Dump all over a story about a four-year-old who dies of a brain tumor? Sure, I'll take that action. "Queen Elizabeth" by Brad Felver

It seems like every "best of" short story anthology has at least one entry that makes me wonder what on Earth the editors were thinking when they picked it. For the 2018 O.Henry Short Story Anthology, that story is "Queen Elizabeth" by Brad Felver. Part Nicholas Sparks and part compendium of the kinds of philosophical ramblings a mildly precocious college freshman far too enamored with his own learning might share, this story has nothing to offer and much that annoys.

One of the reasons I blog about award-winning short stories is that I hope to be able to open up interesting readings that might not occur to readers without specialized education in fiction or literature. But there's almost no hidden secrets in this story. The images are all there on the surface, screaming to be heeded, no matter how shallow they are. What theme there is could perhaps, without doing too much damage to the story, be summarized as: death is a hard blow, especially when it happens to your child, and there are no easy answers.

That's this whole story. It postures at having something deep to say about the timeless subject of death, but fails on page after pompous page. The only potentially useful analysis I might offer is why I dislike it so much. I'm sure some readers read it and enjoyed it, maybe even found it moving. They might be confused why I didn't like it. After all, it's got all the elements of a moving story: a love story with a stand-up guy and a girl dazed by how awesome he is; their romance is interrupted by the death of their daughter. So I'll try to offer an explanation of why I found the story failed, which can sometimes be as interesting an analysis as that of a story I read with profit.

1. The Garcia y Marquez opening: Gabriel Garcia y Marquez's novel 100 Years of Solitutde, which belongs in any time capsule of human artifacts meant to show future civilizations who discover our rubble what our best looked like, begins with the line, "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." It's such a famous line, I can't believe writers try to start their stories with "years later" and think they're being clever. It's not even a clever line if you're intentionally drawing comparisons between your story and 100 Years. Yet this terrible story begins its terrible journey with this: "Many years later, knots of grief cinched intractably within her, Ruth still urged her memory back to their first evening together..."

2. A chronology so straight, the protagonist Gus could have used it to measure angles when making one of his stupid desks. So Ruth supposedly studies stochastics as a Ph.D. student at Case Western. Stochastics is math about randomness. But the plot line is the opposite of random. It starts with their first date and moves with the most unimaginative directness from that moment through dating to marriage to miscarriage to finally having a baby to losing that baby to divorce to a final meeting years after the divorce. Rather than beginning the story as close to the moment when the status quo is altered, we spend half the story building up the status quo before we finally have it changed. And what a dull status quo it is. There is nothing interesting about Gus and Ruth. He's from Ohio on a farm and she's from a well-to-do family in New England! Her family looks down on him! They're such a plucky couple! Who cares? 

3. Lots of the types of pseudo-profoundities you get from someone who just took  all his 101-level courses. There are a number of places where the narrative shoehorns in a concept where the only point seems to be for the author to say, "Hey! Look! I know basic concepts about a subject." Gus plays the ukulele for the child. We read that "D-minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D-minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out of reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G." Is this really something a father would do? Or is the point here for the author to say he's learned about tonal and atonal music, and knows that in tonal music there is a concept of suspended chords? I don't see how this is really an organic notion for simple Gus to be putting into practice. Ruth the mathematician might be endlessly fascinated by the mathematical relationship between chords and their effect on human perception, but not Gus. And it's not a reference that's picked up again anywhere else. 

Most of these "I have learned some basic facts about a subject and will now use that to create images in my story" are of the science and math variety. There is a tendency in the humanities to do great abuse to STEM when translating STEM ideas for mass audiences. This goes back at least as far as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the many imitators who tried to claim modern physics undid the rational underpinnings of the enlightenment and subsequent intellectual movements. The book Fashionable Nonsense presented the views of a group of scientists about how European philosophers of the post-structural variety abused scientific ideas in the service of trying to give an aura of credibility to specious arguments about language and culture. Every bloated Andrea Barrett story presents an unconvincing portrait of a scientist whose entire way of looking at the world, down to how he eats, sleeps, and goes to the bathroom, is somehow a reflection of the theory he is best remembered for. 

This story is STEM name-dropping gobbledygook in that same vein. 

• Gus doesn't know much fancy book-lernin', but he does know about Euclidean planes requiring three points, and he makes his desks with three legs because it's somehow, I don't know, a symbol in the story for how Gus and Ruth won't make it because they can never find the third leg to build on or something. It's not a symbol that makes sense, and it's really forced, both with the reference back to Euclid and in the making of a three-legged desk nobody would want. 
• The specialist who looks at their daughter and avoids directly giving a death prognosis talks about how her physicist father forbade grieving for the doctor's dead mother, because "According to the Law of Conservation of Mass, she was still with us." This is a layperson's stupid paraphrasing of science, not something a scientist himself is likely to say. 
• As Ruth and Gus are breaking up, the breakup feels inevitable to them, but they will also, we are told, look back one day to find the moment they pivoted away from each other, because "...if they could isolate the fulcrum, the singularity, perhaps some wormhole would sprout and revive a conduit to the past." It's got STEM! STEM plus arts is STEAM, and that's very in right now! We must cram more STEM into the narrative! Never mind if it makes sense, or if it's whatever Wikipedia version of STEM a writer concocted for a story, put it in! Hang those who talk of less!
• "He stared at the note. It demanded that he develop a fresh emotional response, one that hadn't yet been charted and classified by scientists." There was no set-up to this science imagery, but SCIENCE IS A CENTRAL MOTIF IN MY STORY, SO MORE, I SAY, MORE!!

4. Passages that are meant to be lyrical and beautiful, but come off as hackneyed or cliche. It's a pretty cliche story overall, focusing entirely on well-trod territory of falling in love and having kids: the bedtime stories, the loss of identity for the parents, the child drawings on the wall. But there are a few passages where these cliches become more concentrated. Examples:

• "The pain from this encounter was real, and yet so was the excitement."
• Describing the troubles between them as "civil war."
• "Without noticing it, they had created an entire country with its own language and customs and mythologies and even defensive perimeters. Their own lines allowed few breaches."
• "A growing swell of energy between them, they each felt it, the way it lashed them together."
• When trying to put their arms around a giant tree, named "Queen Elizabeth" (because it's been alive since Elizabethan times), we read that "even together their arms were swallowed up by its girth." But their arms are around it, so how are they being swallowed up? Because the cliche is for something to be swallowed up, and this story can't be bothered to rework cliches, that's why.

