If there was a single factor that decided whether a story ended up in my ongoing pile of contenders, it was its basic power to make me lose my bearings, to envelop me in a fictional world. In the case of Molly McNett’s “La Pulchra Nota,” that world unfolds in the year 1399, when a devout singing teacher named John Fuller narrates his own mystical, heartbreaking downfall. In Laura van den Berg’s “Antarctica,” it is the end-of-the-earth landscape of the story’s title, a setting for grief and forensic investigation. Charles Baxter’s “Charity” manages, in three paragraphs, to gyre its protagonist from teaching English in Ethiopia into homelessness and drug addiction in Minneapolis. And Benjamin Nugent’s “God” is imbued with the cloistered bonhomie of college fraternity life, made perilous by the homosexual longings of its fraternity-brother narrator.
The vehicle for this transport into alternate worlds is vivid, specific language. Consider Craig Davidson’s “Medium Tough,” which subsumes the reader in the hyper-medicalized sensibility of Dr. Jasper Railsback, a surgeon of newborns who is beset with a physical abnormality he attributes to his mother’s alcohol abuse while he was in utero. Railsback observes, “The air in the NICU was heavy with pheromones: aliphatic acids, which waft from the pores of women who’ve just delivered. A distinctive scent. An undertone of caramelized sugar.” The language is technical, lyrical, and sensory—qualities whose seeming incompatibility makes their fusion even more potent.
It seems silly to continue quoting from stories that are printed in this volume (though I’m tempted), but suffice it to say that there’s plenty more where that came from. Karen Russell’s “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound” is the imagined story of Emma Bovary’s lost pet, Djali, told from the animal’s perspective. An intriguing conceit, to be sure, but what gives the story its energy and tenderness is the play of Russell’s inimitable prose. And Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “The Judge’s Will” owes its idiosyncratic power to the crystalline precision of her sentences.
So: a compelling premise and distinctive language to get in the door. Then what?
I read many stories that met both those requirements at first, but ultimately settled into predictable patterns, or seemed to stop short of something truly interesting. Each one of the twenty stories I chose had at least one move—often several—that genuinely surprised me, pushing past the obvious possibilities into territory that felt mysterious, or extreme. In Joyce Carol Oates’s “Mastiff,” a dog attack—which the reader half-expects—prompts an unlikely intimacy between the quasi-strangers who undergo it. Stephen O’Connor’s “Next to Nothing” has the aura of a modern-day Grimms’ fairy tale, featuring a pair of blunt, affectless sisters who insist on ignoring warnings of an impending flood as they summer together with their children.
The surprise in David Gates’s “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me,” a story about the long friendship between an alcoholic musician and his one-time devotee, is its final destination: happiness. Gates’s protagonist winds up happy—a striking outcome in a year when optimism was in short supply. The stories I read were predominantly dark, even grim, reflecting a mood of anxiety and unease that I guess is no surprise at all, given that Americans have endured six years of recession and eleven years of a war whose point—and endpoint—remain unclear. I’m proud to include two excellent stories that engage directly with the lives of soldiers: Will Mackin’s “Kattekoppen,” set among American forces in Afghanistan, and O. A. Lindsey’s “Evie M.,” about a female veteran struggling to function in a corporate workplace as she contemplates suicide. The British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico figured in more than one story I read, including Nicole Cullen’s “Long Tom Lookout,” included here, about a woman who spirits away the autistic, out-of-wedlock child of her husband, who is working long-term on the Gulf cleanup.
For the most part, the locus of anxiety in the larger pool of stories I read was the domestic sphere: illness and addiction, dead or imperiled children, cheating spouses, dissolving marriages. There was a curious predominance of pivotal roles played by wildlife, including crows, elk, bear (both brown and polar), turtles, deer, fish, and the aforementioned dogs. The prevailing narrative approach was the first-person singular, past tense. It was a year without much humor, but I welcomed the laughs that came, and was reminded that the funniest stuff is usually quite serious. I’ve included T. C. Boyle’s riotous “The Night of the Satellite,” in which a relationship’s precipitous unraveling culminates in a dispute over whether a mysterious piece of hardware has fallen to earth from outer space. In Nell Freudenberger’s “Hover,” about a divorcing woman who begins levitating involuntarily, humor offsets a fierce account of a mother protecting her gentle, quirky son. In Ann Beattie’s “The Indian Uprising,” caustic repartee between a retired professor and his former student masks their shared understanding that he is dying. And the deadpan delivery of Peter Cameron’s “After the Flood,” in which an elderly couple agrees, at the behest of their pastor, to house a family left homeless by a flood, allows the story’s horrific underpinnings to surface very slowly.
Although the majority of the 120 stories I read had contemporary settings, many could as easily have been set twenty years ago without anachronism. This is odd when you consider that a present-day photograph of any American location containing humans—a school, a street corner, a concert, a ball game—would be impossible to confuse with an image of the same scene, circa 1994. I’m not talking about facial hair or width of pants; I’m talking about the devices people walk around with, hold in their hands, and use to communicate—in some cases, almost constantly.
