BASS thoughts part one: the Internet and me

This is really a mini-post; the next two will be much meatier. I'll attempt to put this year's Best American Short Stories anthology into some kind of context historically and culturally soon, but for now, I just wanted to muse briefly on the personal meaning of one passage in this year's BASS. It's from Dina Nayeri's "A Big True":

I know the Internet isn't some deity. I know it's made up of people trying to inscribe the void, to mark the very ether with what they've lived and what they know.

I've been at this blog for over four years and written a little over 220 posts. Some of those posts were light little throwaway thoughts, but some took real work to put together. In all that time, I've had a pretty moderate readership. I've had about 33,000 hits. I'd guess one-third of those might be bots, unless Russia and Ukraine really love thoughts about writing from a small-time American writer.

So it's not a lot of readers, but there are some, and a few of those readers have been amazing. They write thoughtful replies that show they've actually taken the time to read something I wrote, absorb it, and form their own thoughts in reply. Anis Shivani, whose criticism I find incredibly on-the-nose, once commented on my blog. Amy Silverberg gave me a "Thanks!" the other day when I tweeted a link to my write-up on her story. A few other writers I've written about have sent me a note in one way or another. One friend of mine, who already spends his time reading everything he can consume, still puts time aside to read and posts on half my posts.

I've met others trying to inscribe the void on their own, like Karen Carlson, who keeps posting away on her blog for no other reason than it gives her joy to do so. There's Marc Goodson, who just wants to tell his story and won't quit until he does.

And then there's all those people who stop by for reasons I can never be sure of, since so few comment. Every post gets at least 20-40 people stopping by, and some get more. Although my son likes to point out all the YouTubers who get millions of views just by playing video games on screen, I'm happy for what readers I have. For whatever reason they browse, when I stop to think about it, it's unspeakably flattering. It's Saturday morning somewhere, and I post something, and then a guy I don't know at all, who could be doing anything and doesn't have to read what I write, chooses, of his own free will, to spend ten minutes of his day with me.

That's ten minutes of a reader opening up her mind to my best shots, my attempts to "mark the ether with what I've lived and what I know." I felt the same way about my book, once I got past the initial shock of realizing how few copies I would sell. Because as few copies as sold, there were still some that sold where I have no idea who the buyer was. Reading is hard, and a person somewhere chose to expend the effort to read me.

I've tried to write seriously about the twenty stories in BASS this year. It wasn't easy. My hope is that this effort will be of use to normal folks who gave BASS a try, the people who do something else with their lives besides think about books all the time, but who still like to try to read well. I was aiming for the literary equivalent of the YouTube video where some guy did shows you exactly how to fix the thing in your house you needed to fix. There won't be thousands of people who read this. Even though I put as much effort into this as if the whole literary world were hanging on my every word, I know I have virtually no influence on American letters. But I'm going to write like I'm America's top critic, just like when I blog about the struggles of writing, I'm going to write like America's next Melville needs my words to get them to the next step. I'm going to write like it matters, because to me it does.

I'm grateful the Internet gives me a place to share what I've written, even though the Internet is not a person to whom I can be grateful. It's easy to dismiss people following their passion projects on the Internet, but I stand by what I've written. The Internet has made us dumber in many ways, but for me this year, it allowed me to see a thing I wished existed in the world and make it exist.

And now, to conclude the way my son always tells me I should: But that's just my opinion; leave yours in the comments below. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe! 

And then we came to the end. Of BASS, and maybe the world.

The last story of the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology, "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esmé Weijun Wang, is the only story in the collection that somewhat directly takes on what everyone knew was the big deal in America in 2017. (The stories for the 2018 BASS collection were all originally published between January 2017 and January 2018.) "Terrible Thing" is set just before 2017 begins, on the day of the election of Donald Trump.

Although every year when the anthology comes out, there are some introductory remarks that try to place the contents within the context of what is happening in America, both politically and culturally, it's difficult for the anthology to really keep pace with contemporary trends. Many of the writers in this anthology said it took them years to write the stories that appear here, meaning most were written before Trump was president. After the stories were written, it took months or even years sometimes to find a publisher, followed by the wait for the story to actually come out. For BASS, there is then the additional wait of determining which stories published in 2017 will make the 2018 volume, then pushing out the anthology. It's strange that a medium with so little equipment and manpower required to produce has such a slow turnaround time. Many television shows--art that requires hundreds of people--managed to respond to the Trump election within months. South Park did it in weeks.