5. Gus is a great guy! Such a great guy! Gus has one or two small stumbles, but mostly, he's insanely great. He reminds me of the father from the NBC show This is Us. In fact, this whole story reminds me of that show, because it's cry porn disguised with just enough seriousness to allow people to feel like they earned their cry. (It's like The Shack or a number of other recent stories in this regard. If something bad happens, then the audience is allowed to think it's not watching something sentimental, so the emotion is earned. It's not.) Not every character has to be deeply flawed, but there were a lot of "he's great" passages. And those passages all seemed to be written specifically for the Hallmark-Special-crowd to appreciate his greatness. After Ruth's miscarriage, her sadness comes in waves. "The waves came suddenly, and he learned how to recognize them. He didn't understand them, but he knew it wasn't important that he did." Ooooooooooh, I just had such an empathetic orgasm reading that. (Gus also gains twenty pounds on purpose because Ruth feels bad he's skinny and she's not. Sooooo thoughtful! Soooo dreamy!) 

It can't be cheesy if bad things happen in it! 

6. Old-school sage author. This story is in third-person omniscient, giving us, the readers, access to the thoughts of both Gus and Ruth. This isn't used as much anymore, and while there's nothing wrong with using it, one has to be careful while using it not to come across like the kind of sage writer of 100 years ago, the one who knows all and is graciously allowing the reader access to his wisdom. Omniscient shouldn't mean acting like God, in other words, in the sense of talking down to reader about the way the world is. 

This story slips into this mode twice. Once comes with an "of course." Ruth is calculating the odds of their daughter having the brain tumor she gets (because she's mathy, remember?) Gus doesn't get why she does this. The narrator tells us that "What he didn't understand, of course, was that (her calculations) allowed Ruth a respite, precious moments." 

You can use "of course" (of course) in a narrative, if it's the character's own interior monologue. For example, "Jenny searched the house for her keys for hours, before finally remembering that she'd left them dangling from the deadbolt on the front door, of course." That's her talking to herself. But when an omniscient narrator says "of course" like this, he's talking to us, the reader. It's a direct address, like "gentle reader." It's a hack move. Soon after, after telling us the two characters had chosen anger over sadness, the narrator wonders: "Perhaps this was not a conscious decision." Again, that perhaps is addressed directly to the reader, because it can't be either person thinking to themselves. The reader is therefore now brought into the story in a way I don't think is really intended. 

So why did the editors love this story?

I'm not really sure. Laura Furman, in her introduction to the volume, raves about how this story reminds us that as bad as our own mortality is, "there are losses that are worse." She claims that this story is "as lovingly crafted as the furniture Gus makes, and Felver leaves the reader with a haunting and bittersweet truth." What bittersweet truth? That sentimental stories about children dying can make us cry? This is a lazy review of a lazy story. Furman saw the easy opportunity to write that sentence linking the story's crafting and the desk's crafting and took it. In an otherwise challenging and pretty well thought-out anthology, this story strikes me as one that both the author and the editors phoned in, and then the editors tried to hide it early on the B side of the album. 

There's nothing wrong with writing a story that isn't all together. Not every song is a hit, or deserves to be. Some are just part of the process of trying things. Felver's apparently a highly regarded writer, and I'm sure I'd like some of his other work. But why waste space in one of the few anthologies focused on short stories out there with a weak story like this? Why pretend sadness equals depth? Every one of the twenty spaces in this anthology represents a responsibility on the part of the editors, because those stories can be a huge shot in the arm to the writers who get them. Giving this spot to a melodrama like this was a missed opportunity. 

Something to pretend belongs to you: "An Amount of Discretion" by Lauren Alwan

Seline was a good choice to be the executor of the estate for her recently deceased artist husband, Jonathan. Not only is she an artist herself (Jonathan's former student and about thirty years younger than he was), she's fastidious, she notices small details, and she pays attention to the rules. Since  Jonathan had achieved some renown before shuffling off this mortal coil, it was a comfort to him while dying to know his work would be cared for and appreciated. Seline's carrying out his wishes to the letter was part of that consolation.

What Seline's personality doesn't make her well suited for is caring for Jonathan's surviving son and her step-son, Finn. She did okay as a part-time mother to Finn when Finn was a kid, although she had no real maternal instincts herself. It helped that Finn had been an "even-tempered, pleasant child," and it helped even more that she only had him on weekends and for a couple of weeks in the summer. After that, they could send him back to his mother's house, Jonathan's former wife, and it "was always a relief when the visits were done, and, released from having to care for a child not her own, she could return to her life with Jonathan and her work in the studio." 

Nonetheless, here after her husband's death, Seline finds herself wishing she'd gotten closer to Finn. They've had a few conversations just between them that have gone well, now that Jonathan isn't there to mediate everything between them, and it's got Seline thinking she's longing for a closer relationship with him. When she finds eight of Jonathan's notebooks, she decides to offer them to Finn so he has something to remember his father by. Because she doesn't feel confident explaining her need to be close to him outright, she hopes the gesture might express "what she could not--her regret at the distance she'd put between them when Finn was young."

Finn's on his way to visit her, and this presents an opportunity for her to give him the notebooks and have that conversation she's been wanting to have, but it's obvious right away it's not going to go well. Finn is dating someone at San Francisco State University, and she'd got a kid. Finn's bringing both to meet Seline, because he was going to be in the area anyway for his mother's birthday. So already, her private moment she was hoping to have with him will be interrupted.

Much more than that, though, as Seline prepares for her guests, anyone who has ever spent five minutes with a four-year-old can see disaster looming. There is a lot of time given to the description of Seline's house and the things in it. She sets the table with a blue madras cloth, pottery carried back from a trip to Portugal, heavy goblets bought secondhand in North Hollywood. She purchases a complicated cake called a sacripantina from an Italian bakery. She has heavy linen drapes lined with cotton duck. She spends a lot of time dressing and thinking about her accessories, especially one piece of jewelry she feels sentimental attachment to, but cannot put on because she needs help with it. And then, there's Seline's studio, with all the tools of an artist along with her art she'd been working on laid out carefully.

I foresee nothing going wrong with this visit. 

From the moment Finn's girlfriend Anna arrives, Seline finds fault with her, thinking her "close-cut dark blond hair gave her a severe, unforgiving look." Seline tries to be lenient with Chole, the four-year-old, ignoring the first several transgressions of the child. When Chloe insists on holding a nutcracker at the table herself, then drops it and breaks a plate (not one of the good ones), Seline actually "felt relief--as though the inevitable had finally occurred." The reader is tempted to share this relief, but more tension is about to be piled on.

