David Means' "The Mighty Shannon" and Andre's Dubus III's "Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed"

I have long had an uneasy suspicion that really good short stories embody a philosophic, psychological, theological, or interpersonal theme about the complexity of what it means to be a human being—basic, universal issues.  I have talked about the importance of universal theme many times on this blog—indeed every time I have discussed the stories of Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud, William Trevor, David Means—to mention only a few of the really great short story writers.

One of the differences between really good short stories and merely ordinary short stories, I am convinced, is that "ordinary" short stories and most novels are more concerned with as-if-real characters and events than with  themes, or, if they do seem to be "about" something,  their themes are often obvious and simplistic.

This makes me "uneasy" because it suggests that good short stories make demands on the reader that ordinary short stories and most novels do not—a claim that smacks of elitism and the academic because it suggests that one has to "learn" how to read good short stories, but not how to read ordinary short stories and most novels.  It makes me uneasy because it may cause some readers to huff and sneer that such good stories may be fit only for students and professors in the classroom, not for ordinary people in the real world (whatever that is)

This issue occurred to me again recently when, after reading Andre Dubus III's story, "Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed," in his new book Dirty Love, I read a story by David Means in the February issue of Harper's Magazine entitled "The Might Shannon." Although both stories are ostensibly about one man's attempts to deal with his discovery that his wife is having an affair, I thought Dubus's story was just an ordinary one, that is, a story with an obvious, even simplistic theme; while I thought Means' story was a very good one, that is, a story with a complex philosophical theme about what it universally means to be human.

Now, in all fairness, I have to admit  a predisposition:  I have always admired David Means' stories and have always respected him for remaining staunchly committed to the short story form.  And I must also confess I have always thought Andre Dubus III's fiction was second rate—just ordinary novelistic House of Sand and Fog stuff, casually realistic and carelessly written, about as-if-real characters and interesting plots that not very challenging.

Furthermore, I surely don't have to remind anyone that I am partial to short fictions, much preferring them over long fictions. Dubus's story is a "short novel"—about 25% of his book; whereas Mean's story is a very short story— about five and a half pages in Harper's. And, I would argue ,Dubus's piece is not a tightly woven, thematically dense novella like the classics of the "novella" genre, but rather a "novel" that just happens to be relatively short.

Finally, I have to admit, once again, that I greatly admire writers who love the language and treat it carefully, making it an inextricable part of the narrative, not merely a transparent means by which the narrative jogs realistically along, a clear glass through which to view the world (whatever that is). Given this criteria, there is no doubt in my mind that David Means is a much more scrupulous artist of language than Andre Dubus III.

If all that makes me an effete snob, a dilettante, an ivory tower academic just plain out of touch with the gritty world of everyday reality, one of those ethereal characters who cannot abide Junot Diaz, but loves Henry James—then so be it.

Let me make a few comments about the Dubus story first, for it is fairly easy to dismiss. The central character, Mark Welch, aged 56,, has been married to his wife Laura, also 56) for 24 years.  When he suspects that Laura is having an affair (because one night he senses she holds his testicles as if she is comparing them to someone else's), he hires a detective to make a video of the man treating her to oral sex in a parked car.  Welch forces his wife to watch the video, and makes a wreck of the kitchen when she says he made her do it by always criticizing her. Much of the rest of the story focuses on his alternating between rage and remorse—imagining what his wife has been doing with the man, taking a peek at her email record, planning on how to kill the man, convincing himself that he doesn't care because she has bad breath and has never really been a good cook, having a sexual encounter with another woman, fantasying she will return to the man she has loved all along, etc. etc.—all pretty pedestrian soap opera stuff that goes on and on repetitively and predictably.

In order to provide some motivation for the affair and some opportunity for Mark to reach an inevitable self-recognition, we are given some background to his becoming a successful project manager by being more than a little ruthless and, from his wife's point of view, just plain bossy. In a revelatory confrontation she tells him, "You treat me like I work for you. You always have.  Well I don't work for you all right?"

The story ends with Mark thinking maybe he will apologize to her, make it all up to her, pay more attention to her, let her do whatever she wants.  Standing at the threshold to his home, he hears her footsteps in the entryway: "his heart in his head once again for he did not know if he was even up for any of this, this change from change, the door swinging inward as he straightened, his wife's face lovely and surprised and waiting."

What is this story about?  Well, it is about what many soap operas on television are about.  Nothing more. Simplistic, predictable, pedestrian, ordinary.  On finishing it, a reader might tsk tsk testily at Mark's bossy attitude toward his wife, nod knowingly,  and smile smugly.

David Means does not give a name for the male character in his story; he is simply "I" in this first-person account that begins with a pain in his hips and lower back and shoulders and neck, for which he consults a doctor. The doctor says he needs to look at the man's stress levels, suggesting that it is possible that his musculoskeletal pain is related to his emotional life.  The idea that something inner might be related to something outer is echoed when, standing vulnerable  in his underwear, the man looks out of the examining room window and sees his reflection, "while a barge navigated through his belly and the buildings of Fort Lee, New Jersey, stabbed through his breastbone."

The man thinks a great deal about his condition, just as Mark Welch does in Dubus's story, but he thinks in longer, more complex sentences. For example, after the doctor's tentative diagnosis, he thinks:

"I did not want to acknowledge that one way or another my so-called migrating pain was connected to what was going on at home, not only with Sharon, who at that time was in the middle of her affair with her colleague at the firm, but also with my own thing with Marie, who was at that time my lover but also, in truth, a responsive gesture (as Dr. Haywood would later call it)."

The theme of the relationship between inner and outer is suggested again in the following long, well considered sentence: "Even there on that crinkling sheet of paper, with sweat beading on my brown, listening to Dr. Zuck breathe while the light outside faded and the light inside, fluorescent and shrill, pressed the glass, I had a sense that whatever was going on with my body was eventually going to find a way to relate itself to the extremely tactile facts of my life, my son, the house, the yard, as they, in turn, would relate to vague, nebulous, cloudy sensations that surrounded love, desire, loneliness, need."

Compare this with Dubus's more obvious description of his character considering what to do about his cheating wife:

"Wasn't it time to let her go?  But to allow the question into his head and heart was to allow a black tumor to take residence there where it would grow.  But the only thing growing was this distance between himself and the world he supposedly lived in.  He's become a man things happened to, and he found himself groping for the tools of his work: Risk response and its plans for contingency and mitigation.  The monitoring and controlling of the results of those plans."

