by Tom Perrotta
Carver taught creative writing at Syracuse University, so that was where I went to graduate school two years later. Unfortunately for me, he retired right before I arrived, but I was lucky enough to work instead with Tobias Wolff, at the time an up-and-coming short story writer (he hadn’t yet published This Boy’s Life, the now-classic book that would make him famous and revitalize the genre of literary memoir). Fairly or not, Carver and Wolff were both closely associated with a literary movement known at the time as minimalism, or dirty realism, a style that combined pared-down, plainspoken writing with hardscrabble subject matter. I had no doubt that it was the most exciting thing happening in American fiction and was thrilled to be so close to the center of that particular universe.
During my time in grad school, the Syracuse English Department also happened to be a hotbed of Marxist and post-structuralist literary theory—Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, and the like—the kind of dense, jargon-filled criticism that seemed like a foreign language even after it had been translated into English. It was mind-boggling and comical at the same time, a supposedly revolutionary form of discourse that would have been utterly incomprehensible to the working-class people it aimed, in some mysterious way, to liberate. My exposure to this arcane academic dialect only deepened my commitment to the clarity and concision I found in Carver’s work, his willingness to speak in a language everyone could understand.
I left Syracuse after an eventful three years, equipped with a set of core beliefs about fiction that has remained with me ever since: I like stories written in plain, artful language about ordinary people. I’m wary of narrative experiments and excessive stylistic virtuosity, suspicious of writing that feels exclusive or elitist, targeted to readers with graduate degrees rather than the general public, whatever that means. I sometimes think of this as a blue-collar or populist aesthetic, but it’s probably better to think of it as democratic, part of an American vernacular tradition that includes Twain and Crane, Cather and Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler, and stretches all the way back to Emerson (“The roots of what is great and high must still be the common life”) and Whitman (“Nothing is better than simplicity”).
For the most part, I think these ideals have served me pretty well. They’ve helped guide and inspire my own writing—both my choice of subject matter and the kinds of sentences I write—and focus my reading too. But they’ve also caused me to misunderstand, or at least underestimate, writers who work from a different set of assumptions and values.
This was certainly the case with David Foster Wallace, now widely considered the most important writer of his (my) generation. When Wallace published his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, in 1996—it was mostly written in Syracuse, by the way, that unlikeliest of literary meccas—I couldn’t help but see him as the anti-Carver, long-winded and erudite, more familiar with tennis camps and elite colleges than diners and hospitals. I found it all too easy to dismiss him as a self-indulgent postmodernist, a throwback to 1970s maximalists like Pynchon and William Gaddis, the old guard whom I believed Carver had supplanted. In some ways I was right: Wallace shared the outsized ambition, intellectual confidence, and stylistic boldness of his predecessors, along with their willingness to write exhausting, unapologetically cerebral novels that were vehicles for ideas rather than stories, riffs rather than characters. Unlike a lot of readers, I was irritated rather than charmed by the sprawling footnotes—Wallace’s refusal to let you forget his presence (or his genius) for even a page or two. To my mind, his postmodern pyrotechnics were the fictional equivalent of a rock-god guitar solo that goes on for so long, you can’t even remember what song you’re listening to; all you can do is shake your head in weary, worshipful amazement. The Carver school was closer to indie rock, I thought, the songs tight and unpretentious, the line between the musicians and fans so blurry it sometimes vanished altogether.
It took me a long time to get past these objections and see that Wallace wasn’t simply picking up where Pynchon and Gaddis had left off. It was the brilliant and wide-ranging essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again that changed my mind, helped me understand that Wallace wasn’t really a fiction writer in the traditional sense. Like Norman Mailer, he was more of a free-floating intelligence, a cultural observer whose methods and obsessions enabled him to notice things that were invisible to the rest of us and to diagnose the peculiar sickness of the age. No matter what he was writing—story, essay, novel—he was engaged in the same overarching project, attempting to document and embody a crisis in postmodern consciousness, the human personality breaking down under the pressure of too much information. Yes, he was guilty of literary excess, but the excess wasn’t really superfluous; it was precisely the point. I felt a little stupid for missing that.
