An evangelist of the literary story, O’Brien went beyond praising the individual writers he’d chosen for the inaugural volume to applaud and promote the magazines that met his standards as well, including The Bellman, in which the top story of the year appeared (“Zelig,” by Benjamin Rosenblatt), and a new monthly, Midland, which though it published but ten stories that year, found its writers displaying “the most vital interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been able to show.” And more: “Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such assurance and modesty.” Hyperbole? Yes, of course, when viewed from the far end of the long tunnel of a hundred years’ time, but hyperbole in a good cause. He also singled out stories by writers like Stacy Aumonier, Maxwell Struthers Burt, and Wilbur Daniel as achieving the highest honor he could bestow, that of being of lasting value—and if he was wrong, carried away in his enthusiasm, give him credit here too. After all, who can say with any certainty what literature will endure and what will die with the generation that produced it? Make no mistake about it, O’Brien was on a mission to cultivate the taste of the reading public and champion the homegrown story, and he was feisty over it too, singling out British critics like James Stephens, who, in his estimation, insufficiently appreciated the American novel and seemed barely aware of the achievement of the American story.
But what of the stories themselves, the selection from 1915 that included pieces from Fannie Hurst and Ben Hecht (the only names I recognized, both of whom would, traitorously, go on to careers in film)? I’d like to report that there are hidden gems here, works equal in depth and color to Joyce’s Dubliners stories or Conrad’s “Youth” or Chekhov’s “Peasants,” but that’s not the case. The stories are rudimentary—character studies, anecdotes, tales that exist only to deliver a surprise or the mild glimmer of irony. And they are short, for the most part, more like scenes that might have been contained in the longer narratives of this volume. The shortest of them, what would be called “flash fiction” today, at just 152 words, is by Mary Boyle O’Reilly. It’s called “In Berlin,” and I find it fascinating in its historical context (two years before America entered the First World War) and the way in which the author so nakedly attempts to extract the pathos from her episode set aboard a German passenger train. The scenario: “The train crawling out of Berlin was filled with women and children, hardly an able-bodied man. In one compartment a gray-haired Landsturm soldier sat beside an elderly woman who seemed weak and ill.” The woman, lost in her thoughts—dazed—kept repeating “One, two, three” aloud, which prompted titters from the pair of girls seated across from her. The old soldier leaned in: “‘Fräulein,’ he said gravely, ‘you will perhaps cease laughing when I tell you that this poor lady is my wife. We have just lost our three sons in battle. Before leaving for the front myself I must take their mother to an insane asylum.’” Paragraph. “It became terribly quiet in the compartment.”
All right. I’m sorry. But if that penultimate line doesn’t make you burst into laughter, you’d better check your pulse. O’Brien read 2,200 stories that year (by contrast, Heidi Pitlor, who, as series editor, does the heavy lifting here, considered 3,000), and his aim was to define the literary story and elevate it above the expected, the maudlin, the pat and declamatory. To give him credit (he is, after all, one of the first to have recognized Hemingway’s talent, including “My Old Man” in the 1923 volume, even though it hadn’t yet been published, and in subsequent editions he recognized the work of Sherwood Anderson, Edna Ferber, J. P. Marquand, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Herbst, among many others), he can play only the hand he’s been dealt, as is the case with all editors of best-of anthologies. “Zelig,” the story he singled out above all the rest, does show elements of modern sensibility in terms of its milieu—Zelig is a working man, a Russian Jew come to America reluctantly because his immigrant son is stricken ill—and in its representation of the protagonist’s consciousness, which moves toward the close third-person on display in a number of stories in the current volume, like “The Fugue,” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, or Victor Lodato’s grimly hilarious “Jack, July.” Still, Zelig is cut in the mold of Silas Marner, a miser and nothing more, and it’s his lack of dimension that artificially dominates the story and propels the reader toward the expected (and yes, maudlin) denouement. I can only imagine what the “technical-commercial” fiction must have been like that year.
