Yiyun Li, GOLD BOY, EMERALD GIRL: Shortlisted for 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

The two most prominent sources of reader/reviewer fascination with the stories of Yiyun Li are: that a writer for whom English is a second language can write so “elegantly” in her adopted language and that Li provides “insights” into a culture with which Western readers may not be familiar. Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Prayers, won the first Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Guardian First Book Award in 2006, only ten years after she came to the University of Iowa from Beijing to study immunology. She has told an interviewer that she did not know Iowa City was a writer’s town; during her second year, someone told her that everyone is Iowa City was writing a novel, “And that started my dream. I thought I wanted to write a novel, too,” although she had never written anything in China. She began taking several undergraduate writing classes and then enrolled in both the nonfiction and the fiction program at Iowa, graduating with two MFA’s at once. Readers find such authorial backstories remarkable and irresistible.

Li has been named by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. In 2010, she won one of the so-called “genius” MacArthur Foundation Awards, worth half a million dollars over a five-year period. Her novel The Vagrant was shortlisted for the big-money IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2009, which was won by Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. But the fact that she won the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award in 2005, beating out David Means’ wonderful collection The Secret Goldfish, may make judges decide this year to award it to another, even though most reviewers think that Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is a better collection of stories than A Thousand Years of Prayers. I have not read Li’s first collection, but after reading her recent collection, I ordered it and plan to read it soon. Her success reaffirms my suspicion that good storytellers are born, not taught

As might be expected, the long, novella-type story, “Kindness” that opens Gold Boy, Emerald Girl has attracted the most praise from reviewers. It is often just assumed that if a story is long, it is more complex than one that is short. However, although “Kindness” is an affecting first-person account of a woman named Moyan who rebuffs the affection of her mathematics students and lives alone, which is not surprising since she has rejected overtures of love and friendship from others all her life—her professor who introduced her to Dickens, Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, and her Lieutenant while a teenage recruit in the People’s Liberation Army. Although Moyan’s refusal to make contact with anyone has made her an exemplum of what Frank O’Connor has said is characteristic of the short story as a form—loneliness—“Kindness,” in its drawn-out exploration of the sources of Moyan’s isolation over a period of years, is much more characteristic of the novel form than the short story.

If “Kindness” is to be taken as typical of Li’s novelistic technique, the eight remaining stories in the collection, in my opinion, are ample evidence that Li is a stronger short story writer than she is a novelist. Frank O’Connor’s “lonely voice” is predominant in all of Li’s short stories—which may due as much to the fact that the great Irish short story writer William Trevor is her favorite author as it is to the influences of a repressive modern Chinese culture.

In “A Man Like Him,” a retired art teacher becomes incensed when he reads about a young woman who is suing her father for taking a mistress and abandoning his family. He frequents social web sites, pretending he is a younger, more desirable man, buys fashion magazines with pictures of young women, and lives with his ninety-year-old mother, who adopted him as a child. He ponders the expression, “a man like him,” feeling lost and alone, and stalks the beaten-down father who abandoned his family to show his sympathy--telling him, “We are the kind of men who would not kick our feet or flail our arms if someone came to strangle us to death.” He tells the father his own story of being accused of perversion for simply looking with fascinated interest at a young girl in one of his classes. The father tells him that his daughter has said that if she is unsuccessful in getting him put in prison, she will come with rat poison, adding, “I am waiting every day for her to fulfill her promise, and I count it as my good fortune to have little suspense left in my life.” The retired teacher leaves the man with an expression that his aged mother often uses and which he has adopted for his own, “I have nothing to say about this world.”

“I have nothing to say about this world” might be the mantra of most of the lonely characters in Li’s stories. For example, in “Prison,” a successful Chinese couple living in America lose their sixteen-year-old daughter in a traffic accident and find their world shattered. When the husband suggests they go to China and find a surrogate mother so that they might have another child, the wife chooses an uneducated young woman whose only child has been stolen by a kidnapper several years before, and stays with her during the pregnancy with twins, fretting over imagined dangers to the unborn children. When the two women are approached by a young beggar boy on the street, the pregnant woman insists that the boy is her missing child, causing such a scene that the boy’s guardian must take him away. When the two women get home, the girl demands that the woman give her half the money promised so that she can buy the boy back from the beggar man. When the woman asks the girl to sit down so they can talk about it, she threatens to run away and sell the twins. The story ends with a standoff as the woman thinks, “This was the price they paid for being mothers…that the love of one’s own child made everyone else in the world a potential enemy.” She knows that the relationship of trust she and the girl has developed during the pregnancy is crushed and that they will remain each other’s prisoners.

“House Fire” starts out to be what seems like a light comedy about six women friends, from their mid-fifties to early seventies, who establish a detective business to investigate men who cheat on their wives. The title comes from a popular joke that circulates as a text message throughout the city: “An old man in love is like an old house on fire, which burns easily and burns down fast.” The women are so successful that a television station does a story about them, which ironically makes them lose business because potential clients think their “cover has been blown.” When they interview a potential male client, they become especially interested because the man thinks that his wife is having an affair with his own father who lives with them. During the course of the interview, the women recall their own past fears, disappointments, and betrayals. It is the lightest story in the collection, but even then it manages to probe beneath the surface of the mere plot to reveal the backstory of the characters’ loneliness.

The shortest story in the collection, “Souvenir,” (about six pages) may be the only one to verge on the manipulative. It is a single scene in which still another lonely, elderly man, approaches a young woman in a pharmacy with the oft-used line, “You remind me of my wife when she was your age.” The girl tries to avoid him, but when she awkwardly buys a pack of condoms, while being laughed at by other women in the story, she drops them and the old man puts his foot on them, scolding her for what he thinks is her immoral behavior. What he does not know is that the girl is planning to give herself to the boy she loved, a boy who has been beaten so badly by the authorities that his parents tell her he will never become a husband. However, “she is the kind of girl who did not believe their words. She believed that her love would save and change him.” The story ends with these lines: “Someday, when she became an old woman, she would show the pink pack to her children, a souvenir of her hopeful youth.”

The title story, which concludes the collection, is about a thirty-eight year old woman and a forty-four year old man for whom the man’s mother (the girl’s former teacher) is trying to arrange a match, unaware that her son is gay. The title refers to pictures of the man with his parents as he was growing up. “They would have been called ‘gold boy’ and ‘emerald girl’ at their wedding, enviable for their matching good looks.” The young woman agrees to marry her old professor’s son, but only because both love his mother. The story, and Li’s book, ends this way: “They were half orphans, and beyond that there was the love for his mother that they could share with no one else, he was a son who had once left but had now returned, she who had not left and would never leave. They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.”

I like Yiyun Li’s stories, not because she provides me with information about Chinese culture, but because she is a fine writer who has mastered my favorite literary form. She is obviously a born storyteller who has learned a new language with which she feels completely comfortable and confident. Moreover, by studying the stories of William Trevor, she has learned the secrets of the short story form from a consummate master.

A couple of weeks ago, Eileen Battersby (who was a judge of the Frank O’Connor Award when Jhumpa Lahiri won in 2008) wrote a piece for The Irish Times about the six shortlisted authors in this year’s competition, concluding, “Lightning may well strike twice. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl stands out on this shortlist. Should it win, it will be a victory for everyone: the author, the short-story form, the judges, the award, literary prizes in general and oh yes, let us not forget, the real winners, us, the readers.”

The winner of the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award will be announced on September 18. In a few days, I will comment on the sixth and final book on the shortlist, Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood. Then I may well venture my own opinion as to who might be the winner of the Award.

