Confederacy of Mermaid Matriarchs: Carolyn Ferrell's "A History of China"

It's really nice when a story smacks you in the face with what it's telling you. I'm talking about lines like "She was having fun, wasn't she?" as in Emma Cline's "Los Angeles." Lines you can highlight with confidence, knowing those are the breadcrumbs that will lead you to the heart of the meaning of the story.

Then, there are the stories like "A History of China," where I start to follow half a dozen different trails, only to have them all lead me into a brier patch. If I hadn't committed to blogging my way through Best American Short Stories this year, this is the kind of story where I'd finish reading it, think "Huh" to myself, and move on to the next one. But committing to critiquing something means committing to being a good reader, even with a story that asks a lot of you.

I don't think I'm going to be able to get to the mother lode of meaning on this story, but maybe I can trace some of the excavations I did looking for it.

The simplified plot

Sasha Jean is at a family reunion in North Carolina. Her father, the black sheep of the family, has died, and Sasha Jean feels it is on her to let the family know. Before dying, Sasha Jean's father willed the 37 acres of North Carolina land where the reunion is taking place to Sasha Jean. He'd swindled the matriarch of the family, Elldine, out of it before she died. In the father's will, he told Sasha Jean to bulldoze the entire land and build something new on it. The family suspects Sasha Jean's father had tried to do this, but don't know he succeeded. They're still looking for this black sheep to come back home so they can forgive but not forget. Sasha Jean can't bring herself to tell them about her father's death or the will.

A giant-ass family tree

I tried to sketch out the family as it's given to us in this story, but I failed. I think great-aunts are being called "aunts," which made a mess of all my branches. We are told that Sasha Jean's father, Bobby Lee, had only one sister, Vitrine, but then the story goes on to name several other "aunts" of Sasha Jean. They definitely aren't coming from her mother's side, so I don't know where they're coming from.

More immediately to Sasha Jean, besides her father, black sheep Bobby Lee, there is her mother, a post-WWII German girl the father met while stationed in Germany in the Army. The mother, Elspeth, came to the U.S. after running away from her mother, stealing the dishes meant for her wedding day. When Elspeth comes to the U.S., she lives with Bobby Lee in the house of his mother, Barbara.

A janky timeline

One of the things that frustrated my attempt to crack this story open was a timeline I couldn't get to make sense. I don't think these are plot holes, but I did have a hard time with placing the times in this story. The reunion is happening some time after 1997, although it's not clear how long after 1997. Elspeth came to live with Bobby Lee five months after getting a letter from him in April 1961. However, the second day she is in Bobby Lee's mother's house, she sees a photo of MLK on the wall with the words "I have been to the mountaintop." I realize MLK probably used that allusion before 1968, but would it have been that closely associated with him before then?

More confusingly, it is also 1961 when Bobby Lee and Elspeth are talking to a real estate agent about buying a house on Long Island. And Bobby Lee is rocking little baby Sasha Jean while they're looking at the house. But that's impossible, because Elspeth just came to New York in late 1961.

How old is Sasha Jean at the reunion? At least 36. She might be pregnant. How old is she when she might be pregnant? Over 40?

Elspeth is old enough to remember World War II. So,  let's say was born in 1935. Then, she'd have been four when Germany invaded Poland and ten when the war ended. Old enough to remember a lot of it. But then she'd have been 26 when she came to Long Island, and she seemed much younger than that.

I don't believe this carefully written story has plot holes. Maybe I made mistakes not realizing we had jumped from one time to another in the story, although handy little lines usually clued the reader in that a break in time was coming. But if they're not mistakes, then how do I read these things?

Some of the false paths I went down

So here are some of the ways I tried to peel back the onion on this story and didn't quite have it work out:

1. The family's old land is a relic that needs to go. Bobby Lee was a not a good person. When everyone realizes Elspeth is in New York to marry him, they all worry that he won't be able to settle down. The family cites an entire page of grudges against him. Easily worst of all, he sexually molests Sasha Jean when she is ten.

The plot of land where the reunion takes place is reminiscent of an old-South plantation. It's got a big, old, crumbling house and seven ramshackle trailers on it. At least one family seems to have lived in one of those trailers. Sasha Jean frequently associates the land at the reunion with slavery. She muses that she will eat "slave food" at the reunion. Sasha Jean has sewed her father's will into her dress, "sort of like the way slaves traveled with their papers." Sasha Jean remembers her father encouraging her to remember slave history in school. Finally, in the final dream-like pages of the story, in which Sasha Jean and her closest cousins will continue to stay on the land:

...even with the brays and hollers of the slave women in these woods, their feet smashing snakes, their arms tattered by thorned vines, their minds agape with the babies they could not afford to carry. The slave women are deafening, the slave women are worse than ghosts. You wonder if your parents are trapped here with the slave women. Would they torture your parents like ghosts in a cheap horror flick? Would that make you feel any better?

As flawed as Bobby Lee was, maybe he was on to something. Maybe there was a reason he left North Carolina and never came back. Maybe knocking the the plantation down is a good thing, and needed so everyone else can start over again, too. Although the rituals of the family carried over from slave days were useful for surviving slavery, they make less and less sense the further from slavery we move in time.

But does that make sense? The cousins closest to Sasha Jean, the ones most forward-thinking, seem to be a little mixed on the notion of what to do with the house. Although Kate, the white girlfriend of cousin Monique, agrees with tearing it down (and then immediately says she loves it), Monique vows defiance: "If Bobby Lee (who she doesn't know is dead) intends to take back Grandma Elldine's house, he's got another thing coming. Family is family. We got our own ideas."

2. It's about matriarchy and the power of women. The men are hardly named in this story. Bobby Lee gets a big role, and cousin Stanley comes in to get his pills stolen, but mostly, we don't know who the men are. All the old men are just "the uncles." In the dream-like sequence at the end, the four friends all turn into mermaids (known to lure male sailors to their death) as they swim in the pond in the woods full of slave ghosts. Sasha Jean might be pregnant, but we hear nary a word about who the father might be.

Does that make sense? It's an incomplete takeover of the system by the women, if it's supposed to be about the power of women. When Sasha Jean sees her fellow mermaids, they seem strangely "bloodless," meaning they've failed to kill any men. Monique's rebellion against the men amounts to nothing more than low-level vandalism. Elspeth fails to take Sasha Jean away from her molesting father. And there is rebellion within the matriarchy: Elspeth's entire reason for leaving Germany seems to have had been largely fueled by revenge for her mother.

3. It's about being syncretic and absorbing the best of other cultures in order to keep yours healthy and vibrant: The family immediately takes to Elspeth when she arrives from Germany. And she turns out to be good for them. Cousin Meggie calls Elspeth the best mother ever, and credits Elspeth with saving her life. When Meggie was living in poverty and neglect (I think in a trailer on the land where the reunion takes place), Elspeth confronted Meggie's mother to make her take care of Meggie. "Your mama saw, Sasha Jean. And she said something. And at that point, my mama had no choice but to look at me."

There are children in the family with names suggesting influence from many cultures: Juan, Cleopatra, Johann, Clotilda.

The whole name of the story is about "China," but not the country. It's about China the dishes. Elspeth brought dishes with her from Germany, but later was gifted others and then bought an expensive set the day after she learned her child had been abused. So the title is a clue that the story has something to do with bringing new things from other cultures into the mix.

