camera that the characters have stashed away in their home that they go running to. It's supposed to be a window into all the things they're thinking to themselves, rather than just giving us a voiced-over interior monologue. When Curly is singing to Laurey about a surrey with a fringe on top, we shouldn't think that they live in an alternate universe where people really do sing and dance their feelings. We should think that the narrative is stopping to give us a musical window into what the characters are thinking. They both are in love with each other and too durned stubborn to say it. Curly is unexpectedly romantic about both Laurey and his natural surroundings. Laurey is unexpectedly emotionally vulnerable. 

When Marfa imagines that the ants have made her their queene (with an e because they speak Middle English), we don't necessarily have to think that the ranch is a portal to another dimension where animals speak or that Marfa has gone crazy. By stretching part of nature beyond its limits, the story is merely emphasizing some emotional aspect. In Marfa's case, the ants accept her, perhaps, because she is small like them. 

It's her identification with the littleness of ants that saves her from the witch-cows of the ranch. I won't go into the slow breakdown of order, how one person after another succumbs to madness, bewitched by the cows. Marfa is running to escape, and she is surrounded by the herd of cows, including a few steers with death machines of horns. They sort of inspect her, weighing her heart in the balance. It looks like they are going to find her wanting, until she thinks of the ants and presents herself as small:

Maybe they would pity her insignificant body. She was a lowly government worker, composed of microwaved burrito bowls and grief. She wasn't like Bob the caretaker, torturing the cows for thirty years, or even Jerry, driving wildly and desperately around the property, knowing too much and unable to change things. She wasn't like the Grandcourts, hardening into sapphire and marble, taking and taking from the cows and this land and the lands across the sea.

That's all it takes. They kind of kiss her to accept her, and then she runs for it. Like the friar from Canterbury Tales, they "herde her confessioun" and their "absolucioun" was "pleasaunt." ("Herde" her confession, oh man. I crack myself up.)  She assumes the witch-cows have lured the whole family and their butler to the field and killed them. 

If I've made this complex little story seem too simple, almost fable-like, I'd say that just as it is both a journey to and an escape from, it is also both very complicated and extremely simple. The bits about the family being exploitative are very on-the-nose. So is her use of a made-by-exploitation robe from Target. It's a world where the vicious thrive and the rest of us seem to just be trying to eke out a living on their property. For Marfa, salvation is in neither being one of them--something she once aspired to until the Middle English-speaking snake cured her of it--nor in frittering away one's life knowing how evil they are and doing nothing about it. If one is small, one can still make something of that smallness by being tough. 

Marfa's denouement finds her reappreciating her life in her small and simple home. I've been comparing the story to escape plots and pilgrimage plots, but she thinks of it as a murder mystery, one like she used to enjoy watching with her father. She decides to continue on as the Queene of Ants. She imagines that ants the world over all have the same purpose. What purpose is that? To survive, I suppose. 

Ah, so this is BASS's bad sci-fi story for this year: "Democracy in America" by Allegra Hyde (Best American Short Stories)

My Kindle tells me this is the 12th year I've read BASS. It seems like more years than not, there's one story in it that's either sci-fi or speculative fiction, and it seems like more years than not, I don't like the selection. Whether it was Michael Byers's "Sibling Rivalry" or T.C. Boyle's "Are We Not Men?" or pretty much anything by Karen Russell, I hardly ever like the "some time in the future" stories. Exceptions have been Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence" and "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders. The rest of the time, to re-use a metaphor I've written before, it kind of feels like churches using modern music to try and seem hip and relevant, except it's snooty lit-fic trying to write the sci-fi it knows the people can never seem to get enough of. I usually leave feeling like BASS should stick to what it's good at, because it's not good at this. 

"Democracy in America" is built around one of those kind of ill-advised premises an intern might nervously shout out in a writer's room if they were given 30 seconds to pitch ideas and couldn't come up with anything good. You know, like "inventor builds an 8-year-old robot daughter," or "British boarding school, but for wizards!" In this case, the premise is: what if Alexis de Tocqueville came to research America and write Democracy in America, but today? Or maybe not today, but some time in the near future?

When I was in a church youth group as a teenager and an adult would ask a question like, "What do you think Jesus would think if he came back to Earth today?" we all knew what the answer was supposed to be. He'd be shocked, of course. Gay people just being gay right there on the street. More abortions than nubile women. Men with long hair. There was a right answer, and we were supposed to give it. 

"Democracy" reminds me of how much the culture surrounding American liberalism seems similar to the religion I knew as a kid. It has right answers to seemingly open-ended questions. The right answer, of course, is that de Tocqueville would be shocked. The story doesn't just make the historical social observer from 19th-century France come back to life, of course. It creates a female character with about the same social background and brings her to America with her companion Beaumont, the same name as the person who came with the original de Tocqueville. The original people came to study America's prisons, and the people in our story are there to study our immigrant detention centers. 

The right answer for politically liberal people, which includes nearly all literary magazines, is that the traveler will find America is terrible, and "Democracy" meets those expectations. It's full of ugly strip malls that all look the same, giant cars, smelly fumes, and horrible lives for all but the rich. Moreover, science has invented some process whereby old people can more or less take the attractive skin off of young people for money. This process, called "consignment," is attractive to a lot of women who desperately need some help in life.