The man in Means' story says he is aware of his "predicament as it would unfold in the next few months…until, finally, the story of my pain—as Dr. Haywood would describe it—would merge with the story of my relationship with Sharon and our simultaneous assured destruction in the form of two affairs."  Telling the story years later, he has trouble dividing the blame between himself and his wife, although he knows she betrayed him first and he responded in kind; he does admit, however, because he is the one telling the story, "the whole unseemly thing was ultimately on my shoulders."

One indication of the difference between the level of complexity, both syntactic and psychological, in the two stories, are examples in each of a kind of Henry Jamesian self-reflexive awareness.

When Mean's central character describes an encounter with his son Gunner's Spanish teacher, with whom he later has a brief retaliatory affair, she greets him with "Hey, Gunner's Dad." He avoids mentioning Gunner.  "Looking back, I think that one thing that sparked our relationship was her awareness of my avoidance, and my awareness of her awareness, which fed a mutual effort to keep the two arenas separate, opening up a glorious no-man's land, a pure space, unbinding and wild."

When a woman smiles at Dubus's central character as if she has known him longer than she has, the narrator  says: "This makes him feel comfortable which then makes him uncomfortable for feeling so comfortable."

It just seems to me that the Means double awareness is more complex than the Dubus one.

Midway through "The Mighty Shannon," the narrator/central character enacts a repetition of the inside/outside theme that may be quite familiar to literary readers.  When Marie sneaks over to his house during a lunch break while his wife is not home, we have this passage:

"Inside my house, I felt not only the guilt and fear you'd expect but also the same brooding sense of myself I'd get two years later at our annual holiday cocktail party, standing at the window and looking out at the cold, wintry street while behind me someone shook a shaker with an icy sound like a comet flying through the din of chat, and I stared outside for a few beats beyond civility and felt, behind me, the party I was hosting awaiting my return.  One more man staring out his window feeling the weight of his obligations shove him into a loneliness that was almost, but not quite, beyond comprehension."

Compare Means' passage with this famous account of a man looking out a window at a wintery scene:

"Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window.  How cool it must be outside!  How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!  The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument.  How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!"

That tapping of Gabriel's trembling fingers is picked up in Joyce's grand final paragraph:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight… It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Lest you think this is an accidental echo, Means' central character says he felt the same sensation when he went on a second honeymoon with his wife to Ireland.  Indeed, the title of the story comes from his recalling a third honeymoon when he and his wife cross a bridge over what one of them refers to as "the mighty Shannon."  Joyce's "The Dead" is a classic of the short story genre because it explores the theme of the mystery of the inner life, the secret life, so delicately.  David Means pays a subtle tribute to the story.

Another example of the inside/outside theme occurs when Means' character describes one afternoon when his cell phone rings and he hears his wife's voice as if far off, and he realizes it is a "pocket dial" and that her phone is in her purse.  He hears a giggle that he knows she makes only in response to something said "in the most intimate terms."  He shouts, "Hey, hey, I'm here in your purse, Sharon.  I'm right here in your fucking purse."  He admits that now, years later, he is still ashamed of being privy to a moment of her life from that vantage: "It was as if I'd gone behind her face for a moment and stared out through the bright blood spume of her eyelids."

This is the most crucial example of the inner/outer theme Means creates throughout the story because it suggests that most important ability to empathize with the other—to be able to go out of the self and see as the other sees.  This is, indeed, the heart of "The Mighty Shannon."

The story ends with the central character and his wife Sharon sitting on their back deck with drinks in hand, recalling their meeting with a marriage counselor and laughing at how he had fallen to the floor of the office because of his pain.  He says if you were hiding in a bush near their deck you would hear the "intimate forgiving sound" of Sharon's laugh and his own responsive laugh, an entwined sound that is like a "Bach counterpoint: two themes working together in a helix of motion, twisting around a dark heavenly void that might be where God, if he lives, lives.  Hearing it, you'd be able to tease out the story that had produced the laugh.... If you listened with enough sensitivity, you'd hear in our laughter…the first hint of a playfulness that is, if you're lucky, the wonderful byproduct of forgiveness."

It just seems to me that David Means' story is a better example of the genre than Andre Dubus III's story—more complex, more profound, more subtle, more artistically sound.  The basic theme of the difficulty of moving from the outer of the other person to the inner is an important one, and Means explores it in a style that syntactically matches that complex theme. As in a Henry James story, the reader must listen to the rhythm with enough sensitivity to "tease out the story."

*A footnote here:  In his story "A River in Egypt," in his most recent book The Spot (2010),  the central character Cavanaugh is an assistant art director who has just been dropped from a big budget sci-fi movie because his design was “too real, too clear.” His wife Sharon is a lawyer. His son Gunner must take a test for cystic fibrosis. One of the toys the child plays with is called the Question Cube and one of the questions is “What river is in Egypt?  The Nile? The Hudson? The Thames? Or the Kalamazoo?”  It's a delicate story about a father trying to come to terms with his son’s possibly fatal disease.  The story ends with a moment in which the father, who has been concerned with his own anxiety, shifts to the boy lying in the back seat of the car. The diagnosis is still somewhere off in the future. I don't know if this is an indication that Means is working on a set of linked stories for his next collection.

Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?" and Rolf Yngve's "The Quail"--also Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?"

One of the stories in the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories that intrigued me, but that I did not have a chance to discuss in December, is Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?"  The story reminded me of another story I once read, which is not unusual, of course. The story I recalled is Rolfe Yngve's "The Quail," which I included in my short story textbook several years ago.

It was not the style of Fitzgerald's story that struck a chord with me, but rather the similarity to Yngve's  basic theme of a young couple coming in contact with, and thus being significantly contrasted with, an older couple.

Yngve's story is quite short—about three pages in my text book anthology--and focuses on a simple object that takes on symbolic significance—the quail of the title. Basically, the story is about a young couple who, during the first spring of their marriage, are visited by eight quail who come to eat in their elderly landlord's garden. They are still within the honeymoon phrase of their relationship, and their life seems quite idyllic.  They feed the quail, while the landlord and his wife rail against them for eating their seedlings. The seasons pass until winter when the quail disappear.  The young husband discovers that the elderly landlord has trapped them and eaten them; he does not tell his wife.

