Best American Short Stories 2014--Thumbnail Comments

I like the editing method of Best American Short Stories better than the method of O. Henry Prize Stories.  In the latter, the 20 stories depend solely on the taste and judgment of Laura Furman, and I don't always understand her judgment. In the BASS, Heidi Pitlor picks 120 stories and then turns the batch over to an independent judge, usually a fiction writer, to choose the final 20. Since the guest judge differs each year, the reader gets some variety. I really liked the selection Elizabeth Strout chose for the 2103 edition of BASS. 

But although I enjoyed Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, I was not impressed with her selection in this year's BASS.  I thought too many of the stories depended on "ripped from the headlines" newsworthy content, simple concepts, or technique tricks.  Oh, well, next year is another year, and regardless of how I felt abou this year's batch of stories, I will look forward to the 2015 editions of Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories.  Here are my ho-hum reactions to the 20 stories chosen by Jennifer Egan in this year's BASS.

"Charity" by Charles Baxter focuses on a young gay man named Matty Quinn who has come back from working in Ethiopia with infections that get him started taking painkillers. He lives in a basement apartment in Minneapolis, but his boyfriend lives in Seattle. When his painkillers run out, he mugs and robs a man to buy more, for which he feels guilt. Part I of the story ends with his disappearance. The second part of the story is told in first person by the Seattle boyfriend, who has just told/written the first part of the story. He comes to Minneapolis and finds homeless Matty living on the riverbank. After cleaning him up, Harry, the boyfriend, beats up Matty's drug dealer and takes Matty back to Seattle  and sets him up in an apartment. a simple plot-based story that depends on "ripped from the headlines" prescription drug abuse, African poverty, and homosexuality.

Anne Beattie, "The Indian Uprisin." The most famous story with this title is by Donald Barthelme.  The only indication that Beattie may have had it in mind is the opening disclaimer by one of the characters in her story: "There's no copyright on titles. It wouldn't be a good idea, probably, to call something Death of a Salesman, but you could do it." The story is largely made up of witty dialogue with literary allusions between the female narrator and a seventy-year diabetic  man who was once her creative writing professor. While they are eating in a Mexican restaurant, she sees blood on her old professor's foot and faints. When his receptionist, a postoperative transgender, comes to take him to the hospital, he takes a Mexican hat off the wall and puts it on, prompting someone to say, "There might be an Indian uprising if we stop him.". The story ends with the narrator telling us that the professor refused dialysis and died. Heeding her professor's last bit of advice to find something to write about after he is dead, the narrator says, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story." And it is this story--not a great story, but Anne Beattie-clever as usual.  I don't see any thematic connection between the story and the Barthelme story. Perhaps Beattie had a personal connection in mind.

The voice we hear in Peter Cameron's "After the Flood" is that of an elderly woman who "writes" the story in a rambling, casual manner, with numerous asides. The story begins with the woman's minister, Reverend Judy, coming to ask the narrator and her husband if they will temporarily take in the Djukanovics,  a family whose house and belongings have been destroyed by a flood. Something has happened in the past to the narrator's daughter, Alice, but she does not talk/write about  that even. In a final conversation between the narrator and the minister, we get hints that the narrator's daughter and her own daughter Laila have been killed by the son-in-law because of financial losses. The story ends with the narrator and her husband deciding not to go to church any more. For a famous version of a similar "Displaced Person" story that deals more complexly with loss, charity, and faith, see Flannery O'Connor's story of that name. Cameron's story perhaps depends too much on a "ripped from the headlines" murder and a too simple treatment of loss of faith.

T.C. Boyle, "The Night of the Satellite." This couple-conflict story focuses on two English graduate students. On the way to a friend's farmhouse, they encounter another couple having what the central male character calls "a lover's quarrel." The central female character wants to help the young woman in the quarrel; the man does not. This leads to clashes between the two, which is cranked up even more in the evening when they go to  bar and run into the couple again. While they are quarreling out in a dark field later that night, a small piece of mesh falls from the sky and hits the man on the shoulder. He finds out online that a NASA satellite had fallen out of orbit, scattering some debris; but his girlfriend thinks it is just from a tractor or a lawnmower and throws it away. The first-person narrator drives away from the farmhouse and sees the quarreling couple once again, still fighting. He thinks that they can go on "careering around the world on any orbit they wanted just as long as it never intersected mine again." He calls his girlfriend, but she is still angry with him, so he hangs up, thinking that he wanted to say was that he would be back and that she should look up in the sky "where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what's going to come down next."  This is a simple story based on a single metaphor of accidental stuff out of nowhere that sometimes exposes character weaknesses and incompatibilities—right out of 1001 Nights.

Nicole Cullen, "Long Tom Lookout" begins with the central character, Lauren, being given responsibility for caring for her husband's 5-year-old son Jonah after the child's  mother is sent to jail for drug possession and the father is on an oil spill skimming vessel on the Gulf of Mexico. Insisting that she has no intention of being the boy's mother, she drives to Idaho and takes a job with the Forest Service as a fire Lookout.  You know that being stuck on a lookout tower with the boy in the forest, there will be some sort of crisis and Lauren will feel a commitment to the child. Sure enough, that's what happens.