Nothing is more tiring to me than being lectured about something I kind of already agree with, and it's worse when it's coming from a true believer instead of someone who tentatively believes it, but with reservations. There are no reservations in "Democracy." It's full-bore, uncomplicated, America-is-a-shithole observations. I'm far from being rah-rah Team America, but it's hard for me to believe an observer would come here and see nothing to admire at all. 

I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Netflix snatches this up and it becomes a hit. Americans don't just buy a lot of crap at strip malls; they buy it on streaming services all the time. There are a hundred stupid shows doing just fine right now. 

One key point the story looks past is that societies have always practiced a kind of consignment, letting the old and wealthy feed off the young. Whether it's having young people do physically demanding tasks, or having those who work pay into social security for those who have stopped working, or having a volunteer fighting force of young people who take recruitment bonuses in exchange for giving over control of their person to a power of indeterminate concern for their wellbeing, various forms of "consignment" exist everywhere. All societies live on hope; they want those struggling now to believe that eventually, they'll be part of the class benefitting from the system. That's true in North Korea, it's true in China, it's true in old Europe, and it's true here. 

Is there some way out of it? Is there some specially invidious way societies trick us into believing the lie? Those are interesting stories, but this isn't. It's the kind of smug, non-reflective liberalism that bears more than its share of the blame for the idiot we just got elected for the second time. It's a thin idea with thin characters, and I'm ready to move on. 

See also: Karen didn't like it either, but for different reasons and to a different extent. 

I can't believe this story is making me talk about Lacan and Kristeva: "Seeing Through Maps" by Madeline Ffitch

I swore that when I dedicated some of my time between last year's aborted BASS blog-through and this year's to shoring up my relative paucity of understanding of literary theory, that wouldn't mean that every blog post I was going to write would get neck-deep in theory. I still think a plain-old close reading that never mentions any theory can produce a perfectly good reading, and theory isn't de rigeur. Moreover, I realize that my somewhat shored-up theoretical understanding is still not exactly professional-grade, and I'm as likely to make a mess of things by bringing theory into the picture as I am to clarify anything. Nonetheless, here we are with the third story already in BASS this year that I've read and found I cannot approach without thinking about some theory. "Seeing Through Maps" by Madeline Ffitch has the smell of Lacan and French feminism all over it, the way the protagonist's log has the smell of cat urine on it.  Maybe I'll start with the theory I'm thinking of before I get to the story. 

French feminism and Lacan, badly but somewhat succinctly explained

Historians of feminism sometimes claim that in the 1970s, there were three broad schools of feminism: French, British, and American. The last two don't concern us now, but one of the characteristics of the French school was its focus on language. One philosopher who really appealed to them was Jacques Lacan, who combined a modified version of Freudian psychoanalysis with the linguistics that was hip at the time. According to how Lacan understood early childhood development, children start to learn language at the same time that they are realizing that they are separate from their caretaker mothers. The hard logic of language (e.g., "This is a dog, not a cat," or "This is neither a cat nor a dog, it is a tree") is associated with the father, the avatar of culture. Obviously, there are some assumptions about family structure here that many of us may no longer recognize, but I continue. 

Boys end up identifying with the father, and so language becomes associated with separation from the mother. So hard logic is a male point of view, which gives women some hard choices. They can act like men and adopt the logic of language, or they can be silent, or they can seek to develop l'écriture féminine, i.e. women's writing. This isn't just writing using male logic done by women; it's an entirely reimagined kind of relationship to language. Here, Lacanian French feminist theory is likely to invoke someone like Julia Kristeva, but instead, I'll summarize in my own words. Most linguistics at the time thought that language worked largely by exclusion. A word is this and none of the other things. That's how language means something, how it keeps from becoming anarchy. And males, the keepers of the law, protected the exclusionary logic of the system. But l'écriture féminine broke away from that. It was more inclusive and in many ways pre-linguistic, like the pre-linguistic babble of a child. 

An aside for skeptics and other non-professionals

Even this half-assed introduction to Lacanian feminism is enough to make any reader of "Seeing Through Maps" stand up an shout, "Aha! I see it! The father is the austere keeper of language! The mother wants to preserve the son's pre-linguistic relationship to the world!" But you might also think," So what? Who cares about some abstruse French theory from 50 years ago? Why should I even think there's any validity to such a theory?

I hear you.

When I was in grad school, I hated Lacan, because he combined the two types of literary theory I thought were the dumbest: psychoanalysis that took Freud seriously and linguistic theory that attacked human confidence in language. Did these people not know how thoroughly debunked Freud had become? I thought. What responsible therapist still quoted Freud? What non-quack of a cognitive scientist cared at all what he thought? So wasn't anything built from his thought likely to be junk? As for the linguistic theories of the post-structuralists and the deconstructionists, they seemed to have an idea about what language was that was both much lower and also more grandiose than one I, as a former and future translator, had. I tended to think about language in a sort of rough-and-ready way, where I never expected transcendent truth of it and knew it was always kind of messy, but as long as I kept talking and people's heads kept nodding, it was good enough. Deconstructionists seemed to base their attacks on language on 1) claiming people had assumptions about language I never had, and 2) showing how language didn't meet those assumptions. 