It turns out Finn has something he wants. He's come to ask about a particular painting his father made, one that, unlike the usual aesthetic his father employed, was very personal. It includes a rabbit Finn and Jonathan had seen while out walking together--a fact that even Seline was not aware of. She takes Finn to her studio to see the painting, and is considering using the discretion afforded her as executor to perhaps find a way to let Finn keep it, when Chloe comes into the studio. She draws by herself for a while, but then drop the pencil and spills brushes while trying to pick it up, lightly damaging Seline's works-in-progress along the way. Seline reacts just a touch harshly, grabbing the girl's arm and telling her that "things break if you're not careful" in one of those really over-the-top double-meaning lines.

From then on, it's obvious Finn and Anna are angry at Seline for the way she treated Chloe in the studio. One could read this as standard old generation vs. new generation stuff, the old generation insisting children need boundaries and rules while the new refuses to discipline their kids, but there's something going on that makes the reader think that even while Seline has a point, she's wrong.

In the moment Chloe dumps the brushes, Seline has rethought giving not just the painting, but even the notebooks to Finn. She sees her near-decision to give the work to him as a "...lapse in judgment. She knew better know. She knew sentiment could not influence her. She would follow Jonathan's wishes and keep the collection together. There was no room for discretion, not even hers." 

In fact, Seline is so closed off, she is wired against the sentimental. She tried to open up that day, even symbolically opening her drapes to let in the sun she typically kept out, but it was too much for her. Ultimately, she likes her ordered life. When Finn tells Seline that Anna is pregnant, she knows he means it as good news, but "she kept thinking of the irreversibility, the obligation it would mean." Finn, speaking only for himself, offers that "a little discomfort keeps you in check," but Seline immediately writes this thinking off as "one of those odd theories" young people come up with that "explain nothing."

This emotional reserve seems to even pervade Seline's work, which is "solemn and enigmatic, and none of it...ready to be seen." Seline spends her days in a studio she has made to be exactly like the gallery that shows her work, meaning she is always in the artificial world, never creating art meant to be experienced by full-blooded people. Even Seline herself doesn't "know what to make of" her own paintings, because it has never occurred to her to connect with them in that way. She is not capable, perhaps, of making a personal piece of art like the one Finn covets.

In the end, Chloe wanders off. As Finn's new family is checking the house to be sure they didn't leave anything, Seline realizes that Chloe has stolen her treasured bracelet. She tries to come up with a way to get it back without accusing the girl, but can't come up with one. Because Anna and Finn are already angry with her, she allows the girl to leave with it. She understands the impulse, having been a hell-raiser herself as a girl. "How irresistible it must have seemed. How unexpected. The child must have marveled at her luck, that she had found something she could pretend belonged to her."

Seline likely feels she deserves this treatment, to lose something of sentimental value to her at the hands of someone pretending it belongs to her, because she is doing the same thing to Finn by pretending her duty as executor means the painting cannot be his.

A masterpiece...that I can't stand

Every once in a while, there is a movie or a story that I can recognize is artistically nearly flawless, but which I still don't like. That's this story. I hated Seline. I know it's considered facile to complain that you don't like a character and use that as a reason to dismiss a story--the "correct" attitude is supposed to be to ask not whether the character is likable, but whether the character seems lifelike. And Seline is very real--this is a type of person I know. Know and don't like. Even while Alwan was brilliantly building tension with olives perched just-so on the table and the cake in the refrigerator, I kept thinking it would be fine with me if a fire just burned all of Seline's things, art and all, to the ground. Seline is a stick-in-the-mud who cares about stupid belongings being kept in a certain way and creates art I can't imagine wanting to look at. She cares about her stupid things--even though in the end, we're all going to die, so we're all just pretending things belong to us--more than the people around her. It's hard for me to get past a story being about a silly person whose life has been one big waste just because I recognize how well the portrait is drawn and how convincingly the tale of her final failure to open up is.

All coming-of-age stories all the time: "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" by Jenny Zhang

I knew when I was writing my last post that I was jumping the gun. While writing about how it had been hard for me to get past the fact that I was reading a fourth straight coming-of-age story in the O.Henry Anthology, I thought to myself, "Surely, they won't go for a fifth?" But they did. It's the year of the bildungsroman, I guess.

Like with the last one, it would be unfair of me to judge the story because it happened to have been anthologized with so many other coming-of-age stories, and I'm going to deal with it on its own merits. I can also see what the anthology editors were thinking. These might have been five stories that were alike in that they featured young protagonists passing through trials into adulthood, but the stories are also profoundly different from one another. We had a wealthy Connecticut family taking their teens on vacation to Italy, a German child growing up during post-WW-II reconstruction, a wonderful Afghan boy-goes-on-a-journey tale, a Russian child in the 90s (I think?) watching her mother and her mother's best friend try to find happiness, and now this story about a Chinese-American girl's relationship to her grandmother.

Zhang's story stands out as different for more reasons than just the ethnicity and location of the narrator, a now-grown woman thinking back over her childhood from age nine to age seventeen. It also stands out for being perhaps the only story in which the climax is not the main character changing, but failing to change. Or does she? The narrator essentially tells us this is a negative character arc, but it's possible that the act of writing the story is more meaningful and more indicative of a post-facto change in the narrator than the narrator realizes.

The story unfolds as four different visits from a Chinese grandmother to the home of Stacey, the narrator. When Stacey is young, she is won over by her old grandmother, who is hard of hearing, entirely too self-assured and unaware of herself, and who re-invents her past from moment to moment. She first says she lost her hearing when a horse ran into her, then later says it happened when she was running away from boys who were throwing bricks.

The grandmother is the one who supplies the question to this second version of the story, "Why were they throwing bricks?" She answers, "Who knows. There was a violence back then no one can understand now." It turns out that Grandma lived through Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution and lost her own parents in the process. This is why she has developed a habit of re-inventing her past; it's a survival mechanism for her. It's also why she is so devoted to her grandchildren. She sees loving them as a way to redeem herself for failing to save her own parents.

We often tend to talk about Mao's revolution now like it's all a joke, which is another way to disassociate from what we find hard to understand.

We don't realize all this until the end. Stacey, after loving her grandmother and missing her when she goes back to China when Stacey was younger, later grows to be mortified by her. The grandmother is a symbol of all the things Stacey wishes she wasn't, all the things that make her standout as weird in America. When the grandmother returns for her second visit, the narrator recalls that, "I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night--I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread."

