I'm 90% sure the title isn't ironic: "The Pleasure of a Working Life" by Michael Deagler" (O.Henry Awards 2025)

It's a good idea in general to be on the lookout for irony when you're dealing with a title as triumphant-sounding as Michael Deagler's "The Pleasure of a Working Life." One good reason to be wary is that's exactly often how good literature works. You think you're going to get a paean to working-class life, and maybe the story does dangle some distractions at you to get you to think that's really what it's about, but really, it's about how capital takes advantage of this very idealization of working life in order to extract maximum value from labor without paying a fair wage in return. I was especially on guard for this because "capital takes advantage of labor" seems like the more likely political stance a story in a literary fiction anthology would take. 

But I think that actually, the opposite is happening. I think the story is using the instinctive wariness of irony among its readers, coupled with a number of characters who are skeptical about the value of a working life, to throw the reader off. We are expecting another takedown of capital, but really, the story is, without offering any real opinion on the battle between capital and labor, simply reaffirming an old belief in the value of work.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker

An occupation is given for almost every character in "Pleasure." Rather than being dehumanizing, reducing people to the work they do, this has a humanizing effect. Nearly everyone in the story gets to demonstrate at least some level of individuality, and the means by which they do it is primarily through work. Here are some of the people, and the work they do:

-Gary Monihan, the main character, who delivers mail until bad health forces him to run the small post office in Kilntown, PA. Gary could be seen as alienated labor. He never really liked carrying mail, and he always wanted to do something else, like write.

-Chuck Feeney, Gary's friend who is higher up in the post office, and who tries to advise Gary on how to be politically savvy. 

-Gary's pair of malcontent employees at the Kilntown post office, Marla and Alondra. Alondra complains more, but Marla outdoes Alondra in terms of malfeasance, as she eventually gets caught trying to pull off a worker's comp scheme.

-Adman Jeremy Krukowski, who fashions himself a wheeler-dealer but who seems mostly to be bad at his job. He wears loud suits. He imagines he's an old-time business man, making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, but he is mostly just failing, and his wife has noticed. John Candy would have played him in a movie, if John Candy had ever wanted to make the jump from comedy to tragi-comedy. 

-Gary's wife, Claire, who keeps books for a screw and bolt manufacturer, along with their daughter Caitlain, who has a degree in communications and their son, Colin, who works in medical software along with his significant other. 

-Unnamed construction workers Gary sees through his window as they work on a ditch. 

-The nuns Mary Elizabeth and Agnes Marie, with whom Gary makes jokes. 

-Two unnamed postal employees, one of whom seems to really love his job.

"Pleasure" acknowledges that work is work

One of the red herrings the story throws at readers that might make them think this is actually critical of the idealization of work comes when Gary looks out the window of the Kilntown post office. (Even the name of the tiny town where Gary works gets its name from the kind of work that was once done there.) He sees construction workers. He imagines some ill-informed people thinking that it might be nice to work outside on a day like today, and he extrapolates to something he also heard when he was carrying the mail:

For thirty years, people had said to Gary, "At least you’re getting exercise," even as he stood before them in all his heaviness, growing wider by the season. It was a hot day for early May, with the sort of heat that a person walking in and out of buildings might mistake for beautiful weather. Anyone who had to dig a ditch would never mistake a hot day for anything other than what it was.

I've heard similar complaints from people I knew who worked outdoors. Everyone sees them outside on a sunny, sixty-eight-degree day and thinks, oh, I wish I had your job, but they don't notice when it's a hundred and muggy or when it's four below. People do have a tendency to imagine jobs are better than they are, especially when they're jobs they don't themselves do. Everyone envies teachers being off in the summer, but anyone who thinks this is unfair is welcome to go become a teacher if they want, and yet few do. Jeremy the adman think Gary's life as postmaster seems pretty good, because Gary has enough time to sit and read books, but Jeremy wasn't there all those years when Gary was slogging from one house to the next, slowly getting bad hips. Jeremy comments on how it would be great to slow down like Gary does, but does he? No, he prefers to keep on keeping on with his get-rich-quick schemes that don't pan out.

 

"Pleasure" doesn't ignore the cold and hot days. It doesn't overly glamorize work. Its characters go to their jobs with debilitating medical conditions, like lupus, a herniated disc, and diabetes. They struggle with seeing the meaning in all of it. They feel alienated, because they can easily imagine things they'd rather be doing. Gary acknowledges that there are seasons in life, and some of them, like when you've got young kids and you're struggling with work and family, are the hard part of life, and there's just no getting around it being hard.

"Pleasure" manages to avoid both extremes of work as either paradise or purgatory. 

But work still has value, and it might even be allowable to enjoy it

In spite of the very real challenges of work, "Pleasure" still holds out hope that a working life can be a pleasure without irony. It shows us a number of ways people deal with the hardships of a working life, all of which I'm sure we have all seen examples of in real life, and all of which, on a given day, I'm sure I've done to some extent. There is the complainer in Alondra, who never meets with a work condition she can't kvetch about. There's the scammer Marla, who gets tired of seeing her cousin make what looks like easy money, and decides to try to make some of her own. There's the dreamer Jeremy Krukowski, who thinks the key to making working life succeed is to have the right connections, leading to the right golden opportunity. There's even the "I love my job" guy, shredding the postcards at the end, and the woman with him, who seems to enjoy the social aspects of work, along with her frequent smoke breaks. 

Then there's the main character, Gary. Gary was a guy who slogged ahead, in spite of not wanting to, and near the end of his career, while his old, broken-down body is struggling to shovel snow out of the parking lot, he chastises himself for not having picked one of the other strategies: 

He had been a fool to think there would be an early departure, a special dispensation that would excuse him from his work, his real work, before they had gotten everything they needed from his body. He ws only--had only ever been--a set of arms and feet, a back to lift and haul. A shoveler. A carrier like his father. A smarter man would have played his hand better. Cut corners, made a fuss, found a scam. He'd lacked the imagination for that. 

This is a nearly Marxist way of viewing his labor. He's been a schmuck, used by callous, cynical capital, who saw him only as an expendable bag of bones to be exploited until there was no more value to be squeezed from him. Against such a view of labor, it's natural to think it's okay to pull off a worker's comp scam, or just to have been as underproductive as he could get away with, complaining and taking smoke breaks as often as possible. 

Community and solidarity

But Gary's father, who had also been a mail carrier and who originally got Gary his job, had an entirely different way of looking at work. His father, on the last day he carried mail, put a letter in the mailbox of every customer he had served. The letter was all about how his job had at times been difficult, but "the people on his mail route were a source of fulfillment." Gary's father had considered being among these people to be "the pleasure of (his) working life." 

There are two senses the story gives us in which work may not be utterly futile. By far, the biggest is the way works makes us part of the community we serve. When we ring a register, dig a ditch, or build software, we become part of the lives of the people our labor serves. Gary learned about the letter his father wrote when one of his father's former customers gave it to Gary at his father's funeral. Gary is later astonished at how meaningful it is to the family of a woman he once delivered mail to that he went to her wake. "He delivered mail to Mom for ten years!" the son announces. When the adman dies, Gary cannot understand why his wife thinks he should go to the funeral. He wonders why anyone would care that he sold stamps to the dead guy, but his wife thinks it might matter to the family. Most of us never get to achieve immortality through fame or far-reaching deeds, so the closest we get is in the links we make in the work we do every day. If we repaired a driveway so well it'll still be in good shape three owners of the house from now, that's all most of us get. In Gary's case, he's been fortunate in that by delivering mail, he's impacted a wide number of people in a small way every day. His work has an effect in ways he can't quite see, down to even the (presumably unemployed) homeless people who sleep in the warmth of the post office he now heads. 

Work binds employee to customer, but it also binds one employee to another. When Gary is out struggling to clear the sidewalk, he hears the "sympathetic scrape" of a shovel from the McDonald's parking lot as another, much younger worker with his whole working life ahead of him struggles through the same task. Through work communities are brought together, but also there is a universal solidarity of working people that is made stronger. Work sucks, but it sucks for the guy next to you in the same way it sucks for you, and so by working, you join a family of people worldwide who are trying to get from one day to the next. 

I don't think we HAVE to come to an especially rosy picture of work by the end. We don't have to be the "just happy to be here" guy at the end of the story, the one who drives us all crazy to be around in our jobs. It's understandable if we spend most of our working lives wishing we could be doing something else, if we regret the time not spent with family, the time not invested in doing activities that better our spirits. A college professor of mine once said that we are taught that there is dignity in work, but in reality, there is only dignity in labor. We don't have to abandon our critiques of capitalism as wage slavery, but neither should we shut out all possibility of finding some meaning in work. Gary, who spent much of his life wanting to be a writer, finally dedicates himself to reading during his easy postmaster job, and he finds that it, too, is work. He eventually gets better at it, as all people do at just about anything they stick with, but he seems to miss the point. The final lines of the story are of Gary having meant to sent his customers a letter like the one his father sent, but he forgot, and when he thought of it, the moment had passed. Gary's moment of finding something redeeming in his working life, some pleasure, has almost passed him by, too. 

Possible objections

I can see a reader with deep Marxist commitments, or possibly just one who really hates their job, finding fault with the story.  Gary's father was a boomer, and work paid back boomers much better than it did future generations. Gary's job is also a throwback, one of the few jobs that still provides a pension, that has little chance of a layoff, and which accommodated Gary when his health became poor. Most people don't have jobs that good anymore, and if they do, it's only because labor fought for those conditions and capital hasn't yet been able to wrest those benefits back yet. Work still often consists of the many being taken advantage of by the few. 