The question that my students and I discussed is whether the story makes effective use of the symbolic object or whether it is a bit too rigged and predictable.  The dichotomies in the story are quite explicit: old couple and young couple, romance and reality, the beautiful and the practical.  The fact that the quail arrive during the first spring of the couple's marriage is sufficient to indicate the symbolic value of the birds. 

The fact that the protagonists are referred to only as "the couple" or "the tenant and his wife," while the antagonists, if such they are, are only called the landlord and his wife is sufficient to indicate the fable-like nature of the story.  The language, with its short simple declarative sentences, also suggest that what we are reading, in spite of the fact that the characters seem "as-if-real," is an illustrative fable, not a realistic story.

Given the fact that the romance of early married life inevitably gives way to the practicality of everyday reality, there is no other way that the story could end than that the quail are transformed from being the symbolic center of a romantic idyll for the young couple to being merely food for the older couple. 

Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?" is also about a young couple, Vega and Henry, who, in the spring of their second year of marriage, move out of the city to a house they buy in a neighborhood mainly occupied by elderly couples, widows, and divorcees. The young wife begins taking walks with an old man with emphysema man who smokes cigarettes secretly; the young husband begins do small odd jobs for the old man's wife.

Fitzgerald's story, at eighteen pages, is considerably longer than Yngve's story—the added length creating more of an "as-if-real" quality to the story--in contrast to the fable-like nature of Yngve's story.  But I wonder if this difference in generic style is the only reason that Fitzgerald's story is  so much longer than Yngve's.  It makes me reconsider Chekhov's famous injunction about short stories:  "It is better to say not enough (or too little) than to say too much."  But then, Chekhov added teasingly, "because, because, "I don't know why."  Well, if Chekhov didn't know why, then who does? Even after all these years of studying short stories, I am not sure I do.

The short story, as I have argued many times over the years, is a form that is more often structured by a meaningful theme than by mere mimesis. The form originated as an illustrative fable and, in spite of the Renaissance shift to realism, still has something of the parable about it.  The novel does not have the same heritage and thus, in contrast to the short story's thematic need to be controlled by what Poe called a "single effect," has a tendency to be, what Henry James called, a "loose, baggy monster" (no offense intended).

By this criteria, I ask myself the following questions:  Does a short story have to be limited or controlled or structured around a central theme? Can't it just be about "something that happened"? Can't it just be a story of an event or an action?  Moreover, if it is structured around a central theme or "effect," can it not be "loose" enough to include details that have nothing to do with that central theme?  Can't there just be details that suggest that this is a "real" event, taking place in a "real" world, involving "real" people?

Rolf Yngve's story "The Quail" is so tightly controlled around the theme of young and age, romance and reality, that there is little or nothing in it that is not about that theme.   However, there may indeed be details in Fitzgerald's story that have little or nothing to do with the theme of youth and age.  But, could that not mean that Fitzgerald's story is about more than the theme of youth and age?  Or could it mean that her story is a more complex treatment of that theme than Yngve's?

I think the novelist, faced with the need to write a "long" work, often includes details that just "occur" to him or her at the time—interesting and intriguing, or clever and amusing—but that have little to do with the theme of the story.  This, I would call the "novelistic" temptation.  However, the short story writer more often tries to resist that temptation, ruthlessly cutting out everything that does not seem to advance or explore the significance he or she senses is at the heart of the story.  For example, in Fitzgerald's story the narrator  introduces a bartender who tells Vega about freezing his leg in dry ice so it could be amputated. You can find on line a true story of a man named Baz who did that.  It's a well-known intriguing obsession,  but is it relevant to Fitzgerald's story?

Another aspect of the novelistic temptation is to provide a social/historical/cultural context for the story, as well as a biographical background context for the characters.  For example, Fitzgerald provides a four-page section devoted to the story of how her young couple met and married. We know little of the background of Yngve's couple. Do we need to know the background?  Well, maybe in Fitzgerald's kind of story, we do, but in Yngve's we do not.

Moreover, there is something else going on in Fitzgerald's story.  Since the couple have moved from the city, her young woman has been having "inexplicable episodes of disorientation," which her husband suspects may be panic attacks.  The young husband starts having dreams that he is looking for his wife in "crabby caves under the lake, and he begins to worry that she might indeed disappear someday.  One of the young woman's attacks take place in the supermarket--an attack that brings on the most thematically mysterious sentence in the story: "But it was only a matter of time before that feeling, the knowledge that something was coming for her—and for Henry too, coming for them both—would return."

We don't really know what this ominous sense of the impending means, although the possibility of having a child is suggested, as well as the possibility of falling out of love and the possibility of mortality. The story ends with the couple at a party, when the narrator once again refers to  some inevitable time coming: "It was going to be different for each of them, they both knew that.  Vega would become unreachable, impatient and sullen as a teenager.  Henry would cry and, if his wife was still alive, he'd draw her into his weak arms."

When they go home, they make love, slowly, bringing "each other along."  The next morning, Henry puts his hand on Vega's stomach and "looked at her hopefully.  She nodded 'yes,' although it was impossible to know yet for sure."

"The Quail" is clearly an accessible story; the structure, technique, and meaning are all quite clear.   The question that might be posed is: Are we completely satisfied by a story that is so satisfying?  Or do we prefer a more puzzling story? 

"Where Do You Go?" is a less taut story, more realistic than fable-like, more discursive than economical.  Which is the more complex story?  Is it really better to say too little than too much? Is it necessary to provide a bio-background to the characters in the story? Does a story have to has a theme? 

AT the risk of making these questions all the more difficult to answer, I suggest a third story about a young newly-married couple coming up against the future, challenging the hopeful promise of Browning's "Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be."

"Why Don't You Dance?" the first story in Raymond Carver's controversial collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is characteristic of the qualities of his short fiction at the high point of his career.  The story begins with an unidentified man who has, for some unexplained reason, put all his furniture out on his front lawn.  What makes this event more than just a mundane yard sale is the fact that the man has arranged the furniture just as it was when it was in the house and has even plugged in the television and other appliances so that they work just as they did inside.  The only reference to the man's wife is the fact that the bed has a nightstand and a reading lamp on his side of the bed and a nightstand and reading lamp on "her" side of the bed; this is Carver's typical unstated way of suggesting that the man's marriage has collapsed and that his wife is no longer around.