Stacey begins to resent her grandmother, whose weird Chinese-ness and origins in a time that doesn't make sense anymore remind Stacey of all the things about herself she doesn't like. Stacey works to keep her younger brother from loving Grandma the same way Stacey used to love her, and eventually she succeeds.

We see hints that Stacey, as she is growing into a woman, is also developing the ability to see grandma's own struggles from a mature and sympathetic perspective. Stacey finds the grandmother out late one night after Grandma's senility is beginning to set in, bouncing on a neighbor's trampoline. Through Grandma's dialogue with the ghosts of her parents, Stacey understands more than she ever has about why Grandma chooses to re-invent her own story. And here's where the narrator self-diagnoses herself with a failed epiphany:

"I thought I would always remember this night and be profoundly altered by having seen her this way. But it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake--that if you remember this dream, it will unlock secrets to your life that will otherwise be permanently closed--but when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. And after trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don't change at all."

That's the narrator's diagnosis. Should we accept it? Or is it possible that Stacey has adopted some reverse syndrome from the grandmother's? While Grandma changed the past to make it more palatable, Stacey might have changed her story to make herself feel more guilty than she needs to. It's the story of many "hyphen people": Chinese-Americans feel damned if they are too Chinese and damned if they are too American,and so live with a permanent sense of guilt. 

There are two reasons to doubt Stacey's own self-diagnosis. First, even when she is telling herself she is happy to see the grandmother leave for the fourth and final time, she shows signs that she will miss her. She finds the grandmother's hearing aid on the ground. After first saying, "It's like you just won't go" and kicking the hearing aid away, she immediately runs, picks it up, and tenderly brushes the dirt off it. At her worst, she is torn about the grandmother.

Secondly, she hasn't forgotten the dream, the one that she thought might "unlock secrets to her life." She just told us the dream in minute detail. It's possible that the act of writing this story is the moment when the narrator finally internalizes the lessons learned from her long contact with her grandmother.

I remember in grad school my adviser specifically used the "grandma dying" story as an example of a story we shouldn't write. "Everyone feels bad when Grandma dies," she says. "And everyone thinks everyone else should feel bad about it, too, but the fact is that nobody else really cares about Grandma dying." Zhang picked an uphill battle for herself, but I think she was mostly up to it. I felt like the narrator herself may have been too absent from the story. We get insight into her only through her reactions to Grandma. We never see her interacting with peers or doing homework or hoping for something for herself. The passage above about the many ways she felt inadequate is one of the few bits of internal dialogue we see from her. Since the story is really about the narrator and the effect Grandma had on her, I thought the story was too focused only on the older generation and not enough on the new. It's easy to understand why--Grandma was a great character, and it was more pleasant to focus on her than on Stacey. In the end, I felt like the impact was slightly less than it might have been, but still worthy of its place in this block of five stories written form the points-of-view of five vastly different young people. (I read ahead the first few pages of the next story this time. I really think it's got adult protagonists.)

Okay, fine, let's do yet one more coming-of-age story: "Deaf and Blind" by Lara Vapnyar

Originally, when I read "Deaf and Blind" by Lara Vapnyar, I was going to write an angry analysis about it being part of a culture that is infantilizing readers by giving them too many stories about children. There are plenty of critics who have been suggesting this in recent years, and I could have cited them as part of denigrating this story. I even had a title picked out for my review, one from the story itself: "bland and runny and desperately silly."

But it later occurred to me that it's not Vapnyar's fault that her story takes place in a culture that writes a lot of coming-of-age stories. Nor is it her fault that the O.Henry Anthology likes to group stories by themes, meaning it put four coming-of-age stories all in a row in the middle of the collection. It isn't her fault that her story came last in this run, meaning I'd already kind of been worn down by similar stories. My responsibility was to get past all of that and read the story for what it was.

What it was, taken by itself, is a serviceable story about  a young woman learning to accept her mother as a flawed but lovable person. Not just lovable, but deserving of love. This is an important, if not earth-shattering, discovery most people make at some point in their early adult lives (assuming their parents actually do deserve understanding and love, despite their flaws).

The narrator, who is telling the story as an adult, is remembering back over a couple of years of childhood, starting at about age seven and lasting into roughly early puberty. (In spite of reading this story twice, I cannot recall if the narrator's name is ever revealed. I often forget to look for this, and I'm tired of even trying to care about whether there is some significance to a character remaining unnamed. If the narrator's name is in the story, it's not in there much, and I can't find it now.) The father has left the narrator's mother, and the daughter now finds herself acting like children often do in such circumstances: she idolizes the one who left and is hyper-critical of the one who stayed behind. "I loved my father more than I loved her." The girl even tells her mother this, in the cruelly blunt manner of children. But there is also a desperate sort of bond between mother and daughter.

It is the very strength of this bond that makes the daughter so critical of her mother. The girl can sense her mother's hypocrisy not because they are distant, but because they are so close: "I was only a child, but I was very close to my mother, so close that I couldn't help hearing the smug note in her voice." What the mother is being smug about is her friend Olga. Olga and the mother met when they were both undergoing fertility treatment in a Moscow clinic. (Oh yeah, the whole story is in Russia, but somehow that doesn't really matter much.) The mother managed to have a child, but Olga didn't, and the mother voices her "regret" that Olga never had a child as much to gloat as to genuinely sympathize with her friend.

But Olga ends up with a reward of her own. She takes a lover. Her lover is the blind and deaf Sasha, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy like Olga does. Olga leaves her husband, whom she respects but does not love, and stakes all on her love for Sasha. Olga brings her lover to the mother's house to introduce him, where the narrator, the mother, and the narrator's grandparents all go to a great deal of trouble to prepare the best meal they can. They are very excited and nervous to meet a blind and deaf person, treating him like a novelty meant for their own entertainment.

During the dinner, it becomes apparent that Sasha and the narrator serve parallel purposes in the lives of Olga and the mother. Both women are hoping to receive love from their respective counterparts in order to justify the choices they've made in life. The mother hypothesizes that Olga picked a blind and deaf person because she couldn't have a child, so she chose a person who needed help and would therefore fill a similar role. While the grandparents dismiss this theory, the important thing is that it is true for the mother. She sees Sasha as competition. She has staked her life on her daughter's love, just as Olga has staked hers on Sasha's.

