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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Junot Diaz's Story "Miss Lora"--"This is Some Real Shit?"

When I read that Junot Diaz had won the Sunday Times Short Story Award for his story “Miss Lora,” I swore I was not going to say a frickin word about it on this blog. I did not have access to the other stories on the short list--

 "The Gun" by Mark Haddon
"Evie" by Sarah Hall
"The Dig" by Cynan Jones
"Call It 'The Bug' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title" by Toby Litt
"The Beholder" by Ali Smith

So who in the hell am I to second guess the decision of the judges—Joanna Trollope, Andrew O’Hagan, Sarah Waters, Lionel Shriver, and Andrew Holgate?  (At this point, you may be nodding your head sagely or wryly in agreement).

But then I read that O’Hagan called “Miss Lora” a “contemporary classic” and that Holgate said: "If the test of an outstanding short story is that it deepens with every reading, then Junot Diaz's 'Miss Lora' passes that test with flying colours. It is a rich, precise and challenging story whose emotional pull becomes more and more apparent with each revisit.” 

I had already read the story three times—once when it appeared in The New Yorker and twice when it appeared in This is How You Lose Her. (I comment on that book in an earlier blog).  But Holgate's suggestion that the story deepened with every reading, which made it an outstanding story, challenged me, so I read it a fourth time.  You see, I agree that an “outstanding story” deepens with every reading. Maybe I missed something.

After a fourth reading, I find I need help here.  I have been reading and studying and writing about short stories for forty years; I have read thousands of stories multiple times.  Surely, by this time I should know what makes an “outstanding short story” and what does not.  Maybe I deceive myself.  But with all due respects to the honorable judges of the Sunday Times Short Story Award, I just do not see that “Miss Lora” is an outstanding short story.  I wish someone would help me understand how I could be so wrong about a story that has been judged “best” to the tune of some $45,000 American dollars.  Lord, Lord, Lord, that’s a lot of money where I come from!

The piece about Diaz’s win in The Guardian quoted Diaz as saying "Miss Lora" was a "challenging" story to write, noting, "We tend, as a culture, to think of boys having underage sex quite differently to how we think of girls. I find that quite disturbing, and wanted to question the logic of that," he said. "If a boy has sex with his teacher, people under their breath are kind of high-fiving the kid. If a 16- or 15-year-old girl has sex with an older teacher – forget about it. No one's celebrating. That seemed really strange."

Díaz said he grew up "with so many young men who had experiences when they were teenagers with older women, and was interested in writing about the issue. "The silence around it is pretty enormous," he said. "I think it is a conversation we need to continue to have."

Since this all sounds like pretty damned serious stuff for a story about a kid whose girlfriend won’t let him screw her, so he turns to an older woman who will, Diaz repeated This apologia for the story on an interview on the BookTrust blog:

"So many of the young men I grew up with had, during their adolescences, these difficult-to-categorize sexual relationships with older women. What's unnerving is that because we think of adolescent boys - especially teenagers of colour - as already hypersexualised, we tend not to consider these kinds of relationships as criminal and abusive as we do similar relationships that involve teenage girls. I wanted to jump right into the middle of the awful ambivalence. And I also wanted to do justice to that mid-1980s atmosphere of apocalyptic dread that I grew up in. So many of my students and younger nephews have no idea how fearsomely apocalyptic that period was, how the shadow of nuclear annihilation was over all of us. I guess this is one of those sex and the apocalypse stories, my very own, New Jersey, Mon Amour."

I am sure Diaz will forgive me as he laughs all the way to the bank if I say, “Bullshit!” I cannot see that Diaz is exploring an “issue” in this story.  Granted, our culture is more willing to “forgive,” “understand,” even approve of, sex between a young boy and an adult woman than sex between an adult man and an underage girl. Diaz may find that “very strange,” but this story does not deal with that social issue in any way.  I don’t think a story has to deal with an “issue” at all, but I think it is pretentious for Diaz to suggest that his story does contribute to a “conversation” about this one.

Diaz told Sam Anderson in The New York Times that “Miss Lora” was the easiest story in the book to write; he said he tried to write the first page several time in the last decade but never wrestled with it too much.   “And then one day it just hit, beginning to end.”  And that’s how it reads—like a riff in which various bits are stitched together whether they are related or not—apocalypse fear, a dead brother, an older woman, a girlfriend who won’t give in—all connected by the horniness of a sixteen-year-old Dominican boy.

Well, I read it again last night before I went to bed—a fifth reading—and this morning I am reading it slowly, taking notes, the way I would if I were teaching the story—a sixth reading.  Is that enough? Please God, say yes, that’s enough.   In this, my final, I swear, reading, I have translated all the Spanish (what some critics like to praise as “Spanglish”), and I went back and read all the reviews of This is How You Lose Her.  No reviewer singled out “Miss Lora” for special consideration, but everybody praised Diaz’s combination of street talk and big words.  According to the reviewers, it takes a special kind of prose brilliance to be able to say “You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker” in one breath and talk about “atavistic impulses” and “fulgurating sadness” in another.

