Years passed before I risked showing a story to anyone again. Any time I started careening around in time machines, introducing talking goats, or hot-wiring vans full of chocolate bars, my pleasures got all tangled up with insecurities. I worried I was breaking rules that I didn’t properly comprehend, that nothing I was making was harmonious enough, and that my “economy” was unnecessary and imperfect.
In my twenties I encountered many more rules for writing short stories—I’m guessing you probably have, too. Don’t start with a character waking up. Jump right into the action. Exposition is boring. Backstory slows you down. Stick with a single protagonist. Make sure he or she is likable. Don’t break up chronology. Don’t digress. Don’t overwrite. Don’t tell a story inside the story. Don’t take a moral stance. Don’t have a character wake up at the end of a story and discover that everything was a dream. Etcetera.
Although I could see where the rule makers were coming from—backstory risks slowing down frontstory, it’s true, and time-jumping risks confusing the reader, and stories with moral stances risk becoming preachy—I always felt a bristling aversion to rules, because the stories I loved usually broke two or three of them in the first five pages. Indeed, whenever I came across a list of rules like the one above, what I really wanted to do was write a story that was all backstory, in which multiple protagonists, none of whom are exactly likable, wake up, tell lots of different stories inside the story, argue significant moral points, then wake up a second time and realize the whole thing was a dream.
Last fall, when the indefatigable Heidi Pitlor sent me a first batch of forty stories, I dove right in. I had been reading lots of (very) dead writers—Sophocles, Homer, Ovid—and it was a delight to read stories involving Tinder and Lyft and underage Irish cabbies and Jamaican grandmothers and John Updike’s sneakers in an oven.
Each time I’d start a new story, I’d get about two paragraphs in and see why Heidi selected it: it had a magnetic rhythm or an explosive opening or a spare beauty or a fabulous rain motif or a hobo-chic-transient-stalker-creep who looked vaguely like Brad Pitt. The hooks would go in: Manhattan was flooding, astronauts were falling from the sky, a woman was headed to a wake pretending to be her neighbor, and the golden drug of narrative would flash through my nervous system.
By Thanksgiving I felt as though I had lucked into the best gig ever. I had a gifted, generous, and Herculean reader examining every short story published in North America and mailing me tear sheets of her favorites; I was discovering brilliant similes everywhere; I was meeting adulterous Alaskan moms and White House switchboard operators and nuns buying beehives. I kept thinking: There are so many brave voices singing out there!
It was mid-December when I remembered, Shit. I’m supposed to decide why some of these stories are better than the others. I panicked. I spent an entire morning constructing a spreadsheet; I built fields to score and summarize and evaluate, and in about fourteen seconds all the pleasure ribboned away.
Evaluating is a very different experience than enjoying, and I suppose this is true when it comes to parenting, traveling, eating, having sex, and reading short stories. Evaluating sucks. Evaluating turns eating a delicious piece of pie into homework.
By Christmas my spreadsheet had grown gigantic. I synopsized every story, rated it on a scale of 1 to 10 by how much joy it gave me, how many risks it took, and how much literary merit it had (whatever that meant); I handed out 9s, 10s, and a few 11s, and my “What I Loved” fields became long and passionate, and my “What I Didn’t Love” fields became short and painful, and I decided I was giving too many 10s and summarily demoted all preexisting 10s to 9s, and by January my office resembled a Ministry of the Short Story run by drunken bureaucrats. Stacks of stories loomed on the file cabinet, on shelves, in drifts across the carpet, my these-are-definitely-the-best pile draped over the arm of the sofa, my I-ranked-these-as-8s-but-was-I-being-fair? pile next to the dog bowl, my this-prose-is-dense-so-I-need-to-be-well-rested stack on the desk, my did-I-rank-these-too-low-because-they-were-about-cancer? stack on my desk chair.
It was around then that I realized that I was having a familiar experience. I was doing what everybody who has ever tried to make a list of rules about short stories does: I was trying to bind the unbindable, circumscribe the uncircumscribable—to catch magic in my hands, measure it, and decree: This is how it should be done.
But the amazing and beautiful thing about the short story is the elasticity of the form. As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong. With every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.
At some point around mid-January, maybe ninety stories in, I gave up on trying to quantify everything and went back to reading for the pleasure of reading. My spreadsheet became a little less “Caesura” and a little more “Avalanche,” and I aimed for a less rigid kind of rubric: Did the story last in my memory? Two days later, would pieces of the story come spiraling up during some quiet moment?
What I was looking for were fictions that walked the tightrope between control and exuberance, that exhibited not so much the flawless consonance that Rust Hills (and Poe before him) admired as, to borrow a phrase from Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a “cat’s cradle of tensions.” I wanted sentences that pulled me in multiple directions at once, structures that unsettled preexisting patterns, and techniques that took some previously ratified rule and poked it. The stories that lingered in my memory, I was learning, were at once the bonsai and the anti-bonsai; if they were a bonsai tree, they were a bonsai tree with a trash can full of moths dumped on top of it.