I don't think "Pleasure" totally avoids those issues, and to the extent it does, it's because it's dealing with work less as a philosophical and political issue than as a close-to-home issue nearly all of us have to face day to day, starting often from the moment we wake up. It's not looking at work primarily from a social perspective, from from an individual one, asking not how to make work better for most workers, but how to survive your job as you find it today. I don't think every story needs to examine every aspect of the themes it's working with in order to succeed. "Pleasure" is a good reminder that the thing most of us spend more time doing than anything else still has some possibilities for enjoyment.

Fear, power, and the fear of power: "That Girl" by Addie Citchens

When we first meet her, Theo is beneath an awning on a porch that almost acts like a cave in which she is hibernating. "Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street." It's a place of retreat and safety from "the street," where dangers lurk. Theo is in her early teens, about to arrive at a point in life where she cannot hide from danger anymore. Some dangers, in the form of her mother, Jane, who occasionally hits her, have already come to her, although Jane's recent marriage to Roger has temporarily tamed Jane's violent streak. Still, Theo prefers places of quiet retreat, just as she feels more comfortable reading inside her own head, where words make sense, to reading out loud, where she has a stutter. 

Shirlee first appears on the street in front of her house, where Theo is spending the summer reading on the porch, and this is the moment when Theo realizes she is lonely and longs for some kind of connection to the world outside the cave of isolation. Whether Shirlee is--as Jane believes--herself one of those dangers of the street outside the cave, or if she merely brings knowledge of those dangers, she eventually comes into Theo's sanctuary on the porch, rather than tempting Theo to come outside. This is a pattern that will repeat itself. There are two ways to end the isolation of being in a room alone. One is to open the door and leave, the other is to open the door selectively to others so they can come in. Theo much prefers the second method, perhaps because it feels safer to her, but as any cyber security expert will tell you, leaving ports open in a firewall, while necessary in order to be able to do fun stuff like watch videos and chat with people, also leaves you vulnerable to threats. 

Theo experiments with various possible apertures to take her outside her cave of safety. There are books. Theo first reads an unnamed story "about England in the First World War" with Shirlee, finding, to her surprise, that she is no longer stuttering when reading in Shirlee's presence. Her first attempt at letting someone into her zone of safety seems to have helped her out of isolation. There are Roger's songs that he plays when he comes home, forming a diegetic soundtrack to the story. But the main doors she leaves open are literal ones for Shirlee to sneak into the house, first during the day when Jane is gone, and then later during the evening so they can do "secret, sweet stuff" with each other that one can only do at night. 

The second and third books are a book about murderers she selects to entertain Shirlee with and a romance novel she hopes to read when she is forced to go to Bible study. The book about murders is a good example of a door she leaves open into her life that brings both pleasure and fear, as she and Shirlee do, as expected, enjoy reading it together, but once she's read it, it leaves Theo worrying about murderers. One night, when she leaves the door open for Shirlee to sneak in, Theo worries that a murderer might sneak in first, showing she has realized the vulnerabilities that leaving portals open into your life entail.

She briefly imagines, along with Shirlee, taking the fight to the threat by hatching a plot to kill men who would otherwise do violence to women. Beyond the book, Shirlee has already learned about the threat from men when her principal molested her. Their plot involves luring men to let them into their cars, where they would then kill them, but Theo finds herself not up to breaking down the doors into the lives of others. When she thinks of carrying out the plan, she trembles with "fear, and power, and the fear of power." 

Shirlee comments more than once that Theo is a "scary ass" (meaning scaredy-cat) or a "scary Mary," because Shirlee is much less afraid of breaking doors down to go get what she wants. When they go to the house of an older boy to get pot in exchange for sexual favors, Shirlee walks in without fear, while Theo can't even wait for Shirlee to reappear from the back and has to leave the house, locking herself out in the process, and then stumbling back home where she barely manages to let herself back into safety. Theo is curious enough to let others in selectively, but she also knows her mind enough to know when a new adventure is too much for her. 

Icarus doesn't fall but he does get the door to his room taken off

The threat of Jane is kept at bay for most of the first two-thirds of the story, because she is too busy being happy with Roger to take much note of Theo. We will later realize that Jane, helped out by tattling from older cousin Keita, has half-suspected that Theo was running around with Shirlee, including the suspicion that Theo was a "bulldagger" or "dyke," which seems to upset Jane more because of how it would appear to the church-going crowd than anything. Jane breaks into Theo's room when Shirlee is there, and after Shirlee runs away, she attacks Theo with an extension cord. Theo curses herself and Shirlee for getting greedy and bringing Shirlee over too soon, but the worst effect of them flying too close to the sun isn't the bruises Theo gets. It's that Jane has Roger take off the door to her room. Now Theo has no ability to control who enters her quiet inner space. She has no quiet inner space left, no interior life. It's all laid bare to everyone. It's the personal space equivalent of being completely hacked, where the hackers now have access to all your information.

Worse for Theo, the hackers, in this case Jane, have shared that information with everyone. Everywhere Theo goes now, from her aunt's day school for people with developmental issues to Bible studies, people already know why Jane has concocted a strict summer schedule for Theo to keep her out of trouble. 

Lacking any ability to keep others out of places in her life she doesn't want them, Theo is reduced to a space somewhere between fatalism--wondering if she's condemned to hell or if some people just have to live out hell on Earth--and impotent fantasy, promising herself that she will run away when she is sixteen or have her mother put into a nursing home when Jane is sixty. She has one opportunity to run out of a literal door at Bible study, but she declines, and instead return to class, holding her hands over her lower abdomen in a way that leaves Brother Dobbs guessing what the gesture means. Making Brother Dobbs unsure if she has bowel troubles or menstrual cramps is the closest she has to masking her interior life at this point.

Is Theo closer to making a step forward by the end?

One could read the ending as another form of Theo's fatalism. The two girls, who have been a rare portal into happiness for one another, are not going to be able to be together, and that's that and life sucks. Theo shouts her pet name for Shirlee into the darkness, but Leelee is gone. 

But maybe Theo has gone through a transformation, one that might help her prepare for life with some kind of self-fulfillment. She has realized that the spirit resides "between the skin and the muscle," and while an "invisible razor" has been cutting her spirit loose, Theo feels this as a bit of a liberation, because "her skin had been so tight that it had been smothering her spirit." In other words, something about the ordeal has freed her spirit. When Shirlee comes to the house at night one last time, Theo herself goes out the door to meet her, not even taking a minute to put shoes on. This is a significant step for her, as it signals a movement from passivity to actively claiming what she wants. Moreover, the final sentence of the story has Theo calling after her friend, but this time, in her head. She has reestablished her ability to have an interior life separate from that which everyone can see. She's going to need the ability to keep her private thoughts private if she's going to survive long enough to get out of the house. 

This ability to keep thoughts within herself has allowed her to reclaim the phrase "that girl," which is the title of the story, from Jane. Jane has used it as a curse, "that girl" who is threatening to corrupt her baby. But Theo uses the phrase to recall the good that Leelee brought to her: "No one would ever cup Theo as tenderly as that girl had." This isn't the power to bring retribution on all would-be evil-doers, perhaps, but it is power of a sort that might help Theo survive adolescence. 

Gonna be, gonna be golden (arrow): "Arrow" by Gina Chung (2025 O.Henry Awards)

One of the good things about blogging on American contemporary short stories for a while now is that hopefully, I've gotten better at it. One of the downsides is that there are some topics that come up again and again, and after a while, it feels hard to say something you haven't already said before. So it is with "Arrow" by Gina Chung, the most noteworthy characteristic of which might be the second-person narrator. This is hardly a novelty in American literature anymore, but it's still less used than first person or third-person limited, so when it shows up, it does still stand out. 

I used to not like it, because it felt, not gimmicky, but overly writerly. It wasn't until I wrote a story using second person myself that I realized that far from being a stodgy and difficult form to maintain, it is actually very natural, almost as natural as "I" is. When I learned Tigrinya--which now seems so long ago I can't believe it was actually part of this lifetime--I was surprised to learn that as different as the language is from English in so many ways, it shared the use of the indefinite "you" in speech. Much as we might say, "To get to Cleveland from Canton, you have to go up 77," even if we don't mean that the actual person we are addressing has to do this, Tigrinya often does the same thing. This means to me that using it is probably part of humanity's inherited grammatical deep structure. It's a very natural way to speak, so much that English teachers for generations have been struggling to get kids to write "One does not simply walk into Mordor" rather than "You don't just walk into Mordor." "You" just feels right to us when we're talking about a generic person other than us. It's colloquially very common, so when it gets transferred over to a story, it gives it a lot of the natural feel that a spoken word story has over a highly literary one. 

Second person "you" narratives feel to me like they more easily maintain momentum. "Arrow" by Gina Chung was certainly no exception. 

Symbolism!!

Other than the narrative choice, the next thing that stands out the most reading "Arrow" is the symbol of the arrow itself. We're already well into the story of the main character "you" getting pregnant at 35, not knowing who the father is, and not being sure what you should do as you're such a mess you can barely take care of yourself, when the arrow shows up. It gets referenced when we read about your hookup with a tattoo artist, the third of your three trysts that give you one-in-three odds of knowing who the father is. You met the tattoo guy at a cheesy bar, where the two of you played darts. (More arrows! See, I pay attention when I read! 

