Puzzle the Prof: The Ending of Ron Rash's "Cherokee"

Thanks again to Keith Hood, who has submitted another “Puzzle the Prof” challenge. Keith says he would like to hear from anyone who's read Ron Rash's collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay.  He wants some other opinions about what happens at the end of the story "Cherokee,” saying he senses some irony at work in the phrase about the couple’s knowledge that their luck “couldn’t last,” but is not sure what it is. Keith says he would understand the ending better if the sentence read "their luck [wouldn't] last" but the "couldn't last" leaves him scratching his head.

Thanks much to Richard Pangburn, who has some suggestions about “Cherokee.” He says the story is about a couple who exemplify the “working poor,” who have been persuaded to buy a truck they cannot afford and now are taken in by the lure of the casino that “operates as a tax on the poor.” Richard says drink is a metaphor in the story as the wife goes beyond her limit and gets drunk with the power of their winnings. He notes that the story “ends ok, as they both now realize that this has been simply luck and that any thought that they have exerted control of their luck through a rabbit's foot or personal exceptionalism is merely superstition,” adding that they are better off at the end of the story, more mature, and we can hope, more appreciative of love, of the immaterial things that make life worth while.”

In my opinion, the story does not have such serious social/moral/emotional implications as Richard suggests. I’m not sure that Ron Rash is really concerned with the exploitation of the “working poor” in this story, nor do I think the couple have become more mature, have rejected superstition, and have learned something about eternal human values.

Every once in a while, it seems to me, writers, especially writers of short stories, think about the conventions of narrative, kinds of stories, techniques of telling a story, reader expectations, etc, and decide to play a little game with those conventions.

To quickly review some sophomore-level intro to lit: One of the most basic conventions of story—recognized at least as long ago as Heraclitus and Aristotle’s Poetics – is that the two basic causes of what makes things happen to people in the world are fate and character, most evident, of course, in Tragedy.  Oedipus’s pride in thinking he could go against the Gods causes his downfall, but it is fate that put him on the road where he meets his father. 

Luck and fate may be thought of as quite different--luck defined as random events and fate defined as predetermined events. However, they both share the basic characteristic of being out of human control, for regardless of one’s character, luck and fate are just things that happen.  Luck is what, it seems to me, Ron Rash’s story “Cherokee” is about, although it is also ultimately about character.  As in all stories, the reader’s interest lies here in what will happen; and what will happen is dependent either on luck or character.  It seems to me that what Rash is doing in this little story is playing with this basic narrative convention and reader expectation.

The theme of “luck” is announced at the very beginning of the story and is sustained throughout.  The story opens with reference to the young man wearing a rabbit’s foot on his belt and a four-leaf clover dangling from his neck, both of which suggests the human wish to influence luck.  It also opens with the possibility of fairytale magic as the young woman recalls the story of someone rubbing a magic lantern and being granted three wishes, which suggests doing something to make something happen. The young couple only has one wish—perhaps just as fantastic as the genii in the jar—to play the slot machines to transform their savings of $157.00 into a thousand dollars so they can keep the bank from taking away their Ford Ranger pickup.  Lisa, the young woman, whose perspective governs the story, knows that all it would take is a bit of bad luck—getting laid off or an accident—to lose the truck. The two are hoping that a bit of good luck will insure them against possible bad luck.

In terms of character, the young couple have worked hard during the three years of their marriage, with Danny, the young husband, growing out of his boyish drinking and horsing around with his friends to become a responsible man.   Both Lisa and Danny agree that the only way they might get the needed thousand dollars is by luck, for character (as defined by their responsibility and hard work) is not going to be enough.  They do not see that pinning their hopes on luck, especially on slot machines on which the odds are notoriously in the favor of the house, is foolish, unrealistic, and downright unlikely.  Lisa fondles the rabbit’s foot when she thinks maybe they will win, for “It’s not for lack of trying,” although she has doubts when she sees the imposing casino and wonders, “How could anyone hope to win against such a place?” Of course the only way one can “try” to win is to take a chance and gamble.