That revolution is the biggest change I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Between the year I was born and when I went to college in 1981, I knew of exactly three telephonic possibilities: a busy signal, or a person picking up, or endless ringing. Eighteen years of telecommunications stasis! Hard to imagine that happening ever again. I’m not a proselyte; as a parent, journalist, music fan, and believer in copyright, I find my responses to our warp-speed technological change falling mainly on a spectrum from anxiety to terror. But there is no denying that a transformation is upon us, pervasive, dramatic, ongoing. And it is inseparable from many other seismic shifts of the past twenty years: modern terrorism, globalization, climate change.
How can such topics be manifest in a short story? Not all of them can at once, of course—or not directly. But my love of escape notwithstanding, I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges. In each of the twenty stories I chose—even those set in the past—I felt an engagement with the wider world at this specific point in time. It was my last criterion, but possibly the most important.
One way that cultural engagement can show itself is in the form a short story takes. Brendan Mathews’s “This Is Not a Love Song” tells of the rise and fall of an early-1990s indie rocker, using artifacts assembled by her self-appointed documentarian: descriptions of photographs and interviews transcribed from cassette tapes. The story’s inventive structure allows it to ask what separates homage from exploitation, and its setting in a precise technological moment (about twenty years ago, as it happens) suggests a shared understanding with the reader of all that has changed since then.
Another formally ambitious story I’ve included is Lauren Groff’s “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” which begins in the 1940s and reaches to the present. The sweeping tale of a man who spends the bulk of his life in a serpent-infested Florida swamp that gradually becomes surrounded by a university, it vividly juxtaposes primordial mystery with sprawling modernity. Joshua Ferris’s “The Breeze” dramatizes a young woman’s ineffable craving for intensity and authenticity in her dealings with her new husband. By conjuring the relationship in a series of scenes that don’t quite add up—and often seem to contradict each other—Ferris manages, as in a cubist painting, to evoke a larger whole without ever quite pinpointing it.
Of course, there’s a long relation
ship between literary innovation and seismic cultural change: the modernists absorbed the impact of Freud, a world war, and the popularization of film (James Joyce managed a Dublin movie theater); the postmodernists reacted to television, structural theory, and the counterculture. Personally, I could do without any further “isms” (is anyone actually drawn to fiction called “postmodern”?), but I’m stirred by the question of how novels and short stories will evolve to accommodate and represent our ongoing cultural transformation. Prose fiction was invented as a means of flexible, eclectic storytelling, after all; from the very start, fiction writers have greedily absorbed whatever forms were around and bent them to their will. Pamela, one of the first novels written in English, is epistolary, and Tristram Shandy and Robinson Crusoe include legal documents, fake autobiography, and (in Sterne’s case) weird graphics. It would be uncharacteristic if our literary production didn’t seek out new ways to embody the novelties of twenty-first-century life: the commingling of online with actual experience; the disappearance of a certain kind of solitude; the illusion of safety that goes along with being in touch; surveillance as a fact of everyday life; the gulf between those who are technologically connected and those still isolated. To name just a few.
All of this brings me back to fiction’s relevance to the cultural conversation. Will people continue to read short stories and novels, now that virtually every alternative that exists can fit more easily into our pocket than a paperback? People have been asking this question for a long time now—through the arrival of movies, TV, the Walkman, video games, cable, VCRs, personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones. By the time this introduction is printed (the very word outmoded), there may be some new threat. And while I do occasionally cower before the question, I also know that the answer is finally simple: people will keep reading fiction as long as it provides an experience of pleasure and insight they can’t find anywhere else. The twenty stories in this collection did exactly that—for me. Now I cordially invite you to agree, object, call me crazy, and begin the conversation.
JENNIFER EGAN
CHARLES BAXTER
Charity
FROM McSweeney’s
1
HE HAD FALLEN into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year—teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he’d returned to the States, he’d brought back an infection—the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.
Borrowing a car, he drove from Minneapolis down to the Mayo Clinic, where after two days of tests the doctors informed him that they would have no firm diagnosis for the next month or so. Back in Minneapolis, through a friend of a friend, he visited a wildcat homeopathy treatment center known for traumatic-pain-relief treatments. The center, in a strip mall storefront claiming to be a weight-loss clinic (WEIGHT NO MORE), gave him megadoses of meadowsweet, a compound chemically related to aspirin. After two months without health insurance or prescription coverage, he had emptied his bank account, and he gazed at the future with shy dread.
