W henever I’m asked to talk about what constitutes a “good” story, or what makes one well-written story “better” than another, I begin to feel very uncomfortable. Once you start making lists or devising rules for stories, or for any other kind of writing, some writer will be sure to happen along and casually break every abstract rule you or anyone else has ever thought up, and take your breath away in the process. The word should is a dangerous one to use when speaking of writing. It’s a kind of challenge to the deviousness and inventiveness and audacity and perversity of the creative spirit. Sooner or later, anyone who has been too free with it will be liable to end up wearing it like a dunce’s cap. We don’t judge good stories by the application to them of some set of external measurements, as we judge giant pumpkins at the fall fair. We judge them by the way they strike us. And that will depend on a great many subjective imponderables, which we lump together under the general heading of taste.
All of which may explain why, when I sat down to read through the large heap of stories from which I was to select for this collection, I did so with misgiving. There were so many stories to choose from, and all of them, as they say, publishable. I knew this because they had already been published. Over the course of the previous year, the indefatigable and devoted series editor, Shannon Ravenel, had read every short story in every known magazine, large or small, famous or obscure, in both the United States and Canada—a total of more than 2,000 stories. Of these she had chosen 120, from which I was to pick 20. But how was I to do this? What would be my criteria, if any? How would I be able to tell the best from the merely better? How would I know?.
I had elected to read these stories “blind,” which meant that Shannon Ravenel had inked out the names of the authors. I had no idea, in advance, how these small black oblongs would transform the act of editing from a judicious task to a gleeful pleasure. Reading through these authorless manuscripts was like playing hooky: with 120 strokes of a black marker, I had been freed from the weight of authorial reputation. I didn’t have to pay any attention to who ought to be in because of his or her general worthiness or previous critical hosannas. I didn’t have to worry about who might feel slighted if not included. That weighing, measuring, calculating side of me—and even the most scrupulously disinterested editor has one—had been safely locked away, leaving me to wallow among the ownerless pages unencumbered. Picking up each new story was like a child’s game of Fish. You never knew what you would get: it might be a piece of plastic or it might be something wonderful, a gift, a treasure.
In addition to remaining ignorant about authorial worth, I could disregard any considerations about territory. I had no way of knowing, for instance, whether a story with a female narrator was by a female author, whether one with a male narrator was by a man; whether a story about a Chinese immigrant was by a writer with a Chinese background, whether one about a nineteenth-century Canadian poet was by a Canadian. I’ve recently heard it argued that writers should tell stories only from a point of view that is their own, or that of a group to which they themselves belong. Writing from the point of view of someone “other” is a form of poaching, the appropriation of material you haven’t earned and to which you have no right. Men, for instance, should not write as women, although it’s less frequently said that women should not write as men.
This view is understandable but, in the end, self-defeating. Not only does it condemn as thieves and impostors such writers as George Eliot, James Joyce, Emily Bronte, and William Faulkner, and, incidentally, a number of the writers in this book; it is also inhibiting to the imagination in a fundamental way. It’s only a short step from saying we can’t write from the point of view of an “other” to saying we can’t read that way either, and from there to the position that no one can really understand anyone else, so we might as well stop trying. Follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and we would all be stuck with reading nothing but our own work, over and over, which would be my personal idea of hell. Surely the delight and the wonder come not from who tells the story but from what the story tells, and how.
Reading blind is an intriguing metaphor. When you read blind, you see everything but the author. He or she may be visible intermittently, as a trick of style, a locale about which nobody else is likely to write, a characteristic twist of the plot; but apart from such clues, he or she is incognito. You’re stranded with the voice of the story.
In the houses of the people who knew us we were asked to come in and sit, given cold water or lemonade; and while we sat there being refreshed, the people continued their conversations or went about their chores. Little by little we began to piece a story together, a secret, terrible, awful story.
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
It is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. . . . It is only the story . . . that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us.
—Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
How do we learn our notions of what a story is? What sets “a story” apart from mere background noise, die wash of syllables that surrounds us and flows through us and is forgotten every day? What makes a good story a unified whole, something complete and satisfying in itself? What makes it significant speech? In other words, what qualities was I searching for, perhaps without knowing it, as I read diligently through my pile of tear sheets?
