by Laura Furman
Jim Shepard on “The Particles” by Andrea Barrett
Although it begins with as flamboyant a narrative hook as you’re likely to find—our hero barely able to swim and thrashing about the cold Atlantic alongside a ship that’s just been torpedoed—Andrea Barrett’s “The Particles” at first seems as unassuming as its main character, the hardworking if moony and mopey Sam. Some of that restraint seems to be generated by the story’s expert management of its macro and micro modes: as it processes along, its length making the reader wonder where the short story stops and the novella begins, it unfolds, in turn, the opening of the Second World War, the modern history of genetics, and the dismal and mostly on-hold chronicle of its protagonist’s emotional life.
Even as the story never loses sight of the longing and disappointment at the heart of Sam’s relationship with his old friend and teacher, Axel, it provides a visceral (and really, epic, if such a term can be applied to the quotidian life of a scientist such as Sam’s) sense of his lifelong absorption in science itself. The story renders unforgettably that experience of falling in love with experimental science as if “tumbling down a well,” the voices of other kids outside diminishing and then silent. It allows us to feel the exhilaration of concepts made visible. It’s marvelous on that moment when the whole world starts to shimmer under the spell of that intensity of curiosity. It even pulls off the nearly impossible feat of seducing us into imagining fruit flies as fascinating. (In that regard, I’m now with Sam. That courting male who holds out his wing and dances right and then left before embracing his bride: “who wouldn’t love that?”)
The story’s wonderful too, in its offhanded way, on just where the politicization of science leads us: its account of Trofim Lysenko’s dismissal of all of formal genetics at a conference in 1936 in the Soviet Union—“A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it”—resonates uncomfortably with anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to follow the climate-change debate in the United States over the last ten years.
There’s something unassuming and appealing, too, in the way in which this world’s judgments are apportioned: “In the distance a shape, which might have been the guilty submarine, seemed to shift position.” The sufferings of the many are rendered with a distance that seems both compassionate and clear-eyed: “A little string of emptied lifeboats tossed in the swell beside the tanker, the boat closest to the stern still packed with people.” And lives are lost almost out at the very edges of our vision: struggling figures, too small to identify, dotting the water in the distance after their lifeboat’s been tipped, or an old woman caught in the gap between her lifeboat and a destroyer’s hull, a space that disappears when the boats collide.
But for all the suffering around him, the perversity of Sam’s inner stubbornness never recedes. Nothing he experiences—his lost love Ellen, his professional failures and humiliations, the Stalinist purges he just evades, or the trauma of the torpedoed Athenia itself—has the force of his estrangement from Axel. But of course his primary disappointment is with himself. Much of the story’s power comes from its evocation of how, for all of Sam’s humility and gratitude for what he has been able to experience, life has often seemed to him to have been centered elsewhere: wherever his mentor—and with him, the promise of scientific intimacy, and the white-hot core of genetics—resided. No matter what contrary evidence the story so poignantly provides.
Jim Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, the most recent of which is You Think That’s Bad: Stories. His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for a National Book Award and won the Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for fiction, as well as an Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and one for a Pushcart Prize. He’s won an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Writing The O. Henry
Prize Stories 2013
The Writers on Their Work
Donald Antrim, “He Knew”
This story, like most everything I’ve written, short or long, began with not much more than a thought, an idea that was not an idea at all, really, but a kind of simple picture of something—in this case, the picture that came to me was of two people, a man and his younger wife, making their way up Madison Avenue on a bright spring day. Right away it becomes apparent that both are compromised, to a degree, by psychiatric issues, and a day spent shopping seems for them to be a pleasure and a distraction from whatever troubles them.
The story, the writing of it (as, for me, the writing of any story), progressed slowly, over many months. In “He Knew,” narrative movement was guided by the journey up the avenue. Years ago, when I was beginning to write my first novel, I made it a rule that I would move forward in the manuscript without the help of an outline or fixed notions about the story as it developed; the program was to go line by line and page by page, and called for following, adhering to, and extending the accumulating logic of what had been started and written so far. My goal was to have pleasure in the writing, and to make something out of nothing, as it were. And I’ve come to recognize, as I’ve worked over years, that, for me, invention and experience tend to exist more or less as subsets of each other. This is absolutely true of “He Knew.” Perhaps what I am searching for, ultimately, is something in the quality of the relationship between Stephen and Alice—their love for each other, their compatible incompatibility, their shared history of breakdown, their fate or their destiny—and, I hope, the love that bonds them is enough felt by their author to come through, as well, to a reader.