Does that make sense? Elspeth also comes across as menacing, like a rich tourist walking through the third world to find poor children to help. She is also described as a "queen," suggesting she is something like the lady of the manor come down to the slave quarters. And all three sets of dishes have negative connotations to them.

Ultimately, I can't really make any way of reading this story stick. Here are a few other random bits I don't know how to parse:

-The name Bobby Lee. Sasha Jean's dad is named for the guy nearly synonymous with the old south. What's the significance of this?

-The story ends not with Sasha Jean, but with her mother on the day after she moves to America. Elspeth is thinking that her mother will now be finding out that not only did her daughter run off, but that she took the dishes. She imagines her mother's face, "disappointed and yearning at the same time. Not at all the right punishment for the crime."

What does this mean? Whose punishment are we talking about? It could mean the mother's crime, the one that made Elspeth run off. Elspeth remembers the mother refusing to help Jews just out of the concentration camps, pretending not to know they were starving. It would be consistent with Elspeth's character to consider not helping someone in need a crime. In this sense, maybe Elspeth thinks the mother's punishment is too light. But Elspeth has also committed a crime in running off with the dishes. Her punishment, that of raising children with what she now sees "Bob" to be, seems too severe.

People often describe stories like this as "haunting." I think that's code for "I didn't understand it, but I kept thinking about it, trying to make sense of it." I might describe how I feel right now as more hungover than haunted. I need a day off before I read the next story.

Personal notes on the writing

Nearly all stories are a little disorienting at first. Starting en media res is good for drawing a reader in, but it's also a struggle for the reader. The stories in this anthology so far have been more disorienting at the opening than most, I've felt. "A History of China" came at me right off the bat with a lot of names to keep straight.

It's always such a struggle for me to write openings that won't immediately get me thrown off the island. I'm scared of challenging slush pile readers too much, most of whom I know don't read beyond the first few pages. I tend to baby them. But these stories don't. I think this kind of confidence, this kind of trust in your reader, can only come from success. Right now, I don't trust myself, much less the reader, because I keep sending in work I like and seeing it come back rejected. Maybe writing something that trusts the reader like these stories do is something to strive for, because it will mean I trust my own writing.

FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS STORY, GO HERE.

This is all your fault. This is not your fault at all. Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter"

I've been reading Best American Short Stories since the 2013 edition, according to my Kindle. In those six years, this is the first year I've felt awed by the output of American fiction. Most years, I read what's there, find one or two to be really amazing, but mostly wonder why I don't feel knocked down by the stories the way I did back when I first started reading stories seriously as an adult. It made me feel like American letters had peaked sometime in the past, and the most anyone could accomplish now was an echo of a better age.

So far, this year's BASS is, in fact, knocking me down, and Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter" is just another story that's got me crumpled on the floor. 

The set-up, which takes very little time

I love a story that gets right to the conflict, and this one gives us nearly a straight line to it. Claire is down in Florida from college in Vermont to see her father and the woman he married after Claire's mother died. Claire hates her stepmom and, because the stepmom's name is Puppy, the readers are invited to hate her, too. Claire is dating a dirt bag while down there to annoy Puppy, and the dirt bag gives her a Confederate-flag-themed bikini, which she wears partly because she doesn't own another swimsuit and partly because it annoys Puppy. Quite without a plan, the dirt bag takes a quick pic of her in the bikini against his pickup truck and posts it to his social media, tagging Claire. 

The next day, a black student in the same dormitory as Claire re-posts the picture to her own social media, expressing anger that a student in her own dorm would wear something like that. Add 8 million tons of slacktivist, online righteous anger, and Claire is in the middle of a psycho-billy freakout social media shit storm.

Claire in the docket

Last year, when my son's class read "Lamb to the Slaughter" in language arts, the class had a mock trial to determine whether the woman should be guilty for killing her husband. It was kind of corny, but it might actually work really well for this story. Is Claire guilty? If so, of what? There are two ways to look at what happens to Claire and what her responsibility is.

Claire is just misunderstood and we should sympathize with her

At the heart of this story is its strong-willed pro/ant agonist, Claire. It's hard not to like Claire. We sympathize with her for the same reason a lot of people sympathize with the Confederacy: as Americans, we have a natural respect for people who don't want to be told what to do. "Don't tread on me" has a lot of instinctive currency for us. That's Claire in a nutshell. Her reaction to finding out the photo of herself in the bikini is going viral isn't, as one would expect, to rush to make explanations for herself. She has a couple of avenues open to her. She could go the route a lot of white people do when something like this happens. She could say, "But I can't be racist, I have black friends." It's not an approach that usually works out well, but in Claire's case, she might plausibly gain some traction from it. She could also go the route suggested by the campus Libertarian who comes to visit her: she could say she's just proud of her heritage (although her heritage isn't really Southern, as only she seems to notice).

Claire doesn't initially want to take either of these routes. Her instinct is defiance for all of it: "She distrusts collective anger; Claire's anger has always been her own." The funny thing is that the girl who wore the rebel flag bikini is, in a sense, right. Much of the bluster surrounding the incident is utterly false. She sees it for what it is, and rather than cower to it, she's ready to give it the finger. It's hard not to root for her.

As people continue to throw accusations at her, Claire tries to keep her own sense of self. What stood out about the bikini for Claire from the beginning was its distance from her, how it made her feel like someone other than herself. Those are actually the opening lines of the story: "The bikini isn't even Claire's thing." When she puts it on, she feels "hot," but also "like someone she's not." When white supremacists contact her to voice their support, she rejects a link between them. Their "thinking they are the same doesn't make them the same." Claire is determined not to be defined by the bikini.

Claire is a wonderfully stubborn girl. It's very much in her nature to refuse help offered to her. She's certainly not going to apologize when she doesn't think she's done anything wrong. And in a sense, she hasn't. She wore the bikini to piss off her step-mom, which makes it doubly difficult for Claire to understand the "aggrieved reaction" of her black hallmate, since the step-mom, Claire thinks, "is half-racist anyway." She sees this as "doubly hilarious."

I feel about Claire the way I feel about America; I really love her, I'd just like her to be a little less of herself sometimes. 

And it is, in a sense. One could read this story as one long series of tragicomic misunderstandings. (One of the best parts of this story is that Claire doesn't fall in with white supremacists who come to her aid; she falls in with Libertarians who are more obnoxious than they are dangerous. When Claire sees one at her door, she thinks that he smiles "like he's just won second place.") If we were to trace the events of this story back to their roots, we could say that it all started when Claire's mother got sick with cancer. We could say Claire had no control over most of the main events in the story.

Until her mother got sick, Claire seemed headed for happiness. She certainly didn't seem like a candidate for most likely to invoke the wrath of the Black Student Union. Although she was raised in a home where she felt a little frightened of herself, there were always Angela and Aaron next door. These are the black friends Claire didn't cite as proof she's not a racist, although she could have. They had an uncommonly tight friendship, one that's described in terms that are exactly the right amount of sweet. Just before everything goes to shit, Angela and Claire get drunk at camp together and are dreaming of the future. They are in the grass, and Claire turns to Angela: "It is a love that requires touch, and so Claire snuggles against her, nuzzles into her neck to say it out loud against her. Love love love. Angela is her best friend, her other self."

But then both Angela and Claire's moms get cancer at almost the same time. For a while, it just makes Angela and Claire closer, and Claire also becomes closer with Aaron, the brother who used to just be a target for Claire and Angela to torment. She has sex with Aaron once, although to her it doesn't mean they're falling in love but just finding a new level of intimacy in their friendship. But then Angela's mom survives and Claire's doesn't. Claire resents Angela and Aaron for still having a mother.

