Junot Diaz, Michael Byers, Charles Baxter, Joan Wickersham--Best American Short Stories 2013

I love a good love story.  I don’t mean those faux romantic fictional fluffs that you often see at the movies or on television.  I mean a story that explores the mysterious complexity of love.

When I started this blog, almost five years ago, the profile program asked me what my favorite book was. I wrote, without hesitation, The Great Gatsby.  I was reminded what a classic love story it was when I saw the recent film version, which was just frothy cinematic display, until Gatsby came face to face again with Daisy, and from that point, it was all about that boyish look on his face and his effort, Tom Sawyer-like, to impress Daisy. It didn’t matter that she was not worthy of his adoration; that wasn’t the point. That’s never the point. For example, there is only one moment in Wuthering Heights when Cathy is worthy of the mad passion of Heathcliff—when she says “I am Heathcliff.”  The love object is not the result of evaluation but rather obsession.

When the profile program asked me my favorite movie, without hesitation, I wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is, to my mind, a brilliant exploration of the fiction/reality complexity of being in love. The character Jeremy Irons plays is no match for the magically mysterious fictional construct that Meryl Streep creates so brilliantly that one never knows when the French Lieutenant’s woman is acting and when she is….what? Well, when love is concerned what else is there but acting?

What’s all this preamble about love stories about?  I want to talk a bit about four love stories of sorts in the 2013 Best American Short Story collection. And since one of those stories is Junot Diaz’s “Miss Lora,” for which I have expressed my distaste in an earlier blog this year, I thought it would give me one more chance to try to explain why I thought it was an inferior story—certainly not a story deserving of all the awards that Diaz has received this past year for it and the collection in which it appears. So far in my reading of the 2013 BASS, it is the only Elizabeth Strout selection that disappoints me. And she doesn’t give me any clue in her introduction why she chose it except to praise the vividness of the character Lora. However, since I respect Strout’s work, the fact that she chose it as one of the “Best” has forced me to go back and read the damned thing one more time—the sixth time.

The other three stories I want to talk a bit about, are Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” Michael Byers’ “Malaria,” and Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain.”

I think the basic problem I have with “Miss Lora” is that the central character, a sixteen-year-old Dominican Republic male, has no depth of feeling.  He just wants to have sex.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But if it is the only motivating force of a piece of fiction, we are apt to call it “pornography.” Nothing wrong with that either--except when the work is parading as something better than that, something meaningful or culturally relevant.

And Miss Lora herself, although we do get a bit of a backstory about her past sad life, is primarily just an older woman that Yunior can have sex with—what more about her do we really know than that? So what really happens in this story? A sixteen-year-old boy admires his older brother, who has recently died of cancer, because he was such a successful sexual predator. The boy’s girlfriend will not have sex with him, so he is delighted to hook up with an older woman who will. What sixteen-year-old horny boy wouldn’t? They have sex for a time; he graduates from high school, becomes involved with another woman and then graduates from college. Miss Lora disappears. It means nothing.

I have been accused of having a blind spot about this story, but so far, no one has told me why they think it is such a great piece of fiction. I assure I am no prude and am not put off by the explicitness of some of the sexual description. It’s just that the story offers me nothing complexly human.

  If Elizabeth Strout happens to read this, I hope she will tell me why she thinks it is one of the “Best.” Yes, the “voice” is an interesting mix of educated jargon and street patois.  But the story is so hollow, so cynical, so meaningless. Nuff said.  Never for the rest of my life will I say another word about “Miss Lora.” I hope Diaz is laughing all the way to the bank.

Diaz’s Yunior may be just the kind of guy that Susan, the central character of Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” secretly desires.  Although she goes out with the kind ones, the considerate ones, what her roommate calls the “humane” ones, what she really seems to wants is a bit of a ”troublemaker.” She meets and marries a kind and considerate man, Elijah.  When they go to Prague on their honeymoon, they encounter on the street a madwoman, who Susan imagines tells her that in the future she will be terribly jealous of her good-hearted husband “because of the woman in him.” And this announces the story’s theme.

When they have a son they name him Raphael, the name of another angel. Soon after they bring him home from the hospital, Susan comes into the nursery and finds Elijah holding a bottle of her breast milk in his left hand with the boy cradled in his right arm. Baxter says, “A small twig snapped inside her” and, finding it hard to breathe, Susan tells her husband there is something about this she cannot stand, insisting that she is the mother here, and that she does not want him to feed the boy. “With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, not unique to her, but true for all women.” She shouts at him that this is her territory and that he must put the child down immediately.