But here was a story in which the presidency of Donald Trump formed a major part of the plot, making it unique within the 2018 anthology.

Plot

Wendy Chung is suffering from hallucinations. She has a hard time getting others to understand it's not depression, it's hallucinations. Wendy began having these hallucinations a few years after Becky Guo--the only other Chinese girl in Polk Valley--was murdered. Becky was drugged and then hanged from an impossibly high tree. Wendy ended up getting involved in trying to help Becky's parents to get the tree cut down so it wouldn't stand as a reminder to them of what they'd lost. She was seventeen when this happened.

Because it is difficult for Wendy not to identify with Becky, and also because nobody ever figured out who the murderer was or--more importantly--the reason for the murder, Wendy has never been able to rest easy since then:

"It could have been any of them who killed Becky. It would have been any of them. As long as the murderer was free I would not know who had sedated and hung Becky from that high branch. I would not know why or how the killer had done it, and because there seemed to be no reason for the act I would have to keep my head bowed. If she had not been killed in part because of her race I could, as the saying goes, breathe easier, but I could not assure myself of that any more than I could wipe off my own face." 

Wendy is considering getting electro-convulsive shock therapy to zap away her hallucinations. The procedure comes with risks: she might not be able to form new memories. All of this is happening on the day of the 2016 election. The anxiety everyone feels over the election is making all of Wendy's symptoms worse.

It's especially poignant to read this story here, in the last week of October 2018. Although generally, I've felt like liberal concerns that Trump's election would mean an increase in hate crimes against minorities were overblown, this last week has certainly seemed to make those fears seem valid. We've seen two black men shot at random in a grocery store, a series of bombs sent off to liberal political figures, and now a mass shooting of a synagogue. I don't want to get into a digression here about Trump's role or responsibility in all of this (it seems especially problematic to try to pin an anti-Semitic attack on Trump). Maybe Trump hates these white supremacists as much as anyone and is just too bumbling a speaker to state his hatred of white supremacists without also qualifying his dislike in needless and ranting ways. Maybe he's really secretly cheering these guys on. The point is that as long as people don't KNOW where he stands, they, like Wendy, have a right to feel unsettled and unsafe. The current president brings nothing so much as uncertainty.

This story isn't like the others, so I'm not going to review it like the others

A big part of me instinctively felt revulsion to this story. It's not because I don't think Trump's election represents one of the worst moments in American history. It does. I watched it unfold from the couch with my son. It was the first presidential election he was really old enough to grasp. We fell asleep watching, but not long after I dozed off, he rolled over and kicked me in the head, which was a perfect metaphor to describe what the election felt like. I couldn't get back to sleep that night, which made the weirdness of it all the next day that much stronger. Trump's election was, in my mind, a more profoundly disturbing event than 9/11. 9/11 just made it clear that we weren't as safe as we thought we were. But 2016 made me question more than what kind of threat we faced from outside; it made me wonder who we ourselves were.

That being said, I've seen more than my share of conservative memes gleefully laughing at liberal tears following the election, and "Terrible Thing" seemed to play into the hands of those who think everyone who was upset by the election felt that way because we get triggered by anyone who disagrees with us.

I might have felt like this in November 2016, but no fucking way was I going to show it.

(I hope the following is not "ableist"-- a concept I only sort of understand and only partly agree with the recommendations of to the extent I understand them. If I am wrong, I am open to correction.)

Wendy is, in fact, an actual psychiatric patient. Wendy's life and choices and experience are valid and worthwhile. They are not made less so by the way she has responded to trauma or the fact she is seeking help. But it does cast Wendy--and by extension, anyone who found Trump's election deeply unsettling--as a victim. It plays into the narrative that we are unable to respond to adversity with anything other than falling apart, becoming bed-ridden, needing sedated or, in Wendy's case, having our brains electrocuted to where we can't even remember anymore.