I’ve spoken of “the voice of the story,” which has become a sort of catchall phrase; but by it I intend something more specific: a speaking voice, like the singing voice in music, that moves not across space, across the page, but through time. Surely every written story is, in the final analysis, a score for voice. Those little black marks on the page mean nothing without their retranslation into sound. Even when we read silently, we read with the ear, unless we are reading bank statements.
Perhaps, by abolishing the Victorian practice of family reading and by removing from our school curricula those old standbys, the set memory piece and the recitation, we’ve deprived both writers and readers of something essential to stories. We’ve led them to believe that prose comes in visual blocks, not in rhythms and cadences; that its texture should be flat because a page is flat; that written emotion should not be immediate, like a drumbeat, but more remote, like a painted landscape, something to be contemplated. But understatement can be overdone, plainsong can get too plain. When I asked a group of young writers, earlier this year, how many of them ever read their own work aloud, not one of them said she did.
I’m not arguing for the abolition of the eye, merely for the reinstatement of the voice, and for an appreciation of the way it carries the listener along with it at the pace of the story. (Incidentally, reading aloud disallows cheating; when you’re reading aloud, you can’t skip ahead.)
Our first stories come to us through the air. We hear voices.
Children in oral societies grow up within a web of stories; but so do all children. We listen before we can read. Some of our listening is more like listening in, to the calamitous or seductive voices of the adult world, on the radio or the television or in our daily lives. Often it’s an overhearing of things we aren’t supposed to hear, eavesdropping on scandalous gossip or family secrets. From all these scraps of voices, from the whispers and shouts that surround us, even from the ominous silences, the unfilled gaps in meaning, we patch together for ourselves an order of events, a plot or plots; these, then, are the things that happen, these are the people they happen to, this is the forbidden knowledge.
We have all been little pitchers with big ears, shooed out of the kitchen when the unspoken is being spoken, and we have probably all been tale-bearers, blurters at the dinner table, unwitting violators of adult rules of censorship. Perhaps this is what writers are: those who never kicked the habit. We remained tale-bearers. We learned to keep our eyes open, but not to keep our mouths shut.
If we’re lucky, we may also be given stories meant for our ears, stories intended for us. These may be children’s Bible stories, tidied up and simplified and with the vicious bits left out. They may be fairy tales, similarly sugared, although if we are very lucky it will be the straight stuff in both instances, with the slaughters, thunderbolts, and red-hot shoes left in. In any case, these tales will have deliberate, molded shapes, unlike the stories we have patched together for ourselves. They will contain mountains, deserts, talking donkeys, dragons; and, unlike the kitchen stories, they will have definite endings. We are likely to accept these stories as being on the same level of reality as the kitchen stories. It’s only when we are older that we are taught to regard one kind of story as real and the other kind as mere invention. This is about the same time we’re taught to believe that dentists are useful and writers are not.
Traditionally, both the kitchen gossips and the readers-out-loud have been mothers or grandmothers, native languages have been mother tongues, and the kinds of stories that are told to children have been called nursery tales or old wives’ tales. It struck me as no great coincidence when I learned recently that when a great number of prominent writers were asked to write about the family member who had had the greatest influence on their literary careers, almost all of them, male as well as female, had picked their mothers. Perhaps this reflects the extent to which North American children have been deprived of their grandfathers, those other great repositories of story; perhaps it will come to change if men come to share in early child care, and we will have old husbands’ tales. But as things are, language, including the language of our earliest-learned stories, is a verbal matrix, not a verbal patrix.
I used to wonder why—as seems to be the case—so many more male writers chose to write from a female point of view than the other way around. (In this collection, for instance, male authors with female narrators outnumber the reverse four to one.) But possibly the prevailing gender of the earliest storytelling voice has something to do with it.