The story begins its muted dramatic turn when a young couple who are furnishing their first apartment stop by and begin to inspect the furniture.  As the girl tries out the bed and the boy turns on the television, their dialogue is clipped and cryptic, reminiscent of the dialogue of characters in a story a by Ernest Hemingway.  There is something a bit unsettling about watching the young couple try out the man's furniture--the girl lying on the bed, the boy watching television, for it suggests a new story beginning to be enacted on the remnants of an old one.  "I feel funny " the boy says, and well he should as the girl tries to seduce him into this new story in the making. The girl plays the role more willingly, lying on the bed, inviting him, asking him to kiss her; the boy sits up making believe he is watching the television. 

When the man returns from a trip to the store, the dialogue continues in its understated and laconic way as the couple make offers for some of the furnishings and the man indifferently accepts whatever they offer.  The man turns off the TV and tells the girl to pick out a record; but she does not know the names on the labels, for they belong to another milieu than hers.  In the epilogue of the story, weeks later, the girl is telling someone about it, about getting drunk and dancing in the man's driveway.  "She told everyone.  There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out.  After a time, she quit trying."  The story ends with the common short story motif of the ancient mariner, as the girl must tell the story--the manifestation of the repetition compulsion--over and over again until it can be, if not understood, at least integrated. 

           

The story is an embodiment of the way that modern short fiction since Chekhov has attempted to embody inner reality by simply describing outer reality.  By placing all his furniture on his front lawn, the man has externalized what has previously been hidden inside the house.  When the young couple arrive, they embody the ritual process of replacement of the older man's lost relationship with the beginnings of their own, creating their own relationship on the remains of the man's.  However, the story is not a hopeful one, for the seemingly minor conflicts the dialogue reveals between the two young people--his watching television and her wanting him to try the bed; her wanting to dance and his drinking--presage another doomed relationship just like the one that has ended.  Indeed, there is more to it, as the girl senses, but she cannot quite articulate the meaning of the event, can only, as storytellers must, retell it over and over again, trying to get it talked out and intuitively understood.

It's a puzzling story, probably made all the more puzzling by Gordon Lish's cut-and-slash editing—a story that truly challenges Chekhov's dictum about brevity.

I would be glad to hear from any of my readers about these issues—especially Rolf Yngve and Samar  Farah Fitzgerald.

A. E. Coppard, WEEP NOT MY WANTON

James Doyle of London's Turnpike Books was kind enough to send me an attractive paperback edition of selected short stories by the great A.A. Coppard entitled Weep Not My Wanton. The collection contains only seven stories, but they are fine examples of Coppard's subject and style.  In addition to the title story, the book includes "Dusky Ruth," "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me," "The Higgler," "The Wife of Ted Wickham," "The Watercress Girl," and "The Field of Mustard."  In America, Amazon has it listed at $7.99; in the UK, Amazon prices it at £6.93.

I have read Coppard before, of course, but was happy to read these stories once again. I especially enjoyed the controlled and scrupulous rhythm of his sentences, even when his lyricism borders on the self-conscious. Take this opening of the title story: "Air and light on Sack Down at summer sunset were soft as ointment and sweet as milk…watching the silken barley moving in its lower fields with the slow movement of summer sea, reaching no harbour, having no end."

I especially enjoyed the poetic control of Coppard's language after having just finished reading Andre Dubus III's new collection of four novellas entitled Dirty Love, the style of which which I found loose and lazy 

Similes may be just a matter of taste, or they may be a matter of appropriate tone, but I prefer the Coppard images cited below to those of Dubus. The danger of the simile beast is that if you push them too far, the comparison overwhelms the original. I wonder what you think:

Coppard:

"Thoughts and images went flowing through him as easily and amiably as fish swim in their pools, and as idly too."
"The clock ticked almost as if it had been caught in some indecent act."
"She looked at him as uncomprehendingly as a mouse might look at a gravestone."
"Beautiful she was: red hair, a complexion like the inside of a nut."
 

Dubus:

"his heart kicking like a hanged man's feet"
"two cans of coke lie on their side like forgotten children"
"the vodka going into Mark like a mildly dangerous thought he ignores"
"Her tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a nurse tending to many patients at once."

Any suggestions as to which of the following is the most effective and why?

"A small scarlet notice to stone-throwers was prominent as a wound." (Coppard)

"The spartan light on the screen was like the parting of a wound." (Dubus)

The most common critical comment made about the stories of Coppard, one of the few British writers of his generation to  remain dedicated to the short story, was that his stories combine two conflicting aspects: realism and simple earthiness on the one hand, and fairy tale fantasy and formal  sophistication on the other.  H. E. Bates, who said that  in Coppard,  there existed a “strange battle between tale-telling at its simplest and tale-telling at its most sophisticated,” complained that the second type overwhelmed the first in Coppard’s stories, resulting in stories that were too carefully elaborated. 

“The Field of Mustard,” often said to be Coppard's finest story, is a good example of the kind of combination of realism and lyricism that placed him within the tradition of Guy de Maupassant. It is also the best example of what Frank O’Connor called Coppard's “inner compulsion” to write one kind of story over and over again, the story in which the motivation is given by some woman’s secretiveness.” Centering on the seemingly simple conversation between two peasant women, Coppard uses repetitive imagery of the natural world and the inevitability of death to make this a meditation on lost possibilities, fatalistic foreboding, and unspeakable desires. 

Bates goes on to say that behind Coppard’s insistence that he writes not stories but tales lies the “theory that the art of telling stories, since it originates by the primitive camp-fires of unread peoples far back in time, is an oral and not a written one.” He argues that  such a method of tale-telling, "having much in common with folk-lore, local legend, and the spoken parable would depend for its effect largely on pictorial simplicity, the use of homely metaphor, and the entire absence of literary language.”

Bates claims that “unfortunately for Coppard’s theory his work shows the strongest signs—increasing rather than decreasing as time goes on—that he is in reality a very literary writer, influenced in turn by other very literary writers, notable Henry James.”

Thus, Coppard’s work is corrupted by sophistication. Bates complains that Coppard’s stories have the effect of being the product of an “arts-and-crafts shop, in which apparent spontaneity is in reality studied. 

This, of course, is a common complaint about the short story. I suspect that the  2013 Best American Short Stories collection, which, as a great admirer of the short story form, I enjoyed a great deal, will not be liked by many readers who are more comfortable with the more realistic style of the novel. The stories in the new BASS may be just too "short storyish" for many.

