I have been reading the 2015 O.
Henry Prize Story collection this
month, and, although the subtitle of the collection is The Best Stories of the Year, it has not been an invigorating
experience.
As you probably know, the twenty stories are chosen solely by Laura Furman
(albeit with some help from a couple of editors at Anchor Books). Furman
teaches creative writing at the University of Texas, Austin, and has been the
series editor since 2003. Each year three other writers are asked to blindly
pick the story they "most admire" from the group and write a brief
appreciation of it.
What follows are some brief thumbnail notes of my own opinion of half
the stories in the collection. I have not read all the stories Professor Furman
read, from which she chose these twenty stories as the "best of the
year," so I cannot challenge her comparative choices. However, I am not
sure I understand by what criteria these competent but ordinary ten stories constitute the "best."
I will try to post some comments
on the other half—some of which I "admire"-- next week.
Percival Everett, "Finding
Billy White Feather"
You know what kind of story you are in for in the third paragraph when,
after Oliver Campbell finds a note on his back door from Billy White Feather,
announcing that twin Appaloosa foals are for sale and scolds his dog for not
being much of a watchdog:
"The dog said nothing."
Campbell has never met Billy White Feather, so he goes looking for him
and gets conflicting reports about what White Feather looks like. The first person Campbell queries
says he is a tall, skinny white boy with blue eyes and a blonde pony-tail. The
second person tells him that White Feather is a big guy with red hair and a
huge mustache. Another says he is an Indian with a jet-black braid down to his
narrow butt. Still another says he is
very fat. Everybody agrees that White Feather is an asshole.
Obviously Campbell has nothing else to do, so he continues to search,
even though he has no real interest in Billy White Feather. It is just a
mystery he wanted to solve (that is, a picaresque story Everett wants to tell).
He finally learns that this "tall, short, skinny, fat, white Indian with
black blond hair" is in Denver, so he drives all the way there from
Wyoming just to see what he looks like. Why? Because the story demands it. He doesn't find Billy. The twin horses die. The end.
This is less a Big Sky Wyoming story with Annie Proulx characters than
a sly Native American story with a Sherman Alexie aspect. Fun, but surely not among the year's best.
Lydia Davis, "The
Seals"
Lydia Davis is right up there with Alice Munro for being one of the most
honored short-story writers practicing that much neglected art form, having won
a McArthur Prize, a Man Booker International Prize, etc. Many of her pieces are
quite short and elliptically cryptic.
This one is longer than most of her stories and more a meditation than
an anecdote—a story about the narrator thinking about her dead older sister on
a Christmas Day train trip to Philadelphia. The story intersperses
recollections of her sister with observations on what she sees out the train
window. An added complication to her meditations is her recollection of her
father, who died the same summer her sister did. The "seals" of the
title refer to little white seals filled with charcoal her sister gave her—stuff
you put in your refrigerator to absorb odors.
The meditations are the usual ones a person might have after a loved one dies—the
difficulty believing the dead person is really gone, grief that one can
sometimes ignore but that comes flooding back, the philosophical question about
whether it is all over when the body is finished or whether we live on in some
form. The feelings are sincere and the
writing is honest, but there is nothing extraordinary about this meditation,
nothing to make it stand out as one of the best stories of the year—except that
it is by Lydia Davis.
Lionel Shriver, "Kilifi
Creek"
This is a concept story to illustrate an irony, which a summary of the
plot will make clear: A young American woman is travelling in Africa, bumming
off whoever will put her up. She goes
swimming one day and almost drowns. Several years later she is living in New
York and accidently falls off a balcony to her death. In her comments at the
end of the book, Shriver says she has always keep a list in the back of her
head about times she almost died, e.g. a bike accident, and has always wanted
to write a story about such moments. Then when she read a story in The New York Times about a young woman
who fell to her death when a balcony collapsed, she decided to write that
story--which, of course, is this story.