Colm Tóibín’s THE EMPTY FAMILY: 2011 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award Shortlist

The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín

It is not often that I like an author’s novels better than his or her short stories. Usually, the writing is better in short stories than in novels, not only because it is difficult to sustain careful, precise, evocative writing over the long haul, but also because of the short’s story’s dependence on thematic significance communicated by careful poetic patterning of language.

I liked Colm Tóibín’s The Master, as a stylistic tour de force and loved Brooklyn because its universal theme, communicated by such carefully written language, suggested the technique of a short story than that of a novel (See my earlier blog entry on Brooklyn, January 20, 2010). However, I did not like Tóibín’s first collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, and I am no big fan of his recent collection, Empty Family, in spite of its being short listed for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

Of the six collections on that list, Tóibín’s book has received the most attention by reviewers, albeit, not so much by American reviewers, who, with the exception of positive reviews in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, pretty much ignored it. However, reviewers in Canada, Australia, England, and Ireland were mostly unanimous in their praise for the collection, which I thought lackluster, ordinary, and even sometimes carelessly written, as if Tóibín had so little respect for the short story form he used it only for “occasional” writing. In my opinion, he has not given it the care and careful attention that he did in The Master and Brooklyn.

In the opening story of The Empty Family, “The Silence,” Tóibín returns to his mentor of The Master, Henry James, taking an anecdote from James’s Notebooks to put together a fictional recreation of Lady Gregory’s account of her short-lived but heated affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. As a result of the affair, Gregory wrote a group of sonnets, which Blunt, at her request, published under his name. In my opinion, a competently done, but hardly Jamesian, literary jeu d' esprit, in which Tóibín attempts to write the story that James did not get around to writing.

The title story, “The Empty Family,” begins with a signature thematic sentence for this collection of stories, as well as a classic Irish theme ever since George Moore’s 1903 The Untilled Field: “I have come back here.” The story is a sort of meditation addressed to a former lover by a man who, while living in California, drives out to the ocean every Saturday so he can stand there and “miss home.” He returns to County Wexford where “home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road.” In a central passage that echoes Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the narrator looks out over the sea and focuses on a single wave to discover that although the wave comes toward us as if to save us, it does nothing, withdrawing in a “shrugging irony, as if to suggest this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing but a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy.” A bit too facile and self-indulgently ruminative, it seems to me.

“One Minus One,” also addressed to a former lover, is mainly a meditation about a man’s return to Ireland to attend the dying of his mother. For everyone who has made this melancholy journey back home for the deathwatch and funeral service of a mother or father, this will seem a familiar experience, which Tóibín handles in a quite ordinary personal essayistic way.

“Two Women” is about Frances, a movie set designer, living in California, who returns to Dublin to work on a film. She recalls her broken relationship years before with her dead lover, an Irish actor. The woman is a brittle, crusty old lady, scornful of her home country and just about everyone with whom she comes in contact, although we are not sure if this attitude has anything to do with that old lover affair. When she meets the widow of her ex-lover in a most convenient, unlikely encounter, they have a sit-down, heart-to-heart that seems inconsequential. Although the woman is “careful to use detail sparingly but make it stand for a lot,” I am not so sure that Tóibín does the same in this story.

“The New Spain” is about Carme Giralt, who, exiled as a communist under Franco, returns to Barcelona to claim an inheritance from her grandmother—an inheritance that has excluded her parents. In its focus on family conflicts, the story is much like the loose pieces in Tóibín’s earlier collection, Mothers and Sons.

“The Colour of Shadows” is about a Dublin businessman who goes to Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s homeplace) to care for his aunt, suffering from dementia. She becomes paranoid that he has been seeing his mother, who has been cut off from the family for deserting the narrator (who is gay) when he was a boy--something his family cannot accept.

“The Pearl Fishers” is about a man who writes thrillers having dinner with a married couple of friends. The wife, who is writing a book about being sexually abused as a young woman by a priest, does not know that her husband and the narrator were lovers in high school. He is on the verge of telling her about his past love with her husband, but is prevented by the disclosure of her own secret. In her New York Times Review, Francine Prose names “Pearl Fishers” the best story in the collection, suggesting that, “multiple ironies, some obvious and others quite subtle, are allowed to shimmer lightly in the atmosphere surrounding the former friends. Resonating throughout the story, the contrasts between action and intention, expectation and outcome alter our perception of the characters: of who they were as teenagers and how they became the adults on whom we are eavesdropping.” As much as I respect Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer, I cannot agree that this story has that much Jamesian stylistic subtlety.

“Pearl Fishers” introduces the reader to something previously missing from Tóibín’s fiction, explicit descriptions of male sexual encounters. The narrator recalls sex with the husband, remembering “I had fed his sweet, thick, pungent, lemony sperm into my mouth with my fingers as if it were jam, desperately trying to make sure that none was wasted.” The sexual descriptions, describing painful anal intercourse, continue in “Barcelona, 1975,” which is about a young Irish man who leaves Dublin at age 20 for Barcelona (as did Tóibín) and takes a lover The emphasis in these sexual scenes is merely on the physical event, not the significance of the event. The prose is routine and ordinary, for example: “I don’t know when I first let my new friend fuck me. I had been fucked for a few seconds the year before, but it was so painful I had made the guy take his dick out forthwith and keep it out. Another guy, summer before I left Ireland, had tried more successfully, but it was better when I fucked him. So when my new friend asked me if I liked fucking or being fucked, I said I like fucking. He said he did too, and in fact he hated being fucked and couldn’t do it.” That, it seems to me, is just tedious, purposeless, writing, regardless of what act it describes.

When asked by one interviewer if he was trying to shock readers with the sex scenes, Tóibín replies, ”with a gale of giggles,” “Yes, that’s thrown in for mischief.” But then more defensively, he adds, “It’s actually an important part of me, and it’s an important part of the world and here it is, and I’m not ashamed of it and I’m certainly not going to hide it, and it’s going in my next book and if you can’t deal with that I can’t…I’m certainly not going to do anything about it such as not put stories into the book or not write things that occur to me. You just have to go wherever things take you. I’m not sure you can take everyone with you, but you should be prepared to try.”

Although one can certainly agree that Tóibín has the right to describe that which is important to him, that which, to some extent defines him as a person, at the same time, a reader has a right to question whether these flatly described explicit sex scenes are anything more meaningful than examples of the author’s right to disclose. Hermione Lee of the Guardian says, “Every so often he allows himself some lavish, graphic sexual writing, as though challenging us to read these descriptions any differently from his scenes of longing for lost family homes or missed landscapes.”

The reviewer in The Toronto Star, Alex Good, suggests the sex passages give one the feeling that “Tóibín is determined to overcompensate for James’s reticence” about male sex. Good argues, “It’s not being prudish to feel that descriptions of analingus or remarks on the taste and consistency of spunk are out of place in stories that otherwise eschew physicality for the inner life. Tóibín’s characters get defined by their sexual urges and behavior, which is a trap that James took some pains to avoid.”

Reviewers are more accepting of the sex scenes in the longest story in the collection, “The Street,” about a young Muslim immigrant, Malik, who has come to Barcelona and must work out the cost of his passage by selling phone cards. Reviewers call it a “daring story,” a “dangerous, dramatic story.” Because it deals with issues of immigration, marginalization Muslim strictures about moral behavior, and because Malik is a young man struggling with his sexuality, reviewers seem ready to ignore the sexuality in favor of the multicultural social issues. However, I think an Australian reviewer best understands the success of this story, suggesting that “The Street” is one of the best stories because “ultimately Tobin is a novelist rather than a short-story writer; his preference for stories of sweeping emotion sits better in extended narratives that allow for character growth and development rather than the sculpted precision shorter narratives demand.”