Frank O’Connor says that although Coppard knew Chekhov and Maupassant backward and forward, he “never settles for one convention rather than the other, or indeed for any convention other than his own need to grip the reader by the lapel and make him listen.  As a result, his formal range is remarkable—greater I should say than that of any other storyteller.”

Coppard believed that the closer the modern short story remained to the oral tradition the more acceptable it was.  However, influenced by Henry James, he insisted that the story neither have the ragged edge of reality or the informal tone of a careless teller, but rather that it be controlled by unity and completeness of contour.

In It’s Me, O Lord, Coppard says he “envisaged the short story as a work of literary perfection, supreme though small, a phoenix, a paragon…. I felt that it was my mėtier, and that I could give it a significant setting, gold maybe, and adorn it with gems, a creation to be treasured.”

If you have not read Coppard, Weep Not My Wanton would be a fine introduction.  "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" is a magical delight.  The title comes from a child's verbal game that goes, as I recall from my own childhood: "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe; Adam and Eve got drowned. Who do you think was saved?"  Of course, when the respondent says, "Pinch Me," the teller does so, although, we trust, ever so gently. It is a nice example of reality intruding on fantasy, or else fantasy becoming reality.  And this is what the story is about also. If you have not read it, I won't spoil it for you.

"The Higgler" is a realistic story with some inevitable Coppard fairy tale element, in which the fear of craft combined with the reticence of innocence make for wrong choices. As in many Coppard stories, death always hovers in the background.  Similarly, "The Watercress Girl" is a spoiled romance that may or may not be ultimately redeemed.

I thank James Doyle for sending me this book and sending me back to Coppard.  I recommend it to you highly.

2013 O.Henry Award Stories--Part II

Laura Furman, the series editor for the O. Henry Prize Stories (formerly, and temporarily, the Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories {What was that all about?}) is, as far as I know, solely responsible for choosing the twenty stories that appear in the annual volume. I have no way of knowing if her choices are influenced by editorial pressures from the publisher to assure an overall attractive (i.e. profitable) volume. However, three writers are asked each year to read the twenty stories and to "write an appreciation of the story they most admire." According to Furman, the three writers receive the twenty stories in mss form with no identification of author or publication.

This year, the three are Lauren Groff, author of the collection Delicate Edible Birds, Edith Pearlman, author of the excellent collection Binocular Vision, and Jim Shepard, author of, most recently, the collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway.  Groff chose Deborah Eisenberg's "Your Duck is My Duck." Edith Pearlman chose Kelly Link's "The Summer People." And Shepard chose Andrea Barrett's "The Particles."

Groff has some good things to say about the short story as a form, noting that when it is done right, it is a "ferocious creature," adding "A reader, finding herself alone in a room with a great short story, should feel thrilled, unbalanced, alive." But Groff recognizes that such intensity is not for everyone, that many prefer the "long, slow waltz of the novel to the story's grapple and throw."  True that! Several people have said they do not like the 2013 Best American Short Stories volume; I suspect that those folks just don't really like short stories—merely my opinion, of course.

Groff echoes my own insistence that the short story is "not a lesser form" than the novel and suggests that maybe readers just have not been exposed to the "short story geniuses rampant on the earth these days, people like George Saunders and Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and –cripes almighty!—William Trevor," or for that matter, Deborah Eisenberg."

Groff admits that although she was given the stories to read blind, "if you love short stories passionately, you read them passionately and in great quantities, you begin to be able to see the individual writer's imprint on her story from the very first words." She says she knew "The Summer People" was by Kelly Link after only a few words, that the "The Particles" just had to be by Andrea Barrett, and that "Leaving Maverley" was obviously by Alice Munro.

Groff's choice of Eisenberg's  "Your Duck is My Duck" is a writer's choice of a writer's writer, for it is the unerring rhythm of Eisenberg's sentences that catches her, concluding that it is the kind of story you want to press into the hands of short-story doubters, because it is its own best defense of the form." Although I do not think this is one of Eisenberg's best stories, and it is not my favorite in the book, I do understand why it is Groff's choice.

Edith Pearlman, one of my very favorite short-story writers, says she has a "taste for the inexplicable and the semisurreal in literature and in life."  She found she could not resist Kelly Link's story "The Summer People," a fairy tale which she says "supplies Whys, not Because; endings, not wrappings-up; and it dispenses with that sine qua non of realism, motivation." This is a wonderfully compact definition of what the short story does so well, especially the form's dispensing with motivation, what Flannery O'Connor once called "what some folks would do, in spite of everything."  Pearlman quotes the poet Amy Clampitt who wrote, "who knows what makes any of us do what we do," an insight Pearlman says writing workshops should keep in mind. Amen to that.  Again, I would not have chosen "The Summer People," but again, I understand why Edith Pearlman did choose it.

It is certainly no surprise that Jim Shepard would choose Andrea Barrett's "The Particles."  Both are meticulous writers who scrupulously research their stories in books on history and science.  In answer to an interviewer’s question about whether “historical short stories” provide readers the pleasure of both fiction and nonfiction, Shepard replied:

They do feed the hunger that readers have for nonfiction in fiction. When I first started reading literary fiction, I was struck by how much I was learning – not only about the human heart, which is traditionally what literature is supposed to be about, but also about how the world worked and the way the world was. So when I read Ernest Hemingway’s [short story] “Big Two-Hearted River,” I felt I was learning not only about Nick Adams’s interior but also about fly fishing.”

Although Hemingway always creates such particularized experiences that he does indeed make me want to go fly fishing, I think the fishing information in “River” is only as good as for what Hemingway uses it—a means by which Nick tries to deal with the implications of his war experience.  Indeed, when one gets intrigued by mere “information” in a story, one runs the risk of neglecting the complex human experience the language of the story attempts to create.

In my opinion, Andrea Barrett, Shepard’s colleague at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.,  does a more convincing job of integrating historical context into a complex human story than Shepard does. Barrett understands some basic similarities between science, history, and storytelling.  She knows that all three construct narratives—whether they are called scientific theories, historical accounts, or fiction--to reveal connections, relationships, the interdependence of all things; all are human efforts to understand, or perhaps construct, what makes life meaningful. Barrett once told an interviewer that after doing graduate work, first in zoology in the late seventies and then in history in the early eighties, she began to see a way to weave science and history together with her love of fiction.

