Puzzle the Prof: The Ending of George Saunders' "Escape from Spiderhead"

Thanks to Keith Hood for playing my “Puzzle the Prof “ game during Short Story Month. Keith’s query is about George Saunders' story “Escape from Spiderhead,” which was selected for Best American Short Stories: 2011 and was included in his highly praised collection this year, Tenth of December.  I commented briefly on “Escape from Spiderhead” in blogs on both those collections, but said little about it because it is a “concept” “satiric” story, which I did not see as one of Saunders’ best.

What bothers Keith about the story is the ending, which is narrated by the first-person narrator after he kills himself.  Keith says when he realized that the ending of the story was going to be narrated from the beyond, he did “a mental equivalent of throwing something at the TV saying, "No, no, no. You can't end a first person narration that way. You've destroyed all believability."

For me, the issue of “believability” in a story is determined by my understanding of the “kind” of story it is, and since for me “Escape from Spiderhead” is a concept/satiric story, its believability is not dependent on its sticking to the rules of everyday reality, but rather sticking to the rules of the concept or satiric target that unifies it.

Saunders is not coy or mysterious about the concept at the center of this story.  At one point, Abnesti, the lab tech responsible for administering the experimental drugs to the human lab rats in the Spiderhead lab, states it quite explicitly. After having been induced by drugs to fall in love with (not just be sexually aroused by) two young women, Jeff is asked to decide which one he would choose to be administered a drug that induces suicidal depression.  When he cannot make a choice, Abnesti says the fact that he is totally cleansed of love for the two women is a “fantastic game-changer,” that they have unlocked a “mysterious eternal secret.”  If someone cannot love, the drug can make him love, if someone loves too much, the drug can tone it down.  “No longer, in terms of emotional controllability, are we ships adrift…. Can we stop war? We can sure as heck slow it down!”  With the drug, soldiers can be made to feel fond of each other, dictators can become great friends.

The satiric target is, of course, the contemporary use of drugs, many of which already exist, to govern the emotions,—drugs that induce euphoria, reduce (or cause) depression, create or increase desire, increase energy, etc.  The broad concept that governs the story is the eternal problem of human aggression.  Perhaps the most famous fictional exploration of this issue is Anthony Burgess’s novel Clockwork Orange, which Saunders obviously echoes in “Escape from Spiderhead.”

At every given moment throughout human history, people have killed each other for a variety of reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all.  It is the ultimate element of human freedom to be able to do so.  The Judeo/Christian mythos situates the origin of this freedom in the story of Cain and Abel.  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 possible only because of the previous Original Sin of humans against God.  As a result of eating the apple, the first humans are cast out of the Garden—separated from the God and nature with which they were formerly at one.  However, perhaps the most important result of the Fall is the separation of human beings from each other. 

The story of Cain and Abel is the inevitable result of this separation--a series of cumulative symbolic objectifications of the implicit reality of the Fall.  No real explanation is given for God’s making a 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 simply to 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:  All humans, 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 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.

When Jeff witnesses Heather’s anguish after being given the drug Darkenfloxx, and when he is given the drug Verbaluce, he eloquently expresses the central concept of the story:  “Every human is born of man and woman.  Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father.  Thus every human is worthy of love.”  He feels a great tenderness hard to “distinguish from a sort of vast existential nausea; to wit, why are such beautiful beloved vessels made slaves to so much pain?”

When Jeff must witness the other girl Rachel suffer, for the sake of the experiment, the suicide-inducing Darkenfloxx, he resists even though Abnesti tells him, “ A few minutes of unpleasantness for Rachel, years of relief for literally tens of thousands of underloving or overloving folks.”  When he realizes that they are going to Darkenfloxx Rachel just to hear him describe it, he knows that if he is not there to describe it, they would not do it.

Jeff’s decision to take an overdose of Darkenfloxx himself is a decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of Rachel.  Within the Judeo/Christian mythos, it is the Christ like decision to endure death in order to be resurrected to eternal life.  Death, of course, is the ultimate human mystery—a mystery that gives rise to all religion. Since an experience of the afterlife cannot be verified, there is no way the ideal of redemption can be substantiated except to follow Jeff’s consciousness into that afterlife. 

The notion of dying and then immediately hovering above the world one has just left is one of the most common concepts of after-death stories--from simple popular ghost stories to complex theological resurrection stories.  Within the Christian mythos, the ultimate aim of a life of sin and separation is to achieve redemption, thus ending a life of separation and entering that pre-Fall state of complete at-oneness.  To quote the words of an old hymn I heard my father sing as a child: “This world is not my home; I’m just passing through.” Thus, “Escape from Spiderhead” ends with an experience of the ultimate escape from our fallen state:

“From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward.  I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.”

In my opinion, from the perspective of the concept on which I think Saunders’ story is based, Jeff’s ascension into the afterlife of at-oneness, is not only believable, it is inevitable.

Thanks again to Keith Hood for his “Puzzle the Prof” challenge. I do not pose my explanation of the ending of “Escape from Spiderhead” as the only answer to his query—merely as my attempt to solve a narrative puzzle.

More "Puzzle the Prof" challenges in a couple of days.

George Saunders’ Perceptive Understanding of the Short Story as a Narrative Form

When George Saunders' first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned."  Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty.  If that were not encouragement enough, three of the stories in Pastoralia (his second collection) won O. Henry Awards prizes: "The Falls" in 1997 (which won second prize), "Winky" in 1998, and "Sea Oak" in 1999. After the publication of his third collections, In Persuasion Nation, reviewers called Saunders "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist." Comparing him to Vonnegut, Pynchon, and T. C. Boyle, critics praised his demented black comic view of modern American culture. 

A primary way Saunders creates this cultural view is to zero in on our pop entertainments.  The focus of the title story of Saunders' first collection is a virtual reality theme park that simulates America during the Civil War era, and the locale of the title story of Pastoralia is a museum in which two people pretend to be a cave man and woman for the entertainment and edification of the public. When asked in an interview why theme parks are often featured in his stories, Saunders said that they create a sort of cartoon-like mood that keeps him from becoming too earnest and serious, reminding him that he is not writing realist fiction and giving him permission to "goof off."  However, Saunders is not just "fooling around" stories like “Pastoralia”; as usual, he has a target, in this case the world of modern work in which bosses are distant anonymous entities with whom workers communicate by fax machines and who insist that we perform in accordance with their view of artificial reality. The couple in Saunders' story, controlled by sophisticated technology, must make their living by pretending to be dumb and inarticulate--a metaphor, Saunders suggests, of how most Americans consider the role they play in the world of work.

