What was the father-in-law's height in centimeters? "Paradise" by Yxta Maya Murray, Best American Short Stories, 2021

It's inevitable that in an anthology of twenty stories, there will be a few that don't seem as transcendent to me as they did to the judge. It would be a lot weirder if I loved every story in an anthology. This is the first one in BASS 2021 I didn't like. 

It's not really fun for me to look deeply into the ones I don't like. I don't get any thrill out of dumping on a story. I'd rather just skip it, but since "Why didn't you like it?" is a fair question, let me give it a very brief answer.

This story gave too many details that weren't important to the story, needed pared down, and didn't have an emotional center for me. It felt like a story from a developing writer (albeit a talented one) who hasn't quite learned yet how to separate the chaff from the wheat. There's back story there, which is great, because it gives the characters depth, but a lot of that back story could have been left on the editing floor to produce a tighter final product with more drive. Karen Carlson called the story a "model of simplicity," but I felt like it had simplicity in its hands and gave it away. A family trying to escape a fire is about as straight-forward a journey as you can get. If having a character who wants something is key to a compelling plot, then having three people and a dog who just want to get away from a fire (or two people who want to escape and one who wants to stay) is a pretty direct way to get there. But the story opens with one page of setup, then five pages of backstory, then seven pages back in the present. We're halfway through before we really get to the point where someone wants something. 

That backstory, when it happens, is full of details that don't need to be there. They don't come from the narrator in any kind of natural style; instead, it feels like there's a checklist of things the narrator wanted to tell us and she's running down it. Here's how the narrator introduces us to racist father-in-law Wes: "He was a big bull of a man, about five eleven. He was white and bald and wore glasses. He had a chipped front tooth and his son's blue eyes. He wore a Cowboys T-shirt and blue nylon shorts and black flip-flops. Eight years old." 

Some of that's solid description (although, as Karen pointed out, I'm not sure the story is consistent about the color of Wes's son's eyes, although some cultures call blue and green the same thing, so maybe it's fine). But "about five eleven"? That's kind of the sort of thing writers try to avoid. Why? Partly, because it's cheating. It's telling us his height instead of showing us his height. But also, it's because we don't want to feel we're being given the answers so we can cram for some kind of test. "Big bull of a man" is fine, but not "about 260 pounds." (Although I don't know that I think of five eleven as a "big bull.") 

There are a lot of these passages that feel like the narrator is shoehorning information in:

-"We stood in the front yard of the house, which was on Edgewood Lane." 

-"Pulga's a little town maybe fifteen miles away from Paradise as the crow flies." (That's not in dialogue; it's the narrator talking directly to us, as though giving us directions. A better way to do this naturally might have been for the narrator to think something like: "Shit," I thought. "Pulga was only, what, ten miles away? Fifteen? Twenty? Mike always knew that kind of stuff, could plan trips to arrive on time down to the minute, but distances have a way of going all wobbly in my mind." Or whatever. Just not telling us the distance on a map.) 

-"I'm Pomo and Mexican and grew up in the Evergreen Mobile Home Park with my parents, Lupita and Ben."

-"Mike was above me because my parents worked as janitors at Paradise's Best Western and Chico's Oxford Suites. But his pa, Wesley Noonan, was one of the best lawyers in town. Wes set up a three-man outfit--Noonan, Gump, & Penzer--up on Skyway, where he did estate planning for folks from Paradise to Chico. We was a big man, and not just physically." (Not even physically, I'd say.) 

This kind of thing is at least begging for an explanation, a statement from the narrator like, "People tell me I tend to share too many details" or whatever. Instead, it feels like a developing writer. I realize Murray is an accomplished writer, but accomplished writers are capable of slipping just like anyone. That's what this story feels like. 

Did she mean that?

There are also a few passages in the story that just made me raise an eyebrow and wonder if they'd been edited thoroughly. 

-The narrator calls Wes's house his "ancestral manor." But it was built--as we are told twice--in the 1980s. Is "ancestral" ironic? In what way? "Stately manor" with echoes of "Stately Wayne Manor" might have done that, but "ancestral" brings in connotations that don't accomplish anything. 

-Telling us twice when the house was built, both times like it was news to us. 

-Did Mike have blue eyes or green? Also, Fernanda isn't right that she must have white in her to have had a child with green eyes. As this site--which is called "Gregarious Green Eye Facts" so you know it's infallible--says, people of any race can have green eyes. 

-Did Wes really build a "salon" in his house? He doesn't seem the salon type. 

I had something for this...

The story is called "Paradise," and it's set in a town of that name. We're about to find out how non-paradisal the place is, but the story really does nothing with the name or the symbolism inherent in it. Even with the kind of unnecessary summoning of Trump's name, which would have allowed for some kind of clever transposition of Trump into the role of Satan, we get nothing. Wes's safe could have played off the name, with Wes thinking he was saving in order to afford some kind of ultimate reward in the end. Instead we get a mention of "hellfire" in the end that contrasts with "Paradise," but that's about it. 

Okay, enough. I wanted to give a sufficient answer for why I didn't like the story, but now I feel like I've gone too far. It's a miss for me. On the the next one. 

Be dog: "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog" by David Means, Best American Short Stories 2021

Nothing turns me against a story as much as the feeling I'm being trifled with. The best example of this I can think of is Curtis Sittenfeld's "The Prairie Wife," the entire point of which seems to be to trick the reader into thinking a character is a heterosexual man instead of a lesbian female so it can revel in its moral superiority about not making assumptions even though we all know no human being can function for five seconds without making assumptions. 

The first time I read "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," I felt a little bit irritated by it. Countless children's stories have used an animal's point of view. Normally, those stories opt to heavily anthropomorphize the dog, cat, etc., but with characteristics we tend to associate with animals. To use one example, the 2008 movie Bolt features a dog who is trusting and genuine enough to be tricked into believing he has super powers and needs to get back to his pre-teen crime-fighting partner. It also has a scheming cat who tries to take advantage of the dog's naivete. Nobody thinks dogs and cats actually think like this, but we accept it, because it's cute and because we know it's just anthropomorphism. This is what dogs and cats seem like to us. There are variations on this, too. The TV show Wilbur features a dog who operates much more on dog terms and thinks like a dog rather than an anthropomorphized animal (even though it's obviously a human in a dog suit). The human who interacts with Wilbur is doing so either because of drugs or a mental breakdown or powerful forces we cannot understand. Then there's Bojack Horseman, which features of world of animals, half-human/half-animals, and full humans all interacting more or less like humans, except that the half-animals tend to exhibit fairly strong behaviors associated with their animals sides. Mr. Peanutbutter (dog) is faithful, kind, and impetuous. Bojack (horse) is headstrong, lusty, and gluttonous. And so on.