What Shepard likes about "The Particles" is how the story "renders unforgettably that experience of falling in love with experimental science, as if 'tumbling down a well.'"  He also is quite taken by the fact that the story "pulls off the nearly impossible feat of seducing us into imagining fruit flies as fascinating." And within this context of science, there is the human story of the character Sam's inextricable relationship with his old friend and teacher, Axel. Again, although I have always admired Andrea Barrett's stories, this is not, in my opinion, one of her best—failing to hold together in that admirable way that many of her other stories do.  But, I am certainly not surprised that Jim Shepard chose it as his favorite in this collection; I can't imagine him choosing any other.

            I apologize for taking so long to get back to my discussion of this year's O. Henry stories, and for not getting to all of them that I read but, it is December, after all, and I have been blessed with visits from my three children and three grandchildren, and there were, you know, cookies to bake and candy to make, and a turkey to stuff, and, well, you know.  And truth to tell, I just was not as impressed with the O. Henry collection as I was with the Best American collection this year, so was not compelled to get right back to writing about it. You understand.  Tomorrow begins a new day and a new year, and, as my father always said, "If the Lord is willing and the creek don't rise," I will be back at my blog post in January 2014 to talk about the stories I am reading.  I just finished reading a fine little collection of stories by A. E. Coppard that I received from an editor recently.  A pleasure that I am pleased to discuss next week.  Have a safe and happy New Year's celebration and a new year that is everything you wish it to be.

--Charles

2013 O. Henry Prize Stories: Part I

During the past week, I have been reading the twenty stories in the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Although there are stories by writers I have always admired—Deborah Eisenberg, Anne Beattie, Andrea Barrett, and Alice Munro--I have not enjoyed this collection as much as I did the 2013 Best American Short Stories, which I read in November. So forgive my lack of enthusiasm in what follows.

I won't comment on Jamie Quatro's "Sinkhole" or Alice Munro's "Leaving Waverly," since I posted blogs on both those stories on April 22 and Jan. 12, 2012.  I will comment briefly on the others in no particular order, discussing ten this week and the remaining eight next week..

Polly Rosenwaike, "White Carnations"

Rosenwaikie's Notes at the end of the book indicate that this story is part of a collection in progress about pregnancy and new motherhood.  I am always a bit suspicious of stories cold-bloodedly written to fulfill a scheme, preferring rather stories that seem to spring from something obsessive that the writer discovers in the process of writing. This story begins a bit too cutely-smart for my tastes, with some women meeting regularly on Mother's Day at a pub frequented by gay men and regular drunks although the narrator pointedly notes that they no longer have mothers and are not mothers themselves. The  narrator is pregnant after a one-nighter, and has decided not to have an abortion. Much of the story focuses on the narrator's summary of her mother's own pregnancy and her thoughts about her pregnancy; it ends with an image of two pregnant women—one eager and one reluctant—sharing their news.  It's not the subject matter that fails to interest me here, but rather the flat, self-centered and self-conscious, way that the story is told.

Derek Palacio "Sugarcane"

This is about the experience of a doctor in post-revolutionary Cuba who has an affair with a seamstress and who mentors the son of a plantation manager, in return for extra sugar, which—both sweet and bitter because of regulation--becomes the central  of the story. Although ostensibly the story is about the doctor being torn between a desire to leave and a desire to stay, it really centers on the political/cultural context of Cuba at this particular time in its history.  The long dialogue section between the doctor and the seamstress and the prolonged child delivery scene witnessed by the boy seem more filler than thematically essential.

Tash Aw, "Sail"

The story centers on a Chinese man who has been involved in a minor way in the Tiananmen Square protests and wants to be a political writer; however, he  has instead become a wealthy businessman. He is married to a successful woman who seems more businesslike than passionate and has an affair with an English woman he has hired to help him improve his English.  The story seems inconsequential until a surprising final scene when the man is on the verge of killing his mistress; up to that point, it has no real significance except some vague connection between the man's minor political experiences and his current sense of purposelessness.

Donald Antrim, "He Knew"

This  is one of those sophisticated New York yuppie  stories that usually fail to involve me. Stephen and Alice, a married couple, are taking a walk up Madison Avenue, passing lots of expensive shops, taking prescription drugs for depression and anxiety.  He is an actor who specializes in comic roles, but not getting much work. She has suffered a breakdown.  They walk and talk and take their meds in what is basically a great stylized exercise about the life of two people who are bound together in a fragile yet inescapable way.  I suppose I should care about them, but I just don't.

Asako Serizawa, "The Visitor"

The story takes place on an afternoon in postwar Japan, when a middle-aged woman is visited by a soldier who claims to have known her son during the war. The encounter is fraught with some tacit tension, partially because the woman is afraid of the man and partially because she dreads what he has to tell her about her son, who went missing during the war and has never been found.  I found the story too easy and predictable—both in the writing and in the plotting and characterization. Take the following bit of what seems to me to be careless prose: The woman pours the man some tea and offers him food, saying she "nudged the noodles toward him." Then a few lines later she wonders how she might "nudge" him out the door. I know that might seem minor, but two "nudges" in a row seems careless to me. The story ends with a revelation about her son that makes a "sharp chill snake up her spine."

Joan Silber, "Two Opinions"

At over thirty pages, this is the second longest story in the collection and is perhaps the most "novelistic," for it is something of a summary of one woman's life.  Although ostensibly the story centers on the theme suggested by the title—Louise's ability to hold two opposing opinions at once—it actually focuses on her life in the shadow of her war-protester father and the ghost of her husband, who departs for a teaching job in Okinawa and basically never really returns. Her two opinions—that she is against war like her father, yet at the same time approves of the end of the Nazi persecution—is not really thematically relevant to her life with and without her husband. She is a woman of relatively simple animal and domestic pleasures, not an ideologue like her mother and father, although her mother scolds her, "You think you can do without ideas but you can't." Too novelistic for me.

Melinda Moustakis, "They Find the Drowned"

This is a modular story, written in several short sections.  But for this kind of story to work, there has to be some cohesion. The pieces alternate back and forth between scientific observations about a river and its inhabitants and the experiences of a woman living in the wilds of Alaska. The title sentence is from one of the scientific sections: "They find the drowned don't have liquid in their lungs—they gasp in the cold water until their tracheas collapse."  Although the individual sections are tightly written, lyrical prose poems, this is less a story than a poetic rhapsody about the natural world and those that live in the wilds.