Lacan and Kristeva seemed particularly noxious to me because they blended these two kinds of bullshit.

However, let me now say at least this much in defense of this kind of theory. Yes, Freud is mostly discredited now, at least as science about human cognition, but I think we can rescue one proposition, which he was at least partly responsible for making known: humans have a part of their consciousness that is inaccessible to them, that part of their consciousness is influential, and it operates with a different kind of logic and language from the conscious mind. So reading that makes use of how this part of the brain works and ties it to what is going on linguistically--the text of the story--can still be interesting. And really, making a text more interesting is the whole value of applying theory to reading. Freud might be bad science, but the vocabulary of id, ego, and superego can be very valuable for reading a story like, say, Lord of the Flies. So while I can't believe this story made me bring up the theorist I maybe hated the most, let's go with this Lacanian reading.

Father the keeper of language

From the moment we first hear of the narrator's ex-husband, her "neighbor" in the woods she lives in, it's as a self-appointed guardian of the right use of language: "He says I should be more careful about language. He says that words have power. My hope every day is that he will leave me in peace." The neighbor also criticizes the narrator about not prepping her firewood at the right time. In fact, nearly everything seems to be subject to the neighbor's judgements about right and wrong. The neighbor tries to stave off disaster through a disciplined attachment to order, whereas the narrator is more willing to take life as it comes: "All winter, I stay one fire ahead of the cold. I’ve never been good at planning. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t know why. I am, however, curious."

Curiosity killed the what, now?

This curiosity is a sly way of setting up a new feminist symbolism in the story. Cats are associated with the feminine, and dogs with the masculine. There are many places, however, where the dichotomy is a lot less subtle, including the opening paragraph. The woman sees a cat pissing on her wood she is splitting, and the narrator joins the cat in pissing on the ground. Cats are not really rule-bound, which is why you can't own one. 

The son recognizes this split, and when he is at a stage where he calls all objects either "cat" or "dog" (enraging the father who wants words to mean what they mean), he is careful to call foxes "dogs" when his father is listening and "cats" when his mother is. 

 

A loophole in the father's system?

The woman finds a map written in the wood she is cutting. It immediately makes her think of a book that her neighbor/husband used to own, called Seeing Through Maps. As a semiotic system (a sign or group of signs that convey meaning), it's obvious why the father's world would include information on the right use of a map. But the book seems to suggest that maps might actually be a loophole, one in which right use of signifiers isn't so important: "There are no rules for making maps," the book boasts, but the narrator isn't buying it. "Of course there are rules," she thinks. "As with a journal, or any cavalier use of text, a map may help you remember things, but also invent a way of remembering them that makes you forget everything important."

This is the heart of the quest for l'écriture féminine. Male language is limiting. It will make you see one thing only by forgetting others. The narrator tries to counter this with her own form of l'écriture féminine, which is a kind of baby talk: she writes lists. Early verbal children do the same thing, naming whatever they see. One of the two passages she approves of from the book is that if the map is for your own purposes, then it doesn't matter if others can understand it. This is a revolt against the linguistic system of the father, the one tied to logical language that allows for sensible discourse. The narrator thinks associatively about language. The word "salary" doesn't conjure up words like "money" or "bills" for her, but words like "salad" and "salal." 

Not a loophole but a trap

It turns out that the map on the log is just such a "for your own use" map, because she can't understand it at all. It's not an intelligible sign, but it is almost a magical device, because it summons the neighbor/ex-husband, who has cut off his thumb and needs a ride to the hospital. The arrival of the husband/father causes a rupture in the narrator's private language. For the first time, she explains that her "neighbor" is her ex-husband. She had re-signified him and taken away his authority by calling him her "neighbor," a neighbor she confined to the edges of her property, but now, he has reclaimed his original meaning, although with "ex" attached to it. Soon after, she explains that her other "neighbor" is her son. As she leaves the woods, enters the world outside the woods, and spends a few hours with her ex, a clearer narrative begins to emerge, which is helpful for the reader, but it also erodes the boundaries of her écriture féminine. The map seemed like a loophole from the father's system, but it has had the opposite effect, allowing the father's language to reinvade her territory. 

He's no sooner inside than he's straining to bring even random acts under the rule of logical male language. When he discovers that a cat has pissed on her wood, he chides her for not reading it as a sign: “When animals act like that, you should stop what you are doing. You should call it a day. You should go inside and shut the door tightly and stoke your fire.” He indulges in a train of thought that accuses her failure to read omens as the cause of his thumb's amputation. 

Part of the father's logical system of language is the insistence on causality. Everything must have a cause. That seems sensible if one is a detective, but for the narrator, it's another trap. It's a religion, an attempt to assert order where it does not apply. Worse yet, it's an attempt to find a place to assign blame. 

I always knew that map was fucking trouble. 

The son refuses both languages 

While in the ER waiting, the narrator sees a mother changing a baby's diaper. She tells aloud a story she should only have thought to herself: “When my son was a baby,” I told her, “I told him I was going to change him. I meant his diaper. But my husband at the time said, Don’t tell him you’re going to change him because then he’ll believe we don’t accept him as he is. He’ll wonder if the universe fashioned him wrong.”