For me the central issue of Tóibín’s stories is whether they are tightly written, precisely structured short stories, or merely occasional authorial pastimes and recollections to while away the time in between what her perhaps thinks is the more important work of writing novels. Tóibín’s short fiction certainly embodies some of the obsessions of the Irish short story—the theme of exile and return, the notion of the lonely voice--but I am not sure that Tóibín takes the form as seriously as he does his novels.

Heather Ingman, who has written a book on the Irish short story, says in The Irish Times, “For the reader prepared to read slowly and savour the silences between the words, there are rich rewards in this collection.” In my opinion, although Tóibín's novels encourage us to read slowly, his short stories do not.

Francine Prose opens her review in The New York Times by asking: Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia, and regret?… In its search for the surprising yet inevitable chain of events that will illuminate a character’s---and the reader’s—life, a short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.” I agree. I just do not get a glimpse of the genie in the stories of Colm Tóibín.

I will discuss the fifth book in the 2011 Frank O’Connor Award shortlist, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, by Yiyun Li (who won the inaugral Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005 for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) in a few days.

Suzanne Rivecca's DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION: 2011 Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist

As soon as I started reading the opening title story of Suzanne Rivecca’s Death is Not an Option, I wrinkled my nose in clichéd old man fashion and laid the book aside. It was the same way I felt when I made the mistake of rereading Catcher in the Rye a few years ago. When I was a teenager, Holden Caulfield’s smart-ass behavior and language was exactly what I aspired to. Now that I am an old guy, I have so firmly put away childish things I have a hard time finding them; hell, I have a hard time finding my car keys.

But since I have promised to read all six of the shortlisted books for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize and comment on them, I picked it back up and forged ahead in this first-person rant of a Catholic high school senior, Emma, who has been accepted at Brandeis, but is not telling anyone, because her smartness and smart-aleckness has always made her an outcast. She scorns everyone and everything, describing one teacher as an “overgrown and demented Chucky doll,” one classmate as a “sadistic psycho bitch,” and practically everyone as “Mental Giants.

She refers to the uterus as an “impregnable fortress” and “chuckled happily at her ironic wordplay.” And she confesses, but only to the reader, “I have an absurd and disgusting fixation with my own crotch…a secretion-obsessed fetish.” When she tries to use a tampon for the first time, she feels like she is “trying to perform surgery with a Tinkertoy.” At the end of the story, during a touchy-feeling round-robin during which everyone is to tell what they will miss most about Sacred Heart high school, the sadistic psycho bitch talks about how much she will miss Emma, and then, I’ll be damned, the smart, tough, sassy, pain-in-the-ass Emma begins to cry, thinking about what lies in store for her, admitting that she does not know who she is unless she is fighting, that she cannot survive except in a hostile environment. And yes, that is supposed to redeem Emma from her Holden-like sense of the futility and hypocrisy of the whole lousy world, if you really want to know.

This smart-talking female figure, now age 21 and named Katrina, has matured somewhat by the second story, “Yours Will Do Nicely.” “Big words were my province,” she says, and often speaks in a tone of deadpan mock-gravity. After a one-night pickup with a guy who writes her an appreciative letter, she opens up to him in a long, frank and seemingly honest response that she fantasizes will change his life. She imagines him “marveling at how smart and insightful I was, my clever turns of phrase, the forthrightness of my disclosures.” Later when she does not hear from him, she cringes at what she has written, seeing her revelations as “self-important, performative, my metaphors strained, the crude obviousness of my need and self-ennobling loneliness.”

But as I read this second story about an outwardly brittle but inwardly vulnerable young woman with a snarky mouth, I realized two things: First, although I did not like this character, I did like Rivecca’s prose. It is the hard-earned, polished nature of her writing that kept me going. It was this sentence at the end of “Yours Will Do Nicely” that got me:

“And even though I knew these things weren’t the exact truth, they were a variation of it, and they felt true as I wrote them down. And they still felt like the truth—as if on some deeper, irreproachable level, those incidents hatched me like a newborn chick and I’d crawled from the wreckage of them with a bright new face. They had to have happened, because if they hadn’t, how could I explain the unhappy accident of myself.”

Language, carefully chosen and arranged in practically perfect sentences redeems other stories in the book that, on the surface, seem typically “ripped from the headlines” fodder for made-for-TV Opra movies. The longest story, the two part “Very Special Victims,” is about a young woman molested by her uncle as a child; “Look, Ma, I’m Breathing is about a young woman being stalked by an erstwhile landlord. But in neither of these two stories is the emphasis on social issues, but rather on the complex involvement of the central character in what seems to be a made-for-TV case of sociopathic behavior, “ripped from the headlines.” And what makes this involvement so complex and engaging for the reader is the careful structuring of Rivecca’s prose.

I am tempted simply to complete this discussion by quoting sentences from these two stories, for it is not plot, but prose that makes them so impressive. Both are told in the third person, so it is the voice of Suzanne Rivecca that we get, not the smart-alecky tones of a young female character. And it is a very fine voice indeed. For example, when the young girl tells about being abused by her uncle, we get this sentence:

“In the weeks after she told, something in her overturned, like lifting a rock and finding the ground underneath spongy with grubs, and she stayed up for hours bending God’s ear, fetisihizing prayer, clinging to His coattails and wrapping her arms around the pillars of his legs, stroking Him like a rabbit’s foot rubbed to a bald knuckle.”

The story is complicated by the girl’s feeling that she is not completely innocent in the abuse, but this is not a simple made-for-TV-movie presentation of female guilt about leading men on. This following sentence very profoundly tries to capture it:

“Kath thought telling would stop everything. Not just the uncle’s nocturnal groping, but her own weak love for the role she played with him, the novelty persona of cosseted scamp: how she had craved and courted the attention of the uncle before his hugging and cuddling and teasing snowballed into strange, fast-breathing caresses, that she could not return, that blanked her out of the scenario completely even though she was the centerpiece of it, there but not there, like the eye of a hurricane.”

She tells three men about the abuse. The first stops sleeping with her right away. The second asks a lot of questions, treating her “like the burial site of an ancient civilization; he dug for clues with a sweaty-palmed reverence and did not stop until he held it triumphantly aloft, that sordid tidbit like a saber tooth.” The third tells her it is not her fault and wants her to go to the policeThe story ends with a meeting with the uncle who wants to apologize, reassuring her that none of it was her fault; however, much to his puzzlement, she tells him she would feel better if it did have something to do with her. The ending of the story seems rigged to me, but once again, Rivecca’s prose redeems. She imagines herself lying on the pavement with police looming over her:

How grateful she would be as she waited for them to deliver their most merciful line, that rote benediction bestowed on every single person in trouble: the insane and the reasonable, homeless and naked, innocent ad guilty, uncle and nieces. You have the right to remain silent.

In “Look Ma, I’m Breathing,” the young woman, Isabel, is an associate professor of English looking for an apartment. After being turned down for a house she loves, the man renting a small house, begins writing her letters, at first romantic and then abusive, until she gets a court hearing to issue an injunction against him contacting her. The story line is simple enough, but the prose that describes the character as a child is striking and hard to resist: “She was an ideal vessel: dedicated, saturnine of aspect, with a mournful face and an eerie, shell-shocked poise… She was an eccentric, lonely child, given to soulful gazing and cryptic pronouncements.” Isabel has written a memoir in which she confesses that as a child she lied about seeing the Virgin; as a result, she is almost denied her request for the injunction. And like the women in these stories, the man, who has presented himself as obnoxious, is chastened and reveals his vulnerable self. The story ends with Isabel blocked in trying to write her second book, putting her editor off with promises and excuses. She replays the trial over and over in her mind in this well sculpted concluding sentence:

“How she opened her mouth and things came out, elegant and lucid things, and she was like the nightingale in the fairy tale placed in front of the king, watching respect and recognition dawn on the judge’s face—this doll-like girl, she speaks so well!--…and surrounded by the blank walls of her new apartment, she held the scotch in one hand and knew it was useless, knew that nothing would ever come out of her more purely or clearly than things like this: these distilled episodes, these illuminated lamentations, sculpted in all the right places, these testimonies of harm.”