This is an unfair way to look at it, I know. Wendy has a right to feel afraid. Many people in America have a right to feel afraid. Even if the risk they face is marginal compared to what many people in the world face every day and get through, it's the uncertainty that gets you. Being unsure what others think of you can eventually drive you slowly insane, especially when an endless news cycle keeps reminding you there are people who don't like you. This is an important story to tell about life in Trump's America. Yet, maybe because it was the only story directly addressing Trump in the collection and wasn't balanced out by another with someone, say, fighting back with useful and practical action, I was a little disappointed in it. Not that it's Wang's fault what else happened to be in the anthology. For what it is--an aperture into the mind of someone suffering from something it's hard to believe would still be a social illness in 2016--it's effective.

So that's it

I've tried to give some kind of helpful thoughts for all twenty stories in the 2018 BASS, thoughts that might help get others past some hurdles and get into thinking about these stories on their own. I'm going to attempt to do my own version of the "what does this collection tell us about the big picture in American literature" question in the next few posts. I hope I've helped somebody to enjoy these stories more than you would have otherwise.

Figuring it out as they go along: Rivers Solomon's "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver"

Rivers Solomon's "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver" is a story about inter-generational trauma, but the "inter-generational" is a little muddled, because the mother had her daughter at sixteen, making the inter-generational gap between them a little closer than it is for most parent-child trauma pairs.

In fact, "Jo," the self-named mother of "Whose Heart," is still sort of a kid herself. She admits to not feeling like an adult. Her worldview seems to be largely composed of the kinds of notions a precocious teenager who has only read the "great works" one gets exposed to in high school would have. She chose her name from Little Women, and refers throughout the story to works of Joseph Heller, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Edward Thomas, and James Joyce.

Jo's whole life, in fact, is a lot like one of the best-known characters of 20th-century literature, Lolita. Jo left home at about twelve and immediately ran into "Mr. Wheelock," who took an interest in her for being mature for her age. Because Jo felt like an ugly black girl, she quickly fell under his spell, because he seemed to think she was beautiful. By sixteen, she was pregnant with Mr. Wheelock's baby. When Jo wanted to give the baby up for adoption and Mr. Wheelock threatened her with physical violence over it, Jo shot and killed him.

It's not clear exactly what happened after that. She did give the baby up, and it turns out that Mr. Wheelock had already willed her a house and enough money to live on. Jo endured some kind of questioning from police and lawyers, but it doesn't seem like she went to jail or faced charges.

Eighteen years later, Jo meets the girl she gave up. I say "girl," but that's not quite clear. Jo's daughter tells her, before they even meet, that she is trans and that she has changed her name to Luciana, or Luz. Jo asks, "You mean trans, like, you're transsexual?" Luz responds with "Trans like gender is dead."

Which left me wondering: was Luz born a biological male who identified as female, and has now transitioned? Luz does seem to be taking medications to support a gender reassignment surgery. Or was Luz born physically a woman, but now considers herself non-binary? If that's the case, though, what is the medication for? We don't know what Luz's original name was. Jo keeps calling Luz her "daughter" and using pronouns like "she" and "her" with Luz, but is that because Jo doesn't get it, or because Luz really identifies as female? Jo wonders if Luz is gay like Jo is, which made me feel like maybe Luz identified as a lesbian female. Ultimately, I wasn't really sure what the deal with Luz was.

Neither is Jo, and she blunders her way through trying to connect with the girl. Luz has all kinds of questions. She's just aged out of the foster care program, and while Jo can give Luz a place to stay, she can't really answer any of the questions like Luz wants. That's because Jo still hasn't resolved her own traumas.

This is never clearer than in how Jo craves the reassurance of a gun. Jo takes guns with her everywhere. She fires them weekly. That's because a gun is the only thing Jo has ever experienced in life that can even the odds life has dealt her:

"Imagine a large man gifted with athleticism and strength, favored in life because of his class and wealth and color. Now imagine a child, young and poor and thoroughly pathetic. See the two of them together, in a room, butting heads. 

Now imagine the scene again, but this time the child has a gun, and the man does not. He steps back, suddenly fearful of her scrawny figure, her shaking frame, her tearing eyes. Everyone fears the bullet, no matter what gift the invisible puppeteer has bestowed upon him."

