"There is nothing safe about these stories," Heidi Pitlor writes in the foreward to 2009's Best American Short Stories - and that is certainly the case, if by safe you mean something that you might lie down with after lying in a desert war zone for two weeks in desperate need of something quiet cushy and warm. What these stories are above anything else is real. They are not an effective escape from the real world - they form no kind of alluring alternative reality a la Harry Potter or World of Warcraft. They reflect back to you, in a thousand ways, the icy indifference of the hand of random chance which we are all dealt.
Yet this is not a collection of despair, per se. The resounding voice at the conclusion is not one of despondency or hopelessness. What many of these stories address is what Edgar Allen Poe described as Gothic: "hidden vices and perversions beneath the veneer of virtue." These stories merely out that veneer, in the way a good Mark Twain burlesque might out some fad of absurdity commonplace on the 19th century Mississippi - the way the financial success of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn is meant to make society re-evaluate the mob mentality of witchtrialing that has been such a thorough part of American culture from Salem through Hester Prynne and all the way on up to McCarthy and the Patriot Act. Our world has always seemed to have a peculiar way of hiding its ugliest bits and pieces behind that veneer - the same veneer which drove Thoreau to say that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." We are busy holding up a guilded bevy of optimism, of positive reassurances - in many ways we have never passed from that time over a century and a half ago which Twain himself named with a title of one of his books: The Guilded Age.
In her introduction, Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones) notes that "Narrative, after all, is perhaps the most powerful antidote we have in the face of what at first may appear to be insurmountable odds." These stories address issues which Hollywood and most popular literature would rather gloss over. The confrontation which they provide is exactly what a society needs to move forward in the aftermath of epic tragedy. Not only confrontation, but an artistic interpretation which gives meaning, establishes a spiritual resonance, an empathetic bond, between victims and sufferers and all men and women spited by the darker side of the indifferent universe.
Since any reader of any story inevitably passes judgement, it was hard for me not to rank the stories below - not to pit them agaist one another in competition, but to explain my personal view of the collection. There were two stories which I profoundly did not like: Alex Rose's 'Ostracon' and Joseph Epstein's 'Beyond the Pale.' The former because I did not understand it and found myself reading every sentence ten times (this does not mean it was not a good story), and the latter because of unrealistic dialogue and my own personal vendetta against writing about writing (as a rule I dislike all such self-indulgence not in small part due to a quote by Quenton Cassidy given when asked by Bruce Denton in Once a Runner what he thinks of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories: "Yes, I liked them pretty much. Except for all the stiff-upper-lip crap. But the guy went out and did things, you know; I mean you could tell he really did those things, knew about them before going out and shooting his mouth off. He just sat down and tried to tell it as honestly as he could. That's a shitload better than sitting around New York with a bunch of other artistes diddling each other and writing about the state of being Jewish, or how anguishing it is to be an anguished writer.") 'Beyond the Pale' is almost precisely about that: an anguished Jewish writer living in New York writing about another anguished Jewish writer living in New York, the story itself written for a New York magazine. Like rungs on a concentric circle the reader passes deeper and deeper into an exclusive club which - imagining the outer rung of the circles as the ideal perch for the audience - not only is he severely removed from emotionally and intellectually, but in which he feels unwelcome.
On the other end of the spectrum are six incredible stories, of which Annie Proulx's 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' emerges as the cream of the crop. Sometimes the greatest tribute a critic can pay to a movie is to say that it feels like literature; Proulx's story, in that vein, feels like an old Arlo Guthrie or Johnny Cash song, lonesome heartfelt country music before it became branded by the banalities of Toby Keith and co. It tells the story of Archie and Rose McClaverty, young newlyweds on the countryside in the 1880's setting out to make a living. From the start events play out in an almost Tolstoyan fashion of inevitability - there is the distinct sense, like in Old Yeller or No Country for Old Men, that something brutal lurks beneath the silent goings on around this desert homestead, that something dark and horrible is about to shatter the lovely pastoral vision of two people living happily in solitude. As the story progresses - as we see Archie and Rose's respective roles manifest themselves in Archie's looking for a job as a cattlehand hundreds of miles away, Rose left to have a baby all alone in her shack - we begin to understand their plight as part of the land, inextricably linked to the natural elements which have formed them to begin with. Their tale, like any spoken in whispers across the countryside, is just another old cowboy song, sung by those who do not understand but only see the world and the exacting hand of fate. "Some lived and some died," the pentultimate paragraph reflects. "And that's how it was."
1. Them Old Cowboy Songs - Annie Proulx
2. Sagittarius - Greg Hrbek
3. Into the Gorge - Ron Rash
4. Modulation - Richard Powers
5. Hurricanes Anonymous - Adam Johnson
6. Magic Words - Jill McCorkle
7. A Man Like Him - Yiyun Li
8. NowTrends - Karl Taro Greenfield
9. The Briefcase - Rebecca Makkai
10. Yurt - Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
11. Rubiaux Rising - Steve De Jarnatt
12. The Peripatetic Coffin - Ethan Rutherford
13. The Farms - Eleanor Henderson
14. The Idiot President - Daniel Alarcon
15. Muzungu - Namwalli Serpell
16. The Anniverary Trip - Victoria Lancelotta
17. One Dog Year - Kevin Moffett
18. A Shadow Table - Alice Fulton
19. Beyond the Pale - Joseph Epstein
20. Ostracon - Alex Rose
Song of the Day: Miss Ohio - Gillian Welch