In his book, How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, Stanley Fish begins with an anecdote by Annie Dillard from her book The Writing Life, about a colleague being asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, ‘do you like sentences’?” Fish quotes Dillard on the importance of carefully structured sentences: “When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.” Fish says that in a letter once, Gustave Flaubert described himself as being in a semi-diseased state, “itching with sentences.”

Suzanne Rivecca’s writing has already received a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and currently a Resident of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I hope she remains in that Flaubert semi-diseased state, “itching with sentences.” I wish her luck in her competition for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.

In a few days, I will talk a bit about the fourth book on the Frank O’Connor Award shortlist, Colm Toibin’s collection of stories, The Empty Family.

Edna O'Brien's SAINTS AND SINNERS: Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist

Unlike most recent reviews of Edna O’Brien’s new collection Saints and Sinners, the following discussion does not mention how old she is, how prolific she is, or what a scandal she caused in her younger days.

Although best known for her Country Girls Trilogy and other novels, Edna O'Brien is the author of six previous short story collections: The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman (1974), Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978), Returning (1982), A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories (1985), and Lantern Slides, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in 1990. Her most recent collection, Saints and Sinners, is shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize, to be awarded in Cork on September 18.

An early story by O'Brien, "Irish Revel," from her first collection The Love Object (1968), and "Lantern Slides," from the book of the same name published in 1990, both of which are anthology favorites, are good examples of her typical themes and her stylistic range.

"Irish Revel" centers on Mary, a seventeen-year-old village girl who has been invited to her first party in town. However, when she arrives in her best clothes, she discovers she has actually been invited to be a serving maid. Her head filled with romantic fantasies about sophisticated city, she is surprised that so many people there are coarse and vulgar. When the men get drunk and start quarrels and one clumsily makes advances to her, Mary loses all illusions about town life. Slipping out of the hotel before dawn, she goes home, but she has not given up her romantic hope for a handsome young man. The story ends with lines that echo the famous lyrical ending of Joyce's "The Dead": "Frost was general all over Ireland...frost on the stony fields, and on all the slime and ugliness of the world."

"Lantern Slides” is also a tribute to "The Dead," for it recounts a contemporary Dublin party in which a number of characters tell their own stories of love and disappointment. Just as in Joyce's story, the focus here is on the ghostly nature of the past in which all have experienced the loss of romantic fantasies. However, the power of desire has such a hold on the characters that chivalric romance seems an attainable, yet not quite reachable, grail-like goal. When the estranged husband of one of the women arrives, everyone hopes it is the wandering Odysseus returned home in search of his Penelope. "You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it--a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds...It was like a spell...It was as if life were just beginning."

The reviewers’ favorite story in O’Brien’s new collection, Saints and Sinners, is “Shovel Kings,” for it is the longest (and thus, according to reviewers, the most novelistic) and gives them an opportunity to generalize about the historical/social issues of all those Irish men who had to leave Ireland to do manual labor in England. The story is told by a narrator who encounters the central character, a man named Rafferty, who came with his father to England to work when he was only fifteen. Later, when his father leaves, the boy makes it on his own with other Irish men like himself. In fact, Rafferty comes to be a representative of all those Irish men who emigrated to England to find work; the story ends with a “litany” of all the so-called Irish “shovel kings” who have now have gone to dust. It is an affecting story about a man “on whom a permanent frost had settled,” an exiled man who does not belong in England but no longer belongs in Ireland either, a man whose heart has been “immeasurably broken.”

My own favorites are three shorter stories that echo some of O’Brien’s earlier work, focusing on women—both young and older—who dare to dream or else have had their dreams dashed: “Sinners,” “Green Georgette,” and “Send My Roots Rain.” Such stories as “My Two Mothers” and “Old Wounds,” focusing on mother/daughter tension and family conflicts, are also reminiscent of O’Brien at her stylistic and culturally sensitive best. I do not care so much, however, for “Black Flower” (about an IRA man released from prison), “Plunder” (a fable about cultural clash and rape), or “Manhattan Medley” (a sort of stream of consciousness mental letter recounting a New York affair).

Although there is some reference to cultural change in Ireland in the three stories I like best, the references are only background—not the focus of the stories. In “Send my Roots Rain” (the line is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins), an aging librarian known in the small town as the “Spinster,” takes the bus to Dublin for a rendezvous with a famous Irish poet. The poet is not identified, but may be modeled after Seamus Heaney (He is called “our Laureate” by the porter in the hotel), or Brendan Kennelly, who taught at Trinity and is a popular Dublin poet, or he may be a composite of both. He is certainly not, as one reviewer says, “unmistakably Patrick Kavanagh,” for Kavanagh died in 1967, and this story takes place in the twenty-first century.

Although the name of hotel where the arranged rendezvous is to take place is not mentioned, it is obviously the Shelbourne, which the porter calls “the most distinguished address in Dublin.” The porter says he was been working in the hotel for thirty-three odd years, “barring the two years when the establishment was closed for the massive revamp,” which we know took place between 2005 and 2007. None of this really matters; I just wanted my readers to know that regardless of my objections to focusing unduly on information and background in short stories, I am not unaware of such things. And on a personal note, one of my happiest days in Dublin took place three years ago when I shepherded a group of California students to Dublin to study Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, I took my daughter (who was part of the class) to afternoon tea in the Shelbourne.

Many reviewers are fond of pointing out O’Brien’s negative attitude toward the so-called “Celtic Tiger” image of Ireland and the damage that has been done to the Irish economy by the economic errors of that period; and indeed, in “Send My Roots Rain,” the disruptions which that economic rise and fall have wrought in Ireland are mentioned as the librarian Miss Gilhooley thinks about what she and the poet will talk about when he arrives: “the changes that had occurred in their country, changes that were not for the better, bulldozers everywhere and the craze for money. Money, money, money. The rich going to lunch in their helicopters chopping the air and shredding the white mist….” But the story is not about social change; it is about the mystery of poetry, the inexplicable nature of love, and the “mysterious certitude of marriage,” which Miss Gilhooley has never managed to reach—all of which she thinks about while waiting for the poet to arrive. Having been in love many times, but always failing to make it to marriage, she has “turned to poets as she would to God.” Hopkins is her favorite, and she often repeats the line, “O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain.”

She remembers her loves and waits for the poet. But of course he never arrives. The porter makes excuses for him, saying that the poet often comes to the hotel bar, that he would have every intention of meeting her, getting dressed and probably came as close as the corner by the statue of Wolfe Tone, but then “balking it.” When she asks why the poet would baulk it, the porter says, “shyness, the shyest man I ever came across. I’ll bet you he’s walking the street now, or maybe on a bench by the canal, reproaching himself for himself for his blasted boorishness…his defection.” The porter shows her to the door and watches her go down the street. “She held herself well, but there was a hurt look to her back.”