"You" tell the tattoo artist about the only tat you ever wanted, which is a "slim arrow pointing down the length of (her) forearm." You don't explain what it really means to him, but it has to do with how you wanted to escape your mother and Southern California. It means two things to "you." You recall learning about how sharks die if they don't keep moving, so you also kept moving, working hard to get good grades and earn money for scholarships so you could leave. So in that sense, the arrow just represents something moving. But then "you" also associate the arrow with fear: "You thought of your fear as a golden arrow that pointed outward from the dark surrounding your mother's house, a beam that led you away...toward a future where you were no one's daughter, where the only dreams and desires you had to follow were your own." 

Fear of what? Presumably, of not escaping your mother and Southern California. Your golden arrow is both a symbol of the need to keep moving and also of fear. Turns out you have pretty good reasons to fear your mother. She's pretty tough. She hits. She belittles. She manipulates. She's like a lot of Korean mothers I've seen on Korean television shows or read about in books, and also like a few that I've known in person. There's some cultural reasons why Umma (pronounced Uh-mah, not Oo-mma like Uma Thurman) acted the way she did to you, but it was still a traumatic childhood for you. Even when you talk to your mother today, you end up on drinking binges. 

Even more symbolism!!

Once it arrives in the story, the arrow takes over as the gravitational force of the narrative. The narrator has two ideas of what the arrow means to "you," but more emerge, unasked for. When "your are alarmed by and resentful of the passage of time," this calls to mind Eddington's "arrow of time," which tells us that time only flows in one direction. This is the closing image of the story, when the gold arrow has been replaced by the golden shafts of lights coming into your apartment: "And as the sun climbs over the lip of the sky, and the two of you watch its ascent, gold filling the corners of your apartment, you begin to understand that there is only this moment, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and that the only thing to do is to keep on living." 

It's typical for a character's narrative arc to be completed in a way that the character wasn't expecting. The Wizard of Oz is one of the clearest examples of this, as all of the main characters find that the thing they set out to have was there all along. There's no place like home. In "Arrow," the unexpected arc is expressed through the shifting appearance of the central image. "You" thought the arrow was telling you to keep moving, to run like hell from home. But the golden arrow turns to golden shafts of light, reminiscent of the "warm, healing ball of divine light and energy" you try to imagine God as, that instead tell you to keep on living. 

If you wanted to go a little bit further, you could also extend the arrow's meaning to how, once we are all shot into the world, we are at the mercy of fortune, which is why "you" feel your connection to your mother is as much of an accident as anything else. The arrow is just uncertainty in general, then, which is natural for "you," given your upbringing. 

Foreshadowing!!

I'm just going to point out that "you" foreshadowed your own golden arrow tattoo on your forearm by cutting yourself with paper clips so you could feel something. That's it. I have no greater point than that. 

Look, this is a good story...

I have nothing really negative to say about this story. The symbol of the arrow comes in at just the right time and exerts just the right amount of influence over events. "You" are a believable and sympathetic character in your weakness. It's not too much weakness, and the explanations for your foibles don't sound like weak attempts to excuse bad behavior. When "you" lose the baby, I felt loss, even though I kind of thought that's where it was going. 

I'm often tough on Korean stories, because I think I know enough to be critical, but this one put in all the Korean touches in just the right places. I love juk, by the way. South Korea has a chain of restaurants that just serve juk (translated as porridge, although that never felt quite right to me). I think I went five times a week one autumn. 

...But I can't help reading it in the context of this cultural moment

Because absolutely nothing in America anymore can just be a thing in itself without it being a thing either claimed by right or left, conservatives are really into fitness. In a recent New York Times discussion of this phenomenon, Jessica Grose quipped that compared to conservatives, who are all about going to the gym and eating well and cutting alcohol out of their lives, liberals come off as "TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a Ring light." Conservatives have latched onto wellness because, among other reasons (some of which are very good ones), they feel that a message of taking control of your own life and taking responsibility for your own health will play well politically to people who are tired of being shamed for ableism or being forced to watch the Oppression Olympics. 

Conservatives of this stripe would read this story and shake their heads, saying look, here's what fetishizing your traumas instead of working to overcome them, along with decades of feminism and free sex have gotten you: a woman totally unable to live her life responsibly or make good choices. I'm just glad that "you" didn't take anti-depressants in this story, or it would have been a perfect conservative strawman all queued up for them. 

I think the "you" of the story is sympathetic and not overly indulgent of herself and her traumas. I think your drinking and dropping out of law school and questionable sexual choices are all understandable, but in this particular moment, when conservatives are being especially hard on women in their thirties and forties who aren't married and don't have kids and are still struggling to get their lives in order, it's a little bit tougher to appreciate the story as "your" own private life story and not as part of a social drama that's going on. Which might be the whole point of conservative rhetoric: to deny the existence of personal stories by turning them all into public and political ones. It's a perverse application of Kant's categorical imperative by making every individual's life journey a question of what the world would be like if we all lived in that way. "Arrow" could be seen, then, as an answer to that kind of thinking, one that defiantly defends a woman's right to pick her own errant way through life. 

I'll just say that society sometimes fixes flaws by overcorrecting. If we've gone too far in one direction, being too indulgent of ourselves as a reaction to traumas such that we have infantilized ourselves, the movement among conservatives is likely soon to go too far in another. It will eventually spark its own backlash. If so, we may one day in the near future be looking back with nostalgia to when it was okay to write stories about deeply flawed female characters using their freedom to make bad choices. 

By that time, I assume I'll have forgotten all about what happened in the summer of 2025 that made me choose the title for this post that I did. 

The role in socialization of the last thing you should do in polite society: "The Stackpole Legend" by Wendell Berry (2025 O.Henry Anthology)

I've blogged Best American Short Stories nearly every year for the past seven years, but I've only done the Best Short Stories anthology, a.k.a. The O.Henry Awards, twice. Both times I did O.Henry, I did it after BASS. This year, I'm aiming to switch the order and do O.Henry first. I don't know if I can get all the way through O.Henry by the time BASS comes out in a little over a month. I'm hopefully starting a new job soon, and it's going to take up a lot of my better brain cells for a while. But I don't want to not start something just because I might fail to finish it. So here we go.

For a long time, I didn't read much contemporary fiction. I think I felt like there were the classics and there was contemporary fiction, and contemporary fiction had to be all frivolous, or else its products would be classics. Since I wanted to write what would become classical fiction myself, I decided to stay away from anything that wasn't already on college syllabi. I'm not sure how, in my highly circular system of evaluation, anything new could become considered classic, since its failure to already be considered a classic meant it must not be one, but it was my system. It's really only been in the last dozen or so years that I've read books written by people who were alive when I read them. 

I wonder what my brain would have done if, by chance, the first contemporary writer I had chosen to read had been Wendell Berry, because reading Berry is a lot like reading all those authors that a high school student encounters in the first semester of American Lit. The language is a bit more up to date, although still full of some anachronisms, but if one of his stories was slipped into a high school class next to Twain or Washington Irving, a student might very well not notice the difference. 

"The Stackpole Legend," which leads off the 2025 O.Henry anthology, is a good example of a story with a 19th-century feel in a 21st century book. Its entire presentation as one of many local legends collected by an author who is more aw-shucks-I-just-came-across-this than the thundering man of tortured genius the 20th century created reminds me more of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" than it does any work of the last hundred years.

This throwback feel is Berry's signature style. I try not to write too much commentary on writers themselves on this blog and focus only on the work, but with Berry, it's kind of important to know that you're reading someone whose entire oeuvre as well as personal life is an effort to turn the clock back. Much of his work takes place in the past of his fictional Port William, as does this story. 

Berry thinks modern society is unhealthy for humans, both individually and as a society, but rather than write entirely about what's wrong about us, he writes a lot about humans in a bygone age to show what a different relationship with the world would look like. That isn't to say that every story he writes is a rosy picture of the past, a sort of MAGA literary movement that goes back to 1850 instead of 1950 the way the current political MAGA does. But his stories from the past do present us here today with a different way of viewing human nature, both individually and in a social context.

Socialization

"The Stackpole Legend" is a fable about how socialization happens. We follow the life of Delinthus Stackpole, one of Port William's residents long ago. Delinthus is made fun of for his name, but he neutralizes his would-be tormentors by simply not realizing they were teasing him. Soon after, the boys his age, thinking him slow, try to bully him by pushing him, but they realize that, just as Delinthus will not be teased, he will also not be pushed. This is how he earns the nickname "Stump," presumably because he is as hard to move as the stump of a tree is hard to pull out. 

Since he was raised in a very small society of three on his family's farm, one in which he did very little talking because it simply wasn't needed, he is bewildered by the avalanche of questions to be answered that he faces when he enters school. He is happy to let others do the talking. One could look at this and say that it was the relative isolation Stump grew up with, having only his parents nearby and not speaking much with them, that made socialization difficult when he began school, but it's actually the opposite. It is the solidity and certainty of his value and place in his family that prepares him for life outside the farm. His unique upbringing is what allows him to remain unbothered when introduced to social life at school. He might take longer to become part of the community, but he at least survives childhood unharmed by society--more than most people can say--and when he decides he is ready, he turns out to have all the tools he needs. Stump is able to navigate his way into society precisely because his personality is first made secure and unmovable through isolation. Stump's progression is to first be secure in himself, and then to try to find how to make that self fit into a larger world. 

Stump is impervious to the mean side of social life, which does him a lot of good, but he is also unable to enjoy the positive aspects of living in a community, and therein lies his arc. When both his parents die, he realizes the same thing Adam realized when alone in the Garden of Eden: it is not good for man to be alone. But Stump, who has been content to not speak for most of his life, suddenly finds himself in need of speaking if he is to find a wife to end his loneliness. 

