The unmagical magical realism of Karen Russell: "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"

"When discussing book ideas with an editor, it's good (for a novelist) to mention that the story is either magical realism or surrealism. That way, the editor will start thinking about the story according to their own designs, and pretty soon, they end up liking the idea." -Kim Young-ha, "Corn and me" (translation mine)

"The unicorn kept changing as she walked toward me." Karen Russell, "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"

Seems like a lot of these short story anthologies I read and sometimes blog through really, really want me to read Karen Russell. This will be the fourth time I've blogged on one of her stories, to go along with at least two other times I've come across her from back before I used to write about reading Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, etc. (First time, second time, third time, and she also had "Madame Bovary's Greyhound" in the 2014 BASS and "The Prospectors" in the 2016 BASS.) I also went and read her novel Swamplanida! a few years ago.

One of the reasons I took the time to read Swamplandia! is that Russell always makes me unsure of myself as a critic. Everyone seems to love her. I can certainly see why people enjoy her work, but the level of devotion she inspires is hard for me to understand. There is obvious, raw talent in every page. Her stories, though, have the feeling to me of a Netflix original movie: each feels as though it was written by a team of bright professionals who have studied what makes for a successful story and included all of these things without quite managing to fully give life to their creations. A solid 6/10 nearly every time, with enough moments to make you finish it, but nothing you're going to remember for years afterwards. A Karen Russell short story feels to me like what we'll get in a few years when we ask ChatGPT to write a magical realist short story with a monster in it. 

There are people out there,though, who gush about Russell like she's near the pinnacle of American literature at the moment. This guy is a good example; he says she's not only a good writer, but that her work has "truly and deeply impacted" his life. Impacted his life? Truly and deeply? Those are big words. I can point to precious few writers who have done that for me. There are many writers I enjoy, but few who have made me actually change the course of what I do and how I think about core issues. I'm curious how Russell has done this for this critic. As I read the piece, though, I began to suspect that she hadn't really impacted his life. She'd just impacted his understanding of literature by opening his "eyes, as a budding college student, to the wondrous world of magical realism."

Oh. Is that all she did? Taught him that a genre of literature exists in which the fabulous is combined with the realistic? (Also, Russell did that? Not the hundred years or so of writers doing it before her? Even Russell found out about Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a young age, she says in that same interview. I feel like few people would ever read Russell who weren't already serious about literature, so it's hard to guess how she was someone's first taste of magical realism. But I digress.) 

The critic goes on to also say her stories "...took me to worlds I hadn’t yet known. They taught me about guilt, love, loss, and, mostly, what home was—and could (and can) be." I find this hard to believe. Those are just phrases you throw out to overly praise a work. Those are blurbs, not what actually happened in his life. It's rather like when people claim Jesus or Gandhi as a role model. Really? In what way would you say you're living a life that adopts theirs as a model? I don't believe this critic really thinks differently about, say, what home means as a result of reading Russell. I think he read work that he enjoyed, saw material in it that referred to the meaning of home, and then chose that subject as a good thing to list to make it seem like she has affected his psyche on a deeper level. 

Yes, I'm aware of how "problematic" Perez is. I follow him on Twitter. Sometimes, I think he's a parody of himself, because he's now decided he's an outlaw and he takes his outlaw persona too seriously. Other times, like with this tweet, he's really insightful and pithy. I'm willing to take the mix, which is why I follow him.

Theme and subject

There is a frequent tendency among people who talk about literature to confuse theme and subject. Subject is what comes up in a narrative. Theme is an attitude toward what comes up. For a very long time in Western literature, the dual purpose of narrative was assumed to be "to delight and instruct." This meant that authors often wanted to make sure their audiences understood the theme by making it explicit. Aesop's fables are of course one example, but even in epics like the Iliad we were told at the opening what the poem was really "about." Medieval morality plays made sure to drive their point home, but many of Shakespeare's plays also made sure we got what the point was with a prologue or epilogue that made it explicit. Driving the point home was the norm. 

Not all of Shakespeare's plays did that, though. Arguably, the one play of his that continues to speak most profoundly to "the human condition" is Hamlet. Hamlet stands out for how ambiguous it is, relative to other literature of the time, about what its "instruction" is. It's the most modern of his plays. The Romantics saw in it an example of "negative capacity," the ability to imbue characters with ideas without the narrative becoming fully identifiable with those ideas. Modern fiction theory loves the notion of negative capacity.

I certainly wouldn't want to read fables that wrapped up with a two-sentence explanation of the moral of the story. Thematic ambiguity is fine. It's okay that I'll never be able to state the theme of Hamlet in a fully satisfying way. But I at least have some kind of sense about what the subject I should be looking to attach a theme to is. I know the area code of the theme in a great work, even if I don't know the address. In Hamlet, it's something about how weird and fleeting life is and what the point of it is and how we can ever know anything definitely and how difficult it is, if you really think about anything, to determine one's course of action. I know that's what the play is ultimately about, even if I can't quite say exactly what it is saying about those ideas. 

Back to Russell

With Russell, though, I really can't tell where the center of the story I'm supposed to be digging to find is. Partly, I think that Russell is a victim of her own talent for observation here. She'll be writing along, and something appears in the story, and she's got a bit she comes up with on this thing, which is great, but it's so powerful, it blows the whole trajectory of the story off course. The density of some of these passages exerts a gravitational pull on the overall narrative that's so strong, the center keeps veering all over the place. I first noticed this in "The Tornado Auction," but it's also very apparent when reading "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," which is in this year's Pushcart Anthology.

The story opens with neighbors hauling trash out. Russell riffs on the dual meanings of "refuse," both verb and noun. Russell often deals with ecological stress in her work, so I figured we might be getting some kind of statement on consumption here. We don't even get through the opening two pages before there are three different themes on the subject of "refuse" emerging:

 

1. Trash/consumption as a reason for ecological disaster. The "Cloud Lake" of the title is gone now, a victim, perhaps, of urban sprawl or climate change. The mist of its ghost is a hinted-at but never-arriving monster. 
2. Trash pickup as a religious ceremony. The narrator, Mauve, calls hauling trash to the curb a "secular ceremony of reckoning and forgetting." She later calls the trip to the curb a "pilgrimage." 
3. Trash as a record of human consumption. "The curb is like the diary where we record our hungers." One thinks of future civilizations performing archaeological studies of us through our buried trash heaps, making guesses about what our lives were like and what mattered to us. 

Any of these is fertile ground for a thematic foundation to build a story on, but the three are pulling in somewhat different directions. In one, trash is a sin that harms the Earth. In another, it's a quasi-religious ceremony in which we are absolved of our past foolish consumption choices. That is, it's not a sin so much as absolution from sin. In the third thematic possibility, trash is instead a record of human activity. 

There's nothing necessarily wrong with these differing meanings of refuse being at war with each other. In fact, the whole story could have unfolded as a meditation on the tension between these meanings. When Mauve reveals that she is pregnant, she goes to a drug store she is nearly certain is a mob front. Already, the theme of consumption as a sin seems to be striving for primacy over the others. After Mauve learns she is pregnant, she throws the pregnancy test stick in the trash. I found this interesting, because Mrs. Heretic and I still have the pregnancy stick from when we learned we were having our son. It's our "diary" of our "hunger" for a child. Mauve doesn't want the record, though, although we soon learn that it isn't because she doesn't want the child she thought she could never have. Rather, a "violent desire" to have the child comes over her. She "refuses" the record of wanting the child while still wanting to keep the child herself. There's a great setup here for a tension that could continue.

Instead, a fucking unicorn shows up and the whole thing goes off the rails. The unicorn is the kind of thing people rave about in Russell. To me, though, the magic in her magical realism is usually what makes the whole framework of her narratives wobbly. 

What is the unicorn?

My blogging friend Karen Carlson accused me of "taking the fun out of musicals and the magic out of magical realism" last year when I was commenting on Yohanca Delgado's "The Widow from the Capital." Seriously. It was savage what she wrote. Our friendship may never recover. Here's what I said: 

Whenever I encounter magical realism, I like to think of the bits of magic sort of like the songs in a musical. In a musical, characters are going along talking to each other like normal people, and then suddenly, they burst out into song and a choreographed dance number. Which--I don't know what your life is like, but the people I know don't do this.

Unless the song is diegetic, you're not supposed to think that the people in the story are really singing and dancing. It's a dramatic and lyrical expression of the feeling a character or characters would be having at the point in the story, or it's a way to establish a feeling to a plot point, rather than just having it happen It's the same thing with soliloquies in plays. In real life, people don't talk to themselves out loud in poetry while other people fade into the background. You're meant to think of this as an opening into the psyche of the character by means other than action and normal dialogue.