Luz has her own trauma she's dealt with in foster care, but we never learn about it. There are, in fact, many details withheld from us that might have made the story's arc clearer. As the story stands, the best we can puzzle out is that both characters have a lot to figure out before they can move forward. Jo wants to help Luz, but she needs to help herself, first. The climax, in which Jo shares a small bit of knowledge that she didn't learn from Mr. Wheelock, is a very early step in her healing. It's something she has independent of him. This isn't a thunderous climax with a profound character shift. It's a microscopic move toward trying to get better.

Some stories take a clear, almost prescriptive approach to what a character ought to do to overcome her problems. Others are content to simply report on the character and what issues she faces. This story is more just reporting the facts as Jo and Luz try to figure out their way.

Both characters have tried to define their own realities. They've both given themselves their own names. However, they both find there are constraints to defining or re-defining yourself. Jo laments her own "obvious" choice, taking a name from Little Women, and as soon as she learns about the name Lucinda, Jo places it as belonging to Catch-22, even though that wasn't the association Luz wanted. We can try to remake ourselves and the world around us, but often we find we're just trying the same solutions others have already tried and failed at.

Still, you have to try something, because the only other choice is to give up. "Whose Heart" is a brief tribute to those who fire shots in the dark at whatever demons are coming for them.

I see what you did there. And I don't like it one bit. "The Prairie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld set herself up a couple of tough tasks in her short story "The Prairie Wife," the 18th entry in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology.  There are two targets in the sights of this story: how social media affects us and how we can misjudge others. Neither is a new subject, but that's not the danger, since fiction always is approaching old themes in hopefully new ways. One hurdle the story has to get past is that with so many non-fiction sources telling us nowadays about the dangers of social media, it's hard to keep that part of the story from having an "after school special" kind of feel to it. It could, if not handled right, feel like the familiar warnings about social media transposed into fiction rather than an organic story that happens to have social media in it.

A second danger is that Sittenfeld is attempting a true surprise ending, a tactic that used to be standard for short stories but which is now generally shunned. Just last year, in the introduction to this same Best American Short Stories series, Amy Wolitzer warned against the dangers of the surprise ending:

But of course if everything is surprising, then nothing is. Because we had all been raised on the power of surprise, the short stories that my class wrote for the creative writing unit...sometimes attempted a cheap and lazy kind of mimicry of the kinds of fiction we'd already read. I recall more than more than one kid standing up and reading his or her own short story aloud; it was invariably full of action and suspense and a touch of Borges-like surrealism, and finally there came the last line, the kicker: "Then I woke up, and it was all a dream!"  

Those clever endings taught us not only what to want and expect, but also what not to want: an unearned surprise for a surprise's sake. 

Wolitzer goes on to say that as her tastes grew, she began to want more from a story than a shock ending. She learned to want "a whole story--not just the ending--(that) might itself take on what had been considered the function of the ending."

Does Sittenfeld's "The Prairie Wife" accomplish this? Is it enough of a surprise throughout that its surprise ending doesn't feel like a gimmick? Yes and no.

The set-up

Kirsten appears to be a heterosexual woman with a secret. She had a five-day fling with a girl named Lucy when they were both camp counselors as teens. Kirsten has learned, though, that Lucy is now a well-known celebrity cook/homemaker/individual-brand-celebrity-thing that exists nowadays. She's especially popular with heartland evangelical types. Kirsten is driven crazy by the hypocrisy of Lucy proclaiming her happy marriage and strong sexual attraction to her very male husband. Kirsten considers outing Lucy.

Meanwhile, Kirsten drives herself and her spouse Casey a little crazy obsessing over Lucy's social media. It makes Kirsten less focused at work, as a mom, and as a wife.

The two reveals

Big reveal one worked well for me. Turns out that Lucy's not a fake. Before Kirsten can get around to outing Lucy, Lucy outs herself. In her new cookbook, she confesses to having dated women before marrying her husband. On a talk show promoting the book, she explains she is bi-sexual, although she is a monogamous bi-sexual while married to her husband. She did this, in spite of the risk of alienating her heartland fans, because she wanted to let LGBT kids know they're not alone.

Reveal number two left me a little bit angry. Kirsten's spouse Casey is a woman. They're a lesbian couple raising two kids together. Suddenly, I as a reader realized that the story had carefully avoided using a pronoun with Casey prior to the reveal and let me fill in the gaps. I think the story wanted to pull off a layered surprise, one in which Kirsten is wrong about Lucy, but the reader is also wrong about her.