Yunior/Diaz says he is at the age when you could “fall in love” with a girl over a gesture.  He says that’s what happened when his girlfriend Paloma stooped to pick up her purse, and his “heart flew out” of him.  Oh, Romeo, was it really Juliet’s sweet ass that won your heart? As Yunior so romantically puts it, “Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason.”  So after one night when he is allowed to “touch Paloma’s clit” with the tip of his tongue and she holds his head back with “the force of her whole life,” he “gives up, demoralized.”  I mean, can you blame the kid for turning to Miss Lora—a woman who happily pops his rabo in her mouth while he holds her “tresses like reins…urging her head to keep its wonderful rhythm,” adding generously, “You really do have an excellent body, you say after you blow your load.” How can he resist a woman who lets him “bone her straight in the ass”? "Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come.  You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides.  That makes me shoot like a rocket.”  Didn’t I see that in a porno movie once?

Even though Diaz says he is trying to deal with the apocalyptic fears of the 1980s in the story, what he really talks about here are the movies he saw—The Late Great Planet Earth, The Day After, Threads, Red Dawn, WarGames, Gamma World.  Yep, this kid is really suffering from fear of the end of the world as we know it. And this is why he gets involved with an older woman. Sure.  Guys used to use that “end of the world” line back in the fifties and sixties when the Russians were coming too.

I am not a prude.  I have defended sexually explicit writing in print and in court.  However, I do not see that “Miss Lora” is “about anything” except a sixteen-year-old wanting sex.  I suspect that many sixteen-year-old boys do.  And I have no objection to someone using male adolescent sexual desire as the basis of a story.  However, I think a story should be “about something” more than just having sex.  There is no thematic relationship in “Miss Lora” between sex with an older woman and fear of the end of the world.  The only thematic relationship between sex with an older woman and the death of Yunior’s older brother in the story is simply that, as the second paragraph proudly states, he would “fuck anything.” Now, Yunior will “fuck anything” also.  So that’s what this story is about?  A sixteen-year-old-boy who would “fuck anything.”  As Diaz/Yunior would say, “That’s some real shit.”

To repeat what one of the judges of The Sunday times Short Story Award said after giving Juno Diaz $45,000: "If the test of an outstanding short story is that it deepens with every reading, then Junot Diaz's 'Miss Lora' passes that test with flying colours. It is a rich, precise and challenging story whose emotional pull becomes more and more apparent with each revisit.” (No pull pun intended, I am sure).  Well, I have revisited “Miss Lora” as many times as I can bear.  If someone would tell me what makes this an “outstanding story,” I would much appreciate it.

The Story Prize 2013: Junot Diaz and Dan Chaon

The Story Prize, established in 2004 to honor short story collections, especially worthy collections that are often ignored by other Prizes, will have its annual award ceremony on March 13, 2013. The winner will receive  $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000.  The three finalists for the award are:

Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her

Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake

Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn

I posted my opinion of Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her last October; you can find it, if you are of a mind to, by searching my archive. I swear to God, I read the book three times before writing that blog entry; I absolutely refuse to read it a fourth time for this entry.  I stand by my previous opinion that the main reasons reviewers rhapsodize over Diaz are: his still trendy focus on multicultural, social, immigrant issues; his coarse street-smart patois combined with smooth university-wise lingo; and his “I-can’t-commit-but I-am-fuckincool-about-it” persona Yunior, who, after three book’s worth, I am pretty tired of listening to; really now, aren’t you? Yunior/Diaz is just too nerdy-adolescent-horny-pottymouth-self-indulgent-simplistic for my view of what makes good short stories.

I read Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn a few weeks ago, one after the other, and my first-read reaction was that I liked the Watkins book better than the Chaon.  This was not what I expected.  Please allow me to explain my lukewarm response to Chaon in this blog essay and my more enthusiastic response to Wakins in one next week.

Chaon’s first collection, Fitting Ends, which I read and enjoyed, came out in 1996, although it had a bit too much of the “young-man-just-out-of-creative-writing-workshop” feel about it (even if some of the workshops were chaired by Tobias Wolfe).  And I did not agree with the reviews (mostly in the Cleveland Plain Dealer) that, just because Chaon was from Ohio, claimed his work “resonated” (horrid overused word!) with that of Ohio’s most famous literary son Sherwood Anderson.). Chaon’s second collection, Among The Missing, which I also read with some pleasure, was released to considerable more ballyhoo in 2001 and made the shortlist of the National Book Award that year.

After the publication of Fitting Ends, Chaon posted a little essay on the Random House website in which he described his first book in terms that sounded very much like his most recent collection Stay Awake:

“I think of this collection as a series of ghost stories set in the real, non-supernatural world, and I wanted the stories to evoke the mixed emotions that such ‘ghostly’ glimpses can elicit—dread and uneasy courage, sadness and nervous laughter.”

In this little publicity essay, Chaon calls the short story a “solitary and lonely creature” that resists being corralled into a pack with its fellows.” Stories are meant to be experienced singly, he said (echoing a sentiment expressed by William Dean Howells last century) “with a long, silent pause between each one.”  And indeed, in a Los Angeles Times review of Among the Missing, Michael Harris said that the only real drawback to the stories in the book is there is a “sameness to them, in tone and theme, that wouldn’t be so noticeable if we read them as there were written, one at a time.”

This “samesness..in tone and theme” may also be one of the problems of Stay Awake.  Patrick McGrath says in his New York Times review that one of the curious aspects of this new collection is Chaon’s recurring use of a few distinctive motifs, the sense of which is of “a narrow cluster of related ideas being urgently worked out.” McGrath concludes,  “These stories feel as though they had been written fast, one after another, expressing with some urgency, a closely related set of various on a given theme.”

