Anything can go wrong, but it doesn't: "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein (Best American Short Stories 2025)

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the title, I had to do some post-facto thinking to re-insert the story's title into my overall understanding of it. Like many stories nowadays, it didn't even have the words of the title appear in the narrative itself.

None of that is true of "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein. Rather than being a quick onramp into the story, something I read and then immediately sprang past into the narrative, the title made me stop and consider it before I moved on. In everyday meaning--at least among the kinds of people likely to use "abject" in a sentence--the word means something like "extreme, but only for bad things." In my mind, the word most likely to follow "abject" in a spoken sentence is "poverty," and the words most likely to precede it are something like "He/she/they lived in..." 

So maybe it's just talking about "really bad examples of naturalism," or "naturalism taken to extremes that are bad." If that's the meaning, it sounds like something an erudite critic would say about a painting. What would this meaning of "abject naturalism" in the sense of "naturalism run amok" be? Well, that makes us consider what naturalism is. The line between naturalism and realism can be hard to draw, but one boundary we might use are these words from Encyclopedia Britanica: "Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities." 

This emphasis on the "physiological" nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity's grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It's borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term "the abject" from theorist Julia Kristeva. I've delved more deeply into the meaning of "the abject" in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I'll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our "naturalism." If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like "Abject Abject." A double dose of abjection. 

And that's what we get

From the first lines of the story, it's this kind of naturalism, the gross and abject kind, that we get: "The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil." In its reminder that female bodies produce other bodies, that those bodies get scarred in the process, it's introducing us to the uncomfortable facts of the female body, the ones that horror movies play with.

In fact, there are a lot of hints at horror in "Abject Naturalism." The narrator, Toni, is a former creative writing student who's given up, but when she did write, she wanted to write scary stories, scarier than Stephen King. (And what, in society, it more "abject," in the sense of being "thrown out," than one of the many former students of a writing program who have now given up, "all early sense of specialness evaporated"?) At many points, we get hints that a horror story is about to break out. Toni lets her daughter Amelie go jogging, and we, along with Toni, worry she won't make it back. There is a neighborhood man, Marco, who gives Amelie a telescope. He seems harmless, but we worry that Toni's decision to put off Googling him might be a mistake. When Amelie, commenting on deformed animals at Chernobyl, remarks that "anything can go wrong," we might be tempted to see it as foreshadowing. 

Nothing ever does take that turn for the worse and terrifying, though. Toni certainly faces disappointment. Her writing never takes off, but the jerk who got her pregnant, a romantic-adjacent foil to her naturalist nature, not only abandons mother and daughter for "texts," but then he goes and has a successful writing career right where Toni can see it. So Toni's dreams don't come true, but it's not all bad. Having decided to keep the baby when she gets pregnant and then committing to motherhood, right away "something lucky happened" to Toni when she finds a cool apartment in a hip part of the city for a good price.

The "abject" never goes away. Rather, it's there on every page. From Toni becoming a phlebotomist who draws blood, to her friends obsessing about their children's periods, to the body odor of the homeless in the library where Toni reads the father's successful novels, there is plenty of the gross and everyday about the story, what my mother used to call "bathroom talk" when my siblings and I were kids. However, when Toni is touring her lucky apartment, she notices that although her Cesarean scar is smarting, it's now so subtle "she could almost forget about it." The abject is always there, but it's not so "abject," in the sense of it not being as acute. 

Graduation from "abject" naturalism to "mere" naturalism?

The title of the story comes from a criticism that Toni's writing instructor made of her work, calling a story in which a couple fights about a skunk they need to get rid of "abject naturalism." This instructor went on to say the story's weakness was that "the plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order." This is probably similar to the criticism many have made about contemporary fiction in the realist vein. Anis Shivani has called it "plastic realism," and many other critics have bemoaned our era's overreliance on verisimilitude. 

Personally, I've been more annoyed by "plastic magical realism" in contemporary fiction than realism, as I feel like the fantastic is more likely to feel forced and fake, but in any event, you can be too much of anything. There can be "abject" anything. 

Naturalism was a strange name for a trend in art that wasn't really about seeing nature for what it was. Instead, naturalism tended to see nature only in its "red in tooth and claw" version, never the symbiotic one, and it saw humanity's fate within nature as basically doomed. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is one of the examples of literary naturalism most often assigned in schools, and if you've read it, that's the kind of "nature" that naturalism saw, a nature that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst (and more likely) out to get us. 

Toni's journey is the move from "abject" naturalism, one that fetishizes the gross and offputting and horrifying, to "mere" naturalism, one that can also see some good in the world because it actually considers the world on its own terms. She graduates from drawing blood to filing papers for the hospital, because paperwork makes more money. And naturalism, in the sense of letting nature speak for itself, is perfected in Toni's daughter, who uses the telescope to see the stars.

The strange climax

Toni and her daughter sharing a night looking at the stars through the now-fixed telescope is the denouement, but the climax is just before it, when Toni and Marco use the telescope to spy on the neighbors in their home. If ever there was a moment when the plot was going to take a turn toward horror, this was it. Suddenly realizing Marco used the telescope to look at people feels very Hitchcockian. But it turns out to be very tame. They see one person asleep and the other reading, occasionally scratching his balls. Toni finds "The dullness of the scene, the abject naturalism, aroused her." 

So is Toni's arousal her slipping back into fetishizing the abject? I don't think so. Instead, she's realized that the big, frightening thing, which is humans qua human animals, isn't really that frightening. It's more like what she'd always wanted to write, something much more terrifying than King, but also funny. The abject isn't terrifying. It's just a thing. That's naturalism that actually takes nature seriously. 

The story ends with as much abject grossness as it began with--Amelie throwing up in the coat room of her school after ODing on donuts and coffee too early in the morning. But Toni has come to terms with the abject now. She's gone beyond seeing nature as an impersonal force out to get us nearly to the other extreme: She reads the fact that "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song about a murder, ends just as she is dropping Amelie off for school in nearly providential terms: "When she starts the car, the radio is playing the right song, Freddy Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself has set the needle down."

The world is a tough place. The story alludes to some of this toughness when Toni briefly thinks about the immigrant families in her neighborhood. I could probably just as well do an "against the grain" reading of this story that comes up with a reading totally at odds with the apparent catharsis of the narrator, one that argues that Toni only is able to become reconciled to abject nature and to develop a belief in at least some goodness in the world because of her privilege. But I leave that reading to others and stop here with the "with the grain" reading.