More Good Stories from Best American Short Stories 2013

Antonya Nelson, “Chapter Two”

This is a story about the uses of story.  The central character, a woman named Hil, tired of telling her own story at  AA meetings, tells a story about her neighbor Bergeron Love, who comes to her house drunk and naked. Bergeron is the gadfly nuisance character of the neighborhood. She once reported a neighbor to the police for abusing his daughters, a false accusation that made it necessary to move her own son to another school to avoid retaliation. Hil sees her as a bully, a hypocrite, as pitiful, and as a legend.  Hil tells other stories about Bergeron, but leaves out the final story of her death because, as she says, that would have ruined the fun. Her friend tells her that she could tell the dead story at the next meeting, as though it had just happened, a follow-up to the naked visit story, in other words, a “Chapter Two.”

However, the real “chapter two” may be the untold story of Hil’s displacement of her weaknesses onto Bergeron. The closest the story comes to a statement of theme is when Hil says, “It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective.” The final section of the story makes clear that when Hil talks about herself at the AA meetings, she is lying, that her one-year mark is fictitious, that she is not living a life of sobriety. When she talks about Bergeron, at least she is telling the truth, but, she asks, “was it a story?” as she considers other scenarios she could tell about Bergeron. The story ends with Hil finding a new meeting to go to, conveniently near a pub, where she will begin a story of Bergeron by talking about her son trying to keep his drunken mother out of trouble.  This is a doppelganger story, in which Hil uses story about another to avoid talking about herself, but, inevitably, she ends up talking about herself.

Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Nemecia”

I posted on Kirstin Valdez Quade’s New Yorker story “Five Wounds” in July 2009.  I felt then that she was a very promising master of the short story form. This new story confirms my initial response to her work. ”Nemecia,” which won the 2013 Narrative Prize for a story by a new or emerging writer, is another doppelganger story, another sort of “evil twin ”tale. It is a first person pov story told by a young woman whose cousin Nemecia has been taken in by her family as a child.  The story begins with Nemecia at thirteen and the narrator at six. The narrator says she was afraid of Nemecia because she says she killed her own mother (who came back to life after a month) and her grandfather. This convincing fictional tale has such power over the narrator that, “The next day, the world looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.”

Nemecia is jealous of the narrator and damages her things just enough to ruin them but avoid blame. When she develops acne, she begins scratching the narrator’s cheek, opening the scab each night until it leaves a permanent scar from her nose to her lip, making her look dissatisfied. The narrator feels she owes her sense of identity to Nemecia, until one day she tries to individualize herself by winning the honor of being the angel in the Corpus Christi parade. When the mother sympathetically allows Nemecia to take the narrator’s place, she responds so angrily that she is sent to live with her great aunt Paulita, who tells her the truth about Nemecia’s past—that Nemecia’s mother had been attacked by her husband; when the grandfather tried to intervene the man kills him. The narrator’s response is to hate Nemecia all the more for the demands she makes on her sympathy and for having such a tragedy she could call her own.  It’s an honest, complex tangle of emotions that Quade explores masterfully.

The story ends with Nemecia’s mother sending for her from Los Angeles—a move that makes her even more glamorous in the narrator’s eyes and makes the doppelganger theme more explicit:  “Night after night I told myself the story: a pettier me, swept away to California, and the boy who would find me and save me from my unhappiness.” A doll that Nemecia shattered when a child is the metaphor that concludes the story. Even though its repaired face stared at the girls in their bedroom for years, Nemecia does not remember it. Instead she collects dolls of the world and Waterford crystal. The last line of the story is a perfect metaphor for Nemecia’s effort to clear the shattered past of her life, but which simultaneously recalls the past that links her to the narrator: “Nemecia held a wineglass to the window and turned it. ‘See how clear?’ Shards of light moved across her face.”  It’s a subtle story of sympathy and identification, damage and vulnerability.

Suzanne Rivecca, “Philanthropy”

I previously posted a blog on Rivecca’s collection Death is Not an Option, which was short listed for the 2011 Frank O’Connor prize. In that essay, I praised her prose, even as I found the personae and plots weak. “Philanthropy” is the most “socially conscious” stories in this year’s BASS—a focus that, in my opinion, makes it too diffuse and general to work well as a short story. Once again, it is the symbolic use of doppelganger characters that energizes the social theme.