What "Clementine" does is try to write the story, as close as human language will allow, from the perspective in which a dog would really see it. Which, the first time I read it, felt like a gimmick and something in which the reader was being asked to tag along while the writer showed off. Sure, Jack London did it, but for a serious contemporary writer trying to do it, it's a risk. (Also, when's the last time you read Call of the Wild? I read it when it was assigned to my son about five years ago, and it blew me away how terrible it is. It's like Ayn Rand reading Nietzsche put into the mouth of a dog.) So it seemed to me like I was reading something notable only for a single-dimensional trick. The second time I read it, I saw something deeper in it, but let's put that aside for a moment.

Audiences and readers will forgive almost any schlock if there's a dog in it. 

The rules

The story is about 90 percent passages from the point of view of the "protagonist," a dog named both Clementine and Carmelita, because she passes through two human families who give her two names. There are also, however, occasional intrusions that explain the narrative approach or apologize for its limitations. There's an "I" narrative voice creeping in here and there, and it's not an "I" first-person narrator. It's a genuine authorial intrusion of the "gentle reader" variety. One example:

Here I should stress that dog memory is not at all like human memory, and that human memory, from a dog’s point of view, would seem strange, clunky, unnatural and deceptive. Dog memory isn’t constructed along temporal lines, gridded out along a distorted timeline, but rather in an overlapping and, of course, deeply olfactory manner, like a fanned-out deck of cards, perhaps, except that the overlapping areas aren’t hidden but are instead more intense, so that the quick flash of a squirrel in the corner of the yard, or the crisp sound of a bag of kibble being shaken, can overlap with the single recognizable bark of a schnauzer from a few blocks away on a moonlit night. In this account, as much as possible, dog has been translated into human, and like any such translation, the human version is a thin, feeble approximation of what transpired in Clementine’s mind as she stood in the woods crying and hungry, old sensations overlapping with new ones, the different sounds that Norman’s steps had made that morning, the odd sway of his gait, and the beautiful smell of a clump of onion grass – her favorite thing in the world! – as she’d deliriously sniffed and sneezed, storing the smell in the chambers of her nose for later examination while Norman waited with unusual patience.

Or, in another place, another apology of sorts: "Again, this is only a translation, as close as one can get in human terms to her thinking at this moment..." 

These authorial intrusions allow the narrative to tell the human side of the story as our hero dachshund moves from one family to the next and then back again. There is one point that feels like cheating a bit, a parenthetical that goes into the mind of Steve, the father in the second family Clementine/Carmelita lives with. "...he didn't want to give her up. He had made a halfhearted attempt to locate her owner...But then one day at the Stop & Shop...he saw her photo." None of this is the dog, and it's not even a translation of the dog's point of view. For the most part, though, the narrative follows its own rules: I'm going to tell this as close as I can to how a dog would really experience it, not anthropomorphizing any more than needed to make this story readable by a human. 

Not anthropomorphism, but affinity

Although the story tries very hard to stick to its own rules and show us the world as Clem/Carm sees it, without making the dog think like a human (as in a children's story), there are, we are told, certain affinities between the human world and the dog world. "It is a fact that there is just as much nonsense in the dog world as there is in the human world," we learn when a mixed-breed mutt launches into a tail-chasing routine in the middle of the walking path. 

This affinity is especially strong when it comes to suffering. While dogs and humans do not process suffering in the same way, they do both experience it. When Carmelita is adopted into a new family after getting lost from Norman, she is happy. However, she still experiences "a form of grief particular to her species. There are fifty-seven varieties of dog grief, just as there are--from a dog's point of view--110 distinct varieties of human grief." (These "facts" seem to be another form of authorial intrusion, one in which we learn that while the author probably did some research into dog cognition, we are not getting a highly accurate version of that cognition. In another place, we are told that a dog's sense of smell is a million times stronger than ours. A dog's sense of smell is very strong, of course, but a million times is an overstatement by at least one factor of ten. Karen Carlson, in her reading of the story, also picked up on how the dog facts in this story are not terribly rigorous.) 

It's this shared grief between humans and dogs that gives the story that deeper something I mentioned earlier, the thing that made me forgive it for the way I thought it toyed with me on the first read-through. 

What a dog can teach us about surviving grief

Clem/Carm belongs to two families. The first is Norman and Claire, but Claire dies of (presumably) cancer or something like it. Norman is mourning Claire when Clementine gets lost. In fact, Norman was evidently planning to kill himself the morning Clementine got lost.

The second family is Steve and Luisa. They are mourning the loss of a child when Clementine (whom they rename Carmelita) shows up. 

The dog helps both human families to survive their grief. With Steve and Luisa, she is someone they can love and care of to take the place of their lost child. They eventually heal enough to become pregnant again, something the family couldn't help but credit to Carmelita: "...it seemed important--in some mystical way--that she had appeared in the woods before Luisa became pregnant." 

For Norman, it's not the dog's showing up that rescues him, but her disappearance. When she returns to him at the end of the story, he tells her, "I let you go and started missing you the second you were gone, and when you were gone I knew I had to go on." He likely felt he had to go on because he worried for the dog and thought he needed to locate her to know she was alright. She represented unfinished business for him, and the frantic search, the putting up posters and contacting authorities, likely gave him the time he needed to get over the loss of Claire. 

The dog herself is experiencing grief, too, although we are reminded she doesn't experience it in human terms. The "translation" of her grief we get is "a long stretched-out sense of displacement that would arrive suddenly, amid the hubbub of the house, the leather satchel fragrance, the thump in Luisa's skin--that heartbeat--and the memory of Claire. It spoke loudly of all the things that had gone into the past and all of the things that might, like a slice of meat, appear in the future..." 

The dog feels grief in the sense that it realizes something isn't right, but it is helped to overcome this grief by a memory that works not in a linear fashion but much more amorphously. This prevents the dog from making "should/should not" statements, something cognitive therapy teaches us causes us suffering. The dog doesn't think "X happened, and then Y happened, but if only Y hadn't happened, I wouldn't be in this mess now." It just thinks of X and Y as two things to add to its bank of data. 

The final authorial intrusion in the story comes as the dog is approaching Norman at their reunion. The author states that he wishes he could make words "be dog," or really get inside the dog's mind. If he could, then we, the readers, would all be able to experience a "world defined not by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct."  

It's this living by instinct that makes the dog so good at survival. So good, in fact, it passes on this knack for survival to the families that host her. 

It's similar to what Spender from Ray Bradbury's "And the Moon be Still as Bright" found that Martians had determined:

"The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see--the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again."

"It looks pagan."