What heightens the stakes is that the narrator has always liked Olga more than her own mother, a fact that is not lost on the mom. There are several character developments that happen at once as the story comes to its climax. One is that the narrator turns down an offer to visit her father, the one she formerly idolized although he almost never made time for her. This helps to break one of the spells on her. A second is that the mother seems to be genuinely happy for her friend. She does her honest best to treat them well and make sure Sasha is comfortable. The mother is so intent on her friend's happiness, in fact, that she lets her own guard down and realizes how unhappy she herself is.

The story ends with the mother crying in bed. The narrator climbs in to join her. This vulnerability of the mother finally melts the narrator's walls toward her. "I pitied her. But I loved her more than I pitied her. I loved her so much much that it was hard to breathe. And another thing: at that moment, I felt close to my mother in a completely new way. Not as a child, but as a fellow woman, an equal."

Some might complain that a passage like that is too on-the-nose, too "tell-y." I'm fine with it. The story has a bit of a fable-like quality to it anyhow, so there's nothing wrong with the moral being laid out plain and simple.

Most people who love literature are probably drawn to the stories with the big epiphanies, the cosmic-level conflicts with life-and-death hanging in the balance. But that's not a reason to despise stories about the small epiphanies in life, the ones that bring marginal improvements to our daily existence. "Deaf and Blind" is a story in which one character's lack of two of the five major senses awakens another character to her own inability to sense what is going on around her. I see no reason to be obtuse myself about accepting and appreciating a story like that. 

The time bomb plot structure: "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier

It's common to talk of fiction as being primarily about change. Nearly every "how-to" book or class will tell writers we need to first establish a "before," then introduce action that causes change in the status quo, leading to an eventual catharsis in the character that means his or her life will never be the same.

A typical way to do this, if we were to assume a five-act structure, is:

-Introduce the status quo in act one
-Introduce the change in act two
-Have the character resist the change and try to restore the status quo in act three
-In acts four and five, the character will realize that the status quo is gone, and she now needs to change to adapt to a new reality. There will be a catharsis near the end of act four or beginning of act five and a denouement immediately after, which show what the new reality after catharsis will look like for the character.

Generally, it's considered a weakness to wait too long to bring in the disruptive force. Creative writing instructors are often pointing out that the stories of their students may be full of incisive prose and intriguing characters, but if nothing happens, then the story is dead on arrival. So writers are encouraged to make something happen as soon as possible after establishing the "before," and to set their stories as close to the beginning of the change as they can.

Mark Jude Poirier's "How We Eat" doesn't do any of these things. Nearly the entire story is "before," where we see the present reality of Trent and Lizzie, the two grade-school children of Brenda in 1992 Arizona. And what an awful reality it is for them. On the day of the story, the two children have been pulled out of school to help their mother, Brenda, go shopping at second-hand stores. Brenda hunts for overlooked valuable items she can sell herself at a profit, while she has her kids rifle through pockets for anything of value the donors might have left. She then searches the kids' pockets and even the tops of their underwear before they get back in the car, because she doesn't trust them not to hold out on her.

"How We Eat" joins the company of other excellent tales of the child victims of bad parents.

Often, it's considered a bit sloppy to only paint a character as a bad person. Since most people have a good quality or two, putting only a character's worst into a story seems to lack objectivity. But in the memory of Trent, who is first-person recollecting this day at some point in the future, we do not see a single redeeming characteristic of Brenda. From his physical description of her ("hair like hay because she uses Miss Clairol too often") to his fear of being attacked by a serial killer ("I blame Brenda") to Brenda's pointing out that her son hasn't begun puberty yet when she checks the top of his underwear to Brenda's terrible reasons for pulling her children out of school ("We could have gone to school and Brenda could have gone thrifting by herself, but she hates being alone,") there is just no mercy for this character. She's awful. An awful mother and an awful person. Her kids should be taken from her. And because this is Trent's memory, it's okay that he himself isn't objective enough to find the good in her.

When Trent finds a measly dollar, the family stretches it, along with ten cents from the seat of the car, to split lunch at McDonald's, making this the "How We Eat" scene from the title. It's clear that nothing taking place on this day is unusual for the family. The entire day is the "before" in Trent's life.

I kept waiting for the explosive action, thinking there were hints of what it might be. Trent had a stash at home of $126 dollars he'd managed to keep hidden from his mother by stuffing it in a Ziploc bag and taping the bag inside the toilet, like he'd seen drug dealers do on TV. I thought Brenda would discover it. But that's not what happens.

Instead, the explosive event happens late in act four, leading to a very quick catharsis and resolution in a short act five. Brenda gets in a brawl at the second thrift store and needs to leave before the cops come. She hauls Trent out to the car, wet pants and all (because she has refused to help him figure out where he can go), leaving sister Lizzie behind. Trent, thinking that Lizzie will be killed by the serial killer he imagines in his head, jumps out of the car and goes back to get her. One sentence is both Trent's transformation and the action he takes based on the transformation: "This story, these images of Lizzie and the strange man, take residence in my gut and sit there like a tumor, so when we stop for a red light at Prince Road, I open the door, jump out of the car, and hurry down the dirt shoulder back towards Goodwill." From that point, there are only two more sentences in the story. We're done.

I've spent a lot of time reading fiction "how-to" books over the last few years. I'm always amazed at how much standard advice both does and does not help a writer to create a great story. On the one hand, you'll never go wrong doing things the traditional way. The O.Henry story just before "How We Eat" in the anthology, "Nights in Logar," very much follows traditional advice by starting as close to the disruptive event as possible. In fact, it starts with the event rather than before it, as the boys are already headed out to find the dog from the beginning. We get the "before" filled in for us as they're making plans to go and setting out. But "How We Eat" defies this pattern by instead dropping a time bomb quietly into the narrative and waiting until the end to set it off.

You could, of course, look at this as still being traditional. The "before" is the totality of Trent and Lizzie's shitty lives, the disruptive event is a day at the thrift stores, and acts two and three represent Trent's attempts to continue to make the status quo work, which only fails to be possible when the shittiness of the status quo gets ratcheted up in the finale. But to me, it felt like one, long crescendo to a final explosion.

That put a lot of pressure on the narrative to have a compelling status quo, one that the reader can stay with even while the disruption is being kept at bay. Poirier was very much up to the task.