Elijah angrily leaves, and Susan falls asleep watching television, dreaming about her experience in Prague. When she wakes up, Elijah is standing over her with blood on the side of his mouth, but he is jubilant, telling her a story about seeing two men attacking a young woman and him charging in to rescue her by beating the men off, breaking the jaw of one of them. When she wipes the blood off his face and knuckles, she cannot believe his story. She tells him she loves him and then tucks him in bed as she would a child. The story ends with her looking in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. She does not recognize her own face, but she does recognize her milk-swollen breasts and her smile when she thinks of ”sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere.”

This is not a highly complex story, for it seems a little too governed by its theme—the puzzling conflict women perhaps experience about nice guys vs. somewhat dangerous characters. Baxter explores several aspects of this conflict. Whether it is an “animal truth” deriving from the primitive need a woman had for a strong masculine male to protect her and her child or a socially instilled bit of claptrap, I like the way Baxter carefully sets the situation up. If you read it, please let me know if you think the story is true, or false, to a basic human truth.

I have to admit right up front that I was predisposed to like Michael Byer’s “Malaria” before I read it because I loved his first collection of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, published in 1998 when he was only 28 years old.  I especially liked “Dirigibles,” which is a wonderful love story about a couple much too old for Byers to understand, except by the wondrous magic of authorial empathy. And indeed authorial empathy is what the story is really about.

I can understand why Elizabeth Strout was drawn to the first-person pov voice of this story, for Byers creates convincingly the rhythm of mind of the central character, Orlando, who is twenty and, as he says, unadventurous. The story focuses on his short relationship with a girl named Nora and her older brother George. The title comes from the fact that George tells Orlando that he caught malaria while in Ecuador, although Orlando knows that George has never been to Ecuador. “Everything changes" when George is arrested naked in the middle of the high school athletic field. Nora says he is hearing voices and she begins to worry that she is hearing voices also. Orlando admits that he does not know what to do about all this, since he has little experience with women and believes that “frictionless amiability” is his best way of handling things.

Orlando’s grappling with his relationship with Nora and Nora’s relationship with George makes him feel that for the first time he has an idea of ambition, that he could “be something in particular, rather than just me in general.”  But he does not know what to say to anyone about George’s delusions and Nora’s fears that “wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous.” He knows that his own life up to this point has been “featureless,” “free of pain,” and thus he has no training in delivering sympathy. The primary focus of the story ends with Nora trying to reassure Orlando that there was nothing they could have done about George.

But the story does not end until a final section some years later, after Orlando has married, and he is at home alone with the flu; in his fevered condition, he feels he is in a different world and senses a “hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life.” He says he feels not only alone, but as if he were the only human left in the world. He knows his problem is that he does not know what he was supposed to do about George, asking: “What is George Vardon to me?”  He wonders if one is supposed to do anything; he thinks maybe what he is telling is just a story of something that happened to him or to George, concluding, “It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.”

I like this story because it is such a conscientious and thoughtful exploration of our relationship to the “other.” Maybe I am prejudiced in its favor because it reaffirms much of the argument in my recent book about what Frank O’Connor saw years ago as a basic thematic impulse in the short story. The answer to Orlando’s question “What is George Vardon to me? is perhaps the answer that O’Connor says Gogol poses in”The Overcoat”: “I am your brother.”

I have to confess that I am not familiar with Joan Wickersham, although the Contributors’ Notes say that her work has appeared before in Best American Short Stories. Her most recent book, from which “The Tunnel or the News from Spain” is taken, is entitled The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. I liked this story so much (and since I am such a sucker for a love story), I just ordered a copy). Wickersham says that the book is a “suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories” in which the title “the news from Spain” means something different in each story, but “acquires more resonance” (hate that overused word) as the book goes along.  I will talk more about that when I get the book and read it.  As for “The Tunnel,” there are multiple love stories involved here, although the primary one is the love story between Rebecca, age 45, and her mother Harriet, who is living, unhappily, in a nursing home.

The narrator of the story sums up the relationship between Harriet and Rebecca as one in which Harriet needs attention and Rebecca needs to feel like a hero. But more than this, they have discovered that they like each other and are having a good time together. Now that her mother is dying, “in some unexpected way she and Harreit had fallen in love.” Almost on the periphery of this love affair is the ten-year relationship Rebecca has with Peter and a short new relationship she has with Benjamin, who comes into her bookstore and buys a set of Chekhov stories.