But it's actually a little more loaded than that. On the one hand, it's kind of like that old brain teaser they gave us in school where they tell you that the doctor can't operate on the patient because "he's my son," but also the doctor isn't the patient's father. So, if you're a boy growing up in 1982, it takes you a a minute to get past your own biases and realize that women are also doctors and the doctor is the boy's mother. In that puzzle, your own biases lead you astray.

Some stories, you're okay with a big twist at the end, and some it just feels like it's a little out-of-bounds. 

But in this story, many of the details also actively lead us astray. We are led to believe that Kirsten was really heterosexual. She is thinking about boys during most of her childhood tryst with Lucy: "...she was mostly preoccupied with the hotness of a counselor named Sean." Or again: "...because she was busy wondering if Sean and Renee would break up and, if they did, how she, Kirsten, would make her move." The hookups with Lucy "didn't strike her then as that meaningful," but were rather "arbitrary."

In other words, it seems like Kirsten is naturally more attracted to boys, and was just taking advantage of Lucy's attraction to her to have an exciting but otherwise meaningless experience while at camp. Kirsten seems "flaky and petty," as she describes herself, and therefore capable of receiving sexual gratification from someone she wasn't really attracted to. Because I read it the first time through as though Kirsten was truly heterosexual, I assumed Casey was a man. True, Casey was in the story before the past with Lucy was introduced, and I naturally assumed Casey to be a man, much like I naturally assumed a doctor was male in 1982 when I was nine. But the story is obviously trying to reinforce this assumption. Casey has a lot of traditionally male traits, like wanting her kids to develop "grit." According to the one site I just Googled and am not bothering to fact-check, 59% of people named Casey are men. And why would Kirsten's childhood tryst with a girl be her "most damning secret" if she's now married to a woman who already knows she's a lesbian?

Of course, I could see at the end that I assumed one reality when everything in the story could have been just as true with another reality in place. But I didn't realize while reading that this was something I ought to be on the alert for. It's just not a common thing in literary fiction to trick readers like that. Usually, the story is trying to get a lot of background to the reader right up front, so you can get oriented to the reality of the characters. This story played off that assumption. It revived the old O. Henry surprise ending, trusting that it would work exactly because nobody expects a surprise ending anymore.

I get that a lot of the point of the story is that I assumed Casey was a man because heterosexuality is still the default assumption in America. The story would like to point out that the normal lives of the characters are also the lives of people we don't think of as normal. Lesbians can be petty, too, and lesbians can struggle to keep affection alive in their marriages. Fine. But I still think I'm in my rights to call foul a little bit here. A fairly small percentage of women are lesbians. About 3.5% of adults in the U.S. are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. If a character in a story had some other characteristic that put them in the 96th percentile of something, I think the story should let me know that right up front. If a character is six-foot-seven, say, or makes a seven-figure income.

I ended up liking Lucy and mustering some reluctant sympathy for Kirsten. It turned out that when they met each other as teens, neither had figured out who they were yet, even though they both thought they knew. I also thought I had figured them out, but I hadn't. If ever there were a story where this kind of surprise ending was merited, it was here. I'm certainly a big fan of the message that we ought to be slow to judge others on who we think they are, because nobody's identity is as clear as it seems. But it also felt like I was being led toward a particular reading that was meant to make me feel guilty about my own biases, when in fact the story gave me more than a little coaching to bring those biases to life.

Life imitates art imitating life

I didn't know who Curtis Sittenfeld was before this story. What can I say? Literature is not my main profession. This is something I do in my spare time, and I was emphatically not reading literature in English for over a decade. Plus, I can't remember anyone's name. So I don't know everyone in literary fiction who's a somebody. I assumed Curtis Sittenfeld was a man. I didn't even know Curtis was a unisex name.

As a result, when reading this story about lesbians, I thought the writing about lesbian sex was typical of what I would expect a man to write about lesbian sex. Mrs. Heretic is always laughing about how men write sex scenes from a woman's point of view, and this story used some of the kinds of language she's always telling me no woman would ever write. Lines like:

- "She and Lucy rolled around a lot, and jammed their fingers up inside each other..."
- "...Lucy was lapping away at her..."
- "After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy's face..."