Craig Davidson, "Medium Tough." The gimmick in this first-person pov story by a doctor is the heavy dependence on technical language of ailments, procedures, medical devices, and the good doctor's flippant use of the tools of his trade. A good dictionary would be helpful here, but is it worth it? One character says to the narrator, "I love it when you talk shop."  You will have to love the shop talk also to get through this story. But then the story would not exist without it.

Joshua Ferris, "The Breeze"—This is a "What do you want to do tonight?"/"I dunno. What do you want to do" story.  This "much ado about nothing" story is held together quasi-poetically and supposedly meaningfully by the metaphor of the "breeze" of the title.  The woman is enraptured by the breeze and it isn't in him to feel such things. And, so it goes, or doesn't go, as they continue to query, "What do you want to do?"/ "I dunno. What do you want to do?" A New Yorker story in the old bad way.

Nell Freudenberger, "Hover"—An easy, trivial, single-read story about a mother who, against her will, hovers slightly above the ground. It only happens when she is doing "mom stuff," and so this is what it signifies—doing mom stuff.

David Gates, "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me"—I have to admit that I found this story about an English professor who teaches the Victorian novel and his friendship with a father-figure mandolin-picker of bluegrass music who is dying of cancer hard to resist.  But then I am an English professor from Eastern Kentucky who loves bluegrass music and wrote his dissertation on Thomas Hardy. What's your excuse?

Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"—The story begins in good old David Copperfield novelistic fashion—"Jude was born in a cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles." Now, all Groff has to do is invent what happened to this child whose father is a crazy snake-raiser and whose mother runs away. If I were to summarize the story, you would think I was summing up a novel that ends with a man who escapes the "hungry darkness."

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, "The Judge's Will"—O.K. here's the situation: A Delhi judge has a heart attack, his second, and decides he must tell his wife about the provisions in his will for the woman he has been keeping for 25 years. When she finds out he wants her to meet the woman, she takes it rather well, for she does not love him, and is only concerned with her son, who is more like a brother to her than a son. When the woman begins visiting the house on a regular basis, the relationships between the four all become like what the son says is an "old-fashioned French farce." A plot-based 1001 Nights type story that is fun, but not fulfilling.

O. A. Lindsey, "Evie M."—This is a first-person pov story in the form of notes taken by a veteran of one of the recent wars in the Middle East.  Although the narrator imagines ejaculating and a colleague makes a reference to sucking the narrator's dick, it seems relatively clear that the narrator is a female with a female lover and is suffering some form of  post-traumatic stress, the story ending with a suicide attempt.  More "ripped from the headlines."

Will Mackin, "Kattekoppen"—An American soldier in Afghanistan regularly gets a childhood favorite Dutch licorice from his mother, for she does not know that he no longer likes the candy. In fact no one likes the candy, so it stays on a shelf, becoming valued only when the narrator uses it to mask the smell of a decomposing ambushed comrade. You gotta like war stories to like this one.

Brendan Mathews, "This is Not a Love Song." In his comments on this story, Mathews says it was busted until he discovered the point of view he needed to make it work.  The pov he uses is a series of  photographs focusing on a female rock singer with whom the narrator/photographer went to high school and with whom she is so obsessed that friends think they are lesbians. The story depends largely on the photo pov.

Molly McNett, "La Pulchra Nota"—The center of this story of a14th century music teacher is his understanding of la pulchra nota—the moment that music comes closest to perfection: "La pulchra nota is the moment of beauty absolute, but what follows—a pause, however small—is the realization of its passing.  Perhaps no perfection is without this silent realization." This is Isak Dinesen type fable of disfigurement, loss, denial, religious obsession, sin, and punishment.

Benjamin Nugent, "God"—The first sentence sums up the story: "He called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends." If you were in a college fraternity, you may appreciate this story.  I was not.

Joyce Carol Oates, "Mastiff." I read this story when it first appeared in The New Yorker.  Every time I read a new Joyce Carol Oates story, I try to like her, but God help me, I cannot.  She makes it look so easy.  And in most cases that's what the story is—easy. Joyce Carol Oates can make a story out of everything.  And it seems she does.  For Oates, anything—such as a man being attacked by a huge dog—can mean something—that is, if, like Oates, you know how to make a story.

Stephen O'Connor—"Next to Nothing"—Two sisters, sociologists, are caught in Hurricane Irene. I made the mistake of reading O'Connor's "contributor's notes" on this story before reading the story—a mistake because I liked the notes better than I did the story. O'Connor suggests the story is about the complex paradox that even though he is an atheist, he must live by faith—"not in spiritual terms, but in the sense that in order to be a happy and decent human being" he must cherish beliefs that can never be verified. Intriguing idea that catches my imagination. The story not so much.

Karen Russell, "Madame Bovary's Greyhound"—I have posted blogs on Russell's two collections of stories St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Groves.  You can do a search over to the right of this and see what you think.  The basic problem I have with Russell's new story is the same I had with her previous ones—they are concept stories—fun to read for their imaginative inventions, but lacking in depth. In this one, it helps if you have read Flaubert

Laura van den Berg, "Antarctica."  I liked this story of a woman who comes to Antarctica to find out about the death of her brother, not because it was the longest, but because it was the most ambitious in its exploration of the mystery of being human. No tricks, no self-conscious gimmicks here, just an honest exploration of why people do the inexplicable things they do.