So what does all this have to do with The Best American Short Stories 2012? Less than I expected, actually. I’ve read a lot of short fiction over the past several months, and one thing I’ve learned is that the debate that seemed so important to me fifteen or twenty years ago—minimalism versus maximalism, populism versus elitism, realism versus experimentalism, Carver versus Wallace, however you want to frame it—just isn’t that big an issue anymore. As crucial as they are in my own personal narrative, neither Raymond Carver nor David Foster Wallace seemed to cast much of a shadow over this year’s pool of stories. You might sense a vague kinship with Wallace in George Saunders’s poignant and very funny “Tenth of December” or catch the homage to Carver in Nathan Englander’s provocative “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” but that’s about it. This makes sense, I guess: time passes, the culture moves on, tastes evolve. Carver and Wallace are gone, both way before their time, and death has made them seem even more distinctive somehow, more stubbornly themselves, one of a kind and irreplaceable, rather than leaders of rival schools of fiction.
If there’s a single writer who looms over this year’s collection—over the art of the short story as it’s practiced in North America right now—it would have to be Alice Munro. Munro is an acknowledged master, of course—her reputation has been growing steadily for decades—but she still hasn’t gotten enough credit for the way she’s expanded our sense of what stories can do and how they might be written. “Axis,” the story included here, feels both typical of her work and quietly remarkable—typical in its choice of subject matter (rural Canadian girls hoping to escape their drab small-town lives) and remarkable for its combination of amplitude and compression, its ability to encompass multiple decades and points of view in a handful of tightly focused scenes. Edith Pearlman’s creepy and powerful “Honeydew” has a similar complexity—it’s composed of three intricately braided perspectives—as does Saunders’s “Tenth of December,” the two-sided chronicle of a chance encounter between a lonely boy and a sick man, both of whose inner lives are fully accessible to the reader.
When I was in graduate school—not that long ago, I swear—it was considered highly unorthodox for a story to be written like this. Out of curiosity, I looked back at the Best American Short Stories 1986, edited by none other than Raymond Carver—it’s an amazing collection, a snapshot of an unusually rich moment in American fiction, with stellar contributions by Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, and Mona Simpson, among others—and confirmed my suspicion: there’s not a single story in the anthology that switches its point of view. It just wasn’t done, at least not in the literary mainstream: back then, you had your main character, and you had your central event or situation, and that was that. The fact that it’s no longer considered risky, or even especially noteworthy, to tell a story from multiple perspectives—or to range freely across the expanse of a character’s life, as Julie Otsuka does in her haunting “Diem Perdidi”—owes a lot to Munro’s formal daring, her insistence on smuggling the full range of novelistic techniques into the writing of her short fiction, and the influence she’s had on her contemporaries.
But maybe that’s just inside baseball, gossip for the MFA crowd. Form and technique matter, of course, but we read f
iction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten. If that’s what you’re looking for, I humbly suggest that you’ve opened the right book.
As always, this year’s stories come from prestigious publications (The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House) as well as obscure ones (at least to me) such as Fifth Wednesday Journal and New Ohio Review; oddly enough, two come from a single issue of a magazine called Hobart. You’ll find work from some of our finest writers—Mary Gaitskill, Kate Walbert, Steven Millhauser, and Jennifer Haigh, among others—and discover new voices such as Taiye Selasi, Taylor Antrim, Adam Wilson, and Mike Meginnis. You’ll enounter bizarre scenarios—please check out “Beautiful Monsters” by Eric Puchner and “Volcano” by Lawrence Osborne—as well as a variety of intriguing, sometimes challenging characters: the homeless drunk trying to be a good dad in Jess Walter’s “Anything Helps”; a black woman who teaches structural engineering at an obscure technical college in Roxane Gay’s “North Country”; a young boy jealous of his dying brother in Sharon Solwitz’s “Alive”; a lesbian single mom who works at Home Depot in Carol Anshaw’s “The Last Speaker of the Language”; and a sewage inspector who wanders into dangerous moral territory in Angela Pneuman’s “Occupational Hazard.” Some of these stories are funny and some are heartbreaking—my own personal favorites somehow manage to be both at once—while others are angry or disturbing. There are a couple of sexy ones too, though fewer than I might have expected. But all of them took me somewhere I didn’t expect to go and jolted me into that state of heightened alertness and emotional receptivity that’s one of the great rewards of reading good fiction.