On the bus ride home, she presses her face to the window and says the name of the man she had so loved, “a name that had not passed her lips in almost twenty years, and all of a sudden she was crying.” She thinks of the poet, a lonely, clumsy man walking the streets of Dublin, staring into the greenish water of the canal. “She knew then, and with a cold conviction, the love, the desolation, that goes into the making of a poem.” It’s a nice, tight little story that reaffirms Frank O’Connor’s famous notion of how loneliness is a characteristic of the short story.

“The Sinners” also focuses on an aging woman, this time a widow named Delia who runs a B&B. In her loneliness, she has “lost that most heartfelt rapport that she once had with God.” When a handsome English couple rent a room with their adolescent daughter, she envies them their youth and family closeness. However, in the evening, she hears the daughter’s going to her parents’ room on tiptoe. She listens and “her whole body stiffens in revulsion… something appalling was transpiring in there, whispers and tittering and giggles… she pictured them, their hands, their mouths, their limbs, all seeking one another out.” She imagines in vivid detail the naked girl, the man fondling both her and his wife, “and before long she knew that it would reach the vileness of an orgy.” She thinks that the girl could not be a daughter, that they have picked up a young girl, perhaps a hitchhiker or someone they solicited in an advertisement in their local paper, the wife agreeing to it all as being the surest way she could hold on to a husband.

Taking a sleeping pill, she has “a glut of dreams.” In one she is with a group of women about to be photographed by two men. They are ordered to undress, but she refuses. In another she is alone in a church in which the priest sings lustily as if in a beer garden, and a little altar boy drinks wine from the chalice. At breakfast “she took her revenge.” She tells the guests that she is only charging them for one room since only one room was fully occupied. Realizing that she has heard them, they insist on paying for two rooms, but she throws the money back at them. When the car drives away, she cries “from the pit of her being.” She thinks it was not because of them and the “unsavourines of the night,” but rather it has to do with herself. “Her heart had walled up a long time ago, she had forgotten the little things, the little pleasures, the give-and-take that is life. She had even forgotten her own sins.” The “little pleasures” have nothing to do with what the family do in the woman’s rented bedroom, but what she overhears reminds her of the secret lives of others and the loneliness of her arid existence.

“Green Georgette” is told from the point of view of a young girl who has been invited with her mother to a Sunday evening tea with the Coughlans, an upper-class family new to the town. The girl is very aware of the social differences between her family when she sees a piano being moved into their home, but it is her romantic, poetic side that is emphasized in the story, not social difference; when the piano is put down, it emits “a little sound of its own, a ghostly broken tune.”

Drew Coughlan, the woman of the house, is “the cynosure of all…like a queen.” All the women in the town are intrigued by her finery, her proud carriage, and her glacial smile. However, as seems fitting for her poetic perception, in church, the girl turns around to look at the woman, to take note of her little habits, and how often she swallows. “She blinks with such languor.”

The title comes from the crepe-like fabric dress that Mrs. Coughlan wears on the day of the visit. As the mother and the woman talk, the girl’s response is typically romantic and poetic: “It was like a room in a story, what with the fire, the fire screen, the fenders and the fire irons gleaming, and the picture above the black marble mantelpiece of a knight on horseback breaching a storm.” The conversation between the two women primarily suggests two secrets: that the mother wishes to ingratiate herself with Ms. Coughlan, and that Ms. Coughlan’s relationship with her husband is bland and unexciting.

The tea is disrupted suddenly when Ms. Coughlan asks her sister, who lives with them, to look at her rash and check her lips for swelling. Although the mother does not think there is any thing wrong, she tries to be accommodating by suggesting they call the doctor. But, Ms. Coughlan insists that they drive to the doctor’s office instead, which makes the mother think there was “something fishy, decidedly fishy” about it all, especially since she knows the doctor has a reputation as something of a lady’s man who has kissed the nurses on the hospital grounds.

The girl’s romantic imagination once again takes over, as she imagines Mrs. Coughlan lying on the doctor’s couch, and “how both, as in a drama, had a sudden urge to kiss each other, but did not dare to.” When Mrs. Coughlan and her sister return, the girl thinks she looks different, “as if something thrilling had happened to her.” As the mother and daughter leave, Drew says she is glad they came, “but it was like telling us we were dull and lusterless...” Walking home, the mother is scornful about the “grand Mrs. Coughlan,” but the girl has an “insatiable longing for tinned peaches.” She concludes by saying that mixed with her longing is a mounting rage. “Our lives seemed so drab, so uneventful. I prayed for drastic thing to occur—for the bullocks to rise up and mutiny, then gore one another, for my father to die in his sleep, for our school to catch fire, and for Mr. Coughlan to take a pistol and shoot his wife, before shooting himself.” Like the woman in “Sinning,” the young girl laments the lack of romantic engagement in her life—a sense of loss that in Edna O’Brien’s stories often manifests itself in brute and perverse imagining.

Edna O’Brien’s stories are not terribly complex, but they perceptively investigate the secret desires of their characters and the mysteries that lie behind the seemingly controlled surfaces of life. They are not as challenging as the stories of her Canadian colleague Alice Munro (who has always been a great O’Brien admirer), but they are delicately written and sensitively explored.

I’ll end on a final personal note. I have met Edna O’Brien briefly twice—once when I was in Dublin and attended a reading she gave at Trinity College; she was kind enough to have a brief chat with me and sign a copy of her most recent novel that I had just purchased for my wife. Three years ago, I was in Cork for an International Short Story Conference, at which she was a featured reader. I was very sick at the time, coughing so much that I had to leave the auditorium and listen to her finish the story from the public address system in the hallway. As one of the featured speakers, I was invited to sit at Ms. O’Brien’s table for the banquet dinner that night, but because I was coughing so much, I knew I would be a disruption and had to decline. Instead I went back to my hotel, the Imperial, where Michael Collins spent his last night, and spent my night coughing-- miserable that I had missed the opportunity for what I imagined would have been a delightful evening, drinking wine and making sophisticated chat with the grand Edna O’Brien. For a romantic like me, it was a crushing blow.

I send my very best wishes to Ms. O’Brien in her competition for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. In a few days, I will discuss the third book on the shortlist: Suzanne Rivecca’s Death is Not an Option.”

Alexander MacLeod's LIGHT LIFTING: Short Listed for 2011 Frank O'Connor Award

Sometimes all it takes is to make the shortlist of a literary contest, especially when you are not expecting it. Alexander MacLeod (age 40) lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia with his wife and three young children, teaching English at St. Mary’s University. His father is the wonderful writer, Alistair MacLeod, now retired, one of the best, least appreciated, short- story writers devoted to the form. But the father’s brilliance does not seem relevant to the son’s highly praised short story collection Light Lifting. In fact, MacLeod told an interviewer last year that although he and his father talked about lots of things when he was growing up, they never talked about stories and literature.

Alexander MacLeod has been writing stories for the past seventeen years, never really having time while getting his degrees and raising a family to create a book out of them. It seems it took his friend, Dan Wells, publisher of a small Ontario press, Biblioasis, to work with him to get Light Lifting together. MacLeod has said it was a shoestring operation, with he and Wells promoting the book by “driving around in a Volkswagen, selling books out of the trunk.” Then in early October, 2010, he got word that his book was long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Bingo! The rush of agents, publishers, reviewers, reporters all began, much to his surprise and bemusement. Then, lo and behold! the book made the shortlist of the top five for the Giller. This is not small stuff. The Giller, renamed the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is the largest annual literary prize in Canada, awarding $50,000 to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $5,000 to each of the finalists. It has been won by Alice Munro (twice), Mordecai Richler, Austin Clarke, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, and the shortlists include just about every major Canadian writer.