Two kinds of stories we first encounter—the shaped tale, the overheard impromptu narrative we piece together—form our idea of what a story is and color the expectations we bring to stories later. Perhaps it’s from the collisions between these two kinds of stories—what is often called “real life” (and which writers greedily think of as their “material”) and what is sometimes dismissed as “mere literature” or “the kinds of things that happen only in stories”—that original and living writing is generated. A writer with nothing but a formal sense will produce dead work, but so will one whose only excuse for what is on the page is that it really happened. Anyone who has been trapped in a bus beside a nonstop talker graced with no narrative skill or sense of timing can testify to that. Or, as Raymond Chandler says in The Simple Art of Murder: All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Expressing yourself is not nearly enough. You must express the story.
All of which gets me no closer to an explanation of why I chose one story over another, twenty stories over the remaining hundred. The uncertainty principle, as it applies to writing, might be stated: You can say why a story is bad, but it’s much harder to say why it’s good. Determining quality in fiction may be as hard as determining the reason for the happiness in families, only in reverse. The old saying has it that happy families are all happy in the same way, but each unhappy family is unique. In fiction, however, excellence resides in divergence, or how else could we be surprised? Hence the trickiness of the formulations.
Here is what I did. I sat on the floor, spread out the stories, and read through them in no particular order. I put each completed story into a “yes” pile, a “no” pile, and a “maybe” pile. By the time I’d gone through them once, I had about twenty-five stories in yes, an equal number in “no,” and the rest in “maybe.”
Here things got harder. The first fourteen yes stories were instant choices: I knew I wouldn’t change my mind about them. After that there were gradations, yeses shading to maybes, maybes that could easily be on the low end of yes. To make the final choices, I was forced to be more conscious and deliberate. I went back over my fourteen instant yes stories and tried to figure out what, if anything, they had in common.
They were widely different in content, in tone, in setting, in narrative strategy. Some were funny, others melancholy, others contemplative, others downright sad, yet others violent. Some went over ground that, Lord knows, had been gone over before: the breakdown, the breakup, love, and death. Collectively they did not represent any school of writing or propound any common philosophy. I was beginning to feel stupid and lacking in standards. Was I to be thrown back on that old crutch of the creative writing seminar, It worked for me?
Perhaps, I thought, my criteria are very simple-minded. Perhaps all I want from a good story is what children want when they listen to tales both told and overheard—which turns out to be a good deal.
They want their attention held, and so do I. I always read to the end, out of some puritanical, and adult, sense of duty owed; but if I start to fidget and skip pages, and wonder if conscience demands I go back and read the middle, it’s a sign that the story has lost me, or I have lost it.
They want to feel they are in safe hands, that they can trust the teller. With children this may mean simply that they know the speaker will not betray them by closing the book in the middle, or mixing up the heroes and the villains. With adult readers it’s more complicated than that, and involves many dimensions, but there’s the same element of keeping faith. Faith must be kept with the language—even if the story is funny, its language must be taken seriously—with the concrete details of locale, mannerism, clothing; with the shape of the story itself. A good story may tease, as long as this activity is foreplay and not used as an end in itself. If there’s a promise held out, it must be honored. Whatever is hidden behind the curtain must be revealed at last, and it must be at one and the same time completely unexpected and inevitable. It’s in this last respect that the story (as distinct from the novel) comes closest to resembling two of its oral predecessors, the riddle and the joke. Both, or all three, require the same mystifying buildup, the same surprising twist, the same impeccable sense of timing. If we guess the riddle at once, or if we can’t guess it because the answer makes no sense—if we see the joke coming, or if the point is lost because the teller gets it muddled—there is failure. Stories can fail in the same way.
But anyone who has ever told, or tried to tell, a story to children will know that there is one thing without which none of the rest is any good. Young children have little sense of dutifulness or of delaying anticipation. They are longing to hear a story, but only if you are longing to tell one. They will not put up with your lassitude or boredom: if you want their full attention, you must give them yours. You must hold them with your glittering eye or suffer the pinches and whispering. You need the Ancient Mariner element, the Scheherazade element: a sense of urgency. This is the story I must tell; this is the story you must hear.
Urgency does not mean frenzy. The story can be a quiet story, a story about dismay or missed chances or a wordless revelation. But it must be urgently told. It must be told with as much intentness as if the teller’s life depended on it. And, if you are a writer, so it does, because your life as the writer of each particular story is only as long, and as good, as the story itself. Most of those who hear it or read it will never know you, but they will know the story. Their act of listening is its reincarnation.