"On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life is possible."

"Clementine" and "Escape from the Dysphesiac People"

Although the stories in BASS were not written to go together in any way, there's always a few in the anthology every year that seem to serendipitously respond to one another. This especially seems true of "Clementine" and "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," which I looked at here not too long ago. 

Both the dog and the unnamed human protagonist of "Dysphesiac" have ended up in new homes against their will and been given new names. The human resists both, but the dog is able to quickly remake her map of the world. These people are feeding me. These people are good to me. I guess I'm Carmelita now.

Of course, that can't work for the abductee of "Dysphesiac," just as it couldn't work for anyone who's been kidnapped. The rulers of the dog's second home are kind and loving. The ones who ran the Indian school were not. 

Both stories presented characters who adapted to survive hardships. One adapted by clinging desperately to the past and to the narrative that gave him identity. The other remade her identity and her conceptualization of the world. I don't think one is right and one is wrong; they're two options for coping with trauma that might work better or worse depending on the circumstances of the trauma. 

I was thinking I'd close by pointing to statistics that people with dogs are less likely to die by suicide than those without them. I didn't know this was true, but I suspected it was with such certainty, I figured I was one quick Google search away from proving the point. But it turns out that it may not be true at all. I know a lot of dog parents point to their dogs as the things that keep them sane, but there's no solid evidence to prove that dogs help their human families avoid suicides. Therapy dogs, which are not considered pets, might be different. That suggests to me that looking at a dog's way of thinking as being free from notions of power and morality and memory might be too simple, too much of another human imposition, as much as the author tried to avoid those. (Indeed, dogs in nature are very much interested in the power structure in their packs.) 

I think we can, in fact, learn something from animals, especially dogs, which are the animals many Americans know the most intimately, about how to push through and thrive in challenging circumstances. Having a short memory and not imposing "should/should not" thinking might be some things we at least think we see in dogs that could help us. But there's a limit to what we can adapt from dogs, partly because we are incapable of thinking like them and partly because as humans, we often face situations where surviving can only happen if we apply a human set of skills to the problem. 

 

The physics of safety: "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss, Best American Short Stories 2021

At the end of "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss, the unnamed narrator muses that a "person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself." As central as this slow ripening--of a person the narrator knew thirty years early--is to the story, it's a much briefer encounter with someone that's at the heart of what the narrator is struggling to understand. Unlike her encounter with Soraya, the narrator's encounter with this person takes root immediately:

"...as I stood looking into the window of a chocolate shop, a European man in a beautiful suit came up behind me. He leaned in, his face touching my hair, and in faintly accented English whispered, 'I could break you in two with one hand.' Then he continued on his way, very calmly, as if he were a boat sailing on still water."

That this brief encounter had a deep impression on the narrator is seen not just in how she ran in terror to the tram stop immediately after, but in how, decades later, she thinks of the words this stranger said to her when she is trying to make sense of "wild child" Soraya and what people like Soraya can teach her about herself and her daughters. She thinks that Soraya's abusive lover "could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken or she wasn't going to break."

----

My Kindle has the annoying habit of showing me what passages in a book other readers have highlighted. I'm sure there's some way to turn this off, but I'm too lazy to discover it. I don't want to know what other people thought was interesting; I want to decide for myself. There were a number of passages in this short story highlighted, more than in other stories in the 2021 BASS anthology, and it's easy to see why. Krauss drops breadcrumbs on nearly every page about what Soraya and young women like her say about female sexuality and independence, about the treacherous balance between tenderness and violence. Readers didn't seem, however, to underline the one phrase I thought most pithily captured this tightrope walk for young women, which is "...the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability." 

Brief synopsis

The narrator has arrived in a boarding house on the outskirts of Geneva. It's kind of a stuffy place, with the matronly named "Mrs. Elderfield" keeping an eye on the narrator and the two eighteen-year-old girls she's staying with. Both of the older girls are there because they had become too much for their parents to handle. They'd been sent to a kind of cobbled-together thirteenth year of school because of "wildness--sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply." 

They've been sent to Switzerland because it seems the safest place on Earth. It represents "reserve and conformity." The narrator calls it "neutral, alpine, orderly," and a "sanitorium or asylum." The parents of the girls have come from professions that one might argue share an obsession with preparing for trouble. The narrator's father is in Switzerland to study to become a trauma doctor, while Soraya's father once was royal engineer for the Shah of Iran, specializing in the "physics of safety," before the Shah was toppled from power. 

The narrator no longer arrives than she is unable to escape the uncomfortable feeling of her budding sexual maturation. Aside from the talk about sex she hears from the older girls, there are the "red apples...rotting in the autumn sun" outside her window, reminders of how quickly her sexual bloom that is only arriving will fade. Then there is the fact that the beds the girls sleep in were once slept in by Mrs. Elderfield's sons. "...we never knew what they looked like, but we rarely forgot that they had once slept in our beds. Between Mrs. Elderfield's absent sons and us there was a carnal link." Like it or not, the girls are at an age where male intimate intrusions are going to come at them from all over.

The ecstasy I feel with a story as full of symbolic grist for the analyst to grind as this one.

As stultifying as this house is, it's a breath of fresh air for the narrator compared to her home. She's freed from her parents continual fights and the "Olympic cruelty" of the girls from her school in America. She is also able to wander around Geneva, which is a considerably larger playground than she's used to. 

The two older girls both are there because of "sex and stimulants," but their relationship to these things is different. The narrator thinks of Marie as someone who "radiates trouble." She has strict house rules set by her father. Soraya, on the other hand, radiates "a sense of authority." She seems confident in her beauty, her sexuality, herself. But it's Soraya who gets in far deeper trouble.

Soraya takes up with a banker who is creepy in a that-guy-from-those-Fifty-Shades-books-I've-never-read-but-can't-help-having-heard-about kind of way. We don't get elaborate details, but it's enough to sketch out what it likely amounts to: a game where he sets the rules and Soraya is punished if she breaks them. The narrator, still much younger than the other two girls and not yet understanding sex like they do, tells herself that Soraya must be amused with the relationship or else she wouldn't allow herself to play the game. She thinks of Soraya as too "unassailable" to act otherwise. 

Looking back, the narrator can see the error of her calculations. "And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core that had come to her, like all natural gifts, without effort, and what might happen if it failed her. The sex she described seemed little to have to do with pleasure. On the contrary, it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial." 

So what's Soraya's deal?

