Best American Short Stories 2010

In her introduction to the 2010 Best American Short Stories, which came out recently, Heidi Pitlor has some bad news and some good news about the short story. She laments, as do we all, the demise over the past decade of such venues for the form as Story, Double Take, and Ontario Review, and the budget slashings that have threatened such journals as Southern Review and the New England Review. But then, she suggests, hopefully, perhaps the length of short stories is better suited to new technologies than other literary forms, citing the shift of Triquarterly and Ascent from print to online, and Atlantic’s decision to sell stories through Kindle.

Concluding that there is cause for concern as well as cause for rejoicing, she advises readers how they can help insure the continuing life of the short story: subscribe to a literary journal, buy a short story collection by a young author. However, readers are not going to do either if they do not like to read short stories, and they will never like to read short stories if they do not know how to read them well, or having learned how to read them, still do not enjoy the experience.

Richard Russo’s Introduction to the volume will not do much to encourage readers to embrace short stories. I know authors are chosen as editors for the Best American Short Stories series because their names on the cover may help to sell copies, and I am all right with that. But surely, the folks at Mariner books could have found someone who knows more about short stories, or cares more about them, than Richard Russo.

Richard Russo is a wry, funny, self-effacing writer who carefully constructs big multigenerational sagas about the great American dream—old-fashioned, multilayered, full-canvas epics with vivid descriptions of classic American places populated by colorful blue-collar characters. He has said that he revels in the discursive, the digressive, and the episodic. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course--that is, unless you try to write short stories.

So what does an old-fashioned Dickensian novelist do when he sits down to write short stories? He writes stories like the ones in Russo’s one collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories-- a textbook example of what often results when an interesting and entertaining novelist writes short stories: pleasurable, but perfectly ordinary, plot-based tales with a concluding twist, featuring likeable but relatively simple characters whose problems the plots resolve rather neatly. Those who like novels will find his stories completely satisfying. Those who like short stories will like them well enough, but they won’t be haunted by them, and they won’t feel the need to read them again.

Perhaps because he doesn’t know much about short stories, in his introduction, Russo doesn’t tell us anything about the stories in the present collection, which is all right, I guess, if he had only told us something, anything, about short stories at all. Instead, he regales (I always wanted to use that word) us with a little anecdotal recollection (not a story) about a time in the late 1980s when he as an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University when a real short story writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited the campus. The anecdote centers on Singer’s answer to a student’s question about the purpose of literature, to which Singer, elderly and frail, responded, “The purpose of literature is to entertain and to instruct.”

Russo then spends a bit of time defending the notion of “entertainment” as opposed to “instruction” (as if those were the only two possibilities for the purpose of literature). The rest of the Introduction describes Singer at a public reading, which turns comically disastrous over his trying to manage his manuscript, which has been stapled together. When he tears off a page, having nothing else to do with it, he lets it drop, and a gust of wind catches it and blow it into the audience. He finally gives up, reaches into his pocket for another manuscript, and reads it instead.

Yeah, that is all very interesting about Singer's difficulty, and how he handled it, etc. etc. Gee, I wish I had been there. In the last paragraph of the introduction, Russo tells us that he read two hundred and fifty stories in order to choose the twenty in the collection, which, he says, felt like some “sort of literary waterboarding.” God help us! If reading short stories is that much like torture for Russo, then why in hell did Mariner Houghton Mifflin not choose an editor who loved short stories? Yeah, I know, I know. Because of the value of the Russo name on the cover.

I have only read half the stories so far, choosing them because of the appeal of the first paragraph, the familiarity of the author, the etc. Here are some impressions, recommendations, impressions, etc. I may get around to the other ten some day.

James Lasdun’s story, “The Hollow,” is the same story as “Oh Death,” which was in the 2010 O. Henry collection. One was published in the U.S. version of his most recent book; the other was published in the British version. I have already commented on Lasdun and this story in previous blog entries. I like Lasdun, and I like this story, no matter what its name is.

Wells Tower, “Raw Water.” I have commented on Wells Tower in a previous blog entry also. He got a lot of buzz last year with his first collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. I was not impressed with that collection. I think Tower is a clever writer with a lot of surface appeal, but with little or no depth. This story about a couple going to live in Triton Estates, a real estate development gone bad on the shores of a sixty square mile manmade lake in the desert, is more of Tower’s inventive cleverness. Futuristic sci-fi satire with snappy dialogue and funny bits, it will while away some time, but not leave you with anything.

Joshua Ferris, “The Valetudinarian.” Ferris was one of the New Yorker’s Twenty-under-Forty crowd this past summer, so it bothers me a bit that he is writing about a man living alone on his sixty-fourth birthday, as if he knows anything at all about that. Ferris is also a funny, clever guy, and this story made me laugh out loud just for the sheer facility with which Ferris moves merrily along almost extemporaneously through it. The central character Arty Groys bitches a lot about his age, his loneliness, his weight, his gallbladder. When an old friend sends a prostitute to visit him, complete with Viagra, problems arise, if nothing else does. It’s funny; it’s rigged; it’s facile.