Cora, the central character, manages a Women’s Service program, which is visited by a successful popular novelist, Yvonne Borneo, who is also a philanthropist. Cora needs money from the woman, but Yvonne wants to know why Cora survived life on the streets and her daughter Angelica did not. The story focuses on the impossibility of knowing the other.  Yvonne tells Cora that her daughter is like an ocean underneath an ocean, “a complete mystery.” Although Cora knows what it is like to be Angelica in a way that her mother never can, she insists that knowing her will not help Yvonne know Angelica, for “we are all different people.” 

But if we cannot know one person by knowing someone who seems like that stranger, then how can we ever know anyone?  I discuss this theme as a predominant one in the short story genre in my new book. The look Yvonne gives Cora, while neither remorse nor reproach, registers “something old and muddied and orphaned between them, a helpless moat of transference, brimming with the run-off of two people whose primary identities were….of someone else’s mother and someone else’s child.” This is not my favorite story in this year’s BASS, for, in my opinion, its focus on the general social issue of displaced young women blurs the specific human issue of the difficulty of knowing the other.

George Saunders, “The Simplica-Girl Diaries”

Because I have written about the stories of George Saunders several times on this blog, particularly his collection Tenth of December, which contains “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” I will not spend any time here on it here.  Although it is not one of my favorite Saunders stories, it is a very funny satire that pushes the old “keeping up with the Joneses” theme to futuristic extremes. Saunders creates a stylized but believable voice of the 40-year old guy who wants to make his daughter proud and thinks he has the chance when he wins a scratcher for $10,000 and hopes it will change his lackluster life—that is, until the ultimate prestige lawn adornments--exploited third world women—are set free by his other daughter.  I like it; it made me laugh in a painfully relevant way in the way that good humor should. But still and all, it is basically a satire and therefore an illustration of a general social theme, not an exploration of a mysterious human complexity.

Jim Shepard, “The World to Come”

I have read many Jim Shepard stories. One characteristic they share is Shepard’s obsession with historical, factual detail, which he researches thoroughly and out of which he creates a meticulously detailed fiction.  This one began, he says, with an old book he found in the dollar pile at a local Goodwill store, Sidney Parley’s Historic Storms of New England, which led him, as it often does, to other related books, e.g. books on nineteenth-century farming.  In one such book, he found a farm wife’s journal about the one friend she had in the world being forced to move away. Then, he says, “Suddenly a whole vista of desolation and loneliness and foreclosed options seemed to peep forth.” And once again, we have an exploration of Frank O’Connor’s central short story theme of “the lonely voice.”

Written in a diary format, like “The Simplica-Girls’ Diaries,” the language is radically different from that of George Saunders’ comic satire. Not meant to be an exactly rendering of a farm wife’s voice, the language is poetically stylized but exactly right.  For example: “I grew like a pot-bound root all curled in upon itself.” “I always imagine I’ve been plunged up to my eyes in a vat of the prosaic.” “He said to me this morning that contentment was like a friend he never gets to see.”

 When the narrator and her close friend Tallie begin kissing, she says she does not know what is happening to her. “I told her that I believed that we were now encountering that species of education that proceeds from being forced to confront what we never before acknowledged.” After Tallie is forced to move away and later after her death, the narrator grieves and I struggles to banish the sentiments that she says Tallie “chastened and refined.” The story ends with this line: “I imagined continuing to write in this ledger, here; as though that were life; as though life were not elsewhere.”  This was, for me, one of the most emotionally affecting stories in the book, for Shepard makes the voice of the woman so convincingly poetic that she is absolutely irresistible. Not many stories bring tears to my eyes, but this one, I confess, did—not out of easy sentimentality, but out of complex sympathetic identification.

Callan Wink, “Breatharians”

Twelve year-old farm boy, August literally lives between two worlds—that of his mother who lives in the “old house” and is trying to find a spiritual way to live, and his father, who lives in the new house with a 19-year-old girl with whom he is having sex and who offers August a dollar a tail for killing stray cats that have infested the barn.

Reader warning:  If you are a cat-lover, you will hate this story.