"Switzerland" reminds me of another wonderful story from a past Best American collection about young women making questionable sexual and life choices, "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline. (Interesting that both stories are named for cities. Seems like this is an easy pairing for a lit professor somewhere. You're welcome.) Sexuality for women is a gift, but a double-edged one. When Soraya first notices her creepy, abusive banker in a hotel restaurant, she is fascinated by how carefully he debones his fish dinner. "It takes a certain kind of man to turn what is essentially an act of violence into elegance," the narrator deadpans. Sex always pairs violence and elegance, and if someone can go in one direction (violence to elegance), they can probably also go in the other. 

Women should celebrate and enjoy being young, sexual, and sensual. That part of life doesn't last long, as the rotting apples remind us, and so young women should be as adventurous as they care to be when they feel ready. But adventures always carry risk. When the narrator first makes out with a boy on a bench in Geneva, it ignites a feeling "both tender and violent." So we get pairings in the narrative both of "tender and violent" and "violence and elegance." In nature, the coexistence during sex of both tenderness/elegance and violence is much easier to see, as we are reminded when a little girl is afraid of a (too on-the-nose?) praying mantis she sees on her wall. But it's there in human relations, too. There are boys more afraid of women than the women are afraid of them, and then there are men who threaten to tear you apart with one hand and then keep on walking. 

Soraya knows these risks, but the only way to enjoy the upside sometimes is to pretend you aren't terrified of the downside. The narrator doesn't simply trust Soraya would not play a game she didn't want to play; she needs to believe this in order to come to terms with her own just-arriving sexuality. She "wanted to believe that the balance of power could be tipped in one's favor by strength or fearlessness or something I couldn't name." So she believed, or made herself believe, that Soraya was playing a "game that was never only a game, one that was about power and fear, about the refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into."

Soraya is likely a frustration to the reader, as she was a consternation to her would-be-guardian father. Not for the first time in his life, the father realizes that he was unable to insure against collapse, that not even Switzerland could keep her safe. So the reader is left to ask the same question as in "Los Angeles": why would a young woman with the potential to make less damaging choices make these particular choices? Why would she stay in a relationship that is not just abusive, but seems to be founded on abuse? Was she far less in control than the narrator thought, much more "assailable" than un-? 

The question takes on more than abstract importance for the narrator when she sees her second daughter beginning to show similar signs of imperiousness. "She has a proudness about her that refuses to grow small, but if it were only that I might not have begun to fear for her. It's her curiosity about her own power, its reach and its limits, that scares me." The narrator's daughter is confronting the difficult choice nearly all heterosexual women have to face: be fearless and open to possibilities or listen to fear and be safe. We can feel a paternal, well-meaning frustration with the impulse to "refuse to comply with vulnerabilities," but we have to recognize its centrality as a choice women face. 

Ultimately, the story asks the reader to consider a broader spectrum of reactions to women who allow themselves to be taken advantage of than pity, concern, or frustration. Concern should exist, of course. The police are right to search for Soraya when the grown-ups finally learn what kind of trouble she is in. But along with pity, concern, and frustration, we should also feel respect for the way young women are refusing to live with their vulnerabilities, refusing to be afraid. It turns the young woman's occasional dangerous choice into a rebellion against the way things are every bit as moving as Ahab's.


For Karen's Carlson's take, including a breakdown of the dual meanings of "finished," see here.   

I have more student loan debt now than when I graduated in 2003, and I'm not sure canceling student loan debt is good policy

I grew up a stone's throw from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, so it was kind of foreordained I would at least try to play high school football. It went okay my freshman year; I started both ways on the 9th grade team, and it seemed reasonable that I'd progress over the next few years to play junior varsity and then get playing time on the big stage as a senior. But my sophomore year threw a wrench into all of that. 

Sophomores rarely logged playing time on the varsity team, but they did practice with the varsity squad. We were the "scout team," mainly there to help the varsity team practice by getting beat on. There were also hazing rituals for sophomores. One involved running at a wall of upper classmen who would then flip you over when you got to them. While you were in the air, other players, who had been perched on top of a blocking chute, would jump off the chute and hit you in mid-air. We didn't dare question it, but some upper classmen offered a justification of it anyway. "We had to do it when we were sophomores" was what they usually said.  

As apologias go, that's not a great one. Would an ex-slave oppose the abolition of slavery because he'd had to go through slavery? The previous existence of a pernicious practice is never a reason to continue the practice. I made it through that sophomore year, mostly because I didn't want anyone to think I had quit because I just couldn't take it, but I refused to play as an upper classman. There was no way I was going to keep playing for a team like that after I knew what they did. 

The comparison many people are making to student loan debt is not good 

I doubt I have to argue long to convince most people that the kind of logic the upper classmen produced is faulty. "I had to, so you do, too" is not just a logical fallacy, it envy incarnate. It's evil.  

I'm not sure, though, that the ubiquitous argument in favor of cancelling student loan debt, one that compares a common argument against cancelling the debt to an "I had to, so you do, too" fallacy, is sound. 

I've seen this argument cropping up all over. Here's a Tweet I saw this week that captures the basic point people are trying to make:

Hahahaha. Yes, I get jokes. 

In any sort of metaphorical juxtaposition of two things, there is the original image, the new image, and something those two images have in common the metaphor wants to highlight. In technical terms, these are the vehicle (original thing), tenor (new thing being compared to original thing), and the ground (thing they have in common). In the sentence "Achilles is a Lion," the lion is the vehicle, Achilles is the tenor, and bravery or strength is the ground. 

What are the vehicle, tenor, and ground in a Tweet like the one above? Something like this:

Vehicle: A terrible person who resents people who haven't had to suffer the same things he has.

Tenor: A person who paid all their student loans and is now angry that others might get their loans forgiven.

Ground: Both of these people are uncharitable and jealous. They resent any good thing that happens to someone else if it didn't happen to them, and want any bad thing that happened to them to happen to everyone. They're haters.  

Does this metaphor hold? I'm not sure it does. Cancer is an unmitigated evil. There is no upside to cancer, ever, unless maybe if Hitler gets it. But taking out a loan for a desired good or service, then paying off that loan in a timely manner, might be good or bad. Yes, you can make an argument that society should provide all the education citizens need to become productive for free. I'm open to that argument. But our society has never done this. We've left it up to people to decide for themselves if the cost of a higher education was worth it. That might be a bad way to run a society, but at least we've all been living under the same rules. Given those rules, the existence of student loans was either a qualified evil or a qualified good, not an unmitigated evil like cancer. 

Moreover, paying off one's loans isn't like beating cancer. While there are certain things one can do to help beat cancer, one certainly has more control over paying off loans than whether your particular cancer is going to be one that treatment can beat. Yes, people have things beyond their control that keep them in debt and yes, capitalism can be cruel. But overall, there are more things you can do to take control of your debt than there are things you can do to beat cancer. That means there's more personal responsibility involved. It's not your fault if you succumb to cancer. It might partly be your fault if you get in over your head in debt. 