This seems like another struggle between the two linguistic systems, the mother's less demanding one and the father's hyper-exacting one. It leads the narrator to a series of memories in which the father obviously did not "accept the son as he was." The father was an extremely tough disciplinarian. He made the son sleep in a nap tent even when the son was terrified. He went ballistic when the mother tried to velcro the son's shoes for him instead of making him do it himself. The most upset the father got, though, was when the son, Duncan, insisted on calling everything either "cat" or "dog." 

Maple: cat. Elm: dog. Persimmon: dog. Dogwood: cat. Axe: dog. Hatchet: cat. Truck: dog. Creek: cat. Train: dog. Cat: cat. Squirrel: dog. Raccoon: dog. Spider: cat. It was a small thing, but it enraged my neighbor. Malingering, he called it. It was not honest, nor was it accurate. The one thing that stumped Duncan was a fox. To his father, he’d say that a fox was a dog. But to me he’d say a fox was a cat, because he knew I loved cats and he knew I loved foxes, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen one that I think they might not live in our woods anymore, and Duncan doesn’t live in our woods anymore either. 

At this point in his linguistic development, Duncan is clearly in the pre-paternal linguistic stage. He's calling things names based on some internal logic only he can understand. The father rejects both the system and Duncan's attempts to placate him within the system by calling a fox a dog when the father is around. 

Duncan has gone off and left the woods, left his family, left the lean-to he lived in as soon as he was able because he didn't want to live with either parent. He blames his mother for not stopping his father from being so tough, but she remembers a time she actually tried to run away with him. She threw her list of shopping items in the fire, grabbed Duncan, and ran for a train, jumping on a boxcar with him. But she saw the smoke of the fire she'd started as she left, so they came back. She had destroyed even her own language she'd created as a revolt to the father's, but it wasn't enough to save Duncan. 

Some small reconciliation?

I've gone and done a whole reading of a nice short story with a heavy reliance on theory, proving that even a little bit of theory ruins everything and everyone. I don't like Lacan, but I do like this story, even though it seems to cry out for a Lacan-based feminist analysis. I dislike language-centric theory even more than Lacan, and yet there's something in the story that has me ultimately liking the way language is portrayed. 

Earlier in this essay, I said that I thought a lot of language-centric theorists treated language as both higher and lower than I usually thought of it. Compare that to what the narrator says of her relationship to the neighbor/husband/father: "After that I stopped taking him seriously or I started taking him too seriously. Either one is the death of a marriage."

The two haven't lived together in decades when they visit the ER, but they are taken aback by the word "divorce." The best thing in the woods, the persimmons, are right on the border between their properties. It sounds too pat to say that the best use of language is somehow a marriage of Lacanian "masculine" and "feminine" languages, but as much of a feud as the two are in, they do still seem to have some commitment to each other. Even the father's language isn't totally worthless. He's the one who understands things like creosote. He's the one who finally cracks the riddle of the map, which is that it isn't a map at all, but spalting. 

The two don't reconcile at the end, at least not enough that they come together and live in one house happily without strife. The reconciliation between the two linguistic systems isn't to come to an end of conflict, but to live constantly in a productive conflict. Neither is the happiness type, the type to put all their differences behind them, but they can "build a life" out of the conflict.

I feel like this should end with a PSA about how friends don't let friends get into theory. 

 See also: Karen Carlson, who really loves maps, talks about this story. 

At last, the writer himself is skeptical of literature so I don't have to be: "Dorchester" by Steven Duong (Best American Short Stories 2024)

Pretty much every year I've blogged BASS, I've hit a point where I start to wonder if literature has any real social value, by which I usually mean whether it has the ability to help change anything from bad to better. There will be very heart-wrenching story about something terrible going on in the world, and I'll wonder: does this story, as sharply as it's written and as keenly as it observes the terrible thing, do anything? Does it help at all to make that terrible thing less terrible, less likely to happen? Stories that have led me to ask these kinds of questions include "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana and "Anyone Can Do It?" by Manuel Munoz.

"Dorchester" by Steven Duong even outdoes me with its skepticism about literature, because it goes a step beyond just wondering about whether literature, in this case a poem written by the main character, Vincent, has any social utility. Vincent questions not just whether literature is useful in fighting injustice, but whether the community that produces and supports it is always true and honest. Accusations that poets lie go back at least as far as Plato, of course, but Vincent seems to be calling out art in a way even Plato didn't. Plato complained that poets made up events that hadn't ever really happened. Vincent is accusing art of being, at least occasionally, emotionally false. He's not accusing just any poem of this kind of falsehood, but his own poem about a recent hate crime against an elderly Vietnamese woman, a poem that has gone viral among the kinds of people who follow poetry: 

Even then, before the poem was published, before it was widely shared by online literary types and blown up by the Chinese American congresswoman who retweeted it in May along with the appropriate hashtags, I knew that the best response to a horrific act of violence was not this poem. I told myself that I had to put my feelings into words, that this was how I dealt, how I coped and mourned. And it was. But there was also a thrill in writing about something so recent and terrible, a thrill, too, in connecting it to the various swirling traumas of my own life, however tenuous the connections. Even before I had a full draft on the page, I imagined people encountering my poem on a pristine website, sharing screenshots of it, chittering away in various comments sections, making careful conjectures about the relationship between the speaker and the poet. I wanted the noise. It was ugly of me to want it so badly, but I did.