The title comes from the fact that the boy’s mother tells him she has become a faster, a breatherian, a Hindu practice based on the belief that some holy people can live solely on the atmosphere in which they exist and need no food and water at all. She says she is trying to get to the point where all you have to do is breathe the air and you’re satisfied.

The story’s theme--a young boy trying to figure out how to live his life, torn between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh--is structured in a fairly straightforward way. Although the mother tells August that his barn days are coming to an end that believes that his father’s way have not won him over yet, the ending of the story makes her hope problematical. It’s one of the simpler stories in the collection, but, like all the stories in this year’s BASS, it is a powerful example of the short story form.

Elizabeth Tallent, “The Wilderness”

This is one of the best stories about teaching literature and writing that I have read in many years. In an era when the liberal arts are being undervalued in favor of math and the sciences, it should be required reading for those discouraged students of the arts who struggle to follow what they love. If you are an English major worrying about getting a job, a literature graduate student concerned about finding a place in academia, a student of creative writing fearful that fiction and poetry are being ignored in favor of nonfiction, this is a story from which you might take hope.

In the Contributors’ Notes, Tallent says this story began with bewilderment about her delight in teaching, after which she watched for bits and pieces belonging to the story, a collage-like progression that was like browsing.  She says when she teaches, she wants her student to have a Keatsian willingness to tolerate uncertainties while they are working. And indeed, the short story is a form that cannot begin with a formulated idea or a carefully built plan, but rather with some grain of sand that irritates until it is worked into a pearl of radiance.

My favorite sentence in a story filled with many radiant sentences is:  “She could swear that an enthralled reader nineteen years old is the most beautiful animal on earth.”

If you love lit, you will love this story.  If you yearn to teach, you need this story.

It is Thanksgiving in America tomorrow.  I have dry-brined the turkey and made the stuffing with my mother’s old-fashioned cornbread and sausage recipe; they wait in the refrigerator overnight.  I will also make turkey gravy and mashed potatoes tomorrow when the turkey is a golden brown. After that, the vegetable side dish,whatever it may be, seems superfluous.  Not good for my cholesterol, but very good for my sentimental soul.

I will begin posting about stories in this year’s O. Henry Prize Stories next week.

BRITISH READERS: DON'T FORGET. AMAZON IS FEATURING A DISCOUNT ON THE KINDLE VERSION OF MY NEW BOOK, BEGINNING NOV. 29.

David Means, Lorrie Moore, Bret Anthony Johnston: Best American Short Stories 2013

I am currently reading the 2013 Best American Short Stories, selected by general editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Elizabeth Strout. I am happy to say, at least so far in my reading, that they seem to have been selected on the basis of their excellence as short stories. 

And what other basis of selection might there be for a collection entitled “The Best American Short Stories?” In my opinion, too often in the past, the BASS collection has been built more on the principal of making a book that would be most appealing to those who want a book, rather than those who want the “best" stories. That is, often the stories had to be representative of gender, race, cultural concerns, contemporary subject matter, etc.; they had to be varied and diverse, conscious of relevant content and well mixed in terms of style—not too much of the same, you know, or else risk boring the fickle reader, who is often happier wandering through the diverse world of the novel than being captured by the focused world of the short story.

But this time, if you are familiar with contemporary short story writers, just a look at the table of contents should convince you that the criteria for this collection is the excellence of the work as a short story, not the relevance or variety of its content. Here are stories by great short story writers--writers who know the technical secrets of the form and how to maximize brevity. Here are stories by Alice Munro, Steven Millhauser, David Means, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders (Hell, those names alone would be worth the price of admission), as well as stories by Antonya Nelson, Jim Shephard, Elizabeth Tallent, Gish Gin, and Charles Baxter, not to mention more recent writers who have already made the short story their own, such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Byers, Bret Anthony Johnson, Sheila Kohler, Suzanne Rivecca, and Kristen Valdez Quade.  A collection featuring these writers should convince you right away that this is indeed a collection that emphasizes the short story as a form, not just fiction as a content carrier.

I realize that Heidi Pitlor chose the first 120 stories, but I am guessing that Elizabeth Strout, who chose the top 20 is largely responsible for the focus on short story form in this collection. Her Introduction seems to confirm this. She says right up front, “If you wonder why I chose the stories I chose, I would say it had a great deal to do with voice.” She approvingly quotes from the opening story by Daniel Alcaron: “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.” Strout makes no apologies for the fact that, as she says, “I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject,” adding that if the voice does not work the subject matter is not important.