So in the end, I not only fell for two traps the author set for me based on my own assumptions about gender and sexuality, but three traps, including one the author didn't mean to set.

Not as easy at it looks: Amy Silverburg's "Suburbia!"

Exaggerating one feature in a narrative grotesquely while keeping all the other elements normal-sized is an old technique. Kafka is probably the best known practitioner of this tactic, but it's been used pretty regularly since the advent of magical realism. Just a few years ago in another Best American Short Stories anthology, Nell Freudenberger used it in "Hover," in which everything in the story is just like normal life, except that a man finds himself suddenly able to hover above the ground a little bit.

It sounds easy: just find something that people all recognize and blow that feature up. But it's hard to do well. You can't just exaggerate anything and have it work. Ideally, exaggerating one element of a story enables the reader to consider that element in a strange sort of isolation. You could, say, examine what it feels like to be a new person in a group by having a character who moves to a new location have a weird disease that turns her into a lizard, but a lizard who maintains human sentience. It's just the normal human experience of being out of place, but multiplied to extremes. But you probably wouldn't be able to just have someone have giant feet that took up a city block and say you were trying to communicate the feeling of having big feet. It's got to be something where people will read it and immediately connect, where they will say, even as exaggerated as the element of the story is, that the feeling that exaggerated element evokes is exactly how it feels. 

That's what Silverburg does with two aspects of her story. In spite of both of these aspects being well-trod territory, Silverburg makes them fresh through her grotesque exaggerations.


The first aspect exaggerated is the notion of "pushing young ones out of the nest," or "letting them spread their wings" or whatever leaving-home cliche you want to use. Maria's father convinces her to leave home by means of a simple bet. Her dad bets her she will leave the house the day after she turns 18 and never come back. If she does come back, she loses. It's not clear what she loses, but she will lose. The day after her 18th birthday, he wakes her up while the rest of the family is gone, takes her to the train station, gives her a wad of cash, and tells her to leave and never come back.

Most parents, of course, would never do this, and it's borderline psychotic. But it's not meant to be a real-world parenting strategy. It's a hyperbolic and fun stand-in for the idea of getting your kids to go out and find themselves. And find herself, Maria does. She no sooner gets on the train than she is re-defining herself: "I decided the fewer words I said, the better. I'd be a person who spoke very little, but when I spoke, it would be especially important." Whatever else being dumped on the shore of life does for you, it allows you to re-make your own self-identity.

Maria ends up figuring it out. She goes off to the big city, meets a boy, takes her time deciding what that means. She gets a job, sort of succeeds at it. Finally, she decides, when her parents never come to visit like they promised, that she will lose the bet and go home. That's when the second exaggeration happens.

I feel like this story was based on a Dixie Chicks song, but in a good way. 

Everyone is familiar with the feeling of going back to some place you spent a lot of time as a child and finding it smaller when you return. Maria finds that to be the case, and then some. On the way to the house, knowing she will lose the bet, her boyfriend tells her they should have called first, out of consideration. Maria says she has "outgrown" consideration. That's not all she's outgrown. When they pull up to the house, it's literally not there: "The curb was still painted with the numbers of my address, but the land was filled with grass and dandelions and other unnameable weeds."

Maria looks further, and finally finds something that "shone in the sun like a tin can." She sees it's like her house, only it's a doll house-replica of her house. It's smaller than a toaster, she notes. Her parents, she finds, have shrunk down to its size as well. The father is disappointed, "I didn't want you to see us like this," he says. We are left with Maria still marveling at her parents' diminutiveness at the end.

You could see Maria's father as vain, someone who wanted to get rid of his daughter before she found out what they really are, but I see him as kind. He wanted his kids to know what they are capable of, but they'd have never known that if they couldn't get away and get enough perspective to see how much bigger they could be than what they'd known.

Seeing the father as kind rather than vain has an impact on the meaning of the title as well. One could read it as a dig against suburbia, one that sees suburbanites as small people. Maria's father didn't like his own life, after all, seeing his choice to be a real estate agent (no doubt selling more tiny parcels of suburban life to others) as a kind of failure. But it's also true that from that suburban landscape, Maria's parents raised two kids who went off to do great things, things they didn't even know they were capable of. Suburbia is like the calm waters where whales raise calves. After they're big enough, they move on to the big ocean, but that doesn't mean the calving ground is somehow a terrible place. It's only terrible when the people in it don't realize their own significance in the grand scheme of things. Maria's parents do.