That's some pretty bold stuff, even in a work of fiction, because it's opening the door to the possibility that artists are sometimes publicity whores, even when they're seemingly writing about tragedies concerning communities they themselves identify with. I imagine that's a part of art most "online literary types" would prefer not to think about. Conservatives have been accusing liberal outrage about certain high-profile instances of injustice as "virtue signaling" for years, and Vincent isn't too far from saying the same thing. 

Vincent works among these "online literary types." It's not exactly clear what his employer is. It might be a literary magazine, or it might be some kind of community arts organization. One of Vincent's jobs appears to be to convince people to pay $800 for a six-week lyric essay class, which itself seems a wry kind of commentary on the ways in which "literature" is for privileged people. The workers there seem well meaning. Vincent describes their opinions on politics and literature as "pristine," the same word he used to describe the website he dreamed of his poem appearing on. 

Pristine things usually require some effort to maintain in a pristine state. They have to be encased in plastic and set on a shelf, kept apart from interactions with the environment that might damage them. Calling both the website and the ideology of the literary workers pristine is to point out how insular they are. Everyone complains about how the Internet and social media have served to divide us by allowing people to only associate with others they agree with, but the "online literary types" are no different. 

Vincent compares writing his poem to doing his job. They both are very easy to do once you figure them out:

    About his job:  "It was a job anyone could become good at given enough time and Adderall."

    About his poems: "My poems came from a scary and uncertain place, and this was because they came easy to me. This was the most shameful part. It was easy for me to write in an angry way, using a large and prophetic voice I did not entirely believe in to describe the hurts I had accrued, to write the word body and mean a thousand imagined bodies, bruised and bleeding, to write the word war and mean some argument I had with my mother once over dinner. I wrote like this all the time. I wrote this poem about the woman in Dorchester in one sitting."

Nearly all advice about writing poems or stories or essays or whatever tends to present it in terms of "craft." It breaks down writing a great poem or whatever into techniques and steps. Because anyone can do these steps, it seems like a wonderfully democratizing thing to have art consist of the performance of craft. But it also means that anyone, whether they are sincere or not, can simply master the steps and perform them. AI can do it. An artist can also help his cause by understanding the expectations of the reading community, which Vincent clearly does. Erica tells Vincent his poem is brave, but there's nothing less brave than writing a poem that the intended community is guaranteed to approve of. 

The antithesis of bullshit

In stark contrast to Vincent's cynical use of craft, the expectations of his literary community, and even his own identity is his relationship to Leah, his quasi-dominatrix girlfriend. Although they met under circumstances that led them to perform certain community expectations, telling sob stories about how hard it was to grow up Asian to the Asian student society in college, Leah and Vincent soon develop a great deal of authenticity in their relationship to one another. Vincent tells Leah his big family secret, which is that his mother lied about them being refugees who got out on a boat just as Saigon was collapsing. They were actually regular immigrants who left Vietnam nine years after the war. 

It's not clear why Vincent's mother preferred to tell the story the way she did. Maybe she wanted to inspire her kids with stories of her family's narrow escape. Maybe she enjoyed being admired for her perseverance through trials. Whatever the case, Vincent, who originally applied to his writing program saying his mother's stories were the inspiration for him wanting to be a writer, is now afraid that he will somehow inherit her penchant for framing stories in ways that wrap himself in the suffering of others for the sake of his own ego. 

Admitting this to Leah unlocks something in her. "I had greased some secret machinery in her, whatever it was that allowed her to be who she was." She sticks two fingers down his throat, yanks his head down, and presumably forces him into cunnilingus. But before that, she tells him the words that become the bedrock of their relationship. She says she doesn't think she can ever lie to him. 

It's surprising, given how much time Vincent spends in a collar around Leah and how much of the time is her ordering him around and ignoring his wants, but their relationship is kind of sweet, and it works. It works because there's no bullshit to it. It's possible to try to guess at reasons why each person craves the roles their do in their dominant/submissive relationship. Maybe Vincent, whose mind is always racing as he crushes packs of Adderall, likes the way being put in a collar and told what to do focuses his mind. Maybe Leah, who suffers anxiety in crowds or from unexpected noises, likes the comfort of being in control. Whatever the reasons, what's most important about the relationship is that it's not something either one does to gain approval from any communities they belong to. Nobody knows about it but them. They do it because it feels right and it feels honest to them. They'd tried other arrangements, and none felt right. So they do it this way. That's all there is to it. 

Leah's way of talking to Vincent echoes the honesty of their arrangement. "She always texted in short commands like this. It was a great power of hers. Her economy of language drove me into brick walls again and again," Vincent confesses. She just says what is, and this has more power than any of the carefully curated language used by the writer-administrators he works with. She's a better judge of his poem that anyone else is.  

I wonder if dominatrices in general make good literary critics. 

What kind of change has Vincent undergone at the end?