When something that doesn't happen in the real world happens in a story where most things do happen in the real world, then, I look at it like a song in a musical. It's not about the thing, it's about what the thing signifies. The women aren't afraid of being cursed by a voodoo doll; they're afraid that the little widow's lack of concern for their faces means they aren't really that important. The "we" is facing a threat from the "them." 

I might add mockumentary-format shows like The Office, too. As much as "The Office" attempted at the end to make the whole documentary format make sense by putting together an in-universe movie based on the hijinks at Dunder-Mifflin, it really never made sense that a camera crew was interviewing the people in this office for so long. Same with Modern Family. Instead, the cutaway scenes are just a means to get into the interior mental landscape of the characters, to get their inner thoughts, without having to do a voiceover of those thoughts, like in Dexter, or an aside to the audience as in many plays.

That doesn't mean you can't still love the music or come away from a night watching Les Miserables feeling full of hope and humming a tune. It doesn't mean that the magic can't still be magical; it does mean, though, that the magic has to fit the world, just as the songs have to fit their world. If the Jets busted out in a funk tune in the middle of a jazzy West Side Story, it wouldn't be right. Similarly, you can't just throw a unicorn in somewhere that it doesn't belong. 

So what is the unicorn in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," and does it fit its world? It's many things:

1. It's an immortal being, and therefore a representative of a different way of experiencing time. The opening lines of the story refer to "extraordinary time," and the notion of the unicorn's special relationship to time is mentioned again, but not sustained.  Mauve worries when she first sees the unicorn that she will chase the animal "out of time and back into eternity," for example. Time is a very powerful subject, and so this is one of those centers of gravity that pulls the story in another direction from the main one. It's a false passage the the maze of the narrative. 
2. The unicorn is the reward of God/nature to the pure. The unicorn first comes to Mauve when she is hauling the parts of a cherry tree she's pruned to the curb. Mauve's landlord/roommate Edie has left the tree's health in the hands of God by hanging rosaries on it, but Mauve has "stepped in for God" by taking care of the tree. Is the unicorn, then, like a dryad, a spirit of the tree or of nature, come to Mauve because Mauve is pure of heart and cares for nature? Is Mauve's trash somehow a purer offering to the secular god than that of others? 
3. The unicorn is a symbol of hope in a world that seems like it's mostly dying. If there is a passage in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn" that sort of announces, "This is what the story is about," it's this: "Hope can be agonizing...But you have to keep hoping." The unicorn is haggard and beaten down by eternity, just as we are haggard and beaten down my time, but she ultimately gives birth alongside Mauve, the two sharing a "powerful lifewish in common." Having another child means another consumer, another producer of trash. It might be a stupid thing to do, but Mauve has one anyway, which is an act of foolhardy optimism. 

Too many thematic centers of gravity

These three different meanings of the unicorn aren't like the three possible meanings of "refuse." There isn't a natural tension between them; instead, they occupy three totally different spheres. They don't have enough to do with each other that all of them can be introduced into the story and still keep the narrative moving toward a solitary purpose. The moment one of them becomes the center of the story, the others recede into the background. I can see a critic reading some of the material referring to an alternate time and thinking therefore that this is somehow a central motif in the story or that the story has something profound to say about different ways of experiencing time. It doesn't, though, and the opening line of the story, "Before I started living on extraordinary time, I used to set my watch by Garbage Thursday," contains not one, but two red herrings. A gushing critic would praise the story for its "examination of the subjectivity of time" or something like that, but in fact, the story doesn't do that at all. It refers to this notion--an oft-examined idea in literary criticism and one literary readers would be familiar with--and then relies on the readers to fill in the blanks if they so choose. The magic in a story like this isn't in the story itself. The readers are filling in the lack of magic with their own meaning. 

This is why Caro is in the story, attempting to resolve all these imbalances by insisting any sort of symbolic reasoning is wrong. "You think everything has to mean something," she chides Maude. "But you're not the addressee on the envelope here, OK? Mostly the world is talking to itself." Fine, except the world throughout the story clearly is trying to talk to us, and we are desperately trying to talk back to it. Caro doesn't resolve the tension, then. 

I tend to think the genesis of this "too muchness" in Russell's work is her own outsized talent for observation. A story like this is bursting with moments of keen observation. Mauve is like a skilled comedian; anything that comes across her path is grist for her wit. She looks at the positive pregnancy test and muses, "What a strange way to take the temperature of your future." She riffs on how all pregnancy calendars compare fetus sizes to fruit, then ends with this beauty: "At week forty, the fruit bowl of metaphor abruptly disappeared, and the analogy sutured itself into a circle, beautifully tautological: your baby is the size of a baby." There's a whole schtick about how "perform" is a disconcerting word to hear attached to surgery. All of these individual passages are delightful, but after too many of these, the reader begins to suspect the narrator. This isn't a narrator's voice; it's the voice of an author who sees too many things and can't help herself from pointing them out. I eventually started feeling like Elaine in one episode of Seinfeld:

 

A Russell story is full of brilliant moments that feel like bits, like an observant, witty person is sharing the stored-up observations in her treasure chest. Like a comic's set, though, these often don't have a unifying grand scheme. There's five minutes here on using public bathrooms, then a quick pivot and we're off to the travails of air travel. Occasionally, a very skilled comic can create an entire performance with a unifying theme, but it's rare. Most comedians instead opt for the illusion of unity by ending on a callback joke. The surface unity in a story like this is often nothing more than a good callback joke. 

The unicorn is such a callback joke. So are most of the monsters that appear in Russell's fiction. They're attempts to make a story that is held together in general only by the force of the narrative intellect appear as if its whole is organic. Critics who are only paying attention to surface phenomena see them and think they're reading something that explodes with meaning, when instead, I tend to see stories that are merely pregnant with potential meaning. I mean, they're pregnant as fuck, as in this story that is literally about a pregnancy, but there is sometimes too little urgency to answer a central question and too much joy chasing issues around the center to get to the birth. I don't feel like the story got its start with a burning question about the universe. I don't sense urgency. Instead, I feel like it started with a writer who is good at writing and so she does that. 

My favorite story from Russell was "Madame Bovary's Greyhound," which appeared in the 2014 BASS and which has no magical creatures. In fact, other than its movement into the POV of a dog, there is nothing magical in it at all. It is also the most focused story I've read of Russell's in terms of arriving at a central theme. In this case, the greyhound learns the importance of becoming her own master, which is something her own former owner failed to understand. It has a great last line that feels perfect and earned and complete. Much of her other work feels to me like a symphony with eleven movements. 

I'm certainly not saying Russell is some kind of hack. I won't argue with Karen Carlson for liking the story. I liked a lot of its parts, too. I'm more saying that the author is not being served well by a critical community that seems incapable of seeing magical creatures and finding them anything but, well, magical. Russell's work deserves the reading it gets, but it also deserves serious consideration, which seems to be lacking. Criticism often seems to boil down to either allowing someone into the circle of admired writers or not allowing them in. It seldom offers much in the way of explaining why one should be excluded or what might still be lacking in those approved. Russell is a hugely talented writer, but the iron of criticism that should sharpen the iron of her talent is nowhere to be found.    

The mounting, undeniable backlash against women--by women: "The Children are Fragile" by Jen Silverman

Now Zeus was a womanizer,

Always on the make.

But Hera would usually punished her

That Zeus was wont to take.

-Cake, "When You Sleep" 

I'm taking my sweet-ass time blogging through whatever parts of Pushcart 2023 strike me as worth writing about. That's nice from a stress perspective, but it's bad when Karen Carlson notices something I was going to write about and takes it before me. In this case, she thought to compare "The Children are Fragile" by Jen Silverman to Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure," which we both blogged about when it appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020. The reason Silverman's story reminded me of Gaitskill's is that both, as I put it when writing about "This is Pleasure" a few years ago, are "about how agonizing it can be to determine, in some cases of alleged sexual misconduct, not just whether the person charged is guilty, but how guilty, and whether the degree of guilt ought to matter when it comes to consequences."

Both stories are built around the reactions of an older woman when she hears that a charming, successful older man she knows has been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment. In both cases, they are reluctant to believe the charges, and in both cases, that's partly because they're of an older generation that understood the rules of interaction with men differently. They understood them how Caitlin Flannagan explained them in 2018 when she reacted to accusations by Aziz Ansari's date that he'd been overly aggressive trying to get her to have sex with him. After acknowledging that the articles and books on sex she'd read as a young woman didn't prepare her to be a scientist or a captain of industry like today's women are ready, Flannagan also claims that they did make her generation "strong" in a way that modern women aren't:

But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.