Afghan Stand by Me: "Nights in Logar" by Jamil Jan Kochai

Between this year's Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Anthology, and now the O.Henry winners, there have been a lot of stories from writers with recent origins outside the country. BASS gave us "The Art of Losing," about a Korean-American family in Philadelphia, "Unearth," about a Canadian first nations woman connecting with her roots, "Everything Is Far from Here," about immigrants on the American/Mexican border, "A Big True," about an Iranian musician and his daughter," and "What Terrible Thing It Was" about a Chinese-American girl. That's 25% of the stories in the collection. I can't find my Pushcart right now, but at least "The Whitest Girl," Guerrilla Marketing," and "The Bar Beach Show" qualify.

So far in O.Henry, there's already been "Nayla, "Lucky Dragon," and "Past Perfect Continuous" that draw on the author's rich immersion in something other than mainstream American culture. Now, we get "Nights in Logar," which probably goes more off the map for most American readers than any of the other stories I've just mentioned.

American readers looking for the best literature are going to be reading a lot of this from now on. There are more English speakers in India and Pakistan than the rest of the former English colonies combined, and many are excellent writers. Nigeria contributes a good number of top-rate authors in English as well.

But even if we restrict our writers to just those within the United States, as BASS does, we still have a lot of writers whose families have come to the U.S. in relatively recent memory. When they write their stories, we not only read about the trials of moving to the U.S. from some other place, but also of the fraught realities of American involvement elsewhere. Our current literature is the literature of our post-9/11 attempt at enlightened empire. 

When Kochai writes about Logar, a remote province in east Afghanistan, most readers may not know the first thing about the world our characters find themselves in, but it's a world influenced heavily by the decisions of our government and the presence of our soldiers.

If the sky, that we look upon...

Marwand is an American kid with Afghan parents who has gone back to his family's former home for the second time in his life. He's very much a child of both worlds, as he drops frequent Pashto words into his speech, calling himself a musafir (traveler) from America. There are some words he almost doesn't seem to be able to say in English, but then he also needs to revert to the English "fuck" when he's really flummoxed, and the best reference he can come up with in his head for an attack he participates in comes from a John Wayne movie.

Marwand joins three other boys--Gulbuddin, Zia, and Dawoud--as they leave the safety of the village to go look for the lost dog Budabash. At first, when the story described the boys stepping onto a main road made of hard, dark clay, it made me think of four other travelers stepping onto a yellow brick road (I supposed I was helped in this association by the reference to Afghanistan's poppies). But soon it dawned on me that this was much more like Stephen King's Stand by Me. The boys are in early adolescence, heading out into a world of danger with a MacGuffin to go find.

That MacGuffin is a dog. Well, sort of a dog. Budabash is described as more some kind of crazed, primordial beast than dog. It's never really stated why the boys want to go get him. It might be because they are worried the dog will hurt someone else. It might just be a sense of adventure. But if we read a little closer, we might find a key to unlocking much of the story.

Marwand would never again have friends like he did when he was twelve. Wallah! Does anyone? 

In Marwand's first trip to Afghanistan, he beat up the village dog, which he called "Mr. Kareem." But after going back to America to get a proper education, he learned that "dogs were supposed to be hugged and petted and neutered, but never beaten or tortured." So when he got back to Afghanistan, the first thing he wanted to see was the dog, so he could make up for his former bad behavior.

But Mr. Kareem wasn't there anymore, and in its place was "not a dog at all, but something more like a mutant." When Marwand tries to befriend it, Budabash bites off Marwand's fingertip.

So why is Marwand chasing the dog? Is it because he thought he had learned, after having first treated a wild thing in a cruel way, how to behave rightly? Has he not come from America wanting to apply his modern ideas of virtue and goodness? Doesn't he think it will be different this time? And has he not been shown the error of his thinking, and paid a price for it? And doesn't this all fit with everything America has done in Afghanistan since 2002?

Marwand needs to find the dog so he can correct the seeming contradiction in his theory. It is right to pet dogs. He has petted the dog, and yet it did not go as planned. It is not unlike America's now almost 20-year stay in the country, much of which can be seen as the refusal to admit that our theories about benevolent empire have gotten us nothing but a mangled hand (to say nothing about what it has done for Afghanistan).

Marwand's three young family members go with him, after they first hold a jirga or council to decide that exactly four people must go. ("'More than four,' he told me and Zia and Dawoud...'and we'll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped or robbed.'") These three are responsible for teaching Marwand about Afghanistan. He tries to learn. Marwand really tries. He professes that he would rather be in Afghanistan than America, but when it gets dark out, it's obvious that this is a lie.

The fact is that Marwand can't get away from being American, and that has meaning here in Afghanistan. There is a very funny twenty-one-point list Marwand puts together of the things he sees while walking through Logar. It includes the shocking, like kids stoning a cobra to death, the pathetic, like laborers building a wall out of the same mud they are covered in, and the surprisingly transcendental: "the wheat shaking in the wind" and "One true God." But the list also includes two American helicopters and what he thinks is a drone.

The list, however, does not include Budabash. The boys never find the dog. Unlike Stand by Me, they never make it to their destination, and the boys do not achieve a coming-of-age leap forward by accomplishing their goal. Instead, there is something of a circularity to the narrative.

This short story is part of a longer collection, called "99 Nights in Logar." There are some questions this story left unanswered that are probably answered in the longer work. One is why the boys refuse to allow Marwand's brother Gwora to come along.

There is no redemption for Marwand, but there is--again, recalling Stand by Me--a section that centers around a carcass. The dog has attacked a number of sheep, and one was so torn apart it seems like it has "exploded from the inside out." Or was it the dog? The shepherd who tells the kids about the carcass notes that he was tending the flock when he was momentarily distracted by "the erratic flight patterns of an American helicopter." Has there been some kind of accidental targeting?

Ultimately, looking for Budabash is like waiting for Godot. You cannot redeem imperialist urges, you cannot turn war into something meant to help the enemy. Marwand cannot stop being American, as much as he wants to be Afghan and only Afghan.

There is, however, maybe a note of hope. When Marwand is praying along with the other boys for help in their quest, he prays for a long list of things. He ends with this:

I prayed for the men in the village who took care of their families and prayed all their prayers and watched over their neighbors and worked all day in the sun and never beat their wives and never sold their daughters and never snitched on their people and never joined the Americans and never hurt anyone they didn't have to hurt, because I swear to God those sorts of people existed in Deh-Naw, in Logar, in the country. I swear to God. 

The most noble thing Marwand notices are those who maintain some sense of independence from the great political powers of the time, the Americans and the Ts (Taliban). The closest Marwand can come to reconciling his two halves is not to fuse them, but to show some level of indifference to both, preferring a simple life of private goodness, rather than the kinds of lofty ideals that make someone turn his back on those closest to him in favor of some grandiose political ideal.