From there, the series of unfortunate events goes something like this: Claire's dad gets married again almost right away to someone Claire hates; Claire self-destructs; Claire goes to a party trying to get drunk and taken advantage of; Aaron tries to take her home to keep her safe; another person at the party sees a "large black man" carrying passed-out Claire to her car and rooting around in her purse for the keys and misunderstands; this leads to a car chase that kills Aaron; Nobody believes Claire when she tries to say Aaron wasn't doing anything wrong; Claire loses the friendship of Angela; Claire goes off to school in Vermont hating everyone and pretty much using "don't tread on me" as her one operative principle; which leads to wearing the bikini to piss off Puppy and setting off the whole firestorm.

In a sense, although it's a long chain of events, Claire isn't the one responsible for them.

Counterpoint: Claire has done terrible things and we should hold her accountable

About that night with Aaron, though. Claire's mom had been dead for four months, and Claire was still angry with Angela about it. She hadn't been talking to her friend, which made coping with a bad situation far worse. When Aaron finds her at the party, he can see she's headed for something bad: "You're messed up right now, I get that, but at some point you're going to have to stop making it worse."

Instead of getting her shit together, though, Claire dives headlong into "making it worse." Only it's Aaron, trying to help her, who bears the brunt of her actions.

In fact, it's Claire's own solipsistic view of her suffering that is the proximate cause of a lot of the suffering in the story. While it's easy to admire Claire's independence and her keen nose for bullshit, there's a telling little line early on that clues us in to her tragic flaw. When she realizes that the black girl in her dorm has objected to a "hallmate" of hers (Claire) wearing the rebel bikini, Claire is her sarcastic self: "she wasn't really aware that hallmate was a thing, a relationship carrying some expectation of trust of camaraderie."

It's a funny line, and it's easy to see Claire's side of it, but she's missing something. As sympathetic as we might be in America to "don't tread on me" kinds of thinking, living in society means that at times, you really have to allow others to tread on you. You have to modify your own choices for the sake of others. The libertarians might be right that at the heart of it, Claire has a right to flaunt the Confederate flag all she wants, but that's missing the point. The point is that there are people in society who will be aggrieved--hurt, offended, scared even--by Claire's actions, and Claire can't be so anti-social as to pretend that's got nothing to do with her.

As a matter of fact, Claire seems utterly surprised to realize that her actions have real consequences for others. When Carmen, the black "hallmate" who has objected to Claire's choice in bikinis, gets interviewed, "there is genuine fear in her eyes, which startles Claire." The entire outcry over the photo, in fact, is a mystery to Claire. Because she can't see what started the uproar in the first place, she doubles and then triples down in disastrous ways, first slipping a printed-out Confederate flag under Carmen's door with the note "Hope you had a nice vacation," and then posting the flag to her dorm window.

One thing that's a little bit ambiguous is how much she is to blame for what happened to Aaron. We can probably forgive her for the accident. In a different world, a young black man in Virginia wouldn't feel he had to floor it to get away from a car full of white kids pursuing him. But also in a different world, a good young man wouldn't have to carry a drunk girl away from a party to keep bad things from happening to her. So Claire can't really be blamed for the accident itself, even if her self-destructive behavior was part of what put Aaron at risk.

But she might have some responsibility for how the media viewed the accident. Most people seem to have sided with the boys who chased Aaron down and assumed Aaron was up to no good. Claire tried to clear it up:

Claire tells the reporter Aaron was a friend, that she was drunk and he was taking her home, but the bones of that story don't convince anyone it wasn't all, at best, a tragic misunderstanding; at worst, a danger she didn't see coming. Claire tells the reporter some innocuous nice thing about (the boy who chased Aaron down), and the paper calls him one of her best friends, after which she stops trying to explain.

The media can be incredibly obtuse. It's why Claire doesn't trust them when Bikinigate breaks. She has also learned that the reactions of the public are false. When Aaron died, "the people who give him the benefit of the doubt mostly feel themselves to be magnanimous." Claire is right about how full of bullshit the media and the people who get themselves in an uproar about it are, but she is wrong to give up trying to get her message across. The public might not get it right, but the people involved still needed to hear the truth from her.

The right amount of tension

Writers sometimes suffer from readers getting the wrong message from what writers create. I'm sure there will be readers who think the point of "Boys Go to Jupiter" has something to do with how full of shit the media is when stories take off, or how phony the fake righteousness of those who hop on the indignation bandwagon is. Danielle Evans has almost certainly been at a reading somewhere where a reader came up and said her story was a great farce about the hypocrisies of social media storms. That's an element of the story, but it's not all of what it's about.

I know a lot of white people who complain that Black Lives Matter (or any person they perceive as linked to BLM because that person is stating that life isn't equal in this here republic) is just "blaming white people for everything." This story ought to satisfy people with that particular complaint. The white person in it who starts all the mess isn't a bad person. In fact, she's pretty likable. This is better than just saying, "Not all white people are bad." It actually gives us a fully realized white person who's a lot better than just not bad. But she still makes mistakes she needs to correct.

I don't like when we talk about "balance" between opposing points of view. Balance suggests that there is some point of stasis between forces that are in opposition. It implies that each are equal in some way, and we could ideally reach a place where the two cease to oppose each other, a place where all the kinetic energy is gone. That's not usually the case in the real world that two things are really equally balanced. Just because Claire is really a pretty great character doesn't mean she doesn't have some serious moral defects to amend. Her good and her bad are in tension with each other, just as the reasons for us to forgive her and condemn her are in tension. The story doesn't offer us a point where we can harmonize the two; it offers us forces that continually push against one another.

That's why the ending is perfect. Claire, coached by the Libertarians, is all set to give a big speech at the end in defense of herself. But the black students in attendance get up and leave. They leave comment cards that are blank. She might have something to say, but they've got nothing to say to her. She's been shunned, which is far worse than a hate storm. It means she's lost her chance to have a voice.

Whichever way you view Claire's arc, whether she's a sympathetic victim or a self-deceiving antagonist who lacks empathy for others, the end works. If she's the victim, then at the end, she is denied the chance to tell her whole story, the one with Angela and Aaron in it, the one that will clear everything up and maybe bring some healing. If she's the antagonist, then she's denied the chance to offer her own self-justification because she doesn't deserve that chance.

The two forces are opposed, but not equal. The story is called "Boys Go to Jupiter," which was a child's chant Angela and Claire said as kids to harass Aaron: "Girls go to college to get more knowledge; boys go to Jupiter and get more stupider." Claire's had a lot of chances in the pages of the story to have her say, but the title goes to Aaron, who had a story of his own he never gets to tell.

It's interesting to me that Aaron tells her she is "making it worse." That's the same line the creepy man tells Alice at the end of "Los Angeles," the fourth story in this anthology. The two stories have a lot in common in what they have to say. It's okay to be messed up. There are plenty of things the world can do to you to make you that way. But at some point, you have to accept responsibility to stop making them worse.

Will Claire stop making it worse? Depends on which force she decides to get behind and push with after the story is over.

FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS, INCLUDING A REALLY GOOD TAKE ON THE MANY "IT IS/IT ISN'T" PASSAGES IN THE STORY, GO HERE. 