This story is more “novelistic” that I usually like, lacking the language-based poetic focus and economy that make for a great short story, but it is so intelligent and sensitive about the various complex aspects of love that I find I can’t resist it.  It is not a story I will read over and over, but I did enjoy the experience of reading it the two times I did.

Charles Baxter's "The Cousins": Puzzle the Prof Contest--Short Story Month 20011

The third head-scratcher for my Short Story Month 2011 “Puzzle the Prof” contest comes from Ray, who at Southern Oregon University’s version of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is taking a course that studies the annual Best American Short Story collection. In the 2010 edition, edited by Richard Russo, the story “The Cousins” by Charles Baxter provided a puzzle for the class with Baxter’s introduction of an apple at the end of the story. Ray points out that the narrator steals the apple on page 59 and then informs us on page 60 that he could have paid for it, “but shoplifting apparently was called for. It was an emotional necessity.” Then Ray notes that the narrator has it with him when he gets home on page 61. “There it is, deliberately and repeatedly,” says Ray, adding emphatically, “What the hell is it doing there?”

Apples are notorious for causing problems in literature, especially the short story, where the thematic demands and the mythic sources of the form often seem to require that certain objects have symbolic, often mythic, significance. And, of course, the most famous apple in all of myth and literature is the apple in the Garden of Eden that Eve purloined against the warnings of Jehovah and gave to Adam.

Many years ago, I was in a graduate school course on literary criticism conducted by a professor I admired, Dr. Eric Thompson; we had read the short story by Eudora Welty entitled “A Visit of Charity,” in which a young girl hides an apple before visiting a home for the elderly and then retrieves it and takes a big bite out of it at the end of the story. I posted a blog on March 5, 2009 in which I discussed how the class debate about the story centered on the Edenic implications of that apple and how my dissatisfaction with that debate lead me a few years later to write and publish my first academic article.

Of course, in no translation of the Bible I am familiar with is the forbidden fruit identified as an apple. It is simply referred to as a “fruit.” Some scholars think it probably was a fig rather than an apple. However, since the apple seems so irresistible with its solid shiny roundness, it has trumped the fig in the popular imagination. When Milton referred to the fruit as an apple, he seems to have settled the forbidden fruit issue for artists and cartoonists for all time.

Of course, there is no compelling reason to associate every apple in every short story with that archetypal apple that Eve bit and shared with her husband, thus introducing the knowledge of good and evil into the world. Sometimes, an apple is just an apple. Just as Freud supposedly said, (although I cannot find the exact citation of his saying this), sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

So, we will hold the apple in abeyance and start by looking at Charles Baxter’s story to see if there are other elements in the story that might thematically compel us to read his fictional apple as the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“The Cousins” originally appeared in Tin House in 2009 and was later collected in Baxter’s most recent book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, 2011. As Ray has already mentioned, it was also chosen by Richard Russo for the 2010 Best American Short Stories. In the Contributor’s Notes to BASS, Baxter says, “I have always liked stories with dubious narrators given to rationalizations, and ‘The Cousins’ has one such narrator, someone who should give what used to be called ‘moral support’ but doesn’t do so until it is too late.” Baxter further says the story is built from several bits and pieces: an anecdote told to him by a friend, another anecdote told to him more recently, a dream, his memories of New York City in the 1970s, a stanza from one of his own poems, and a monologue he heard from an Ethiopian-American cab driver. Baxter must have seen some thematic connection between the various bits that urged him to “build” the story.

By “dubious narrator,” Baxter may be referring to the concept that Wayne Booth introduced in his classic 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction—the “unreliable narrator.” Booth says, "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work ... unreliable when he does not.” When the reader feels that a narrator (usually a first-person narrator) is what Booth calls, "morally and intellectually deficient,” the reader may judge that narrator unreliable and thus his judgments and observations questionable or suspicious, or as Baxter has it, “dubious.” Often we classify narrators as unreliable when their value system clashes with the prevailing value system of the society, the story, or our own notion of what constitutes basic human decency and moral behavior.