It felt very much like "The Children are Fragile" was responding to exactly this kind of thinking about the younger generation among some older women. In this case, the point-of-view character is the older woman Marsha, who goes by the rather pregnant nickname "Mars," suggesting both the warlike, strong god of war as well as a reversal of the old book on relationship advice "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Mars is definitely not from Venus. One of the things she will not brook is being called "Marsha," perhaps because in "Mars" she is more able to deny her sense of affinity with other women. She's been through a rape in her life, a "survivor" in the current lingo, although she herself hates that particular expression. She instead recasts it, as she does her name, by referring to Greek mythology:

She didn’t think of herself as a victim, but she also didn’t like being called a “survivor”— it felt condescending, like an award given out after battle by the people who had stayed home. When she thought of herself in relation to that event — which was not often — she thought in the terms of Greek melodrama. Oedipus putting out his eyes, Agamemnon punctured with swords, Odysseus exiled far from his home. Something about men in the face of implacable power: they could fight and lose without being weak. She had fought and lost, but she would never agree to think of herself as weak.

Mars has two parallel questions she is dealing with in "The Children are Fragile," and they are linked. Fist, she is hearing one accusation after another being levelled against the charming director of a theater she's known casually. She, too, had seen some warning signs, but nothing definitive, and she was in any event conditioned, as a "stronger" woman of her generation, to not make too much of it. As the accusations mount, she is forced to ask herself whether she should have seen it coming. The second question she has to ask herself is what responsibility she has to protect Sheila, her student in playwriting. Sheila has been complaining about a roommate who gives her "looks." Mars doesn't exactly blow off Sheila's concerns, but she doesn't offer her any useful advice, either. Over time, Sheila is more and more rattled by the roommate's allegedly creepy behavior, and, after writing a string of erratic short plays about murder, disappears from class. Mars makes some effort to make inquiries, but it probably isn't really enough. 

Every time Mars tries to rationalize some behavior that the older generation would have met with "strength," Sheila insists that it should be met with community disapproval and sanctions. This is true from the first moment they discuss the accusations against the theater director, and it continues throughout. Sheila gets impatient and even angry with Mars for using words like "questionable" to describe men's bad behavior instead of "appalling." While Sheila is determined to believe women, Mars rejects "believe women" as a slogan and therefore, like all slogans, not useful. 

Mars' own words as evidence of thematic center

One could think of "The Children are Fragile" in the same sense as "This is Pleasure" as leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the older generation or the newer one is right, but I think the weight tends to lean in favor of the younger generation being, if not totally right, at least less wrong than the older one. The evidence comes in Mars' own words. Early on, when discussing the idea with the soon-to-be-disgraced director of getting exposure for the plays of some of her students, she talks about how important it is, at this stage, to provide them with "encouragement." 

The director responds with the rather Darwinian suggestion that maybe there's too much encouragement, that it might be better to let the kids who are "doomed to write," who would "do it even if they had nothing," come to the fore. Mars responds with,  “But wouldn’t you like to see what those kids can do if they aren’t constantly worried sick about having nothing?” In this case, Mars is explicitly rejecting strength as a requisite for success in life. 

Furthermore, Mars insists twice, which is twice too much, that she "doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think." She means it in one sense, the self-empowered sense of being one's own judge. What she misses, though, is that her own toughness has made her forget about the other sense of caring what other people think, which is known as empathy. In this case, she should be especially empathetic to Sheila, because Mars is supposed to be the older, wiser woman who can help Sheila learn how to navigate the hazards particular to women, especially those in theater. 

The story ends with Mars wondering impotently, after equally impotently making weak attempts to help Sheila, whether she should be looking at things differently. It ends with an "I don't know," but the "I don't know" isn't really ambiguity; it's an indictment. Mars should know. She should know better. Mars thinks at one point about Sheila that she was "capable of a ferocious conviction that Mars herself had not possessed at that age. For this reason, among others, Sheila both irritated and impressed her." Mars' agnosticism at the end isn't ambiguity; it's lack of conviction. 

Women propagating mistreatment of other women

There was an article recently in Vox about the "mounting, undeniable backlash against #metoo." When I saw this article linked on Twitter, I also saw a lot of comments from people who hadn't read it saying things like, "It's about time," and, "I'm glad to see this article, because clearly it's gone too far," etc. The article, though, was actually not critical of #metoo, but was written from a feminist perspective. It claimed that the backlash was inevitable and part of a historical trend. Whenever women began to make advances in society, like they did in 2017, there was always a movement to restrict their rights, especially their rights to earn money or to reproduce freely. The article looked at the overturn of Roe v. Wade as part of the backlash. 

What both "This is Pleasure" and "The Children are Fragile" get at--the latter much more than the former--is the way that the inevitable backlash against women is often coming from women. One of the justices behind overturning the right to an abortion was a woman. As studies on the practice of female genital mutilation show, the forces that keep women from gaining equality aren't always exogenous; often, the forces that keep it in place are from the older generation of women. That's what "The Children are Fragile" is about. In its critique of the "strength" narrative of the older generation, it was responding to pieces like the one Flannagan wrote for The Atlantic. I'm not entirely convinced, actually, that the story isn't also responding directly to "This is Pleasure," which had a more ambiguous view of the gray areas of sexual misbehavior. When she meets with the director early in the story, he tells her it's for pleasure not business, although she can discuss business if she wants. Mars responds, "“I always have business to discuss...but it gives me a great deal of pleasure.” Was this a sly reference to Gaitskill's story? 

The original "women should be stronger when men try to take advantage" proponent. 

Another implication of #metoo

There's one of those "talking past each other" dialogue sequences in "The Children are Fragile" that made me think there might be a better way to communicate what #metoo is all about. Or maybe what the inferences of #metoo are for most men. Most men aren't actually going to force themselves on women to the extent that, say, Harvey Weinsten did. 

I think there is some genuine concern that too much focus on explicit consent might ruin some of the genuine fun of flirting. That might be a bit of what makes the ending of "This is Pleasure" so hard to pin down. To kill off all unwanted advances, we'd probably be killing off some actual wanted ones. There is sometimes a thin line between pleasure and its pain. That's where some of the pushback to #metoo has been coming from, some of it from women. 

When Mars and Sheila were talking about the looks Sheila's roommate was giving him, Mars very often came close to offering helpful advice. She never quite got there, though, because she was focused too much on clearly over-the-line behavior or on clearly communicating feelings about not-quite-over-the-line behavior. Sheila understood that neither was going to happen. If she'd have tried to communicate to her roommate how his looks made her feel, everyone would have said there was no ACTUAL harm done, and they'd side with him. This is maybe one of the most important lessons of the #metoo moment that comes from listening to women's stories. 

There are three levels to male bad behavior that have gotten into the news:

1: Clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power

2: Not clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power, but still pushing it on someone who felt pressured because of a power relationship, and 

3: Behavior that is gray, such as jokes or innuendoes or "bad boy" behavior that some people like, some people feel neutral about, and some people really don't like. As Karen put it in her blog, "there are looks and there are looks." Not everyone agrees on which are which. 

Both "The Children are Fragile" and "This is Pleasure" are operating on this third level, with maybe some of level two. While "This is Pleasure" is a meditation on the ambiguities of level three, "The Children" is about how serious violations of level three can be to the psyche of the offended. Even if violations on this level never go beyond unwanted looks or comments, those alone can be damaging. They may be damaging to some people and not to others, but it's important not to cast this is in terms of "strength." It's especially important to avoid referencing preferences relative to ambiguous gestures and words with a strong/weak dichotomy. Because really, the point for everyone relative to third-level questions is not what is absolutely right or wrong, nor what women should be expected to take or not expected to take. It's a renewed sense of consideration. It doesn't matter if a man should be able to look at a woman if he doesn't touch her or say anything to her. What matters is whether it bothers the woman in question, just as I may have a right to blare my music with my car window down, but I still shouldn't, because it's likely most people in my listening blast radius don't like K-pop much. 

The two considerations of level three behavior that "The Children are Fragile" brings up are that women shouldn't determine how strong other women should be about level-three behavior they don't like, and men looking for unspoken confirmation that their gestures or words are wanted should assume they're not as good at reading signs as they think they are.  

The poetics of patriarchy: "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta

In the past, I've enjoyed blogging through the short stories in the annual Pushcart anthology, probably more than I've enjoyed blogging through Best American Short Stories. The stories in Pushcart have a different feel. They're less likely to be products of the elite of literary fiction. Sometimes, they're by complete newbs, and that gives the volume a rawer, more outlaw feel to it.  