The popular interest in Saunders’ satiric stories often overshadows his more universal theme of the male "loser" who cannot succeed in the real world and must create a fantasy compensatory reality.  In many ways, the most perfect example of the short story as a form in Pastoralia is "The End of FIRPO in the World," in which a young overweight and disliked boy named Cody takes imaginative revenge on classmates and neighbors who torment him by putting boogers in their thermos and plugging their water hose to make it explode.  During a bike ride, Cody imagines that his ultimate revenge will occur when he is famous for his splendid ideas, such as plugging up the water hose.  The story ends with irony and pathos when he is hit by a car and the only person who has ever told him that he is "beautiful and loved" is the man who has hit him

 Although Saunders has always had a devoted following for his satiric stories, it is only with his fourth collection, Tenth of December that he has been discovered by a wider audience. Part of the reason for this may be what Jon McGregor in The Times of London calls his “dialing back on the satire, relaxing into realism, letting the clear voice of suffering sing through.”  Saunders told one interviewer that he thinks his fiction is “bigger-hearted” in this new book.  I don’t intend to analyze individual stories in Tenth of December in this blog entry.  I have no doubt that if you read them, you will see the excellent way they embody the virtues of the short story as a narrative form.  Instead, I want to highlight Saunders’ perceptive understanding of the short story.

As of this writing, Tenth of December has been on several bestseller lists for two months and Saunders has been interviewed by everybody from Charlie Rose to George Stephanopoulos.  The most common (and I do mean common) question of most of the interviewers with George Saunders in the past few months has been, “Why do you write short stories,” as if that were some sort of neurotic notion in which no one in his right mind could possibly engage. Saunders always says something about the short story being his form “neurologically--that he is wired for it.  He believes that when writing you have to have a feeling for beauty and says that he knows it at eight pages, not eighty pages. “I think it is the limit that makes [the short story] magical,” says Saunders.  “Give me eight pages and I’ll do something.”

Indeed, he does “do something”—something that is particularly characteristic of the short story form at its best. And it is not always his popular satiric short stories that are his best.  I like what Saunders does with the short story, and I like the way he talks about writing in general and the short story in particular in his interviews and essays (See The Braindead Megaphone, 2007).

In his interview with Charlie Rose, Saunders says he used to think that the artist had an idea he or she wanted to get and then sort of dump it on the reader.  Now, he knows that really doesn’t produce anything; it is condescending. When you study writing, Saunders says, there’s this intentional fallacy that the writer has a set of ideas and the story is just a vehicle for delivering those ideas. He says his experience has been totally the opposite. “You go in trying not to have any idea of what you are trying to accomplish, praying that you will accomplish something and respecting the energy of the piece and following it very closely.” 

In his PBS interview with Jeffrey Brown, he says his approach is to go into a story not being really sure what he wants to say.  He finds a little seed crystal and tries to divest himself of any ideas about it.  He calls writing the short story an elaborate exercise of being comfortable with mystery. (I have talked about this aspect of the short story in many places in print and on this blog.  It is the most prevalent understanding of the short story by many writers who excel in the form.)

Saunders has talked most about essential short story characteristics of mystery, ambiguity, the process of discovery, and human sympathy in the title essay to his collection The Braindead Megaphone:

“The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.  If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible.”

In his essay, “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,” Saunders says that before he read Vonnegut, he always thought the function of art was to be descriptive, a kind of scale model of life to make the reader feel and hear and taste and think what the writer did.  Then he began to understand art as a kind of “black box the reader enters.  He enters in one state of mind and exits in another.  The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’—he can put whatever he wants in there.  What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.”  He says that for Vonnegut the change that takes place in the reader is that his or her heart is softened, our capacity for pity and sorrow encouraged.

Saunders told George Stephanopoulos, that he believes  fiction is not a great propaganda tool, that overt political fiction doesn’t work, explaining this way:

“There’s something about the intimacy of the exchange demands openness on both sides.  On the writer’s part, openness means ‘I really don’t know.’  “The way to get to those ideas is through the language, paying close attention to phrases and sentences, and if you do that in kind of an open state, not only will the ideas show up, but they will be the highest form of your ideas; they won’t be propagandistic; they won’t be superficial, but they will deep and sort of ambiguous.”

Telling interviewers that the litmus test for him is always the language, Saunders talks about the importance of looking very closely at the prose and seeing if it has any energy or not and then trying to get that feeling in the prose and to follow where it leads, even if it is not going where you want it to.  In his essay, “Thank You, Esther Forbes," he talks about his discovery of the importance of the sentence when a teacher gave him Forbes’ historical novel Johnny Tremain when he was a child.  He was most impressed with the sentences, which seemed to have more life in them than normal sentences:

“They were not merely sentences but compressed moments that burst when you read them…. “A sentence was more than just a fact-conveyor; it also made a certain sound, and could have a thrilling quality of being over-full, saying more than its length should permit it to say.  A sequence of such sentences exploding in the brain made the invented world almost unbearably real, each sentence serving as a kind of proof… By honing the sentences you used to described the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.”

Saunders says you “start off with a kind of condescending relationship to your characters almost by definition, and as you work with sentences you find that the bad sentences are equal to simplicity or condescension, and as you work with language you move yourself toward complexity and often to a state of confusion where you really don’t know what you think about the person… You’re sending out a bundle of energy, you know, concentrated energy that you’ve made with your own sweat, really, and your heart, and it goes out and it jangles somebody. Now, there’s another level where you do hope to make people more alive in the world, maybe more aware of the fact that we have more in common with others than we think we do.”

It is not incidental that George Saunders often mentions Anton Chekhov’s short story “Grief” as an example of the importance of language in the short story to human understanding.  "”Grief" is a lament (as the title is sometimes translated)--not an emotional wailing, but rather a controlled objectification of grief and its incommunicable nature by the presentation of deliberate details in carefully constructed sentences.  It therefore indicates in a basic way one of the primary contributions Chekhov makes to the short story; that is, the use of the form as the expression of a complex inner state by means of the presentation of selected concrete details rather than by presenting either a parabolic form or by depicting the mind of the character. Significant reality for Chekhov is inner rather than outer reality; but the problem is how to create the illusion of inner reality by focusing on externals only.  The answer for the modern short story is to find a story that, if expressed "properly," that is, by the judicious choice of relevant details in carefully constructed sentences will embody the complexity of the inner state.  T. S. Eliot will later term such a technique "objective correlative," and James Joyce will master it fully in The Dubliners. Saunders calls “Grief” a great political story.  If you want to explore a political idea, says Saunders, you embody it in a person, a human connection.

Like his colleagues, Steven Millhauser, David Means, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Edith Pearlman, Joy Williams, and others, George Saunders is a master of the short story.  We can only hope that his recent and well-deserved popularity will stimulate new interest in the form. In his PBS interview, he told Jeffrey Brown: “I love the idea that more people will read short fiction. It’s such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.” “If I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out there, I’m thrilled.”