Through another friend of a friend, he managed to get his hands on a few superb prescription painkillers, the big ones, gifts from heaven. With the aid of these pills, he felt like himself again. He blessed his own life. He cooked some decent meals; he called his boyfriend in Seattle; he went around town looking for a job; he made plans to get himself to the Pacific Northwest. When the drugs ran out and the pain returned, worse this time, like being stabbed in his elbows and shoulders, along with the novelty of addiction’s chills and fevers, the friend of a friend told him that if he wanted more pills at the going street rate, he had better go see Black Bird. He could find Black Bird at the bar of a club, the Inner Circle, on Hennepin Avenue. “He’s always there,” the friend of a friend said. “He’s there now. He reads. The guy sits there studying Shakespeare. Used to be a scholar or something. Pretends to be a Native American, one of those imposter types. Very easy to spot. I’ll tell him you’re coming.”
The next Wednesday, he found Black Bird at the end of the Inner Circle bar near the broken jukebox and the sign for the men’s room. The club’s walls had been built from limestone and rust-red brick and sported no decorative motifs of any kind. If you needed decorations around you when you drank, you went somewhere else. The peculiar orange lighting was so dim that Quinn couldn’t figure out how Black Bird could read at all.
Quinn approached him gingerly. Black Bird’s hair went down to his shoulders. The gray in it looked as if it had been applied with chalk. He wore bifocals and moved his finger down the page as he read. Nearby was a half-consumed bottle of 7 Up.
“Excuse me. Are you Black Bird?”
Without looking up, the man said, “Why do you ask?”
“I’m Quinn.” He held out his hand. Black Bird did not take it. “My friend Morrow told me about you.”
“Ah huh,” Black Bird said. He glanced up with an impatient expression before returning to his book. Quinn examined the text. Black Bird was reading Othello, the third act.
“Morrow said I should come see you. There’s something I need.”
Black Bird said nothing.
“I need it pretty bad,” Quinn said, his hand trembling inside his pocket. He wasn’t used to talking to people like this. When Black Bird didn’t respond, Quinn said, “You’re reading Othello.” Quinn had acquired a liberal arts degree from a college in Iowa, where he had majored in global political solutions, and he felt that he had to assert himself. “The handkerchief. And Iago, right?”
Black Bird nodded. “This isn’t College Bowl,” he said dismissively. With his finger stopped on the page, he said, “What do you want from me?”
Quinn whispered the name of the drug that made him feel human.
“What a surprise,” said Black Bird. “Well, well. How do I know that you’re not a cop? You a cop, Mr. Quinn?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t know what you’re asking me or what you’re talking about. I’m a peaceful man sitting here reading this book and drinking this 7 Up.”
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“You could always come back in four days,” Black Bird said. “You could always bring some money.” He mentioned a price for a certain number of painkillers. “I have to get the ducks in a row.”
“That’s a lot of cash,” Quinn said. Then, after thinking it over, he said, “All right.” He did not feel that he had many options these days.
Black Bird looked up at him with an expression devoid of interest or curiosity.
“Do you read, Mr. Quinn?” he asked. “Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.” Black Bird spoke these words in a bland monotone.
“I don’t know what to read,” Quinn told him, his legs shaking.
“Too bad,” Black Bird said. “Next time you come here, bring a book. I need proof you exist. The Minneapolis Public Library is two blocks away. But if you come back, bring the money. Otherwise, there’s no show.”
Quinn was living very temporarily in a friend’s basement in Northeast Minneapolis. His parents, in a traditional Old World gesture, had disowned him after he had come out, so he couldn’t call on them for support. They had uttered several unforgettable verdicts about his character, sworn they would never see him again, and that was that.
He had a sister who lived in Des Moines with her husband and two children. She did not like what she called Quinn’s “sexual preferences” and had a tendency to hang up on him. None of his friends from high school had any money he could borrow; the acquaintance in whose basement he was staying was behind on his rent. His student debt had been taken up by a collection agency, which was calling him three times a day.
Quinn’s
boyfriend in Seattle, a field rep for a medical supply company, had a thing about people borrowing money. He might break up with Quinn if Quinn asked him for a loan. He could be prickly, the boyfriend, and the two of them were still on a trial basis anyway. They had met in Africa and had fallen in love over there. The love might not travel if Quinn brought up the subject of debts or his viral arthritis and inflammation or the drug habit he had recently acquired.
Now that the painkillers had run out, a kind of groggy unfocused physical discomfort had become Quinn’s companion day and night. He lived in the house that the pain had designed for him. The Mayo Clinic had not called him back, and the meadowsweet’s effect was like a cup of water dropped on a house fire. Sometimes the pain started in Quinn’s knees and circled around Quinn’s back until it located itself in his shoulders, like exploratory surgery performed using a Swiss Army knife. He had acquired the jitters and a runny nose and a swollen tongue and cramps. He couldn’t sleep and had diarrhea. He was a mess, and the knowledge of the mess he had become made the mess worse. The necessity of opiates became a supreme idea that forced out all the other ideas until only one thought occupied Quinn’s mind: Get those painkillers. He didn’t think he was a goner yet, though.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 2