Donald Antrim was born in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson For a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist; and a memoir, The Afterlife. He contributes fiction and nonfiction to The New Yorker, and is a past recipient of awards from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Tash Aw, “Sail”
The story has its roots in a passing observation: I was in Hong Kong—in Central, the financial district—waiting for a friend in a café. It was lunchtime and the place was full of elegantly dressed men and women, the air rich with a buzzy testosterone-fueled optimism. At the adjacent table there was a man in a suit who looked like any other in the room. But there was something about him that (I thought) suggested that he, like me, was out of place. His shoes were a bit too shiny; his suit and printed silk tie ostentatiously screamed Success. He was looking at a brochure for a yacht, constantly putting it back into his briefcase before taking it out again, as if it made him anxious. When he spoke on his mobile phone I noticed he spoke Mandarin with a northern accent. But then my friend arrived and I forgot all about that man and his yacht.
Years later, I was on the Normandy coast, watching sailboats head out to sea; there were a number of them out that day—it was part of a race or a regatta of some sort, I think. And as I stood on the cliffs watching the white sails of the yachts billow and tilt as they ventured out into the Channel, I suddenly remembered that man from Hong Kong. It was the inherent loneliness of these yachts in the vastness of the ocean that recalled that man and his anxieties (or at least the anxieties I had attributed to him). Without knowing it, I had carried him around in my head for years, and when I sat down to recreate his story, the pieces of his life fell into place swiftly, as if I knew him intimately.
Tash Aw was born in Taipei to M
alaysian parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Harmony Silk Factory won a Whit-bread Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first novel, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. His latest novel is Five Star Billionaire. He lives in London.
Andrea Barrett, “The Particles”
In 2008 I started a story called “The Ether of Space,” about a middle-aged widow with a passion for astronomy, struggling to integrate the news confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity with older theories about the ether of space. Near the end of the story, her young son, Sam, jumps into the foreground—which made me realize the story’s deeper intentions, and also confirmed my desire to explore Sam’s character as a grown man. Then I began work on what would become “The Particles.” Knowing that Sam, although different from his mother in many ways, would also be drawn to some field of science, I chose genetics because I’m interested in that field’s early history. The famous “Fly Room” at Columbia seemed like a natural place for Sam—but as I got to know that world better, positioning him near (rather than exactly at) the center of this exciting new field was more intriguing. I wrote eight or nine versions before learning that several scientists attending the 7th International Conference on Genetics in Edinburgh had been aboard the Athenia, while others had been on the City of Flint.
Pure serendipity; I would have been a fool to resist it (although, for a while, I did). Then I gave in and rewrote and restructured everything. As a result of those choices, the nature of friendship—equal or unequal, passionate or cool, scientific or personal or both, envious or loving (or both)—became crucial to the story.
Andrea Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe, and three collections of short fiction: Ship Fever, which received a National Book Award; Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Archangel (forthcoming). She lives in western Massachusetts and teaches at Williams College.
Ann Beattie, “Anecdotes”
How did those pink Uggs come stomping in, how did I write a story that contains the word Astroturf? There are many stories hidden in this one that I might have reported, straightforwardly. When writing, though, I get bedazzled by details. Once the necklace was lapis (I had to envision something, but the reader knows it’s probably not really lapis, right?), William Butler Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” began to figure in—especially the poet’s tone. I see the little warrior on horseback, at the end of my story, as a lesser version, indeed, of the carved scene Yeats contemplated. In retrospect, I might have had Lucia speak about the poem, or perhaps had her teacher-daughter do so, but I kept it more or less hidden, almost a throwaway: its displacement is all. In the time elapsed, what has the wife thought of the broken necklace sent to her anonymously? Whatever she thought, what does she make of the information she gets much later, which is a lie? I hope the story happens inside the mind of many characters, even if I couldn’t fully write those stories.
• • •
Ann Beattie grew up in Washington, D.C. She has written nine story collections, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2011 was the recipient of Bard College’s Mary McCarthy Award. She lives in Maine.
L. Annette Binder, “Lay My Head”
This story started with the character of Angela, who—like me—was on her way back to visit Colorado after many years away. I thought about Angela for a long time before starting to write the story, about her return to the place where she grew up and how she knew she wouldn’t be leaving again. I’d also been thinking a lot about German fairy tales at the time—the fairy tales my parents told me when I was little—and one in particular kept coming back to me. The story of Lucky Hans, who gradually sets aside all his possessions because he sees them as the burdens they are.
These two threads wove together in unexpected ways when I wrote the story. As the draft progressed, Angela stayed quiet. Normally that would worry me. Your characters need to be active, most people would say. They can’t just be still. But this story felt different. Angela was looking at the world and trying to mark it all down, to take it with her, and she had no need for words.
L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado Springs. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction has been performed on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and has appeared in the 2013 Pushcart Prize anthology, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Rise, was published in 2012. She lives in Boston and New Hampshire.