Rust Hills suggested that a short story writer stick with a single point of view, but Deborah Eisenberg, in her dystopic paean to the imagination, “The Third Tower,” leaps into a doctor’s mind in two of its thirteen sections. Without those leaps away from her protagonist’s point of view, her story would collapse.
Wendell Berry waits until the last seven paragraphs of “The Great Interruption” to introduce a first-person narrator—a character you didn’t even know was part of the story until you meet him. Berry also wraps a story within a story and accelerates wildly through time, and it is these contraventions that make you feel the story’s moral heft: this isn’t about a humorous old anecdote, it’s about now, about a nation “dismemoried and without landmarks,” about the destruction of local-ness and what it costs us. If Berry doesn’t break these rules, his story doesn’t work.
Hills said a story writer shouldn’t mess much with subplots, but from a certain angle, Nicole Krauss constructs her gorgeous “Seeing Ershadi” entirely around subplots—three of her first five paragraphs, for example, are spent summarizing an Iranian film. Yet her story utterly wrecked me. The prose in Kathleen Alcott’s haunting “Natural Light” is always trending away from straightforward clarity toward something more interesting; the central narrative hangs just out of reach as you pursue meaning down through the thickets of her sentences. And Jenn Alandy Trahan’s “They Told Us Not to Say This,” narrated by a collective “we” of NoCal girls, transforms the familiar expectations of rising and falling action into something newer: an anthem of independence.
Hills argued that in a story “everything’s bound together tightly,” but Julia Elliott’s “Hellion,” which contains kids racing yard carts, a gator named Dragon, and a Swamp Ape that eats Slim Jims, embraces exuberance with a courage I wish I possessed when I was a young writer. For decades writing teachers have been warning students not to open stories with too much exposition, yet Saïd Sayrafiezadeh opens “Audition” with seven long paragraphs of fluid, funny exposition before settling you into a proper scene, and I think you’ll be grateful for it.
Sigrid Nunez, in “The Plan,” smashes the “make your protagonist likable” dictum into splinters, then grinds those splinters into dust: her narrator, Roden Jones, is one of the m
ost despicable actors you’ll find in fiction, yet “The Plan” sucks you down into its whirlpool just the same. Or maybe you’ve heard the injunction that a short story is too small to sustain multiple protagonists? In this book two masters, Jeffrey Eugenides and Ursula K. Le Guin, contribute pieces that embrace dual protagonists as well as any short stories I can remember reading. Jim Shepard’s epistolary “Our Day of Grace,” about Confederate soldiers on their way to the 1864 Battle of Franklin, presents four protagonists, all while shining a light on our current hour, “when we consider how much corruption runs riot in high places, & that it may be that our country’s day of grace is passed.”
Speaking of which, anyone who thinks short stories can’t or shouldn’t ask moral questions about our political moment should turn to Weike Wang’s “Omakase,” a story as meticulously structured as any omakase dinner and which will wake you up to the minute-by-minute realities of white privilege as well as anything you’ll read this year. “Black Corfu” by Karen Russell presents an Ovidian parable about xenophobia, racism, and the wealth gap—a zombie story set in 1620 that seems entirely about 2019. “They are neighbors,” Russell writes, “and yet their breath barely overlaps.”
In “Letter of Apology,” Maria Reva presents a hilarious and heartrending glimpse of life under a regime where it is illegal to criticize or even joke about political leaders; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah imagines a freaky postnuclear future of genetic modification and pharmaceutical addiction in “The Era”; Alexis Schaitkin’s “Natural Disasters” explores profound questions about authenticity along America’s urban/rural divide; Ella Martinsen Gorham’s “Protozoa” demonstrates, in alarming detail, how difficult it is for its teenage protagonist to live both online and “in the actual world”; and Manuel Muñoz’s moving “Anyone Can Do It,” about a woman whose husband has been rounded up by immigration police, might be set in the 1980s but could not be more timely.
Empathy might be the most-talked-about value attached to fiction writing nowadays, but even that precept gets tested here. As you start Jamel Brinkley’s “No More Than a Bubble,” you wonder: Am I being asked to empathize with two young men who think of girls as “snacks”? Gradually, though, because another, wiser voice (the author’s) populates the world around the narrator, the texture of your understanding deepens.
And Mona Simpson’s “Wrong Object” pushes the reader to a different frontier of empathy—pedophilia—but by the end of her story, you might be surprised to find yourself asking: Who among us can’t relate to trying to repel our own unbidden desires?
I started reading these stories as Christine Blasey Ford finished testifying during the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, and I finished these stories as the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee. All winter, questions about the truth and who gets to control it rippled through my thoughts. The stories we chose for this volume don’t all focus on these questions, and they don’t all violate the so-called rules to the same degree, but they do each stray far enough from the familiar to feel new and strange and true. They’re about people severed from their places or their histories, about girls being told they “weren’t worth much, not as much as sons” (Trahan, “They Told Us Not to Say This”), about an overdependence on pharmaceutical solutions to unhappiness, and about the insidious ways racism and classism can silence voices and distort memory. They are provocative, weird, dazzling, dark, bright, serious, and hilarious, and as a group they demonstrate the incredible possibilities implicit in the form.