Is all this too much to ask? Not really; because many stories, many of these stories, do it superbly.
But they do it in a multiplicity of ways. When I was reading through the stories, someone asked me, “Is there a trend?” There is no trend. There are only twenty strong, exciting, and unique stories.
I didn’t think anyone could ever write a story about taking drugs in the sixties that would hold my attention for more than five minutes, but Michael Cunningham does it brilliantly in “White Angel”— because the narrator is a young boy, “the most criminally advanced nine-year-old in my fourth-grade class,” who is being initiated into almost everything by his adored sixteen-year-old brother. The sensual richness of this story is impressive; so is the way it shifts from out-of-control feverishness and hilarity, as the two brothers scramble their brains with acid against a background of Leave-It-to-Beaver Cleveland domesticity (“We slipped the tabs into our mouths at breakfast, while our mother paused over the bacon”), to the nearly unbearable poignancy of its tragic ending.
Another story that blindsided me by taking an unlikely subject and turning it inside out was “The Flowers of Boredom.” Who could hope to write with any conviction or panache about working as a paper-shuffler for a defense contractor? But Rick DeMarinis does. The visionary glimpse of cosmic horror at the end is come by honestly, step by step, through dailiness and small disgusts. This story is one of those truly original collisions between delicately handled form and banal but alarming content that leaves you aghast and slightly battered.
“Hell lay about them in their infancy,” Graham Greene remarks in The Lawless Roads, and this is the tone of Barbara Gowdy’s “Disneyland.” If “The Flowers of Boredom” views the military enterprise as a giant, superhuman pattern, “Disneyland” squints at it through Groucho Marx glasses gone rotten. The controlling figure is a domineering father obsessed with his early-sixties fallout shelter. He and his mania would be ludicrous, almost a parody, viewed from a safe distance; but the distance is not safe. This man is seen from beneath by his children, who are forced to play platoon to his drill sergeant in the smelly, dark, tyrannical, and terrifying hell in which he has imprisoned them. The senses of claustrophobia and entrapment are intense.
There are several other fine stories that concern themselves with the terrors, and sometimes the delights, of childhood and with the powerlessness of children caught under the gigantic, heedless feet of the adult world. Mark Richard’s “Strays,” with its two poor-white boys abandoned by their runaway mother and rescued, after a fashion, by their rogue gambler of an uncle, is one fine example. Its deadpan delivery of the squalid and the grotesque reminds us that everything that happens to children is accepted as normal by them; or if not exactly normal, unalterable. For them, reality and enchantment are the same thing, and they are held in thrall.
Dale Ray Phillips’s “What Men Love For” contains another child who is under a spell, that cast by his fragile, manic-depressive mother. Against the various rituals she uses to keep herself stuck together, and those the boy himself is in the process of inventing for his own preservation, there’s the magic of his father—a magic of luck, risk, hope, and chance embodied in the motorcycle he drives too fast.
“The Boy on the Train,” by Arthur Robinson, is a wonderful, warped memoir of sorts. Instead of being about one childhood, it’s really about two. Two children grow up to be fathers, two fathers misunderstand their sons, and two sons bedevil their fathers in niggling, embarrassing, or nauseating ways designed to get right under their skin: “In prepubescence, Edward gazed at his face in the mirror a great deal and studied the effects he could get with it. Once he discovered that a strip of toothpaste artfully placed just below a nostril produced an effect that could easily turn his father’s queasy stomach. The result was more than he could have hoped for.” The beautiful way this story turns around on itself, loops back, plays variations on three generations, is a delight to follow.
Two of these stories have an almost fablelike simplicity and structure. One of them is M. T. Sharif’s “The Letter Writer,” whose hapless protagonist, Haji, is arrested during the Iranian revolution because he is suspected of being the brother of a supposed spy and can’t prove he isn’t. But the authorities can’t prove he is, and since he won’t confess and they can’t convict him, he is given a make-work job: covering up the bare arms, legs, heads, and necks of women pictured in Western magazines by drawing clothes on them with pen and ink. Earlier, a passing dervish had prophesied that Haji would end up living in a palace, attended by concubines and servants. The manner in which this fate is actually fulfilled is reminiscent of both Kafka and the tradition of the ironic Eastern tale.