When the past is better dealt with in the present: Alicia Elliott's "Unearth"

This is one of the shortest entries in this year's Best American Short Stories anthology, and my critique of it is going to be short, as well. I've rushed to get it out a bit, since today is the recognition of Columbus Day here in the U.S., and today seemed the day to put this out.

This was a donut story for me, as it had a bit of a hole in the middle. It started strong, with a grotesque juxtaposition. The body of a Mohawk child who died under suspicious circumstances back during the days of residential schools for native peoples in Canada is found underneath what will be the foundation for the latest sleek fast food joint in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood. It's a literal Indian burial ground, although nobody knew it until now.

The story then slows down for me a bit as we go into the past. I'm never sure what to do with a story when it goes into detail about terrible wrongs done in the past. Hopefully, most people now know about the crimes done to native children when they were taken into residential schools, where the idea was often to forcibly remove the Indian from the child. It's not just the U.S.; Canada has its own troubled past with this, too. They've done better in some ways than the U.S., but as this story makes clear, they've still got more than their share of baggage. Early in the story, there is a reference to a quote from Canada's first prime minister, "Kill the Indian, save the man." With the younger brother of Beth, the story's main character, the school seems to have killed both. "Turned out killing the Indian saved no one. It just killed Indians."

Maybe the reason "Unearth" slogs when it's in flashback mode for me is because the subject matter is kind of familiar. I've heard this story before about the terrible treatment indigenous peoples suffered. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. Maybe, as the story puts it, it doesn't "do much for me" because I'm not the one this happened to. I'm like the people living in the new development next to the site of the old residential school. They forget because it's easier to forget. "It was always easier to forget when it didn't happen to you."

Beth tried to forget, but couldn't. Her younger brother disappeared right after going to the residential school, and he was never found nor was any justice done. Her mother went to prison for attacking the Anglican priest who brokered sending the boy to the school. Beth wore masks and adapted. She became a nurse, had a daughter of her own.

What helped her to adapt was the same thing that made her unhappy as a child: she doesn't look like a Mohawk. That was a problem for her when she was young, because she felt alienated from her own people. But it allowed her to blend in outside the reservation. She "let people think she was Portuguese or Italian or Greek."

Where the story really comes together for me is at the end. Beth has a daughter, it turns out, and this now-grown daughter never knew anything about Beth's past or about the brother who never came back from residential school. The daughter, although somewhat annoyed by her mother's call, still answers, and has no problem dashing off reasons why the mother should be proud of the life she lived: "You were a nurse--you helped so many people."

The real beautiful part of this story is when Beth goes back to her old home. She's looking for the ingredients to the corn mush her mother used to make. She wants to feel some connection to the life that was severed. And even in the middle of the smoke shops and the obvious devastation European colonialism still has left on the land, she finds when she is ready to go looking for it, that life is waiting for her. A young Mohawk who is studying the language, trying in her own way to connect to her own roots, calls Beth "Istha," meaning "auntie." Beth doesn't remember the word, but she is happy that someone recognized her as Mohawk. The girl says of course she knew she was Mohawk, because she's "got that tough Mohawk look" to her.

The story reminds us of the best way to handle our past traumas. You need to go back to the past to remember, but life can get stuck in the mud if you stay there too long. The best way to deal with the past is in redeeming what you still can here in the present. That's how you honor your past.

FOR KAREN CARLSON'S ALWAYS INTERESTING TAKE ON THIS STORY, GO HERE.

What if your life isn't a big joke? Emma Cline's "Los Angeles"

I usually don't like stories where a lot of what's being said seems to be about the actual location of the story. Maybe it's just hangover from all those Woody Allen paeans to New York. (Jesus, I get it--you love New York. Shut the fuck up, already.)

So I was a little hesitant when I started reading "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline, the fourth story in this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. That concern was misplaced. Yes, the zeitgeist of Los Angeles in important to this story, but not because the author is making some great point about the city itself. She's not really saying anything new about the city, but rather relying on what many others have already said about LA and the reader's assumptions about that place to add power to her punches at her real target, which is the bad choices of youth.

A one-paragraph digression

The compilers of the BASS series usually offer some forward in which they try to assess how the stories are somehow reflective of the times we live in. This story, especially, came with some auspicious timing. "Los Angeles" is all about bad choices young people make, and as I write this, we've just put a new justice on the Supreme Court after weeks of debating his bad choices as a young man. A lot of people suggested we should overlook those mistakes, because youth is youth, right? This story has an interesting take on that notion.

Now, on to the story

Alice has been in LA for three months. It's not clear what she did between high school and coming to LA--college, maybe? But there has definitely been some time between high school and moving to LA, because she feels responsible for acting like a big sister to seventeen-year-old Oona. She gets a job at a clothing store that sells crap, but relies on hiring sexy, young women to make the clothes appear appealing.

Alice is in LA to have a go at acting, although we don't really see a whole lot of love for acting on her part. Rather, it seems to have been something she settled on as a default:

Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reason Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through. 

Alice does take acting classes, which her mother pays for. She doesn't seem to think the acting classes are really that wonderful, but at the same time, she needs the classes in order to feel better about herself: "If Alice wasn't taking a class, if she wasn't otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter."

When her mother, who lives back in some unnamed but presumably flyover-country-ish and dull place, threatens to quit paying for acting lessons, Alice has to confront this very fear. So she tries an extremely unwise method for making money, one she learned about from Oona. She starts selling her used underwear to men.

Alice's rationalization

Alice is not a fool. She's not getting swept away with the glitz and glamour of LA. She sees behind the facade of the place. When Alice sees the photos of women on the walls of her store, she supposes they've been doctored "to make sex with them seem more likely." When she sees a box of the t-shirts the store sells come in "all stuffed together and flattened in a cub without tags or prices," she realizes that these shirts the stores sells for exorbitant prices are really just "junk." Alice knows enough to be shocked when she learns from Oona about the idea of selling used panties to perverts, and Alice often feels like she is supposed to be the responsible one when others are around. Yet Alice still talks herself into selling her used underwear to men she meets on the Internet. Why? Why does she allow her mind to "glaze over, not unpleasantly" in LA?

Part of it can probably be explained by the powerful effect of Los Angeles itself. It's possible to know that LA is a superficial town and still be influenced by its superficiality. Alice seems to have something of a contempt or pity for the people who stayed behind in whatever mid-western town she comes from. Maybe she feels like she has to embrace the zeitgeist of LA, even if she realizes that zeitgeist is foolish. If she doesn't, what did she come all that way for?

What is this zeitgest of LA? Well, it's pretty similar to what many others have said about the city. I was reminded throughout the story of earlier meditations on the city, such as Steve Martin's "LA Story" or how Southern California is depicted in Sheryl Crow songs or what Bojack Horseman said about the city:

"What's great about Los Angeles is nobody cares where you're from or who you are. It's a superficial town where you can worry about stupid shit like keeping your pool clean, and what artisanal nuts to put on your salad."

What Cline adds to this mix of LA as a superficial town or a false paradise at the end of the rainbow is the notion that LA doesn't take itself seriously. Everything is a big joke in LA.  This is made clear from the story's opening lines, where fake snow is being put onto the windows of stores as a Christmas decoration, "as if cold was just another joke." When Alice first learns about selling her panties online being a thing, she thinks it's insane, but "then, like other jokes, it became curiously possible the more she referred to it in her own mind, the uncomfortable edges softening into something innocuous." When Alice is in an uncomfortable situation with someone buying her panties, she tells herself it won't seem so bad once she can tell Oona about it and turn it into a funny story, "dramatizing incidents so that everything took on an ironic, comical tone, their lives a series of encounters that happened to them but never really affected them, at least in the retelling, their personas unflappable and all-seeing."

