Not long after I started reading that first batch of stories, I found myself at a literary event in Dayton. After the dinner and the speeches, a few of the writers adjourned to a bar. During the first round of drinks, someone started telling jokes. We took it in turns then, dredging up ethnic jokes, light-bulb riddles, and shaggy dog stories from forgotten vaults of memory. Most of us ran out of material fairly quickly, but one had the recall of a Homeric bard, and kept us laughing at joke after joke until the bartender called time and kicked us out into the night. That jokester was Richard Bausch, master of the short story.
This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs.
I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content.
I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube.
A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime.
Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented mother's Jamaican night nurse in "The Call of Blood," by Jess Row. And in "Ceiling," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie perfectly captures the yearning spirit of a man who has settled for the wrong wife, the wrong life, in the stultifying salons of Lagos's corrupt upper class.
Two stories in opposite settings got at large truths about friendships under stress. In "Soldier of Fortune," by Bret Anthony Johnston, the accidental scalding of a toddler severs and remakes bonds in a Texas military town. In "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart," by Rebecca Makkai, a gay man tries to help his once dazzling best friend as he staggers through a public breakdown amid Chicago's artistic elite. Three beautifully crafted stories examined, with great originality, the parent-child bond. "ID," by Joyce Carol Oates, is a plangent tragedy with an unforgettable protagonist. The troubled savant of Ricardo Nuila's "Dog Bites" struggles to see his father through the overbright glare of his quirky vision. And in "The Dungeon Master," by Sam Lipsyte, a role-playing game bleeds into real life and seeps into the story's quirky prose.
In the end, the stories I fell upon with perhaps the greatest delight were the outliers, the handful or so that defied the overwhelming gravitational pull toward small-canvas contemporary realism. "Phantoms," by Steven Millhauser, takes the form of a dispassionate evaluation by one citizen of a town long visited by ghostlike apparitions. The assessor's cool tone plays beautifully against the eerie events he is describing. " The Sleep," by Caitlin Horrocks, is a suave, unexpectedly exhilarating satire about a beaten, blizzard-scoured prairie town that takes up hibernation as a way to manage the pain of ordinary living. And "Escape from Spiderhead," by George Saunders, was that rare example of full-bore speculative fiction to make it through the literary magazines' anti-sci-fi force field. Coming across this story elicited the same joyful surprise I once felt when offered a glass of wine after a dry week in Riyadh. In "Spiderhead," convict volunteers are the human test subjects for an array of psychoactive drugs that manipulate the deepest workings of the soul. The setting is fantastical and futuristic, but the heart is achingly familiar, and real human dilemmas are enacted against the highly imaginative backdrop. I would like to raise a small, vigorously waving hand in favor of releasing more such stories out of the genre ghetto and into the literary mainstream.
While I'm up here on the soapbox, I might as well set down a few more carps of the day:
Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/anus/armpit/Airedale.
Eros ≠ thanatos necessarily. Not all love stories have to have bleak outcomes.
Foreign countries exist.
There's a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America's longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of one hundred and twenty stories.
Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Female genital mutilation, military-funeral picketers, abortion-doctor assassins. So why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?
Not that I want to discourage humor. There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone...
La belle dame sans levity hath thee in thrall,
And no mirth rings.
I should stipulate that the above carps refer to a hive mind that became apparent only because I read a mass of stories in a compressed time frame. There's nothing wrong with writing stories set in bedrooms, classrooms, kitchens. These are the places where we spend large slabs of our lives. But the air becomes stale there. And after a dozen—a hundred—such stories, I became claustrophobic.
When I was in journalism school I had a professor, Melvin Mencher, for whom the description "crusty" did scant justice. The man was a day-old baguette. When I tried to hide thin reporting under stylistic flourish, he would put a red line through my fine prose and scrawl:You can't write writing.
Later, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, I had an editor named Paul Ingrassia, whose pet hate was to catch someone in his newsroom looking up something online. He would creep up to the terminal and bark: "The story's not on Nexus. It's on the street. Get out there!"