Harriet Doerr’s “Edie: A Life” has the plain charm of a sampler. It violates almost every rule I have ever heard about the construction of short stories. It doesn’t concentrate, for instance, on an in-depth study of character, or on a short period of time, a single incident that focuses a life. Instead it gives the entire life—in miniature, as it were—complete and rounded and unexplained as an apple.
Other stories persuade us and move us in other ways. Larry Brown, in “Kubuku Rides (This Is It),” gives his sad story of an alcoholic wife its edge and drive through the immediacy and vigor of his language, as does Blanche McCrary Boyd in her uneasily uproarious “The Black Hand Girl.” (The hand, which is a man’s, gets black by being sprained in a panty girdle. Read on.) Douglas Glover, in “Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes,” also draws on the mordant, self-deprecating humor of women. There’s a murder with a hammer, a rescue from the snow, an attempted rescue with a skillet. There’s a Chinese woman, in David Wong Louie’s “Displacement,” who is trying to make the best of America, and a native Indian woman, in Linda Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man,” who is also trying to make the best of it. There’s a left-wing mother whose son rebels by taking up religion. But these are just hints. To get the real story, you have to read the story, as always.
I must admit that although I was reading blind, I did guess the identities of three of the authors. Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief” wasn’t even a guess, as I had read it before and it had stayed with me. It’s a finely tuned, acutely felt story about an Indian immigrant wife’s reactions when the plane carrying her husband and sons is blown up over the Irish Sea by terrorists. The sleepwalking intensity with which she gropes her way through the emotional debris scattered by these senseless deaths and eventually makes a mystic sense out of them for herself is sparely but unsparingly rendered.
When I read “The Concert Party,” I guessed that it was either by Mavis Gallant or by a male writer doing a very good imitation of her. Who else would, or could, write so convincingly and with such interest about a hopeless nerd from Saskatchewan bungling around loose in France in the early fifties? The story did turn out to be by Mavis Gallant, leaving me to admire once again her deftness with a full canvas, her skill at interweaving the fates of her characters, her sharp eye for the details of small pomposities, and her camerawork, if it may be called that. Watch the way she shifts, at the end, from close-up to long shot:
Remembering Edie at the split second when she came to a decision, I can find it in me to envy them. The rest of us were born knowing better, which means we were stuck. When I finally looked away from her it was at another pool of candlelight, and the glowing, blooming children. I wonder now if there was anything about us for the children to remember, if they ever later on reminded one another: There was that long table of English-speaking people, still in bud.
I think I would recognize an Alice Munro story in Braille, even though I don’t read Braille. The strength and distinctiveness of her voice will always give her away. “Meneseteung” is, for my money, one of Alice Munro’s best and, in the manner of its telling, quirkiest stories yet. It purports to be about a minor sentimental “poetess”—the word, here, is appropriate—living in a small, raw, cowpat-strewn, treeless nineteenth-century town, which is as far a cry from our idyllic notions of a golden past as the poet’s sugary verses are from real life. Our sweet picture of bygone days is destroyed, and, in the process, our conceptions of how a story should proceed. Similarly, the poet herself disintegrates in the harsh and multiple presence of the vivid life that surrounds her and that finally proves too huge and real for her. Or does it? Does she disintegrate or integrate? Does crossing the borders of convention lead toward insanity or sanity? “She doesn’t mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality,” we are told when the crocheted roses on the tablecloth began to float, “and that is how she knows that she is sane.”
The last word is not the poet’s, however, but the nameless narrator’s, the “I” who has been searching for the poet, or scraps of her, through time. These last words could be an epigraph for this collection of stories, or for the act of writing itself:
People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
I thank all the authors in this book for the pleasure their stories have given me, and for what they added to my own sense of what a story is, and can be.
From listening to the stories of others, we learn to tell our own.