Alice has, in other words, talked herself into accepting a familiar mythology about young adulthood, that's it's the time for making mistakes, that in fact making mistakes is good. "It was that time of life when anytime something bad happened, she could soothe herself with that forgiving promise: it's just that time of life. When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned."

I've seen this way of thinking championed in meme form before:

The entire story can be summed up in one line, when Alice is trying hard to enjoy herself at a party she doesn't feel comfortable at: "She was having fun, wasn't she?"

There's a perverse logic that people take to the pain our bad choices leave us sometimes. We think that if it gives us a good story to tell, then it's worth it. A lot of story writers have fallen into this trap, intentionally making their lives a mess in the hopes it will help them write better. Back when I was still an evangelical, I heard a preacher who felt he had to convince young people that you shouldn't go and make bad choices in your life just because it would give you a more interesting testimony of how God had rescued you; it was fine to just say you'd made good choices your whole life and that because of that you'd been spared from needing God to pull you out of the gutter.

The truth is that your life is not a joke. It's worth taking seriously, and it's worth avoiding going down wrong roads that waste your time or lead you to somewhere dangerous. That doesn't mean you need to spend time later in life regretting those decisions, of course. If you've tried to make good choices and failed, it's okay to try to find something redeemable in the time you spent going down those wrong roads. I've certainly made a lot of choices I regret, choices I'd do entirely differently if I had another chance. I can still try to mine those bad choices for stories to tell, but that doesn't change the fact that those were still the wrong choices. The fact that you can redeem parts of a bad choice isn't a reason to make choices as though they don't matter.

Something I can't quite figure out in this story

So selling panties to men and trafficking off her own sexual desirability is a wrong choice for Alice, but is it a wrong choice for everyone? Are Alice and Oona just two different people, and what might be a wrong choice for one might work for the other? Every time Alice is shocked by the sexual behavior of a man, Oona just laughs it off. When Alice wears clothes that sexually objectify her, she literally feels them attacking her, but Oona "was easy and confident, already well versed in her own beauty." Oona seems to even have a natural understanding of how to use her beauty for profit. She gets men to buy clothes at the store, from which she will get a commission. She has been offered a commercial, if only her worried parents would allow her to be in it.

I was wondering if Oona's different relationship to her own sexuality could be seen as recalling an old argument in feminism. Some feminists feel that it is fine for a woman to use her sexuality as long as she is profiting by it and it fulfills her. If you enjoy sex, and people will pay you for it, then you are using what is normally dis-empowering in society (being a woman) to achieve power in the form of money.

Oona seemed to fit this category of woman, except for one scene. At a beach party, we see that Oona is wearing a one-piece. A man looking at her (gazing at her, to use the feminist term) complains about her choice of swimwear. "I hate those one-pieces she wears...She's embarrassed about her tits."

It could be that the man who said these lines was just projecting. He's just seen Alice's bare breasts, because she was pretending to be brazen by sunning topless. He might have just been pretending that he admired Alice's choice by comparing Oona badly to her. But he might also have known something Alice didn't, that Oona's whole act was just that, acting. I'm still not sure how to read that part of the story.

Notes on the writing

Damn, this story goes down easy. There are a lot of stories I have to force myself to get through, but this one read as easily as watching a sitcom on Netflix. I could have binge-read a couple more like it.

Cline is one of those writers who makes me feel like shit, because she's capable of creating lines that are just concertina-wire sharp. I don't have a gear like that I can shift into. Here are a few of the better lines I haven't quoted already:

-"Inside, the store was bright white and shiny, a low-level hum in the background from the neon signs. It was like being inside a computer."

-"The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and beach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness."

-"Completing classes had the sheen of building blocks, tokens being collected, no matter if they had no visible use."

-"Everyone wanted to enjoy their tea more than anyone else enjoyed theirs."

-"Worse: the ones taken on the shores of a lake or in front of sunsets, photos name-dropping the natural world, the plain, dull beauty of the shore."



FOR ANOTHER LOOK ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S POST ON IT.

I attempt to review Yoon Choi's "The Art of Losing" without coming off as an insufferable, pompous ass who wants the whole world to know I speak Korean

I've written a lot of stories with point-of-view characters from other cultures. As a translator, that's just where stories come from for me. There are dangers in writing about a culture that's not the one you were raised in. Even though I've worked hard to learn languages and cultures, I'm never going to get it the way a native would. So I run the danger of reading my own cultural assumptions into the new culture. I might speak over the voice of a character from another culture with my own voice. Worse, I might highlight an aspect of another culture because to me it seems like something that will shock or titillate the English speaking reader I am writing for, meaning I am exploiting another culture and giving a false impression of it in order to earn points with Western readers.

If I've done it right, it will work in much the same way as a good translation. I'm not going to write a story with, say, a Korean setting that will really qualify as great Korean literature. It's not going to be sufficiently imbued with Korean-ness to accomplish that. But I might be able to get some key sense of Korean-ness across to an English speaking audience. I can write good English literature about Korea. Hopefully, I've gone deep enough into the culture I'm setting the story in to be able to pull something real out and present it in the idiom of the reader from my culture.

When someone who really belongs to another culture writes for an English audience, there is a different kind of danger that presents itself. I might compare it to the danger that confronts a film director when she tries to adapt a book with a rich alternate universe to film. Does the director try to convey the fullness of that world and risk losing a general audience? Or does the director simplify the world and risk irritating the core fans of the book who feel the world they love has been ripped apart and made poorer in the attempt to translate it for a general audience?

That's the choice that Yoon Choi faces in her short story "The Art of Losing," the third selection in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. She's a Korean-American, which means she has deep access to three cultures: Korea, America, and the very real, third culture of Korean-Americans. In this story, she is mining all three. Her two main characters, a very sympathetic elderly couple who came to the States from Korea as young adults, carry marks from all three cultures. They have deep memories of life in Korea, although we see more of hers than his. We see also into their lives as Korean-Americans, largely through that most elemental of settings for Korean-American life, the church. They also have a uniquely American part of their character, one that is colored for the man, Mo-sae, by having grown up near a military base in Seoul, where he built up ideas about America before he ever came. American symbols like a can of Coke and an ice cream truck both play a role in getting the action going.

Choi had choices to make throughout about how the Korean aspects would be presented to an Anglophone readership. Would she go deep and risk alienating most of the readers of the New England Review, in which the story first appeared? Or would she keep it simple and risk alienating the "core fans," who in this case would mostly be other Korean-Americans reading the story, or Koreans in Korea with enough English to read it, or, in a much smaller niche, people like me?

To put it in culinary terms, does she give her audience Bulgogi, a beef dish that goes down easy with Westerners, and which is therefore often given to them to introduce them to Korean food? Or does she serve them up oeenaengkuk (오이냉국) and let the chips fall? Does she introduce them gently or throw her readers in the deep end?