The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius, the biplane of the First World War to the jet of the Second, modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition and this is what makes O’Brien’s achievement so special—and so humbling for us writers bent over our keyboards in our own soon-to-be-superseded age. The Best American Short Stories series still follows his template and his aesthetic too, seeking to identify and collect some of the best short fiction published in the preceding year. O’Brien listed 93 stories in his Roll of Honor for 1914–15 and 37 periodicals from which the selections were made. In addition, he included an alphabetical listing of the authors of all the noteworthy stories he’d come across, replete with asterisks for the ones deserving of readers’ special attention. In the same spirit, the editors of the 2015 volume list the 100 Distinguished Stories of the year and some 277 magazines. (In a wonderfully fussy way—and by way of encouraging competition—O’Brien also produced a graph of all the magazines, showing how many stories each periodical published and figuring the percentage of those he considered exceptional.) Finally, O’Brien made no apologies. The stories he presented were the best of the year by his lights—and his lights were the only ones that mattered.
I have to confess that I came to my role as guest editor this year with just a tad less assurance. This was my show, yes, but those hundred years of history—that tunnel of time—was daunting. Ultimately, though, what I was looking for wasn’t much different from what O’Brien was: stories that grabbed me in any number of ways, stories that stood out from the merely earnest and competent, that revealed some core truth I hadn’t suspected when I picked them up. Another editor might have chosen another lineup altogether from the 120 finalists, but that only speaks to the subjectivity each reader brings to his or her encounter with any work of art. If I expected anything, I expected to be surprised, because surprise is what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.
For one thing, I was struck by the intricate narrative development and length of many of these stories, some of which, like the two powerful missing-child stories that appear back-to-back here due to the happy accident of the alphabetical listing O’Brien ordained at the outset (Colum McCann’s “Sh’khol” and Elizabeth McCracken’s “Thunderstruck”), seem like compressed novels in the richness of their characterization and their steady, careful development. So too with Megan Mayhew Bergman’s elegant historical piece, “The Siege at Whale Cay,” which presents a deeply plumbed love triangle involving the young protagonist, her mannish lover, and, convincingly, touchingly, the cinema star Marlene Dietrich. (What did Marlene do on vacation during those grim war years? Where did she go? Who was she? It’s testimony to Bergman’s imagination that such a familiar real-life figure can seem so naturally integrated into the world she creates that we’re never pulled out of the story.) Likewise, Diane Cook’s feminist fable, “Moving On,” with its dark shades of Kafka, Atwood, and Orwellian control, develops with the pace and power of a much longer work, as does Julia Elliott’s delicious and wickedly funny examination of the ascetic versus the sensual in the convent that provides the setting for “Bride.” Long stories all. Very long stories.
Which begs the question, eternally batted about by critics, theorists, and editors of anthologies like this one: what, exactly, constitutes a short story? Is it solely length (the 20,000-word maximum that the how-to manuals prescribe)? Is it intention?
Is it a building beyond the single scene of the anecdote or vignette but stopping short of the shuffled complexity of the novel? Lorrie Moore, in her introduction to the 2004 edition of this series, quipped, “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” And: “A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Yes, true enough, and best to get at any sense of definition metaphorically rather than try to pin down the form with word and page limits. For my part, I like to keep it simple, as in Norman Friedman’s reductive assertion that a short story “is a short fictional narrative in prose.” Of course, that brings us back to the question of what, exactly, constitutes “short.” Poe’s criterion, which gives us a little more meat on the bones, is that a story, in contrast to a novel, should be of a length to be read in one sitting, an hour’s entertainment, without the interruption that the novel almost invariably must give way to: “In the brief tale . . . the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention . . . During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”
There’s an undeniable logic to that—and a mighty power too. What writer wouldn’t want the reader’s soul held captive for any space of time? But Poe, for all his perspicacity, couldn’t have foreseen how shrunken and desiccated that hour has become in the age of the 24/7 news cycle and the smartphone. We can only hope to reconstitute it. Ultimately, though, beyond definitions or limits, I put my trust in the writer and the writer’s intention. If the writer tells me that this is a short story and if it’s longer than a sentence and shorter than, say, The Brothers Karamazov, then I’m on for the ride. I have never had the experience of expanding a short story to the dimensions of a novel or shrinking a novel to the confines of a short story. I sit down, quite consciously, to write a story or to write a novel and allow the material to shape itself. “The more you write,” as Flannery O’Connor pointed out, “the more you will realize that the form is organic, that it is something that grows out of the material, that the form of each story is unique.”