Here is the 2010 Giller citation for Light Lifting:

“Rarely does fiction inhabit the body – the moving, athletic body – as fully as in Alexander MacLeod’s debut story collection. Whether describing what it is to run track, to swim against a current, to build cars or to haul bricks, MacLeod brings into vivid concrete language the physical experiences that mark us as profoundly as any thought. His stories are a careful marriage of the lyric and the narrative: each unfolds around a resonant, ineffable moment, replete with history and emotion, a Gordian knot comprised of all the strands that lead up to and away from it. Sensitive and subtle, MacLeod is a writer through whose deliberately partial and quotidian pieces shimmers life’s unspoken complexity.”

MacLeod did not win the Giller; Joanna Skibsrud did for her novel The Sentimentalists. But his success with his debut book of stories is not over yet. He has also made the shortlist for the lucrative Frank O’Connor Prize, to be awarded in Cork in September 2011. Again, no small thing. The prize is worth 35,000 Euros, which, currently equates to 50,510 American dollars or 49,512 Canadian dollars. Yiyun Li, who is nominated this year, won it once before, as have Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, and Ron Rash.

So, what is it about this collection of seven stories that has put it on the short list of two of the best-paying literary awards in the world? It has not been widely reviewed in the U.S., and not paid much attention to in Canada until it made the Giller longlist/shortlist. The reviewers largely attribute the book’s appeal to its focus on ordinary working class people. Of course, the popularity of such writers as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolfe, and Richard Ford back in the sixties was also attributed to their focus on the so-called “blue collar.” But there is nothing minimalistically hyperrealistic (whatever that means) about MacLeod’s stories. In fact, they go on at great lengths about the details of work and the obsession of workers to do the job right. From a young drugstore delivery boy who overcomes his revulsion to save the life of a threatening old man to a young track star obsessed with shaving two seconds off his run, the stories seems to focus more on the surface of experience than on the depths.

However, Macleod believes that his stories are not just about the attention and dedication to the physical action necessary to succeed at what one does. At his first reading, when asked what makes physical action significant and meaningful, he said, “that somebody cares about it.” For MacLeod, the specific physical action of his stories has “general meaning.”

I will discuss only one story in the collection—“Miracle Mile,” although two others-“Light Lifting,” and “Adult Beginner I”—also seem illustrative of what constitutes the appeal of this collection and perhaps account for why it has been shortlisted for two major literary prizes. “Wonder About Parents” and “Good Kids” are family stories and not particularly compelling; “The Number Three,” about a man who tries to deal with guilt for the death of his wife and son in an auto accident, seems somewhat “rigged” and conventional. “The Loop” is a rather ordinary coming-of age-story about a young boy who delivers drugstore meds to the down and out elderly, often injured by a lifetime of work.

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe, short stories have often focused on obsession, because a psychological obsession most often leads to an aesthetic obsession with the unity of the story. Moreover, short stories often focus on characters, as one Hemingway story suggests, who inhabit “Another Country,” living outside the ordinary controls of everyday society, made to earn their identity rather than deriving it from social definitions. As the narrator of “Miracle Mile” says, “It was like we belonged to our own little country and we had this secret language that almost nobody else understood.” Well aware of the need for obsessive focus, he adds, “If you ever wanted to see what it was like on the other side, you would need to change your entire life and get rid of almost everything else.”

Short story collections that focus on a culture previously unexplored—a country, a region, a profession, a cult, a subculture—often grab the attention of reviewers and judges. It is the “new,” the “unknown,” the “mysterious that makes readers say, “wow, that’s really something, I’ve never heard of that before.” For a profession, like running, (MacLeod, who was a runner himself and seems to know what he is talking about), the reader is apt to be fascinated by what makes runners do what they do with such rabid devotion.

“It’s hard to tell anybody what it’s really like,” the narrator says, but tries by describing guys who are willing to spend two years of training to shave s single second off their personal best, tells about popping anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, recounts with some pride getting more cortisone injections in the feet in five months than you are supposed to have in your whole life, marvels at long distance female runners who are anorexic, iron deficient, and have not had a regular period in years, but who can run a hundred ad twenty miles in a week, who can slow down their hearts so far you have to wait between the beats.

All this is engrossing, “wow” information that contributes to the appeal of MacLeod’s stories. But mere information does not a story make, so MacLeod adds an insert action story about when he and his friend, whose nickname is “Burner” were in high school and used to race trains in the underground tunnel from Detroit to Windsor, Canada—foolish, “I’m invincible” type behavior that makes readers shake their heads in disbelief and hold their breath in anticipation as Burner gets out of the tunnel ahead of the train: “He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage.”

To give the story some historical context, MacLeod situates his story his story on that day in 1997 when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, which the narrator and his friend see played over and over again on television. He takes his title from the famous 1954 race when Roger Bannister beat John Landy as both broke the four-minute “miracle mile,” in Vancouver. What the two incidents share is what the narrator calls “pure craziness”; as one announcer of the Tyson fight said, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” MacLeod provides some detailed description of the bite and the race, but he does not have to rely on memory for these, since both events are available for viewing over and over again on YouTube.

In addition to the racing information about obsession and two historical events of head-shaking craziness, the story must, of course have a plot—the story of the race. And who can resist a race story—horse races, swim races, running races—for of all athletic events, a race seems the most audience-involving, as we try to “pick a winner” and watch in real time people or animals simply moving their bodies competitively through space-- but doing so at a speed that can only fill us with wonder.

The narrator describes the race as only a participant can describe it, and, as usual in races, the winner wins because of an ability somehow to exceed what ordinary human beings can do—like Roger Bannister in that final sprint around Landy. But the story also requires that the narrator elevate a mere race, which is the essence of action and suspense, into something more generally significant. The narrator ruminates:

“I know that when you give yourself over completely to just one thing, you can lose perspective on the rest of the world…. We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there’s no way to separate our faith from our desperation… We can only value what we yearn for and it really does not mater what others think… We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire.”

But stories cannot just be descriptions of interesting details, accounts of historical contexts, or even suspenseful, action-packed plots or thematic essays. They also have to have meaningful endings. And since MacLeod’s stories are less plot-based stories than explorations of physical actions, his endings sometimes seem generated by the convention of the necessity of a short story ending rather than by the necessity of the story at hand. “Miracle Mile” ends with a “crazy” example of the basic madness of what underlies the obsessed competitor. There’s something ultimately out of control about the absolute control required to be a winner. So when a group of four or five children, ages 7 to 9, speed by the narrator and Burner as they are jogging to cool off, the kids jeer, “I’m faster than you are…. you can’t catch me.” Burner “loses it” and charges after the children, who, of course have no idea that they are jeering at a professional runner. The story ends with Burner catching up with one female child riding her My Little Pony bike away as fast as she can, a strange, high-pitched wheezing sound coming from her. “But there was nothing she could do. Burner had already closed the gap and his hand was already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair. It all disintegrated after that. He must have been a foot taller than the oldest one.”

Finally, and never to be forgotten, there is style. Since MacLeod’s focus is on physical activity, it would not do for him to call attention to the writing itself; and indeed, the style here is relatively transparent. Even when the story is told in first person, the emphasis is less on the personality of the teller than it is on the action being described. This quotation from which the book takes its title is typical. The narrator is describing carrying brick on a job site:

"Anyone who’s ever done this kind of work can tell you that the bending over is the worst pat of it. Bending over and getting up, and then bending over and getting up again—it’s like you’re folding and unfolding your body all day. You get creaky. And just that little bit of weight—just the weight that’s in a couple bricks—that’s enough to grind you down. Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times. But it’s the light lifting that does the real damage.”