George McCormick, "The Mexican"

This short, simple story about a boy who works during the summer on refrigerator train cars would not be a story at all without the final paragraph, when the boy has become a man and tells his own boys a different story than what actually happened. When a huge block of ice falls through a rail car on to a load of oranges below it, the boy is told to go down and open the boxcar from the inside to get the ice out. When he does so, he sees a Mexican man hiding in a small space beside the door, who walks past him and disappears into the oranges "like a snake into a river." In the final paragraph he tells his boys a story without ice and no Mexican, but rather about Mexican steers breaking loose from a boxcar and running out into the plains. The story ends: "I tell them this story because in the West what we love most are lies.  What we love are images of a stampede, of animals running; of what we think are the right stories of stealing away." This is a nice example of the importance of endings for the short story.

Nalini Jones, "Tiger"

Jones says in the Writing Notes at the end of the book that she wrote this story to try to discover something about  the mother Essie, who is a character in a novel she is writing. Eventually she said she discovered  it was not part of a novel at all,  but was becoming something entirely different.   I like this story precisely because it is a story, not a chapter in a novel, because it seems self-sustaining and complete in itself, not requiring anything else at all to make it whole. Essie's discovery of the lump in her breast and her use of this to try to bind her daughter closer to her and keep her home all seems entirely believable because Jones's telling of the story is appropriately restrained. The mother is the tiger in this story, using whatever means possible to take care of her young and keep them close. Her lies to both daughter and granddaughter seem entirely justified and understandable.

Lily Tuck, "Perou"

This is a delicate story told in the risky point of view of a small child, beginning with her infancy in a pram, up to age five, when she and her mother were living in Lima, Peru, having escaped the Nazi invasion of France during World War II.  The story primarily focuses on the child's perception of her nanny, a 19-24-year-old French girl, compelled to leave her family to care for the child.  The story is really about the child's sympathetic identification with her nanny Jeanne, with whom, of course, she is much too young to identify. The adult teller of the story sympathizes with the loneliness and exploitation of Jeanne, who seems destined to remain an exile from her homeland in Perou or Peru.

More Good Stories from Best American Short Stories 2013

Antonya Nelson, “Chapter Two”

This is a story about the uses of story.  The central character, a woman named Hil, tired of telling her own story at  AA meetings, tells a story about her neighbor Bergeron Love, who comes to her house drunk and naked. Bergeron is the gadfly nuisance character of the neighborhood. She once reported a neighbor to the police for abusing his daughters, a false accusation that made it necessary to move her own son to another school to avoid retaliation. Hil sees her as a bully, a hypocrite, as pitiful, and as a legend.  Hil tells other stories about Bergeron, but leaves out the final story of her death because, as she says, that would have ruined the fun. Her friend tells her that she could tell the dead story at the next meeting, as though it had just happened, a follow-up to the naked visit story, in other words, a “Chapter Two.”

However, the real “chapter two” may be the untold story of Hil’s displacement of her weaknesses onto Bergeron. The closest the story comes to a statement of theme is when Hil says, “It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective.” The final section of the story makes clear that when Hil talks about herself at the AA meetings, she is lying, that her one-year mark is fictitious, that she is not living a life of sobriety. When she talks about Bergeron, at least she is telling the truth, but, she asks, “was it a story?” as she considers other scenarios she could tell about Bergeron. The story ends with Hil finding a new meeting to go to, conveniently near a pub, where she will begin a story of Bergeron by talking about her son trying to keep his drunken mother out of trouble.  This is a doppelganger story, in which Hil uses story about another to avoid talking about herself, but, inevitably, she ends up talking about herself.

Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Nemecia”

I posted on Kirstin Valdez Quade’s New Yorker story “Five Wounds” in July 2009.  I felt then that she was a very promising master of the short story form. This new story confirms my initial response to her work. ”Nemecia,” which won the 2013 Narrative Prize for a story by a new or emerging writer, is another doppelganger story, another sort of “evil twin ”tale. It is a first person pov story told by a young woman whose cousin Nemecia has been taken in by her family as a child.  The story begins with Nemecia at thirteen and the narrator at six. The narrator says she was afraid of Nemecia because she says she killed her own mother (who came back to life after a month) and her grandfather. This convincing fictional tale has such power over the narrator that, “The next day, the world looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.”

Nemecia is jealous of the narrator and damages her things just enough to ruin them but avoid blame. When she develops acne, she begins scratching the narrator’s cheek, opening the scab each night until it leaves a permanent scar from her nose to her lip, making her look dissatisfied. The narrator feels she owes her sense of identity to Nemecia, until one day she tries to individualize herself by winning the honor of being the angel in the Corpus Christi parade. When the mother sympathetically allows Nemecia to take the narrator’s place, she responds so angrily that she is sent to live with her great aunt Paulita, who tells her the truth about Nemecia’s past—that Nemecia’s mother had been attacked by her husband; when the grandfather tried to intervene the man kills him. The narrator’s response is to hate Nemecia all the more for the demands she makes on her sympathy and for having such a tragedy she could call her own.  It’s an honest, complex tangle of emotions that Quade explores masterfully.

The story ends with Nemecia’s mother sending for her from Los Angeles—a move that makes her even more glamorous in the narrator’s eyes and makes the doppelganger theme more explicit:  “Night after night I told myself the story: a pettier me, swept away to California, and the boy who would find me and save me from my unhappiness.” A doll that Nemecia shattered when a child is the metaphor that concludes the story. Even though its repaired face stared at the girls in their bedroom for years, Nemecia does not remember it. Instead she collects dolls of the world and Waterford crystal. The last line of the story is a perfect metaphor for Nemecia’s effort to clear the shattered past of her life, but which simultaneously recalls the past that links her to the narrator: “Nemecia held a wineglass to the window and turned it. ‘See how clear?’ Shards of light moved across her face.”  It’s a subtle story of sympathy and identification, damage and vulnerability.

Suzanne Rivecca, “Philanthropy”

I previously posted a blog on Rivecca’s collection Death is Not an Option, which was short listed for the 2011 Frank O’Connor prize. In that essay, I praised her prose, even as I found the personae and plots weak. “Philanthropy” is the most “socially conscious” stories in this year’s BASS—a focus that, in my opinion, makes it too diffuse and general to work well as a short story. Once again, it is the symbolic use of doppelganger characters that energizes the social theme.