Stump feels lost, but he does, in fact, know everything he needs to know in order to develop his capacity for speech. "To say something, he had to begin by saying nothing" is now the narrator put his reluctance to speak, but it also sums up Stump's progression. He becomes part of society by first not being part of it, and he learns to speak by first being silent. If the path to socialization of young people today is thrown off by too much togetherness through social media and other forms of technological togetherness at too young an age, Stump, by contrast, is able to follow a much more natural path of silence then speaking, of learning to be comfortable being alone before learning to be comfortable being with others.  

When he finally gets up the nerve to talk to Kizzie, he feels "himself pushed backward" by his question, but "he held his ground." His practice at being "not pushed" that came in his pre-social days has prepared him for his dive into society. 

The fart

I'd bet a lot of us have heard many stories from friends and family that involve passing gas in embarrassing ways. It's a pretty normal topic of conversation for real tales, but not for literary ones. High literature might include frank depictions of sex or the gory details of injury or illness, but I can't think of a single story from one of the "best of" anthologies of the past many years that had a fart in it. Literary fiction is seemingly like the female-dominated planet Gazorpazorp in Rick and Morty, where it is referred to as "the sound we do not name because it does not exist." 

"The Stackpole Legend" not only includes passing gas, but it's the climax of the story. Stump gets up the nerve to take Kizzie out for a buggy ride, but this is no "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" kind of trip. Kizzie is curiously quiet, and for once, Stump can't stop talking, because he is no longer comfortable with silence. He keeps talking and talking, which makes him more and more nervous, until pressure starts to build up inside. He tries to cover over the sound of his fart by firing his revolver into the air, but it misfires, meaning she hears the whole thing. She laughs, and soon he does to, and that's what opens the door to them having a long life together.

Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry away from this fart I just ripped.

In modern couples' therapy wisdom, there is something of a split verdict on the value of couples breaking wind in the presence of one another. Some say it promotes intimacy, because you're being real with one another and doing in each others' presence what you wouldn't do in polite society, which makes you both co-conspirators of a sort. The other school says that it takes the mystery and the romance out of a relationship. Couples should strive to impress one another as much after marriage as they did before, so the thinking goes, and that means still going on dates and thinking of thoughtful gifts and romantic gestures and not farting, burping, or going to the bathroom in the presence of the other. 

Stump's flatulence is involuntary. He didn't mean to do it. It's possible he will go the rest of his life and never fart in front of Kizzie again, because now he won't be as nervous. For them, at least, it's a faux pas that Kizzie generously interprets (as she also interpreted his accidental touch of one of her softer areas). She laughs at it, and this laughter is what allows "Nature" and the preacher to guide them to the altar. Stump has missed out on society at its worst, the mob mentality, but it isn't until he shares a laugh with Kizzie that he gets to enjoy society at its best.

Nature

Nature looms large in "Stackpole." Stump eyes up potential mates with the eye of a "stockman," comparing them to livestock. The "Nature" that lays the way before Stump and Kizzie is capitalized. Nature is best when it's in harmony with society, as in the case of Bill the horse, who is always ready to go when he needs to go, and always ready to stop. And the best way for a person to integrate into society is naturally, as Stump has done. 

Portrait of an artist

You could probably turn about half of all art into self-referential works about art, and this story is no different. When Stump realizes he needs to start talking to people, he begins by talking to himself. When someone catches his talking to himself, he quickly makes up a lie about what he is doing. He finds, to his own surprise, that he is pretty good at making up lies. What is making up lies but writing fiction? He also opens up his imagination to start asking himself what someone else might be thinking, frequently questioning "how do you reckon" someone would react if they saw his home. Trying to imagine what someone else might be feelings is foundational both to writing fiction and to the empathy upon which all life in a society is grounded. 

Style

As I said up above, the narrative style is a throwback. The narrator slips himself into the story, but as a cataloguer of the legends of Port William, not as a character within the story itself. He uses folksy devices, such as turning God's declaration in Genesis of "It is not good for the man to be alone" into "the world's first piece of good advice." The are numerous euphemisms and some hilarious use of litotes, both of which are characteristic of how an old person might tell a real, spoken story, but neither of which is used in the same rhetorical fashion in much literary fiction nowadays. Literary fiction and a good yarn have little to do with one another. Except in Wendell Berry. 

I've mused before on why the best literary writers don't seem to tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do. It's nice once in a while to enjoy a pace and tone that's a little more like the everyday tales our co-workers might tell, the ones we stop our work for a minute to hear. 

Future

Kizzie and Stump have four boys and a girl. They children all go off to school, and eventually they move off to the city, into the "world of the future." Their background of hard work and love on a farm ensures they succeed when they go off into the world, but it also means they never come back home, and eventually, the Stackpole name disappears from Port William. Here, the story lays out an irony of the idyllic life in which Stump was raised. Its success leads to its own demise. Stump was raised with the right mix of solitude and society, and so were his kids, but they eventually move off to cities, where they--and most of America--will now have too little solitude, too much community. The America that balances the individual and society, leading to healthier versions of both, will disappear. To a nation that now cannot even conceive of things being different, the narrator presents a version of life from the past, one in which a different balance of individual and society existed, to suggest what ails us.

No Free Road Snacks: "Mobilization" by Allegra Hyde (O.Henry Anthology)

Why does the first-person plural narrative voice so often give summaries of habitual actions rather than declarative sentences in the simple present tense? I'm not complaining; I'm really asking. I'm not the most widely read of commentators, but I can think of five stories I've written about on here that used the first person plural: "Serranos" by Francisco Gonzalez, which appeared earlier in this same O.Henry anthology as "Mobilization"; "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, which appeared in the 2022 Best American Short Stories; "The Whitest Girl" by Brenda Peynado, one of the few Pushcart stories I've looked at on here; "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor, which appeared in the 2022 BASS; and Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End, one of the few novels I've looked at in depth on this blog.

All of these stories, when using the "we" of the first-person plural voice, tend very often to avoid a simple depiction of past events, such as: "We went to Heini's Cheese Chalet as a group that day, and although we all meant to spread out as we went through tasting samples, we ended up clumping around one another at the same popular cheeses." If these stories were written in Spanish, they'd favor lots of past imperfect verbs and very few preterits. There's a heavy dose of depictions of things the "we" used to do regularly, rather than things we did once. Because nobody in the "we" is more important than anyone else, the narrative tends towards general descriptions of behavior, rather than specific anecdotes.

Here's an example from "The Whitest Girl":

We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz me el favor, how dare she?...Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.

And here's another example from "Serranos":

Although we had been ten years in the valley, and no longer thought of ourselves as foreigners, our precautions had long ago become a part of us. We avoided banks, police stations, doctors' offices. We had stopped attending Mass, since we'd heard the stories of worshippers seized at the steps of churches. And we visited Albertsons or Safeway only in groups of three at most. We couldn't risk losing too many adults; someone had to remain to watch over our daughters and sons.

If there was too much of this kind of generalizing, this-is-what-life-was-like kind of summary in a first-person or third-person singular POV, I think it might get boring quickly. But for some reason, with a first-person plural, it actually leads to a strong forward propulsion of the narrative.

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"Mobilization" Does This Even More Than Most

Most of the other we-narrator stories I've alluded to break from the general to the specific at some point, but Allegra Hyde's "Mobilization" sticks to imperfect-tense actions almost exclusively. It reminded me not so much of the stories I mentioned above, but Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," in that it's a poetic series of paintings of landscapes, both internal to the "we" and also external, that tell a loose story. Only the very end of the story seems to tell of a specific event that happens to the caravan of RVers, and even then, there is still a good deal of general listing of the kinds of actions taken to cope with the end of the party mixed in with the occasional specific, one-time historical action taken.

Many of the we-narratives I've mentioned make a shift in style at some critical junction. In And Then We Came to the End, there is a chapter told in the voice of the boss, Lynn, that stands out from the "we." In "Mbiu Dash," the "we" switches to "I" after the protagonist is rejected by the town. In "Mobilization," the shift isn't from "we/us" to some other pronoun, but from the past "imperfect" to the present indicative. This shift happens in the closing paragraphs.

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A Real Present Transposed on an Imagined Future

As anyone who's seen the movie Nomadland knows, the community described in "Mobilization" isn't made up. There really are communities of people in the United States living fully nomadic lifestyles in RVs, vans, and various cobbled-together vehicles. "Mobilization" has them traveling in packs together a bit more than Nomadland does, and that's to fit the idea behind this being a true mobilization. The title is, of course, a play on words, as the nomadic families described are both mobile, meaning on the move, but also something of a movement, giving it the military flavor of one of the word's meanings.

The attitude of the nomads is a unique blend of independent and communal. They look down on land dwellers who are tied to their normal lives and relish their freedom above all else, but they also share in a quasi-communist fashion. The mobilization, then, depicts two sides to America, two sides that have always been there. The first white settlers left to be able to practice religion as they saw fit without being told by someone else how to do it, but the initial colonies they founded were intensely, often oppressively, communal.

As anti-establishment as the nomads are, they are generally very pro-American, sporting "USA" signs among their bumper stickers and shooting off fireworks to "show our shared patriotism." This isn't the only contradiction in them. Their feeling of superiority is founded on their belief that they have solved a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too contradiction, being able to be "always at home, but always away," to "have an adventure yet keep your home close." They hope their ancestors' ashes rest in peace on their dashboard, even while they stay forever in motion.

The nomads, then, are a riven embodiment of the nation they are traveling about. Not unlike their country, they generally mean well, but they still cause harm as an unintended but unavoidable consequence of all that activity: "We tried not to litter, but we often couldn't help it. Leaflets, leftovers, stray bits of plastic wrap--they fluttered from our windows."