So, for whatever it is worth, I'm passing on this advice to the next generation of short story writers, those jeunesse dorée who will come to the form at what might be the most perfect time in its history—a golden age to rival and perhaps surpass the era of the popular weeklies. The form is perfectly suited not only to the emerging platforms of our times but also to the users of those platforms, a new generation of young readers who love and demand good stories, their imaginations nourished by a decade-long boom in children's fiction. The right short stories, with their highly skilled writing, tough-minded, somber adult themes, but undaunting length, can be the perfect form for young readers still developing and experimenting with their fictional tastes. But here's the caveat: these kids have been raised on actual storie
s with plot, where x leads inexorably to y, with x being interesting and y being more interesting; on wizards and dragon riders, on Eoin Colfer's inspired Die Hard-with-fairies mashup and Philip Pullman's Milton meets string theory. I might be wrong, but I don't think affectless Carveresque minimalism, no matter how liminal or luminous, is going to cut it for them.
So, at the risk of calling down the wrath of the MFAfia, my advice to young writers is, read this book. Enjoy the stories, admire the craft. Then put it in your backpack and go. As far as you can, for as long as you can afford it. Preferably someplace where you have to think in one language and buy groceries in another. Get a job there. Rent a room. Stick around. Do something. If it doesn't work out, do something else. Whatever it is, you will be able to use it in the stories you will write later. And if that story turns out to be about grungy sex in an East Coast dorm room with an emotionally withholding semiotics major, that's okay. It will be a better story for the fact that you have been somewhere and carried part of it home with you in your soul.
GERALDINE BROOKS
Ceiling
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
FROM Granta
WHEN OBINZE FIRST saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Land Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued to his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First he skimmed the e-mail, dampened that it was not longer. Ceiling, kedu? I saw Amaka yesterday in New York and she said you were doing well with work, wife—and a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I'm still teaching and doing some research, but seriously thinking of moving back to Nigeria soon. Let's keep in touch ? Ifemelu.
He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married four years ago, she had called him Obinze, wished him happiness in breezy sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he googled the black American, a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as "cats," but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply. Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life, he'd written. It was complete bullshit, stupid posturing, and she had to recognize this; nobody knew him as well as she did. He hoped she would write something mocking back—so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again, after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.
The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth, over and over, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. His driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval from the rearview mirror.
"God bless you, oga." the child beggar said.
"Don't be giving money to these beggars, sir," Gabriel said. "They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money in this Lagos. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!"
"So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel?" Obinze asked and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university and secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her hands on his head, and afterward she said, "My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before." She was seventeen and he was eighteen and other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her, which he had found so disconcerting and then so irresistible. Longing for ceiling, can't wait for my period to end, she once wrote on the back of his notebook during a lecture. Then, later, she began to call him Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way—but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. "Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?" his friend Chidi once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first-semester exams. She had joined a group of his classmates sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor outside campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at him, and said, "Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can't you see?" Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that she wanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used ceiling with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a hopeful, confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.
"Darling, kedu ebe I no?" His wife, Kosi, always began her calls to him with those words: where are you? He never asked where she was when he called her, but she would tell him anyway: I'm just getting to the salon. I'm on Third Mainland Bridge. It was as if she needed the reassurance of their concrete physicality when they were not together. She had a high, girlish voice. They were supposed to be at Chief's house for the party at 7:30 P.M. and it was already past 6:00.
He told her he was in traffic. "But it's moving, and we've just turned into Ozumba Mbadiwe. I'm coming."
On Lekki Expressway the traffic moved swiftly in the waning rain, and soon Gabriel was sounding the horn in front of the high black gates of his home. Mohammed, the gateman, wiry in his dirty white kaftan, flung open the gates and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the yellow colonnaded house. Inside was his furniture, imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-old daughter, Buchi, the nanny, Christiana, his wife's sister, Chioma, who was on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and the new housegirl, Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after his wife decided that Nigerian housegirls were unsuitable. There would be the smell of cooking, the television downstairs would be showing a film on the Africa Magic channel, and pervading it all, the still air of well-being. He climbed out of the car. His gait was stiff, his legs difficult to lift. He had begun, in the past months, to feel bloated from all he had acquired—the family, the house, the other properties in Ikoyi and Abuja, the cars, the bank accounts in Dubai and London—and he would be overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be free. He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.
"Darling," Kosi said, opening the door before he got to it. Her dress was cinched at the waist and made her figure look very hour-glassy.
"Daddy-daddy!" Buchi said.
