Maybe this story could be a little bit sweeter, but I'm not sure how: "City Girl" by Alice Hoffman (O.Henry 2025 Anthology)

The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading. I write for the intelligent, curious lay reader, so these stories feed into what I'm trying to do perfectly. I find a thread worth pulling on that might not occur to most readers, and I pull on it. The hardest stories to post about are the ones where I either dislike them so much I don't see anything worth further appreciation (although once in a while, it can be instructive to write about why I don't think the story is worth this kind of consideration), or stories that are so obviously good and easy to appreciate, any reader can see why they're in a "best of" collection. 

"City Girl" by Alice Hoffman is in the latter category. Although its subject matter, concerning a teenage girl who decides to drop out of school and get high with a drug addict in her rich father's New York condo, is pretty normal for an anthology like the O.Henry, the sweet and --dare I say--happy ending isn't. This is more the kind of story you'd find in the Coolest American Short Stories series than in O.Henry or Best American Short Stories. Normally, in a high-end literary short story collection, I'd expect the girl to continue wandering toward her own destruction in a quasi-nihilist way. Instead, all the bad things that happen in "City Girl" only serve to treat the reader to the dopamine-producing kindness of the girl's father-in-law, Gig. 

There's not much to add to that, but I will note one characteristic about the story that might not be readily apparent. There's a diversity of opinions among writers about how much of a character's motivation to show. I think most writers agree that's it's possible to either show too little or too much, but I feel that with a majority of stories in contemporary short story collections, there's a tendency to agree with Aatif Rashid and err on the side of showing too little rather than too much:

"And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience."

Iago from Othello is often held up as an exemplar of a character without a fully explained motivation. I Googled Iago, and I assume this must be who they're talking about. 

That's kind of where the narrator/protagonist of "City Girl" begins. She confesses at the beginning to not listening to her father's warnings. She gives only surface motivations for her recklessness: "We loved the city, even though it was dangerous," or "I only felt alive when I was dancing" as an explanation for going to clubs while underage. Both of these only take us one level into motivation, and they invite further questions, the answers to which we are denied. Why do the father and daughter love the city in spite of it being dangerous? Why does she only feel alive when dancing? 

Most of the girl's true motivations for the first half of the story can be summed up in her own profession of ignorance: "I don't know what I was looking for." However, there is a point, soon after she brings Cooper, an older drug addict, into her family's home, when she has what in therapy would be called a breakthrough. She has just gotten done letting Cooper take her virginity, and she is cleaning her blood off the couch, when she looks at herself in the mirror and says that "all at once I knew I had done this because I could never be a dancer." She's too tall to go as far in dancing as she wants, and since she's denied what she really wants, she's decided to go ahead and ruin herself.

Once we get this confession, others follow. "My own real father hadn't wanted me; my mother loved her baby boys." We get a full backstory of a father who abandoned her and a mother who was distant from her. When her father-in-law rescues her and puts her in a detox clinic, she meets with therapists, and there, a whole torrent of motivation comes gushing out after she tells the doctor she thought she saw a little girl beside the pool she jumped into in despair:

"My doctor said it was me, me before Gig, when my mother would leave me alone when she went to work and I sat in one place, terrified, until she came home. And then one day I walked out the door, tired of being terrified. I decided I wouldn't be a child anymore, I would do as I pleased. I would step out of the world and make my own way."

"City Girl" has come up with a different way of resolving the too much motivation/too little motivation dilemma. It began the story by withholding it, and by the end of the story, it was brimming over with it. This parallels the way the story begins with a character who is mired in nihilistic indifference to her own suffering, then begins, little by little, to be open to the possibility of happiness.

Narrative theory might prefer that stories refuse to give too much motivation. We can have hints about why Iago hates Othello, but ultimately, Iago should hate Othello because he just does. And that's all fine for plays, and yes, in some ways, it is reflective of how the human psyche is incomprehensibly complex. But for human beings living our lives, we do kind of need to understand our own motivations if we're ever going to find any level of happiness. "City Girl" begins in narrative purity and ultimately defects to human kindness, and in the process, it refuses to continue to kill its darlings and delivers us a teenage girl with hope for her future. I think most readers will approve of the rebellion.  

The pícara as parent: "Shotgun Calypso" by India Finch

(Personal update before launching into this: Obviously, my new job has slowed down my pace of posting here. I don't know yet if it will end my pace completely. I'm so tired right now it's hard to see how I'm going to keep pushing in posts, even delayed ones, but I've been doing this a long time and don't want it to just end yet. So I'll keep pushing forward slowly, even though everything below is probably fatigue-induced gibberish.)

The picaresque story is one of the great, ubiquitous forms of Western storytelling. In a picaresque story, there is a person (the pícaro, variously translated as "rascal" or "rogue" or something like that) who is typically at or near the bottom rung of the social ladder, cynically using the contradictions of society to survive. The pícaro doesn't worry overly much about right and wrong; he is pragmatic, and he thinks only of what works and what will help him to live another day. Using his wits to make his way in the world, the pícaro highlights society's absurdities by understanding it on a more fundamental level than those who are doing well do. Pícaros tend to move from one master or sponsor to another, and they wander somewhat in their quest to survive.

The picaresque novel originated in Spain, but there are a number of classic American examples. Huck Finn might be the both the best-known and the clearest example, but there are many more. What there aren't a lot of are picaresque novels with a female protagonist, which I guess would be called a pícara. Moll Flanders might be one, but it's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. 