The narrator of “The Cousins” is named Benjamin, but called by his childhood nickname “Bunny” by his cousin Brantford, named for the grandfather, who made a fortune from a device used in aircraft navigation. Brantford has spent his entire college fund frivolously, while, it is assumed, Benjamin has used his to get a degree in law. Benjamin says that although he is twenty years older than Brantford, they are “oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins.” This theme of “brother” occurs later in the story at Brantford’s funeral when Benjamin meets Camille, the woman Brantford had been living with and the mother of his child. She tells Benjamin that his face is like Brantford’s, that they both have the same cheerful scowl. She also says Brantford talked about Benjamin “as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”

Perhaps the most famous brothers in the Bible are the original brothers, Cain and Able. This story of the “first” brothers seem related to Baxter’s story. When Benjamin and Brantford meet for lunch at the beginning of the story, Brantford tells his cousin, “Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody…Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody. I’m sure of it.” At the end of the lunch, Brantford says, “Would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

Brantford’s confession of his feeling that he has committed a murder is important, for it is mentioned later in the story after Benjamin tells of his past life as an actor when he knocks a man down in the subway for urinating in his drink glass and then runs away as the man crawls toward the tracks. When he can find no newspaper account of the man’s death, he thinks he may have dreamed the whole thing, or that someone else dreamed it and then put him as a lead actor in the dream—“a cautionary tale whose moral was that I had no gift for the life I’d been leading.” He then dreams that someone points to his body on the floor, saying, “It’s dead.” He says what frightened him was not his death, but that he had become an “It.” He says that he would not have eve thought of his days as an actor had not Brantford told him twenty years later over lunch that he felt he had killed somebody and if he and Brantford had not had a “kind of solidarity.”

This theme of Brantford’s thinking he has killed someone combines with Benjamin’s concern that he may have been responsible for the man’s death in the subway, evoking that archetypal first murder in the Bible, when Cain rises up and kills his brother Abel because God chose Abel’s sacrificial gift over his own.

The Cain and Abel story always puzzled me as a child. I could not understand why God chose Abel’s gift over Cain’s. It was not that Cain gave the Lord rotten or unripe vegetables from his garden, while Abel gave the firstlings of his flock, nor could I accept the theological justification that in Genesis we are dealing with a vengeful God. I published an article several years ago about how the Cain and Abel story is related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I quote a passage from that article below.

Cain’s murder of his brother is the first sin of man against man in the Old Testament. But it is a sin that is only possible because of the previous Original Sin of Man against God. As a result of eating the apple, Man is cast out of the Garden—separated from the God and nature with which he was formerly at one. However, perhaps the most important result of the Fall is the separation of man from man. As Erich Fromm suggests in The Art of Loving, when Adam and Eve see their nakedness and seek to cover themselves, they do so not because of bodily shame and prudery, but because they have become aware of themselves and the separateness. The realization that they are no longer one causes their shame, guilt, and anxiety.

The story of Cain and Abel is the inevitable result of this separation; it is a series of cumulative symbolic objectifications of the implicit reality. Both Cain and Abel bring offerings to the Lord, each according to his own ability and resources. Abel brings the “firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof” and Cain brings the “fruit of the ground.” However, “The Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect.” No real explanation is given for God’s making this distinction between the two brothers. Cain has given his best just as Abel has. It is certainly not, as many casual readers think, that Cain offered rotten fruit. Moreover, it trivializes the symbolic significance of a powerful story to simply attribute the distinction to the historical notion that the Old Testament God was partial to blood sacrifices.

God’s distinction may be better understood as an explicit objectification of what is implicit in the Fall: men, even brothers, are ultimately separate. By this act, God says, “You are isolated from one another. It is therefore possible to make a distinction between you.” Cain reacts to this realization by testing it in the extreme—by rising up against Abel and slaying him. Cain kills Abel simply because he can, because he is separate from him, because he is free to do so. God’s response is, of course, to make Cain the original symbol of isolated man. He cuts him off from other men completely: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” Thus begins the nightmare reality of man’s isolation from his fellow man—a reality that makes him horrifyingly free to slay his brother because he is separate from him.

I hypothesize that “The Cousins” has something to do with our human responsibility to our “brother,” that is, all other men and women, but that we often have difficulty fulfilling that responsibility because of our inherent separation from the other. As Baxter says in his Contributor’s Notes to Best American Short Stories, the story has something to do with a man, Benjamin, who fails to give moral support to his “brother” until it is too late and then tries to rationalize his moral failure as he begins to realize his “sin.”

In some ways, the relationship between Brantford and Benjamin is like another famous pair of brothers in the Bible in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Brantford spends all his money on an expensive lifestyle, while Benjamin saves his money and gets an education. Although Benjamin says he wanted to help Brantford, he says he did not know how to express compassion with him or how to express the pity he felt. “I think my example sometimes goaded him into despair.”

By the way, I never liked the parable of the Prodigal Son any more than I did the story of Cain and Abel. It just didn’t seem fair to me that the father would welcome back with a big party the son who has foolishly spent all his inheritance, while the son who stayed home and saved his money would get no party at all.

