If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing it

For most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. 

The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"

Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. 

I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.

1. Maybe I'm not that good

When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. 

But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. 

Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. 

Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.

When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.

2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better

I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. 

But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. 

Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.  

Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer.  A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. 

3. I can't get away from the world

I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. 

One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. 

Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:

"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."

Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. 

Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.

Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.

In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. 

4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now

Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. 

I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. 

I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.

All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. 

So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. 

My cycle

So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. 

My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:

Looking for life after literary fiction

Can one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I should read. In fact, I probably weighed should over want to most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. 

Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. 

After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a story rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why. 

But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer (or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. 

So after putting down this year's Best American Short Stories, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. 

It's different, all right

The first story in the anthology was first published in Conjunctions, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. 

After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.

I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.

One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. 

This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?

Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" 

Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. 

Committing to the bit

Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes Moulin Rouge, which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously."  She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. 

Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. 

So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.

There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment"  and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.

However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. 

I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. 

Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while. 

 

 

Enough for now

I've sworn I was finished with writing and blogging about writing and so on enough times now that nobody will take me seriously if I swear I'm done again, but I am taking a break. The last story was a good place to end, what with its relevance to current world events and the fact that almost the last words in it were "I am sorry, Jacob." Kind of like the universe was talking directly to me in response to my complete failure to accomplish what I wanted to as a writer. I'm not in any kind of place to give myself over to the stories in BASS this year. 

This fall is the twentieth anniversary of the end of my time in graduate school, and it's been ten years since I picked up my notebook again and actually gave writing a sustained try. Right now, I feel like all of that was a huge waste of time. I don't really have anything great to replace it with, but I don't want to keep going enough that I'd rather deal with a big empty place in my life than with continuing to fail. 

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep doing this. That's why I gave BASS another try this year. But the few people who comment on here aren't really enough for me to say this is a good use of my time and effort. 

Pulling at the fringes of the universe's tallis: "The Master Mourner" by Ben Ehrlich

It's pretty obvious that "The Master Mourner" belongs to a class of stories that could be grouped under the category of "stories with ambiguous endings." The way you're asking yourself "What did he say to her" at the end of Lost in Translation, or the way you're wondering what was real and what was an implanted memory at the end of Total Recall, or the way you're asking yourself "What the hell did I just watch?" after 2001: A Space Odyssey or Inception, so at the end of "The Master Mourner," I think it's pretty easy to find yourself asking what has gone on. The story itself encourages the reader to look for secret conspiracies and hidden shenanigans, beginning as it does with the Hebrew school teacher who once helped the Irgun to carry out a terrorist plot against British occupiers of Israel by distracting them with her piano playing. The reader at the end of "Master Mourner" is justified in wondering if he, too, has been distracted throughout in order to be surprised by a bomb at the end. 

There are hints throughout the story that a secret plot--in both the literary and espionage meanings of the word--is going on beneath the surface plot, which resembles a familiar Jewish coming-of-age story. Jacob, son of Henry Singer, fails to emotionally connect to his mother's death when he is young. Jacob only experiences mourning as series of social obligations he must fulfill: "...to open the door with my face prepared with a mourner's mixture of pale sorrow, stiff resilience, and a hint of eye-smiling gratitude for the offering of yet another fruit basket." He looks upon his duties as a mourner much like he looks upon singing and praying at temple--as something to be endured until it's over. Meanwhile, Jacob's father seems to check out emotionally after the death of his wife. He retreats to a "different realm," one in which nothing reaches him, where even if Jacob tries to yell to him or to buy the wrong eggs to "get him out of reverse," the sound is "inaudible to him." As opposed to the Hebrew teacher with her three hearts allowing her to be resilient even through trauma, Henry stops running, a hobby he seemingly enjoyed, because, he claims, he has a bad heart. Bad heart, indeed. 

That's the surface story, at least, but there's another story straining to be heard throughout. Even inanimate objects seem to be trying to let Jacob know something is afoot. The pews in synagogue squeak "No!" and "Please" to him. The floors of his house say "No! Stay!" when he goes to answer the door in the middle of the night. 

Then there's Jacob's understanding that the universe is full of mysteries to be solved and resolved. When he attends temple as a boy, impatiently waiting for the end of service, he spends "most of the time playing with the fringes that dangled from my father's tallis. I tugged at them, pretending they were levers that opened the ark or did some other unexpected trick." Jacob hopes to open the ark, the replica in the temple of THE ark, the ancient religious relic that supposedly housed the glory of the Lord God himself. Jacob hopes, that is, to unlock the mysteries of the universe. 