As I read these stories a second time, I was torn between whether this sense of “sameness,” “recurrence,” and “urgency” comes from some inner authorial obsession relevant to universal human experience (which would be a good thing) or whether the feeling springs from Chaon’s rapid-writing exploration of a familiar literary genre (which would not be so good except as a “good read” (horrid phrase for easy pop stuff).

In an interview in Publishers’ Weekly on November 28, 2012 Chaon says the idea for Stay Awake came after writing a requested genre story for a 2003 anthology with the “good read” title, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales.  Chaon’s response to that request was the first story in Stay Awake, entitled “The Bees.” While writing the story, Chaon says he started toying with the idea of writing a book of ghost stories, calling his new collection the (his words, my emphasis) “product of playing with the ghost story and with horror forms.”

In his review of Stay Awake, in The Washington Post (2/17/12), Jeff Turrentine notes that ghost stories have long played an important role in literature: as terrifiers, fuddy-duddy moralizers, stand-ins for repressed sexual desire, inducers of guilt, etc.  “But writers of literary fiction usually feel compelled to tread lightly in the graveyard.  For all their spookiness, ghosts can be something of a cheap fix: spectral shorthand for the idea that a character is ‘haunted’ by some weighty matter left unresolved.”  Indeed, there may be something that smacks of the self-conscious “fix” about the stories in Stay Awake, cheap or no.

In his New York Times review, Patrick McGrath says that many of the characters in Stay Awake seem to be hovering on the brink of insanity.  Folks used to say that of Poe’s characters too, but madness in Poe was more complicated that that.  McGrath says the best of Chaon’s stories embody the “great guilt pleasure of good horror fiction: the sickening moment when the monstrosity at the heart of the story’s darkness suggests itself to the eager imagination, while still withholding its true shape.”  The problem, of course, is whether Chaon’s stories are ghostly because of the complex human mystery they explore, or whether their spookiness just springs from crazy guys who go bump in the night.

For me, the best definition of a truly spooky story—the kind of story that Poe pioneered so many years ago—is actually provided by Chaon’s narrator/protagonist in “Fitting Ends,” the title story of his first book, that is: one in which all the details add up so that you know the end even before the last sentence.

One of the characters in Donald Barthelme’s story “See the Moon” says, “Fragments are the only forms I trust. Donald Barthelme himself once said, ''The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century.” Like Barthelme, Chaon says he is a “very collage-oriented thinker,” adding that “fragments are really important to me as a writer.”  He adds in the Publishers Weekly interview that he realizes there is a degree to which in several stories in Stay Awake he is subconsciously commenting on his own writing process, concluding that he is interested in the way collage can create certain moods better than a linear narrative.

“Fitting Ends” is about a man trying to fit all the loose ends of his life together into a coherent story. It does not have a chronological plot structure, but revolves around various stories the narrator Stewart recalls from his childhood.  The first such story, about his brother De, recounts three different appearances of a ghostly figure walking on the railroad tracks near the nearly deserted village of Pyramid, Nebraska and then falling on his knees in front of a train.  A few years after these supposed sightings began, Del, who was seventeen at the time, is killed by a train while walking along the tracks. 

Chaon has said that “Fitting Ends” owes a debt to the self-reflexive story, “Death in the Woods” by Sherwood Anderson. Like that more complex story--about a boy who sees a mysterious scene in the woods and tries to understand the meaning of it--Chaon’s self-conscious concern here is with how “storytelling” tries to come to terms with the ambiguous relationship between truth and lies by pulling disparate events together into a significant whole. The theme is announced in the first paragraph of “Fitting Ends” when the narrator tells how his brother’s death has been transformed into the stuff of story in a book called More Tales of the Weird and Supernatural, a book whose author says is based on “true facts.”  The event the author describes is concerned with one of the basic aspects of fiction—the presentation of events that anticipate events yet to occur.  The author’s fascination with the story of the sightings of a ghost on the train track results from the fact that the ghost of Del appears two years before he died.  As Stewart says, it is the nature of story that the reader can “imagine the ending.” This anticipates the ending of “Fitting Ends” when Stewart notes that at certain moments all the loose ends of his life fit together as easily as a writer can write a ghost story in which all the details add up so you know the end even before the last sentence.

The basic technique of the story reflects its theme, for Stewart recounts various anecdotes about his childhood in an effort to make them “come together” into a coherent story.  In his contributor’s notes to the 1996 Best American Short Stories, in which “Fitting Ends” appeared, Chaon says that writing a story for him is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle in which he writes hundreds of pages of fragments and puts them in a folder hoping they will “mate.” He says he had a folder three inches thick full of jottings about the brothers Del and Stewart.  He says when it came to putting these fragments together, he found it helpful to read the works of others who inspired him, such as Sherwood Anderson’s “Death in the Woods” and Alice Munro’s stories about time and loss.

All the characters in the twelve stories in Stay Awake are haunted in one way or another. For example, in “To Psychic Underword,” a man named Critter begins to see upsetting messages in the world around him after the death of his wife, “as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals.” In “I Wake Up,” a boy goes to live with a foster family after his mother is sent to prison, sleeping in the bed of their dead son.  In “St Dismas,” a man rescues his meth-addict ex-girlfriend’s daughter, only to desert her because he cannot handle the responsibility.   In “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow,” a man feels guilt and responsibility for not attending his baby’s funeral. Other stories in the collection deal with characters who are brain damaged, who lose their fingers in an accident, who commit suicide, and who murder others.  Arguably the three most representative stories are “The Bees,” “Patrick Lane Flabbergasted,” and “Stay Awake.”