Torn between hope and doubt, Danny and Lisa play a slot machine, with the number of credits registered on the machine moving up and down as they win and lose.  The two men who are witness to the couple’s playing are, like everyone else in the casino, depending on “luck”—not knowledge, not skill, not experience—just luck, with one of the men asking to rub the rabbit’s foot and playing some money on Danny’s “lucky” streak.  Throughout the story, the references to luck continue, with one man saying, “You got to ride this kind of luck out,” believing that once you get these machines in a mood to give it up you best stay on them, as if one can, by sheer will and effort, influence the machine.

Finally, when Danny and Lisa win enough to accumulate the needed thousand dollars, Rash has basically three alternatives as to how to end the story—either they will lose it all, or they will win more, or they will quit and go home.  Lisa looks at Danny watching the players after he cashes in, but cannot tell if he is thinking, as she is, that they might win enough to fulfill more of their wishes—pay a year’s rent, start a family, etc.  Lisa thinks that since they have had two experiences of good luck—winning the money and being given a free room—a third time might be a charm.

In the last section of the story, when Lisa wakes the next morning, hung over and finds Danny is not in the room, she, and the reader, suspect the worst—that he has taken the money and gone downstairs and lost it all.  Rash quite purposely sets up this expectation in the reader, for given the overwhelming focus on luck in the story and the conflict between character and the couple’s desire for more good luck, the couple seems narratively set up for a final loss. 

However, when Lisa opens her handbag and finds all the money still there, the story ends with this line: “The elevator closes behind her, and she walks toward a man who knows as well as she does that their luck couldn’t last.” The story does not end with the phrase “their luck wouldn’t last” because there is no clear indication that they are going to continue to gamble; Lisa is sober with the needed thousand safely in hand, and Danny did not take it out of her purse when he had the opportunity.  So the end of the story depends on the couple’s decision about which notion of luck to believe—that luck comes in threes or that luck cannot last.  The first is a wish; the second is a sure thing. 

But there is another possibility: It is not surprising that Danny has not taken the money and gambled with it while Lisa sleeps, for in this story, the couple does everything together.  At the end of the story, they have had continued good luck.  But as she walks toward him, they may be preparing to continue to gamble together—a decision that would mean their luck has now ended, for both know their “luck couldn’t last.”

So what will influence their decision when the story ends—their character or their wish for luck?  Will they feel they have fulfilled their goal and go home and make the payments on the truck, or will they create new goals and hope their luck will continue? It is up to the reader to decide.

The most famous example of an open story like this is Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.” Ostensibly "The Lady or the Tiger" is a story about justice, that is, the only kind of justice possible in fiction--poetic justice.  The end of the game played by the semibarbaric king has only two alternatives, and they are quite purposely the conventional alternative endings of comedy or tragedy--marriage or death.  The fact that this particular story "ends" before it ends, giving the reader the freedom to choose a conclusion, is a game on Stockton's part to exploit the reader's need to "close" a story, to see true justice enacted. 

Stockton urges readers to close the story not by choosing what they want to come out of the door, but rather in the way readers always achieve closure--by looking back at the plot, the tone, and the thematic motifs to determine the story's thematic "end."  Since the story makes quite clear that the semibarbaric nature of the princess consists of her being both lady-like and tigerish, what readers are really asked to decide is which aspect of the princess dominates at the end--her lady side or her tiger side.  Because the presentation of what goes on the princess' mind makes quite clear which side that is, the reader is not so free to choose as it first appears.    

The story is most interesting, however, for its focus on the reader's need for closure.  For even though the story leaves little doubt that the tiger pounces out at the end (for the princess has more tiger in her personality than lady), most readers feel somehow tricked or cheated that the author leaves the final choice ostensibly open.  