Lauren Groff, “Delicate Edible Birds.” I was never sure whether this story was meant to be taken seriously, or whether it was a parody of very bad “lost generation” writing of the twenties. It’s part of a collection of stories about famous women; this one is Martha Gellhorn, best known for being Hemingway’s third wife. It’s about a small group of war correspondents held prisoner by a French Nazi sympathizer unless the Martha Gellhorn type character agrees to have sex with him. As Groff tells us in the Contributor’s Notes, the plot is based on a much better story by Guy de Maupassant, “Boule de Suif.” There’s some quite terrible writing in this story, which is so filled with verbal clichés that you begin to predict them. But I think it is a joke. I hope it’s a joke. By the way, for some totally strange reason known only to himself, John Updike chose a not-so-great story by Martha Gellhorn for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In its badness, it sounds a bit like Lauren Groff’s story.

Ron Rash, “The Ascent.” This one was also chosen for New Stories from the South: 2010. It’s the shortest story in the collection, one of those tight, clipped little stories that says little, but make you constantly uneasy. A boy finds a downed airplane in the wilderness near his home. He takes a diamond ring off the body of a woman in the plane and shows it to his parents, saying he found it in the woods. The father says he is taking it to the sheriff, but instead sells it and blows the money. The boy goes back to get a man’s watch, knowing the parents will squander that too. He makes one final trip to the plane. I liked this story. It is the first Ron Rash story I have read. But based on it, I am sending for his collection Chemistry and Other Stories. One of the best things about Best American Short Stories is that it has always been a good way to discover new writers.

Lori Ostlund’s “All Boy,” which I also liked, is, like the Ron Rash story, also about a young boy who seems closed out, alone. In this case, the story moves almost inevitably to the conclusion when the boy learns that his father is moving out to live with a man. I just received a copy of Ostlund’s recent debut collection The Bigness of the World, which won this year’s Flannery O’Connor Prize. I will post a blog on it soon.

Kevin Moffett, “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events” is a story about a young man who tries to write fiction, not very successfully, while teaching remedial writing at a community college. When his retired father begins writing also, quite successfully, the narrator has a hard time dealing with this, especially when he recognizes in his father’s stories many of the events from his past that he has also plans to write about. It’s another funny story that made me laugh. Although it violates a common admonition in MFA writing classes never to write about writing, I liked it.

Jill McCorkle’s “PS” is another comic story, this time a bit too gimmicky for me, written in the form of a long letter from a woman to her marriage counselor. Clever and inventive, but nothing much more than that for me.

Jennifer Eagan, “Safari.” This is still another story about adolescent children trying to come to terms with their father. In this case, the father had taken up with a much younger woman who is working on a Ph.D. program in anthropology at Berkeley. The adolescent daughter tries to break up the relationship. Oh, and by the way, they are on safari in Africa with some other people, one of which is a young man the young woman is inevitably drawn to. Oh, it’s all complicated. What holds it together is the anthropology student’s use of a structural schema to organize the needs of each of the characters and the structural relationships they create. For example, the daughter’s situation is described as “structural resentment,” while the father’s relationship with his younger bedmate is described as “structural incompatibility—all suggesting the way anthropologists study relationships among primitive peoples—which I guess basically everyone is.

Maggie Shipstead, “The Cowboy Tango.” Nothing pretentious about this story. Just a well told love story about a man named Glen Otterbausch, who hires a young woman named Sammy to work on his ranch and falls in love with her. But, alas, you know how love stories must be; she does not love him. She falls in love with his nephew who has recently got a divorce and comes to work on the ranch. But then the nephew leaves, for that’s how love stories are. Otterbausch tries to get revenge on Sammy, but ultimately loves her too much to do so. I am a sucker for a love story, so this one sucked me right in with its uncluttered style and heart-scalded cowboys and cowgirls. It ain’t Annie Proulx, but it will do.

I have been buying my annual copy of Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories for many years now. Their multicolored paperback spines line up neatly on my bookshelves. I have most of the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South collections as well. I don’t always agree with the choices in these books, but they do help me keep up with the short story and introduce me to writers I am happy to discover.

New Yorker's 20 Under 40--Joshua Ferris and Gary Shteyngart

“The Pilot” by Joshua Ferris

Ferris got his MFA from U.C. Irvine. He has published two previous stories in The New Yorker, as well as stories in Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Granta. His first novel, Then We Came to the End, (2007), won the 2007 Pen-Hemingway award and was short-listed for the National Book Award.

This story was written to make you laugh and to make you think about what you are laughing about, in this case a helplessly insecure guy trying to make it writing for television in Hollywood. It is also a story that makes you feel sheepish and a little guilty about what you are laughing about, a story that makes your laughter choke a bit in your throat, but not enough to make you stop laughing, or at least smiling, in that superior way that you know you have. And you are supposed to feel superior to the people in this story, for it is a satire, and that’s what satire does—make fun of others who may or may not deserve to be made fun of. Gogol’s little Akakey in “The Overcoat” and Dostoevsky’s self-conscious “Underground Man” are the early prototypes of this character.