“The Bees” centers on a man--who admits he was once a drunk and a monster—being haunted by his past. “Something bad has been looking for him for a long time, he thinks, and now, at last, it is growing near.” Although he is remarried and has a young boy who is tormented by nightmares, he has been dreaming of his first son, DJ, who he once took on a carnival ride and then made fun of him for being afraid.  He beat his first wife and child until they ran away, and he has not seen them since.  When he dreams that DJ comes back to him as a ghost and threatens him, he awakes to a room full of smoke.  The story ends with this gruesome image: “He sees, off to the side, the long black plastic sleeping bag, with a strand of Karen’s blond hair hanging out from the top.  He sees the blackened, shriveled body of a child curled into a fetal position.”  Yes, it is a spooky, grisly tale of being haunted by your past sins, but it exists solely, it seems to me, to frighten the reader, not to explore the complexities of guilt.

The central character in “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted” focuses on a young man living in the home of his dead parents, for whom, “There were simply fewer and fewer things he felt like doing, indifferently aware “that things had probably deteriorated.”  As he cuts himself off in the house, his actual living quarters shrink more and more.  He finds an old Scrabble game in the basement and throws it across the floor when some cockroaches come out, feeling that the tiles had spelled some eerie message to him.  He begins to see markings on his arms in his own handwriting. His feet start to develop a fungus. He feels that video games, the television, and computer images create a small force field around him.  A bagger in a grocery store, he thinks more and more that his days in the store are like being in a zombie movie.  When his sister tells him that he just has to get himself together, he imagines there was a way in which all the pieces of his life can come together—the zombie movie, the Scrabble game, the note his parents left him when they killed themselves—but the story ends with the power shutting down, covering him in darkness. This treatment of the conventional image of a dysfunctional young man haunted by who knows what demons, seems primarily a compilation of clichés—zombie movies, scrabble games, technology media--for disengagement and isolation.

“Stay Awake, the title story, is the most grotesque piece in the book. A man and his wife have twins conjoined at the head, in which the parasitic one fails to develop a body.  The man falls asleep dreaming while driving and has an accident that puts him in the hospital.  He becomes obsessed with the child, doing research on the phenomenon of conjoined twins.  He discovers the concept of Astral Projection, which posits that the self exists outside the body and is connected to the physical self while sleeping by a silver thread.  He imagines that his child, who survives after surgery to remove the parasite head, may have felt the other brain drifting up like astral projection when it is removed.  He thinks that one day she may wake up and remember the way someone else’s thoughts felt, hearing a voice say, “I’m still awake.” 

Perhaps the story began with Chaon’s own research into the phenomenon of conjoined twins (The protagonist discovers on the Internet the story of The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal born in 1783, who lived four years with a separate head before dying of a cobra bite). Perhaps then Chaon saw the possibility of exploring the theme of universal human isolation--never being able to share the mind of another and know how someone else thinks or feels.  However, since the central image is never really bound up with the human isolation theme, the story is interesting only because of the grotesque image of a child with two heads. (You can look up the Two-Headed Bengal Boy on the Internet and see pictures of his dual skull, that is, if you really want to).

Ever since Poe, the short story has been a favored form for the presentation of the obsessive, the supernatural, the otherworldly.  However, the best of such stories are characterized by a tight stylistic control and an exploration of the mystery of the human personality.  The best of such stories are not just about characters who are schizophrenic or psychotic, and thus whose motivations and actions are outside the realm of human understanding.  In the best of such stories, one can usually arrive at a fearful answer to the question, “what made him or her do that?” by examining one’s own inner self.  When the answer to the question is simply “He was crazy,” the story is not among the best of them, just among the most horrifying.  There is just too much of horror for entertainment’s sake in these stories, it seems to me--simple horror that competent writing by a known “literary” writer cannot conceal.

The Publisher’s Weekly interview mentioned earlier ends with Chaon admitting that the stories in Stay Awake were the result of “playing with the ghost story and with horror forms,” but then adding that as he was finishing up the book, he “realized that there was something about the mood of the stories, a mood of loss and dread of what comes next, a sense of things not working out the way we thought they were going to, that really spoke to the current moment in an immediate way.”

An interesting afterthought apologia, but not convincing enough to redeem these stories out of the realm of the simply horrifying into the literary short story world of the complexly meaningful.

Next week:  Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn

Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her

Once or twice every year, a collection of short stories is published to such critical acclaim that my own lukewarm reaction to it makes me wonder if I know what the hell I am talking about here.

Last year, it was Don Delillo’s The Angel Esmeralda, which got rave reviews and was nominated for several awards, although I felt it was self-indulgent and showed no understanding of the uniqueness of the short story form.  This year, it was Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a collection of slick, O. Henry-type trick pieces, but which critics loved and which won the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

When I found out a few months ago that a new collection of Junot Diaz stories was due out, I decided not to buy it.  I did not like the stories in his first collection, Drown, although the critics fell all over themselves praising Diaz’s depiction of the “hardscrabble” (their word) world of Dominican immigrants and Diaz’s “streetwise” (their word) language.