Silverburg is a comedian, according to her contributor notes. She certainly has a comedian's knack for pointing out some aspect of life you always knew had something funny about it, but never noticed until she did that bit about airplane peanuts. Certainly, the surest sign that this story hit home with me is how sure I am that I'll think of it for a long time whenever Mrs. Heretic and I are talking about our son leaving home.                                                                                                                                                                           

Ron Rash's "The Baptism" is a short story with words in it

I've been whipping through the 20 stories that comprise this year's Best American Short Stories anthology at a pretty good clip. I'm on pace to be done about a month after I downloaded the book. I'm getting a little worn out, which is why I'm glad I can take a pass on story #16. There's just nothing much there. It's easily my least favorite of the anthology so far. It's the story of a minister in the 19th Century who tries to stop an abusive man from marrying a 14-year-old. The abuser, Gunter, has already run one woman into the grave and made another run away. The reverend is trying to stop the marriage without violating the principles of his faith. Gunter needs the revered to baptize him so the girl's mother will agree to let him marry the 14-year-old, and in that lies what conflict there is in "The Baptism."

There's nothing new in this story, nothing arresting or interesting about the main character or any of the side characters, and nothing surprising in the surprise ending. The villain is dumb enough to do everyone's work for them, meaning he was never really the threat he seemed to be. It's almost a deus ex machina kind of ending.

The dialogue seems a little trite and the narrator's language a little predictable. Nothing was new or arresting or challenging or memorable.

A few examples of the passages I felt killed the magic:

1: "Beneath a coat once worn by her husband, the woman shivered, and perhaps not just from the cold." (That's some kind of romance novel trope there.)

2: (Gunter trying to convince the preacher to baptize him so he can marry and lay pipe to the young girl):

"Our baptisms are held in warmer weather."
"I know for a fact you baptized Henry Cope last winter," Gunter challenged.
"He was dying," Reverend Yates answered. "Even then it wasn't this cold."
"I know the water will be cold," Gunter said, grinning now, "but I figure Pearl will warm me up real good later."

(Jesus. Apparently, the author would like us to know that Gunter is bad.)

3: There is a brief moment when it seems like the story might have something to give. There's a nice line: "At such times, he feared some malevolent counterpoint to grace operated in the world." But then, there's a knock at the door and then some dreadful dialogue takes place between the townspeople who want to stop the baptism/wedding and the preacher.

"That is of no importance, Reverend." The storekeeper bristled. "Let them go elsewhere."

....

"Doubtful, I say," Birch answered. "And if so, might not death be better for the child than being wedded to that blackguard?"


-----

Okay, enough. I didn't like it. It wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, I just don't understand how Roxane Gay suddenly went from one great pick after another to this story. On to the next one.

Nostalgia for the future's past: Tea Obreht's "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure"

There are two literary devices I sometimes think are overdone nowadays that Tea Obreht uses in "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure." One, the use of second person to tell the story, is becoming more and more ubiquitous, although I am usually not sure why it's being used. It's so common now, it's almost just another form of first person. This story didn't seem to call for its use, but fine. The second device, though, made absolute sense here, such that it was almost a necessity. Obreht opened with what I call the "Hundred Years of Solitude" opening, in which the narrator hurries ahead to the end of the story for a moment, but only to look back at the beginning of the story from the point of view of the end:

One evening almost thirty years later, a call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your husband out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand.... 

When you finally lift the phone to your ear...you get the wind knocked out of you.... 

It's Wade. Your Wade. So long-lost that his name overcomes you as first a sensation and then a smell before finally taking lettered form. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar as your own, saying: "Syl?" And then: "I knew you'd sound exactly the same." 

In a minute, it will hit you that of course you sound the same...

It's the perfect opening, because this is a story written here in the present about a future most people see coming, even though we hope it never comes. In that future, one of the favorite activities of people seems to be pining for the day before that future. Which is now. That's a little disorienting to summarize, and the opening accomplishes just the right combination of orienting and disorienting.