As a result of Strout’s focus on form rather than subject matter, it should be no surprise that some stories deal with similar subjects, with no fear that the reader will snort that the stories are redundant or too much alike.  The first three stories I want to talk about are David Means’ “The Chair,” Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” and Lorrie Moore’s “Referential”-- all three of which deal with parents’ relationship to children

However, as important is that relationship is, these stories use this “content” to explore more universal human mysteries.  All three stories are quite short—between four and seven pages—and all three depend, as Elizabeth Strout reminds us , more on language, rhythm, and voice than on mere content.  Indeed, in these stories, as in most short stories, content is transformed and mere surface reality is penetrated to reveal secrets, mystery, even magic.

Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unsuspected Animals” is closest to recognizable reality. This is a third-person pov story about a man whose fifteen-year old son is in a relationship with a seventeen-year old girl who, in a description that lets us know what the father thinks about her, has “a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck.” 

The dinner conversation about wildlife the girl and the boy’s family have seen in strange situations—a macaw riding on the headrest of a car’s passenger seat, goats in the tops of peach trees—sets up the central metaphor of the story suggested by its title. The father cannot understand what the girl sees in his son, since he has only recently been playing with model airplanes.  Indeed, the unspoken mystery of the story, concealed beneath his ostensibly fatherly protection of his childlike son from this experienced woman, is his own sense that what the girl needs is a man, not a boy, a man, of course, like himself, although this is something he could never admit to himself.

When he stops the car on a deserted road and tells her to cut the boy loose, that she “has been to the rodeo a few times” and that she can do better, that she is too much for his son, he even feels pleased with his superior tone and how much he thinks he sounds like a father.  The girl knows him better than he knows himself, for when he says there is no mystery in his stopping with her alone in the middle of the night, she says “There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

The incongruity of the father in the car with his son’s girlfriend is made all the more extreme by the girl’s superiority to the father’s naiveté. When he keeps insisting that she turn the boy loose, leave him be—that this is the only “takeaway tonight,” she makes it all more complex by asking him to consider what might happen if a girl came home dirty and crying. She asks him to consider if the girl might keep it to herself and it be a secret between the two of them when she marries his son and she bears his grandbabies. “These are bona fide mysteries,” she says.

He watches her jump quickly out of the car and dash across a creek, and he wants to see her as an animal he has managed to avoid, “a rare and dangerous creature.” He feels disoriented and short of breath. “He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.”

This is a classic short story ending, with the sudden appearance of an animal when animals were not expected, coalescing the central metaphor, and the central character, who thought he knew his motivation but discovers that he did not know it at all, when he has engaged in an action based on mysterious desires that changes his life in ways that he has no way of predicting. The mystery of motivation is, as I have discussed many times, a central dynamic of the short story as a form. Bret Anthony Johnston explores it masterfully in this story.

David Means’ “The Chair” turns the narrative screw that moves his story farther away from action in the world and closer to reality as a construct of consciousness. This is a first-person pov of a man who says at home in the suburbs with his five-year-old boy while his wife goes off to work in New York City each day.  He is a man who thinks a great deal about the significance of what he does, indeed so much so that the story is more about what he thinks or what he thinks he thinks, than what he does. The initial motivation of the story is his thinking about what is involved with being a parent, which involves having an ideal image in his mind of the best way to live and trying to impose that ideal on his son, but at the same time being glad that his son resists becoming what his father tries to impose on him.

It is the rhythm of this meditative voice that makes the story move as the man considers “the sublime nature of taking care of his boy” and feels the “pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments.”  And, as usual in the short story, it is this focus on meaningful moments and what they mean that makes the story work. The narrator not only thinks about what he thinks, he also thinks about what he might think in the future about what he thinks now. As Henry James knew well, it is the rhythm of thought and the action of the mind doing the thinking that best reveals the complexity of humans in conflict.

Part of the conflict in the man’s mind is his thoughts about his wife, who has what he calls a Helen of Troy face, a beauty that gives her “a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought I think.” The man uses this self-reflexive reference to his thinking several times in the story, saying “I used to think, I think,” reminding us of the mysterious nature of consciousness.