This was the awed opening paragraph of a San Francisco Chronicle interview story on Junot Diaz in September 1996 after the publication of Drown: “Junot Diaz couldn’t read or write Spanish, let alone English, when he came to this country from the Dominican Republic at age 7.  Today he’s being hailed as a major new voice in American literature.”

Named one of Newsweek’s “new faces of 1996,” (a face that publicity photos showed grin-glowering under a shaved head), Diaz got a six-figure contract for his first collection Drown and promised to write a novel. Alan Cheuse, chair of the committee that chose Diaz for the Pen/Malamud Award that year explained, that Diaz wrote about material no one had really focused on before: “the Dominican-American way of looking at things.” The Boston Review called Diaz one of the very first serious chroniclers of the Dominican Diaspora in English-language fiction. Introducing a slice of heretofore-unrevealed life to most American readers.

Six years later, The Boston Globe announced crisply “Then—nothing.” Diaz said he couldn’t write, that he did not feel natural anymore. It took five more years for his first novel to be published, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  I listened to all of Oscar Wao--for which Diaz won the Pulitzer--on my Ipod while walking my dog in my safe, white, middle-class neighborhood, and decided that Diaz’s voice and talent for narrative expanse made him a better novelist than a short story writer. Fine, let him write novels about Yunior and his “hardscrabble streetwise” life and leave the short story to others.

Then short pieces of fiction started to appear in The New Yorker. I read them, but I thought they were chapters of still another novel about Yunior.  So when I saw that a new collection of short stories was due out, I decided to ignore it.  But recently Diaz won one of the MacArthur, so-called “genius,” awards, and This is How You Lose Her was nominated for the National Book Award.  

As a life-long fan of the short story—a guy who has read and written about so many stories over the past fifty years that he is supposed to know something about the form and writes about it on a blog, I had no choice.  I downloaded the book and set about trying to figure out why critics think this guy is so great.

Although I had already read most of these stories when they appeared in The New Yorker, I read them all again, shook my head in disbelief, and tossed the book aside to ponder the mysteries of critical opinion.  I have been pondering for the past two weeks, and—given my determination to read short stories at least twice—I am reading them again, trying to reserve judgment.  After all, when I was teaching, I always encouraged my students to “do the research” after having read stories at least once—listen to what other readers/reviewers had to say—then make a considered analysis.

Maybe I missed something.  Maybe I was biased in some way.  Maybe I was exercising some personal preference rather than critical judgment.  So, I did my usual Internet Lexis-Nexis search to see if the many superlatives in the reviews were actually justified or just the result of reviewer reverence for immigrant fiction.

Carmen Gimenez Smith on National Public Radio says that one of the greatest appeals of Diaz’s work is his ability to balance the “less palatable qualities” of his characters—cruelty, abuse, and infidelity. Similarly, Sanjena Sathian, in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, says that each of his stories evokes an empathy with the narrator, although the narrator is not the type of person most readers want to like.  I think that is true. Yunior is (to use Diaz’s language) fucked up, but in a way that may not be as simple as it first appears. Sarah Hall says in The Guardian that Diaz has the ability to spend 200 pages on Junior as the perpetuator of unforgivable crimes and in the end making his sorrow and sorrowfulness our own. 

Smith also says that This is How You Lose Her is a major contribution to the short story form, for it exemplifies Diaz’s minimalist and voice-driven writing.  Other critics point to Diaz’s maximalist style. Sam Anderson in The New York Times says Diaz’s work is characterized by a “kind of radical inclusiveness.  My own opinion is that what seems “short-story-like” in Diaz’s often rambling novelistic inclusiveness is a dependence on rhythm, rather than plot, and a movement toward a conventional metaphoric short story type ending.

It seems to me that Diaz appeals to the still trendy focus on multicultural, social, immigrant issues among critics.  Carmen Gimenez Smith says that Diaz deals with the “complicated particulars of cultural exile, of want and of the bravado that is born of fear.”  And Leah Hager Cohen in The New York Times says that Diaz’s signature subject is “what it means to belong to Diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider-outsider status.  “Invierno” is singled out as a favorite by several reviewers because of its focus on the conventional immigrant experience.

However, in spite of their desire to justify Diaz’s work as being a contribution to immigrant fiction, reviewers cannot help but be most attracted to his prose style. Cohen calls Diaz’s idiom so “electrifying” that it is practically an act of aggression, describing his rhythm as “a syncopated stagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire.”  Claire Lowdon in The Observer has suggested that whereas in Drown, Diaz’s voice was not fully formed, “nervous of its own newness,” but in this second collection he has refined Yunior’s voice “into an utterly convincing idiolect that takes in delicate literary detail and tough bilingual argot.”  Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times calls him “one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully electric.” 

No one goes as far as Sukhdev Sadhu in The Telegraph¸ who exults that this collection is so “sharp, so bawdy, so raw with emotion, and so steeped in the lingo and rhythms of working class Latino life that it makes most writing that crosses the Atlantic seem hopelessly desiccated by comparison.”