I also approach a Pushcart blog-through differently from BASS. With BASS, I force myself to at least write something about every story. Even if I'm basically passing, I have to at least say why I'm passing. With Pushcart, though, I only do the stories that move me. If that's only three in the whole volume, then I only write about three. There's no pressure. Also, since many of the writers in Pushcart are complete unknowns, unlike the majority of writers in BASS, I tend to avoid writing about a story I didn't like. There aren't a ton of critics out there putting fingers to keyboard about these authors, so why make the one critical piece on their work something negative? There's no point to it. Since I don't like writing negative pieces, the decision to skip those makes the project a lot less arduous. 

So it's unusual that I'm writing about a story from Pushcart I didn't like. I don't actually mean that the story isn't written well. It fulfills very precisely the expectations of our time for what a short story in a literary journal should do. The writer did what she needed to do to get published by a hard-to-get-into literary journal (The Idaho Review). It's precisely because the story is a success at what it is that I felt while reading it like something clicked about why I don't like a certain type of story, one that's extremely popular now and possibly even the default aesthetic for developing writers. What follows is a critique not of this particular story, but of that aesthetic. If this work is such a good example of a particular literary style that I wanted to use it as a springboard for a deeper examination, then it can only be seen as a success.

No ideas but in things

I don't know if William Carlos Williams' dictum of "no ideas but in things" really was a watershed in cultural history, but it feels that way to me. Hardly a writing advice book fails to cite this credo. It fits the aesthetic approach of Ray Carver, who was probably held up as the ideal writer in many graduate writing programs when I was in school. 

Fiction has always featured use of significant details that appeal to the five senses in order to establish setting, tone, mood, and theme. Don Quixote, nearly the first true novel, did it. Homer gave us the wine-dark sea. There's nothing new about stimulating the brain's sensory apparatus through evocative words, but in no-ideas-but-in-thingsism, the things are no longer just setting. They start to take over. We don't have a woods laid out so we can imagine people doing things in it, but rather a woods that contends with the people for our attention. Setting isn't just there to provide a place for characters to do make decisions in. The props are the show. Mood isn't supporting the action, it is the action.

It's appropriate a poet like Williams was the one who bequeathed this idea to us, because it's fundamentally a poetic logic. More precisely, it's the logic of lyrical poetry, rather than narrative poetry. The guiding force isn't the plot, but rather the emotions and feelings of the narrator. We aren't concerned with hunting a deer in the woods, but with a stream-of-consciousness series of sensory impressions that accompany hunting a deer in the woods. The end result for a short story that employs this aesthetic is that you get a story where it can be challenging to summarize the plot. Sometimes, there isn't much of a plot. There's people and the things around them and the feelings those things evoke.

Does this picture get you horny? It does for the main character.

Lists!

That's the effect of the approach in "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta. It's such a poetry-as-story approach, in fact, that its opening lines break into poetry-like line breaks: 

On Wednesday mornings the father hoists someone else’s
       daughter onto his naked lap
       bends someone else’s daughter over the press board motel desk
       flips someone else’s daughter onto her skinny back
       does not think about his own
       will not think about his own.
       His own is younger than this one
       But not by much
       not by enough.

I read a lot of stories in litmags and anthologies that seem ruled more by the logic of poetry, the dictates of language over logic that poetry brings, and the associative and connotative connections of imagery over movement from one plot point to the next. One of the characteristics of these stories is that they're just chock full of stuff, of "things." In an early description of Samantha, the too-young girl the father is having sex with on Wednesdays, we get things that appeal to nearly all the senses: "This one has lavender-pointed toenails and skin that tastes like watermelon candy. She has sticky lips and straight white teeth and when he looks at them he can think of nothing but what they feel like on his nipples." 

One of the frequent characteristics of a lyrical-poem-as-short-story is the list. Lists are a frequent device in poetry. Even more traditionally narrative stories often will resort to mini-lists, often in the form of triplets that the narrator is noticing. In "Ambivalence," though, the narrator is so frequently listing things, the lists begin to take over. "Herewith, a partial accounting of things the father doesn't know," begins one list. In another place, we get a list of things the father doesn't think of when he's banging the young tweaker: "No daughter, no five-bedroom house, no three-car garage...no tennis club membership, no Saturday tee time...No airport lounge priority pas and no NFL season tickets." 

These lists are sometimes of the more common variety, the one of listing things the POV character is noticing. For example, the father is aware of many of the peculiar props present in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where he goes on Wednesdays to have sex with Samantha. He thinks of taking her to a restaurant with "plastic tablecloths, plastic flowers. A small wooden triangle pegged with brightly colored golf tees meant to keep children busy." Soon after, he lists off things he remembers his daughter having put in her mouth when she was young. The story goes way beyond these lists of items in the immediate scene, though. Anything in the story can help build a list. 

Nihilistic realism

Some people really love this poetic device, but at some point, I found it oppressive. By constantly putting the human characters in a world of unending things that can be listed and then including their own behavior among those lists, the story puts human behavior into a category of "things," things that just are. Human behavior is no different a thing from a road. Both include things to be listed. Human behavior cannot transcend, then. It's part of the environment it's playing out in and will only ever get dragged into it.

Because of this, the story ultimately feels more like it is admiring self-destructive sexual behavior in young women and the predatory men who take advantage of them than it is critiquing it. Or, if not admiring it, it is impotently bemoaning it. The tone is almost one of  joy that such things exist, because they give the narrator such exquisite lists to make. There is no thought of building a critique of either men who take advantage of such women or of the women who make youthful bad decisions (as Emma Cline did in one of my favorite short stories), because a critique is an idea, and ideas should only exist in things. Long, relentless, and eventually disheartening (even if perceptive) lists of things. If this is realism, it's realism with a series of nihilistic assumptions lurking behind it. 

Maybe someone will say that if I felt oppressed by the poetic of the narrative, then it succeeded, because women feel oppressed by the sexually predatory men who take advantage of women like these. I'm not so sure. Part of this story reminded me of the HBO series Euphoria, which I watched about ten minutes of and then turned off. (Only to have my daughter watch it on my account, so HBO kept sending me updates about the show.) I don't care if the actors are over 18. They're playing kids--wildly oversexed kids. Don't tell me that if I feel uncomfortable, then the show is succeeding. That show gratifies the very men who prey on young women's immaturity and poor decisions. It gratifies sex offenders. It normalizes behavior that hurts the people who perform it. It's exploitative and so is this story. While Euphoria is exploitative in that it takes teen angst and turns it into a titillating HBO show with lots of T&A, "Ambivalence" is exploitative in that it takes advantage of the poetic possibilities in suffering to luxuriate in those possibilities without offering a roadmap out. Roadmaps out are preachy, didactic. Things listed in sharp and clever detail are smart, modern, objective. 

The revenge of poetry students

This has ended up sounding like a criticism of this story, but it isn't. The story was written under certain aesthetic expectations, and it succeeded in meeting those expectations. It's certainly not the only story to have done this. It was just a clear enough example that the outline of what those aesthetic expectations were became clear to me. Plenty of other stories do what this story did. They find some injustice, some imbalance in the world, some tragedy, and they explore the poetics of its awfulness with a sharp eye and a complete unwillingness to impose any kind of corrective force to it. 

I often think that a decent working definition of literary fiction in the 21st century might be "fiction in which plot is not a primary consideration." Obviously, this definition doesn't work for every story you might find in The New Yorker or The Georgia Review or The Missouri Review. There are still a lot of great stories with plots you could summarize. These are usually my favorites stories. This definition does work, though, for a surprisingly high number of stories. Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream pushes this kind of writing, one in which a story feels like a dream, and his book has been extremely influential. I think a lot of writing programs think they've succeeded when their students begin to write like this.

When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Cris Mazza, once remarked in class that because fiction sometimes sells books and poetry hardly ever does, it's somewhat easier to have an objective discussion about what works in fiction than in poetry. If nobody expects that a poem will ever be read by more than a small handful of award panelists or graduate advisors, then it's hard to know if the poem "works." With a story, though, there's at least some hope that if the story "works," then people will like it. I thought this was a good argument, and it had something to do with my decision to change from a poetry focus to one in fiction. I felt kind of bad for poets, actually. 

But perhaps poets have gotten their revenge by exporting some of their aesthetic preferences into literary fiction. Maybe many of the people writing literary fiction, or the editors of literary fiction, are others who once wanted to be poets. In any event, while I don't necessarily hate every story that conforms to the aesthetics of lyric poetry, I do more readily connect with stories that have at least some plot to them. This story was more of an evocative description of the status quo into which a disruptive force would naturally come in a more traditional narrative structure than it was a tale of people and their trail of decisions.  

Other views: My friend Karen Carlson is actually ahead of me in reading Pushcart. When we do BASS, she's usually behind, meaning I've already stolen all the easy stuff to say about a story. Now I have to follow her, which is going to make it a lot harder for me to have anything original to write. Here's her take on this story. 