Korean 101 and my rage-reading

This story kept it simple. The biographies of both of the main characters, Han Mo-sae and his wife, Han Young-ja (they seem to have followed the Western custom of the wife changing her surname, rather than the Korean practice of her keeping her own surname), are well-worn material. You could create characters like this without much more than a half-day introductory class on Koreans in the diaspora. He's from Seoul, she's from Busan. She worked in a factory where the work was exhausting and unsafe back during Korea's transformation to a powerful economic nation. He came to the States to study. They met at the Korean church in Philadelphia. They took over a dry cleaner's. They raised two kids who now are a lot more American than Korean.

There was a passage early on that irritated me. Knowing I'd be prone to reading hyper-critically, I was trying to suppress my inner Simpsons-Comic-Book-Guy, but this got to me:

He was working toward a master's in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take.

Why does this passage irritate me? Because I knew American readers would fawn all over it, but I also knew the passage was not as fresh as it seemed. The picture of a man so desperate to learn English he would actually eat the dictionary does seem arresting and memorable, but only if you don't know anything about Korean culture. This is actually a very old, well-worn trope in Korea. Students were told to eat the pages of their books for decades. It was supposed to symbolize their commitment to learning. I think some students actually did this, to hear them tell it, although I suspect some are exaggerating. I've heard this one a hundred times. But I KNEW that Western readers would just about pass out with ecstasy reading this. When I read the interview from New England Review of Choi after the story came out, I found I was dead on:

RW: There are a few really striking details that stay with me: the first is the way that Mo-Sae “memorizes” English. It’s such a powerful, bizarre, and almost terror-filled act. What was the origin of this moment in your writing?

YC: When I first read this question, I absolutely couldn’t remember this moment in the story. At a random moment later in the day, it came to me: I once had a Sunday School teacher with a face scarred by smallpox. I remember two things about her. Once, she gave us a demonstration of sin using a pitcher of water and food coloring. Another time, she told us that she had learned English by eating a page of the dictionary each time she had memorized the words. Decades later, I had Mo-Sae do the same.

It felt like hearing someone take credit for a joke you've already heard someone else tell. I don't doubt that Choi really heard it the way she said it. It's possible she wasn't aware of the larger use of this image within Korean society, since she grew up in the United States. Choi was born in Korea, but grew up in the States. The image of eating the book in order to internalize it is a perfect symbol of a culture obsessed with test scores and kids getting into the best colleges. It's fine for her to draw upon that cultural heritage, but it seemed like a bit of plagiarism to pass it off like it was her own. Choi was getting credit for something fresh and original because her story was written to be part of American literature, but the same image, if used in Korean literature, would have elicited a yawn.

But the story's not really about that, so I got over it

Much as I wanted a story with Korean-American characters to be about truths unique to Korean-American life, maybe what's unique about this story is that although it's got Korean-American characters in it, it's not just about truths unique to that culture. It's about universal stuff, about getting old and the legacy you leave behind and what marriage does to one's identity. One of the things I noticed in that interview was that the word "Korean" doesn't appear once on the page. It's not about that. Which is a nice thing. It's great that a story can have recognizably ethnic characters and not have the whole story be about questions concerning ethnicity. Ethnic identity is important, but there are other issues for writing to be about. Just because Choi is Korean-American doesn't mean she should be confined to one type of issue. She wrote using characters familiar to her, but she expanded the consciousness of those characters to cover new ground.

Once I get past my pedantic nitpicks about the cultural appropriation of the author's own culture, it's a pretty nice treatment of other kinds of identity issues besides ethnic ones. The patriarch of the family is losing his sense of self through Alzheimer's. The mother is losing her sense of self, too, because so much of her own self-identity is bound up in her ability to serve others (another frequent type in both Korean literature and Korean society). As her health declines, she is losing her ability to care for others. So much of the Hans' identity is bound up in each other now that as one slips away, the other can't help but slip with them. The most solid the man's mind is throughout the whole story is when he sees a container of loose change at exactly the moment he needs it, which he sees as an embodiment of his wife's entire existence: "But what really stirs in him is sadness. This is his wife. This is the evidence of her life. A handful of small saving actions."

But the coins end up being dropped into the pool, slipping away just like their co-dependent existence is slipping away.

Or is the story kind of about being Korean, too?

Then again, there is a way to read this story that would make it sort of about the uniqueness of the Korean-American identity. The Hans have made their own existence in the world, a new existence they had to forge for themselves. There was no template for what it meant to be Korean-American, but they made meaning as they went along. Now that meaning is being washed away, replaced by a new reality that is more American-Korean than Korean-American. Han-sae remembers, looking at the coins, that "these are American coins." The thing he saw as such proof of his wife's existence is American.

The kids have American names. When Mo-sae is trying desperately to ground himself amid the muddle of his mind, he is looking for the names of people: "Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-sae. His wife was Han Young-ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina." He has a hard time remembering his grandson's name. If a name is one of those last, fundamental things to help ground one's identity, then the kids will be grounded in a different way than Mo-sae.

The couple met and were married in Philadelphia, a city with important meaning to the beginning of the American experience. They began a Korean-American experience together there, but as Han-sae is forgetting himself and Young-ja is losing her ability to serve those around her, their entire generation is being lost. Their children look upon their church rituals as something to smirk at, a relic. The grandchild will be raised on the Cokes that Mo-sae once saw as exotic. Opening a Coke, which is to open up the insides of American life, is a secret beyond Mo-sae. He can't provide that to his grandchild. The daughter has married an Indian-American man, and thereby created a different story line altogether from what her parents wrote.

I'm glad this wasn't the kind of immigrant fiction I'm so tired of, the kind that has endless scenes full of the scents of cooking an ethnic meal. In this story, the only time Korean food comes on stage, the father is looking for something and finds only "ingredients, not food."

In the end, that's what a lot of us come down to. We still have the ingredients for life, but we no longer know how to craft them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But Yoon Choi did, and the result is a story that goes deep into the meaning of consciousness and identity, even if it doesn't delve that deeply into Korean issues.

FOR ANOTHER TAKE ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE; KAREN'S BEEN REVIEWING BASS FOR YEARS AND ALWAYS COMES UP WITH SOMETHING I HADN'T CONSIDERED.

Jamel Brinkley's "A Family" and the case of the detective who tried to solve the mystery that everyone else had already solved

When Jamel Brinkley's "A Family" cold starts, we meet a man on a stakeout. Curtis Smith is watching a mother and her son across the street. In some ways, he seems competent at the craft of discovering whatever he wants to know about the two: he applies reasonably good logic to guessing what they're arguing about and what movie they might have gone to see. In other ways, though, he's a bit bumbling about the work: the whole neighborhood, apparently, is aware he's following the woman and child, and they're talking about it. He is not a professional detective. It's a twist to the usual detective on a stakeout scenario, because in this case, the one doing the surveillance is himself a criminal, only recently released from twelve years in prison.

In the first few pages of the book, the details of why he was in prison emerge, as well as glimpses of why he might be tailing the two. He had a friend, Marvin, who is the father of the boy. Marvin is now dead, a death that sent Curtis into a tailspin that ended when he killed a woman while driving drunk. This vehicular homicide landed him in jail for twelve years.

At first, I assumed what Curtis wanted was to be some kind of big brother or mentor to the child, fifteen-year-old Andre: "Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that." Although his would-be advice, like that many fathers give, is a little muddled: "Though sometimes it was important to disobey." While eavesdropping on the two, he learns that the mother, Lena, is going clubbing the next night, and she wants Andre to stay home alone. I fully expected that Curtis would go to Lena's house to talk to the boy while she was out. There were hints he might have held a grudge against her at this point in the story, and I assumed he needed or wanted to be able to talk to Andre without Lena present.