It looks for a moment like Vincent disavows bullshit, that he has refused his inheritance of "the liar's gene" from his mother. The moment when he is about to be honored by reading his viral poem aloud at a "Stop Asian Hate" rally, he "swallowed two Adderall and boarded the red line to Dorchester." Getting on the bus to Dorchester is exactly what the speaker in his poem, the one he wrote but didn't mean, did. It seems at this point that he's trying to give his poem some after-the-fact sincerity by meaning what he didn't mean when he wrote it. He realizes he doesn't belong on the same stage as the daughter of the slain woman. She means what she says. So he goes to Dorchester almost as penance, to try to recapture some authenticity. 

That's what seems like the catharsis, but then there's a denouement that seems completely out of tune with the catharsis. Back with Leah and serving her needs, he checks a mouse trap he's set. There's a mouse in it, and although Vincent had wanted to set the mouse free, he can see the mouse's legs are maimed and he'll have to put it out of its misery. He can immediately see himself writing a poem about killing the mouse, and as he writes it in his head, he is already starting to duck the truth. "There were so many ways to write the true thing, but I wouldn’t. I wanted the lie. I wanted what I wanted, and no amount of leaves and water could carry it away from me." The "leaves and water" are a reference to something a therapist had recommended to him, that when he had a stray, interrupting thought, he send it down a river in his mind, like a leaf on a current. But Vincent can't. He's got the "liar's gene" too bad. 

The story is, in my mind, at least the equal of Plato in terms of calling the value of art into question. It's obviously not telling us that art is always insincere, or else this would have been a non-fiction essay instead of a short story. But it is the work of an artist who is willing to undergo more honest introspection than most, who will tell us artists need to beware when they are being feted, because it is so easy to substitute what we want for what is true. It may be baked into the DNA of the artist such that it will never be completely eradicated. 

The people around Vincent tell him his poem is "brave," which of course it isn't. But Duong writing this story was brave, and it was brave of The Drift to publish it, and it was brave of BASS to include it in its anthology. 

See also: Karen Carlson's look at this story, in which she disagrees with the narrator about the poem's quality. 

If the Raneys had showed up, would the parents still have split?: "The Bed & Breakfast" by Molly Dektar (BASS 2024)

My mother enjoys watching a show on Discovery called Homestead Rescue. A grumpy old man in a dumb cowboy hat named Marty Raney goes off with his two kids to rescue people who idealistically tried to establish some kind of independent/off-grid/subsistence homestead and failed at it. I am sympathetic to the desire to set up on one's own. Mrs. Heretic and I almost did this once. We put an offer in on a four-acre property in Pennsylvania. I was going to commute down to my job, Mrs. Heretic was going to stay home with our son and our dog, and we were going to--I don't know, do something with chickens and apple trees, maybe. 

We won the offer, but I got cold feet, and because the owners had taken more time to respond than we'd given them in our offer, I was able to back away. Given that this was pre-Raneys, I think those cold feet saved us. I don't even like to mow the lawn. The spirit was willing, and living a different kind of life was very attractive, but the flesh and our know-how were both weak. I can't fix shit. How was I going to build a chicken coop?  

The father in Molly Dektar's "The Bed & Breakfast" has been bitten by a similar bug to set up on his own, and he eventually prevails on the narrator's mother, sells the family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and moves his wife and three children to Italy. There, instead of building a self-sufficient homestead, they occupy a dilapidated old farm house and try to renovate it so it can become a Bed & Breakfast. (There is probably a reality show for this situation that fits better, but I only know the one show. I can almost guarantee Karen Carlson will know the right show.) Like the families in Homestead Rescue, the father is in a bit over his head. He isn't able to make good on his promises to get the roof and plumbing and stove going before winter hits. Eventually, he wears out the patience of his wife, Sara, and she takes off for a few days, leaving the father to both try to fix the house and tend to the children.

On one level, then, the story operates as a kind of anti-Under the Tuscan Sun, and the anti-every-story-about-deciding-on-a-whim-to-move-somewhere-to-change-your-life. "The Bed & Breakfast" begins sounding like a familiar family-overcomes-hardships-to-accomplish-its-dreams story; in fact, if I had been reading this in the personal essays section of a news outlet, that's probably the direction this story would have taken. The family would have finished its remodel, become financially successful, and made its own relational foundations as strong as the house. But this is fiction, and it's got elements undermining that trajectory--the trajectory the father dreams of making come true--from the very beginning.

My mom loves this show, but it feels a little staged to me. 

 

Houses as metaphors, homes as metonyms 

Let's start by acknowledging that this story does what countless others have done before and uses the physical structure of the house as a metaphor for the family that lives within it. Maybe the simplest and most well known example is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," in which the crumbling house dies at the same moment the ancestral family living in it comes to an end. 

"House" and "home" are sometimes synonyms and sometimes not quite. "House" always refers to a physical structure of bricks, wood, and drywall, but "home" can sometimes mean the physical structure and sometimes means the family living inside of it. When used to mean the family inside the home, the word is operating as a metonym, rather than a metaphor. 

Metaphor draws a comparison between two different things by pointing out their likeness. "This family is as broken as the walls of the house it lives in" would be a metaphor. Metonymy, meanwhile, brings together two different things more by contiguity. So when an article on parenting strategies recommends certain approaches in order to "make for a happy home," it is using the building in which the family lives to mean the family itself.  

