Edited by Heidi Pitlor and Richard Russo
2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Best American series originated as a collection of the year's best short fiction by a single editor. Since the late seventies, each year's publication has featured a guest editor who works with the series editor to cull down to 20 the number of stories which will appear in the finished product. The tastes of these disparate editors (who have included the likes of Stephen King and Raymond Carver) rarely seems to have too much of an impact on the collection.
This year's collection is unique in that the best piece of writing it features is guest editor Richard Russo's introduction to the volume.
My experience with Russo is limited. In high school I read his Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls and subsequently gave a copy of it to a friend. This was in a stage of my development as a reader that gave priority to cleanly realistic modes in novels, one that in recent years I have become disinterested in (my entry on John Irving's last novel demonstrates this backlash clearly).
As such, I was a little bored by the idea of Russo guest editing this year's issue, which continues a long line of talented but purely realist writers picking stories of a similar ilk (where, for example, was the guest issue by Donald Barthelme? or Aimee Bender?). Russo would doubtlessly prove to be just like the others, choosing traditional stories of people experiencing quiet epiphanies in their otherwise ordinary lives.
Well, to a certain extent I was right; there are plenty of those (most of which, as those things tend to be, are well written). But oddly the most enchanting piece in the collection is Russo's introduction, in which he recounts a visit to his university from Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Singer had come to read a bit of his work and to answer questions posed by the university's students and faculty on the nature of his craft. Russo describes with loving, amusing detail the comedy of Mr. Singer's struggles with the pile of paper on which his excerpt was written. The papers, not bound together but loose, each have but a few sentences written on them in large print to accommodate Singer's failing sight. As Singer finishes with a page, he drops it off the podium and sails over the audience.
Russo's anecdote, despite being very funny, achieves some sort of gravitas as he relates Singer's suffering as the audience presses him on the purpose of fiction, a question that Singer answers simply by saying, "To entertain... and to instruct."
In this way, the introduction proves to be the perfect segue to these 20 stories of an occasionally entertaining and quite instructive nature. There are, of course, several duds in the collection: stories that wax epiphanic in soapy prose. But it is in the nature of this sort of collection for these things to appear (indeed, each year's edition contains some sort of warning along those lines from its editors). Instead, I'll focus on a small handful of the ones I like best.
Jennifer Egan's story "Safari" appears here, although it was excerpted from her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which just won the Pulitzer for fiction (and which I wrote about here). "Safari" seems to me to need to function within the novel, now that I've read it, but will certainly entertain any reader (regardless of "instruction").
"Least Resistance" by Wayne Harrison describes the flailing attempts at happiness by a young auto-mechanic. The main character in this story is content with his mostly passive life and does not appear to realize that he is stalling out, allowing the doors to his future to close neatly, quietly as he convinces himself that an ill-advised dalliance with the boss' wife ensures him the minimal amount of happiness required to live.
Rebeca Makkai's "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship" is a very funny story about a professor of literature who accidentally kills an albatross, aping Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". What starts as a delightful saga of this meta-literary murder becomes an exploration of perhaps two of the most complex issues in contemporary American society: race and gender. The professor's neurotic need to be found attractive belies her intellect and her boyfriend's honest attempts at comfort and the professor's insecurity and her inflated sense of her importance at the university set the stage for a larger conflict on racism in higher education that is gripping right until the end.
A story I was not so sure that I loved until I finished it was Brendan Mathews's "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer", which contains the following sentence (which should tell you all you need to know): "It wasn't just that you were beautiful; there are a lot of pretty ladies in the circus, tattooed and otherwise."
"Lion Tamer" begins with a strong undercurrent of dark humor and gets much darker in a hurry. It's worth a read as its circus act love story recalls La Strada in its pathos.
"Further Interpretations of Real Life Events" by Kevin Moffett is a story I had read previously, in McSweeney's Quarterly, although I was pleased to re-read it. It is the story of a son who is struggling to write fiction about his relationships with both parents. His work comes out puerile or adolescently bitter. He is stunned to discover his father, in his retirement, has taken up fiction writing and begins publishing work about the very same subject. It is probably my favorite story in this year's collection.
Lastly, I was reluctant to read the story included by literary super-starlet Tea Obreht given her age (25) and reputation (inflated and rising). I read a few paragraphs of her story "The Laugh", thought to myself "Now, what's all the fuss" and skipped it, vowing to return after I'd finished the other pieces in the collection. Well. I did.
"The Laugh" is without a doubt one of the finest short stories I've read in several years. It is still preying on my thoughts, haunting me with its stunning imagery, its assured sense of location, its gripping view of the ceaseless quest to make sense of our lives through love. I highly recommend it.
Other notable stories in this year's collection included a story by Karen Russell about time-traveling seagulls and a story by Danielle Evans about a war hero who lies his way into a contest to win Hannah Montana-like concert tickets.
One final note: in the past, I had contemplated reading a ten- or twenty-year-old edition of the Best American Short Stories to contrast with the current year's. Would anyone actually find this an interesting exercise? I have back issues dating to about 1987 and could easily execute such a task.
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