A bigger reason the comparison doesn't wash

For better or worse, capitalism does, in some sense, pit all of us in competition with one another. We frequently use the metaphor of a race for capitalism. Arguments for economic justice especially like to use this image, because they argue that it's neither fair nor good for competition the way some people have to start the race behind. 

If student loans represent a handicap in a race, then you can certainly make an argument for removing that handicap. The next time the race starts, we should try taking that handicap away and see what it does. But canceling student debt suddenly is like removing the handicap in the middle of a race, and only for some people. 

An example from my own life

I got through undergraduate school without any debt, thanks to help from my parents. (This is the original unfair handicap all capitalism strains under. Nobody can pick their parents, but you can get a huge head start or a huge disadvantage in life based on something you can't control.) My parents didn't pay for grad school, though, so I picked up debt then. So did Mrs. Heretic. We picked up quite a lot of debt, actually. When we both finished our M.A. degrees in 2003, we had about 90K in debt. We didn't sweat it, though, because we figured we had a few years to work and get it taken care of before we'd have kids. I don't know why we were so optimistic, when we both had gotten degrees in liberal arts that weren't good for much, but that's what we were like then. 

Long story short, Mrs. Heretic got pregnant almost the second she finished grad school, and we spent years trying to figure out how to either live off my one salary or juggle childcare so it paid for her to go to work. We didn't do well at it. We were having a hard time paying our bills without student loans figuring into it, and we had to put expenses on credit cards. I think my credit rating was in the low 600s at one point, even though I was paying everything on time. The great thing about capitalism is that when your credit rating is low, you pay more for everything, making it harder to improve your score and trapping you in that rut forever. 

We both put our loans into "forbearance," which meant we didn't have to pay on them, but they were accruing interest. I did that for my loan for as long as they would let me. When I finally started paying, I'd gone from 25K in debt to 33K. I picked a graduated plan that would start paying interest only, then increase over time. Before COVID-19 put everyone's loans on hold in 2020, I had been paying a little over ten years, and had only gotten the balance down to about 30K. Mrs. Heretic had a higher balance, so we focused more on getting hers down. Between us, we now owe about 85K. We've probably made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50K of payments, and we now owe 5K less than we did in 2003. 

A lot of people present these stories as evidence of the inhumanity of student loan debt, but I'm not so sure. I got a degree in the liberal arts knowing it wouldn't lead to a job that paid much. So did Mrs. Heretic. We could have opted for cheaper places to live than we did, but we were afraid of what the effects of living in some of those neighborhoods would be on our son. (There's a great example of the cruelty of capitalism--the place you can afford has a direct impact on your personal safety.) We took vacations. Not extravagant ones, but we took them. We ordered food out sometimes, instead of always eating hyper-economical meals from bargain grocery stores. We bought new cars. Not fancy ones--I've been driving the same Toyota Corolla for twelve years--but we did buy new cars. We could have taken public transportation. It would have sucked, but we could have.

Some people did make the sacrifices we didn't, because they were playing the game by the rules as they were. They paid off their loans, and now they're in a better position than us. I don't begrudge them this. I'm not good at capitalism. I don't really like it, and I don't put as much effort into it as I would if I thought the rewards were worth the cost. That's why I do things like get degrees in English. I know that I'm never going to win at capitalism. I might prefer a different system, but we don't have that system now. Others didn't spend time moping about the world like I did. They worked to thrive in it. Do I now deserve a governmentus ex machina bailing me out?

A funny thing happened last year. Capitalism actually kind of worked for us. After losing a lot of money we couldn't really afford to lose on a house back during the crash of 2007/2008, we sold a house in early 2021 and made a lot of money out of it. I didn't sell it to make money; I was moving to a new job. But man, did it work out. We'd bought the house in 2015 with a VA loan. Qualified buyers were so few back then, I asked for the seller to pay all my closing costs, and he said okay. Without that, I couldn't have bought. I had very little actual cash. I financed 100% of the cost of the house plus the VA financing fee. I wondered what the hell I was doing. We made essentially no improvements in six years of home ownership. Then COVID-19 made it so nobody wanted to sell a house, driving down supply and making my house worth way more than it should have been. 

We now have enough money that we could pay off our student loans. We even have a little bit beyond that, not enough to make us rich, but certainly a bigger savings account than I had in 2015 when I had to finance 103% of the cost of a house. We aren't paying off our loans, though, because it's possible we might not have to. Or that we might not have to pay off all of them. 

The real irony here is that I had worked a government job for a long time prior to last year. If I were still working that job now, I'd qualify to have nearly all my student loans cancelled. Oops. Did I mention I'm not good at capitalism? I hardly ever make the right choices.

If the government cancelled all or most of Mrs. Heretic's and my loans, we'd suddenly have actual money in our account, instead of money we ignore because we know we have to use it to pay something off. We might actually have enough to be competitive for one of these incredibly inflated houses, instead of paying ridiculously inflated rent. 

But--and here's where the cruelty of capitalism shines again--I'd be bidding on those houses against other people who are struggling as hard as I am. Some paid off their loans. Some never went to college, because they didn't want the student loan debt. We were all running a race against each other, and suddenly I got an advantage over them. Now I get the house in the nice neighborhood, while the guy who paid off his loans gets stabbed by a meth head. 

Capitalism is brutal and shabby (even if it might be the least terrible option available). A policy like sudden student loan cancelation would make it less so, but only for some people, and rather randomly. Why not a sudden massive payment to anyone making less than 50K a year instead? Why not paying off medical debt? Because this is the issue the politics of the moment have seized on, not necessarily because it's the best way to mitigate the brutality and shabbiness of our system. 

Policy isn't the same as private morality

When I got hazed as a sophomore, the right thing to do was to end hazing. If my grandparents got polio as kids, it's a good thing I have a vaccine now so I don't get it. Nobody should hate the inheritors of the future because we've made it better for them. That's what we're supposed to do for our progeny. 

But public policy doesn't always work the same as individual morality does. It isn't flexible enough to provide for what is right in every circumstance. Instead, the best it can strive for is to be fair. Sometimes, fairness is a very blunt tool, and it means enforcing the same crappy rules equally across all of society. 

We don't allow for punishment of crimes ex post facto. If someone saw a loophole in a system and exploited it, we close the loophole, but we don't punish the person who took advantage of it, even if that person was a jerk for having exploited it. Private morality would dictate we hate the guy, because he should have known better, law or no law. But the law has limits. 