But even when he is thinking these thoughts, he betrays his Americanness. His concern for the welfare of women is very Western, and when he swears to God it is the only place in the narrative where he swears in English instead of using the colloquial "Wallah!" for "Honest to Allah."

There is savage beauty in the landscape and nobility in the people, but in the end, even the hope of religion is somewhat taken from them. Zia, the child who manages to attract a congregation at one point with his beautiful recitations of prayers, falls asleep in the dark with Marwand, "and for the first time in a long time, Zia forgot to pray."

This story is likely to stay with me longer than some of the others in the collection, I think. It's not exactly anti-American. U.S. adventurism in Afghanistan isn't the main subject of the story; it's always a whispered danger on the fringes of reality, but then so are half a dozen other things. Marwand's discovery of his uncle's resting place brings up the past colonial adventurism of the Russians, making the current U.S. experiment less unique. What makes this story effective for me is that it isn't focused on Americans in Afghanistan, like so many war movies we've seen, nor is it a fully Afghan view of American occupation, which would be worth reading, but wouldn't then belong in an American-focused anthology. Marwand's unique heritage allows for a translation of Afghan experience that has a note of authenticity, putting the experience of Afghanistan's people in the center while still speaking in a way American audiences can understand. 

The just-out-of-reach epiphany: "The Inversion of Marcia" by Thomas Bolt

This story nearly ended my attempt to analyze all the stories in the 2018 O.Henry anthology. It's a very long short story at 45 pages. This makes it difficult to read all in one sitting, which is the advantage short stories usually give to the would-be analyst. One problem I had was my ignorance of Italian geography. The entire story is about an Italian vacation a Connecticut family takes, apparently over Christmas break, and I was a little lost. Actually, the family itself is often lost, driving through the same arch over and over again as they try to get back to their villa, or asking whether the body of water they can see from their villa is the Gulf of Naples or the Mediterranean Sea (it's the Tyrrhenian Sea).

The three girls who form the nucleus of the story are helped out by maps, so I'm going to provide one here. The first half of their trip, they stay near the archaeological site in Cuma. From the villa, they strike out on trips to nearby Naples, Pompeii, and one now mostly inactive volcano.

The family mostly follows its planned itinerary: "We were going to Pozzuoli and Pompeii--both close by, out there in the dark somewhere; then back to Naples to see more churches and museums, shop, and eat more amazing food; then north for a bit; and back to Connecticut." This second part of the trip, the "north for a bit," centers on Siena. I won't provide a map of this part, because geographical specifics aren't as important. At some point near the end of the trip, the girls get lost and have no idea where they are, and neither does the reader.

Bildungsroman of an empath

This is a coming-of-age story, and not just for the point-of-view character, Mary. It's also about the growing up of the two older girls/young women Mary is with. These are Marcia, her older sister and the character the title comes from, and Alicia, the college-aged girl who was supposed to be their baby-sitter while the parents went off on their own for excursions, but who is herself more in need of supervision than the girls are.

It's Alicia who gets the conflict rolling through her bad influence on Marcia. The "inversion" of Marcia is partly a joke based on an Italian billboard Alicia and Marcia have seen, but it also refers to the change in Marcia's behavior Alicia has caused. Marcia is dressing like Alicia--literally, because she is actually wearing Alicia's clothes and makeup. More to the point, the two are having a romantic relationship right under the noses of Marcia and Mary's parents. For Alicia, being with another woman is probably something experimental, part of her college self-exploration, since the two girls also apparently engage in a threesome with an older, married Italian man at one point.

Mary is fourteen or maybe fifteen. She's smart, and so she's beginning to become aware of some of the big philosophical issues life throws at us. These include:

1. The fact that we're all going to die. The villa in Cuma is right by an archaeological site where people dig up the remains of societies buried under their feet. Right outside the window of the villa, Mary can see see an orange grove that "followed the shape of the amphitheater buried underneath." The very ground Mary's family is spending its vacation on is a living palimpsest where humans have simply erased the civilizations of the past and are writing a new story on the same page where the old one once was. The roads they drive on are just new roads on top of the old ones: "This road had older roads underneath; people had lived here, lied to each other here, cried, prayed, fought, spoken languages no one living even knew, and died, and now we were here: just for a second, it was our turn."

Because of this realization, Mary flirts with nihilism from time to time.  "...how do most things turn out? They all end here: grandparents, parents, kids, whole families, nothing left but old buttons and bones. Skeletons in boxes, dressed in rotten clothing long out of style. Atoms and the void." Her nihilism is helped along by her realization that her parents are unhappy, a realization made worse by Marcia's exaggerated interpretation of how bad it is. Mary also feels isolated because she is ignored while Marcia and Alicia are infatuated with each other.

2. The paradox of the future being both finite and limited. Mary reads a lot of old books by philosophers and historians while she's in the villa. She's particularly interested in Diodorus Cronus, whose "master argument" had to do with whether one should consider something that might happen in the future as either false or true here in the present. Diodorus's view, that everything that does happen does so because it must necessarily happen, seems to be a proposition that limits future possibilities. We may imagine there are infinite forking paths to the future, but really, the future is already laid out by present reality.

Mary combines her thinking about the future with her sudden realization of universal mortality, and she is worried she will not be able to pick a future worthy of her "second" of life on Earth. She worries about how she will develop in the near future, pointedly thinking that when she goes to college she will become like Alicia, "socializing chaotically while ideas slid by like roadside scenery."

Mary's basic stance with regard to a future is a sense of unreadiness. Her father recognizes this, and he also recognizes how isolated Mary feels being around two girls who do feel ready--whether they are or not. As she considers all the things she might do with her life, Mary finds herself preferring to wait rather than to go find the answers: "Somewhere a girl my age was practicing her sport with a serious trainer. Somewhere millions of strangers were doing billions of things I'd never know about. And, in the mirror, a girl who was me and no one else stood waiting for something to happen."

3. Being perceptive about others can, paradoxically, make one cruel rather than kind. Mary boasts to herself at one point that it is possible to know what a kiss will feel like without even kissing the person. This leads her to muse that people are actually rather "defenseless," because she can read them like an open book.