In one branch of literary theory connected to structuralism, metaphor and metonymy are seen as working against each other, both narratively and also psycho-linguistically. Metaphor seeks to bring things together. It is a unifying force. Metonymy, meanwhile, tends to destroy unity by making one thing continually grow out of another. 

In "B & B," the home operates both metonymically and metaphorically, meaning it is both unifying and dividing. That is because the people in it have opposing desires for both unity and individuality, none more than the narrator, pre-teen Louise. (Or rather, adult Louise recalling her pre-teen self.)  

Father Metaphor and Mother Metonym

"The house has a good foundation," Louise's father Peter declares after he's had a chance to do a little work. "Doesn't matter that it's out of level. It's a good foundation." To Peter, if the house has a good foundation, the rest will come in time. He then invents a metaphor to explain his approach to renovations: "We're making a house sandwich!...Foundation and roof first. They are the bread of the sandwich. And the rest--the walls, the windows, plumbing, another stove, furniture--is the delicious ingredients. And the foundation is all good!"

Given Peter's metaphorical bent, it's hard not to think that he applied his belief in the strong foundations of the house to extend to the family as well. He probably thought something metaphorical like, "My family's foundation is as strong as the foundations of this house." 

For Peter, taking the renovations one step at a time, it was logical to think in terms of foundation above all. Humans very often proceed from a very metaphorical line of thinking in which if the foundation is good, then the whole project is likely to be good. One of Jesus' most famous parables, the man who build his house on sand and the man who built his house on rock, argues for this very line of thinking. It's tempting to end up thinking that foundations are really all that matters. In fact, the father's name, Peter, seems to be playing with this whole idea. Peter the apostle used to be called Simon, but Jesus gave him his new name, a name which means "rock," because Jesus wanted to make Peter the rock upon which his church would be built.  

In Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, although there are foundational human needs, such as safety, food, and water, if humans do not continue moving forward with achieving their desires--if they do not, to use the father's metaphor, keep adding to the inside of their sandwich--they become psychologically unfulfilled and are unhappy. 

This is where mother Sara is. She isn't impressed by the father's continued insistence in the solidity of the foundation. She's concerned about the inside of the sandwich. She wants beds for her children to sleep in, rather than hay. She wants curtains and flowers to adorn the insides. She wants a second stove so her children don't freeze. 

If we want to play games with the meaning of her name from the Bible, too, we can see that as the namesake of the mother of a great nation, she represents not things coming together and becoming one, but rather an offspring that multiplies and spreads throughout the Earth. 

The father thinks that if the children get cold, they can just come share the parents' room and its stove. He thinks the family is all one unit, so it's fine to all huddle together. The closer they get, the better, at least in his mind. His thinking is metaphorical, and therefore unifying, seeing the family as a whole rather than a grouping of individuals. The mother, however, realizes that they cannot ask their now sexually mature older son to share a bedroom with them, because it will drive him out of the house. She respects the individuality of the members of the household. Metonymical thinking allows greater freedom, more room for play and for individual development. 

Ultimately, Sara will exercise her own individuality to such an extent she will leave the family, at least temporarily. When she does, she still respects the children's individuality, saying her leaving was because she couldn't make the children into bargaining chips, but only herself. 

There is one exchange that is particularly telling of the different assumed family vs. individual assumptions between Sara and Peter. Sara is speculating on how long it will take to have the place made into a B & B, and she thinks it will take two years. In an aside to Peter, she adds "if you don't get it done first" (emphasis mine). Peter responds with, "We'll get it done" (emphasis mine). 

Louise as a union of metaphorical and metonymic thinking 

Louise's age isn't given, but she's between her thirteen-year-old brother Lewis and her nine-year-old brother Lindsay. So she's a pre-teen, an age when the budding desire to mark oneself off as an individual coexists with a lingering, childish desire to remain safe within the family. 

It seems that for the most part, it's the binding, metaphorical thinking that is holding strong. Although part of her knows that things are about to change and that her desire to remain a non-individuated part of a whole may be a last stand, that's the primary impulse in her. At the ages the children are in the story, the breakup of the essential unity is likely to come anyway, but it also seems that the move to Italy may be helping to speed it up. 

In North Carolina, the three children all slept together in one big bed in the attic. As Louise saw it, "The three of us were essentially one person. I was the holy ghost." Louise equates the essential oneness of her and her siblings with the divine. Even their names, all beginning with "L," seem to suggest that they are all part of the same whole. 

Many coming-of-age stories focus on children wanting to be seen as individuals, to come out from the stifling hold of the family, but Louise mostly wants the opposite. At least three times in the story, Louise stresses that what she most wants is to remain as an assimilated part of the hive-life of the family, not to stand out on her own. When her father takes her on a supply run, he asks her if she likes Italy, and she thinks, "The truth was I didn’t like being singled out and asked like this." At another point, she confesses that she "didn't like to be alone this way." 

When Claudio tries to show her favoritism by letting her win the chocolate gelato her brothers also coveted, Louse has her most extended meditation on what she wants: 

"I didn’t like walking alone, so I made my brothers come with me. I liked to feel like we were all one person. I had decided that I didn’t like winning the chocolate gelato, or Claudio’s good favor; I didn’t want attention that pulled me away from them. And, equally, I didn’t want the house to become a bed and breakfast, and all this dirt and strangeness to wash away."