And so are we, Mr. Saunders.  Thank you for your keen understanding of the short story as a form, for sharing that understanding with us both in fiction and analysis.  Congratulations on your success with Tenth of December.

Has George Saunders Caused a "Boom" in the Short Story in 2013?

Can one high profile collection of short stories actually spark a “Boom” in the short story?  Can one rapturous review spark a frenzy of publicity and sales for one collection of short stories?  I know I have talked a bit about this earlier, but since the “Boom” idea has gained some more traction in the last week, I thought it might be well to revisit and summarize the buzz created by George Saunders’ collection of stories, Tenth of December.

It’s always a pleasure for me when a writer I admire publishes a collection that gets the popular media to talking about short stories.  On January 8, 2013, George Saunders, who has been publishing intelligent and carefully controlled satiric short stories for almost twenty years, published his fourth collection, and became an overnight sensation.  The book has been on a number of bestseller lists for the past six weeks, and Saunders has been interviewed by just about everyone on television, newspapers, and the Internet. 

It’s hard to tell how much of this much-deserved ballyhoo is due to a story by Joel Lovell that appeared in The New York Times Magazine on January 3 entitled GEORGE SAUNDERS HAS WRITTEN THE BEST BOOK YOU’LL READ THIS YEAR.  Well, hell! How could you resist that daring challenge, coming on the third day of the New Year?  And if that was not enough, a review featuring Saunders’ new book appeared in the January 5 U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal with the headline, GIVING HOPE TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY.

In his long interview profile story, Joel Lovell calls Saunders “The writer for our time,” another irresistible sound bite picked up by journalists and bloggers.  Lovell then goes on to define “our time” as an historical moment in which we are dropping bombs on people we know little about, a time when we are desperate simply for a job, a time in which we are scared out of our wits for reasons we find hard even to name. 

It is this  “our time” that Lovell says Saunders is “the writer” for.  For George Saunders is, above all other things, a satirist.  When Saunders' first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned."  Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. 

Lovell’s praise for Saunders was bound to get some reaction.  Adrian Chen, of Gawker blog, who does a lot of reacting, posted an essay on January 23 with the title, ‘WRITER OF OUR TIME’ GEORGE SAUNDERS NEEDS TO WRITE A GOODAMN NOVEL ALREADY.  Calling the novel the Super Bowl of fiction writing, Chen says that without a novel there’s no chance for Saunders to reach the sort of “era-defining” status that Lovell imagines for him.

It did not take long for the reaction to Chen’s childish remarks to get a response.  On January 25, Kevin McFarland of the AV Club blog posted a piece entitled WHY GEORGE SAUNDERS (OR ANYONE ELSE) CAN WRITE WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE, calling Chen’s tone “patronizing” and his remarks “heady with ignorance about Saunders career and what makes him notable in the first place.” 

Then Hector Tobar published a piece in The Los Angeles Times entitled PERFECTING THE SHORT-STORY FORM, in which he praised the short story form and suggested that Saunders hasn’t written a novel because he is too much of a prose perfectionist and likes the control the short story gives him.

The Saunders publicity is all good publicity for the much neglected and oft-ignored short story form, and probably gave impetus to a February 15 piece in The New York Times by Leslie Kaufman entitled GOOD FIT FOR TODAY’S LITTLE SCREENS: SHORT STORIES.  Kaufman opens by saying that short story collections, “an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence,” but argues that the cause of this is the proliferation of digital options. 

Kaufman notes that 2013 has already yielded an unusually “rich crop” of short story collections,” including Saunders’ Tenth of December, which debuted “with a splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies.”  Kaufman also mentions Karen Russell’s new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Amber Dermont’s Damage Control, and Jess Walter’s We Live in Water.  Kaufman also mentions last year’s collections by Nathan Englander and Junot Diaz.  Dermont is quoted as saying that “the single-serving of a short narrative is the perfect art form fro the digital age…. Stories are models of concision, can be read in one sitting, and are infinitely downloadable and easily consumed on screeens.”

The problem with Kaufman’s piece is that it does not really make any connection between the so-called digital age and the popularity of such collections as those by Saunders, Diaz, and Englander—all of which have been published in the traditional hardcover, soft-cover editions. 

This was pointed out by Laura Miller in a Feb. 21 story on Salon.com entitled SORRY, THE SHORT STORY BOOM IS BOGUS, who summed up the current situation of the short story this way:

A short story can be anything from an exquisite specimen of the literary art to a diverting pastime. In its mid-20th-century heyday, when even magazines like Mademoiselle published short fiction by writers like William Faulkner, stories offered readers an hour or two of satisfying narrative entertainment at the end of the day. Television has largely replaced that function, and the literary short story itself became a more rarefied thing, a form in which writers exhibit the perfection of their technique, rather like lyric poetry. With the exception of certain communities of genre writer and readers — most notable in science fiction — these writers aren’t reaching a wider audience because they aren’t especially trying to. 

It should be noted that the best-selling short story collections of the past several months-- Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About when we Talk About Anne Frank, Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her, and George Saunders’ Tenth of December--all have “special interest”: Englander’s “O. Henryish” well-made stories on Jewish culture, Diaz’s potty-mouthed sexcapades with women he dropped, and Saunder’s sharp satires on modern culture.  The only other collection of the year that stayed a time on the best-seller list is Alice Munro’s Dear Life, but then Munro writes so well that she does not have to have a “special interest.”

I plan to write a short essay on the “magic” of George Saunder’s stories, for I don’t think it is the satiric pieces that are the most representative of the genre or his best stories, even though they indeed may be the most readable and the most popular.  Junot Diaz (whose stories I do not care for and who I think has been highly overrated this past year), does, however, put his finger on the key to Saunder’s excellence that I hope to explore further.  He told Joel Lovell that although there is no one who has “a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital” than Saunders, on the other side is “how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion.  Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or as deep as Saunders does.”

I agree.  It is Saunders’ moral vision, combined with his respect for the word and the sentence, that makes him a great short story writer. In one of his many recent interviews, he said the litmus test for him is always the language.

I will come back to Saunders in March.

Why Some Short Story Writers Don't Want to Write Novels

Well, this is interesting.  Last week I opened the LA Times and was caught by this headline:  PERFECTING THE SHORT-STORY FORM. It’s not a line I often see in the LA Times or any other newspaper, for that matter.  The piece, one of a regular feature called “Jacket Copy,” was by LA novelist and journalist, Hector Tobar, who reviews books regularly for the Times now.

Tobar referred to a recent piece on the “Gawker” blog by Adrian Chen, urging writer George Saunders to get off his butt and write a novel.  When I checked “Gawker,” I saw that Chen was chastising Saunders in response to a recent New York Times Magazine piece by Joel Lovell who rhapsodizes that “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.”