Ron Rash's NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

I have read all the stories in Ron Rash’s previous two major collections: Chemistry and Other Stories, Picador Paperback Original, 2007; and Burning Bright, HarperCollins, 2010, which won the richly endowed Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize (35,000 Euro [$45,900] in 2010). He had his first big success with his novel Serena, which was a New York Times bestseller; you can get a bitter taste of its titular character in the story “Pemberton’s Bride” in the collection Chemistry. I think the stories in his new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay are his best yet.

Rash stands to enjoy even more success with the upcoming film based on the novel, directed by Susanne Bier and staring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as newly-married Serena and George Pemberton building a timber empire in Depression-Era North Carolina. The film is scheduled for release on September 27, 2013.

Rash’s stories has appeared in the best quarterlies, such as Sewanee Review, South Carolina Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review, but perhaps not often read in those low-circulation journals.  He did not make it to The New Yorker until the May 23, 2011 edition with the opening story to Nothing Gold Can Stay, “Trusty.”  It is not one of Rash’s best stories, but with its careful control of the old “biter-bite” story, it is a good introduction to Rash’s management of the short story form.

I like the stories of Ron Rash, although, as I have noted in previous essays, I am a bit skeptical when writers run the risk of exploring or exploiting the people from the Appalachian Mountains who I grew up with.  Rash’s stories have their complement of hardheaded old hillbillies and meth-headed young no-accounts.  But he does not condescend to them.  He may not always like them, but he always respects them.  And he always seems to know what is in their hearts. 

 For example, in the title story (the title also of a Robert Frost poem you can find online), two young men break into an old man’s house to steal gold uniform buttons, souvenirs of war.  But even as we are disgusted by their act, at the end of the story, even as the young man who tells the story pops the pills they have bought into his mouth, he looks toward the river and sees a lantern or a campfire.  “Out beyond it, fish move in the current, alive in that other world.”

One of my favorite stories in Nothing Gold Can Stay, because it embodies the kind of delicate poetry that saves Rash’s often coarse and ignorant characters from our scorn, is “Something Rich and Strange”—an extended prose poem about a young girl who gets carried away in a fast-moving stream and drowns.  What the diver, whose story it is, goes in the water to find her body finds at the bottom of the stream, he does find something “rich and strange” about the nature of human vulnerability and the harsh beauty of time. 

Another favorite, also an extended poem, is the concluding story, “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” in which two old friends, Carson and Darnell, both who have lost their wives and live alone, deliver a breech calf together.  The story ends with them shaking hands and Carson driving away, thinking, “Darnell would hang the lantern back on its nail, maybe smoke another cigarette as he stood at the barn mouth, attentive as any good sentry.”

The trouble with writing about Ron Rash’s stories is that anything you might say about them is likely to be a spoiler.  That can be both a good thing and a bad thing.  On the one hand, Rash’s stories always seem more than just their plots, so a plot summary would not tell you a whole lot; on the other hand, a plot summary would indeed “spoil” the pleasure of following a story’s deceptively simple narrative movement toward an ending that crystallizes everything.

In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin notes Rash’s gift for “hard-hitting surprise endings,” adding that both Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling would have loved “A Sort of Miracle,” the hilarious story of an accountant named Denton saddled with two worthless brother-in-laws that his wife won’t let him throw out.  Because of their wallowing around on the couch all day watching medical shows, Denton has begun to experience what medical folks nowadays call erectile dysfunction. 

Rather than embarrass himself by going to a doctor and then to a drugstore to get Viagra, Denton goes into the mountains (taking his no-account brother-in-laws with him) to trap a bear, having read that an old Chinese medicine to cure ED uses the paws and gall bladder of a bear. The ending isn‘t pretty, and to laugh at it, which you can’t help doing, might make you feel a little heartless. I am not going to tell you the ending, for that would be a spoiler.