Certainly the most formally unique piece included here is Denis Johnson’s “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” a story about stories, about how we’re composed of them and how they comprise our personal mythologies. Johnson builds a portrait of his distressed narrator through the stories he tells and absorbs. At one point, the narrator picks up the phone to hear one of his ex-wives, through a very poor connection, telling him that she’s dying and wants to rid herself of any lingering bitterness she still has for him. He summons up his sins, murmurs apologies, but at some point realizes that he may in fact be talking not to his first wife, Ginny, but to his second, Jenny, and yet, in a high comic moment of collateral acceptance, realizes that the stories are one and the same and that the sins are too. In a similar way, Sarah Kokernot’s “M & L” switches point of view midway through the story to provide two versions of events, both in the present and the past, which makes the final shimmering image all the more powerful and powerfully sensual. And Justin Bigos’s “Fingerprints” employs a fractured assemblage of scenes to deepen the emotional charge of the unease the protagonist feels over the stealthy presence of his estranged father, who haunts the crucial moments of his life.
There are others I’d like to flag for you too, but since this is merely the preliminary to the main event, I’ll be brief. Kevin Canty’s “Happy Endings” gives us McHenry, a man widowed, retired, freed from convention, who is only now coming to terms with that freedom in a way that makes luminous what goes on in the back room of a massage parlor, while Laura Lee Smith’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” plays the same theme to a different melody, pushing her middle-aged protagonist out onto the wild edge of things just to see if he’ll give in or not. Smith plays for humor and poignancy both, as does Louise Erdrich in “The Big Cat.” Edrich’s story came to me as a breath of fresh air, the rare comic piece that seems content to keep it light while at the same time opening a window on the experience of love and containment. In contrast, Thomas McGuane’s “Motherlode” presents us with a grimmer sort of comedy and a cast of country folk as resolutely odd as any of Flannery O’Connor’s.
There’s a whole multiplicity of effects on display here, which is as it should be, each of the best stories being best in its own way. Shobha Rao’s “Kavitha and Mustafa” is a riveting, pulse-pounding narrative that allies two strangers, an unhappily married young woman and a resourceful boy, during a brutal train robbery in Pakistan, while Aria Beth Sloss’s “North” unfolds as a lyrical meditation on a life in nature and what it means to explore the known and unknown both. In “About My Aunt,” Joan Silber contrasts two women of different generations who insist on living their own lives in their own unconventional ways and yet, for all their kinship, both temperamental and familial, cannot finally approve of each other. Ben Fowlkes’s “You’ll Apologize If You Have To” was one of my immediate first-round choices, an utterly convincing tough-guy story that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hemingway’s canon and ends not in violence but in a moment of grace. So too was Jess Walter’s “Mr. Voice,” a story about what it means to be family, with one extraordinary character at the center of it and a last line that punched me right in the place where my emotions go to hide. Which brings me to the most moving story here, Maile Meloy’s “Madame Lazarus.” I read this one outdoors, with a view at my command, but the view vanished so entirely I might as well have been enclosed in a box, and when it came back, I found myself in the mortifying position of sitting there exposed and sobbing in public. An old man, the death of a dog, Paris. What Meloy has accomplished here is no easy thing, evoking true emotion, tristesse, soul-break, over the ties that bind us to the things of this world and the way they’re ineluctably broken, cruelly and forever, and no going back.