In an unexpected second act twist, it's actually Lena he goes to see the next night. He contrives to run into her at the club. She knows who he is--mostly, anyway. She knows he was Marvin's best friend. "Like brothers," she says they were. She doesn't know they had a falling out right before Marvin died in a fire, a fire Marvin started when he fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. She doesn't know the fallout was because of Curtis's jealousy over her. She doesn't know that Marvin's friendship meant something different to Curtis than it had to Marvin.

Strangely, they head back to a hotel and strike up a sexual relationship right away. But it isn't love. It isn't clear to either of them what it is they feel. Curtis tries to rationalize it as a sense of obligation, but:

"it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation....It was beyond either of them...so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright delicate object they couldn't see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress...and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light." 

The sleuth motif emerges

There was a detail in the story I almost skipped over. While in prison, Curtis developed a liking for the novels of Walter Mosley. That's the writer best known for the Easy Rawlings series of mystery novels, with Rawlings as the black detective. I had gone past that for a few pages when Curtis asks Lena if Marvin liked Easy Rawlings. Suddenly, a light went on and an aperture to the whole story opened up.

My literary tastes are generally high-brow, but I do love a good hard-boiled mystery

Curtis pictures himself as a detective, even if he doesn't put it in those words. What exactly he's searching for is itself sort of a mystery. On one level, he wants details about his friend's death. He pesters Lena to find out about it, even though she claims she doesn't know much: "You must have heard how it happened, Curtis. It was just like that." It turns out that this mystery--the mystery of what happened to Marvin--is a mystery everyone has already solved. And what isn't already known, Lena really doesn't know that much about. She didn't even know that Curtis and Marvin had fallen out, much less why.

Curtis might also be searching for redemption from killing a woman while drunk driving. He is haunted by the woman in light-flooded dreams. One way to find redemption might be to take care of his own mother, who is 60 now and starting to show her age as a result of caring for and worrying about him. Another would be to take care of Lena, who takes over the role of breadwinner for Curtis when he leaves his mother's house for hers. Most of all, he could find redemption by sharing life lessons with Andre, the fatherless son of his best friend.

Curtis isn't without these hopes. Neither was his friend Marvin. They wanted to provide for the people in their lives. Marvin was once naive enough to believe he'd be able to pay off his mother's debts and buy her a house. As Curtis put it, the young Marvin "spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration." And Curtis, although unable to find a job or pay for himself after prison, much less help those around him financially, still feels something inside him that wants to be the traditional male provider. This traditional man likes old 60s and 70s love ballads, rather than rap music that has women shaking their asses lewdly. Curtis seems himself as "a man true to better times."

Black men and their families

But like in any great mystery story, the detective starts investigating one mystery, and finds he's been played for a fool all along, because this mystery goes all the way to the top. Or in this case, to the bottom of the power pyramid--to the struggling black men who are unable to find work and who therefore become listless. Curtis sees himself, in fact, as a "baby" with his mother: "That's right, he thought. Your baby. Can't get a job, can't get my own place, can't open a goddamn bank account. You wouldn't even care if I pissed the bed."

Through a combination of institutional racism, the prison system, and bad personal choices, these black men who once had dreams of taking care of the women in their lives end up being cared for by them. It begins with their mothers. Early on, Lena shows a sort of feminine chivalry towards her son, shielding him from the rain and wiping off a wet bench for him to sit on. But the pampering and Sunday breakfasts continue when the men move from their mothers to their romantic female partners.

Curtis is mostly unable to share anything with Andre about being a man, because he hasn't been able to learn how to master it himself. Even Curtis's initial meeting with Andre, which I assumed at the end of Act One would be the big moment of the story, takes place anticlimactically off-screen. All Andre seems interested in are the lies Curtis tells about prison. Andre does come to Curtis, though, with one earnest question: "What makes mothers the way they are?" In many ways, this might be the real mystery for gumshoe Curtis to solve. If this had been a Tyler Perry dramedy instead of a crime-mystery-inspired meditation, Medea would have come in with sassy jokes for the women in this story, asking why they continued to support men who wouldn't change. But these women don't question it. When Curtis gets Andre to start making fun of his mother for the way she feeds them bacon on Sunday mornings with food she paid for and made, she accepts the harassment.

It's not clear whether the story is suggesting the very indulgent behavior of the women, which is a natural reaction to the wrecked lives of their men, is itself somewhat to blame. Does the indulgence  infantilize them, prevent their growth? Curtis's answer to Andre's question about why mothers are the way they are is, "They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous...Ain't no mystery to it."

Unable to find their own independence and uneasy while accepting semi-permanent charity from their women, these men seek for a middle ground, one where they can feel "contained but not trapped." Curtis is "horrified" by the "feeling of being stuck" when he realizes he is headed for a relationship with Lena, but at the same time, he feels that "freedom is a wilderness." He feels about his relationship with Lena like he does about the East River: it is polluted, but he likes it anyway.

The men are stuck, and the women coming along with them by whatever bonds there are to hold them there are stuck along with them. The story is called "A Family." Not "The Family." "The" family would have suggested something special about this one family in this story. "The" family indicates hard ownership and people who belong together. But "a" family suggests this is just one possible arrangement out of infinite choices, a possibility that came together like molecules bouncing into each other until they formed a happenstance bond. (Brinkley asserts in the notes that he changed the title from "A Kind of Family" because he didn't want to suggest the family in this story was a degraded family in any sense. It's not. I don't think that, either. It's clearly a legitimate form of a family. But legitimate families can still be pathologically dysfunctional. Curtis's family is every bit as much a real family as a family in a Eugene O'Neill play, including all the things wrong with it.)

What began as a solitary quest to find out facts about a lost friend becomes, by the end, a deep meditation on the struggles of black families and black men.

Personal thoughts on the writing

Two things about the writing put me off temporarily. One was the figurative language that seemed to me at first to hammer away too often with light imagery: "many windows, a thousand squares of humming light"; "bright delicate object they couldn't see"; "daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence"; "his dreams were full of light."  Once the importance of Mosley dawned on me, though, I started to like the play of light, giving it, if not a Dashiell Hammett-like noir quality, at least something of a chiaroscuro crime story feel.

Secondly, last year I did a couple of posts in the "Would I have published this story?" vein. The idea was to take a critically acclaimed story and review it, asking myself if I would have thought it was good enough to publish it if it had come into me as a reader at a literary journal without knowing it was supposed to be good. The first page of this story might have put it on thin ice with me as a reader. The first page-plus has just a few snags as Brinkley is getting us acquainted with three living characters and one dead one, and sometimes he uses appositives in order to avoid repeating names too much. Andre is "the boy" in his first mention, then Andre after that, then "the boy" again. But he's "the boy" in the same sentence that Lena is "Lena," which made me wonder why he knew one person's name but not the other's only to find out he did know them both.

It's fine, really. But a tired reader on his eleventh story of the day might have prematurely bailed on it. I might have bailed on it, given the wrong circumstances. I respect Brinkley for trusting his readers. And I respect Gulf Coast for getting it right. Props also to Roxane Gay for picking it for BASS. She's two-for-two so far according to my reading.


FOR ANOTHER TAKE ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S POST IN IT HERE.