However, he is doomed to disappointment. Moses-like, he hears the voice of God as a young man when he is coming out of the drug store where he picked up medicine for his ill mother. Jacob is wondering if he will end up like his father, and God Almighty answers: "Of course." Near the end of the story, Jacob, having tried to embarrass synagogue icon Bernie Bernstein, is ashamed when he realizes Bernie lost a brother in the Holocaust. At this point, Jacob realizes "that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be." Jacob's not going to live up to his big dreams of penetrating the big mystery of it all. Can the reader hope to escape the same fate?

God's presence everywhere can be viewed as either a balm or a menace. In the movie this photo comes from, it's a little bit of both. 

Who is Bernie?

After opening with the former-terrorist-turned-Hebrew-school-teacher telling Jacob's class that God is everywhere, the story then encourages us to equate the suggestively named Bernie Bernstein with God Almighty. The idea of God's omnipresence could be viewed as either reassuring or a threat, but in context, it feels more like a threat, given that it's coming from the woman who once played piano until her listeners ended up in chunks all over the keys. It's more "God can get you anywhere, any time" than "God is always there to help in time of need." This affects how the reader feels when Bernie replaces God in Jacob's mind: "This was after my mother passed, during the time when I realized that God is not everywhere; Bernie Bernstein is everywhere." So Bernie feels like a vague threat throughout. But is he?  

The first thing you'd have to say about a name like Bernie Bernstein is that it's an obviously Jewish name. Sure, "Bernie" doesn't have to be a Jew, nor, technically, does "Bernstein," although most people with that name are Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt anyone would hear that name and not assume the person answering to it was Jewish. It literally "doubles down" on its Jewishness. You couldn't have that name and pretend not to be Jewish if you were ever in a position where you thought it was dangerous to be Jewish. Henry Singer isn't the same. The surname Singer has been pared down from the one used by "longer-surnamed shetl dwellers from the morasses of Eastern Europe" who are Jacob's ancestors. Henry (a name more German than Jewish) might have wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, a feeling Jacob shares, as he doesn't like to think about the people from whom he is descended. Bernie has taken the opposite approach from blending in. He's not just Jewish; he's Jewish, damnit. 

A second unmistakable thing about Bernie is that he's an important member of the congregation. Henry's the one who first identifies him as such. He receives congratulations at the end of every Shabbat service for nothing more, Jacob thinks, than having survived another week. 

Henry actually seems to like Bernie, in spite of how one seems to value his Jewish identity and the other seems to downplay it. Before long, Bernie is Henry's only friend. They're both in the same business together, and they meet once a week to talk about the old times. 

Punishment or sympathy? 

So what the hell happens with that ending? One possible way of reading it is that Bernie has killed or attacked Henry. We've just learned that Henry is the only member of the congregation who violates the laws of the Sabbath by driving to temple rather than walking to it. In this sense, one could read it that Bernie, the image of the traditional Jewish community, is taking the place of the omnipresent God who can punish us when we do wrong. If this is what happened, then Henry's saying "I'm sorry, Jacob," is him apologizing for doing "what had to be done," the same way Morah Lev did what had to be done when fighting for Jewish independence. 

I don't think that's what happened, though. When Jacob sees Bernie at the door, it's with a torn shirt, which could suggest that there was an altercation between Bernie and Henry. But it's much more likely that this torn shirt is the traditional torn shirt of shivas, the mourning ceremony. The story is called "The Master Mourner." Jacob believes that he's mastered the art of mourning, by which he means looking grave and telling people thank you for bringing over a whitefish salad, but it's Bernie who is the real master mourner. The torn shirt isn't a sign that Bernie has attacked Henry; it's a sign that Bernie has joined Henry in genuine mourning, at least partly in order to help Henry with his own loss. In this sense, the "I'm sorry" isn't "I'm sorry I did something terrible," it's a genuine expression of sympathy. 

Bernie has already had a lifetime of practice in mourning, having lost his brother in a concentration camp years ago. If we extend Bernie from an individual to being a larger symbol of the Jewish community and its ability to endure suffering over the ages, he's had much more than one lifetime. This symbolic reading is suggested by Jacob's inability to guess Bernie's age: "He could have been anywhere between thirty and three thousand." If Bernie isn't just one person, but a symbol of Jewish endurance over the ages, then this explains why his continued survival from week to week is such a cause for celebration. 