My favorite story in the collection is the first one, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”—partially because I think it best embodies the typical Yunior voice—clever lines and lyrical descriptions with a bit of street talk and some educated academic language interspersed, but not the gratuitously coarse language of some of the other stories.  Sometimes, it seems as if Diaz wants to write a lyrical realistic story but gets pulled back to the “voice.”  For example, when he and his girl go to the DR, we hear this confession:

“If this were another kind of story, I’d tell you about the sea.  What it looks like after it’s been forced into the sky through a blowhole. How when I’m driving in from the airport and see it like this, like shredded silver.”  “And I’d tell you about the traffic…a cosmology of battered cars…”  “But that would make it another kind of story, and I’m having enough trouble with this one as it is.”
 

His deft combining of the coarse and the academic is obviously appeal to many readers:

“And she’ll turn her head, which is her way of saying, I’m too proud to acquiesce openly to your animal desires, but if you continue to put your finger in me I won’t stop you.”

“Every fifty feet there’s at least one Eurofuck beached out on a towel like some scary pale monster that the sea’s vomited up.  They look like philosophy professors, like budget Foucaults, and too many of them are in the company of a dark-assed Dominican girl.”

Diaz sprinkles enough clever sentences throughout the story to keep one looking for them, and smiling when they are found:

“You know how it is.  A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life.”

“She treats me like I ate somebody’s favorite kid.”

She is “short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in.”

“She’s sensitive, too.  Takes to hurt the way paper takes to water.”

“Magda gets to her feet and walks stiff-legged toward the water. She’s got a half-moon of sand stuck to her butt.  A total fucking heartbreak.”

“It’s a thousand degrees out and the mosquitoes hum like they’re about to inherit the earth.”

“Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit either.”

The final epiphany in the story comes when Yunior is taken by a man called The Vice President and his bodyguard Barbaro to the Cave of the Jagua. When they hold him by his ankles and lower him into the hole, he recognizes that it is an epiphany: “This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better.”  He cries and they pull him up and call him a pussy. The story ends when he gets back to their bungalow and Magda is packing to go home.  “I sat down next to her.  Took her hand.  This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.”  It is a plaintive cry that will echo throughout the stories.

Two stories focus on Yunior’s brother, Rafa, who is dying of cancer. In “Nilda,” Rafa is described this way: “You should have seen him in those days: he had the face bones of a saint.” Rafa was boxing then and “was cut up like crazy, the muscles on his chest and abdomen so striated they looked like something out of a Frazetta drawing.”

Yunior describes himself this way: “I had an IQ that would have broken you in two but I would have traded it in for a halfway decent face in a second.” He says girls start to notice him and in another universe he would probably be OK, “ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.”

In “The Pura Principle,” when Rafa is dying, Yunior is 17. “Dude had lost eighty pounds from the chemo, looked like a break-dancing ghoul.” This story is one of the weakest of the Yunior stories, for it rambles about too much, lacks focus, depends too much on Junior’s tough-talking reaction to Rafa dying, and ends weakly.

“Alma,” the shortest story, whose final line gives the book its title--“This is how you lose her”--is told in second person by Yunior, who has a girlfriend with a “big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans.  An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit.”

When she finds his journal, he says he is “overwhelmed with pelagic sadness.” I confess I had to look it up.  Does he mean pelagic, meaning relating to the open sea,or Pelagian, relating to the British/Irish monk who denied the doctrine of original sin in 418?

Several reviewers single out  “Invierno,” the most traditional immigrant story in the book, as a favorite.  It deals with a very young Yunior and his mother and brother being first brought to American by his philandering and often cruel father, who often takes him on his pussy runs. “A father is a hard thing to compass,” says Yunior. His father gets the boy’s head shaved and he has to wear a Christmas hat around the apartment to keep warm, making him look like an “unhappy tropical elf.”

At the end of the story, Yunior’s homesick and lonely mother takes them out in the snow for a Joycean ending with a Diaz twist as they look over the landfill toward the ocean. As the mother weeps, they throw snowballs at the “sliding cars and once I removed my cap just to feel the snowflakes scatter across my cold, hard scalp.” 

 In another second person story, “Miss Lora,” a year has passed since Rafa’s death, and (dropping another one of those dictionary words)  Yunior says he feels a fulgurating sadness. (You look it up.). Yunior is 16 and at his most strutting, street-talking self, describing the older, teacher he has sex with this way: “chick was just wiry like a motherfucker, every single fiber standing out in outlandish definition.  Bitch made Iggy Pop look chub.”

The final story,” The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” is a kind of compendium of what has gone before.  Yunior is grown up now, but not quite--a professor and a writer, fraught with tenure madness and the pressure of “the book” he is trying to write.  The story is one of the weakest in the collection, for it seems artificially constructed and flawed by easy, clichéd phrases, e.g.

“Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul.”

He makes it through the semester.  “You ain’t your old self (har-har!)

“The rest of the semester ends up being a super-duper clusterfuck.”

“You want to move on, to exorcise shit.”

We leave him, pondering his folder (a kind of binder of women) which contains copies of all the e-mails and fotos from his cheating days, the one his ex found and mailed to him with this postscript:  “Dear Yunior, for your next book.”

The “next book”--which we assume is this book--ends not with a bang, but a whimper:

“That’s about it.  In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.” 

On my third reading, I appreciated the rhythm more than before, but I still do not agree with the rave reviews and the prestige awards.  “That’s about it.”