To which, Adrian Chen retorts, if Saunders is so damned great, why hasn’t he written a novel?  Chen asserts, “the novel is the Super Bowl of fiction writing, and any fiction writer who hasn’t written one is going to be relegated to runner-up in the annals of literary history.”   (One wonders if Chen has ever read Jorge Borges or Anton Chekhov.)  He says that those poor writers who have never written a novel may be fan favorites and heroes to MFA students and “connoisseurs of literature,” like Raymond Carver or Alice Munro, for example, but, Chen insists, “without a novel there’s no chance a fiction-writer can reach the story of Pop, era-defining status Lovell imagines for Saunders.”

Chen rants on that “literary types” have a “peculiar fetish for the short story writer: “Short fiction is the Hard Stuff--pure uncut stories prized by real literature heads,” snorts Chen, concluding with added scorn, that the excessive praise heaped on short-story writers seems patronizing: “like an out of town guest struggling to compliment a New Yorker’s cramped and overpriced apartment: ‘look how much you’ve done with so little space.’”

Hector Tobar scolds Chen for the childishness of his remarks, arguing that Saunders has not written a novel because he is a “prose perfectionist...because he’s unwilling to write a mediocre page. Because he likes the control the short-story form gives him.” Tobar say that to write a novel, every once in a while “your prose, for lack of a better word, is going to be more prosaic than it would be otherwise.”  He says the reason for this is that to get a reader to make it through a novel, you have to have that “chunky, unattractive but very utilitarian thing called a plot,” the creation of which often hides your weaknesses as a writer. 

Tobar concludes that a successfully short story writer “can’t get away with crafting two or three mediocre paragraphs.”  He argues that George Saunders is “building perfect, if smaller constructions, with nary a wasted word.”

I agree with what Tobar suggests is a real distinction between the short story and the novel.  The important question for me is what other important generic/thematic/stylistic distinctions are there between the two forms that give rise to (or result from) this authorial attention to style on the microcosmic level of sentence rather than the macrocosmic level of plot. 

I have read Saunders first three collections of stories--CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and Persuasion Nation—and agree with Joel Lovell that Saunders is a “writer’s writer”—a kiss-of-death term often loaded on short-story writers. 

I have just received a copy of Saunder’s new collection, The Tenth of December and will comment on it in the next couple of weeks.  I also picked up a copy of Saunder’s collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone and will comment on some of his essays that focus on fiction.

Chen may be right that the only folks who really love short stories are other writers of short stories and those “literary types” who appreciate the writer’s attention to language rather than just plot.  But that attention to language may result in something more universally important than what “nonliterary types” like Chen might scorn as mere aestheticism.  Lovell says in his New York Times piece that Saunders once told him his aim in his fiction was to “soften the borders between you and me, between me and me, between the reader and the writer.” Lovell believes that Saunders’ writing “makes you wiser, better, more disciplined in your openness to the experience of other people.”

Chen retorts, “if Saunders can literally make the world a better place then he needs to write a novel and get Oprah to talk about it on TV and put it into the hands of as many of the sad but nobly struggling people who are the subjects of so many of his stories as possible.”

In my own opinion, a better solution would not be to urge George Saunders and other short-story writers to write novels, but rather to urge more readers to read short stories.    And God help us if we have to wait for Oprah, in her wisdom, to tell us what to read.

Best American Short Stories 2012: Part III

One of the most common questions that audiences ask authors at the end of short story “readings” is a variant of the following:  “Where did you get the idea for the story?”  “Where did the story come from?”  What is the story based on?” “What was the originating germ of the story?”  I guess it’s one of the few questions you can ask an author who has just read one of his or her stories.  Authors know that audiences will not be satisfied with the answer, “I just made it up,” although that may often indeed be the case.  The question suggests that audiences are fascinated with the “real life” or “idea” that somehow must underlie a story, as if it were the real life or the idea that is most important.  However, it is likely that what engaged the author was the process by which the story transforms “real life” or “idea” into a meaningful fictional artifice. 

Although I do not know whether Heidi Pitlor or the publishers of Best American Short Stories specifically request authors to talk about the origins of their stories, this is usually what they do in the’ “Contributors’ notes.”

Julie Otsuska, “Diem Perdidi”

Julie Otsuka says that she had been taking notes for “Diem Perdidi” on the backs of envelopes, napkins, and ATM receipts for many years—ever since her mother was first diagnosed with dementia—before she came up with the “She remembers,” She does not remember” structure and the second-person voice addressed to “me” that made this story possible.  When readers ask where a story comes from, they often perhaps do not realize that the most important and mysterious question is what made it possible to transform some experience of idea into a fiction. The answer always has something to do with form or technique, voice or structure, some literary convention or device that miraculously makes a story.

“Diem Perdidi” means, “I have lost a day,” supposedly uttered by the Emperor Titus at the end of a day when nothing meaningful was achieved—perhaps the opposite of “carpe diem,” for all days that are not seized are inevitably lost.  The story uses the convention of a repetitive rhythmic refrain or list emphasizing the most important verb for those stricken by, or witness to, dementia— the verb “remember.”

But the list is not composed just of random things that the woman remembers or does not remember; they are specific to her as an individual and as a member of her culture— for example, the loss of a daughter or her incarceration in an interment camp during WWII.  And even though most of the sentences begin with “She remembers” or “She does not remember,” they are routinely repetitive; the length of sentences varies, and the subject matter continually and meaningfully changes. Frequently, the repetitive sentences are interspersed with brief statements by the woman herself in italics, e.g., “I shouldn’t have talked so much,” “I didn’t know what else to do.”  Furthermore, the general remembered items are interspersed with remembered items specifically about the writer/teller, addressed to “you.”  And the story ends, inevitably, with all those things the woman remembered in the first paragraph—the name of the president, the name of the president’s dog, the day, the season, the year—forgotten in the last paragraph, except, of course, she does remember the death of her first child and the taste of dust in the interment camp, for some things are too painful to forget. 

This is a story that could have been sentimental and self indulgent, but Julie Otsuka finds just the right form and tone to make it deeply engaging and meaningful.  It’s not the origin of the story that is important, not even the “real life” behind it that must have been so painful to experience—but rather the restrained formal control that transforms it into a meaningful fiction about how one’s life in memory fades and resurges, fades and resurges until finally it simply fades away.