Ayşe Papatya Bucak, “The History of Girls”
I have a Turkish father and an American mother, and I was born in Turkey, but raised in the United States. As a result, for a long time I hesitated to write about Turkishness, as it’s something I’ve experienced only indirectly. But then I realized I could write about Turkishness in the way that it comes to me, popping up prairie-dog-style into my American life. This happens largely through stories: my mother’s memories, my father’s metaphors, news items, folktales …
A few years ago, the New York Times covered an explosion at a girls’ school in Eastern Turkey, and initially the cause of the explosion was undetermined. But my mother immediately said, “Of course, it was the gas. It was always the gas.” And it turned out she was right. I was struck by the sadness of this—the avoidability. When I began the story, which I always knew would center on the girls in the explosion, I realized I had created a rather difficult scenario to write—my characters were immobile and in the dark; some of them were dead. All they could do was talk to each other. But as is often the way, through writing I figured some things out. In drafting the dialogue, I was reminded of conversations I’d had in the dark as a girl, in the twilight hour of slumber parties when the host’s parents have made you climb into your sleeping bags and turn out the lights, but haven’t yet come in and yelled at you to stop giggling and go to sleep. Those were some of the most intimate and funny conversations I’ve ever had. When I thought about my characters’ backstory, including the realities of shared life at a boarding school, I realized these girls had been speaking to one another in the dark for years.
Celine’s Easternized fairy tale came directly from my father’s way of telling stories, which involves an incredible amalgamation of Eastern, Western, ancient, and modern influences. The first-person plural point of view was something I had been wanting to try and that seemed to fit the situation. (One thing I love about teaching is that the close study of other writers and constant focus on craft encourage me to try techniques I might not otherwise.) Originally the story was first-person plural all the way through, but with some help from my two most treasured readers, I realized it needed a stronger sense of progression, which could come from a narrowing in point of view.
Also, I once was terrified by having a hawk’s shadow pass over me, as well as by the sight of an unripened potato.
Ayşe Papatya Bucak was born in Istanbul. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She directs the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University and lives in South Florida.
Deborah Eisenberg, “Your Duck Is My Duck”
I was out of context, away from home, in Marfa, Texas, for a good long time, and even the ones inside you who look over your shoulder while you’re working and roll their eyes couldn’t find me. So I could do anything I felt like doing, and I felt like having a little fun.
It’s always impossible for me to remember how a piece of fiction started or developed—for me writing fiction is almost invariably just a very long, very awkward process of discovering that whatever I wrote the day before was an error, being repelled by the error, repeating the steps, and waiting for what’s behind all the errors to be disclosed and thicken up into something that has an intent and a shape. And this story was no exception.
In short, I cannot for the life o
f me remember the specifics of how it grew. I do have various friends—generally struggling artists (something I also consider myself to be)—who sometimes go to stay with wealthy friends of theirs, friends who have spectacular houses in spectacular places. And I suppose I was thinking of them and thinking how happy I was to be on my own in Marfa. And there’s something uncanny about a really, really good puppet show—I always envy people who work in media that put at their disposal contrapuntal lines, like music and visuals in addition to words on a flat piece of paper.
Certainly, when I got around to doing what I think of as the post-final draft—that is, to making all the changes I must make after I’ve thought a particular thing was finished but it turns out I have to confront the question of what the thing is and what it ought to be—I saw that many of my preoccupations and worries were reflected in it: the ravages of climate change, including the growing populations of climate refugees; the worldwide plight of the embattled and looted middle class; the co-optation and trivialization of art; and the relationships—especially in regard to the use of resources—between the middle class, the looters, the artists, and the new wretched of the earth.
Deborah Eisenberg grew up in a suburb of Chicago. She is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at Columbia University. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2011. She lives in New York City.
Samar Farah Fitzgerald, “Where Do You Go?”
Usually I begin with an image I’m trying to bring into focus, or a mood I’m straining to pinpoint. But this time the story began more concretely with an anecdote my mother had told me. Several years ago, my parents sold our house in New Jersey and relocated to a nearby townhome. The day after the movers unloaded their belongings, an elderly neighbor queried my mother about cigarette stubs in her driveway. Neither of my parents smoke, so she assumed the butts belonged to the movers, but the old man didn’t seem appeased, and my mother felt watched and unwelcomed. Shortly after, a relative paid my parents a visit. At one point the relative stepped out to smoke and was approached by the same neighbor, this time stealthily seeking to bum a cigarette. The accuser turned out to be a moocher, presumably under orders by his wife not to smoke. As I wrote the story over a period of two years, I realized my interest in this little incident had to do with the limits of intimacy—the secrets we keep from the most loving partners and the ultimate experience we must face alone.