The nomads are presented as highly sexual, and their sexual appetite is linked to the nation's "fecundity," i.e., its fertility. They are representative of America in so many ways: their pioneering spirit; their don't-tread-on-me sense of individual freedom that nonetheless has room for community; their high levels of consumption, sucking up gas as well as a long list of foods they eat on the road in their "invincible ease." They hope this restless energy will keep them from harm, "death as distant as a possum in a mirror," much like our national zeitgeist has always felt the restless need to move forward. Even their very contradictions are American ones: they try not to read much, but they also cover their vehicles with text that "piles on top of itself."

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The Piper Has to Be Paid

The narrative pays a lot of homage to "us," and much of its poetry is a paean to the grandeur of the caravanners. They are the opposite of xenophobic, welcoming all without discrimination, happy to introduce their children to "every accent, every perspective."

Nonetheless, at some point, there ain't no free lunch, and this very American lifestyle, with all its goods and bads, can't go on. Gas suddenly disappears. The proximate cause isn't given. We read about a trade embargo and general chaos, but that seems to be a result of the gas shortage and not the cause. We can maybe assume that of the many reasons why we in the real world might one day face a serious gas shortage, the nomads in "Mobilization" were victims of several or all of them. It doesn't really matter. That level of consumption can't be maintained forever, and at some point, it's going to end, whatever governments may do in the meantime.

The caravanners conduct a desperate search for gas, sure it must be out there somewhere, but the search is in vain. The camaraderie of the road at last breaks down as the few people with custom-made electric vehicles run off, allegedly to get help, but they never return. The marooned campers try to carry on gamely, but eventually, they are hot and hungry and cut off, and things look bad.

As I've already noted, the end of the story switches to present tense. "Darkness comes quick..." "Algae blooms..." "It swallows us, grinds us." The finale is, I believe, an epoch-making event, perhaps marking the end of the Anthropocene era. "The bones" of the motorhomes are buried along with their owners. Mud and muck presses on top of them. They are pressed and squeezed. They're turning into fossil fuels, in effect. The restless nomads are still restless for more motion at the end of the story, and they will get it, but this time, they'll be powering the movement of others rather than using the remains of a past era to move themselves.

I do not plan to present a song that matches the theme of every story I blog about, but I have done it for two stories in a row now.

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It's obviously a commentary on American consumerism and American lifestyles in general, but is it anything else? 

Well, maybe not much more, but it's offering its commentary in a layered way that's kind of interesting. In fact, I found this story a lot more appealing than Hyde's "Democracy in America," which was also a pointed commentary on the American way of life. "Mobilization" at least takes the time to eulogize the dead way of life, doing what all good eulogies do by finding that even in the worst of the deceased, there is often much to admire and praise.

America's weird leave-me-alone-but-also-don't-touch-my-social-security and its I-hate-taxes-but-the-police-better-come-when-we-call split personalities are contradictory, but it's so breathtaking to behold the chutzpah of Americans being themselves, we don't always mind the contradiction. The observation of the hypnotic power of American kinetic energy calls to mind Whitman. And of course Kerouac, but that's too obvious to even bring up. "Mobilization" is a eulogy for a dying America, but it's also a hymn to what has been best in us: our adventure, our creativity, our fierce sense of individualism but also our compassion and community spirit that can thrive as long as nobody is making us do it.

He who goes down to Sheol does not come up: "The Dark" by Jess Walter

For much of "The Dark" by Jess Walter, the title seems totally inappropriate, because the mood of the story is anything but. Doug Coates' dad humor is on the higher end of the spectrum, and it's matched by the characters he interacts with. This isn't the overpowering humor of a comedian essentially playing themselves in a movie, where the dialogue is impossibly sharp compared to what an actual human could come up with on the spot. It's the kind of genial, self-effacing humor that knows it's not quite succeeding as soon as it comes up with a joke, but the realization of its own failure is part of what makes it funny. 

There's so much of this breezy humor--"banter," as Doug's son Aaron calls it, a word of uncertain origin but that might be related to a term meaning to hit a ball back and forth, highlighting the play involved in the practice--that one almost forgets it's a story about a guy trying to get over the death of his wife from some kind of terminal disease. The story feels light, both in terms of weight and also in color. So why is it called "The Dark"?

Life is ultimately a comedy. That's because there's a big joke being played on all of us, which is that we work hard to make the most we can out of this life and act like the choices we make are very serious and important, but ultimately, we die and do not come back and all the things we thought were so serious don't matter much in the long run. The only way to keep treating life as a tragedy or a drama is by believing that life goes on after death and our decisions will reverberate in eternity, but that wasn't a choice for Doug and his wife Ellie. Doug was an agnostic by temperament and by training as a scientist, while Ellie came about her lack of belief by way of rejecting the faith she was raised in. For both characters, as Ellie was dying, the belief in life after death wasn't a consolation either could reach for. 

That's why it was so disconcerting for Doug when Ellie called for a pastor to come speak with her in her dying days. Doug was worried that: 1) This meant he had never really known his wife, which made him feel more alone, and 2) She knew something about the afterlife that he didn't, and she would be able to obtain it and he wouldn't.

Cosmic and common fears

There are two levels of anxiety and fear going on the "The Dark." One is the big fear that all of us have about death, the fear we mostly spend our lives trying not to think about. The other is more about all the little, daily fears we have. What will dating be like after four decades? Will this person like me? Did I look like an idiot with the joke I tried to tell? Both are fears of the unknown, but the former, the fear of "the dark" of death, is the more fundamental one, while the fear of not knowing how things are going to work out in life is a more contingent concern. 

If I have an issue with much contemporary literature, it's that it ignores the more fundamental fear and only writes about the contingent ones. It will offer an endless stream of flawless detail, told in sparkling prose, about working through trauma or the struggles of the subaltern, but it never puts their fears within the larger context of what the fuck is this whole strange eventful history even about?  Personally, the trouble I have dealing with the smaller fears has a lot to do with how out of whack I feel knowing the bigger fear is always there at the back.

It's not, of course, that the battle to overcome trauma or the realities of the subaltern are unimportant. We should strive to make the world better for people and not worse. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest," says the Bible's most nearly nihilistic book, and I agree. Modernity, though, seems to have shortened it to just the part up to "do it with thy might," without the uncomfortable reason why. Reasoning that the brevity of life and the uncertainty of death is a cause to focus more on the precious life we do get, they take that focus so far that they ignore the big questions altogether. They might even call those questions irrelevant or childish. Rather than deal with the darkness, modernity chooses to keep the lights turned up as brightly as possible, to put the music on full blast and to keep itself focused on work not because of the shortness of life, but in order to forget about it.

"The Dark" doesn't shirk from the yawning maw of death, Sheol that is never satisfied. It does, however, lead us into it softly, cushioned all along the way with what the narrator calls "polite, gentle questioning." When the pastor shows up to talk to Ellie, Doug thinks it's a mistake. Oh, no, we don't go in for that, he says, but then he finds that Ellie has, to his dismay, asked the pastor to come. This leads Doug to twin fears. They are listed out of order, perhaps. First is that if he didn't really know her, then his "temporary detour from the existential horror of being alive and alone" was mistaken. The second is that perhaps Ellie knows something about the afterlife he doesn't, that she'll get in and he won't. 

The pastor who shows up unbidden forces Doug to ask hard questions about life that he's managed to avoid through his close relationship with Ellie. But the narrative holds off telling us what Ellie actually spoke with the pastor about until nearly the end. Almost the only thing we hear that the pastor said about life after death is that it's strange that we teach our children to be afraid of the dark. They wouldn't naturally have this fear, because, after all, they come from the darkness of the womb. It's home to them, so there's no reason they would ever develop a fear if we didn't teach it to them.

Pay no attention to the faulty biological basis of this argument and the fact that our fear of the dark is very much a natural part of our evolution. This is an emotional truth, not an empirical one. As Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" puts it, "You start out from nothing, you go back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!" 

It's not an answer that gives a map of where we go when we die. It's much less dogmatic and certain than that. The pastor doesn't say she knows what happens when we die; she says that there isn't any known reason to fear it. It's a tentative but also a compassionate and gentle answer to our most fundamental fear.

Comic and tragic mindsets

We can respond to the basic, comic losing battle of life with either a comic perspective or a tragic one. Tragic approaches include rejecting the darkness (Rage against the dying of the light) or accepting it, either as part of God's plan or as a necessary limit to life necessary to make life have meaning. Comic approaches also can either acknowledge the dark (optimistic nihilism like that Monty Python song) or try to avoid thinking about it (eat, drink, and be merry). 

The unique, humane excellence of "The Dark" is that it blends these views. It accepts that as humans, we can never stop trying to make sense out of death, to hope there is some way beyond it. Nonetheless, it also understands that the dark is too dense to peer into, and so really the only consolation we can obtain is the contingent, highly bracketed consolation of love and companionship. This love and companionship, though, has a necessary end. One has to accept the comic view to handle the trauma of the dark, to enjoy our human relationships as tiny lights that hold back the dark. But it's only in acknowledging the dark that these relationships take on their full meaning and value. Without the dark, it would be impossible to even feel sad for those we have lost.

"The Dark" is full of ironies. All of Ellie's dating advice turns out wrong. Her lifelong grudge is pointless, but also, the person she held it against unintentionally hurts Doug just as she (probably) unintentionally hurt Ellie. With all this witty banter and all this irony, it's clear that "The Dark" is mostly encouraging a comedic response to the comic problem of death. But as they say, if everything is funny, then nothing is. Or maybe if nothing is sad, then nothing is funny. It's the sadness of death and the terror of the grave the underpins the humor. 