Typical of MacLeod’s ruminative style is the following passage from “Adult Beginning I,” in which a third person narrator describes how a young woman feels when learning to swim:

"That’s when it happened. An understanding, a new realization came into her head and triggered a transformation that was almost total. Maybe this was how all learning worked in the end. The right kind of concentration deployed in the right way at the right time. If you paid attention and sorted carefully, put things in the right place at the right time, it was possible to think yourself away from yourself, away from the things you could not do."

To his credit, in an interview last year, MacLeod said:

“I’m a fan of the short story. I don’t see it as a warm-up for the great novel-writing career. People say that you have to escape the limitations of the short story to move on to the broader canvas of the novel, but there are possibilities in short stories that are not there in the novel. I wanted these stories to have a lot of tension, which is harder to sustain in a novel.”

I congratulate Alexander MacLeod on making the shortlist of the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize and wish him luck. I will discuss Edna O’Brien’s nominated collection, Saints and Sinners in a few days.

Guy de Maupassant and the Psychological Mystery Story

In the decade between 1880 and 1890 Guy de Maupassant published over three hundred short stories in a variety of modes, including the supernatural legend, the surprise-ending tale, and the realistic story. Although he is best-known for such surprise-ending tales as La Parue (1884; "The Necklace," 1909) and most-respected for such affecting realistic stories such as Boule de Suif (1880; "Ball of Fat," 1909), Maupassant also contributed to the sophistication of the horror story by pushing it even further than Edgar Allan Poe into the modern mode of psychological obsession and madness.

The predominant mode of Maupassant’s psychological stories is not the manifestation of the ghostly supernatural in the traditional sense; rather the stories focus on some mysterious dimension of reality that exists beyond what the human senses can perceive. But even as this realm of reality is justified rationally, the reader is never quite sure whether the realm truly exists "out there" in the world of the story or whether it is a product of the obsessive mind of the narrator. The style of several of these tales is similar to some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, particularly the stories of the perverse which combine narrative story line with the narrator's quasi-philosophic considerations of madness, murder, and the mysterious realm beyond the pale of ordinary understanding.

The most explicit story to focus on this realm, parts of which are used later in the more famous La Horla, is "Letter from a Madman." As told by the narrator to a doctor, the story unfolds a theory that the human mind receives only sparse and uncertain information about the external world because the limitations of the five senses restrict what humans can perceive. The narrator argues, for example, that if we had additional senses we could perceive a reality that is closed to our present senses. From this assumption he tries to infer, rather than directly perceive, the mysterious impenetrable world that lies around us. As a result he feels in the presence of non-corporeal beings, although he does not actually have the sense organ that would make it possible for him to "see" them. While sitting in front of a mirror he cannot see himself, for the invisible thing stands between him and the mirror and blocks his reflection. Since that time he has spent hours before his mirror, going mad waiting for "It" to return, knowing that he will wait until death.

The story "He" is similar to "Letter from a Madman" in its focus on some unseen but felt presence; however, it differs thematically in that it emphasizes the appearances of the apparition as a result of the narrator's loneliness, and it differs stylistically in that it features a more developed narrative with less discursive meditation. "He" is very similar to Poe stories which focus on the fear of fear itself and which emphasize the power of hallucination. The narrator acknowledges that he suffers from a disease of fear, an incomprehensible terror that causes him to fear the very madness or confusion of mind that constitutes the fear itself. He describes entering his room after a walk and seeing a man sitting in his chair before the fire. When he reaches out to touch him, there is nothing there. Although convinced that the figure was obviously an hallucination, he cannot shake the fear that it will appear again. Even though he knows that it does not exist except in his own apprehension, he cannot escape that apprehension. In both of these stories, it is the narrators' own intense self-consciousness which constitute their insanity; they push what they consider to be reasonable assumptions to such ultimate conclusions that the inevitable result is madness--that is, the perception of a state of being that exists outside of the normal everyday limits of human experience, perception, and thought.

In "Am I Insane?" and "The Madman," Maupassant's focus is on how an obsession becomes so powerful that it is translated into murderous action. In "Am I Insane?" the simpler of the two, the narrator loves a certain woman to madness. However, he also hates her passionately, for he knows that she is impure and without a soul; he intensely desires both to possess her and to kill her. When she tires of him, he becomes insanely jealous, determines that her horse (which she rides enraptured) is his rival, and executes it with a bullet to the brain before also killing his mistress. The madness here is similar to the meaningful madness in many Poe stories; there is some basis for the narrator's jealous obsession, both figuratively in the powerful male symbolism of the horse and literally in the narcissism and autoeroticism that the woman’s daily rides suggest.

In "A Madman," Maupassant carries to even further extremes the theme of madness resulting from carrying a line of reasoning to ultimate conclusions. The story consists of diary entries of a dead judge who always seemed to know the secret hearts of criminals. Over and over again in the diary he questions what pleasure there must be in killing. He justifies his obsession in long discursive passages in which he wonders why it is a crime to kill when killing is indeed the law of nature; inevitably he puts his theories into action. Equating his desire to kill with the power of sexual passion, he describes in graphic detail reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade his murder of a young boy by strangulation and his killing of a fisherman by splitting his head open with a spade. Even after he sentences the fisherman's nephew to death for the murder that he committed, he describes watching the boy's head being chopped off and wishing he could have bathed in his blood. Although the ostensible theme of the story is that many such madmen exist secretly in society, the more predominate motif is the notion philosophically examined by Nietzsche and fictionally explored by Dostoevsky that killing is the nearest thing to creation.

However, of all the Maupassant tales that focus on madness, hallucination, obsession, and the mystery of a dimension beyond the senses, the most sustained and deservedly the most famous is "The Horla." Although many critics point to the autobiographical elements in this story (for during its writing Maupassant was possessed by the increasing madness caused by syphilis), still others suggest that the work stands on its own merits as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own madness as well as his understanding of the process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.

The story begins with many of the same themes that Maupassant had earlier developed in "Letter from a Madman," even at times using much of the same language as that story. The narrator begins considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to perceive all that is out there in the world, and the theory that if there were other senses, one could discover many more things about the world around human life. The second predominant Maupassant theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a presentiment of something yet to come. This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and the conviction that there is something following him; yet when he turns around there is nothing there.

This sense of something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual creatures who exist in this invisible dimension. This conviction is then developed into an idea that when the mind is asleep an alien being takes control of the body and makes it obey. All of these ideas then lead easily into the concept of mesmerism or hypnotism; for under hypnosis it seems as if an alien being has control of our actions which, when we awake, we have no awareness of. Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he also feels he is in complete possession of all his faculties, and he becomes even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his own mind does not direct him to do. Thus he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who have always existed and who have haunted mankind even though they cannot be seen.

The final event to convince him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of the creatures, is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil in which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures who feed on them during sleep. He remembers a Brazilian ship that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped ship to possess him. Now he knows that the reign of man on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla which man has always feared--forces called spirits, genii, fairies, hobgoblins, witches, devils, and imps--will enslave man.

Finally, in a scene that was used earlier in "A Letter from a Madman," he "sees" the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like man, be prematurely destroyed. His final thought is since the Horla is not dead he shall have to kill himself; the story ends with that decision.

What makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to account for his madness as being something external to himself. This universalizes the story, for human beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible presence named gods, devils, spirits, etc. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which is the very basis of hallucination.