Are these all the voices that Heidi and I should have discovered, all the voices that warrant inclusion, all the voices that need to be heard? Not even close. They’re merely twenty stories that found us at the right intersection of interest and fatigue and experience and joy and longing. What I can promise is that, depending on whatever intersection of interest and fatigue and experience and joy and longing at which these stories find you, they will put their hooks into you.
Flip to a story at random, blink your eyes, and then it comes—“The first time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights” (Sayrafiezadeh, “Audition”)—and your attention slips through the walls of your skull and lands in the hands of someone generous, someone you want to go examine the world with.
It’s a kind of love: you fall in love.
Storytelling is the first and oldest spell, cast around lamps and fires since before there were cities, alphabets, and domesticated herbivores. The lives we live through stories intermix with our own memories, and because of stories our experiences multiply; our apprehension of the humanity of others is broadened, improved, and complicated, and each voice we hear becomes a small part of our own experience on this earth.
Inside the boards of this book are twenty different voices singing in twenty different registers to twenty different tunes from twenty different corners of right now, composed at a time when we worry about the future habitability of our planet; need to work harder to understand the lives of people who don’t look, love, act, or vote like us; and continue to fight to allow marginalized stories to be told as publicly as any other. These stories push back against tradition even as they simultaneously embrace it, and help us remember that in art, so long as we humans manage to keep having children, and our children keep growing up and looking around at the stories their forebears have told and deciding they can tell them better (which is to say faster, or slower, or greener, or longer, or with more monsters, or fewer verbs, or more stolen vans full of chocolate bars), the resistance is always happening.
Anthony Doerr
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
The Era
from Guernica
“Suck one and die,” says Scotty, a tall, mostly true, kid. “I’m aggressive ’cause I think you don’t know shit.”
We’re in HowItWas class.
“Well,” Mr. Harper says, twisting his ugly body toward us. “You should shut your mouth because you’re a youth-teen who doesn’t know shit about shit and I’m a full-middler who’s been teaching this stuff for more years than I’m proud of.”
“Understood,” says Scotty.
Then Mr. Harper went back to talking about the time before the Turn, which came after the Big Quick War, which came after the Long Big War. I was thinking about going to the nurse for some prelunch Good. I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.
“So after the Big Quick,” Mr. Harper continues in his bored voice, “science and philosopher guys realized that people had been living wrong the whole time before. Sacrificing themselves, their efficiency, and their wants. This made a world of distrust and misfortune, which led to the Big Wars.
“Back then, everyone was a liar. It was so bad that it would not have been uncommon for people to tell Samantha”—Mr. Harper points a finger at Samantha, who sits next to me—“that she was beautiful even though, obviously, she is hideous.” Samantha nods her ugly head to show she understands. Her face is squished so bad she’s always looking in two different directions. Sometimes, kids who get prebirth optiselected come out all messed up. Samantha is “unoptimal.” That’s the official name for people like her, whose optimization screwed up and made their bodies horrible. I don’t have any gene corrections. I wasn’t optimized at all. I am not optimal or ideal. But I’m also not unoptimal, so I wasn’t going to look like Samantha, which is good. It’s not all good, though, since no optiselect means no chance of being perfect either. I don’t care. I’m true. I’m proud, still. Looking over, being nosy ’cause sometimes I do that, I see Samantha log in to her class pad: I would have been pretty/beautiful.
“Or”—and now Mr. Harper is looking at me; I can feel him thinking me into an example—“back then a teacher might’ve told Ben, who we know is a dummy, that he was smart or that if he would just apply himself he’d do better.” The class laughs ’cause they think a world where I’m smart is hee-haw. In
my head I think, Mr. Harper, do you think that back then students would think you were something other than a fat, ugly skin sack? Then I say, “Mr. Harper, do you think back then students would think you were something other than a fat, ugly skin sack?”
“I don’t know what they’d say about me,” Mr. Harper says. “Probably that it was a great thing that I was a teacher and that my life wasn’t trash. Anything else, Ben?” I start to say something else about how they must have really, really liked lying to say Mr. Harper was a good teacher, but I don’t say that out loud because, even though I’m being true, they’d say I was being emotional and it was clouding my truth.
“I understand,” I say.
Being emotional isn’t prideful, and being truthful, prideful, and intelligent are the best things. I’m truthful and prideful as best as I can be. Emotional truth-clouding was the main thing that led to the Long Big War and the Big Quick War.
They’re called the Water Wars because of how the Old Federation lied to its own people about how the Amalgamation of Allies had poisoned the water reservoirs. The result was catastrophic/horrific. Then, since the people of the Old Federation were mad because of their own truth-clouding, they kept on warring for years and years, and the Old Federation became the New Federation that stands proudly today. Later on, when the Amalgamation of Allies suspected a key reservoir had been poisoned, they asked the New Federation if they’d done it. In a stunning act of graciousness and honesty, my New Federation ancestors told the truth, said, “Yeah, we did poison that reservoir,” and, in doing so, saved many, many lives that were later more honorably destroyed via nuclear. The wars going on now, Valid Storm Alpha and the True Freedom Campaign, are valid/true wars because we know we aren’t being emotional fighting them.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 2