He imagines his wife entering her building in the city, going up in the elevator, while he stands looking out the window of his home, feeling they are riding on an apex, with her career on one side and his own deep solitude on the other.  It is not that he feels jealous of his wife’s going out in the world or that he resents staying home with his son; it is not that he distrusts his wife or chaffs against his responsibilities as a care-giver. It is all this, but more than this.

The one physical action in the story occurs near the end when the boy ignores the father’s warning and goes too near an embankment. The man says, “In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance of glory of a sort perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember.”

When the boy falls over the side of the embankment into the black sand, and the father must come down and lift him back to safety, he says, as he has said throughout, “It’s the chair for you, little man”--warning a punishment that he prefers to the usual “It’s time out for you.” The boy then leans over and offers his hands to the man, and for a few seconds there is a moment of what he sees as “astonishingly pure love.”  But then he takes the boy home and makes his sit in the chair, and when the boy squirms, he says “Your time’s not up.  Your time’s not even close to being up.”

It is a story that cannot be summarized, but must be read, aloud if possible, or at least with your lips moving to internalize the subtle rhythm of a father being supremely aware of the complexity of caring for his son when he is thinking about it, more when he is thinking about what he is thinking. 

I read Lorrie Moore’s story “Referential” before I read her discussion of its origins in the “Contributors’ Notes,” and I kept thinking that I had read the story before, although, for some reason, I missed it when it first appeared in The New Yorker.  The visit to a deranged son, the bottle of different jams, the mysterious phone calls at the end—all seemed so familiar, but I could not quite grasp where I had read the story until the last line when the woman in the story answers the third and final phone call and. hearing nothing on the line, wonders what would burst forth—a monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.  And then, I literally smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead and said to myself, in the words of a character in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Mockingbird”--“Idiot!” I often talk to myself in lines from short stories.

Of course, this is a story about a story. The reference to a monkey’s paw is to W. W. Jacob’s famous story of the same name.  And the lady/tiger reference is to the most famous trick ending story of all time, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.’ Then I remembered Vladimir Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols,” which suddenly seemed to be the same story entitled “Referential” I had just been reading.  Hell, I had even included Nabokov’s story in a textbook I edited some twenty years ago, Fiction’s Many Worlds, in the section named “The World of Story.” In the Introduction to that section I quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said, “Stories only happen to those who know how to tell them,” suggesting that it is not the content that makes a story, but rather the technique, the language, the style, the rhythm—all that is other than, but the same as, the story.

And sure enough, when I turned to the Contributors' Notes, Lorrie Moore says a rereading of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” last year led her to a “narrative dance” with the story, with her as the hat rack and Nabokov as Fred Astaire.  Like most writers, Moore became obsessed with the story and felt compelled to write a tribute to it.  It reminds us that stories often come from stories, some very specifically so. In my textbook, I include Guy de Maupassant’s story “Confessing,” followed by Isaac Babel’s tribute to that story entitled “Guy de Maupassant.” I also include Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” followed by Doris Lessing’s tribute to that story, “Homage for Isaac Babel.”

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” is about a deranged boy who has a mania that everything around him is a veiled reference to himself, that all is a pattern, and that he must always be on guard to decode things.  The primary changes Moore makes to Nabokov’s story is to make the mother in the story go to visit the boy with a reluctant lover rather than with her husband.  The result of this is to thrown the drama of the story more on to the mind of the woman than the Nabokov story does.


At the end of Moore’s story, the woman answers the second phone call and pretends that the caller id on the phone indicates that the call is coming from the man’s apartment.   Although it is an invention, his response makes it true, when he says he has to go home and diffidently leaves her.  And at the end, she is completely alone; the third phone call, with no one on the line, emphasizes her isolation. Usually, in tribute stories, the tribute moves the story farther away from reality into symbolic significance. However, here, Moore’s tribute pushes Nabokov’s story away from his aesthetic exploration of referentiality back to the original referent itself, that is, the woman’s loneliness and despair about what to do about her son.

More discussions of BASS 2013 in a few days.  If you are reading these stories (and if you love the short story, you will be glad you did), please let me know what you think about them.