So, let’s say that “The Cousins” derives from, or is a variation of, the two “brother” stories in the Bible (or any other “brother” stories from other mythologies or cultures, and there are many of them, for a “brother” story is most always about making distinctions between the two in which one triumphs and one feels envy). Which of the two cousins is Cain and which is Abel? From Baxter’s point of view, it’s not that simple. Both are Cain, and both are Abel. Both are the same, even as they re different. As Camille tells Benjamin, “You look alike, but that doesn’t mean you were alike. You could have been his identical twin and you wouldn’t have been any closer to him than you are now.”

Camille knows that when Benjamin attends Brantford’s funeral he is there to “exercise” his “compassion.” She tells him that he is in his element, that he is enjoying this attempt at a cheap moral payback for his neglect of his “brother,” his moral superiority. She tells him to send her a regular check, for he is one of “those guys who loves to exercise his pity, his empathy. You’re one of those rare, sensitive men with a big bank account.”

Then, in one of the most important lines in the story, Benjamin tells her: “It seems that you want to keep me in a posture of perpetual contrition,” adding, “I was suddenly proud of that phrase. It summed everything up.”

If our hypothesis about this story is right, it does sum everything up. Given the horrible way we treat our brothers, we should all always be in a “posture of perpetual contrition.”

The encounter with the taxicab driver is a coda of this theme of brothers. When the cabbie tells Benjamin that he is Ethiopian, Benjamin says he thought he was Somali. The cabdriver crossly responds, “Extremely not. I am Ethiopian…very different. We do not look the same either.” He further explains what Ethiopians think a Somali has nine hearts and will never reveal his true heart, only his false one, doing this over and over. Thus, you will never get to the ninth heart, which is the true one, the “door to the soul. The Somali keeps that heart to himself.” This coda seems to emphasize the brotherhood theme of the story—that even though we may seem the same, we are different; or even though we seem different we are the same. We are doomed to always be separate, never to be able to know the true heart of the other, always unable to know the difference between the thing that is and the thing that is not. Benjamin’s encounter with the poet at the party who called him the “scum of the earth,” which in turn caused him to treat the man in the subway as if he too were the scum of the earth, only reminds us that we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, regardless of how repulsive the neighbor might be. If we treat others in the horrible way others treat us, we have no chance of finding a sense of union in the midst of the separation and loneliness brought into being by the original eating of the Edenic apple.

“The Cousins” ends with Benjamin arriving at his home with his stolen apple and the new bunch of flowers he has bought. He thinks he will ring the bell as a stranger might, “a someone who hopes to be welcomed.” The bell does not work, so he goes to the side door. He thinks if he had been Brantford, the yard animal would have approached him (we recall Brantford’s love of animals). He sees his wife home-tutoring a little Somali girl. He feels the presence of his cousin. He raps on the door, but when his wife looks at him, he cannot see her eyes through her dark glasses (we recall his wife’s sensitivity to light), so he does not know if she intends to ever let him in the house again. The last line of the story is: “I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.”

So, why does Benjamin steal an apple to bring home to his wife? And why does he feel he has to steal it? If the apple is the Edenic apple, the original theft of which brought separation into life, then it is only right that Benjamin (Adam) gives it back to Giulietta (Eve). It could not have been purchased, for it is beyond price; it must be retrieved in the same way it was originally purloined. We recall that when Benjamin met Giulietta, he recognized her “insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again.” Giulietta is a different kind of angel than the “fiery angel” Brantford has seen in the sky and thought might descend on him. When Benjamin looks in and sees his sons and his wife in the house, he cannot be sure that he will be allowed in.

And indeed, how can we ever be sure? One tries to look into the eyes of the loved one and see their true heart, but one never knows. It is the “fear and trembling” of not knowing that requires the “leap of faith” to love the other as the self even if we never know that what we perceive is “what is” or “what is not.” But even if we do not know, we must be prepared, as Benjamin is, to wait to be allowed in. “knock and the door will be opened to you.”

I know this has been a long and complex interpretative journey to get to that apple. But in a good short story, to understand the significance of even one small element requires that we understand the role that the one element plays in the whole story. How do I know if this is the correct interpretation of the apple? I don’t. But it is an interpretation that justifies most all the details in the story, an interpretation that seems unified and gives me meaningful pleasure. I think that is what Charles Baxter wants—a reader who cares enough to give his story the kind of attention that he gave in making it.

I thank Ray for compelling me to spend some quality time with Charles Baxter’s story, and I thank Charles Baxter for writing it with such wisdom and grace. My experience with this story reminds me of why I love the short story and so enjoy sharing that love with readers of this blog.