The not quite post-apocalyptic world of "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure"

We don't know exactly what combination of environmental disasters led to the world the story inhabits, and it doesn't much matter. It's some version of what we in the real world are all being told today are the greatest threats to the environment. Over-consumption seems to be the chief culprit. In any event, human life doesn't seem to be on the brink of extinction just yet, but the world is changed. There are no animals, or at least none to eat. Trees seem to be somewhat rare, as well, although in the Bitterroot Mountains, where the story takes place, there are still enough woods to get lost in.

Society went through something called the "Posterity Initiative." It doesn't seem to have been a conservation effort or attempt to take one last-ditch shot at saving many of the species on Earth. Rather, it was more of a historical effort. The point was to save reminders of the past world so the future world could know something about what was lost. For Sylvia's father, that means collecting grass samples. For Sylvia, it means donating to the "Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains."

The nature preserve of the future doesn't host animals. It hosts the last relics of those animals. The man Syl is in love with, Wade, enters into these preserves to "poach" these relics. One gathers wood. Another seems to hunt the last of the quail in the world to serve in expensive breakfasts. Wade and his blackmarketeer friends see no harm in gathering up these objects. They refer to those who have too narrow a view of using the objects of the past as "wasters." It's an ironic inversion, as the ones using up the last of the remaining resources are calling the conservationists the ones wasting things. In Wade's case, though, he might have a point; what's the use in leaving the antlers of extinct Elk in the ground? The government intends nothing more for those antlers than to let them "reintegrate with the undergrowth."

The traffic in guilt

The black market traffic in relics isn't the only booming industry after Posterity. There's a good buck to be made in guilt. Syl says her father's whole life is ruled by guilt. He is subject to panic attacks, thinking about all the water he wasted in his life. (Side note: there is mention of a water shortage, but there seems to be enough water to grow crops. There are even non-essential crops, like coffee. Best not to look too deeply into it.)

For the guilty older generation who couldn't pass along bacon to its progeny, there is the expensive "reintegration" package to buy at the funeral home. You can elect to be planted into the ground inside a protective enclosure (roll credits!) that will give life to a tree. Your body will become the food to grow a new tree. This will offset some of your environmental bad karma.

Opposing nostalgias

While the generation older than Syl's is feeling guilty about what it didn't pass along to posterity and pining away for the old days, Syl in the "present"--meaning 30 years after the majority of action in the story, when she gets the phone call and remembers her own past--has her own nostalgia she's dealing with. Hers is sort of the opposite of the sadness that plagued her father, in which he felt guilty about his over-use. Syl's regret comes from having consumed too little of life. In her case, she never told Wade how she felt about him. There is the regret in "Items Awaiting" from living life too fully, and the regret of not having lived it fully enough. This is what gives the story its narrative drive and its pathos. It's a really intelligent narrative structure.

Humans are either doing too much or too little, which makes us out to be pretty good fools. "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" goes a terrible song that's been covered way more times than necessary. But the song is right. As a herd, we tend to take too much. As individuals, we are often too timid to take what joy is right there for the taking. Both as a herd and as individuals, we end up losing out on the best that life has to offer, either by destroying it actively or letting it go passively. This is why the set-up of the story as a memory from the future of a past that is the future of those reading the story right now in the present is so perfect. No time in this set-up is really home.

At the end of the story, there is one final elk left in the wild. It leaves one final set of antlers to posterity. It lives its elky life as best as the last elk in Idaho knows how. One day, there will be a last human wandering along somewhere. When it sheds its final memento of what we were for posterity, what will that memento say about the what has been lost?

This version of the song, however, is brilliant and utterly necessary for our times. 


Will humanity survive?

It's worth asking at the end whether humanity will survive. Syl, after never consummating her love for Wade, studied ecology. She now works on a "kelp-rig," whatever that is. She's still trying to do something to save the world. It's possible that Wade never told her how he felt because he realized that his particular form of "consumption" wasn't what the world needed, and he knew that. He wanted to tell Syl how he felt, but maybe he didn't because he isn't the right person for her future.

Wade's not bad for taking the antlers. He's the type of person who loves (and consumes) too much. Generally, society has a soft spot for a bon vivant. But it's not the right type of person for Syl's future. As pressure continues to mount on the planet, the person who lives life to its fullest might be an endangered species as well.

LINK: Check out Karen Carlson's take on this story. She does a bit about this being an "envelope" story that was extremely perceptive.