With all this practice mourning loss, Bernie is the perfect person to help Henry. He's not God's terrifying presence seeking vengeance for sins to the ends of the Earth; he's the comforting presence of Jewish tradition there to help Henry. Bernie isn't interested in punishing Henry for driving himself to temple. Henry has said he's too "heavy" to walk; Bernie merely wants to help lighten Henry a bit by mourning along with him in his loss. Bernie has already had one opportunity to get angry about another driver, that being Jacob when Jacob almost ran into him with a shopping cart. Bernie didn't get angry, though. He merely advised Jacob to "drive the cart" rather than "let the cart drive him." Bernie doesn't object to traditions changing. The important thing is that as they change, they should serve the people who carry them out, rather than the other way around. 

What's up with Morah Lev?

Reading Bernie as a symbol of Jewish tradition and its ability to provide comfort makes sense to me, but what, then, to make of Morah Lev, the Hebrew teacher who once duped a room full of British administrators carrying out the Palestinian Mandate to their deaths? Some people today will argue that Irgun wasn't a terrorist organization. They will point out that Irgun at least occasionally attempted to minimize deaths. I hardly qualify to pass judgment on this. I will only say that Morah Lev might signify a counterweight to Bernie. If Bernie represents the ability of a people to endure through resilience and tradition, Morah Lev is the voice that insists that a people can only endure if they fight for it. Bernie is a people enduring through culture; Morah Lev is a people enduring through defending themselves by any means necessary. 

To strengthen herself for her role as defender of the people through violence, Morah Lev carries out a series of rituals of her own. She uses three colors of lipstick at once and braids her hair (using three strands, I presume--is there another way to braid hair?), rituals meant to reinforce the three levels of heart she has to maintain. 

Henry doesn't have much to say about Morah Lev except to call her "colorful." Morah Lev operates on her own logic. That logic might serve to prevent some tragedies for the Jewish people, but it has nothing to say once loss has already occurred. She is unable to unsee the blood and flesh on the white keys of the piano she used to distract her victims to their death. Mourning isn't for her. Her three hearts keep her strong, but they are too strong an armor to pierce through mourning in order to heal.

It's the cultural symbol of endurance in Bernie, rather than the military one in Morah Lev, that ultimately stands as the hope in the story. At the end, having shared in real mourning with Henry, Bernie hands Jacob literal keys, which are hard not to also read figuratively as unlocking some kind of code for life. Having received the keys, Jacob then runs upstairs to see his father. That is, Jacob is ascending a stairway to Heaven. In the original, Biblical account of Jacob seeing the stairway to Heaven, God reaffirms his covenant with the Jewish people, in which he promises to make of them a great people and to give them a land to dwell in. Jacob isn't running to find his father dead. He's running to join with his father in continuing life.  

The story doesn't deny that situations may call for Morah Lev's ways, but they do seem to suggest that the key to a continued future for the Jewish people has more to do with the comfort and encouragement of tradition and culture than through the might of arms and the cunning of plots. 

Timing

This story was published in Gettysburg Review (RIP--the loss of which may require its own mourning) months ago, but it comes out now as part of Best American Short Stories at an interesting time. Yet another terrible chapter in the long history of irrational hatred for Jews has taken place, leading to yet more mourning, to more torn shirts and paltry-feeling signs of sympathy from the community. Israel's government, led by a ruling party which is in some ways a direct political descendant of the Irgun, has launched a counter-strike, which some say is too much, but which Israel justifies, given the extremes of inhuman hatred its people face. 

I've been debating continuing with BASS blogging for some time, or even with literature and writing as an earnest pursuit. One of the reasons I always feel this way is that blogging about a short story seems so irrelevant, given the number of people suffering in the world. This story, though, seems to be arguing that without an identity beyond survival, survival will ultimately be pointless and short-lived.  

Every story, everywhere, all the time: "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin

I should love "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin, right? It's got time travel of sorts and a TV cartoon version of one of the four Chinese classics and science and it's about confronting death. It's a slightly less frenetic version of "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," a comparison I'm going to bet I'm not along in making. So why didn't I like it?

