Just a touch of daylight between form and content: "Roy" by Emma Binder "(O. Henry Prize Winners 2024)

I am foolish enough to believe literature has tangible benefits for the people who read it thoughtfully, both individually and communally. Among the real benefits of reading literature seriously are:

• It helps develop a sense of empathy, even if the extent to which this empathy gets transferred to real-world action varies.
• It helps readers developer the ability to consider other perspectives.
• It forces readers to reconsider how language functions, how it is a constant mediator for our discovery of the world. If language is the water of the ocean we swim in, then literature can help us to become aware of what we would not otherwise be aware of. It makes us use language more precisely and hear/read it less gullibly. 
• It can present us with a safe place in which to consider moral and ethical questions.
• It can allow us to imagine different realities, which both gives us space to reimagine whether the way things are is how they must be and also gives us a sandbox in which to isolate certain facets of reality and imagine what would happen if those changed.
• It can help humans to work through personal and existential issues, like whether there is any point to life and if so, what. It can also help people to cope with the difficulties of life just by being enjoyable in a highly immersive way. 
• It teaches us how to think about important questions that don't have concrete answers, questions like, "What is beauty?" "What is ethical conduct?" or "What is human nature?" Notice that just because there is no one right answer doesn't mean that a nihilistic insistence that all answers are the same is right. This has important implications for the political life of a community. Learning to be as precise as we can about the imprecise conclusions of literary study can help us avoid imprecise thinking about the equally imprecise conclusions of political life. 

A "good" story will fulfill one or more of these functions. Of course, essentially any story can force us to into the aesthetic questions of what beauty is or what a good story is. A bad story forces us to try to explain why it's bad. So a good story should resonate in more than one of these categories. 

American literature of the last twenty to thirty years, or at least "high" American literature, seems to have emphasized the first three benefits of the study of literature from the list above more than the others. This is seen in short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories, which often feature stories with extremely novel language and form. 

These stories seem to accept the majority belief within "high" American literature that form is inseparable from content. I understand where this belief is coming from. People only experience a story through the arrangement of words on the page, so you can't really say that the plot is what matters and that form is only a tool to tell the story. Readers experience both together. 

At the same time, I can't help thinking something is lost when form is treated with such reverence that stories only a few people really can connect with become the ones literary fiction most recognizes. Or when stories read more like poems than prose, using a poem's associative and chaotic logic, its jarring language that resists understanding and interpretation. Being a translator for most of my adult life has taught me to respect the power of language, and I do think a story should try to respect this power. But being a translator has also taught me that language can be pretty flexible and that humans are good at filling in gaps where language fails. We wouldn't love our favorite stories as much if they were told any old way, but we might still love them if they were told differently. We might even love them if told in somewhat less than a virtuoso's voice. Some of my favorite stories were told by only moderately talented "authors" in a formal sense.  

Okay, I'm ready to talk about the story now

"Roy" doesn't stand out for memorable or inventive prose. I don't mean to say its language isn't good or that it's told in a hack manner. It's just that neither language nor structure is what will stand out in memory for most readers. It's pretty much straight chronology in first person. Uncle Roy is a well-worn character, the hick from the Upper Peninsula who wears denim overalls and eats snakes and possums and drinks too much and gambles too much and plays scratch-offs and likes Hank Williams. In a few places, the imagery is either muddled or weak. The best example might be the final line of the story: "There was a spark growing inside me, calling me into a different future, like a train hurtling fast into the wilderness." That's a pretty good example of a mixed metaphor. The spark is also a train? And do sparks call people? Do trains? "Roy" has established trains as an image linked to freedom and self-discovery by telling us Roy once tried to run away from home on a train, but sparks are new to the story in the last line. 

The story doesn't suffer for any of that. The reader is willing to look past its occasional inexactness or conventionality in language, the occasionally stock character nature of Roy, because somehow it all works. It works because Sophie, the first-person narrator, is a believable and sympathetic young woman whose struggles with coming of age as a gender non-conforming woman in small town Michigan feel very real. We can feel how Sophie's environment, from her judgmental friends who take on making her over as a project to her at times catatonic mother and denial specialist father, are suffocating her. When Roy, the least advisable caretaker imaginable but the only one available, comes to watch over Sophie and her sister while their parents go to be present at the last days of a grandparent, we can feel the same relief she feels as she expands into her true form, the form she's been twisting herself out of the whole time. 

Sometimes you can be glad to meet a character, even if you're pretty sure you've seen them before.

"Roy" is a good story in part because of how it forces us to ask hard questions about the world. What is it that children really need when they're coming of age? Nobody would think Roy was the answer, and in a lot of ways, they'd be right. If Roy had been pulled over while driving the girls drunk to the casino, and child services had placed them in protective care until their parents returned from Grandma's, nobody would have said that was the wrong decision. Roy puts the girls in danger with his drinking and his guns, which he mixes. And yet, Roy has a sense for what kind of person Sophie really is that nobody else does, and he nurtures it, perhaps without even meaning to. He calls her tough, and she loves it. It fits in ways none of the clothes her friends have been putting on her do. By the end of the story, she is answering to her own ideas of identity, something that never would have happened either in the care of her distracted mother or the well-meaning mother of her friend who served her casseroles and salads. 

Roy does everything wrong as a caretaker, but he nonetheless is the only person able to give Sophie the gifts of self-recognition and self-acceptance. Does this force us to rethink what the goals of parenting should be? I'm not saying parenting books should include drunk marksmanship and tales of how a child's mother once banged the child's uncle, but we might pause to consider how the most unlikely people in a child's life can provide unexpected benefits. So part of the reason "Roy" is a good story has to do with that.

The other part, for me anyway, is the way it calls the form/content unity into question. Of course, proponents of this unity would rightly point out that "Roy" is inseparable from the language in which it is told. But I can't help feeling that there are form/content unities and there are form/content unities. With some stories, the language, style, and arrangement call attention to themselves by being unusual, jarring, difficult, virtuosic, or all of these things. With those stories, it feels wrong when you try to restate them in different words. Other stories, like "Roy," have some "give" to the narrative. It could have been told slightly differently and would still feel the same. It can't be that the words themselves cease to matter, but there is a different relationship between form and content in a story like "Roy" than in a story, like, say, "Bears Among the Living" by Kevin Moffett. Which means that while it might be true that form and content are always part of the same whole, they fuse in different ways, the same way different molecules present different characteristics depending on the bonds between atoms. "Roy" is also a good story because of the way it forces the reader to consider or reconsider the bond between form and content, and to admit that at times, the bond can be a relatively weaker one. 

Finally, the story teaches us to empathize with Sophie. An occasional reader of this blog commented while I was going through BASS this year that he didn't like a lot of the stories because of what he called an "agenda." He didn't use these exact words, but I get the sense he felt that some stories get picked because they meet the approval of editors who want to push for more underrepresented voices, rather than because of their merit. I tend to feel that even if a story is picked because it fills a quota or meets an agenda, it might still be excellent. There are far more great stories written every year than can get published, let alone anthologized. If a story is anthologized in part because it is about a traditionally underrepresented category of people, that's probably more of a tie-breaker than the whole reason it was picked. "Roy" might fit in with the public discourse about sex and gender of the last fifteen years, but it's also a believable and moving portrait of a person who we all know is out there. Even if you're a die-hard social conservative who thinks this stuff about gender nonconforming and non-binary is a bunch of moonshine, you know Sophie is a person who exists, and whatever view of the world you build, it has to account for people like her.