That all sounds like she's her father's daughter, who thinks of the family more corporately than as individuals, but think about the end of that last passage. Her greatest wish is that the B & B will never come to be, because that would mean the end of the last-stand togetherness of her and her brothers. In her heart, she wants her father to fail. She cannot have her desire unless her father fails, but if he fails, then what she wants will fall apart, anyway. 

Louise's own duplicity complicates her understanding of what she wants

Louise's inner ambivalence is made more acute by her own lack of authenticity. The narrator, who has an adult's voice looking back on the younger Louise, judges younger Louise somewhat harshly in places. When the family arrives in Italy, the father gives the two brothers bowl cuts. He then tries to convince Louise to get her own hair cut short. This is the one time she tries to resist being made one with her siblings. "Holy Trinity" Louise would have wanted a haircut to match them, but here, for the first time, Louise wants to keep her hair long. 

When her father then forces her to get a haircut anyway, the neighbor Claudio shows up. He looks at her and asks if she is okay, and she starts to cry. We might think as readers that she is torn up about having to get her hair cut short and ugly, but the narrator insists that the younger Louise wasn't really all that sad. Instead, she was manipulating Claudio. In the older narrator's assessment, the younger Louise's tears were "partly from true emotion, and partly from conceit." (Conceit, in this case, meaning "an artistic device" rather than "excessive pride.") She pities Claudio for not being able to decipher young Louise's duplicity, her manipulativeness. Later, when the father has a spider near his ear, Louise screams, and Claudio knocks it off, more because of how it scared Louise than because it was a real threat. Again, the older narrator pities Claudio for being a rube, who "didn't know how it worked, how I could be scared and not scared at once."  

Young Louise is already torn between wanting to remain within her family and not seen as an individual on the one hand and wanting to be her own person on the other, as seen in her momentary reluctance to get her hair cut like her brothers. Her interior life is further complicated by her own duplicity. If she is being dishonest with others, is she not likely being dishonest with herself? She wants family unity like her father, but she also doesn't want him to achieve his dream of a B & B, which--because Sara had made finishing the rehab a condition of her continued presence in the family--would mean the breakup of the family's unity. She's of two minds, although her heart seems to be with holding onto her brothers as long as she can, and her inability to be honest about her division is making it harder for her to know where she herself stands.

Claudio

On the one hand, Claudio is a helpful neighbor, brining tomato plants and chickens, giving the children treats, and offering advice to Peter. On the other hand, he's the central force that destroys the unity of the family Louise wants so badly to preserve as long as she can. When Claudio--whom we are told, significantly, pronounces his name "Cloudy-O," like a cloud--shows up, he tells the children to pray that the drought lasts, because their roof will not be able to handle a storm. So the "cloud" is telling the children to beware of the rain, which is to say to beware of the cloud himself. Claudio is announcing himself as a threat. 

Louise and her brothers share one another's dirt when taking baths. She thinks of this dirt as part of what unites them. She doesn't want "all this dirt and strangeness to wash away." But the onset of clouds and rain will do exactly that. 

Claudio, we find at one point, is actually a bit of a racist, concerned about the people from "dirty" countries coming to Italy and not being Italian. He doesn't like the very dirt that Louise wants to hold onto. 

When the rain finally comes and we find that Peter's roof wasn't solid enough to keep the water out, Sara runs to Claudio's house. So the clouds really did bring about the breakup of the family.

Clouds and spiders

Clouds and spiders are two central images in the story, both lurking as threats to the family's unity. They appear together more than once. When the spider lands on Peter's head, it is "Cloudy-O" who knocks it off. Lewis goes to find the spider, and finds it is "gray-green like the storm clouds in the valley, which we had prayed against." When the storm finally breaks and drenches all the beds and curtains, all the middle of the family's house sandwich, it comes with "spider green clouds that meant the end of the drought." The two central images in the story are threatening ones, and their threats work in tandem. 

The catharsis is the victory of metonymy 

In a happy family story, there would have been some eventual Hegelian synthesis between the metaphorical, categorical, unifying thinking of the father and the metonymic, individualizing, diffuse view of the mother. This isn't a happy family story, though. In the end, the metonymy will win. The family's unity will not hold. The older narrator will have her reminiscences about the beauty of that unity's last stand, among the threatening but beautiful "red, silver, and gold...stars and webs" of Italy. But the dirt Louise saw as holding the family together ultimately "filled my nose and mouth," choking her. 

We never really get Peter's motivation for wanting to take the family to Italy. He doesn't say, "I want our family to stay together," or "I want to give up the rat race" or some other explanation of why he upends the whole family's existence in North Carolina. Without any explicit motivation, we have to guess based on what access we do have to Peter's interior life. Given his obsession with foundations, I think we can possibly guess that he viewed the B & B as a way to guarantee his family's continued unity.

In the end, though, families don't stay together forever, because they're made of of individuals who want their own, independent existence. Even Louise feels this pull, as much as she wants to hide it from herself and others. Eventually, water gets into the middle of the sandwich, and members of the family feel their cannot progress psychologically and emotionally within the home. The end of "Bed & Breakfast" recognizes this unavoidable fracturing of unity while still eulogizing its loss. 

See also: Karen Carlson's reading of the story. Karen found it kind of a frustrating read.