What makes it a not very pleasant story is that Shriver makes Liana,
the young woman in question, an unlikeable exploitation artist who somehow
deserves what she gets. She laughs at the couple who she exploits, is arrogant
about her swimming ability and goes out too far, does not seem to have learned
from her exploit, or any other near deaths she experiences later. Shriver does
not like her very much and perhaps is just a bit too sardonically gleeful at
the end when she describes Liana's descent from the balcony, as if from the
perspective of the young woman herself:
"She fit in a wisp
of disappointment before the fall was through. Her eyes tearing, the lights of
high-rises blurred. Above, the evening sky rippled into the infinite ocean that
had waited to greet her for fourteen years: largely, good years, really—gravy,
a long and lucky reprieve. Then, of course, what had mattered was her body
striking the plane, and now what mattered was not striking it—and what were the
chances of that? By the time she reached the sidewalk, Liana had taken back her
surprise. At some point there was no almost. That had always been the message.
There were bystanders, and they would get the message too."
This is just pulp writerly exploitation of the reader's emotions, it
seems to me. No message, except you
live, you die. And you ought to be grateful for what lies in between those two
facts.
Manuel Munoz, "The Happiest
Girl in the Whole USA"
If you know that old country song written and sung by Donna Fargo, you
may read this story, waiting for the allusion to appear. It is the song of a woman so happy to be
married to the man she loves, singing: "Thank you, oh Lord, for making him
for me. And thank you for letting life turn out the way that I always thought
it could be….Now shine on me, sunshine, Walk with me, world, it's a skippity-doo-dah-day.
I'm the happiest girl in the whole USA."
This is a story of a sad situation in which Mexican immigrants
illegally in the US to work on farms in central California are routinely
reported by the farmers to the Mexican border patrol, who take them back to
Mexico. In this story, the narrator is a
woman who is travelling south to Los Angeles hopefully meet her husband who
once more must cross the border back into the US. She befriends a young woman
on the bus who is new to all this. When they reach LA, the young woman's man is
not there, and she has no money, so the narrator buys food for both of them and
gets them into a motel. She also gives her her own comfortable shoes in
exchange for the young woman's painful high heels. The story ends when the
narrator meets up with her husband and they get on the bus for the long trip
back home, perhaps to repeat the whole process all over again. She sits in the
bus watching the other women in the rows in front of her:
"Ahead of me, the
other women and their men face forward, together and stoic, all of them alert
to the city streets, to what's passing by and what's coming. It's still love,
the back of their heads seem to say to me. Not one woman is resting her head on
her man's shoulder, so I sit upright and look straight out into the
distance."
It's a touching story of one woman's strength and the difficulties
facing Mexican immigrants—a rebuke to Donald Trump's proposed silly wall. It is honest and straightforward, but it is
not a great story, just a simple narrative depending on a sad cultural/economic
situation for its emotional impact.
Russell Banks, "A Permanent
of the Family"
Banks says in his end-of-the-book comments that this story actually
happened pretty much as he tells it here, but that he had to wait until the
principals of the story had forgiven one another "before I could subject
the material to the pressures, needs, and requirements of fiction." Indeed
the story begins with the narrator admitting that he is not sure he wants to
tell this story on himself, even thirty-five years after it happened. He says
his main motivation in telling the story, which has become a family legend, to
tell it truthfully, even if it reflects badly on himself.
It is the story of a man wo has separated from his wife. Property has
been settled and they have agreed on joint custody of the three children, but
the issue to be decided is the care of the family dog, Sarge. Although the wife insists on keeping the dog,
the dog keeps slipping away to the narrator's house. "No one blames Sarge,
of course, for rejecting joint custody," the narrator says. What makes the story a story is the writerly
urge Banks has to make Sarge somehow symbolic of the breakup, of what he calls
the couple's lost innocence.
Then he accidently backs
up over the dog and kills it--which leads to a mythic response: "All four
daughters began to wail. It was a
primeval, keening, utterly female wail….Their father had slain a permanent
member of the family. We all knew it the second we heard the thump and felt the
bump. But the girls knew something more.
Instinctively, they understood the linkage between this moment, with Sarge dead
beneath the wheels of my car, and my decision the previous summer to leave my
wife.
He tries to dig a grave in the yard to bury the dog, but the ground is
frozen. He swings a pick at the rock-hard ground, while the girls stand
frightened by his wild swings, "as if watching their father avenge a crime
they had not witnessed, delivering a punishment that exceeded the crime to a
terrible degree."