We’ve come a long way from the forced effects of Benjamin Rosenblatt’s “Zelig” and Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s hammer and anvil pounding out the lesson of “In Berlin.” I can only imagine that this series’ founding editor, Edward J. O’Brien, would be both amazed and deeply gratified.
T. C. BOYLE
MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
The Siege at Whale Cay
FROM The Kenyon Review
GEORGIE WOKE up in bed alone. She slipped into a swimsuit and wandered out to a soft stretch of white sand Joe called Femme Beach. The Caribbean sky was cloudless, the air already hot. Georgie waded into the ocean, and as soon as the clear water reached her knees she dove into a small wave, with expert form.
She scanned the balcony of the pink stucco mansion for the familiar silhouette, the muscular woman in a monogrammed polo shirt, chewing a cigar. Joe liked to drink her morning coffee and watch Georgie swim.
But not today.
Curious, Georgie toweled off, tossed a sundress over her suit, and walked the dirt path toward the general store, sand coating her ankles, shells crackling underneath her bare feet. The path was covered in lush, leafy overhang and stopped in front of a cinder-block building with a thatched roof.
Georgie looked at the sun overhead. She lost track of time on the island. Time didn’t matter on Whale Cay. You did what Joe wanted to do, when Joe wanted to do it. That was all.
She heard laughter and found the villagers preparing a conch stew. They were dancing, drinking dark rum and home-brewed beer from chipped porcelain jugs and tin cans. Some turned to nod at her, stepping over skinny chickens and children to refill their cans. The women threw chopped onions, potatoes, and hunks of raw fish into steaming cauldrons, the insides of which were yellowed with spices. Joe’s lead servant, Hannah, was frying johnnycakes on a pan over a fire, popping pigeon peas into her mouth. Everything smelled of fried fish, blistered peppers, and garlic.
“You’re making a big show,” Georgie said.
“We always make a big show when Marlene comes,” Hannah said in her low, hoarse voice. Her white hair was wrapped. She spoke matter-of-factly, slapping the johnnycakes between the palms of her hands.
“Who’s Marlene?” Georgie asked, leaning over to stick a finger
in the stew. Hannah waved her off.
Hannah nodded toward a section of the island invisible through the dense brush, toward the usually empty stone house covered in hot pink blossoms. Joe had never explained the house. Now Georgie knew why.
She felt an unmistakable pang of jealousy, cut short by the roar of Joe pulling up behind them on her motorcycle. As Joe worked the brakes, the bike fishtailed in the sand, and the women were enveloped in a cloud of white dust. As the dust settled, Georgie turned to find Joe grinning, a cigar gripped between her teeth. She wore a salmon-pink short-sleeved silk blouse and denim cutoffs. Her copper-colored hair was cropped short, her forearms covered in crude indigo-colored tattoos. “When the fastest woman on water has a six-hundred-horsepower engine to test out, she does,” she’d explained to Georgie. “And then she gets roaring drunk with her mechanic in Havana and comes home with stars and dragons on her arms.”
“I’ve never had that kind of night,” Georgie said.
“You will,” Joe said, laughing. “I’m a terrible influence.”
Joe planted her black-and-white saddle shoes firmly on the dirt path to steady herself as she cut the engine and dismounted.
“Didn’t mean to get sand in your stew,” Joe said, smiling at Hannah.
“Guess it’s your stew anyway,” Hannah said flatly.
Joe slung an arm around Georgie’s shoulders and kissed her hard on the cheek. “Think they’ll get too drunk?” she asked, nodding toward the islanders. “Is a fifty-five-gallon drum of wine too much? Should I stop them from drinking?”
“You only make rules when you’re bored,” Georgie said, her lithe body becoming tense under Joe’s arm. “Or trying to show off.”