Inevitably, I had to leave out some stories I really enjoyed and admired, and I’m sorry about that. There were just so many good ones to choose from, so many different ways to envision the final list. There will undoubtedly be critics who disagree with my selections, skeptics who think I was the wrong person for the job or believe that they could have chosen more wisely. To them I say, with all due respect, I’m sure your pizza would be pretty tasty, and possibly even delicious, but mine is clearly the best.
It says so right on the box.
TOM PERROTTA
CAROL ANSHAW
The Last Speaker Of The Language
FROM New Ohio Review
ALL RIGHT. HERE we go.
Darlyn teeters high on a swayback wooden ladder she has dragged in from her mother’s garage. From here she can reach around blindly on top of the kitchen cabinets. She has struck pay dirt—a tidy arrangement of small, flat bottles. She doesn’t have to look to know they will all be pints of Five O’Clock Vodka.
She backs down the ladder, finds a grocery bag, goes back up, and tosses in every bottle she can reach. Then she moves the ladder farther along the way and clears out the bottles above those cabinets. She pours the liquor down the drain in the sink. Five O’Clock is not for the amateur drinker. When she has the presence of mind, Darlyn’s mother filters it through a Brita, then mixes it with lime juice and ice and ginger ale, her version of a Suffering Bastard. After a while, though, she drops the lime and the niceties and in the end skips even the glass.
All this poking around her mother’s hiding places and finding a few handles of Five O’Clock in the bottom of the laundry basket and tidying up a little but not dealing with a huge meal-moth situation in the pantry takes maybe an hour, but when she is done her mother is still passed out on the floor of the bathroom. Darlyn needs to use the toilet, which her mother is sort of propped against, like a bad doll. She takes her by an arm and a leg, and pulls her sideways by her sweatshirt over a ways toward the wall, lifts her head onto a folded towel. Then, while she is sitting on the toilet, she sinks into the special sorrow of peeing while your mother is out cold on the floor next to you. There are probably heavy drinking cultures, she thinks—maybe in rural eastern Europe—where they have a specific word for this emotion.
She leaves Jackie where she lies. She will ask Russ to go over later, when their mother will be more wakeable. He can put her through a home-style Valium detox they use to avoid the punishments of the emergency room. Jackie has a ton of Valium, also pain pills—jumbo scrips from a collection of sketchy doctors around the city. In the pursuit of euphoria and numbness, she is a busy and resourceful person. At one point, she even had money to fund her downfall, a surprise inheritance from an aunt, almost all of it gone in just a few years to the Five O’Clock company, and in the early, flush days of her roll, to the Stolichnaya family. Also to phone scammers who preyed on her until Darlyn got her mother’s number changed, twice. Now Jackie drinks without her phone friends and their tantalizing investments. If she wants bad company, she has to go out for it.
Darlyn does not have enough money to support her mother. This is a problem that weighs on her, what will happen when Jackie runs out. And so she makes these futile gestures toward getting her to sober up, maybe even get a job. Jackie is only in her late sixties. Early on she was a bookkeeper, but of course that’s a computerized business now. Done in offices where no one chain-smokes.