Humanity limps under the porch to die: Maria Anderson's "The Cougar"

If my goal was to give the stories in the 2018 Best American Short Stories collection the serious consideration they deserve, I picked a hard one to start with. The story is as full of symbols taking on a life of their own as the Montana woods of Maria Anderson's"The Cougar" are full of scary things.

I said "symbols," but that doesn't do justice to the images in "Cougar" that come to life, taking over the story the way the cancer "or some other disease" eats the Cherokee landlord Jenny up from the inside. Having absorbed the guts of the story, these images then set about devouring one another. There is so much going on in these fourteen pages, the marks I made to highlight key passages ended up taking over most of the text. The symbols start to acquire meaning, but the meanings are like waves, bouncing into each other, sometimes doubling each other and sometimes cancelling one another out.

The unnamed first-person narrator lives in a Montana where almost everyone important to him is destroying the Earth in some way. He lives near a dying logging town; dying because it has already taken down all the old forest that fueled its growth. The loss of old forest doomed the business of the narrator's father, a man who both loved the trees and also destroyed them, two facts he does not find contradictory: "Dad loved the woods, and, I think, for him, felling the oldest trees in the forests didn't mean he loved them any less." The narrator's friend works on an oil rig and encourages the narrator to join him. More disgustingly, there is the low-quality Chinese restaurant where the narrator washes dishes in a restaurant that serves food described in brutal terms that evoke the violence involved in meat: "Greasy piles of chicken or beef probably slaughtered years ago, thawed and slopped with sauce that left orange residue on the plates."

The meaning in the imagery is so thick, you could dive in anywhere and start swimming in it, but I'll start with two of the central images: the cat and the cougar. The cat here is one of those smiling, arm-swinging little statuettes: "The cat waved at you like it was waving away all the stuff you thought about. Like it was urging you not to think, not to worry about being able to buy food or pay rent or feel like you should try to make some friends or have sex again because that was what eighteen-year-olds did."

The cat represents one kind of reaction to living in the world where one must kill and destroy in order to survive. It's a jaded and cynical philosophy, best typified by the grandmother of the restaurant's owners. The owners, it turns out, are actually Korean, not Chinese, and they tried to first open the restaurant serving non-exotic Korean dishes that might appeal to Westerners. But nobody wanted it. As the grandmother put it, "They wanted shit. They wanted very cheap, big portion of shit...What I decide is, people want shit, you give them shit."

This is the philosophy of the ultra-pragmatist. You didn't make the world a place where you have to destroy to survive, but since it's like that, you might as well roll with it. The owner of the restaurant wants to destroy the cougar to have something go up on the wall that will bring in customers. It's a wholly cynical way of living. It's the way of the narrator's friend, Blake, who, when we first seem him, joins in the "big portion of shit": "I saw my friend Blake outside the gas station, holding a cup of shit coffee in a fancy portable mug."

I think these are actually Japanese in origin, although they're all over Asia now. 

It's a beguiling philosophy, one that holds out a promise of some wisdom for the narrator. He notes that the grandmother is from "a place called Soul," mistaking the capital of South Korea for something much deeper. He ascribes a spiritual wisdom to the owners of the restaurant they do not deserve. The cat seems to offer a sort of enlightened detachment from the world, but instead it encourages its adherents to exploit the world in a terrible way. The owners of the restaurant want the narrator to throw their trash in the river to save money.

The cougar, meanwhile, is the eponymous and powerful symbol of the story. While tracking the cougar after it attacks his dog, the narrator is looking for its scat, "which looks like cat shit, only bigger." Indeed, the cougar is in many ways similar to the cat, only far deeper. The cougar does not deny that to live in the world means having to destroy and kill. The cougar originally caught the narrator's interest when it killed a neighbor's horse, then came back for the remains before they could bury the thing. The cougar does not apologize for itself. The cougar is something like the narrator's father, not seeing a contradiction in loving and destroying.

After the father disappears, the boy narrator tries to find him. He also grows close to the father's dog. The dog seems to change how the narrator feels about life in a dying world. Before the dog, the boy seemed to seek a kind of spiritual detachment, one in which he is an island. The principal appeal of his job washing dishes is that "you could go the whole day without talking to anyone if you didn't feel like it." The entire tone of the narrator's voice suggests an interior monologue, with short, simple sentences prevailing. The boy is given to self-harm, perhaps as a deflection of sorts to take the place of the violence toward the world around him he does not want to carry out.

But the dog invades this space of the boy's world, literally, forcing the boy to turn on his side or spread his legs to make room for the dog on the bed. The boy begins to make plans to live in the world of his friend, working on the oil rig. He saves his money. He restricts his expenses. He steals food for the dog.

But the cougar has other plans. One day, the boy sees the cougar chase down and attack his dog. Although the boy chases the cougar off with a rifle shot, he hits the dog. The next day, the dog hobbles off into the woods to die. The boy loses all interest in heading off to the oil rig or having any kind of future at all.

The cougar is a symbol of a man living in the world as he needs to in order to survive and doing it without apologies. There is an irony in that kind of living, because the resources needed to sustain it are limited. By killing to survive, you reduce the resources needed to kill and eat again. The entire world of "The Cougar" is resource-starved. The town has lost its trees. The animals the narrator and his friend Jenny hunt are all thin and hungry-looking. But the cougar charges ahead anyway, because any philosophy that seems to offer a way out of this conundrum is a lie and a cheat.

It's possible to despise this kind of short-sightedness, but that doesn't seem to be the attitude of the story. Jenny, the narrator's landlord, whose prominent rat-tail gives him a sort of rodent-like link to nature, does not hate the cougar because it kills. Instead, he feeds it, even after it attacks the dog. When the narrator wants to hunt it, Jenny objects, saying "I'm not sure an animal deserves getting shot for being hungry...Nope, I'm not sure it does at all."

Both Jenny and the father seem to understand, like some animals do, when the end has come. They wander off, in different ways, to face their inevitable doom, a doom which is both private and universal, as the world cannot ultimately escape what it has begotten. But the cougar, the grim will to survive, to be part of the world in a non-cynical way, remains. The narrator sees it and can't believe it. "But there it was."

Notes on the writing

I've just scratched the surface of this wonderful story. I didn't even get to all the mother issues. "The Cougar" is a feast, and not a feast of shit buffet food. It makes me feel good to see that even with writing this tight, there are--I won't call them mistakes, but maybe places where I can see the technique the writer tried to hide.

One was after the narrator hits himself in the ankle with a rifle. In the next sentence, the narrator speaks of walking around in the woods on his "busted foot." Of course, it's his ankle, not his foot, that's hurt, but the writer had already said "ankle" once two sentences earlier and was about to say it again, so she opted for a near synonym that sounded just a quarter note off to me. It's not a mistake, of course. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's one of those things I'd write and spend an hour asking myself if I'm a complete fraud. Then, I'd realize I had nothing better and send it in for publication, expecting to fail. I'm glad this story didn't fail.

I also note that there really are no lines that are startlingly original on their own. It's not fireworks of verbal virtuosity. Rather, it's a slow accumulation of very simple descriptions, chosen judiciously, that together have an effect similar to one of those knock-you-down lines. I often chide myself for not being able to come up with many of those big-right-hook lines. But this story is an example of writing that works wonderfully without having those kinds of tricks up your sleeve.


FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE COME HERE FOR HELP INTERPRETING THIS STORY FOR SCHOOL OR SOMETHING SIMILAR, CHECK OUT KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS STORY AS WELL.