New Yorker Stories by David Means, Junot Diaz, and Joyce Carol Oates

Although I get behind occasionally, I try to keep up with the fiction published weekly in The New Yorker. I don’t care what some critics say about the so-called standardized New Yorker story; issue for issue, the magazine consistently publishes some of the best short fiction being written nowadays. And at a story per issue (not to mention a couple of special fiction issues), they certainly publish the most.

During March, I read three stories in The New Yorker, back to back, and the experience got me to thinking about those age-old issues of critical judgment versus plain old personal taste. The stories are:

“The Knocking” by David Means, March 15
“The Pura Principle” by Junot Diaz, March 22
“I.D” by Joyce Carol Oates, March 29

I have commented on all three of these authors in previous blog entries. So, if you have been following me this past year, you know that I think Junot Diaz is more of a novelist than a short-story writer, that Joyce Carol Oates is a formulaic short-story writer, and that David Means is a short story writer of originality and brilliance.

Reading these three stories only reaffirmed these opinions. What does that say about me?

1. May is close-minded and unable to read these three authors without prejudice.
2. May has a personal preference for tight, language-intense lyrical stories.
3. May doesn’t like rambling first-person novelistic, ghetto memoir-type monologues.
4. May thinks Joyce Carol Oates is a compulsive professional story-making machine.

All these accusations may be true to some extent, but I would prefer to think that as a “guy who has read and written about a lot of short stories,” I am making an experienced, knowledgeable, objective critical judgment when I say that I think David Means’ story “Knocking” is a better short story than Junot Diaz’s “The Pura Principle” and Joyce Carol Oates’ “I.D.” Maybe not.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, I wish you would read these three recent stories and tell me what you think. Here’s what I think:

“The Pura Principle” seems like just another chapter in the never-ending story told by Yunior, the young Dominican Republic voice of Diaz’s short story collection Drown and his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In this installment of Diaz’s New York ghetto soap opera, Rafa, Yunior’s brother, is just home from eight months of radiation and chemo in the hospital. When Rafa brings home a new Dominican girlfriend, Pura Adames, his mother is “super evil” to her. After the two get married, she kicks them out of the apartment. Then when Rafa sneaks back to steal money from his mother, Yunior stops him, prompting Rafa to warn, “I’ll fix you soon enough, Mr. Big Shit.” But Mami knows about the stealing and gives Pura some more money when she claims that Rafa owes her two thousand dollars. Yunior says:

“The girl really was a genius. Mami and I both looked like creamed shit, but she sat there as fine as anything and confident to the max—now that the whole thing was over she didn’t even bother hiding it. I would have clapped if I’d had the strength, but I was too depressed.”

Yunior is even more pissed when Mami welcomes the prodigal Rafa back. Finally, on the way home from the store he gets smashed in the face by a mysteriously thrown Yale padlock. The story ends with Rafa saying to Yunior, “Didn’t I tell you I was going to fix you? Didn’t I?”

I know that a plot summary and a couple of quotes are inadequate to convey the significance and texture of the story. But, in my opinion, plot and voice is really all the story is. And of the two, voice is the most engaging. The voice of Yunior is, admittedly, hard to resist. But the story does not “mean” anything. It is just an anecdote about DR life in the ghetto. That may be all right for a chapter in a novel, but Diaz just does not know how to write short stories, or he doesn't want to.

Now there is no question that Joyce Carol Oates knows how to write short stories. She has written hundreds of them (and maybe even hundreds of novels—who really knows?). The problem I have with Oates’ story “I.D.”, and it is the problem I often have with her stories, is that it seems too pat and predictable, too disengaged and carefully crafted. The story is about a seventh-grade girl named Lisette Mulvey whose mother works as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Atlantic City. Halfway between being a little girl and a woman, Lisette passes a Kleenex lipstick kiss to a boy in her class, knowing that it means, “All right, if you want to screw me, fuck me—whatever—hey, here I am.”

After establishing the quality of the life of the young girl, much as she did in her most famous story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates then focuses on the girl’s inevitable coming-of-age encounter. She is called out of school to I.D. a dead body the police have found in a drainage ditch. Oates handles the pacing carefully and slowly to make the reader fear that the body is that of the mother. Then when Lisette is taken into the refrigerated morgue room, “quick—it was over. The female body she was meant to I.D was not anyone she knew, let alone her mother.”

In the last five paragraphs of the story, Lisette insists, “This is not Momma. This is no one I know.” The police show her a dirty, bloodstained coat that resembles her mother’s red, suede coat, but was filthy and torn. "It was not the stylish coat that Momma had bought a year ago, in the January sale at the mall.” When the police want to take Lisette to Family Services, she insists on being taken back to school. Although she feels she is in a “roaring sort of haze,” when her girlfriend asks her if she is O.K., she says, “laughing into the bright buzzing blur, ‘Sure I’m O.K. Hell, why not?”

It’s a well-done story, but it is completely predictable, right down to to the fact that when Lisette says that the dead body is not her mother, we know that in some calculated thematic way this is true. Furthermore, we know that the “bright buzzing blur” at the end of the story is like those “vast sunlit reaches of the land” that Connie goes toward at the end of “Where Are You Going?” "I.D." is a story that beginning college instructors will be happy to teach in their introduction to lit classes. It can be, as theorists like to say, “unpacked” so easily because it has been built so academically. I’ve said it before, and I say it again: If you want to learn how to write short stories, study the stories of Joyce Carol Oates. She knows how to do it by the book.

