I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject. This doesn’t mean that I paid no attention to subject, but rather that subject matter is part and parcel with voice, and if that doesn’t work, the subject is irrelevant. Yet despite this, when we finish a story, it is most often the subject that we remember, or think we remember, and this is the thrill of reading good writing. We are moved by a lingering image or emotion, we can’t get the “story” out of our mind. But it has been conveyed to us through sound; it is the sound we trust, the sound that brings us the subject.
Nonetheless, the subjects that are developed in this collection are wonderful, varied, and full of surprises, because good storytellers know how to surprise. The surprise can seem tiny: perhaps a quiet realization, such as the one that comes at the end of Michael Byers’s story, “Malaria,” or a sudden oddity that feels strikingly believable, as when a madwoman in Prague tells a young bride her future in Charles Baxter’s “Bravery.” These surprises satisfy readers (“Oh, I didn’t expect that!”) but work only if the entire piece maintains its authority. This means that the writer makes and keeps this unspoken promise to the reader, Go ahead and trust me. Whatever surprise I deliver will not be gratuitous, I won’t lie to you, and I won’t show off. I’ll tell you something you’ll be glad to know; even if it is something painful or discomfiting, you can still trust me. And readers, I think, want to trust. Or at least this desire, this almost childlike attitude, is in the ascendancy. It’s a tricky thing to speak of honest writing, but part of us knows it when we hear it, and often when a reader loses interest in a story, and so sets it down, it is because the writer did not sustain authority—honest sentences being a big part of that—and in some fundamental way the reader stops believing. What seems a loss of interest is in fact a failure of trust, of shared intimacy.
Jim Shepard’s “The World to Come” is so exquisitely intimate that we feel almost as if we have trespassed upon the purity of a woman whose voice reveals the deep loneliness of upstate New York farming life more than a century ago. It doesn’t matter that we don’t live that way, or didn’t live back then, any more than it matters that we are not made to wear a scarlet letter these days. The story still takes us away, brings us to a time and place in which women were isolated by their losses while their husbands worked the unrelenting land.
Isolation, just like storytelling, comes in many forms. In Lorrie Moore’s “Referential,” set in contemporary times, a mother is kept to a limited life because of loyalty to a son who is ill. The story holds no note of complaint or judgment: life is what it is, people endure what they can, and they turn away from what they can’t. In the best stories that sense comes through: it is what it is. The writer brings the news from his or her corner of imagined experience.
So what news is included in these pages? Our excessive worry about status, aging parents who require care, trips to A.A. meetings, job losses and mortgage crises, divorce and its upheaval for the kids, the arrival of computers and cell phones in the classroom, the distance between generations, and between the city and those left behind. Spelled out like this—nothing but thin subject matter—the richness of experience and voice is lost, which is to say the experience of reading the story is lost. Antonya Nelson’s “Chapter Two” gives us the A.A. meeting and the variety of ways to tell a story there, as well as the drink had after it and the life lived before it; the naked woman at the door is heartbreakingly believable, and the first-person narrator knows enough to step to the side and let that character make her final bow. In “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” George Saunders, in his inimitable voice, shows us poignantly and satirically the lengths we go to make our children happy, even if it means buying immigrant girls to decorate our front lawns. Junot Díaz leaves us with the image of Miss Lora in her red dress, so real that I expect to bump into her when I walk down the sidewalk. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain” sets out the irony and confusion that arise when an ill and aging mother simply will not die.
Arguably, authorial voice is more important in a short story than in a longer piece of fiction. The ride is quicker, the reader must be engaged right away, and less space is available to absorb patches of soggy writing or gratuitous detail. Where I came from in northern New England, talking too much was considered incontinent, and respect for a person might lessen considerably if he or she was disposed to chatter. I remember how family members agreed that “Uncle Norris talks just to hear the sound of his own voice.” As a result, no one listened to him; I myself cannot remember anything he said, though I recall the thin drone of his voice. In my childhood those who had the power of voice managed it with good timing and economy of detail, just like those two women in the diner. They did not find it necessary to say how the woman had killed her husband, why or where she shot herself, or whether she left children behind. The writer chooses details in accord with the narrative voice most fit to tell the story, sensing how much is needed and what might need to be cut.
In Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Strange Animals,” the details are compact and sharply precise. In only a few pages he delivers the dilemma of a father losing his illusion of control. In “Nemecia,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, the narrator is a Hispanic woman looking back on her life as a young girl, and the child’s puzzlement is conveyed through carefully chosen, telling details that bring the reader into that experience.
Just as voice and subject are not separate entities, form does not stand on its own either. Like subject and voice, it is closely tied to a particular historical time and place, and is, necessarily and naturally, always changing—especially now. Certainly for many decades, the American short story typically involved one incident, one narrator, and one point of view. This is no longer true. As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack in as much material as a short novel might.
Today stories are being written in the midst of an enormous upheaval in the way we communicate and transfer and receive information. Think of this: the agricultural revolution took three thousand years to unfold, the industrial revolution three hundred. These were slowly unfolding developments compared to what we experience now. People alive today have gone through more changes more quickly than at any other time in history. What is to be made of this? I think we don’t know. But we do recognize that the wide world is not as “foreign” as it once was. Faraway places appear in our hands as we hold our cell phones, international crises are texted within seconds, and classes and conferences and family conversations are Skyped across the globe. The American experience is broadening, and so are its stories. They touch down in Boston, South Africa, Peru, and Canada, but even more than variety of location, the spectrum of voices is the strongest indicator of change.