The quest for a better kind of lie: "The Last Voyage of The Alice B. Toklas" by Jason Brown

One of the best things about The Pushcart Prize anthology every year is the way the editors choose works which compare or contrast well with other selections in the anthology. By doing this, the anthology isn't so much seventy to a hundred separate, individually-wrapped treats as it is a real snapshot in time of what bright, literary minds were thinking about, arranged in such a way that the stories call unto each other, each to each. There's a conversation. There's even something which is lacking in actual literary society, at least online anyway, which is meaningful divergence of thought. 

The big three anthologies--Best American Short Stories, The O.Henry Anthology, and Pushcart--all strive for diversity. BASS and O.Henry usually accomplish it in a rather rudimentary way, it seems, trying to make sure the identities of the authors meet a number of the intersectional markers: race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. This partially succeeds at its goal of displaying a wide variety of compelling voices, but sometimes it's a little light on the "compelling" part. Pushcart features writers who are usually somewhat less established and less big-name, writers who are still figuring out what they want to say and who therefore might say anything. It's exciting. Pushcart aims for compelling writing first and tends to get diversity in the bargain, while the others aim for diversity first and struggle sometimes to also get something compelling. The writing in Pushcart reads like stories the writers HAD to write, things they'd die if they didn't say. Some writing in the other journals comes across as what a professional writer felt she OUGHT to write. 

Jason Brown's "The Last Voyage of the Alice B. Toklas" did not have Malerie Willens' "Scandalous Women in History" in mind when it was written, but juxtaposing the two, as Pushcart has, makes both stories more interesting. By mining what American literature produced in a given year, the editors have added value to both stories for the reader by making the reader aware of how two stories were in unintended conversation with one another.

So what was this conversation?

Like Willens' story, "Last Voyage" is about that time-honored idea that we have some control over our own realities through the stories we tell ourselves. John Howland is a fifteen-year-old kid living on the coast of Maine with his grandparents. His lives with his grandparents because his mom left for no more apparent reason than she was bored, and his father is gone for reasons the family won't talk about. His family are the stubborn kind of New Englanders one hears about, the kind who refuse to even mention certain words:

"In our family, if you wanted to speak of John Updike, you spoke of “the stove,” not, as Uncle Alden sometimes called it, “the Aga.” Likewise you could say “Lewiston” but nothing about the dowel factory my great-grandfather had bankrupted. Nothing about China Lake, where my father spent most of his time, nothing about my mother, who had gone to live among the Rarámuri of Copper Canyon."

In other words, his family deals with things they'd rather not exist by pretending they don't. It's a fascinating and often somewhat effective human adaptation to an unfriendly reality. John is working a summer job bringing the mail from the mainland to Howland Island, named, you'd think, although it turns out the reason it's named Howland Island is another one of those things the Howland family doesn't talk about. His grandparents spend most of their summers on the island hating the tourists who live around them for driving up their property taxes. 

There's a writer living for the summer in the small house in the back of John's grandparents' place. He gets a letter from his publisher, which starts the action in the story. John is at an age where he's trying to learn for himself how to adapt this habit for re-making the world as he'd like it to be by making things up. He's starting with telling stories about himself, but he's not that skilled at it yet. He tries to convince the writer that he's bonded for the mail he delivers by skiff from the mainland, but the writer's not buying it: "No, you're not. You're a kid. Kids don't get bonded." 

Throughout the story, John learns the art of remaking himself through artful bullshit. He doesn't learn it from the writer. He learns it from his grandfather. Grandpa's got a couple of good, time-tested classic saws he keeps coming back to. John already knows not only how Grandpa tells the stories and that they're fake, he knows how Grandpa tells them. One story is that the giant stove in the kitchen used to belong to John Updike. Another is is that Grandpa went to Harvard with Updike. Others have to do with the boat they take the writer for a tour of the island on, the eponymous "Alice B. Toklas" from the title. 

Grandpa also pulls some new bullshit out of his pocket John hasn't heard before. He convinces the writer he's some kind of bucolic literary scholar. He does this by fobbing off especially insightful phrases concerning Don Quixote to the writer. John later learns that these are all cribbed from Nabokov. The writer is so blown away by Grandpa's literary insights, he encourages Grandpa to write a book. Word then gets out all over the island that Grandpa is writing a book, when in actuality, he's just writing an old-man-crackpot letter to the Tax Assessor of Georgetown, Maine, complaining about how his property taxes keep going up. 

John eventually learns a few tricks from Grandpa. He takes the Ray-Ban sunglasses given to him by the writer and puts them on at the end. They make him feel like a different person, and he decides to actually become a different person, too. When a girl he's been eyeing from afar notices him and asks, "John, is that you?" he responds with: 

"No," I said in a voice I didn't recognize, and voice I'd been waiting to hear. "It's not." 

"Finding your voice" is a pretty common narrative arc for characters, but for John, it's important that finding his voice means actually finding a new one, one that will allow him to break free from his provincial boundaries while still cherishing them. He's learned to re-make himself into what he wants to be by simply believing his own bullshit. 

I could end it there with what is a pretty simple narrative arc, but that doesn't do justice to the story, which is a lot like Updike with its cast of quirky characters interacting with unintended humor and regional flavor. Every line of it oozes with such charm, I felt like one of those annoying tourists reading it, oohing and aahing over every little idiosyncrasy that, to these characters, would have just been their normal life. There's a reason Karen Carlson loved this story so much. I don't usually write much about how enjoyable a story is to read, but the enjoyment and fun of this story was so much up front while reading it, I can't ignore it. The reader gets as swept away as the writer in the story does by Grandpa's tales. It's great regional fiction that can stand with the best American short stories we're all raised on in 10th grade American Lit. It can stand with Twain or Updike or Irving. 

Capitalism might not be the worst thing ever: "Scandalous Women in History" by Malerie Willens

My expectations about this story were wrong twice. First, the title lead me to believe it would make some kind of strong feminist statement, but that's not what the story was at all. Secondly, once I realized it was about a young woman who works at an upscale makeup counter, starting with her first day as she learns the business, I thought it would be a scathing critique of the industry, and maybe of capitalism itself. 

This second possibility hangs on much longer, as "Scandalous Women" doesn't shrink from depicting the false hopes, false claims, and phony science that hangs like fog over the makeup counter. Even the characters' names are false. Kim, the protagonist, is rechristened "Kendra" for her job, while her mentor Dane was actually once Douglas. At the outset, the Remy counter at Saks Fifth Avenue is a place to tell gullible people lies about "intrepid ribosomes and their unctuous promises," to hawk "the soothing emulsion, the stalwart pentapeptide, and the light-deflecting pearl." 

The cast of characters is basically three, with Jade, the manager, thrown in as a stock character. There's Kim/Kendra, who has come to the job after a summer off and a past full of petty theft she learned from her mother. There's Douglas/Dane, who has gone from closeted gay to over-sexualized gay to now semi-balanced gay who is the star of the makeup counter. He always makes customers believe the crap he's saying. Kendra wonders whether they aren't taking advantage of the suckers who come to them, but Dane doesn't give it a second thought. His attitude is that if they walk away feeling better, then they got what they paid for. Dane believes in "whatever helps," and it's clear he thinks that he is, in his way, helping. He himself claims to take anti-depressants, although he's not depressed. He believes in not overthinking things. 

Then there's Nadia, who is from Romania but hates it when people hear that she's Nadia from Romania and think of gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Nadia's mother is the closest thing to a "scandalous woman" the story really gets to, unless we consider Kendra's mother scandalous for the way she stole things. Nadia's mother is a poet and a bit of a political activist in Romania. 

Shopping therapy...works?

So I thought we were all set up for the fake world of the makeup counter to come into conflict with the "real" world, the one Kendra tries to speak up for when she goes out to drinks with Nadia and Dane: 

"Do you ever feel bad?" Kendra asked him.

"About what? Why should I feel bad?"

"I think she means about lying to the people," Nadia said.

"Lying, schmying. The people feel great when they leave me. Everyone knows confidence makes you prettier."

But selling something awful and expensive that you know doesn't work?" said Kendra.

"Please. Nothing works. Name one thing that works."

It's interesting to read a story that sort of takes the side of the dispensers of untruth at a time when so many people are worried about the Barnum-like manipulation of voters right now. 

So I thought we had a triangular relationship between Dane, the apostle of bullshit, and Nadia, who might have enough grounding in the real world to not get sucked into the bullshit, and Kendra, stuck between the influence of the two. I thought the conflict would be about which way Kendra would go. But it wasn't that at all. 