Because of his ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the complex mind of man, Maupassant is an important figure in marking the transition between the nineteenth-century tale of the supernatural and the twentieth-century short story of psychological obsession. Maupassant is one of those writers whose contribution to literature is often overshadowed by the tragic facts of his life and whose real experimentation is often ignored in favor of his more popular innovations. Too often it is his promiscuity and profligate Parisian life style that receives the most attention from the casual reader. As if to provide evidence for the payment Maupassant had to make for such a lifestyle, these readers then point to the supposed madness-inspired story La Horla--a fit ending for one who not only wrote about prostitutes but paid for their dangerous favors as well with his life. In the last few years of his life, due to syphilis, his eyesight weakened, his memory failed, his thinking became erratic, and he suffered from delusions. After undergoing several unsuccessful treatments for his disease and even attempting suicide, Maupassant was incarcerated in a sanatorium in Passy, where he died on July 6, 1893.

However, Maupassant's real place as a writer belongs with such innovators of the short-story form as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry. Too often, whereas such writers as Turgenev and Chekhov are admired for their so-called lyricism and realistic vignettes, writers such as Bierce and O. Henry are scorned for their so-called cheap narrative tricks. Maupassant falls somewhere in between. On the one hand, he indeed mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number of characters in a luminous situation. The Soviet short-story writer Isaac Babel has perhaps paid the ultimate tribute to Maupassant in his story “Guy de Maupassant” by noting how Maupassant knew the power of a period placed in just the right place.

Maupassant had as much to do with the development of the short-story genre in the late nineteenth century Chekhov did in somewhat different ways. However, because such stories as "The Necklace" seem so deceptively simple and trivial, his experiment with the form has often been ignored. Not until the short story itself receives the recognition it deserves as a respectable literary genre will Guy de Maupassant receive the recognition he deserves for his contribution to the perfection of the form.

Thanks to Caroline for asking for my opinion of Maupassant--a query I obviously cannot resist.

The Short Story Genius of Ambrose Bierce

The Library of America has just announced a new author in their series of editions of great writers: Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs. The book includes Bierce’s greatest collection, In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), as well as Can Such Things Be? The Devil’s Dictionary, and Bits of Autobiography, and Selected Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi, who has edited several other books on Bierce, it is due out in bookstores on September 1, 2011.

I have always been a great admirer of Bierce’s stories, for in face of the increasing demand for realistic novels in the late nineteenth century, he remained faithful to the short story as a form. In my opinion, Bierce, like Poe, is a brilliant short-story writer who has been snubbed by many academic literary critics who scorn the short story as being artificial and trivial. Thus, it should not surprise you that my favorite definition from Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is:

Novel--A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes -- some of which have a large sale.

My favorite Bierce stories, included in this new collection, are:

The Man and the Snake
The Eyes of the Panther
The Death of Halpin Frayser
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
The Mocking-Bird

Critics who have accused Ambrose Bierce of artificiality and lack of depth usually make such claims based on expectations derived from the realistic novel. By insisting on a faithful adherence to the external world, advocates of realism allow content, often ragged and random, to dictate form. As a result, the novel, which can expand to better create an illusion of everyday reality, is the favored form of the realists, while the short story, which requires more artifice and patterning, assumes a secondary role. Those writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century who were committed to the short story instead of the novel were well aware of this fact. When Ambrose Bierce entered into the argument raging between the romantics and the realists, he attacked the William Dean Howells school of realistic fiction by arguing that to them, "nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man's most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions.”

Bierce says that the capable writer does not give probability a moment's attention, except to make the fiction seem probable or true in the reading process. Nothing is as improbable as what is true, says Bierce; the unexpected does occur, "but that is not saying enough; it is also the unlikely--one might almost say the impossible.” Bierce's characters, like those of Flannery O'Connor's, have an inner coherence rather than a coherence to their social framework. As O'Connor says, "Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected.”

Bierce's most obsessive concern in the short story is not simple macabre horror, but rather the central paradox that underlies the most basic human desire and fear--the desire for a sense of unity and significance and the fear that the realization of such a desire means death. In terms of story telling, Bierce knew that the desire manifested itself as the compulsion to present life as if it were a fictional construct, that is, as if it had significance and meaning, beauty and order.

Bierce's characteristic short story dynamic is to distance his characters from the ordinary world of everyday reality--by presenting them in a static formal posture or picture, by putting them in a dream-like autistic state, by putting them on a formal stage. When this formal picture or frozen sense of reality is broken, the result is often the shock of entering another country, another realm of reality; the result is disillusion, despair, or death.

The simplest and most straightforward example of this technique of presenting a frozen reality and then ironically undercutting it is "Killed Resaca," in which Lieutenant Herman Brayle, the archetypal good soldier, sits his horse like an equestrian statue even in a storm of bullets. In a foolishly heroic and fatal gesture, he rides into battle, "a picture" described as "intensely dramatic, but in no degree theatrical." However, when the narrator returns a letter to the Lieutenant's lady friend, a letter that romantically states she could bear to hear of her lover's death but not of his cowardice, the heroic picture or statue of the Lieutenant is undermined when she, disgusted at the blood on the letter, flings it into the fire.

Bierce’s story “Chickamauga" is a particularly rich example of this theme of unreality being presented as reality until the spell is broken and the illusion of heroic order shattered. The story focuses on the two basic worlds: child and adult, fantasy and reality, innocence and experience. This is a story in which nobody listens. We say to child, "do you hear me?" We say to adults in war, "Why don't you listen?" When he reaches home, it is as if he has gone a long way to stay where he was; the plantation "seemed to turn as if on a pivot." The story ends with son's loss of mother, just as the war has to do with mothers' loss of sons. "The child was a deaf mute" completes the pattern of the adult observer. The story is another example of Bierce presenting stories in which language is inadequate and in which heroic pictures are startled into terrible life and in which illusory reality is startled into the reality of our deepest fears.

Of course, Bierce's most famous narrative play with the frozen moment of time and the power of imaginative reality is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The story explicitly and sardonically exploits the idea of the reader (and the protagonist) being pulled up short as Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only genuine "natural end" possible--death. However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it can be forestalled--through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of fiction making which the reader initially takes to be actuality.

The story is made up of three sections that correspond to three fictional elements--static scene, exposition, and action. But all of these elements are self-consciously ironic in presentation and thus undermine themselves. The first part of the story, the only part in which the realistic convention suggests that something is "actually happening," seems quite dead and static, almost a still picture, highly formalized and stiff. At the end of Part I, the teller tips the reader off to the play with time that the story, because it is discourse rather than mere event, must inevitably make: "As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside." The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious characteristic of fiction --the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or timeless he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told one after another. It is this purely rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse that justifies or motivates the final fantastic section of the story.

The second play with the convention of time in the story is the insertion at the end of Part I--purely and perversely by the demand of discourse rather than by the demand of existential event--of a bit of exposition that tells the reader who the protagonist is and what he is doing in such a predicament. The reader sits patiently through this background formality while the protagonist plummets into Part III of the story--which itself is of course a depiction of that which does not happen at all except in the flash (which can only be recounted in words) that takes place in the protagonist's mind. It is thus only because of discourse that Farquhar's invention of his escape from hanging, drowning, and death by guns and cannons makes the reader believe that the escape is taking place in reality. At the conclusion, when the protagonist reaches the end of the fall, the verb tense of the story abruptly shifts from present to the ultimate past tense: "Peyton Farquhar was dead." At this point, the reader is forced to double back to look at the tone and details of the story which created this forestalling of the end--a forestalling which is indeed the story itself, for without it there would have been no story. Postponing the end until the ultimate and inescapable end of death is the subject of Bierce's self-conscious and self-reflexive discourse.

Thus rather than being a cheap trick dependent on a shocking ending, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.

If you have not read Bierce, I recommend his stories to you as brilliant examples of the short story as a genre.