And this is what a writer does—make meaning out of an accidental
event—elevate a mere event into symbolic and representative meaning. It is all just a little too self-conscious
and self-serving for me. Nothing really "best" about it.
Dina Nayeri, "A Ride Out of
Phrao"
This is the story of a forty-five-year-old Iranian woman named Shirin
who has been living in Iowa and joins the Peace Corps to teach in Phrao, a village in northern Thailand
because she has had to declare bankruptcy, and Iran is not on the Peace Corp list. We get details of her new
life in the village, e.g. culture, superstitions, and her background, e.g.
marriage, life in Iowa, birth of her
daughter. She befriends one boy named
Boonmee, who puts his hand on her breast and startles her. Her 20-year-old daughter
comes to visit from America, but she is the typical "ugly American"
who scorns the people and their traditions. She cannot tolerate the food and
soon leaves. Shirin, who has been a doctor in Iran, is much more accepting of
the people, and the story ends with the young boy who touched her breast mildly
rebuking her for her suspicion of his motives by saying, "This is how we
touch mothers."
It's a decent story about cultural differences and cultural acceptance,
and generation differences, but just an ordinary story, competent but
pedestrian in style and narrative structure. This is Tessa Hadley's favorite
story, but her justification for her preference is generalized and
impressionistic. But then Tessa Hadley
has never been one of my favorite writers either.
Becky Hagenston, "The
Upside-Down World"
A parallel story of two couples who are destined to intersect.
First there is Gertrude and Jim, middle-aged siblings in the South of
France in late August. Jim has responded to a call for help from his sister who
is off her meds.
Then there is Elodie, a seventeen-year-old runaway whose mother has recently
committed suicide, and who meets Ted when she tries to pick his pocket
And we bounce back and forth between their actions as Jim helplessly
and haplessly tries to watch over crazy Gertrude, and as Ted colludes with an amoral
Elodie.
The title comes from a line from a museum brochure describing the
"topsy turvy" or upside down world of Marc Chagall.
But there is no Chagall magic in this story.
Brenda Peynado, "The
History of Happiness"
Another young woman picking pockets while on the road, this time in
Singapore. Her boyfriend left her to join Hindu monks while they were in India. She meets two Indian men in a bar and they go
to the beach to talk. It could end in
assault, she thinks, but it turns out they are both very nice guys, so all is
well, that is, after she steals one's wallet, only to get it back to him later
when she has a change of heart and a fear of getting caught. It's a
first-person narrative, and we listen as the narrator/young woman
undergoes a shifting view point. She finally sees "the hunger of the
abyss was my own hunger." Whatever
that heavy ominousness means is left for the reader to guess.
Naira Kuzmich, "The
Kingsley Drive Chorus"
The culture this time is Armenian neighborhood in Los Angeles. The focus is on immigrant mothers whose sons
are not adapting well. The narrator says
"something doesn't translate." There is Carmen and her son Zaven, who
it seems is often in jail. Then there is
Mariam and her two sons, Robert and Vardan, who Carmen says have lead Zaven
down the wrong path. And the problem, it
seems, is drugs, mainly marijuana. We
learn about Carmen's life and Zaven's life and Mariam's life. It all ends inevitably badly, with a
confrontation between Carmen and Mariam, with Mariam calling her boys
criminals, and Carmen slapping her.
Then, Mariam finds Carmen at the end of a rope in the laundry room, and
we see her holding Carmen in her arms as if she were still alive. Zaven serves
six years and then gets married and lives happily ever after. The other women in the neighborhood go to
sleep at night beside their husbands wondering: "If all it took was them
to see us dead, we too would've have done it ourselves." And that's the story—a domestic, cultural
drama suitable for television.
Lynn Freed, "The Way Things
Are Going"
This is a short piece about a South African woman who has and her
mother's home invaded by black policemen in post-Apartheid South Africa. She
gets hit on the head, urinated on, and almost raped. So the two of them move to
America with her older sister. Furman pretty well sums up its only interest—which
simply cultural/political: "a country develops from unjust tyranny to
lawlessness.'
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