While trying to answer that question for this post, I've realized how frustrating it is to do literary criticism as a part-time affair with a day job that's totally unrelated to literature. I spent some time in between my last blog-through of Best American Short Stories and now trying to shore up some of the gaps I have as a lay person, but that has only served to make me more cognizant of all I don't know. Even to do this as a hobby, I don't feel skilled enough or learned enough. 

I feel that lack the most with stories I don't like, and I really disliked "Treasure Island Alley." I will try below to explain why, because I think it's owed, but I am admitting that this attempt at a critique is poor. I just don't have the skills to do more than weakly point to what I want to say. 

What's wrong with it

"Treasure Island Alley" is what people mean when they say that all the stories in lit journals sound alike. They don't, but there are certain types of stories that give that impression. 

There's a formula to this brand of story. We like to think of literary fiction as the kind of fiction that doesn't have follow conventions, but it's got plenty of its own. They might be conventions they teach at Iowa, but they're still conventions. The formula for this type of story goes something as follows:

1) Find some fact about the universe, quirky cultural icon, or profession not many people do. Make sure it's one your audience isn't likely to know much about, so they're sufficiently awed when your character waxes rhapsodic about it for the rest of the story. Science is a good choice, because most literary journal editors don't know much about science, nor do their audiences. If a whole generation of writers could get away with trying to convince non-scientists that physics teaches us the truth of Buddhism or Taoism, you can certainly get away with having a main character who thinks the mitosis he studies in the lab teaches valuable human truths that help him cope with the loss of his daughters in a boating accident. If you're familiar with the history, culture, or language of any part of the world outside the two coasts of the United States, you can also use literally anything you want that's just lying around. Extra points if it will seem exotic to editors, as nearly everything will. 

2) Got your object or icon or unusual profession? Good. Now add some kind of tragedy, and have the main character go on and on for about twenty pages trying to make use of the thing you've picked to help him or her figure out the tragedy and other mysteries of life. No amount of improbable clinging to the thing is too much. It's not overkill; it's narrative unity.  

3) Add a bunch of really specific and esoteric-seeming details. If you can (you always can), render them in staccato sentences. "The metal and oil scent of the armory." "Pungent amines seeping into the wood chairs in the lab." Everyone will call this "lyrical" and they'll say you're making whatever thing you chose to shoehorn into every part of your story beautiful, even though you'll probably be thinking to yourself the whole time that your character's determination to read every phenomena in life through the same lens isn't beautiful; it's Quixotic. Our culture decided long ago to admire Quixote, against the express wishes of text. So go with it.

4) Finally, go on TwitterX and sell it as a funny, whacky blend. When you get interviewed about it and they ask a "fun" question, like how would you describe your story in six words, say, "Vampires, Formula One, and stinky cheese," and then laugh and try to mean it. Literary fiction is so fun! Why don't more people read it? 

Other stories that do this? This is where I know I'm weak as a critic. There was this story several years ago, but one writer who leaps more immediately to mind is Andrea Barrett. Like Da-Lin, Barrett went fairly far down a graduate school path in the sciences before turning to writing, and she's used that background to turn out a series of these kinds of stories. Barret and Da-Lin both know enough science to know more than their audience, which is all they have to know. Da-Lin can add her past in Taiwan to her pool of knowledge most people don't have. A typical Barrett story features a famous scientist making their discoveries and then turning their discoveries in the lab into meditations on life. It will develop a mantra-like summary of a scientific truth and re-use it throughout the narrative. 

That's the formula used in this story. The story takes the Monkey King, Chinese funeral practices among wealthy people in Taiwan circa 1980(?), and some random science-y facts, throws them all in a blender, and comes up with something that is, I guess, supposed to be "a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death," according to the New England Review, which originally published it. But it's not that. It only appears to examine the meaning of death; in the end, it doesn't take death on. It disappears into its cultural tokens and kind-of-science-y stuff, and it lets those icons try to make the story seem to say something that it doesn't actually say. Since most readers don't really know what the hell the Monkey King is or anything about the science of immortality, it's guaranteed that they'll think  it's deep. 

If I were a better critic, there'd be a section here tying in Karen Russell, who I think does something similar. 

The end result is a story that mimics a real spiritual and emotional journey, but doesn't ultimately lead anywhere. It's Western yoga. 

I very nearly quit over this one

Something came undone in me reading this story. I don't know what I'm doing with these blog-throughs any more. I have too much education in literature to do fun reviews, but not enough to do the serious analysis I want to do. We'll see how the next one goes. I might not do this again. 