Maybe I should have been able to get my grad degree for free. Maybe I should have been able to pay it off interest free on my own schedule. If we change the rules now going forward to make it easier for future students, I won't hold it against them that they got something I didn't. That's the correct application of rejecting the "I had to, so you should, too" fallacy. 

For me, I'll take the help if it's offered. Like I said, I suck at capitalism, so I need all the help I can get, even if I don't really deserve it. But I understand why Biden is reluctant to enact some massive forgiveness. 

If forgiving loans will bring a good to society so powerful, it's worth the unfairness to some people, then it's worth considering. I'm not sure, with inflation at an all-time high, though, that we'd get the benefit we want from freeing up a bunch of cash for Americans. It's likely to mean that people like me will just keep paying ridiculous prices for things like houses and gas, instead of making demand slacken and bring prices down. 

It's not an easy choice. Biden has political considerations to consider with a mid-term coming. There are pros and cons to any choice he makes, including a middle ground of forgiving smaller amounts. But the debate is not advanced by applying false moral metaphors where they don't belong.  

Saved: "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" by Jamil Jan Kochai, Best American Short Stories 2021

I try to analyze stories (talk about what they mean) rather than review them (talk about whether I like them), but I really loved this story. It's about a second-generation immigrant in an Afghan family who is a slacker/video game fanatic. Typically, video-game-nut-slacker stories are about white middle-class kids, but that's part of what makes the protagonist's struggle so compelling: his family expects more of him, expects him to take things besides video games seriously: "prayer, the Quran, Pashto, Farsi, a new job, new classes, exercise, basketball, jogging, talking, guests, chores, family time, time," but the main character is an overweight young person going nowhere and weighed down by "the unrelenting nature of corporeal existence." The main character has assimilated into American culture, and the result, to his family, is a disaster. 

He's not a total non-achiever, although he sees himself that way. He uses his Taco Bell paychecks to help out a father who can't work anymore, because he was injured when the Soviets tortured him in the 1980s during their military adventure in Afghanistan. He has some sense of family duty, and he clearly wants to connect with his father and with his family's past, as becomes clear when he's playing the game.

The entire story is about this young person playing the game "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" on the day it is released in 2015. He had to scrimp and save to even afford the game, after what he gives his family from his paychecks, and he also kind of needs to hide its existence, because his father thinks paying for video games is an extravagance when there are "kids in Kabul...destroying their bodies to build compounds for white businessmen and warlords." 

A kid playing a video game doesn't sound like much of a story, but this is--as our main character makes clear and manages to convince us, the readers--no ordinary video game. It's Metal Gear Solid V. What makes it worthy of a story is that it's the first game this Afghan kid in America has ever played where he can play as an Afghan, from the point-of-view of the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets, instead of as an American shooting at Afghans. That means he can play without the guilt of shooting people who look like his father.

Magical realism or sci-fi?

Video games are incredibly realistic now. Accurate satellite mapping means you can play in city landscapes that are eerily like the real thing. Games can also be mind-bogglingly big. "Open world" games--and Phantom Pain was the first game in this series to be open world--are so large, they might as well be infinite, at least from the player's perspective. In open world games, there are still set missions to finish, but you can more or less get to them on your own schedule while you go off and play around, discovering what the world has to offer.

But the game our main character is playing is a little more realistic than video game technology currently can really achieve. It's so realistic, it's either an intrusion of fantasy into a realistic story or it's sci-fi presenting us a future game so true-to-life it's essentially a mirror of the real world. Because of the combination of an open world with hyper-realistic NPCs (non-playable characters), the protagonist is able to find his father and uncle just before the Soviets killed his real-life uncle and maimed his real-life father. 

This is the quest that sets the story in motion. It's a virtual quest, but it feels very real. This feeling of reality is heightened by the main character's family banging on his door throughout his game play, then kicking on the door until he feels the need to barricade it with a dresser. He's under siege in both the real and the virtual worlds, but we, the readers, empathize with him when he feels that his real quest is in the virtual one. In the virtual one, he may be able to right wrongs that have continued to hurt his family for generations. 

It's possible to read this story as a tragedy, because the main character is seeking to connect with his father, to catch him in his arms as he is falling, to "set him down gently on the clay so that the sky does not swallow him," but only in the video game, while outside his room his very real father is seeking to connect with him. The father told his son that he had something important he wanted to talk to him about, but the son hasn't taken him up on it. Instead, he continues to ignore even the father's gentle calling from his bedroom door. 

I don't read it like that, though. Better philosophers of science than I am have written reams on how the dichotomy between virtual and real world might be false, or on how our "real" world might itself be virtual, might in fact be a video game of incredible complexity. I'll just say that the the main character's quest to right wrongs in the virtual world might not be as pointless as it would seem. I think the main character somehow really needs this. I think the video game is offering him a chance at redemption for his family, at a virtual catharsis that has to happen before he can overcome all the things troubling him in the real world. At the end, we see the main character carrying his father and uncle into a dark cave--symbol, no doubt, of the deep recesses of the psyche--as he attempts, perhaps in vain, to rescue them from assaults. It's clear that this retreat into the cave is a move into the protagonist's own mind and toward self-refection: "you feel compelled to keep moving into a darkness so complete that your reflection becomes visible on the screen of the television in front of you, and it is as if the figures in the image were journeying inside you, delving into your flesh. To be saved." 

There is a play on words, of course, in "saved." He is trying to save his family virtually, from death and pain. His family, meanwhile, is trying to "save" him by carping at him to get his life together. And then there's the video game meaning of "saved," which is to backup game progress so you can leave it for a while, return to the "real" world, and come back to the game later in the same place. I believe the main character's descent into the cave of his own psyche is, in fact, going to save him. 

The importance of representation

Video games have been criticized for decades for not being representative. The main character has played tons of games where Afghans are the "other," the ones being killed by American heroes. The emergence of a game in which Afghans are the subject is itself healing for the protagonist. Video games really are trying to get better at this. It used to be that nearly all women in games had giant breasts, small waists, and wore clothes that made it impossible for them to be doing the athletic things they appeared to be doing in the games. This has changed, and now women can play at least some games from the point-of-view of a woman who actually sort of looks like them. 

I sometimes joke a little bit about the clumsy nature of picking stories for a Best American Short Stories collection, because it's pretty clear that there's a bit of artificial "we need at least some from each group" to it. But it's worth using this process even if it is a little bit of a blunt tool. It's better to force different voices into a collection than it is to try to pick stories without considering representation and ending up with none. Of all the attempts to improve the way culture views race, I think adding more diverse voices in narratives might have been the one that's been most effective. We can try to legislate right thinking, or we can try to inculcate it in our education, but it's far more effective to create compelling stories told form the points-of-view of different people and allow wide audiences to live virtually through their perspectives. 