I do not know the Hollywood world of Lawrence Himshell, the story’s protagonist, but I know his mind. His self-consciousness and insecurity are universal. The story’s stimulus is a simple matter. Lawrence gets an email invitation to a party from a woman, whose successful television series has just finished shooting. However, since the email is copied to him instead of sent directly to him, he is not completely sure he has been invited, and he is more distraught when he does not get a reply to his favor-currying RSVP, nor does he get a reminder about the party.

Ferris knows how to make us laugh at Lawrence’s continually second-guessing about every action he takes and every thing he says--even anguishing over the latest protocol for kissing hello at parties. I remember once greeting a female a colleague from Spain; she leaned over to pretend-press her lips on my cheek, and. thinking it was a hug, I held on while she struggled to get to my other cheek.

“The Pilot” is also a funny satire about those who always need to play a role—usually of a television character—of someone else. It’s a nice touch that Lawrence goes to the party wearing a windbreaker and biting a toothpick like a television character called the “coach.” It is supposed to make him look cool, but it only makes him feel foolish.

Lawrence tries to ingratiate himself with his “betters” at the party, but is effortlessly rebuffed by those he approaches. Then the story shifts in the last long paragraph (a column and half), when the pilot he is working on (imitative of TV series that have succeeded) catches fire on his lap and he throws himself into the swimming pool.

Endings are often the most important parts of short stories, for everything seems to lead to them inevitably. The fact that I continued to laugh at an ending when this harmless schmuck flounders in the pool, promising himself that tomorrow (which may never come) he will be a better man and finish his pilot, makes me wonder if I have not been maneuvered to a too-easy ending. Satire like this is an easy-going break for me—a pleasant pastime, but not very challenging. At least, I feel some sympathy for the central character, identifying with his unease and sense of failure.

“Lenny Hearts Eunice” by Gary Shteyngart

This story is also a satire, this time with two easy targets—the predictable insecure little guy, and the current Iphone/Internet/Texting/Twitter culture in which so many young people seem to live. The title refers to the use of little hearts on such shorthand communication in place of the word love.

Shteyngart, born in Russia, but a U.S. resident now, got some good notices for his earlier novels, “Debutante’s Handbook (2003) and Absurdsistan (2006), and this piece may be a chapter from a novel-in-progress, although it does have a sense of wholeness with an ending that could be revelatory. Or it could be a transition to the next chapter.

The schmuck here is Lenny Abramaov, who calls himself a “humble diarist, a small nonentity.” Larry meets a young Asian woman while he is at the end of a one-year sabbatical in Rome. Lenny is thirty-nine, but the girl, Eunice, who is twenty-four, thinks he is an old gross guy, for one of the satirical targets of this story is how today’s society is increasingly youth-oriented. The story is told in the conventional nineteenth-century technique of letters and diary entries, so what we hear are the alternating voices of Lenny and Eunice, as he pines for her and she makes fun of him.

The story seems to take place in the not-too-distant future, for Lenny works for The Post-Human Services Division of the Staarling-Wapachung Corporation, whose one goal is the “total annihilation of death.” Lenny gets replaced by a younger man and is told to go to the Eternity Lounge to try to look a little younger, because he reminds everyone of death, or “an earlier version of our species.” When Eunice breaks up with her boyfriend in Rome and flies to New York, she begins a condescending relationship with the ever-eager Lenny. Completely occupied with a Iphone or Ipad kind of device, she is “freaked out” when she catches Lenny reading an actual book by some Russian guy named Tolstoy. However, since this is a love story of sorts, Eunice begins to soften toward Lenny, for he is such a sweet guy.

The story ends with Lenny and Eunice at the zoo where, when they see an elephant, she grabs Lenny’s long nose “because I’m Jewish,” he says. She then says, kokiri, which means “long nose” or elephant in Korean, and tells Lenny, “I heart your nose so much” and begins kissing it. Identifying with the lonely elephant, Lenny contents himself with Eunice’s patronizing affection, and thinks of her lips on his nose, “the love mixed with the pain” and thinking “how it was just too beautiful to ever let go.” Sweet, sensitive Lenny says, “Let’s go home. I don’t want kokiri to see you kissing my nose like that. It’ll only make him sadder.”

The story is a little bit funny, a little bit sweet, a little bit sentimental, a little bit satiric, kinda clever. But ultimately I am not sure what it reveals about anything of any significance. Lenny is kind of a sap; Eunice is kind of a bitch. The world in which they live is superficial and exaggerated for effect. Superficial people like Lenny and Eunice exist only in satiric fiction, because the satirist is never interested in going beneath the surface, must never create characters that seem like complex individuals.

Bottom line for me concerning both these stories is: Will I be eager to read another story by Joshua Ferris or Gary Shteyngart. Probably not. Both seem just a little too superior and supercilious, picking easy targets for their brittle poking fun. I think George Saunders and Steven Millhauser do a much better job with this kind of satire than Ferris and Shteyngart. With them, you get a sense of depth and meaning, a conceptual complexity, and an imaginative reality to experience, not just simple laughs.