The ghosts are us but not literally like in that one Nicole Kidman movie: "Camp Emeline" by Taryn Bowe

Some stories don't require much critical or theoretical intervention to interpret. That's just the way it is. They speak for themselves quite nicely and most readers are able to "get it" without needing much intermediary exposition. Sometimes, as in "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the story just before this one in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, that's because there's not much of a story there worth giving much thought to. There isn't any deeper layer to it, and the lack of things to say to expand upon the story is a good indication that the story isn't the kind of story you're going to treasure for a long time. Then there's a story like Taryn Bowe's "Camp Emeline," where the lack of things to say after the story is over isn't an indication that the story isn't worth thinking about long after the last words, but only that it managed to make most of what it had to say overt. Like its main character Libby clearing garbage out of the lake, you don't have to dive very deep to find what you're looking for.

I've only got a hodge-podge gallimaufry of thoughts on this story. Mostly, what occurred to me were a few minor observations about technical or formal considerations that made the story work.

The right moment to begin

Any beginning fiction-writing primer will stress the importance of starting the story at the right moment. Two key considerations for picking this moment are first to ask the question "why now?" and secondly to try to move as close to the moment of crisis for the main character(s) as possible.

"Camp Emeline" doesn't start back when Emeline is born with spinal bifida, nor when she gets sick, nor when she dies, nor when the parents are struggling to win a malpractice lawsuit against the hospital after she dies. It starts with the family trying to use the money they've won in the lawsuit to honor their daughter after they've already won. This is an interesting choice, and maybe, with this one choice came the entire success of the whole project. There's a whole different, Erin Brockovich-kind of story that could have been told. This could have been about the plucky family that took on the big charity hospital with all the celebrity endorsements and how they won and how they didn't do it for greed but instead are trying to give back with the money they won by opening a camp for other kids with disabilities. The beginning of "Camp Eveline" could have been the happy ending of another kind of story. But this story isn't so much about what happened as it is about how people cope psychologically with what happened. So it starts with happily ever after and points out that sometimes, happily ever after is the saddest moment, because it's the moment when a family that's been deferring its feelings, pending the outcome of their settlement, finally has to deal with them. 

Terror misdirected

In the 2001 movie The Others, we spend the whole movie afraid that supernatural beings are trying to kill Nicole Kidman and her two spectrally pale children, only to find out at the end that they were the dead ones the whole time. I kind of thought it was a movie that asked the question, "Has it been long enough since The Sixth Sense that we can pull this off again?" but also partly a nice misdirection. One of the scariest ideas is not that there's something to fear, but that the thing to fear is something completely different from what you should be afraid of. 

The word "ghost" appears three times in the story. The first time, it's to describe the camp the family has bought, before they've fixed it up, as a ghost town. That last time reflects the first, calling it a "ghost camp." But the second time, Libby, the first-person narrator teenage girl struggling to cope, calls her and her family "ghosts." She's gone to the wilderness to look for a sign from the dead, but they're the ghosts. This is a perfect way of describing the feeling of losing someone close to you. It is a ghost town, but not because of all the undead from yesteryear haunting the place. It's a ghost town because they've themselves are only pale shadows of their former fully living selves. 

There's another misdirected terror in the story. Libby has been directing all of her feelings about her lost sister and the wreck her parents became because of her death by engaging in sexually stupid behavior. She's been giving out hand jobs to losers at school for twenty-five bucks, and occasionally having sex with people as long as they are okay with her occasional outbursts of violence during sex. Her mother found out about the hand jobs, and now the two barely speak to each other. Perhaps partly because of this awkwardness, the parents do absolutely zero checking in on their children throughout the story as Libby and her brother Eli hang out with a twenty-four-year-old drifter who says he comes with the camp her parents bought. Libby is begging someone to take her up on her attempts to act out sexually, and she's come across precisely the profile of person you'd be worried about her coming across. So the reader does a bit of white-knuckling the book (or device, for those on Kindles), worried that she's about to find exactly the trouble she's looking for, like this is Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" 

It turns out, though, that there was nothing to fear. The drifter, who has his own people he's lost and is hurting in much the same way, turns out to be just what Libby needs. I'm not sure this is how it's likely to work out most of the time in life. I think most of the time, teenage girls probably ought to stay out of the shacks of twenty-four-year-old drifters with pasts. But the guy's got a good heart, and the two manage to help each other face their issues by a series of conversations that up their pain in very minimalist ways.  