Did the story end too soon?

Like with the other Jamil Jan Kochai story I've read, I felt like there might have been a bit of incompleteness to this. I felt like maybe we needed a denouement where we can see that the son has been changed through his virtual interaction with his family history, see him now reaching out to the real father. Maybe he invites the father to come play the game with him. Maybe he saves his game and goes out to talk to the dad, asks questions he hasn't ever asked before. The final sentence isn't just "saved," a past participle meaning some type of salvation or preservation has taken place, but "to be saved," meaning the salvation is still hoped for. "To be saved" is almost the same in this sense as "to be continued." Maybe wanting a symbol of connection is too neat. The narrator might still need time in the cave before anyone can be saved. Maybe salvation is too much to hope for, and the moment of introspection is as close to victory as the narrator can get in this game. I'm still not satisfied at the end, but I love the way that I'm not satisfied, the way I have to keep asking myself if I should be. 

My personal context to this story

I have a son who is a slacker, and it concerns me deeply. He doesn't show any interest in taking his future seriously, although he's at an age where he needs to. He loves video games. If he could sit in his room, eat what we give him, and play games until he dies, I think he would. I'm as concerned about him as the father in this story is concerned about his son. And I feel as unwelcomed when I knock on his door. At this point, if I knew that in a few years he'd be working at Taco Bell and kicking in a few bucks to help out, I might even be happy to know he'll be that productive. He's an incredibly smart, perceptive person. He has a lot to offer the world, but he's also full of ennui and ambivalence, and he's not sure it's worth the effort in a world that's going to hell anyway. This wasn't a parental issue I was prepared for, and I know I'm failing at it. 

While I don't think playing video games is enough for a human being to do to justify the resources necessary to sustain life, I do see a lot of redeeming qualities to games. I hope that eventually, my son will find in one of those games a cave into his own psyche, one from which he can emerge in a better relationship with those around him and ready to do his small part to save the world. 

Karen Carlson's take on this story is here. 

Is it religion, or is it culture? "Escape from the Dysphesiac People" by Brandon Hobson, Best American Short Stories 2021

Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity asserts that it is difficult to talk about Christianity taking the place of native Roman religions, because Romans never thought of their beliefs relative to the gods as what we would call "religion." It was a set of commonly received, commonly accepted, commonly practiced customs. What we would call religion and what we would call secular life were all rolled up together so you couldn't tell which was which. I wonder, if were we to find some long-lost tribe of people somewhere on the hills around Rome who somehow never got the message that the empire had come to an end, and I had the chance to speak with these people, how easy I would find it to celebrate their Roman "culture." Especially if it involved killing chickens to tell the will of the gods or some other superstition. 

I have a hard time with some Native American literature, because often, the culture that is being celebrated, kept alive, and revived in it seems to me to have the same undivided blend of religion and culture. It's all jumbled together. "Harmony"--a frequent subject in American Indian* lit-- means not just erasing the lines between the self and nature, but between the sacred and the secular. I haven't read a ton of Indian lit. I took a class as an undergrad, something like "Intro to Native American Literature," that included plenty of Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo. I enjoyed it. Alexie's an ass sometimes, but he's funny. Silko's novel Ceremony especially stuck with me for a while after reading it. Of course, as an agnostic, I found it hard to accept some of the spiritual aspects of it, but in a figurative sense, the notion of the world as a giant, interconnected spider web in which damage to one part damages the whole resonated with me. 

In Brandon Hobson's "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," I felt a similar simultaneous attraction and repulsion at once. It's a fairly simple story, although because the language of the white people in it is intentionally bizarre (they are all dysphesiac, i.e. they suffer from dysphasia, or a brain malfunction that impedes the language center of the brain), it may not seem simple. The dysphasia is symbolic. To a Cherokee boy taken from his home and thrown into an Indian school/work reformatory, their language must have seemed nonsensical, and so dysphasia becomes an exaggerated means to express how disorienting their talk was for the boy. It's also an effective image for how the talk of white people trying to "civilize" Indians was so hypocritical as to be meaningless. The very notion of killing the Indian to save the child is itself oxymoronic; you can't save something by killing it. So the image of a civilization that speaks only babble works well. Karen Carlson does a great job in her post on this story of explaining how the talk of politicians can be dysphesiac. That's the meaning of the word in this story: talk so empty it fails to be coherent.

The boy is taken at age fifteen. It is probably in the 1950s, although it might have been earlier. We are hearing the story from the boy now as an old man telling it to his grandchildren. A "Dr. Estep"--about whom we are told nothing, but who seems to likely be a counselor of some sort--has recommended he tell the story. (One irony of the name "Estep" here is that both of the two possible origins of the name refer to someone who dwells in the East, while the boy saves himself by following a magical trail west.) The old man stresses that his story is not really as much about the trauma he endured as it is about how he escaped. He says it is not "a mélange of distorted events," which is helpful exposition, actually, because in my first read-through, that's what it seemed like. 

While in captivity, he is contacted by the ghosts of his elders. He sees visions of them, mostly suffering. Many visions seem to be of the "Trail of Tears," on which his ancestors were forced to move from their native homes in the southeast of the United States to Oklahoma. They were sent there by President Andrew Jackson, who makes his presence still felt in the narrative through characters named Jackson and also Carl, who is Andrew Jack's son. (We never see Andrew Jack.) 

His ancestors teach him the way to escape, to follow a spirt trail of cherry blossoms out of the dead lands to find the Pleiades, their home. He learns about the importance of harmony, which is what the Tsalagi (a word with several meanings, the most simple of which is the name the Cherokee give their own language) is all about. He sees ancestors spirit travel and change into animals. And eventually, he runs. His real escape isn't just getting away. It's meeting Tsala (a form of the word Tsalagi). His reconnection to the language is the real cure for the babble-talk of his captors. 

Of course, I don't have to take any of the spiritual events literally. And it's actually possible to separate the story's focus on true and harmonious language as distinct from empty and incoherent language without reference to any of the spiritual elements.

I'm sure many indigenous people today don't believe the "religion" handed down to them is literally true, just as many Jews and Christians believe their traditions in a more metaphorical sense. But, well, some sure do seem to take it pretty literally. Some really do seem to believe they can literally commune with their ancestors, or that spirits are traveling through nature. I can, of course, choose to personally read these things metaphorically and leave others to read them how they will, but there's something about reading this kind of literature that leaves me struggling to know how I should take it. What's the message for me, assuming I'm never going to try to commune with my ancestors, because I don't believe they're still around? How do I look at Native American beliefs in general, or the specific Cherokee beliefs as they are presented here, when I know I don't think any of them are right in more than a very watered-down sense?