David Means’ story “Knock,” (which I assume will be in his new collection of stories, entitled The Spot, due out on May 25, from Faber and Faber) is the shortest of the three stories I am considering here—about a New Yorker page-and-a-half. The first page (consisting of three long paragraphs), introduces us to a first-person male teller who complains of knocking noises from the man who lives in an identical apartment above him. We read nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—ranging from tapping heels, pounding nails, thudding printer, wheezing bedsprings. This has been going on for the two years the narrator has lived in the apartment, beginning with a brief meeting in the hall in which the two men develop a mutual distaste to each other. The knocking is not merely random racket, but meaningful menace. “He not only took knocking seriously but went beyond that, to a realm of pure belief in the idea that by being persistent and knocking only for the sake of knocking…he could increase his level of concentration, achieve rapture, and, in turn strengthen his ability to sustain the knocking over the long term.”

Three quarters through the story, we suddenly learn something personal about the narrator when he says that the knocking often comes late in the day when the man above knows that he is in his deepest state of reverie, “trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions,” feeling the “deep persistent sense of loss; Mary gone, kids gone.”

In the last two paragraphs of this six-paragraph story, the narrator thinks, “Go on, old boy! Pound away! Get that nail in there!” He speaks to the man upstairs as if speaking to himself, recalling long afternoons when he was engaged in handyman projects about the house. Becoming more intense in his concentration on the knocking, he thinks each knock speaks directly to him. “A man who had lost just about everything, and was channeling all his abilities into his knocking. He was seeking the kind of clarity you could get only by bothering another soul…trying to put the pain of a lost marriage behind him…when there had been a great exchange of love between two souls, or at least what seemed to be, and he had gone about his days, puttering, fixing things, knocking about in a much less artistic manner, trying the best he could to keep the house in shape.” And with this identification between the knocker and the listener, the story ends.

I can more easily say what I don’t like about the Diaz and the Oates story than I can say why I like the Means story so much more. "Knock" has something to do with loneliness, something to do with having nothing worthwhile in your life at a given time, something to do with engaging in an activity that goes on and on, an activity that is annoying, but that you cannot cease doing, because you have nothing else to do. You want to scream, to grit your teeth, to hit someone, to repeat some curse or obscenity over and over again. The rhythm of the story somehow echoes these repetitive annoying, meaningless, endless, actions when it seems that such repetitive actions are all that you can do.

There is a timeless universality in Means' story missing in the Diaz and Oates stories. You don’t laugh at the character, although you might; you don’t sympathize with the character, although you might. Mainly, you become the character, or rather for a short time you become deeply embedded in the story, and its rhythm becomes your rhythm.

An indivisible bond exists between the action of the story, the character of the story, and the language of the story. You do not feel you are hearing a voice recounting an anecdote of something that just happened, as you do in the Diaz story, or of being cold-bloodedly manipulated by a skilled but heartless craftsman, as you do in the Oates story. Rather, you feel caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a wildly personal obsession and an carefully controlled aesthetic creation. This transformation of mere “stuff” into art work is what makes the short story, as practiced by a master like David Means, the highest form of narrative art. At least for me, it does.

Junot Diaz Urges MFA Programs for Readers

I just read an interview with Junot Diaz on Narrative. The Interviewer, Reese Kwon, said what surprised her about last year’s National Endowment for the Arts study was not that fewer people are reading, but that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who are writing—that people are reading less and writing more. She asked Diaz if he had come across this trend. Here is Diaz’s reply:

DÍAZ: “ I come across it every time I meet young writers who don’t give a shit about reading; all they give a shit about is their own work. I think that in the same way we’ve had a huge market crash, there’s a quiet market crash going on every year with writers, but we don’t get to see it as openly because there’s no way for it to be dramatized. But every year there is a huge body of young writers that there’s no room for, there’s no place for, there’s no readership for. If we were really smart, if we really cared about reading and writing, we wouldn’t be having MFA programs for writers, we would have MFA programs for readers.”

Although I am not sure there can be too many writers (After all, MFA students don’t really think they can make a living writing, do they?), I remind Diaz that we do have graduate programs to train readers; they are called MA and Ph.D. programs in literature. It is just that for various reasons many of these programs have shifted from focusing on reading to focusing on mining works for cultural and political content and contexts.

All during my forty-year teaching career, I told my students at the beginning of the semester--regardless of whether the class was a survey of American Literature, a seminar in Victorian Poetry, or an introduction to the short story—the class was primarily going to be a course in reading.

I told them that if they wanted biographical background, historical context, social ideas, cultural customs, or political debate, there were many places in the university, including the library, where they could find all that. They did not need a person at the front of the classroom to provide mere information that could be provided more efficiently and cheaply in other ways. I had no intention of being an animated footnote wandering back and forth in front of the chalkboard.

What they did need, I thought, was knowledge of and experience with the conventions of various kinds of writing and awareness of the careful way good writers manipulated language to increase awareness, make discoveries, and change them and the world. Based on my experience with these conventions and language use, I would try--by questioning, prompting, goading, aggravating, and infuriating--to get them to read carefully, closely, and sensitively. My goal was, as is the goal of all teachers, to make myself superfluous.

So, I agree with Junot Diaz. We should have MFA programs for readers. All literature and writing programs—both graduate and undergraduate—should be programs to teach reading. Reading, as all good writers know, is not a simple matter.