Lake is making dinner. At seven she was queen of the Easy-Bake Oven. At ten she is queen of the microwave. When she turns twelve, she will get to use the stove without supervision. Darlyn sees from the empty cartons on the counter that tonight it’s going to be Señora Garcia’s Enchiladas and Rice. Lake is sliding the contents of two black plastic trays onto actual plates, then sprinkling chopped cilantro over the small, dark, oily masses, so it won’t be obvious that dinner is an off-brand frozen entrée. Then she uses her frosting funnel to squeeze a swirl of sour cream onto the rims of the plates. Lake watches a lot of Food Network programming and is big into side dollops and drizzles and sometimes, like tonight, decorative foams.
“Wow, this looks so good,” Darlyn says, and hopes she sounds sincere.
Lake is the name her daughter chose for herself last year. She wasn’t happy with Mary. Darlyn’s thinking was to give her the plainest name possible. She herself has suffered her whole life with one that makes anyone using it sound like they’re calling over a truck-stop waitress. It just never occurred to her that she was allowed to change it. So, good for Mary. Good for Lake.
They sit across the breakfast bar from each other.
“Mmm, this green—”
“Lemon-avocado foam,” Lake says in a grave way accompanied by a small frown of concentration, then tastes some, judging.
“Listen. We’re pulling the plug on the phone tonight. Your Uncle Russ is helping me with Grandma, and at some point in the middle of the night he’s going to throw up his hands and call here for help. I have to open the store tomorrow so I have no time for your grandmother’s monkey business. I need solid sleep.”
“Is she going to be all right?” For no reason Darlyn can see, Lake is crazy about her grandmother.
“Oh, I can’t imagine that, but I don’t want you ruining your childhood worrying about her.”
“Can I cook this weekend?”
“I’m working Saturday while you and your Uncle Russ are at Wicked. But Sunday I’m all yours. What’re you going to make?”
“Arctic char with a crust of crushed macadamia nuts and ancho chilies.”
“Wow.”
“You’ll take me to Trader Joe’s for my ingredients?”
“Sure.” Because the child she wound up with is Lake, single parenthood is turning out to be the easiest part of Darlyn’s life.
At 2:24 A.M., the phone starts ringing. Darlyn forgot to pull the plug.
“Fuck.” She gets up, yanks the cord from the wall, then falls back into bed.
“That’s going right into your locker,” she tells Brad Wiggins first thing Friday morning in reference to his glitter T-shirt. She hands him an orange Home Depot polo. “You got the word about pushing the Butterscotch Heather stain-resistant nylon? We�
�ve got a big overstock situation. Big.”
“The thing is, it’s really a total violation of my professional ethics to put that crap carpet in a client’s home.”
“You don’t have clients. We have customers. This is Home Depot, not the Mart. You’re just a beginning gay guy, not a cutting-edge Manhattan decorator.” She can say stuff like this, being technically queer herself.
Her cell has been ringing in her pocket since she got to work. It’s Russ. When she can duck into the break room, she calls him back.
“How was she when you got there?”
“Well, that’s the thing. That’s why I’ve been calling you seven hundred times. She wasn’t home when I got there and I still haven’t been able to find her.”
“You went to Umpire’s?”
“And Corey’s.”
Darlyn fishes around for an idea on her mother’s whereabouts, but comes up blank. “We’ll just have to wait until she calls. And hope she hasn’t gotten hold of a new credit card.”
“Looking particularly minxy today, D.”
This is Norm Homer, head of Décor and Darlyn’s immediate supervisor. (“Hey dude,” Brad Wiggins likes to say, when Norm is not around, “get a real last name.”)
What is minxy even? He appears to have no awareness at all of workplace sexual harassment. Although he is in his fifties, Norm still lives with his parents. For the employee picnic last summer, his big idea—for the five seconds until it got shot down—was a kissing booth to raise money for a cure for something. Darlyn and the cashiers were supposed to take turns, charging five dollars a kiss. So what is she going to do, report him and get him fired so he can sit home with his parents, bewildered? Plus she doesn’t want to raise a ruckus. She is lucky to have this job. Her two closest friends plus her brother have all lost theirs. They are totally demoralized. They are in a private prison, the lockdown of failure.