Am I wrong to feel like this story is pushing religion on me? Or if not on me, then on the "grandchildren" listening to it. Am I misunderstanding the beliefs presented here and insisting on thinking of them in a Western sense? Maybe, but then that seems to be to be treating Cherokee beliefs as something too precious and coddled to be treated how I would treat a story with religious overtones from a different belief system. How would I take a Jewish novel if it seemed to be telling me that the future of Judaism lay in following the Torah? Even if it seemed like there was some wiggle room for not believing everything in the Torah was a literal fact? What would I think of a short story about a kid who was taken from her parents and put in a foster home but survived because she trusted Jesus? That's kind of how I feel when I encounter a story like this. I feel conflicted, because a story like this that tries to restore and maintain a link to ancestral tradition is both asking to keep alive a culture (which seems noble and worthwhile to me) and also a host of "religious" ideas that do not. Again, it seems there's no way to avoid this, because the culture in question didn't separate the religious and secular into distinct realms.

Of course, religious ideas can be helpful to people and give them strength to endure hardships even if the beliefs are not true. Some contemporary Indians doubtlessly think of the old ways as true "up to a point," that while their ancestors aren't literally alive, they still survive through us, their descendants, and so in a sense, they're still here to guide us. There must be "reformed" Indian spiritual beliefs (to use an analogy to Judaism, although "reformed" is an unfortunate word to use in relation to a story of a child who was sent to a brutal "reformatory.") 

A short story like "Escape" uses what might be called "magical realism," which blends elements of fantasy with elements of realism. One need not literally believe in magic to write magical realism. It could all be meant symbolically or as a colorful exaggeration of the natural. Nobody believes that incest will really cause a child to be born with the tail of a pig, but it still works in a novel about a twisted family history. And that's how "Escape" might work.

But it just doesn't feel like that. The boy's experience is intense, like the experience mystics have of God. His passing it on to his grandchildren feels evangelical. It's hard to reinterpret that in an intellectualized way, like, "Even though we don't believe that humans actually inhabit the bodies of eagles, the moral is that we should treat all nature as if it had cognition." Or such. It feels like a belief so intense that to make it abstract would be to make it nothing.

Ultimately, the story is from the grandfather to his grandchildren. It's for them, not for me. I'm listening in on a story meant for others, and maybe it doesn't need to resonate for me. 

I still liked--or perhaps admired--the story, but you can like a story without thinking it's going to become something you treasure and store up for moments when you need it. 

----

This wasn't a literary analysis. I wanted to do one, to point out how I noticed that there were pictures of tanks and planes in Jackson's home for boys but that in home of the old spirit the boy comes across, the pictures had been taken down. I wanted to trace the emerging symbols of home that broke through. I wanted to investigate the mystery of bathrooms and what sinister happened in them. (I'm sure everyone who's been to a school like this probably learned to fear bathrooms, where human cruelty and deviance seem for some reason to shine forth the brightest.) But ultimately, I think the most honest way for me to write about this story is to admit that I have a hard time allowing its magic to come alive for me. And that's okay. There are plenty of stories written for literary muggles like me. 

*One of the things I discovered in my Native American lit class was that many Native Americans are fine calling themselves Indians. In fact, many prefer it. An important indigenous news source is called "Indian Country Today." In what seems to be an extremely healthy relationship with history, a lot of Indians feel that although the name represents the mistake of early colonizers who thought they'd arrived in India, that flawed name is the name that came, and it's important to remember this error. I've used Indian/American Indian/Native American/Native/indigenous interchangeably here. 

The critic is evicted: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, Best American Short Stories 2021

For a blogger trying to come up with 20 interesting takes on 20 stories, the best fodder is a Goldilocks kind of story: not too hard and not too easy to understand. The perfect story would stretch me to my exact limits of comprehension, synthesis, analysis, and explanatory powers, and no further.

Stories like "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque don't leave a whole lot of room for a critic to work. Nearly all readers will find it easy to understand and relatively easy to know what you're supposed to "get out of it," to use the phrase plain-speaking folks who don't do literature for a living often use. 

In a lot of ways, there's nothing really to "get" about the story. Unlike "Boyz N the Hood," which it celebrates, it doesn't attempt to dissect the origins of urban blight. The story is meant more as raw data than as a grand attempt to make sense of raw data. It exists to say "we were here," to tell the story of people quickly being forgotten as the neighborhood they once lived in is gentrifying. It does this well, with plenty of humorous or palpable details that made me believe the story's authenticity, but once I'd read it, I had a hard time earthing up layers beneath the story to dig up. It's like a basketball analyst trying to come up with something interesting to say after a good team beat a bad team by fifty points. 

I still quote this line sometimes when I'm trying to get amorous with Mrs. Heretic. 

One notable characteristic of this story is that feels a lot more like a creative essay than a short story. It has the logic, chronology, and vocabulary of creative non-fiction more than fiction. That isn't a negative criticism; it's just how the story feels, and that feeling has a lot to do with the reader's emotional engagement. I found myself more nodding my head as I read to say, "I have heard you" than I felt like crying or wanting to race back through the story to pull on interesting threads. 

What this story does, it does well, but what it does well doesn't leave much room for me to try to do more with. 

----

As an complete aside, I would note that BASS has an interesting trend going on. Most BASS anthologies for as long as I've been reading them have sought--consciously, I would guess, whatever the judges may say about their methodologies--to bring about "diversity," understood in the way our current culture understands it. There will be stories by both men and women, and, if possible, trans/non-binary writers as well. There will be white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous writers, and stories about white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous characters. There will be gay and straight characters and writers. Which is fine. The collections usually come out fairly interesting with this approach, partly for the way they allow of compare and contrast exercises within single anthologies. But for some reason, the "Latino" entry in BASS seems to be on a roll of giving us stories full of the "Dickensian aspect" of the American experience. A brief history:

2021: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, about a group of Latino boys in Chicago who grow up to become drug dealers. Some are killed, some go to prison.

2020: "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana, about a group of kids living on the streets in a Caracas slum. 

2019: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Munoz, about illegal immigrant workers (and some who might possibly be legal) and their travails

2018: "Everything is Far from Here" by Cristina Henriquez, about the border and immigrants being held in prisons.

That's not really enough to consider it a tradition. (And to be fair, the 2018 anthology that had "Everything is Far from Here" also had Jacob Guajardo's beautiful coming-of-age story "What Got into Us," so it wasn't all Latino trauma in that edition.) But I will be paying attention to next year's anthology to see what comes out of it. (And yes, I wrote basically the same thing last year when talking about "The Hands of Dirty Children.) 

Karen Carlson found more to say about this story than I did here.