Instead, a note Kendra receives changes the narrative completely. It's a weird note someone left on the counter for her, possibly a secret admirer, although the note is kind of strange as admirer notes go, so it's not really clear what the intention was. The note says things like, "I am the indentation on the pillow just after you've left bed." Or, "I'm the cowlick you comb down, the cleavage you hoist up, the wart that keeps growing back on your thumb." 

Kendra isn't sure what to make of the note. She thinks Dane might have sent it to her and made it look like it came from an admirer just to mess with her, so she repackages it and gives it to Dane, also disguised as a secret admirer note. Dane doesn't seem to react to it, but later, it turns out he gave the note to Nadia, mostly to make her feel better. Which it does. Kendra notices a marked changed in Nadia's behavior: "Her posture seemed straighter and she moved even more briskly than usual. She even spoke more assertive English with her customers." 

Dane confesses to Kendra that he secretly gave the note to Nadia, not knowing (unless he's playing an incredibly brilliant con) that Kendra first gave it to him. Which means Kendra really did get a note from an admirer. (One could, I suppose, concoct a reading in which Jade, the unnoticed manager, is actually the one who wrote the note, because she is playing six-dimensional chess with her employees' psychology, but I don't think that reading adds much to the action.) Kendra realizes that this has been a positive experience all around: 

"Kendra's relief felt like a tropical breeze. She really did have a secret admirer who was not Dane; neither Dane nor Nadia knew the note was originally hers; Dane was kind and generous for giving the note to Nadia: and she had made them both feel desired. They had all three been given the same note."

Kendra, in other words, realizes that it doesn't matter what the truth of the note is if it has the desired effect, which is pretty much what Dane has been saying. When a second note arrives, one that is somewhat incoherent, making Kendra realize her admirer is probably deranged, it doesn't make her value the experience less. Instead, it strengthens her realization that truth is what we tell ourselves it is.

The final scene is Kendra helping an older customer get ready for a date. Kendra makes the woman feel far more ready for her date than she would have been, helping her to overcome feelings of intellectual inadequacy. The woman leaves feeling "dangerous." Kendra has just been told by her manager she's doing a good job. She feels she might have found her calling. She has suffered for a long time from feeling not so much vain, but guilty about her vanity. Her job has taught her that everyone has this problem. Like alcohol in Homer Simpson's proclamation, marketing's promises about beauty are both the cause of, and solution to, all of Kendra's problems.

It's not unlike Joshua Ferris's And then We Came to the End, which seems for much of the novel that it's going to be a harsh critique of advertising, but in the end, makes the most sympathetic character the manager of the advertising agency who decides to keep working at her job through a terminal disease. The narrator says he set out to write an anti-advertising book, but in the end, found that sympathizing with the industry and those in it felt truer. That seems to be the arc of "Scandalous Women in History," too. The name of the story comes from a line of makeup the main characters have to push to customer. The line has colors named for women like Jezebel and Delilah and Eva Braun. It's commercialism at its crassest, using transgressive icons to reinforce conformity to commercial values. But dammit, it works. It makes 58-year-old Bea feel "dangerous." 

It's not a new theme, the idea that humans have a unique ability to shape our own reality by what we tell ourselves about the world, but it's told in a fresh way. (Karen Carlson has more to say here about this theme.) Moreover, it's nice, when the whole world is zigging with "capitalism is killing us" messages, to get a story that zags a bit in the other direction. Whether it's saying capitalism is actually somewhat good and there's a reason we choose to live this way or simply that it's possible, given the inevitability of the system we live in, to find happiness within it, is a matter of interpretation, but either way, it's at least a message not being broadcast much these days. It's the Pushcart Anthology at its best, showing an intellectual independence the other anthologies rarely exhibit. 

Two kinds of fool: "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins

America has a long racial history of wanting minority groups to entertain the majority. The cliche, which remained prevalent in acceptable American discourse up to the mid-20th century, of the black minstrel is an example of this. According to the cliche, black people are intrinsically good-natured, happy, and ready to sing and dance, which white people encouraged them to do for the enjoyment of white people. Given this long history, I assumed, at the beginning of "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins, that the protagonist was a person of color being asked to entertain a rich white family:

"Mrs. Billingsley asks Rachel's mother, not Rachel, if Rachel would like to accompany them to the beach for two weeks. 'There's no television, no A/C. It's almost embarrassingly primitive, but Rachel is just so entertaining. Such a delight. I know she'd make my girls happy.'"

But this is different kind of minstrelsy being forced on Rachel here, one based in class, rather than race. Rachel has come into contact with wildly rich teens Devlin and Davenport Billingsley at a tennis camp--a camp Rachel's mother had to pay for with a credit card--and apparently, Rachel did something there to catch their interest, or at least the interest of their mother. We don't learn exactly what it is she did, but it's clear the two rich girls enjoy experiencing Rachel's "normal" life vicariously. Rachel, who did not want to go but was forced into it, understands her role as a "jester to the elite," someone who can "introduce the joyless to the concept of joy--if not in a way they can experience, at least in a way they can witness." 

The jester, or fool, can work in two ways. The fool can be the butt of jokes, but the fool can also "punch up," as we say nowadays, speaking truth to power through humor in order to get away with saying what needs to be said. The fool can have an important social role by subverting the social order and questioning power structures. 

Rachel doesn't seem to have much power over whether she is going to be a jester, but she might have the ability to control what kind of jester she becomes. Will she be the object of jokes or will she be the one doling out the punishment?

It turns out Rachel's not the only joker in her family. Her father left in order to follow his dream of being a comedian. He seems to be largely unsuccessful at it, working on catch phrases in front of small audiences, some of whom heckle him to "give it up, man." But her father has stuck to it, believing "he deserved--his word--applause." Her father, then, aims to be the kind of jester who punches back, but usually ends up as the punching bag. 

We only see the first day of Rachel's trip with the Billingsleys. They fly by private jet to a private Caribbean island. The Billingsley girls are terrrible--think Kardashian or Hilton-level of decadent and wasted. 

"Devlin and Davenport lean across the narrow aisle to punch one another in the upper arms for a time, back and forth like papier-mahce marionettes, until their arms are red and welted from shoulder to elbow. It's as if both have been grabbed and shaken by a middle-aged lover who's discovered he's been jilted for a pool boy.

'Trucey-trucey?" Devlin asks.

"Vodka juicy," Davenport answers.

Rachel isn't sure how she is going to fulfill her role as designated entertainer for the girls, but her first success leans in the direction of being made fun of rather than making fun of others. She eats while the girls, who are starving all the time so they can one day marry rich men, practically achieve orgasm watching her. After polishing off a huge lunch, Rachel takes three bows as the girls watch.

It looks like it's going to continue like that, with the girls playing a game where they try to say things poor people would say, and Rachel judges whether the things they say are accurate, eating Skittles for their entertainment if they get it right. Then the girls ask what Rachel's father does, a question she dodges by saying he's an entertainer. The girls say that their own father also likes to entertain, throwing parties with magicians or piano players. Once, he brought an owl. Davenport remembers being stunned that the thing was so beautiful. 

The girls then pass out, drunk and high, but Rachel can't stop thinking about the owl. Did it get startled and start to fly around the room? This is the moment of Rachel's transformation. (Karen Carlson looks at this transformation in terms of intrinsic and instrumental values here.) She doesn't want to be like the owl, giving the rich their money's worth while she gets her feathers petted. The denouement has Rachel speaking to Mrs. Billingsley, who is getting hammered in Rachel's bed and trying to tell Rachel to do whatever it takes to marry well. Mrs. Billingsley also asks Rachel to teach her girls something--anything--useful. Rachel, now just annoyed and seeing through the ruined rich for who they are, says she can, then imagines the surf sounds like applause. It seems to me at this point that she's imagining herself one day eviscerating people like the Billingsleys and being applauded for it, turning herself from object of joke to the one dishing it out to those currently laughing at her. Even though it's not a first-person story, one could potentially read the narrative as her origin story of how she came to be the Robin Hood of derision, stealing esteem from the rich to give to the poor. 

A few quibbles

It's a tight story, well-conceived and well-plotted out. The main theme, which asks the reader to answer the question of what kind of jokes you're going to tell to those with everything, is good stuff. There were a few small issues I had with the structure, which I point out more as an example of how hard it is to write a perfect story than I do to suggest the story isn't solid. 

First, the story is cut up into sections separated by line breaks. There's nothing unusual about that, but two of the first three sections have an omniscient POV, navigating between Rachel's mind and her mother's mind. After that, it's all third-person limited from Rachel's POV. Given that we don't keep coming back to Rachel's mother and she's not a character who undergoes any change in the story, it feels a little like cheating to jump inside her head at the beginning in order to flesh out Rachel's world a bit more, only to abandon the mother once she's no longer needed. 

