Our jurors read the twenty O. Henry Prize stories in a blind manuscript. Each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors don’t consult one another or the series editor about their decision. Although the jurors write their essays without knowledge of the authors’ names, the names are inserted into the essays later for the sake of clarity. —LF
I have read any number of metaphors for the difference between novels and short stories. The one I favor concerns plum pudding. If the novel is the whole pudding, the theory goes, then the short story is the piece with the coin in it. Certainly, when I read a short story, I want to come away a bit richer.
I also like to come away surprised, as if by a truth I have known and forgotten. This is to say that a story requires, on the reader’s part, some exercise of imagination. And I love a story sure-footed enough to take for granted the world in which it takes place.
We are much subject these days—especially in the academy, but also in the literary world—to a rather cloying reverence for diversity. The broadening of horizons seems to be the point. And so one encounters a preponderance of horizon-broadening customs, exotic foods, crazy aunties, elders confounded by America, England, etc. And then, occasionally, one comes upon a story that quickly, without tricks and manipulations, takes the reader into a world both new and familiar, and does so with the divine relief of irony. “Omakase” is, for me, such a prize.
It does not start out with a bang. “The couple” is going out for sushi. “The woman,” daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a rather introverted research analyst at a bank (“She was…the kind to create an Excel spreadsheet of everything she owned and send it to him, so that he could then highlight what he also owned and specify quantity and type”). “The man” is an extroverted American ceramic-pottery instructor, given to rolling his eyes, as if in jest, at what he wishes to distance himself from. But, in the restaurant, when the woman feels herself marooned by his eye-rolling, “a spike of anger went through [her]. Or maybe two spikes. She imagined taking two toothpicks and sticking them through the man’s pretty eyes to stop them from rolling. Then she imagined making herself a very dry martini with a skewer of olives.”
One of the brilliant aspects of this story lies in the matter-of-fact nature of the narration, the way it moves through the territory of the story as if from one stepping stone to the next, trusting the reader to follow. Another is the voice—deadpan, wry, sharp, relentless, and clearly, despite the fact that it is written in the third person, the woman’s. It is also, clearly, Chinese, never mind that the woman herself “didn’t want to be one of those women who noted every teeny tiny thing and racialized it.” The fact is, race is at work throughout this story, from the start of the affair to the end of the omakase. It is endemic to the romance itself, informs her embarrassment at the man’s relentless probing of the Japanese chef, is at play in his visit to her parents (“who had been taught to loathe the Japanese”), and then in the Japanese chef himself and his swipe at the Chinese.
Throughout, some of the most cogent moments take place in the woman’s head, in silence. “She wanted to say to the waitress, You have no idea how hard some of us worked so that you could dye your hair purple and pierce your lip.” And it is left to the reader to make (perfect) sense of it.
In the hands of a comedian, much of this material could be rendered as hilarious shtick. In the hands of a master of fiction, it delivers riches.
Lynn Freed’s books include six novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of essays. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two O. Henry Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Born in Durban, South Africa, she now lives in Northern California.
What a magnificent story this is! From the very beginning I knew I was in the presence of a quiet and gracious authority—that the author knew what she was doing and would deliver me with safe hands. And I was delivered; I kept thinking about this story a long time after I put it down.
I think this is because it is beautifully written—but what does that mean? It means there was one truthful sentence after another and that I felt these sentences instinctively to be true. I knew the pigeons in the coop were real, I felt Ebo’s distress at having to kill the last one, I knew that the house was true, his mother, and also Daddy. Just true.
It also means that there were continual small—and large—surprises in the work, that as I rode the waves of the loveliness of it I was always slightly or largely shaken by one of these surprises, which never seemed gratuitous. And it means that the story unfolded without a hitch; there was a wonderful sense of its rolling forward at its own pace; the way it handled time was seamless, a peek ahead, a real glance backward, but always staying on course. The very first paragraph gives us a huge amount of information, but in a soft and tight way, each sentence flowing so naturally from the one before it. It means there was a clarity to it all, that I never felt outside of the setting and the globe it put me into.
Mostly, though, the emotional truthfulness of this story is what makes it so exquisite. One can utterly feel the experience of Ebo, and we are with him right through the unexpected and glorious ending.
Elizabeth Strout is the author of six books of fiction. Her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Strout is the author of Abide with Me; Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009; and The Burgess Boys, nominated for the Harper Lee Prize in fiction. Her latest book is a novel, Anything Is Possible. She was born in Portland, Maine, and lives in New York City.
“The child was nine years old and couldn’t fasten her own buttons.”
I was bothered by this first sentence, because it made me immediately dislike the child in question, and I couldn’t understand why. All we’re given is bare facts, the age of the child and her inability to fasten buttons at that age. Immediately after that we’re told that this was a Victorian-type dress with hundreds of buttons. This information should have redeemed the child in my eyes (who among us can boast of ease with Victorian buttons!), but instead I noticed that my initial dislike was steadily growing into squeamish disgust. There was the smell of the child: “she still smelled of something furtive—musty spice from the back of a cupboard.” The physical description: “a doll—with a plain, pale, wide face, her temples blue-naked where her hair was strained back, her wide-open gray eyes affronted and evasive and set too far apart.” Or the creepy scene of her playing with her poorly made toys:
One voice was coaxing and hopeful, the other one reluctant. “Put on your special gloves,” one of them said. “But I don’t like the blue color,” said the other. “These ones have special powers,” the first voice persisted. “Try them out.”
But by that time it was clear to me that the disgust I felt was communicated to me through the narrator: Valerie, the young stepmother of the child, forced to be her caregiver because the child’s father didn’t express any interest in performing his functions. Valerie is very honest about her reluctance to spend time with the child.
She didn’t really want the child around. But Robyn was part of the price she paid for having been singled out by the professor among the girls in the faculty office at King’s College London, having married him and moved with him to begin a new life in the North.
Valerie is just as clear-eyed about the feelings of her husband, the child’s father. “He might have found fatherhood easier, Valerie thought, if his daughter had been pretty.”
It was this line that pricked me with guilt. I realized that I felt more than simply invested in the story, I felt implicated along with the main character for disliking the child, even though nothing really warranted it, except for her lack of beauty, liveliness, or pleasant manners.
This was when I understood that I was in the presence of true greatness.
When I read about the child treating her new pajamas as her most precious possession, insisting on holding on to them during a meal at a restaurant, I felt both heartbroken and ashamed—ashamed because of my initial squeamishness. As I proceeded to read the story, getting to know more and more about the horror of the child’s situation, about the true scope of the neglect, what I experienced wasn’t simple compassion but true heartbreak, because I felt responsible now.
By the time the story reached its climax, I felt that the responsibility was on me in the same way as it was on Valerie. My initial guilt (as well as Valerie’s) prevented me from being a neutral bystander. I needed this child to be saved for my sake, and not just the child’s or Valerie’s. I was so engaged with the story that I felt that it was my peace at stake here.
Most successful short stories have the power to move you emotionally or stimulate you intellectually, or even simply to entertain you. But only a few truly great ones can directly involve you like that, breaking and shaping you into something new.
Lara Vapnyar came to the United States from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Vogue.