Yiyun Li, “Kindness”
In her essay on why Yiyun Li’s story “Kindness” is her
favorite in this year’s PEN/O. Henry Stories, Mary Gaitskill says that
interpretation of any kind seems “disrespectful” to the story. After having read the story three times, I
would say, rather, that “interpretation” is unnecessary. The very fact that most of Gaitskill’s essay
is simply a summary of the plot and a description of the central character of
“Kindness” suggests that there is very little else to say about it. It is a tale about one Chinese woman’s
lonely life—fit stuff for a novel, but not a short story. I have written about “Kindness” earlier on
this blog in my discussion of Li’s collection Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
when it was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize. I was not impressed by the story then; I am not impressed by it
now.
Li says in her
author comments that she patterned “Kindness” after one of her favorite William
Trevor novels, Nights at the Alexandra. She says as she wrote it, she
imagined her narrator speaking to Trevor’s narrator, since both characters lead
stoically solitary lives. Although the central character in “Kindness” seems an
exemplum of Frank O’Connor’s famous characterization of the short story as the
“Lonely Voice,” Yiyun Li’s story is not a short story at all—not even, as
Daniyal Mueenuddin suggests in his discussion of what the story is his
favorite, a “novella.” It is just a
novel that happens to be shorter than most novels, although it is indeed the
longest piece in this year’s PEN/O. Henry.
With all due respect, I suspect that Gaitskill and
Mueenuddin’s choice of the story as their favorite this year primarily reflects
their preference—and the preference of most readers—for the novel form over the
short story, especially if the novel provides some information about a hitherto
unfamiliar culture in a linear way.
Both Gaitskill and Mueenuddin emphasize that it is the voice of the
character Moyen that holds the story together, with Gaitskill saying it is her
“modesty that gives the story its quiet desolate beauty” and Mueenuddin arguing
that it is Moyen’s subtlety, which he sees a form of “manners,” that draws us
into sympathy with her.
I did not feel that in any of my readings of the story. What Gaitskill and Mueenuddin admire as
Moyen’s modesty and manners, I see only as the simplicity of a character who
holds back from any engagement with others because of her timidity, naïveté,
and fear. More acted upon than acting,
Moyen is a nonentity who goes through life passively, with little or no
emotional reaction to those around her.
Gaitskill says “Kindness” is an “ordinary story. It is terrible how ordinary it is.” I agree that it is a very ordinary story,
and that is why I do not care for it.
It may be the favorite story of these two writers, but that may be
because they prefer novels to short stories.
Alice Munro, “Corrie”
I have already posted previously on Alice Munro’s story
“Corrie,” (Oct. 18, 2010—“Corrie”) and I have written about it in some detail
in the introduction to my forthcoming book: Critical Insights: Alice Munro. I quote two paragraphs from that blog post:
“The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel. In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place. We make judgments on those people, as if they were like real people who live down the street or that we know from school or work. If she were a character in a novel, we might say to Corrie, “Stupid woman, you are throwing your life away on that self-centered man, who will never leave his wife and come marry you.” We might say to Ritchie, “You worthless bastard. How could you ruin the life of this woman, while cheating on your wife?”
But this short story does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments. Instead, it allows us to contemplate not a particular affair, but rather the quintessential meaning of “affair.” This is what Chekhov does so brilliantly in “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” a story that Munro knows is the classic “affair” story. And “affair” is about secrecy, sacrifice, selfishness, retribution, and stasis. This story does not embody a novelistic complexity about the evolution of experience over time, but rather short story complexity about the revelation of a secret that has sustained an intolerable situation for which someone always has to make payment. We don’t have to get inside the head of Ritchie to see him scheme, nor inside the head of Corrie to see her suffer. We only have to stand back a bit and watch this static universal drama reveal its dusty secrets.”
I, like Ron Rash,
single out “Corrie” as my favorite in this year’s PEN/O. Henry. I agree with Rash that short stories are
closer to poems than to novels and that “Corrie” is “constructed with the
precision of a formal poem.” Rash says
that each time he reads the story he becomes more aware of how “integral each
detail is to the whole” with everything from paragraph breaks to commas set
down in its “essential place.” In my
opinion, that is how it should be in a great short story. Rash is just right to quote Muriel Spark’s
judgment, “The role of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” That is indeed
what Alice Munro has always done so very well.
Other Stories in PEN/O. Henry
I have only discussed half the stories in this year’s PEN/O.
Henry. I read all the stories, but
some of them just did not teach me anything, and I would find it tedious to
talk about them. I do, however,
recommend the following three stories:
John Berger’s “A Brush,” Mark Slouka’s “The Hare’s Mask,” and Anthony
Doerr’s “The Deep”—all three which seem to me to be models of what the short
story does best—create a universal complex human experience by the careful
poetic use of language.
Reading Stories on the Kindle Fire
One final word about my experience reading these stories on
my Kindle Fire: I prefer the book to
the pad for reading short stories. In
fact, now that I have read PEN/O. Henry 2012 on the Kindle, I will
probably order a paperback copy of it for my library, for I just do not trust
the existence of the stories on a hard drive or in the cloud. I know that when I buy a book, I buy the
words and ideas, not the paper pages and covers, but there is something very
comforting to me to be able to look at my shelves and see those books lined up
there. I can trust that nothing short
of flood or fire will destroy them, whereas a hard drive is volatile and vulnerable
and a cloud is downright flighty and undependable.
Another problem with reading these stories on the Kindle are
the highlighting and note taking functions.
I did purchase a stylus and have found highlighting is much more
accurate with it. Taking notes on the small touch screen is also easier with a
stylus, though I still cannot take notes on the Kindle as easily as I do in the
margins of my books.
The most troublesome problem I have had is that after
highlighting and taking notes on several stories, I opened my Kindle one
morning to find all the highlights and notes had disappeared. And I cannot seem to get them back. I checked several discussion groups and
discovered this is a common problem with the Kindle Fire. I do not know why Amazon has not dealt with
it. My highlights and notes are all available on the Amazon website at
kindle.amazon.com/high_lights, but they exist there simply in a list; they no
longer exist where I want them—in the stories themselves on my Kindle hard
drive or in the cloud. This is a serious problem for folks like me who read
short stories interactively rather than passively. I appeal to Amazon to fix this.
If anyone out there has a solution to this problem, I would love to hear
it.
Footnote on Sources of the Stories in PEN/O. Henry
Award and Best American Short Stories
The Cumulative Indexes volume of the ten-volume fourth
edition set of Critical Survey of Short Fiction that I edited recently
for Salem Press includes the tables of contents for all the volumes of the Best
American Short Story Series and the O. Henry Award series (named the PEN/O.
Henry Award since 2009). The Best American Short Story series began in 1915;
the O. Henry Award series began in 1919. (Note: If you are interested, the first BASS volume of 1915 is available
as a free Kindle download from Amazon.
If you do not have a Kindle, you can download a Kindle player on your
computer and then download and read the stories in that first volume.)
I did a casual survey of the BASS and O. Henry volumes for
the past twelve years just to see where most of the chosen stories were
originally published. You might be
interested to know that approximately 50% of all the stories in the last twelve
years in both annual volumes come from just eight different sources: Here they are, in approximate percentages:
The New Yorker—20%
Harper’s—6%
Tin House—6%
Atlantic—4%
Ploughshares—4%
Zoetrope—4%
Granta—3%
McSweeney’s—3%
No surprise that The
New Yorker accounts for the most prize-winning stories:
They publish over
fifty a year compared to usually no more than twelve in the others.
And they pay better than any of the others; thus, well
known writers submit there.
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