"Shotgun Calypso" is kind of a picaresque story with a female pícara, only the pícara isn't the main character. (Even though the main character, like Huck Finn, doesn't like to wear shoes.) The story is narrated by Calypso, but the pícara in it is her mother, known only as "Ma." Her mother is cynical about using sex to get men to help her out financially. She may or may not feel some affection for the men she uses, but the affection is by the wayside. Ma is a survivor who uses the affection or just plain horniness of men to get what she needs, and she passes her knowledge of how to do this on to her kids. 

Judging Ma

It's possible to read the story and feel only contempt for Ma, because she is physically abusive and puts her children in danger by getting them close to a pervert, which is her latest boyfriend Lonnie. Lonnie and his wife apparently have some arrangement where he is allowed his dalliances with Ma, but only if his wife doesn't have to witness any of it. Ordinarily, Ma, Calypso and Calypso's younger sister Clio drive from Huntsville, Texas, to Houston and pick Lonnie up, but today, they stay at Lonnie's house, because his wife leaves for the weekend, so it's okay for them to be there. While in Lonnie's house, Lonnie tries to teach Calypso about how to perform fellatio by using his finger. 

So yeah, if a social worker were to read this story and if it were about a real family, Ma would lose her kids immediately, I'm willing to bet. But I don't think she's entirely bad. She's just what happens when a pícara tries to have kids. She's got nothing to pass on to them but the tricks whereby she has survived. (She literally calls the men she's with "tricks," which is what a sex worker calls her clients, but also what a pícaro plays to get by.) Calypso seems to understand that her mother's physical abuse is a limitation she has, but when she says of Ma that "she didn't mean anything by it," the phrase seems somehow more self-aware than when most abused people offer justifications for their abusers. Calypso isn't justifying; she's observing. Moreover, there is a bit of raw wisdom in Ma's advice to her kids that they should become lesbians, because then at least they'd have someone to perform cunnilingus on them, which is "half the battle." As an indirect kind of sex worker, Ma has to worry more about the pleasure of her tricks than her own, but she wants better for her kids.   

Because the pícara makes her living by taking advantage of falsities in society, Ma has a hard time passing on anything authentic to her children. She is invading Lonnie's wealthy neighborhood by bringing her kids and beat-up car into it, and there is a concern about how it all looks. Because there is so much concern about how things look, Ma finds it hard to separate appearance from reality. She doesn't want Calypso to act uncivilized in front of others so "people wouldn't call her an unfit mother." Similarly, white people make Ma nervous because she is "too busy thinking about what they're thinking" around them. The pícara is supposed to survive by taking advantage of the hypocrisy of those around her, but motherhood has taken Ma by surprise and forced her to become hypocritical herself. 

Yet there are moments when Ma transcends her transactional thinking, and those moments have to do with her genuine affection for her children. Calypso and Clio overhear Ma reminiscing about how she almost hooked up with the bass from Boyz II Men. The question comes up about whether this might not have led to the ultimate sugar daddy, but Ma doesn't regret it. Her reasoning, essentially, is that she'd have ended up with kids other than the ones she had. It's at this moment that Calypso realizes that her mother actually likes her and her sister. She knew they were loved, but not liked. There are a lot of kids with "better" parents who might never feel that. 

Boyz II Men, Girlz II Women

The day of the story, the girls head straight to the bathroom to start stealing small items from Lonnie and his wife while Ma and Lonnie start making out. The girls are obviously pros at it, but they get a little distracted and start putting on lipstick and makeup. Soon after, they put on the dresses that belong to Lonnie's wife. Once the dresses are on, the change is immediate. "So suddenly, we were women." 

The change isn't a good one, because it's a change from a kind of innocence to shocking awareness of the danger of being a sexual object. Changes in "Shotgun Calypso" are never good. Ma changes from one type of person to another when Lonnie is around, as do the family's rules and traditions. Although the girls are able to put the bathroom back to its "virgin" state after they "deflower" it, Calypso cannot go back to her innocence once Lonnie sees her in his wife's dress and puts his finger in her mouth. The scene in which the girls are forced to pretend they enjoy the trampoline Lonnie got them, a now inappropriate child's gift for these suddenly grown women, is a horrific dramatization of the trauma they suffered. 

Power

Calypso is given her name for the powerful nymph in The Odyssey who holds Homer against his will. Ma wanted to impart to her daughter the power that comes from using sex to control a man. "My birthright was women who trapped love and took it by force even when men cried." Ma tries to pass on the skill she has learned for survival, which is to find a man who will pay your rent when you're short. 

Calypso's family appreciates the ability to grab a man. They respect Miss Winnie from next door for still being able to pull a man at age seventy. They respect the ability for the power it gives, but it's not a power without costs. Odysseus fought to escape Calypso because he wanted to get back to his wife, whom he loved. Lonnie escapes from his wife to be with Ma. Any man Ma can pull is going to come with some downsides. Odysseuses are hard to find. 

The sister's name

There's an explanation for Calypso's name, but what about Clio? In Greek mythology, Clio is a muse, but not the muse of poetry to whom Homer prays. Clio is the muse of history. We can only guess at the significance of this name. Calypso tries and eventually succeeds, for a time, to forget that night, but then the memory comes back. The memory is tied to the night not only when Lonnie forced his finger into her mouth, but also when Calypso first let her sister have the shotgun seat in the front of the car. The redemption in the trauma for the girls is that they realized their value to one another. It's a moment that completes an arc for Calypso. She originally held onto the seat as her birthright as the older sister, but she eventually cedes it to Clio, because she and Clio formed a deep bond when they shared the trauma of bouncing on the symbol of their now-ended childhood together. The bond Calypso now shares with Clio is what allows her to hold on to the memory of the history of that night.