Of course, one could also say that if everything is tragic, then nothing is. Dealing with death without going utterly crazy relies on the ability to move between comic and tragic ways of looking at it. "The Dark" succeeds as much because of its light as because of its darkness.

                      This story really kept making me think of this song. 

Where review, criticism, and analysis collide: "The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota (O.Henry Anthology)

Although this blog will mix in plenty of review, I generally prefer criticism and analysis. Maybe these last two feel more like "real" literary work to me. Whenever I'm on one of those message boards where people discuss the meaning of song lyrics, I get irritated when the discussion veers from what lyrics mean to someone talking about how much they like or dislike them. Whether one likes something feels hopelessly subjective, more subjective even than an attempt to parse lyrics or explain imagery in a story or poem. Liking or disliking is what people resort to when they're too dumb or lazy to do the real work of understanding. "Real" literary work should illuminate, not just be a dead end about whether something happens to resonate. If you tell me how an egg's chemistry changes while it heats up, you've taught me something. If you tell me you don't like your eggs scrambled, the conversation ends there, because there's nothing I can really say about whether your preferences are right or wrong. 

That's how it has often felt to me, which is why I usually avoid the use of the term "review" when discussing literary work on this blog. But maybe there is a kind of review where the conversation doesn't end with a bald statement of preference. If so, then it must be one in which the review is intimately linked to both analysis and criticism. 

"The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota is a skilled work of short fiction that for some reason doesn't resonate with me much. Something about it calls to mind a debate that's been going on for at least three decades. Has American literary fiction become homogenized, producing what Robert Olen Butler called "polished, bloodless prose"? Or skilled works without much to say that nonetheless state their nothingness well? With literature, this debate is linked to the rise of graduate writing programs, but there is a similar debate surrounding the work on streaming services, which is often good but not great, determined by algorithms to churn out massive amounts of content just good enough to keep people paying their monthly subscription fee. Either way, it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with the work, except that maybe you feel like you've seen it before. 

"Paper Artist" strikes me as a very competent short story that sounds a lot like other short stories I've read in the last twenty years, one that passes muster with the creeds and preferences of workshops, but one that also doesn't read to me like anything that came from the forge of a hot and desperate human consciousness. Maybe this is unfair, though. Not every story has to be Moby Dick. There is probably a feminist argument to be made that favoring "raw and bloody prose" reflects a masculine perspective, and that a close examination of the quiet parts of the world and the human mind in that world are worth serious consideration. In the case of "Paper Artist," the discussion is more complicated, because the story's main character, Muneo, is an artist whose work, his wife notes, "swept through the mind, brushed the soul, and couldn't quite penetrate the heart." So if the story does something similar, is this perhaps not a success of form meeting content? 

To start a discussion of the story and whether its lack of "bloody" content is a success or a weakness, I'd like to start with an outline. This isn't quite what "formalist" theory means, but let's call it a watered-down kind of formalism, because I think looking at the story in this way can help us arrive at a more useful discussion of whether this story is good or just good enough. 

Is "Paper Artist" an example of art that cynically connects the dots based on what has worked before, or does it deserve a more sympathetic reading?

Outline

1.  Confrontation between Muneo (father) and Mana (daughter)

This is the strongest part of the story. It begins directly at the point of conflict. Mana is marrying a foreigner, and one who isn't much to speak of. She's already pregnant. Muneo wants her to get an abortion, ditch the man, and get back to serious study on the cello. She decides to stay with the man and go to America. So the father issues his edict: as long as you stick to this decision, you can never come home. 

We often talk about strong narratives presenting us with something a character wants, but they can also use a character's choice as a framework. Think of The Lion King, and how Simba chooses to run away out of shame when his father is killed. The rest of the narrative unfolds as we see how the decision plays out, at first seeming to succeed but then later showing its flaws. That's what's going to happen here. Scene one gives us the father's decision, and everything after that will come about from the challenges to that decision and whether he sticks to it or waivers. Muneo is described as a "master of control." He is seeking, through his decision, to exert total control over his daughter. Will it work? 

2. Counterpoint

Masako has not really emerged as a character with her own thoughts in Act I, but she springs to life in Act II, and when she does, it's to challenge Muneo's control. This is unexpected, as the narrative makes clear that for most of their marriage, she has indulged his desires and gone along with his view of how their marriage should work. Her first words in the story, though, are, "You were too hard on her." 

She won't push her opposition too ardently for most of the narrative. Life will continue on for them as it has, and when she finally decides to outright oppose his decision, she'll do it quietly, without him knowing. She does offer, however, the perfect counterweight to his "control." The end of Act II is Masako's question to him: "Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman's heart?" She is presenting him with something beyond his control and suggesting it might foil his plans. Now we have a decision and an opposing force to the decision, and the plot works out from there.

3. Exposition!!

We see Muneo paying homage to his parents, which leads to backstory about his father having been a surgeon. Muneo, like his daughter, opposed his father's will, becoming an artist instead of a doctor. We then move from seeing "most mornings" to one particular morning when Muneo and Masako are eating breakfast together. During this particular breakfast, Masako will break with tradition by speaking during what is supposed to be quiet reflection time. There is more backstory and then yet another flashback of how they had gone to make amends with Muneo's father by offering him a dragon lamp Muneo had made. 

There is a lot of flashbacking and backstory going on here, and one of the strongest criticisms I have to offer is that the story thereby loses momentum. In a workshop, you'll offer hear the criticism/suggestion that a short story feels like it really wants to be a novel, and while I usually think that's a dumb comment made by someone who doesn't want to offer anything thoughtful, this story is starting to feel like it really does want to be a novel. Except it isn't. It's a short story, so all of those flashbacks are getting crammed in uncomfortably without organic introductions, and they're piling up faster than the forward momentum is. Also, perhaps because of the attempt to create a generational family drama feel within a short story, there is a tendency for characters to essentialize and openly reveal what other characters are thinking rather than let it be evident from their actions. "It was his pride on the line now, and it stung him that he had been disregarded," Masako summarizes of her husband. 

4. The revolt: Masako conceives of the secret visit

Masako sets up a visit with her daughter and granddaughter while Muneo is on a trip. There are some "Gee, different cultures are different" observations. Muneo has trouble concentrating because of his daughter, but he pushes through. 

5. Mana's updates subside

Mana's marriage ends. More backstory about how Masako accommodates Muneo by not eating out, even when she wants to, but she's going to break that when her daughter and granddaughter visit.

6. Status quo is upset by the visit

We don't see the visit anymore than Muneo does, but we see its impact. Something is off afterwards, although he doesn't know what it is. Another flashback to when Masako's mother died. Flashback to giving gift of hanten. That's four gifts total in the story now: Paining from daughter to dad, necklace from Muneo to Masako, hanten from Masako to Muneo, and dragon lamp from Muneo to his father. How each gives and receives tells us a great deal about their characters, and I feel like much of the backstory could have been ditched and just left us with what these four gifts tell us. Flashbacks to couple in their twenties, to moving into Muneo's parents' house, to finding out what happened to dragon lamp. 

7. Masako's cancer and further explanation of what she meant to Muneo

8. Daughter's death and finding of Mina

The final act begins with Muneo making his masterpiece, which tells us both that he has gone as far as his control can take him, and also, perhaps, that his art has finally brought him to a place of transcendence, and perhaps he will now realize something that will help him outside of his art. He believes that he has finally managed to put soul into his work.

All art is a balancing act between raw emotion and technique or craft. The goal is to channel energy in order to increase its power. Channel it too much, and it chokes everything off. Channel it too little, and it become dispersed slop creating a mess all over everything. If Muneo's art has leaned too far in one direction, it's been to channel too strictly, but now he seems to have learned to let the water of his art flow enough to create more spiritual power. He has given up some control and found that it has helped his art, not hurt it.

This artistic realization is linked to a key personal revelations for Muneo that come about at the end. There is the fact that his daughter died. There are facts about his daughter's life in America. There is the granddaughter who needs a home. Most of all, there is the fact of Masako's betrayal, that she went against his edict when she brought her daughter and granddaughter to Japan when Muneo was gone. 

Newly enlightened Muneo doesn't react with rage. He thinks that the three ladies must have had "fun without him." This is perhaps the strongest possible relinquishing of control possible for Muneo, one that isn't just about him becoming a chiller version of himself so others can enjoy their own lives, but in fact suggests that his presence might not be needed at all. We leave the story thinking that maybe Muneo's late-in-life understanding of his relative unimportance may be the key he needs to being the unlikely guardian his granddaughter needs. Maybe he'll do better with his second chance than he did with the first one. 

Okay, so with that out of the way...

I think that outline gives us a pretty good understanding of what the story is trying to do, how it succeeds and how it might struggle. I can't deny it's a good story, at least in the sense that it gives us a clear conflict with stakes and a character who is trying to navigate the conflict. It does all the things a good story should do. I think it's a little dense with flashback, but I'm not going to be too much of a stickler on that. Sometimes, the information in a character's past is too good not to let it interrupt the present. Digressions in an amiable speaker are an enjoyable indulgence, if you've got the time. 

What doesn't quite go down as easy for me is the way all those flashbacks and all that backstory seems to be aimed at filling in motivation. Just like there is a tightrope to walk with too much form and not enough in art, there is also a balance in a narrative between too much motivation and too little. Laura Walter has written persuasively on the danger of providing a surplus of it:

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

If we knew nothing about Hamlet's past, we'd be at a loss to understand his motivations and why he's so damn moody. If we knew too much, we wouldn't be mesmerized by his struggles. Coleridge wrote of Hamlet that he is "a person of vast intellectual power, and his mind is a world unto itself." It's the inability to pin Hamlet down to a simple motivation that makes him Hamlet. 