Yet a few stories in this collection look back in time. For an early-twentieth-century character in “Nemecia,” a move from New Mexico to California feels as changeful as a move to a different continent might today. Alice Munro’s “Train” begins right after a young man returns from World War II, and his transition, years later, from a rural life to the city of Toronto is written with such clarity, we feel this “modern” world crash into us too. But it is “The Wilderness” by Elizabeth Tallent that brings us to where we live right now, with machines—or information devices—occupying us a great deal of the time. And though they threaten to increase our sense of isolation, they likewise offer the hope—whether false or not—of connection; the story heartbreakingly whispers the word me, as though it is the self we may be losing.
But it is the self we are always looking for, or always trying to escape, and fiction provides us with both options; they are wrapped together, these flights to and from who we are. We read because we are looking to see what others are thinking, feeling, seeing; how they are acting out their frustrations, their happiness, their addictions; we see what we can learn. How do people manage marriage and loss and illness and sex
and parenting? How do they do all this? Often, the emotions that fill our inner lives are too large to make sense of; chaos and irrationality jump around inside us. To enter the form of a story is to calm down, or excite ourselves, within a controlled space.
In a world where telephone calls are made less and less frequently, where a tweet makes e-mail seem a little antiquated, we have more information, yet fewer voices. These changes, I suspect, make us desire the sound of a true voice even more. And we still want that news from the front. Not just the war front, or the economic front, or the navel-gazing front. We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world. What are we without this curiosity? Who in the world, and where in the world, and what in the world might we be? So we pay attention to that inner demand, the pressure of that question. Hello? Please—tell me.
ELIZABETH STROUT
DANIEL ALARCÓN
The Provincials
FROM Granta
I’D BEEN OUT of the conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.
I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road; a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.
We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a few dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud; two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over moto-taxi. Its front wheel spun slowly but did not stop. It was like a perpetual-motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word Joselito.
And I wondered: which of these two men is Joselito?
The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes they and their moods were equally matched.
A boy of about eighteen stood next to me and my father. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.
“Which one is Joselito?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”
I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child then to his mother: Joselito, Joselito.
A chanting; a conjuring.
The two rivals continued, more furiously now, as if the mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course they must have, but when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, had quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence.
“This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.
“No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.
And so on.
Soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop?—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.
This too was part of the act.
“Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”
We left and drove south for another hour before coming to a stretch of luxurious new asphalt, so smooth it felt like the car might be able to pilot itself. The tension washed away, and we were happy again, until we found ourselves trapped amid the thickening swarm of trucks headed to the border. We saw northbound traffic being inspected, drivers being shaken down, small-time smugglers dispossessed of their belongings. The soldiers were adolescent and smug. Everyone paid. We would too, when it was our turn to head back to the city. This was all new, my father said, and he gripped the wheel tightly and watched with mounting concern. Or was it anger? This corruption, the only kind of commerce that had thrived during the war, was also the only kind we could always count on. Why he found it so disconcerting, I couldn’t figure. Nothing could have been more ordinary.
By nightfall we’d made it to my father’s hometown. My great-uncle’s old filling station stood at the top of the hill, under new ownership and doing brisk business now, though the truckers rarely ventured into the town proper. We eased the car onto the main street, a palm-lined boulevard that sloped down to the boardwalk, and left it a few blocks from the sea, walking until we reached the simple public square that overlooked the ocean. A larger palm tree, its trunk inscribed with the names and dates of young love, stood in the middle of this inelegant plaza. Every summer, the tree was optimistically engraved with new names and new dates, and then stood for the entire winter, untouched. I’d probably scratched a few names there myself, years before. On warm nights, when the town filled with families on vacation, the children brought out remote-control cars and guided these droning machines around the plaza, ramming them int
o each other or into the legs of adults, occasionally tipping them off the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach below, and celebrating these calamities with cheerful hysteria.
My brother Francisco and I had spent entire summers like this, until the year he’d left for the U.S. These were some of my favorite memories.
But in the off-season, there was no sign of these young families. No children. They’d all gone north, back to the city or further, so of course, the arrival of one of the town’s wandering sons was both unexpected and welcome. My father and I moved through the plaza like rock stars, stopping at every bench to pay our respects, and from each of these aged men and women I heard the same thing. First: brief, rote condolences on the death of Raúl (it seemed no one much cared for him); then, a smooth transition to the town’s most cherished topic of discussion, the past. The talk was directed at me: Your old man was so smart, so brilliant . . .
My father nodded, politely accepting every compliment, not the least bit embarrassed by the attention. He’d carried the town’s expectations on his shoulders for so many years, they no longer weighed on him. I’d heard these stories all my life.
“This is my son,” he’d say. “You remember Nelson?”
And one by one the old folks asked when I had come back from the United States.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m the other son.”
Of course they got us confused, or perhaps simply forgot I existed. Their response, offered gently, hopefully: “Oh, yes, the other son.” Then, leaning forward: “So, when will you be leaving?”
It was late summer, but the vacation season had come to an early close, and already the weather had cooled. In the distance, you could hear the hum of trucks passing along the highway. The bent men and stooped women wore light jackets and shawls and seemed not to notice the sound. It was as if they’d all taken the same cocktail of sedatives, content to cast their eyes toward the sea, the dark night, and stay this way for hours. Now they wanted to know when I’d be leaving.