Secondly, Rachel notes at one point that the Caribbean "sounds different from other oceans." If Rachel is, in fact, from a family struggling a bit, so much that tennis lessons set them back, I wonder how many oceans she could have been to and how often in order to be able to compare the Caribbean to them. 

Last, while I understand the principle of punching up, and the Billingsleys, as the worst form of America's debauched rich, deserve it, the story seems to rest a little too easily in the notion that rich people turn out to be morally reprehensible. My own experience is that while it would be nice to think the rich are always repugnant, the fact is that rich people often turn out to be really wonderful people. When you have the luxury of not worrying about how you're going to make ends meet, you have time and space to develop things like empathy. It's us who scrap for everything with each other who have a hard time being magnanimous sometimes. Rich people aren't the ones who are astounded owls even live somewhere other than a forest in Germany. They're the ones using their wealth to save the owls, because they went on some amazing vacation as kids and have never forgotten their encounter with the owls there. 

Those are minor things, though, and don't take away from my admiration for how the story said so much with so little space. 

Of Mice and Men until the end: "General: Unskilled" by Ryan Eric Dull

Ryan Eric Dull pulls off something rare in his short story "General: Unskilled." Many stories have images, metaphorical language, or bits of dialogue that are central to understanding the themes of the work, but Dull goes one step further: he actually provides a key within the story of how to read it. Mikey H., the central character, is going about his day industriously picking up as many odd jobs as he can through the app "Taskr." He's the fourth highest-rated freelancer on Taskr in the "General: Unskilled" category, and he's working as hard as he can to move up to third. 

The reader is already expecting something to go horribly wrong. We've been set up for it from the opening paragraph. He's carrying around an incredibly delicate statuette of a saluki that he's got to keep safe throughout his day of running around, meaning the reader has to sweat out the whole story knowing there's a Chekhov's gun on the table. Also, he listens to podcasts of questionable validity telling him to be positive at all times. He's a true believer in the notion that you can make your life better through hard work, which means, we've all been taught to believe, that all his hopes are about to get dashed. I was actually reciting the line about the best laid plans of mice and man aft ganging agley as I was reading. I was expecting an angry treatise on the impossibility of making it in American capitalism for the working guy stuck in the gig economy. (Karen Carlson does some interesting things with the saluki as symbol in her reading of this story.) 

A saluki. I had to look it up. 

One of the jobs Mikey takes is a research subject at UC Irvine. He's got a bunch of electrodes on his head, and he's supposed to say lines given to him, things like, "I hope that we will work together in the future." Only when he says the lines, he's supposed to imagine he's talking to people suggested by the researcher. Pretend he's saying it to a thirty-five-year-old man identified as Pacific Islander. Pretend he's saying it to a veteran. He asks the assistant what they hope to learn from the experiment, and she replies, "We don't know what we're going to find out...That's why we're running the experiment." 

The words Mikey has said might show you one thing and they might show you another, but you have to let the experiment work itself out before you know what they show you. Which is exactly how to read this story. The same opening might be setting you up for a commentary on capitalism and the futility of the bootstraps dream, but it might also be telling you something else. You have to read and delay your judgment until the end to find out. 

Because at the end, it's not Of Mice and Men. Mikey never gets his comeuppance. Instead, the story is something of a paean to the kind of worker we don't think of much, but who is a critical part of everyone's life at some time. It's a Whitmanesque ode to the laborer, in this case, the one-gig-at-a-time laborer the modern world has created. 

The narrative celebrates Mikey's resourcefulness. It compares him favorably to doctors and lawyers, who are capable of pulling off dollar-a-minute quickie consults in their portion of Taskr, whereas allegedly "unskilled" jobs tend to take a lot more time to complete. (Actually, it's usually Mikey himself who has to sing his own praises, but since he proves himself right and nobody else is going to notice his merits, nobody could fault him for this.) 

Mikey is disregarded by the world. Taskr policy tends to dehumanize him, not allowing him to accept handshakes from clients, which forces him to deflect the naturally offered handshake with a thumbs-up. When he discovers that the research assistant has picked the top-rated people from "unskilled" for her experiment, he asks whether picking the top-rated people might not throw off the data, but she just shrugs and says she doesn't "think it's relevant." To the assistant, being a top-rated unskilled laborer doesn't show any real ability, and therefore it's not even worth considering when looking at the data.

Mikey returns the world's disregard by pitying all of us working stiffs. He congratulates himself for how well he understands human nature, One of his clients has asked Mikey to help him practice for a job interview by asking him standard interview questions. Mikey can't help feeling sorry for "...these supposedly ambitious people, these credentialed, meritorious people, believing they had to beg unworthy largesse from the polished, perfumed Big Time." Mikey tries to help the guy to be more confident, but he runs out of time. 

So our experiment is this: the world sees Mikey as "unskilled," not worthy of treating with respect, not worth considering much at all, really, and likely to get chewed up by the system. Mikey sees himself as free, as highly skilled, and on his way up in the world. Which is the right hypothesis?

I kept assuming the world was right, but just like in sports, where they say, "That's why they play the game," here, there's a reason to actually finish the experiment. In the end, Mikey gets a callback from the guy who did the mock interview with him. The guy's having some kind of a breakdown. Instead of it turning into a disaster, Mikey handles it like the decent stand-in for a therapist he believes he is. Mikey has proved his own thesis: "I know what people want...I have spent over 980 hours helping people. I have studied human psychology. I have a 4.6-star weighted rating and in excess of 115 positive written reviews. Can you get in excess of 115 positive written reviews if you don't understand people?" 

Mikey might eventually be proven wrong. He might get sick, and his lack of quality health insurance may ruin him. He might get in an accident driving all over town. He might get attacked by a lunatic he has gone to help, or his rating might get ruined by an impossible customer. The story's not about how all the promises of capitalism are true. It's about showing the people who are forgotten or overlooked by capitalism their due respect. The advice Mikey listens to might be suspect, but I think we all know people whose positivity really does make up for a lot of other shortcomings. It's not a completely unrealistic portrait. 

Dull couldn't have known, of course, that this story would be read at a time when we've all, I hope, come to recognize how essential many workers we've overlooked are. But no story in the three big anthologies (Best American Short Stories, O.Henry, and Pushcart) this year is more immediately relevant to the society reading it than this one. 

What doesn't kill you makes you bi-curious: "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins

There's a temptation while reading the first few pages of "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins to write it off as another story about a privileged kid living out what will later become their "what I learned on my study abroad about the rest of the world" essay for law school. Megan is a twenty-one-year-old virgin in Spain, clueless in Spanish and clueless in love, whose biggest decision seems to be which of the twin nephews of her host mother she's going to let deflower her. During the year I spent as a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review, I probably saw a hundred of those stories come in. I was quite prepared to hate it and write about why I hated it.

But the story is aware of the privilege of the narrator. Meg is herself somewhat aware of it, and becoming more aware, but the story frames Meg's privilege in context in a way that Meg herself isn't quite yet capable of. Meg meets Elena, a double-expat by way of both America and Colombia. Meg can notice that Elena doesn't share all of the privileges Meg does, although Meg doesn't know the whole story of why. Whatever Elena's circumstances are, Meg interprets them as as a thing to respect: "I sense a point of some terrible loss. It's that intolerance for self-pity, the brittle joy I've only ever seen exhibited by people who have suffered, their optimism not so much an outlook on life as a mode of survival. Unlike me, I decide, Elena is tough." 

One could read this as Meg idealizing those less fortunate than her, seeing them as the world's wretched refuse made noble through suffering. I'd think that, too, if it weren't for the fact I've spent a fair amount of time around the African migrants who make a cameo appearance in this story later. The fact is that I've never met one of these refugees who wasn't unreasonably optimistic. If life has stacked the deck against you and you still want to survive, then you really--to use the title of a quack self-help book from decades ago--can't afford the luxury of a negative thought. Meg's observation that those who have suffered have become resilient isn't just the blinders of privilege. It's a generally true observation, and Meg is a sharp young person to have made it.

I don't want to fetishize suffering. I just know I've met a fair number of people who were on ships like this, and never met one who didn't smile a lot. 

Meg does what many young people do, then, and looks to suffering as a way to become tough herself, but she'll spend the rest of the story learning about the subtleties of suffering's mechanisms. If Meg is the character showing privilege, and the refugee family that shows up at the beach is the far end of suffering so great Meg can't even begin to imagine it, Elena is somewhere in the middle. Her father died when she was a girl, and she was molested by her father's identical twin uncle. At least, she tells Meg this, although she later says she made it all up, which, whether it really happened or not, makes whatever Elena's current situation is seem worse. Elena flits from relationship to relationship, and is dodgy about all of Meg's questions. (Karen Carlson focuses more on the unreliability of the narrative in her reading of this story here.)