  

Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”

Edith Pearlman is a classic example of how short story writers, even very fine short story writers, can get ignored by reviewers and the reading public. How can this happen?  Well, it can happen when, like Pearlman, the writer writes only short stories and never novels.  Only a few writers who make this decision manage to get widely read: Raymond Carver, because, with the help of a savvy editor, he created a stylized, attenuated world of blue-collar misfits that caught the attention of reviewers. Alice Munro, because she is such an intelligent observer of the inner lives of women and creates a complex, densely populated world that reviewers can justify as “novelistic.  A good short story write can be ignored by the relatively wide circulation magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, and is published instead only by low circulation journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Idaho Review, and Ontario Review.  A good short story writer can be ignored when those stories are collected in books that only university and small presses care to publish, and, which, for lack of funds to promote them, never get widely reviewed.

Edith Pearlman is a master of short stories that are unmistakably short stories; they are not “novelistic,” either in style or in substance, and for that reason, they have, until recently, seldom been read.  All lovers of the short story should therefore be thankful that, after she published short stories for years in little known places, Edith Pearlman’s collection, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories was “discovered” last year--winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and becoming a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in fiction.  The fact that it has taken reviewers over thirty years to “discover” and appreciate a writer now in her mid-seventies simply shows how little respect the short story as a form receives in a literary world where the novel reigns supreme. 

Pearlman says “Honeydew” began with a specific request for a story from the journal Orion, which announced in its first issue several years ago its “fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.”

So what does a writer do when requested to write a story tailored to the journal’s stated thematic purpose.  What Pearlman did was to dig around in a story she was already working on—a triangle story involving a mistress, wife, and the man between them—and find a way to get the story “vigorously involved in the natural world.”  She had already done an essay for Orion on beetles, so she did some more entomological research on beetles, including the honey-dew-making Coccidae as well as moth grubs that, ground up and mixed with water, produced an ecstatic sleep, and with suicidal ants.  The narrative problem was how to make a story out of this mixed bag of bugs? 

In the first paragraph Pearlman creates a private school for girls with a ravine on one side where a suicide occurred a century before.  She creates an very bright adolescent girl in eleventh grade who is anorexic; she creates a headmistress whose palms ache to spank the girl, and just to complicate matters further, she makes this forty-three year old headmistress six weeks pregnant by the father of the anorexic girl.

She creates a tone that takes all this very seriously, but describes it slyly and slightly sarcastically, for anorexia is a disease that is very serious, but that could be solved if the damned girl would just eat.  She used the results of her research to describe beetles that gorge on decaying corpses and defecate at the same time, turning flesh into compost, noting, “The uses of shit are many.”  And she made use of paradoxical fact that the life-saving manna that saved the Israelites in the desert was actually the result of beetles feeding on plant sap, which rushes through the guts and out the anus floating to the ground to be eaten—creating sweet shit called “honeydew”

This is such a delightful story, so full of seemingly unrelated, but actually tightly woven details, I don’t want to spoil it for you by summarizing it.  As is often the case with great short stories, it is not the plot, or even the characters that draw you in and keep you moving toward the meaningful metaphoric end, but rather how all the parts are so integrated that even as the story is a surprise, it seems inevitable.  The ending, when the young girl metaphorically becomes the insect she strives to be, and the suicidal ravine, like Chekhov’s gun on the wall, is thematically integrated, is an absolute treat.  This is a wonderful story by one of the twentieth-century’s greatest short story writers.

Angela Pneuman, “Occupational Hazard”

Angela Pneuman says this story originated when she was working at a wastewater treatment plant and happened to see a television interview with a man whose nose, arms, and legs had been eaten away by a type of bacteria that he had picked up through a paper cut at his office.  She thought there could be a connection between this victim of bacteria and how her work involved trying to harness the operations of bacteria.  The narrative problem was how to ground this connection in the real life of a character and thus make it more than a concept.

To do this, Pneuman invents a sewage treatment worker named Calvin whose foot slips off a catwalk and submerging his left leg up to the knee in the sewage—something he calls an “occupational hazard” when others smell it.  When another man he works with dies from a strep infection from a paper cut, Pneuman must invent some way for this death to affect Calvin.  So she invents a first wife and a sullen daughter for the dead man who Calvin encounters at the funeral.  It is the daughter who challenges Calvin, but the momentary sexual encounter Calvin has with the 15-year old girl seems, in the pejorative sense of the word, simply “invented.”   The conflict between Calvin and his wife because she wants to have a baby and he does not also seems “invented.”

I know, of course, that stories often have to be “made up,” but they probably should not appear to be just “invented” for the sake of some pre-established concept.  I find this story overlong, filled with inconsequential dialogue encounters.  I suppose when Calvin begins to realize that the dead man’s relationship with his first wife and daughter has left some damages, he feels his own vulnerability and culpability.  But I cannot see that his motive for sexually comforting the daughter is meaningfully complex, nor that his need for forgiveness from his wife is penitently integral to his Calvinistic “sin.”  The story just seems too self-consciously “rigged” to me.

  

Eric Puchner, “Beautiful Monsters”

A few years ago, I reviewed Erich Puchner’s debut collection of stories, Music Through the Roof and thought it to be an example of short fiction consciously created within an MFA program (this one at the University of Arizona).  Instead of erupting with originality out of powerful compulsions, as great stories must,  Puchner’s stories seemed largely learned—skillful, but imitative both in style and substance of so many other stories developed in MFA programs proliferating across the country. First, there was a story about a loner aimlessly searching for significance. Then there was a story about a young woman looking for love. Next there was a story about bullying children preying on weak outcasts. And of course there were one or two multicultural stories about the plight of the immigrant. Of all these well-made stories, the most academically rigged with symbolic significance and thematic unity was “Legends,” a textbook piece self-consciously held together by the relentlessly repeated theme of death.  A man with a “lazy heart” takes his wife to Mexico to try to revive their marriage, where a stereotypical con artist accompanies them to a museum to see mummies and to a semi-comatose woman who performs miracles.  Naturally the young man ends up losing everything.

Puchner says “Beautiful Monsters” was a real departure for him, for he is not a fan of science fiction, although, like many of us, he was an avid reader of Ray Bradbury’s Martial Chronicles when he was a child.  He says this story started with an image in his mind of a huge man, like Bigfoot, showing up in a young boy’s yard one morning.  But, the question was how to make this obsessive image into a story.  His method for doing so was to play a little reversal on the Peter Pan story, in which the children are in control, and the adults are the outcasts.  It’s a concept story about the human need to escape growing old and dying. It’s entertaining enough, with some grotesque and gruesome details meant to make one squirm with the archetypal fear of death and decay; it ends with a Frankenstein monster, fairy-tale mob holding heads on poles, but heads, which, freed from their bodies, and thus ironically free from the fear of death “dance down the street” “nimble as children.”  The way Puchner got from that image of the “Big Foot” monster in a boy’s yard was to simply flip a fairy tale.  I could not get involved in this concept story.