Two of the more perceptive people in the book, Alicia and "Milt," the creepy man who tries to have sex with Mary when she is unbelievably left alone with him, are not particularly kind in their application of their perceptiveness. Alicia uses a love letter from someone who was vulnerable enough to tell her his feelings as a joke to entertain Marcia, while Alicia herself has written a terribly sweet and vulnerable good-bye letter to a former lover. Milt just uses his perceptiveness to try to pry further into the lives of Alicia and Mary. Much worse, he is perceptive enough to notice Mary is more "ready" to be a sexually realized grown-up than she knows she is, and he tries to take advantage.

Mary finds, however, the value in being kind and not using her perceptiveness to pry further than needed, protecting the dignity of those around her. When she sees her sister and Alicia making out in a cemetery late in the story, she thinks to herself that it "was none of my business: really."

So what is Mary's epiphany?

If this is a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age story, and it very much seems to be, that would mean we, the readers, should expect the main character to have come to some realization that prepares her for adulthood. Mary needs, in other words, to move from "waiting" to "ready."

Partly, this is forced upon her by a world that sees her as ready even before she does. She goes off driving on her own. She learns to work a corkscrew. She drinks wine. Alicia is the first to notice the changes, but it's Milt who really forces her to realize that life is telling her, "Ready or not, here I come."

One option that is offering itself to Mary throughout is the option that Alicia has chosen, which is to be either cynical or nihilistic about life. That's the lesson Marcia has picked up, and she expresses it, trying to be clever, when Mary asks why she doesn't drink her coffee with milk and sugar anymore: "I like espresso; it's bitter, like my heart."

It's an enticing option. Alicia carries around a book that, like the Sibyl whose cave the girls go to see, seems to offer oracular answers: "She had this little philosophy book that proved that whatever you thought (though she had no idea what that might be) was wrong." Alicia's first name even turns out to actually be Mary, as the real Mary finds out when she goes snooping through Alicia's things. It seems, in many ways, like the two are a lot alike and so Mary is going to end up like Alicia.

Mary is, in fact, drawn to Alicia, but it's when Alicia tries to play this to her advantage that the spell begins to break. Alicia tries to convince Mary not to tell her parents when she finds Alicia, Marcia, and the older man all naked in bed together. Alicia uses Mary's "readiness," which Alicia sees more than Mary, to stun Mary into silence. Alicia kisses Mary: "She leaned in like an actor in a film and gave me a long, soft kiss on the lips. The kiss went on and on, as if we weren't both girls, as if--Oh."

That "Oh," which is standing on its own line by itself in the original, is the real epiphany. It even comes with an "Oh" to let you know that we've arrived at "Eureka!" Mary doesn't realize it's an epiphany just then. She's mostly undone by the kiss for a few days, dreaming of her and Alicia living together as unhappily as her parents one day. Alicia, in her I-could-take-it-or-leave-it way, acts as though it means nothing, but Mary allows herself to "taste traces of that kiss" all night.

How is this an epiphany? It teaches Mary humility. Earlier, she'd boasted that she could guess what a kiss with someone would be like before she even did it, but Alicia has proven her completely wrong. Mary is smart, but she doesn't know all the answers, and to act like she does would rob her of the answers she might otherwise find. Mary sees Alicia sometimes adopting this humility: "As a reader she seemed completely different--serious and at ease. She read as if she slowly took things in without rejecting or accepting anything right away. If she could really do that, she was wonderful." But Mary is able to make it more fully part of her character.

Two animals that act as spirit guides

Just before Milt attacks her, Mary is still stuck in neutral, worrying about possible future paths:

Once something has happened, sure, its having happened stays true. But all the things that have failed (so far) to happen are not untrue, or not untrue yet. You have to come to a definite end before you can say: Well, here's the list of things that never happened; their possibility was always just an illusion. Ah! Just thinking about it (or trying to) was like swimming underwater, straining to hold your breath till you touch the wall. And what if the things that hadn't happened (yet) but might were not for that reason unreal or false, but only balanced in some unknowable state of potential? The pre-real. The ready. 

And it's here that Milt comes after her and she is forced to act. She's not unlike the wild boar that nearly ends the story. At two points, her family has eaten wild boar and pronounced it delicious. But the three girls accidentally are caught in the middle of a boar hunt in which the boar goes from being an afterthought to a very real entity with preferences and agency. It nearly gores Alicia, but Mary is able to climb up on a crypt (yes, they are in a graveyard) to escape it.

Wise, and also apparently delicious

Mary's strategy of waiting has been somewhat vindicated. You can both wait and be ready. Taking on the future doesn't have to mean trying every possible path in order to keep infinite options open, the way Alicia has tried to cope. It can mean waiting for your opportunity. When Milt forced action on her, she was ready, like the wild boar, to run for her life. The boar probably didn't get away, but Mary did.

The second animal that symbolizes her enlightenment is the octopus. Mary imagines it "undulating out there in the dark, moving exactly like the water at first, then suddenly not as it reaches for prety, all of its suckers flared." It is both waiting and ready.

Denoument

There is a short falling action as Mary returns to Connecticut after winter break. Mary's life has gone back to normal, but she is changed, and is adjusting to her new understanding. She is gentle toward Alicia, who has been "proven wrong" after her failure to cope with the boar. She thinks Alicia's magical philosophy book may have been partly right, at least in how it asked certain questions rather than forcing a set of answers.

That's how Mary views her epiphany. There is no definite lesson she has learned, but she has grown in understanding, and "when you understand a thing it's yours, even when it stays a little bit out of reach." She is no longer apprehensive about the future and strangled by all the choices. "It's like knowing that something quite important is already mine," she thinks, "but having no idea how to get to it. Or anyhow how to wait." She is ready to get on with the future, looking forward to it, because life has shown her that the time for waiting is past for now. Mary concludes with "Let's get on the road."

Personal reactions

It is very hard to get me to like a short story this long, because it seems to me to be taking liberties, trying to take advantage of being called a short story while still indulging in novel-length choices. There were probably very few tough edit-outs that had to be made in writing this; it all went in. Still, after two readings, what won me over was the gentleness and compassion shown for each of the characters (except maybe Milt). We all have our second in the sun, and we're all equally lost trying to find our way through the future with no map. We may not like everyone we are on the road with and we might find their answers to the same questions we face ultimately to be silly ones, but we can still learn from them. The resolution of the Mary-Marcia relationship is that Mary realizes they aren't alike, but Mary will still "treat her as an adult and expect the same, which means we don't talk a lot unless there's a reason." That sounds kind of rough, but it's actually a little bit humane. For people with family members who drive them crazy, which is everyone, it might be the best strategy for putting past bitterness behind and getting on with the travels ahead.