Meg conflates her belief that suffering will make her stronger with her painful desire to get her first sexual experience out of the way. She expects her first time will hurt, but she wants to go through the pain so she can feel wiser and more worldly. While she and Elena share a beach vacation together, Meg gets burned, but the two keep repeating the refrain that "it'll turn into a tan," a mantra that reflects the belief that there is a reward for suffering. 

But Meg will discover two caveats to the "suffering brings rewards" axiom. When she finally has sex, with a waiter she meets at a bar, she anticipates pain, but finds "there is nothing besides a silence in my stomach like a fast-growing ink blot, the last thing I'd expected." Not all experiences she will learn from are going to hurt. They might also not feel great. Most experience is just experience. 

In her obsession with the nobility of suffering, Meg also misses her opportunity to alleviate some of it. She and Elena come close to sexual intimacy on their last night of their vacation, but the moment inexplicably passes. Instead of staying with Elena, whom Meg has just realized she wants badly, she goes to a party with the waiter from the restaurant. The friendship between Meg and Elena ends the next day, and Elena presumably continues on with whatever series of bad choices she's been making.

There's an image that gives the story its title. The Almadraba is the name of a fishing technique used to catch tuna back in the day before commercial rigs ran the traditional fishers away. This technique only caught the strongest fish, while the weaker ones were thrown back and given another chance. 

There's a cliche some religious people like to cite, that "God will only give you what you can handle." This leaves people who haven't had a life that's been all that difficult feeling like they must be weak, because the universe spared them grief. To people like Meg (and me) fortunate enough to not be caught in life's Almadraba net, there can be feelings of survivor's guilt, or the notion that we, too, ought to be given our share of misfortune. But Elena, made wise enough by real suffering, sees through this temptation. She asks of the person explaining the technique what the weaker fish are given another chance for. "To get caught later?" She asks. 

Suffering doesn't come equally, but it will come when it's your turn. You don't have to go looking for it, and there are ways to learn without it. Focusing too much on it accomplishes nothing but make you less able to address the suffering already going on in the world. 

The Marquis de Sade learns to code: "Hi Ho Cherry-O" by Becky Hagenston

When I first finished reading Becky Hagenston's economically told "Hi Ho Cherry-O," I found it fun and interesting, but also difficult to put the pieces of it together into a satisfying "what's it all about" kind of way like I tend to strive for. Even after a second reading, it felt to me like there were a couple of contending readings all at play in the story, competing with one another for primacy, like the noisy children playing twentieth century board games that form part of the backbone of the narrative. Is it a story about alienation, featuring a robotic Bartleby the Scrivener who decides he's prefer not to do the work he's asked to do? Is it a story about how the future may come apart as interactions switch from in-person to virtual, in which board games of the past are a symbol of the good-old days? Or is the commercialization and false happiness of those board games itself the genesis of where it all went wrong? 

The only way I've been able to tease out which of these competing readings is what the story is really about is to do something fairly artless. Rather than preserve the original order of the narrative, if I rearrange the parts, keeping everything there but moving the pieces around in order to form a more obvious but less interesting story, it becomes a little harder for the main theme to hide. 

Our unnamed, first-person narrator lives in a futuristic world in which many people have become so fond of virtual life, some of them have abandoned the physical world altogether. (Karen Carlson talks here about whether we should call this future world a dystopia.) Those who do abandon their physical selves live in a "Home for the Disembodied." The narrator's husband, who is also unnamed, works as a counselor in one of these homes, meaning his commute to work consists of slipping into the virtual reality station in the couple's bedroom. Inside virtual reality, he has another family, where he is married to an actress and they have triplets. He still lives in both the physical and the virtual world, but there are hints he might be slipping permanently into the virtual one. 

The narrator is working on her dissertation, presumably for an advanced academic degree. Against the advice of her dissertation director, she is studying 20th century board games. The director suspects the narrator's interest in the subject stems from her lost childhood. The narrator's parents lived in a Home for the Disembodied, which meant the narrator had to grow up in an orphanage. Although the narrator was able to have some interaction with her parents by going into virtual reality to see them, her parents ultimately deleted themselves even from the virtual world when the world scared them too much.

The director doesn't use these words, but the narrator suspects the director's concern is that this project will do nothing more than force everyone to "be reminded of what we can't get back." This seems to apply to both the narrator, trying to "get back" her lost childhood, but also to society, trying to get back, possibly, to a more corporeal and "real" existence.  

Bartleby the Robot

The narrator has a couple of methods she employs for her research. One is interviewing folks in nursing homes, during which she sometimes will perform brain scans to find traces of memories of playing games. The other is to search through data, although there seems to have been some sort of ecological disaster or series of disasters that destroyed a lot of the old data. To help with her data searches, the university has assigned her Wendell the service robot, who is, significantly, the only character in the story given a name. Wendell is supposedly programmed to make the narrator's life easier, but he seems less than thrilled with his work. Or, perhaps, he is more thrilled by masochistic impulses. He (I'll use the masculine pronoun for no other reason than his name is Wendell) continually asks the narrator to perform painful and humiliating acts on his body. (Or at least they would be painful if Wendell weren't a robot.) These acts crescendo from light to heavy in the story, from, "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour" to, "Cut me with a knife that will leave a mark" to, "Tell me you hate me because I'm stupid. Tell me I should drown myself in a toxic lake."

The narrator's research must be going well, because nothing is more 20th century than a sassy robot who seems to suddenly come to life.

At first, the narrator refuses, mostly because she's a polite, caring person. She's so polite, in fact, she doesn't press her husband too much about the sex he sometimes has with his virtual-world wife, even though the narrator and her husband have not had sex in the real world for a long time. But the more Wendell insists she harm him, the more she realizes it's scratching an itch she didn't know she had. When she chokes Wendell, she keeps going after the robot says she can stop. When she insults him, she says more awful things than he asked her to say.

Not a malfunction

One is tempted to read Wendell as malfunctioning much like Bartleby the Scrivener did when he could no longer handle a redundant job. One could read this whole story as a commentary on how society used to do things like play board games together face-to-face, and now the whole world is virtual, and it's alienating and dehumanizing, so dehumanizing that even the robots who are built for the boredom can't take it. But there are reasons to doubt this reading. For one, the narrator finds that, contrary to the commercials she finds that the children playing the games are "very, very happy children," and also "very white and dimpled (who) mostly wear stripes," the memory scans tell a different story. They recall fights over the games and the correct rules. (Who hasn't had an argument over which house rules to Monopoly are the right ones?) The pre-virtual and pre-ecological disaster past wasn't idyllic. What we've lost isn't a better way of living, it's just a realer way of living. 

Twice the narrator questions the functioning of the robot. Once, she asks Wendell, "Who programmed you?" The robot responds, "I'm programmed to work for you." Another time, the narrator asks the university if she can replace Wendell, and the university is shocked by the request. "The robot was programmed to make your life easier," they say. It's possible to read these as absurd replies that are clearly contradicted by reality, but what if we read them as true? What if Wendell is behaving the way he is because what the narrator really needs is to learn to slash and scream a bit, to get rid of her polite manner, which is itself a form of virtual reality thrown over her truer, more carnal self.

This seems to be supported by the narrator's epiphany. We know it's an epiphany because she all but tells us it is, right after throwing Wendell in the closet for the last time: "Something is happening, a feeling like when my parents taught me math problems and finally, finally, I could solve them." Immediately after this, she tries to have sex with her husband in the real world. When he refuses, she says it's "fine," but then she starts thinking of more horrible things she can do to Wendell. 

I believe the weight of evidence leads to this story being mostly about how the narrator has decided to choose a corporeal existence over a false, less frightening virtual one. She has said in conversations with her husband that she doesn't want to raise kids in a Home for the Disembodied, she wants them "here, in the flesh," but her husband says it's "too dangerous." After giving it another try at the end to coax her husband back out of his virtual life, she takes an internal turn toward a the life of the flesh. True, at that point, it's only planned--she thinks of more awful things she will do to Wendell--but it's nonetheless decisive. Wendell's programming has figured out that this is what it takes to give the narrator what she needs. Through sado-masochism, Wendell has managed to baptize her into the life of the body she always knew she wanted. It may not be a return to some halcyon, Edenic past. Humanity went into virtual retreat because the real world was scary. But for her, it's like she's discovered the rules to the game after only looking at the box for years. The last two words of the story, "I've won," say a lot about how the story is programmed.