George Saunders, “Tenth of December”

George Saunders has always been very good at concept stories.  The reviewers of Saunders' three collections have called him variously "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist."  Typical of the satirist's need for an object of attack, Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target; however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out to get the pheasant," he usually comes back with "the lower half of a Barbie doll."  Comparing Saunders to Vonnegut, Pynchon, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, critics have praised his demented black comic view of modern culture that showcases Americans' fears, shames, and their need to be accepted. 

In his “Contributors’ Notes” to “Tenth of December,” Saunders says, “Sometimes a story comes from a little lonely moment of unwilled, spontaneous fantasy. To illustrate this, he gives the example of a story in his collection Pastoralia, entitled “The End of Firpo,” which came from seeing a miserable little boy standing on the curb of a busy street and asking himself what would he do or say if the kid got hit and he happened to be the first responder. The result was, in many ways, the most heart-rending story in the collection, in which a young overweight and disliked boy named Cody takes imaginative revenge on classmates and neighbors who torment him by putting boogers in their thermos and plugging their water hose to make it explode.  FIRPO is the word Cody's mother and her boyfriend use to refer to anything he does that they think is bad or dorky.  During a bike ride, Cody imagines that his ultimate revenge will occur when he is famous for his splendid ideas, such as plugging up the water hose. The story ends with irony and pathos when he is hit by a car and the only person who has ever told him that he is "beautiful and loved" is the man who has hit him. The story succeeds by initially making the reader scorn Cody for his mean-spirited vengeance and his childish compensation fantasies, only to make us feel sorry for the boy when, with resignation, he accepts that he is the FIRPO his mother and her boyfriend say he is, even as the man who hit him futilely insists that God loves him and that he is beautiful in His sight.

Saunders says “Tenth of December” came to him similarly one day when it hit him that he would die someday and that it would happen by means of a series of actual events for which he would have to be present.  After thinking about this a bit, he says he was left with a “conceptual seed” about a man with a fatal illness, who decides to kill himself by freezing.

The result of playing in his mind with this “conceptual seed” is a concept story or fable that, for me, just goes on too long and too self-indulgently, with Saunders seemingly having a great deal of fun, but just not engaging me either in the character or the concept that surely must lie somewhere beneath all the Mary Poppins cockney stuff and the adolescent jokes, e.g., “Mr. President, what a delightful surprise it was to find an asteroid circling Uranus.”  I tried to read the story three times, but just got bored each time.  If any of my readers can help me appreciate this story, I would appreciate hearing from them.  I have read all of Saunders’ previous stories and enjoyed them, but just not this one.

The Experimental Short Story: Part II: David Means, Stephen Millhauser, George Saunders, Steven Dixon

Rolf asked, vis a vis The Experimental Short Story: Part I, if I had considered Lydia Davis’s short fiction. I have read several of Davis’s stories in various places, but have not yet had a chance to read her Collected Stories that was on several “Best Books of the Year” lists for 2009. Sorry to say I have not got to J. G. Ballard’s Collected Stories either. So much to read! So little time! So I will have to content myself with four “experimental” writers that I have read—two of which are my favorite writers, and two that I find thoughtful and clever. Lydia Davis and J. G. Ballard join several others on my "must read; get the lead out" list of short story collections.

David Means

Although David Means’ Assorted Fire Events (2000), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received rave reviews both in America and England, still, for many critics, it was just a collection of short stories. His most recent collection of stories, The Secret Goldfish, reaffirms that like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.

To understand that “short-story way,” pick up The Secret Goldfish. But don’t rush through the stories. Read one, put the book by and meditate on the mystery of the human condition the story explores. Then wait a while before reading another. The short story is often misunderstood and underrated because readers read it the same way they do sections of novels. Don’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. Go to David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies and for the shock of recognition that those you thought you knew you don’t really know at all.

You go to Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed, stark and astonishing. The first paragraph of the first story in Secret Goldfish, “Lightning Man,” makes clear that the realm of reality that matters for Means is sacramental, ritualistic, miraculous--a world in which the old reassurances, such as lightning never strikes twice in the same place, are shown to be nonsense. Here a man is struck seven times throughout his life by a powerful revelatory energy until he becomes a mythic creature, waiting for the inevitable eighth.

In the short-story world of David Means, a mundane tale of infidelity and divorce gets transformed by the metaphoric stillness of a neglected goldfish in a mucked-up tank, surviving in spite of the stagnation around it. Means’ short stories are seldom satisfied with linearity of plot and thus often become lists of connected mysteries. “Notable Dustman Appearances to Date” is a series of hallucinatory manifestations of famous faces in swirling dust kicked up by wind or smoke: Nixon, Hemingway, Gogol, Jesus. “Michigan Death Trips” is a catalog of catastrophic disruptions, as people abruptly disappear beneath the ice of a frozen lake, are suddenly struck on the highway, or hit by a stray bullet from nowhere. “Elyria Man," lays bare mummified bodies found lying beneath the soil, as if patiently waiting to embody some basic human fear or need.

In each of his stories, David Means reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has—by making us see the world as it painfully is, not as our comfortable habits hide it from us. David Means is a brilliant master of the short story who fully understands and respects the form’s power.

Stephen Millhauser

While most short-story writers in the last three decades joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies, Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition that extends from Poe, to Kafka, to Borges, Barthelme and Barth--playfully and powerfully exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the merely real and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation.

Steven Millhauser's short fictions are often basically "suppose" stories. Suppose someone built the ultimate shopping mall? Suppose adolescent female mystery was really caused by witches? Suppose there was an amusement park that opened the door to an alternate reality. However, Millhauser's most obsessive "suppose" is: "Suppose you took an ordinary entertainment, illusion, or metaphor and pushed it as far as it would go." One could say that all of Millhauser's stories go "too far," that is, if the intensive "too far" existed in his vocabulary. His favorite personae are the impresario, the maestro, the necromancer, the wizard, Prospero on his island, Edison in his laboratory, Barnum in his circus ring. Whether his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the reality of artifice.

Although the thirteen stories in his most recent collection, Dangerous Laughter, are divided into three categories--Vanishing Acts, Impossible Architectures, and Heretical Histories—they are united by the romantic quest for transcendence. Even the opening cartoon, which uses fast-paced present-tense to create the illusion that you are watching a Tom and Jerry animated short, concludes with erasure of the physical and reinstatement of illusion.

The stories in the first group are the most intriguing in their transformation of the mundane into the miraculous. “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” is not a simple crime story. When the narrator and his former high school classmates look Elaine Coleman up in their yearbook, they cannot recall her, finally understanding that she did not suddenly disappear but rather gradually became more and more invisible. That the drive to transcend can begin in the most ordinary ways and lead to the most terrible results is explored in “Dangerous Laughter,” a story of how, pushed to extremes, any activity can become both obsessive and powerfully significant. It begins with adolescents laughing at little until the laughing becomes an end in itself, part of the “kingdom of forbidden things.”