Unlike "The Others," "Camp Emeline" doesn't make every shot a carefully contrived chiaroscuro. It throws light and dark around loosely, and uses both large and small tableaux. 

An interesting stylistic quirk

The opening lines paint a scene, in this case the natural scene of the camp around the lake. After two sentences, though, while still in the same paragraph, it changes to a quick summary of the past leading up to the beginning of the plot that begins "When the settlement money came in..." This "When the settlement money" could have been the opening lines on their own. I'd have probably written it that way, because I kind of have a thing about not liking to open with scene descriptions, but scene description is a tried-and-true story opening. That opening paragraph feels like it has two starts jammed into one rather long paragraph. And while much of the story mostly moves along quickly, some of the individual paragraphs break the typical logic of the paragraph, jamming more than one main idea in before providing an indentation to indicate a change. The third paragraph does this much like the first, beginning with the father going in to Meredith to buy flashlights and batteries, then digressing into how the parents have been off their game since Emeline died, then talking about Libby's risky behavior and the rift it's caused with her mom, then moving back to another description of the camp again, ending with the first reference to it as a ghost town. These aren't on every page, but they do show up now and again. The logic of these paragraphs is more associative than linear, which mirrors the way the story is more about feelings about what happened than what happened.  

So does Emeline give them a sign or not?

The quest for a sign from the dead sister/daughter Emeline continues throughout the story. Libby sees her mother swimming in the lake and wonders if she's also looking for a sign. 

There are three mentions of ghosts in the story, and also three mentions of loons. The three times loons are mentioned are actually not far off from the three mentions of ghosts.

I probably only said this line to myself 8,000 times while reading this story. 

Ghost/loon combo one: "Without campers, the camp was a ghost town. I could hear loons wailing. 'I'm here,' they seemed to say. 'But where are you?'" 

Ghost/loon combo two: Libby and the drifter are out on the water in a canoe at night, and when Libby could "hear the loons wailing, (she) knew (she and the drifter) were moving toward the center where they'd built a nest." Not long after this, the drifter asks Libby if everything is okay with her parents. "Probably not," she answers. "It's like we're all ghosts." 

Ghost/loon combo three: On her last night with the drifter just before the camp opens, they are in the shack listening to the rain. "One of the loons wailed. I waited for another to call back. That's why they cried like that, I'd read, to find a mate, or sometimes, if their calls were short and clipped, to locate family, to check if they were out there still, alive. Before the end of their night together, Libby thinks that she feels "stronger than before (she'd) come here, to this ghost camp, to his little shed." 

Loons, if you've ever heard them, sound a little ghost-like. It's tempting to think that Emeline is speaking through them. But the loons are actually symbols of the survivors, who are the real ghosts, still looking for their lost loved ones. There is no sign from the dead. The only sign that they were ever there is the mournful wailing of those still alive, which marks both the dead's former presence as well as their current absence. 

At the end, Emeline's former presence and current absence is replaced by Libby mourning over the newer absence of the drifter. Meanwhile, there is a new presence, that of the just-arrived campers, that feels to her like a menace. Maybe it's because the new campers, which were like a new puppy to get over the lost dog to her parents, have arrived to her before she's ready.

If this were a typical Hollywood movie, the presence of the wise, older-but-still-somehow-not-a-sexual-predator drifter would have healed Libby enough to allow her to honor her sister by passing on her love for Emeline to the campers. The final scene would be Libby doling out the love in the parking lot to the new children, perhaps looking wistfully off as she sees the drifter walking down the road in the distance. Instead, our final scene is Libby cowering in the Drifter's shack, praying for any kind of illness that will give her an excuse to not meet these kids. She isn't yet done looking for her lost loved ones, and she's not willing to replace them. 

When the drifter first brought up his lost ones to Libby in the canoe, he was sick for a few days after. It's possible this sickness was the poison of losing his loved ones leaving him at last. So while we don't see Libby totally healed, I don't think we should completely ignore her self-evaluation that the drifter's presence has made her stronger than she'd been. Her sickness--or wish for it--is a sign she's ready for the next stage in healing.  