Nonetheless, however unfathomable the human mind might be, most human actions do have at least some level of motivation, however fractured it might be. We tend to want some explanation of why our characters do what we do. I don't really object to the attempts to use backstory and flashback in "Paper Artist" to provide some of the motivation that fuels the conflict. What rubs me the wrong way is the too-intimate link between vocation and character of Muneo. His fastidiousness is unbroken between his profession and his personal life, and it manifests itself in the same way. His job becomes the biggest symbol of who he is, so much that it's the title of the story. Freud isn't reduced to teleology here; it's reduced to a middle school aptitude test. 

This is where I feel like this story, as excellent as it is, might be a little too familiar, and it could be seen as following something of a formula. Choosing the profession of a character as the title of a story has been done a lot, especially in the last thirty years. The "algorithm" here is to do some research on the profession, then extrapolate from profession to person. The short stories of Andrea Barrett, which I've had more than one go at, do this to a nauseating degree. You take a scientist who studies something,  and then you make their whole interior life mirror that thing. The story writes itself.

In reality, there is almost always some tension between vocation and character, some gap between a person's core qualities and the demands their profession puts upon them. Stories that make an artist as fastidious in their personal lives and they are about their work seem to me like horoscopes that say everyone born in 1972 share basic traits. Are all artists fastidious at home and at work? Would you write this about, say, all the workers in a steel factory? I worked in the same job for about twenty years, and while my abilities and personality fit it in many ways, I still found that I often chafed at it. You wouldn't be able to understand me from my profession. Moreover, I was different from everyone else I worked with, even though we all had the same job. 

A woman I worked with told me last year that she assumed I was a neat freak who liked everything in its place based on how fussy I could be about writing reports. If you've ever seen my house or my car, though, you'd see how wrong she was. I'm one person at work and another at home. Or I was when I still had a job. 

So writing a story called "The Dude with this Profession," including a bunch of lyrical descriptions of the work they do, and then tying that work into the character's choices in life and love seems too easy and too essentializing. By naming the story "The Paper Artist" and then making Muneo a near-complete embodiment of a fussy artist in every aspect of his life, the story ignores how much people's professional personalities can surprise us. 

Review, critique, and analysis revisited

Review is generally a commentary on the quality of an artistic work. Analysis is related to exegesis. It's an examination of how the work is put together, what its aims are and how it accomplishes those aims, as well as what its assumptions are and where those assumptions might be challenged. Criticism is something of a hybrid of the two, and it then takes those two and relates them to other issues in the world.  

When I think a work is excellent, I tend to skip past the review and dive right into the analysis, because the quality is assumed. You only dissect a work that's really worth thinking deeply about. When a work feels off to me, I don't end up wanting to think about what it's trying to do as much, because I haven't been charmed into caring. A work like "The Paper Artist," though, forces me to blend together all three disciplines, because I almost am charmed by it. It turns review into a more philosophical effort, pushing it out of preference and into the realm of aesthetics. I can't really answer questions about whether it's working without first answering questions about how it's trying to work. To me, this is a story with underlying good bones built around a decision and its consequences. That framework ends up taking on too much weight from a story bigger than the building code of  a short story will allow, and it also suffers from tipping too much in the direction of a "Freud reduced to teleology" direction. That tipping is especially noticeable because of the tie between profession and character that has become so prevalent in stories of the past thirty years. I won't give you the same list Gemini just gave me of novels, short stories, and movies where the title is the profession of the main character, but it's a long list. 

I realize nothing can ever really be new in art, and I wouldn't reject a story just because it's got a title that follows what other stories have used. If I did that, I'd have to reject all my own work. But you've got to earn your place, make me accept that this addition to the list deserves to be there. This story feels to me like a 6/10 Netflix original. It competently puts a character through development, but at the end, I don't feel like that development really touches the soul. It's a complicated way of having a trad father come across the rather pedestrian observation that maybe he shouldn't be such a dick. 

But maybe the way this story has made me think so much about why I find it to be competent mediocrity undercuts my argument. Because I really had to think about why I felt that way, and when art makes you think that hard, it can't be throwaway. I wouldn't spend two seconds thinking about why I feel like Happy Gilmore 2 is trash. A story that confronts me with questions about why I feel a resistance to it must be, on some level, more than a mere mediocrity. 

Therapy as art and art as therapy: "The Last Grownup" by Allegra Goodman (O.Henry Anthology)

For reasons I only sort of understand, the show Rick and Morty is very polarizing and sometimes written off as puerile, sexist, or misogynistic. One episode in particular seems to divide not only people who hate the show from those who love it, but even fans from other fans. It's the Pickle Rick episode. If you've never seen the show, it's about an older man named Rick who is so intelligent he is almost godlike in his ability to control the world. Rick travels the multiverse with his grandson Morty looking for adventure. Morty is a normal fourteen-year-old kid who struggles to understand his grandpa, while Rick struggles to maintain his sanity when he knows only too well how meaningless life in the multiverse is, where there are infinite versions of himself and everyone else. Rick uses alcohol to try to dull the pain, and he tries not to love those closest to him, because he thinks that will only increase the pain of life in the multiverse. 

In the Pickle Rick episode, Rick turns himself into a pickle. He says he does it to challenge himself, but in fact, he actually does it in order to avoid going to family therapy with his daughter and kids. Through a series of unlikely events, Rick ends up actually challenging himself much more than he meant to, but, because he's Rick, he survives. At the end of his adventures, he finds himself in the therapy session he meant to avoid with Dr. Wong, voiced by Susan Sarandon. 

In the meeting, Rick blurts out his disdain for therapy, and Dr. Wong responds with a monologue of her own. Rather than it them all out, I'll just paste the .jpeg of it that someone helpfully put on Reddit:

Dr. Wong's rejoinder (which Rick later will comment on, hypocritically, with the dismissal of "what a monologist!") should make it clear that the show isn't dismissing therapy. It gives both characters strong lines, and it's possible to side with either Rick's masters-of-their-own-destiny-don't-need-therapy beliefs or with Dr. Wong's sensible and non-threatened rebuttal. By giving Dr. Wong the last word, though, the weight does tip slightly toward her. (Also, Rick will voluntarily go to therapy in later episodes, and he will do so in a way that takes therapy at least somewhat seriously.) But given all Rick knows, even if we side with Dr. Wong, it's hard to escape the feeling that there is something to his approach to life. 

What the hell any of this has to do with "The Last Grownup"

When I analyze a story, I feel pretty free to use however much theory, close reading, criticism, and personal reaction make sense to me with each story, and in whatever combination. In the last year, I've been bringing in more and more theory, probably because I've been reading more about it. When I read "The Last Grownup," though, my reaction had everything to do with a series of thoughts about therapy and the meaning of life I've been playing with for years. 

The story is about a woman who is kind of controlling, in both good and bad ways. For most people, their good characteristics are intimately and inseparably linked to their weak ones. Assertive people don't get taken advantage of, but they sometimes offend others. Caring people make sure others are okay, but are sometimes too nosy. Creative people find novel solutions to problems, but they also often are a mess and they resist doing things that don't really require a creative approach. And so on. 

Debra in "The Last Grownup" is, depending on whether you're her justifying her attitudes or her ex-husband complaining about them, either a very responsible planner or a neurotic control freak. 

Admittedly, Debra tended toward the worst-case scenario. It made Richard crazy, because she was always, as he said, fast-forwarding. But she had foresight. She prepared. She planned meals and vacations, scheduled lessons, pre-registered for summer camp. Slow down, Richard would beg her. Cut back, get help! Of course, he never considered helping. When they fought he said, But you insist on doing everything.

This was true. No one had ever told Debra to stay home and do everything; that came from her. Nothing compelled her but her conscience and her common sense. 

I know some people like Debra. We all probably do. The Debras of the world are often underappreciated and derided, even by those who benefit from their borderline obsessive preparedness. At the outset, Debra's marriage has already been over for some time, but the official paperwork has just been filed and the divorce is now official. Her kids are on their first weekend visit with Dad since the official end, and she's lost in her house without them. The story will be about her figuring out what the good and bad parts of her personality are, where preparedness ends and obsessive, fast-forwarding, control freak begins. It will be her doing what therapy calls "the work." Therapy, in fact, makes at least one direct appearance in the story, as we listen in on part of one of Debra's meetings with her therapist. There is also an indirect appearance of therapy when Debra's sister, during what may be considered the muted climax, instructs Debra on a technique for expressing her anger. 

My feelings about therapy and the unexpected sexual politics of it

I've never been crazy about therapy. This is partly because people close to me in my life went to therapy, along with a psychiatrist who prescribed medicines, for a very long time without it seeming to do much good. It's also got something to do, though, with how in modernity therapy seems to have creeped into territory that was once occupied by religion or philosophy. For example, the whole world seems to treat suicide like it's primarily a question of mental health, but it's not. Therapy takes it for granted that suicide is bad. If I were the cynical type, I'd say that's in part because you can't bill dead people. Like any belief that takes something as an a priori principle, it's kind of boring to listen to its proponents try to explain why you should accept the belief in the same way. Therapy isn't discovery of fundamental truths, but it's often presented as having the same gravitas, like once you've started therapy, it's like you've gone on a quest for the meaning of life. You haven't. You're just on a quest to learn how to stop annoying people. 