The stories in the “Impossible Architectures” group,” although like previous Millhauser stories about artificial and enclosed worlds, are less compelling. “The Dome” begins with transparent domes to cover houses, which then develop into larger domes to cover neighborhoods and then towns, until the entire country and then the world is transformed into a giant mall. And if you encounter a Millhauser story entitled “The Tower,” you can guess that the issue is “how high?” Millhauser’s trope means to explore the complications and implications of religious desire, but it’s just too mechanical a metaphor.

The “Heretical Histories” section gives us stories about two “might-have-been” inventions that could have transformed the way we experience “reality.” In “A Precursor of the Cinema,” Harlan Crane, a late nineteenth century painter creates a pigment that reproduces the object so faithfully that it actually moves on the canvas--a forerunner to current experiments with holographic images. In “The Wizard of West Orange,” one of Thomas Edison’s researchers creates a device called a haptograph, a wired suit which, when put on, simulates various sensations of touch and, more significantly, creates new ones. However, the device’s promise of revelation, transformation, and transcendence dooms it, for the ever-practical Edison knows it will never bring in profits.

Millhauser’s stories are not mere ingenuity, although Lord knows, they are devilishly clever. No, Millhauser is motivated by the same obsessions that drove Blake--to see a world in a grain of sand, to affirm that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. In my opinion, he is our most brilliant practicing romantic, for whom surface reality is merely an uninteresting illusion and ultimate reality is always sleight of hand.

Steven Dixon

The most frequent terms used to characterize the short fiction of Stephen Dixon are: "experimental," "fabulous," quirky," and "tour de force." Previous writers with whom he has been compared include Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. However, the problem with so many of his stories is that, as imaginative and inventive as they may be, they largely seem to be just that--bloodless experiments with devices and techniques rather than real human events.

Many of Dixon's stories are experiments with traditional narrative structures. For example, "Man of Letters" makes use of the epistolary form in which a man named Newt, who features in a number of Dixon stories, writes a series of letters to a woman he has been seeing. Although he begins the first letter with the sentence, "I don't want to see you anymore," by the time he has verbally examined the relationship and justified his decision by writing a whole stack of letters, he ends by saying, "No matter what I'll be seeing you Friday night." It is as if the very act of writing has so self-consciously engaged the protagonist that he cannot state his feelings; he is too busy trying to impress instead of saying simply what he wants to express. Many of Dixon's stories convey this sense of becoming bogged down in verbal and narrative cleverness and thus never quite expressing a truly human experience.

A more radical narrative device is attempted in the story "14 Stories," in which a potentially tragic central event of a man trying to commit suicide is presented as a kind of comically botched job in which his attempt affects a number of people around him. The story begins with a graphic description of the bullet smashing the character's teeth, leaving his head through the back of the jaw, and then crashing through a window in the hotel room. As the story focuses on the man's effort's to try to get help, it simultaneously describes the reactions of a young boy on the roof at whose feet the bullet finally rests and a chambermaid who discovers the body and, at the end of the story, must clean up the bloody room. Although such an emphasis on characters on the fringes of a central drama is a common short story technique, in Dixon's treatment, the reader remains uninvolved in either the central tragedy or its incidental ramifications for other characters.

Such a transition, within a single story, from the realistic to the absurd, is an example of Dixon's favorite technique--what some critics have called "experimental realism," in which stories seem grounded in solid everyday reality and at the same time completely fantastic in their plots and character configurations. This narrative method was of course made famous in the early twentieth century by Franz Kafka in such stories a "Metamorphosis"--a fiction that seems absolutely realistic in its most minute details--that is, once the reader accepts the fantastic initial premise that the central character is a giant dung beetle. It is also similar to what has been called "magical realism," as practiced by South American writer Gabriel García Márquez, in which fantastic and fabulistic events are described as if they were taking place in a specific real world instead of within the once-upon-a-time world of fairy tale or the purely imaginative reality of folktale and parable.

"Darling" is a typical example of a Dixon story that begins realistically enough with the male protagonist describing his care for an elderly invalid woman. As she asks him to turn her over in bed, to give her medicine, and to bath her, he does so in routine fashion, until the very repeated requests and her constant reference to him as "Darling" begin to irritate him, and the reader, so much that when he starts tormenting her by pouring her drinking water on the floor, turning on the light when she wants it off, and finally dumping her out of bed, all this seem not only normal, but inevitable.

Dixon can narrate the most shocking and horrifying events in such a flat, deadpan style that the event becomes transformed into a kind of surrealistic and highly stylized set of gestures that the reader accepts, only to become appalled at that very acceptance. "The Intruder," perhaps the most extreme example of this technique, begins with a man entering his apartment to find his girlfriend being raped by an intruder who is threatening her with a knife. The story describes in graphic detail the intruder's forcing both the woman and the man to engage in sex acts with him. However, it is the stripped-down and matter-of-fact style with which the acts are described that creates the strange unreal effect the story has. As horrifying as the events are, they seem to take place in a world without emotional response.

George Saunders

When George Saunder's first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned." Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. In fact, that prominent periodical was so impressed by Saunders that it originally published all six of the stories in his new collection, Pastoralia. If that were not encouragement enough, three of the stories in Pastoralia have won O. Henry Awards prizes: "The Falls" in 1997 (which won second prize), "Winky" in 1998, and "Sea Oak" in 1999.

The reviewers of Saunders' two collections have called him variously "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist." Typical of the satirist's need for an object of attack, Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target; however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out to get the pheasant," he usually comes back with "the lower half of a Barbie doll." Comparing Saunders to Vonnegut, Pynchon, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, critics have praised his demented black comic view of modern culture that showcases Americans' fears, shames, and their need to be accepted.

A primary way Saunders creates this view is to zero in on our pop culture entertainments. Whereas the focus of the title story of Saunders' first collection is a virtual reality theme park that simulates America during the Civil War era, the locale of the title story of the new collection is a museum in which two people pretend to be a cave man and woman for the entertainment and edification of the public. The protagonist "caveman" is paired up with a woman who does not perform her job with sufficient commitment; she often speaks English instead of inarticulate grunts, and she quarrels with her son who visits her on the job. Although the protagonist, who must fax reports to management about his fellow worker, tries to protect her, he is soon discovered and she is forced to leave. When a new woman assigned to the cave is more scrupulous than he; the story ends with the reader's suspicion that it won't be long before she has him replaced.

