Entertaining Instruction

The Best American Short Stories 2010

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.

The Days of Losing Touch

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
2010, Alfred A. Knopf


Some years ago, I devoted a week to poring through the Eggers-edited Best American Nonrequired Reading of that particular calendar year. I attempt every year to spend some time with those volumes, largely in the hopes of seeking out an author whose novels might interest me. This particular year was fruitful, with several names lodging themselves in the back of my brain for future perusal.

One of these names is Jennifer Egan, whose story in that collection was titled "Selling the General," about a down-on-her-luck publicist hired to improve the PR image of a genocidal general. To this end, she employs fuzzy hats and has-been actress to dress up the general's public image.

Now, years later, I remembered this story when Egan's name appeared again: in a review for her new novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which reads on the jacket as an exploration of the members of a punk rock band as they age, but which is really quite more than that.

Ostensibly, the main characters of the book are Bennie and Sascha, both of whom work in the music industry. Our first introduction is to Sascha, whose kleptomaniacal exploits are recounted to us through her therapy sessions and an anecdote concerning an apparently blind date. She's caught in the hotel restaurant where they eat their meal stealing a wallet from a woman's purse and she goes to lengths to prevent public embarrassment. Afterwards, she takes the man back to her apartment, the distinguishing features of which include a bathtub in the kitchen and a large pile of purloined artifacts.

Egan explores the character's guilt at her thefts, the harmlessness of the act itself from which Sascha derives pleasure not from the malicious Schadenfreude-esque pleasure of wrecking havoc on people's lives but from the forced act of intimacy it implies, and from the thrill of skirting danger successfully. Lifting personal items is a private act shared with an unwilling and unknowing party - an act of intimacy less painful or difficult than more conventional routes of bonding.

Within this chapter it is revealed that Sascha works for a man named Bennie Salazar, former lead singer of a punk band from the late 70's and now a music mogul.

These two men clearly reveal Egan's sense of the narrative: the subsequent chapter revolves around Bennie Salazar and the book does not subsequently return to either Sascha or Bennie's thoughts from a close third person perspective. Instead, Egan reintroduces these characters as auxiliary characters in others' narratives; each chapter is narrated by a new character, one seemingly given birth to through some offhanded allusion in the preceding chapter, with Bennie and Sascha being the through-line in each narrative.

The final chapter of the book returns full circle to the young man who dated Sascha as she lifted the wallet from the restroom. He is now older and cynical in his approach to Manhattan and has all but forgotten Sascha, possessed by an elusive memory concerning a bathtub in a kitchen. The effect naturally is one of a circular narrative in which the emotional timbre of the end plays off of that of the beginning; the sense of loss and sadness and change is derived not from Sascha's narrative arc (this does exist, but peripherally as the novel progresses) but from depriving us of directly witnessing such a thing. Egan tantalizes us with an intimate experience with an important character, but refuses to sate us by returning to that character directly. The novel ends with Sascha no more than a memory, by which point she might seem that way to the reader.

These two characters, Bennie and Sascha, are the main characters of the book inasmuch as they are the lowest common denominator. Each chapter can be traced through some six degrees of separation-ist chain back to the novel's groundwires: Bennie and Sascha.

One might get the impression that the book is manically structured, compulsively moving from one character to the next with a restlessness that denies the reader the ability to learn enough about any character to truly begin to care. However, this narrative technique proves to be just the opposite.

Egan develops character elliptically, slowly. For example, one chapter is narrated from the perspective of Sascha's uncle who has escaped to Italy under the pretext of finding Sascha, who has run away from home. This chapter occurs mid-novel and is therefore out of chronological order, considering our first glimpse of Sascha is as a middle aged woman.

By this point we have a view of Sascha informed and complicated by some understanding of her back story granted through the experiences of auxiliary characters. The cumulative effect is one weighed by great sadness - we are permitted occasional intimacy with Sascha but this intimacy lasts no longer than thirty pages and the reader strains for more insight, which Egan doles out slowly and at a perpetual remove. Ultimately, A Visit from the Good Squad seems to emphasize the inability of people to ever really know each other, and moreover, the fleeting nature of intimacy. People come into your life, you are granted closeness with them that inevitably drifts away with time.

Egan compounds this with the gymnastic prose she employs in writing the book. Infrequently, Egan adopts a bird's-eye omnipotent perspective that teases the reader with information about the future, lending the novel a sense of fatedness:

The warrior smiles at Charlie. He's nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten... Thity-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He'll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering...

This is one example of several times Egan fast-forwards in her novel, and in fact the later chapters take place in eerie, perhaps poorly-envisioned version of the future (which reminds me of the ill-conceived future of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, where people were named Tomcruise and dinosaur-like aliens migrate to Earth).

This omnipotence is not the only example of Egan's gymnastics; she employs significantly more postmodern techniques. For example, one chapter of the book is composed of a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show.

The slide show is on its surface about the occurrence of pauses in rock songs throughout history, but it is eventually gleaned that this is Sascha's daughter and her strained relationship with her parents and her concern for her autistic brother.

The exercise, while it reeks of Safran Foeresque gimmickry, is powerful for a number of reasons. Egan demonstrates the extent of Sascha's unknowability in the distancing from actual prose. The slide show, unlike the book's earlier prose, must be interpreted rather than read. The emotions are subtextual and linger under the surface in the same way that Sascha's development as a character is gleaned as though from the corner of one's eye as the book progresses.

Despite the deliberate withholding of a satisfactory emotional denouement, Goon Squad reads as a very emotionally powerful experience; each chapter stands on its own feet as an entity and the cumulative emotional power of the book, while it reinforces the inability to preserve connection with another person, grows stronger the further one is distanced from Bennie and Sascha.

An appropriate place to end this entry is with a portion of the book that displays the twisted sadness of the whole enterprise:

You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of "you" at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it - what you've seen in people faces on the street - a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you can't see.

"Oh, we'll know each other forever," Bix says. "The days of losing touch are almost gone."

Within pages of this quotation, the main character of the chapter dies in a drowning accident, a revelation that is not divulged to the reader for dozens of pages. In this way Egan delivers an almost crippling emotional blow. The reader is again reminded that he is not granted full access to the lives of these characters. In discovering this character's demise, the reader is full of shock and sadness alike, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

Egan's characters are full of both despair and hope and every bittersweet mixing of the two imaginable. A Visit from the Goon Squad reads ultimately as a tribute to the complexity of life, with its fleeting, impermanent connections, its hardships and the small victories with which we navigate it.