After decades of trying to work to become intelligent, or even, in my more daring moments, to become an intellectual, I realize I'm no Rick Sanchez. I know full well that it's impossible to measure intelligence accurately, but let's pretend you could. In the types of intelligence that matter to being able to judge meaning-of-life questions, the math/science/language/reasoning types of intelligence, I'm maybe a 7 or an 8 out of ten. In effort, I'm a 9 or a 10 out of ten, so I make up for my quasi-mediocrity a bit, but all that work has done is make me realize how futile the work is without also being a ten of ten in natural ability. So maybe I don't have Rick Sanchez-level authority when I say I feel like life in this here multiverse presents us with a prima facie case that there is a lack of inherent order and meaning that's at the very least a bit disorienting, but I do think that I have cause to say that therapists might be side-stepping the real issues, and that they aren't the people with the most relevant things to say about the big questions in life.

I'm not quite a nihilist. Life may not have any inherent meaning, but it's kind of like living in a video game like Minecraft. There's no set order to how you "win" the game, but there are some rules in the sense that "if you do this, X will happen," and there are ways to play the game that are fun and ways to play that aren't fun. I try to play in ways that are fun. It so happens that those ways include not ruining the game for others, so I don't believe that all ethical decisions are equal. Even this borderline nihilism, of course, might raise an instinctive disdain among some intellectuals who feel they've graduated from it, that existential despair is a juvenile state of mind indicative of poseurs in the college coffee house, wearing berets and beating bongos and misquoting Sartre. They're like A.J. from The Sopranos, mispronouncing the name Nietzsche (which I admit I have to look up how to spell every time). I understand the resistance to poseur-y nihilism, but that doesn't mean that the class of people who think they're better than it have really made their case for something else. That includes therapists.

This near-nihilism of mine might not seem to have any reference to sexual politics, but it could, I suppose, be subject to a critique that it falls in the same vein of sexist dismissal of a feminist aesthetic that Nathaniel Hawthorne did when he dismissed popular female novelists of his time as a "damned mob of scribbling women." He meant, in part, that his work was serious but that the women to whom America was "wholly given over" to were not. Hawthorne's characters lived in a dark and brooding universe still haunted by the ghosts of Calvinism or the Book of Ecclesiastes, and there is a sense of the vanity of all things under the sun, whereas the novels he derided were about the business of living life and life lived well, without any need to justify it, and they put away the sense of vanity and fully turned their attention to the secular business of living in all its small and wonderful detail. 

This divide between "serious" fiction and frivolous has never gone away, and there has always been a bit of a sexual dimension to it, with serious white men writing ponderous stories about old men living alone in a cabin that appear in the New Yorker and women writing very talented prose about a seamstress that appear in Harper's. That's perhaps why early seasons of Rick and Morty, where Rick very much is into his "therapy is stupid" philosophy, earn the reputation for misogyny. 

There is also a political dimension to the divide: Hawthorne's preference for eternal meaning-of-life-type issues over life-in-front-of-your-face ones could be seen as devaluing the struggle to improve life on Earth for the masses, because what's the point of short life in this valley of tears, anyway? As Siggy in What About Bob?  put it when pushed to learn to dive off a dock, "With all the horror in the world, what does it matter?" 

Those general philosophical preferences applied to the story

Knowing full well that my inclination for the eternal over the secular and for theoretical concepts over paying attention to the practicalities of life run the risk of being either frivolous or sexist or politically retrograde, those are still my inclinations, and I take them with me to a story like "The Last Grownup." 

My instincts are to find that although I can recognize the quality of the craftsmanship and that the story is, in the terminology of the New Critics, a "well-wrought urn," it also doesn't resonate with me the way "The Castle of Rose Tellin" did a few stories back. (And if there's an argument that my predilections aren't totally sexist, maybe it's that I loved Kate DiCamillo's story, and that I recognize that to the extent there really is a distinction to be made between transcendental fiction and secular, women can write the former as well as men.) 

"The Last Grownup" lets us watch as Debra "puts in the work." Part of the work includes the early phases of "feeling her feelings," as the kids say, but because Debra is Debra, the self-pity and inaction of the opening pages doesn't last. She gets almost excited about working with her ex-husband and his current girlfriend in the process of teaming up to get the whole family onboard about Richard and Heather getting married and having a baby. Yes, it means some pain for her as she watches her husband move on, apparently doing well in his own process of working on himself, as he's lost weight and quit smoking. But it also gives her something practical to do, which she loves. She finds herself, as she often does, fast-forwarding, wishing that Richard and Heather could just hurry up and get this whole transition over with so they could be a few years down the road and already adjusted to the change. "Debra wished it had all happened already, so she didn't have to watch."

Although the narrator assures us that Debra is "good at therapy," meaning that she listens to her therapist, knows the language of therapy, and can recognize the places in her life where therapeutic concepts apply, it's also true that she's guilty of everything Richard says she is. In the first conversation we see Richard and Debra have after the divorce is final, Debra is jumping ahead to Richard proposing to Heather, when he's really just talking about himself making smell steps of improvement. Debra then spends much of the narrative writing the story of what will happen before it's happened. 

The conflict of the story develops when Debra, Richard, and Heather hatch a plan to tell the kids about the baby and their marriage. During their meeting to formulate the plan, Debra is a little pushy--not too much, but enough that Richard and Heather could plausibly say that the plan was Debra's, even though Heather seemed to instantly recognize the wisdom of it. They seem to all be on board, and Debra, happy to have a role to play, writes up a "family proposal," which is kind of like one of those well-meaning corporate values statements that companies immediately ignore when it becomes difficult. Before she can drop the document on the family, though, Richard and Heather depart from the plan and tell the kids everything all at once, instead of telling them first about the marriage and later about the child, as the adults had agreed to at their meeting. 

Mini-lit court

I could have made this post very different. It could all have been one of my literary court entries, and we could have examined whether Heather and Richard were in the wrong for deviating from the plan. Debra's sister Becca sure thinks they were. She thinks Debra ought to be angry about it, and she even gives Debra a little drill to do to work out her anger. She has Debra plant her feet, breathe in and tighten her whole body, including making fists. Then she is supposed to let it go. Which made me wonder: was this a drill where she was supposed to get in touch with her anger rather than justify it away, or to let her anger go? Because Becca seemed to be advocating the former, while her drill was more about the latter. 

In any case, if I were to have done a literary court back-and-forth argument, one strong case against Debra would have been her attitude at the end of her meeting with Richard and Heather, where she feels superior to them, the "last grownup on Earth," in contrast to their foolish optimism launching them into a difficult future. A full litigation of the case would probably have revealed that it wasn't clear whether Richard and Heather were in the wrong, and that, by extension, the failure of Richard and Heather's marriage wasn't entirely the fault of either party. 

The big theme

Debra's revelation seems to be that she needs to let things go more. She tells Max, the dog, that "sometimes you have to rest," and she recognizes that the things she's lost will eventually turn up, probably when she's stopped looking for them. It's a very complete ending, and yet I find myself wondering why I don't feel much. Maybe I'm just a sexist bro and that's why I like Rick and Morty. Maybe I'll never much love a story that doesn't have a white whale in it somewhere, along with a hapless villain-hero trying to kill it. 

As much as I say I value big, cosmic themes, most of the problems that occupy my mind in real life are practical ones. Right now, I've been spending most of the past four months trying to find a job to replace the one I gave up--for reasons I can't believe are wrong--and feeling more and more anxious as the time I'm looking lengthens. I curse myself for not having learned more practical skills in life, like how to do household repairs or knowing more about finance or having chosen HVAC repair trade school instead of an M.A. in English. 

I try to divorce real-life stuff from "what's life all about, anyway" questions, and to put more weight on the second, but there's an inevitable link between the two, because of a lot of the angst that's there is tied to real-world issues. I partly see the universe as potentially hostile because I doubt my own ability to take care of myself and my family in it. This fear would be lessened if I spent less time thinking deeply about short stories and more time learning to run a CNC lathe. Not worrying about what could go wrong and preparing to avoid it is a better way to actually keep the bad thing from happening, I get it.  And yet, I can never fully make myself commit enough to playing the game that I'm willing to quit spending time asking what the point of the game is, anyway, or how the game is put together or what kind of madman created it and put sentient beings inside of it. 

A good deal of story analysis can be done without emotion. One can read closely for meaning and apply theory to it. AI can probably do a (mostly shitty, for now) job of coming up with a thoughtful reading, even while it doesn't "think" about the meaning of the stories at all. But literature really has no point if it doesn't eventually cross a threshold from "meaning" to "meaning something to me." And when it comes to "meaning something to me," I find it hard to feel much about a story that's a "therapy" story, where the revelation has something to do with a small change that will bring a small improvement in one's happiness, provided one is willing to be content being a slightly less annoying parent to one's children and not ask inconvenient questions like why did I bring children into a universe in the first place when this universe is a place where it is possible that those children may be kidnapped and raped and tortured? 

I'm being unnecessarily difficult, I know. I have made personal changes before as a result of revelations from fiction, whether in a book or on the screen or on the stage. Those changes have usually, although not always, made my life easier or better. So I'm not saying every story should be Moby Dick. If it were, I'd probably eventually get sick of it and want some stories about the everyday relationship issues of a butcher in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am saying that there are stories about doing the work, and there are stories about why one should bother to do the work, and I feel myself more drawn to the latter. When I do arrive at those moments in my life where I feel convinced I should do the work--and those are probably the majority of moments in my life--I'm grateful for art that is focused on how to do it. But I will probably draw what benefit I can from the story and then throw it to the side ungratefully. In that sense, a story like 'The Last Grownup" is to me the way people like Debra often feel--full of forethought and wisdom and totally underappreciated.