I mean, if you say so: "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell

My first and most enduring reaction to "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the third story in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, is to recall "Post" by Alice McDermott from last year's BASS, and for all the worst reasons. Like "Post," "His Finest Moment" seems to me to be inspired by a type of story that dominated the news for a few years, one that probably every short story writer during that time took on in some way. (Here's my effort.) "Post" was a failure to me because it did nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of other COVID-19 stories that went out, and Bissell's story, at least on the surface, seem an awful lot like just one of many "Me Too" stories. It doesn't do anything that would make the reader think differently the next time some famous and beloved man is taken down by accusations of sexual assault. It's sort of a formulaic, ripped-from-the-headlines morality tale, full of cliches: the upset and betrayed spouse, the girl about to lose all respect for her father, the plucky and intrepid reporter getting to the heart of the story.

Unlike "Post," it's at least mercifully short and written at a pace where the momentum never slows. It's clearly a paint-by-the-numbers done by a master, but it's still paint-by-the-numbers. I tried very hard to look at this story in some way that would make me understand what Zyzzyva saw in it to publish it to begin with or what BASS saw in it to second that motion by putting it among the year's best, but I have failed. 

The story is about a writer who likes to include morally complicated characters in his novels, although the stories themselves aren't formally complex. The writer ends up mirroring his own characters' moral ambiguity in his own life, becoming a rake. Among his many escapades is one particularly shameful, alcohol-fueled incident involving non-consensual touching and kissing. He knows it's not excusable and he knows there's no way to explain it to his wife or his daughter, although he's trying to in the last hours before the story comes out. Other than a few flashbacks to tell us what he's done and to review how the reporter kept after him until her story was complete, it stays in the moment of the night the story breaks, as he bumbles his way through telling his family what's coming. 

I kept trying to figure out if the story "His Finest Moment" was an attempt to do what its own main character does, to write a morally complex person. But it's not. The night of his assault, which was the "not his finest moment" that completes the thought of the title, he'd just attended the launch of his very successful latest book. "It just wasn't a night he wanted to hear no, in the end." This isn't the Lolita of Me Too. 

"His Finest Moment" doesn't do what the author in its narrative does. It doesn't grant its characters complexity. The author is pretty much a bog-standard cliché of a libertine rake. The author congratulates himself for being complicated, but the text of the story he's in does not. And that's likely the point. The story seems to want to deromanticize the solitary author, depraved in the name of his art. It's the anti-Lolita. The man is a sexual predator and not worthy of ennobling by crediting him with complexity. He might seem complex, but "formally," he's not. 

This treatment of sexual predators kind of mirrors a shift in moderate leftist thinking on this in the last ten years. It used to be that conservatives were the ones to say that if someone rapes a woman, he should be castrated or murdered. Liberals were sometimes wont to say that you had to look at how predators themselves had often been abused or how they had mental illnesses or generally, how it was more complicated than conservatives thought. But liberals have simplified their thinking on sex crimes. They're not calling for castration and the death sentence, maybe, but they are unwilling to let powerful men off the hook when it comes to maintaining their careers in the public spotlight. We've come to accept that there is no excuse for sexual assault. It's not complicated. 

Which--okay. I agree with that change. And I can see that the form of the story follows the function. It's a simple story that tells a simple truth. If this had appeared in the Maryland Literary Review, I'd have thought it was more than good enough to be there and that the writer had a gift for keeping the momentum of a story moving. I'd have hoped the writer had tried other, more ambitious things. But I don't really see this as a great story, one worthy of coming back to over and over. The effect, I think, is supposed to be something like that of all morality tales: by watching the main character go through the painful process of knowing he's destroyed his family and his fortunate career, men should contemplate the wages of sin and not repeat those sins themselves. That's useful, I suppose, but I didn't need a story by a talented author to make me consider this. If I'd ever dreamed of putting unwanted hands on a woman, the last ten years of news headlines would already have scared me straight. (I haven't, by the way. I'm chicken about even approaching women. I've had sex with two women in my life, both of whom I married.) 

This won't go down as one of those BASS stories I really actively dislike, like "Post" or "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It's an okay story, and if BASS editors say they love it, well, if you say so. Maybe the real reason I'm not in love with it is because it violates what Peter Rabinowitz called a "convention of notice." That is, in a BASS story, you kind of expect stories to be packed full of things you only notice after coming around to them again on a second or third reading. Certainly, "Do You Belong to Anyone," the story before this in the collection, met that convention. A few years ago, Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure" met that convention in spades with her MeToo-ish short story. Maybe my whole objection here is nothing more than me being a guy who tries to read BASS in a way where I notice things and then write cleverly about them. A story like this doesn't give me the chance.