One of Saunders’ most problematical story--so absurdly pop-culture gothic it is not surprising that one of the judges who picked it for the 1999 O. Henry Award Prize Stories was Stephen King--is "Sea Oak." The story focuses on a man who works at a male strip club called Joysticks and who lives with his aunt, sister, and cousin in a subsidized apartment complex called Sea Oak, where there is no sea and no oak, only a rear view of FedEx. Saunders evokes some funny bits here: the Board of Health who visits the club to make sure the men's penises won't show, a television program of computer simulations of tragedies that never actually occurred but theoretically could. However, the story becomes most absurd when aunt Bernie dies and returns from the grave as a zombie who urges the narrator to show his penis so he can make more money.

The ostensible satiric point of the story is Bernie's expression of the unfulfilled longings of all the losers who die unheralded. However, what the reader most remembers is the grotesque image of Bernie's ears, nose, arms, and legs decaying and falling off. If there is a central thematic line in the story, it occurs when the narrator puts what is left of Bernie's body in a Hefty bag, thinking maybe there are angry dead people everywhere, hiding in rooms and bossing around their scared relatives. The story ends with Bernie's voice in the narrator's dreams crying the anthem perhaps of every pathetic, and somehow sympathetic, loser in Saunder's collections--"Some People get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?"

The short story as a form seems a natural for so-called “experimentalism.” If the experiment fails, then not so much is lost, since short stories are so, well, you know, short. And because the short story is short, it is more apt to focus on technique than mimesis, more apt to use language in a self-conscious way than simply as a clear glass through which to gaze at “reality,” whatever that is. Poe knew this at the beginning of the form, and many narrative writers who like to “play” with language have paid tribute to Poe. Although some critics like to draw contrasts between “traditional” or “realist” short story writers, such as Chekhov, Hemingway, Munro, Trevor, etc and the experimentalists I have discussed in these two blogs, in my opinion, Chekhov, Hemingway, Munro, and Trevor are no less experimentalists than Borges, Barth, Barthelme, Millhauser, etc. All great short-story writers are more enamored with language than with what some folks confidently call “reality.” As a result, all great short stories must be read with close attention to how style, technique, form, language creates the “reality of artifice,” (if I might be so bold as to quote the subtitle of one of my books on the short story).

It seems to me that there are two basic kinds of “experimental” short story—the “what if” stories of Barthelme and Saunders and the “alternate reality” stories of Barth and Millhauser. Of the two types, I prefer the latter, for the former often seem to me to be merely satire. And satire, for my taste, too often focuses on social issues rather than individual human complexity. And social issues, it seems to me, are not dealt with in a very complex way in short stories. The experimental stories of David Means and Stephen Millhauser interest me more than the satiric stories of David Saunders and Steven Dixon because they explore individual human complexity in subtle and penetrating ways.

Kevin Wilson, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is Kevin Wilson’s first book. The eleven stories were originally published in such places as Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Greensboro Review. Two of them—“The Choir Director’s Story” and the title story—were chosen for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best in 2005 and 2006. The book received decent reviews in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, comparing Wilson’s quirky little stories to those of George Saunders and Steven Millhauser.

I enjoyed Wilson’s stories, especially the first one entitled “Grand Stand-In.” One of the most intriguing and socially significant stories in the book, it plays the “what-if” game of imagining what it would be like if in our modern displaced society without extended families, there existed an organization that “rented” out grandparents to families who had lost them. The narrator of the story, a “grandmother” who works for a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider, admits that although such a concept is incredibly, undeniably weird (as is true of most of Wilson’s stories), once you accept the concept, it begins to make some bizarre kind of sense.

With the exception of two more realistic stories, “Mortal Combat” and “Go, Fight, Win,” most of the stories are based on “what if” social or conceptual premises, primarily about nonexistent and unusual jobs. One works in a Scrabble factory, searching for Q’s. Another is the curator of a museum that houses things that are ordinarily junk, but which have been transformed into something interesting and valuable simply because someone collected them, such as jars of toenail clippings. Another advises businesses on such possibilities as how many people would be killed if a disgruntled worker came back to take revenge on his former coworkers or how many people would die if a bus got stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic.

Steven Millhauser's short fictions are, like Wilson’s, "suppose" stories. Suppose someone built the ultimate shopping mall? Suppose adolescent female mystery was really caused by witches? Suppose there was an amusement park that opened the door to an alternate reality. Suppose you took an ordinary entertainment, illusion, or metaphor and pushed it as far as it would go." One could say that all of Millhauser's stories go "too far," that is, if the intensive "too far" existed in his vocabulary. While most short-story writers in the last two decades joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies, Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition that extends from Scherazade to Poe and from Kafka to Borges, playfully exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the mundane and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation.

His favorite personae are the impresario, the maestro, the necromancer, the wizard, Prospero on his island, Edison in his laboratory, Barnum in his circus ring. Whether his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the reality of artifice. Millhauser is our most brilliant practicing romantic, for whom surface reality is merely an uninteresting illusion and ultimate reality is always sleight of hand

When George Saunder's first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned." Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. The reviewers of Saunders' first two collections have called him variously "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist." Typical of the satirist's need for an object of attack, Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target; however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out to get the pheasant," he usually comes back with "the lower half of a Barbie doll."

In one of my favorite Saunders stories, "Sea Oak." A man works at a male strip club called Joysticks and lives with his aunt, sister, and cousin in a subsidized apartment complex called Sea Oak, where there is no sea and no oak, only a rear view of FedEx. Saunders evokes some funny bits here: the Board of Health who visits the club to make sure the men's penises won't show, a television program of computer simulations of tragedies that never actually occurred but theoretically could. However, the story becomes most absurd when aunt Bernie dies and returns from the grave as a zombie who urges the narrator to show his penis so he can make more money.

The ostensible satiric point of the story is Bernie's expression of the unfulfilled longings of all the losers who die unheralded. However, what the reader most remembers is the grotesque image of Bernie's ears, nose, arms, and legs decaying and falling off. If there is a central thematic line in the story, it occurs when the narrator puts what is left of Bernie's body in a Hefty bag, thinking maybe there are angry dead people everywhere, hiding in rooms and bossing around their scared relatives. The story ends with Bernie's voice in the narrator's dreams crying the anthem perhaps of every pathetic, and somehow sympathetic, loser in Saunders’s collection--"Some People get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?"

Although I can see the similarity between Wilson’s stories and those of Millhauser and Saunders, and I did enjoy the clever concepts that Wilson creates, I don’t think he has the imagination of Millhauser or the satiric vision of Saunders.

When Wilson was asked how he balances the real and the strange in his stories and keeps them believable, he says that the trick is that he works hard at embracing the ridiculous nature of the stories without making the concerns of the characters ridiculous. He also suggests that when you present something strange and perhaps impossible, you simply incorporate it into the story without making a big deal about it, thus making it more readily accepted by the reader.

I think those are both helpful suggestions about writing "what if" stories.