He swung her up and then hugged his wife, carefully avoiding her lips, painted pink and lined in a darker pink. "You look beautiful, babe," he said. "Asa! Ugo!"
She laughed. The same way she laughed, with an open, accepting enjoyment, when people asked her, "Is your mother white? Are you a half-caste?" because she was so fair-skinned. It had always discomfited him, the pleasure she took in being mistaken for mixed-race.
"Will you bathe or just change? I brought out your new blue kaftan. I knew you'd want to wear traditional," she said, following him upstairs. "Do you want to eat before we go? You know Chief will have nice food."
"I'll just change and we can go," he said.
He was tired. It was not a physical fatigue—he used his treadmill regularly and felt better than he had in years—but a draining la
ssitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He went out every day, he made money, he came home, he played with his daughter, he watched television, he ate, he read books, he slept with his wife. He did things because he did them.
Chief's party would bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief's parties and perhaps because Kosi liked going. She enjoyed being surrounded by glittery people, hugging women she barely knew, calling the older ones Ma with exaggerated respect, soaking up their compliments, dispensing hers, basking in being so beautiful but flattening her personality so that her beauty was nonthreatening. He had always been struck by this, how important it was to her to be a wholesomely agreeable person, to have no sharp angles sticking out. On Sundays, she would invite his relatives for pounded yam and onugbu soup and then watch over to make sure everyone was suitably overfed. Uncle, you must eat oh! There is more meat in the kitchen! Let me bring you another Guinness! When they visited his mother's house in Enugu, she always flew up to help with serving the food, and when his mother made to clean up afterward, she would get up, offended, and say, "Mummy, how can I be here and you will be cleaning?" She ended every sentence she spoke to his uncles with "sir." She put ribbons in the hair of his cousins' daughters. There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.
At the party, he watched her, gold shimmer on her eyelids, as she greeted Mrs. Akin-Cole, curtsying and smiling, and he thought about the day their baby, slippery, curly-haired Buchi, was born at the Portland Hospital in London, how she had turned to him while he was still fiddling with his latex gloves and said, with something like apology, "We'll have a boy next time." He had recoiled. What he felt for her then was a gentle contempt, for not knowing that he was indifferent about the gender of their child, for assuming that he would want a boy since most men wanted a boy. Perhaps he should have talked more with her, about the baby they were expecting and about everything else, because although they exchanged pleasant sounds and were good friends and shared comfortable silences, they did not really talk. Her worldview was a set of conventional options that she mulled over while he did not even consider any of those options; the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers. Of course he knew this from the beginning, had sensed it in their first conversation after his friend Chidi introduced them at a wedding. She was wearing a lime-green bridesmaid's dress in satin, cut low to show a cleavage he could not stop looking at, and somebody was making a speech, describing the bride as "a woman of virtue," and Kosi nodded eagerly and whispered to him, "She is a true woman of virtue." Even then he had felt gentle contempt that she could use the word virtue without the slightest irony, as was done in the badly written articles in the women's section of the weekend newspapers. Still, he had wanted her, chased her with a lavish single-mindedness. He had never seen a woman with such a perfect incline to her cheekbones, that made her entire face seem so alive in an architectural way, lifting when she smiled, and he was newly disoriented from his quick wealth: one week he was squatting in his cousin's flat and sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor and the next he owned a house and two cars. He felt as if his life were no longer his. It was Kosi who made it start to seem believable. She moved into his new house from her hostel at the University of Lagos and arranged her perfume bottles on his dresser, citrusy scents that he came to associate with home, and she sat in the BMW beside him as though it had always been his car, and when they showered together, she scrubbed him with a rough sponge, even between his toes, until he felt reborn. Until he owned his new life. A year passed before she told him her relatives were asking what his intentions were. "They just keep asking," she said and stressed the they to exclude herself from the marriage clamor. He recognized, and disliked, her manipulation. (The same way he felt when, after months of trying to get pregnant, she began to say with sulky righteousness, "All my friends who lived very rough lives are pregnant.") Still, he married her. Perhaps he was already on autopilot then. He felt an obligation to do so, he was not unhappy, and he imagined that she would, with time, gain a certain heft. She had not, after almost five years, except physically, in a way that he thought made her look even more beautiful, fresher, with fuller hips and breasts, like a well-watered houseplant.