“A Servant of History” is about a British academic who comes to Appalachia in the early 1920s to find and transcribe mountain songs that have their roots in English ballads.  He knows little or nothing about folks who live in the North Carolina hills, so when he finds an old woman whose name suggests Scottish origins, he pompously plays up his own Scottish roots with, as usual in a Rash story, disastrous results—also funny, but also painful. Again, I am not going to tell you the ending, which is poetically justice and an emblem of the man’s ignorance.

In “Twenty-Six Days” the narrator, a janitor at a regional college, has bought a copy of Chekhov’s stories for his daughter and sits in his truck reading the story “Misery” about the man who has lost his son and no one will listen to him but the horse that pulls his coach.  Although the janitor says, “You’d think a story like that would be hokey,” it brings tears to his eyes.

And then there is “The Dowry,” which involves the need to exact revenge for an old Civil War veteran’s lost hand; the story ends with a potentially simplistic solution, but which, as usual, Rash manages to bring off painfully but believably.

In “Cherokee,” a young couple goes to an Indian casino and tries to turn $157 into a thousand dollars so they can make back payments on a truck they bought. You expect the worse when they win the thousand and then must decide whether to go on, but Rash is not that easy.

In “The Magic Bus,” a young woman named Sabra comes to the aid of a hippie couple whose car boils over while driving by the North Carolina farm where she seems destined to spend her life.  Of course they invite her to come with them, and of course, she is tempted to do so, but then Rash does the unexpected again

Matthew Gilbert in his review of Nothing Gold Can Stay in The Boston Globe says that although “violent twists,” “unexpected and haunting,” mark all the stories, Rash does not present puzzles in his fiction, not does he play tricks; his stories tend toward “a carefully gauged ambiguity that can leave a reader retracing events, asking:  What really just happened?”  And this, of course, is a characteristic that makes any summary of the plots of the story spoilers, albeit simplistic spoilers.

I not only like Ron Rash’s short stories, I also like it that he understands the short story as a form that may begin with a single image or an overheard remark which, with honest exploration and a keen sense of the language, becomes something unpredictable and meaningful.  Although Rash’s stories depend on plot, they never seem planned. Rash has said:

 I never outline, I never plot. I really don’t know where it’s going. Maybe I have a vague idea, but I think sometimes there’s a danger that comes from having an outline, that you’re kind of putting it on rails, not allowing the story to jump off and go to a place that is surprising to the reader, and to you as a writer. I go by instinct, and that’s scary. Usually when I write a novel, I can have worked about a year and it’ll die on me. I don’t know where it’s going, and it feels hopeless. There can be three, four months where it just seems dead. I almost always start with an image. I just see where the image will take me.”
 

I also like his respectful understanding of the poetic nature of the form.  In a Daily Beast interview, Rash talked about the difference between writing poetry, novels and short stories:

“I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry—the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible—but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.”

 You might suspect that I am partial to Ron Rash’s stories because I am an old hillbilly myself who can’t resist stories about a region and a people I know well.  I admit I enjoy reading fiction about people of the Appalachian Mountains; I have even written a story or two about those people.  I would like to think that my mountain background makes me a demanding reader of such stories, for I cannot abide outsiders who know little about mountain people but try to write about them anyway, or, worse, mountain writers who think they have “got above their raisin” and condescend to their ancestors and their neighbors. Ron Rash, in my opinion, is neither.

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.

Short Story Month 2010--Best American Short Stories: 2009 and O. Henry Award Stories: 2010

The Best American Short Stories 2009 came out in Oct. last year; The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2010 came out in April of this. With twenty stories in each volume and priced on Amazon at about ten bucks each for the paperback, they are the two best bargains out there for any lover of the short story form. You may not like every story in the collection, may even shake your head in wonder that a given story was chosen as one of the ”best” of the year, but you will find God’s plenty in these two books, and I guarantee it will be twenty dollars well spent.

While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.

Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.

Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.

One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”

Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.

“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.

Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today.

William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.

“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.

One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.

I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.

Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim

Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.