Cora, the central character, manages a Women’s Service program, which is visited by a successful popular novelist, Yvonne Borneo, who is also a philanthropist. Cora needs money from the woman, but Yvonne wants to know why Cora survived life on the streets and her daughter Angelica did not. The story focuses on the impossibility of knowing the other.  Yvonne tells Cora that her daughter is like an ocean underneath an ocean, “a complete mystery.” Although Cora knows what it is like to be Angelica in a way that her mother never can, she insists that knowing her will not help Yvonne know Angelica, for “we are all different people.” 

But if we cannot know one person by knowing someone who seems like that stranger, then how can we ever know anyone?  I discuss this theme as a predominant one in the short story genre in my new book. The look Yvonne gives Cora, while neither remorse nor reproach, registers “something old and muddied and orphaned between them, a helpless moat of transference, brimming with the run-off of two people whose primary identities were….of someone else’s mother and someone else’s child.” This is not my favorite story in this year’s BASS, for, in my opinion, its focus on the general social issue of displaced young women blurs the specific human issue of the difficulty of knowing the other.

George Saunders, “The Simplica-Girl Diaries”

Because I have written about the stories of George Saunders several times on this blog, particularly his collection Tenth of December, which contains “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” I will not spend any time here on it here.  Although it is not one of my favorite Saunders stories, it is a very funny satire that pushes the old “keeping up with the Joneses” theme to futuristic extremes. Saunders creates a stylized but believable voice of the 40-year old guy who wants to make his daughter proud and thinks he has the chance when he wins a scratcher for $10,000 and hopes it will change his lackluster life—that is, until the ultimate prestige lawn adornments--exploited third world women—are set free by his other daughter.  I like it; it made me laugh in a painfully relevant way in the way that good humor should. But still and all, it is basically a satire and therefore an illustration of a general social theme, not an exploration of a mysterious human complexity.

Jim Shepard, “The World to Come”

I have read many Jim Shepard stories. One characteristic they share is Shepard’s obsession with historical, factual detail, which he researches thoroughly and out of which he creates a meticulously detailed fiction.  This one began, he says, with an old book he found in the dollar pile at a local Goodwill store, Sidney Parley’s Historic Storms of New England, which led him, as it often does, to other related books, e.g. books on nineteenth-century farming.  In one such book, he found a farm wife’s journal about the one friend she had in the world being forced to move away. Then, he says, “Suddenly a whole vista of desolation and loneliness and foreclosed options seemed to peep forth.” And once again, we have an exploration of Frank O’Connor’s central short story theme of “the lonely voice.”

Written in a diary format, like “The Simplica-Girls’ Diaries,” the language is radically different from that of George Saunders’ comic satire. Not meant to be an exactly rendering of a farm wife’s voice, the language is poetically stylized but exactly right.  For example: “I grew like a pot-bound root all curled in upon itself.” “I always imagine I’ve been plunged up to my eyes in a vat of the prosaic.” “He said to me this morning that contentment was like a friend he never gets to see.”

 When the narrator and her close friend Tallie begin kissing, she says she does not know what is happening to her. “I told her that I believed that we were now encountering that species of education that proceeds from being forced to confront what we never before acknowledged.” After Tallie is forced to move away and later after her death, the narrator grieves and I struggles to banish the sentiments that she says Tallie “chastened and refined.” The story ends with this line: “I imagined continuing to write in this ledger, here; as though that were life; as though life were not elsewhere.”  This was, for me, one of the most emotionally affecting stories in the book, for Shepard makes the voice of the woman so convincingly poetic that she is absolutely irresistible. Not many stories bring tears to my eyes, but this one, I confess, did—not out of easy sentimentality, but out of complex sympathetic identification.

Callan Wink, “Breatharians”

Twelve year-old farm boy, August literally lives between two worlds—that of his mother who lives in the “old house” and is trying to find a spiritual way to live, and his father, who lives in the new house with a 19-year-old girl with whom he is having sex and who offers August a dollar a tail for killing stray cats that have infested the barn.

Reader warning:  If you are a cat-lover, you will hate this story.

The title comes from the fact that the boy’s mother tells him she has become a faster, a breatherian, a Hindu practice based on the belief that some holy people can live solely on the atmosphere in which they exist and need no food and water at all. She says she is trying to get to the point where all you have to do is breathe the air and you’re satisfied.

The story’s theme--a young boy trying to figure out how to live his life, torn between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh--is structured in a fairly straightforward way. Although the mother tells August that his barn days are coming to an end that believes that his father’s way have not won him over yet, the ending of the story makes her hope problematical. It’s one of the simpler stories in the collection, but, like all the stories in this year’s BASS, it is a powerful example of the short story form.

Elizabeth Tallent, “The Wilderness”

This is one of the best stories about teaching literature and writing that I have read in many years. In an era when the liberal arts are being undervalued in favor of math and the sciences, it should be required reading for those discouraged students of the arts who struggle to follow what they love. If you are an English major worrying about getting a job, a literature graduate student concerned about finding a place in academia, a student of creative writing fearful that fiction and poetry are being ignored in favor of nonfiction, this is a story from which you might take hope.

In the Contributors’ Notes, Tallent says this story began with bewilderment about her delight in teaching, after which she watched for bits and pieces belonging to the story, a collage-like progression that was like browsing.  She says when she teaches, she wants her student to have a Keatsian willingness to tolerate uncertainties while they are working. And indeed, the short story is a form that cannot begin with a formulated idea or a carefully built plan, but rather with some grain of sand that irritates until it is worked into a pearl of radiance.

My favorite sentence in a story filled with many radiant sentences is:  “She could swear that an enthralled reader nineteen years old is the most beautiful animal on earth.”

If you love lit, you will love this story.  If you yearn to teach, you need this story.

It is Thanksgiving in America tomorrow.  I have dry-brined the turkey and made the stuffing with my mother’s old-fashioned cornbread and sausage recipe; they wait in the refrigerator overnight.  I will also make turkey gravy and mashed potatoes tomorrow when the turkey is a golden brown. After that, the vegetable side dish,whatever it may be, seems superfluous.  Not good for my cholesterol, but very good for my sentimental soul.

I will begin posting about stories in this year’s O. Henry Prize Stories next week.

BRITISH READERS: DON'T FORGET. AMAZON IS FEATURING A DISCOUNT ON THE KINDLE VERSION OF MY NEW BOOK, BEGINNING NOV. 29.