Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

After the dog's cremation, I lie in my husband's bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of "liquor" and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television in what my husband, Flea, said.

With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

My favorite story, I think, in Amy Hempel's collection Reasons to Live is "Nashville Gone to Ashes," about a woman whose veterinarian husband has died and left her with all the animals. The narrator, who came to the work of a vet reluctantly, is left with the parts of her life with Flea (his name is really F. Lee) that she hadn't chosen, and none of what she did. "I think it was that love that I loved," she writes of Flea's attention to his charges. "That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extent to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. My love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back?" I was touched by this story, and the simple grief of what gets left behind. At the end, the narrator finds herself giving money to a homeless man begging for help for his dog, and turning around and seeing a man without a dog, begging for himself. Do we value animals too much? Or do we value them because they serve, unable to talk--except for Flea's mynah--as repositories of our own loves and passions?

Many of the stories in Reasons to Live focus on grief and dying. There's a lot of hospitals. There's one, for instance, in "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that comes up a lot when people talk about stories they love. The narrator, sitting at chemotherapy with an old friend, plies her with fun facts that are almost always wrong. (For instance--Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out.) These facts come to stand in for something else, or nothing else, or the impossibility of finding something to give ground to a relationship that has lasted so long. But for me I preferred "Going," a slim little three-pager from the perspective of a reckless young daredevil who has miraculously survived a car accident while driving with his binoculars. The longer stories here feel no more "complete" or round than the flash stories; I often felt that Hempel offers only snapshots into stories--vivid and in bright detail, but only snapshots nonetheless. I thought this worked well in a pair of stories about fathers trying to keep their precocious children from experiencing a vague kind of familial unease that grips them: "Back to Celia" and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." Other stories felt difficult to penetrate, too wispy or impossible to grasp.

Stories in the Worst Way by Garielle Lutz

Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.

Look: a man who is not me but whose accomplishments are similar (he was the son of some parents, got himself schooled around, circumstanced himself aplenty, placed himself squarely and irreversibly in the employ of somebody who could be counted on to walk all over him, etc.) found a new way to cheat on his wife. This was not the way that everybody else was cheating at the time.

"I hate when it all gets languaged around like this," writes one of the narrator's of Garielle Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way. The quality of being "languaged around" is one of my favorite things about Lutz's fiction, starting with the precisely aloof metaphor, the "meteorites of fried chicken" described as "casketed" in their paper box. But I also thought about Jonathan Franzen's recent comments that he puts a book down when he gets to the second cliche. It seems to me that a really great writer has an interest in, pays an attention to cliche, which are little ossifications of shared meaning. Lutz is great at interrogating cliche and wrenching it just out of place, as when one narrator describes their wife as having "given up on me hand and foot," or when another writes: "Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spent too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out." Phrases find themselves wedged into strange new context, sentences that reveal the strange possibilities of grammar: "And here comes what your life will never be the same after which, the same way mine has already never been."

The characters in Lutz's stories are slightly alienated from language, standing just off to the side of it, as they stand slightly outside their own lives. It is entirely possible that each of these stories has the exact same narrator. They go "rivering" around their anonymous suburbs and work in underpaid, underheralded jobs, like adjuncting. They have sex, or don't, and what that adds up to in either case is never all that clear. Some are clearly marked as men or women, but others occupy a kind of indeterminate space, less non-binary than simple non-essential. On gender, Lutz writes: "This much is figured out: the thing about being a girl is that stuff gets stuck inside you--but with a boy, stuff goes away and never comes back. A boy keeps losing himself. A boy just keeps watching himself run out. How much should this explain?" The stories themselves answer not much, because gender here is subject to slippages and indeterminacies that reveal a deeper sense of alienation and ennui. The characters have feelings of isolation and powerlessness that have everything to do with gender, but not their gender, if that makes any sense. A recurring idea is the character who is somehow not in their own story, how whatever "the story" is, is separate from them.

Lutz is one of those writers who sounds only like themself, which I think is probably the greatest possible achievement a writer can manage. So I found these stories very reminiscent of her later collection Divorcer. The differences are small: the stories in this collection are numerous and shorter; the weakest, I thought, were the flash pieces that pointedly avoid the overbearing nature of subject and narrative. The best stories are those that, being longer, reminded me more of Divorcer, as with "Not the Hand But Where the Hand Has Been," about a narrator whose job is to write the indexes for books. Struggling to understand their daughter, this narrator writes an index for them ("subclothes of," "parents of, constructive potshots taken at"). There are stories about shitting your pants and eating cum. Those, in fact, are the best ones, the ones that root the "languaging around" in the terrible and frightening physical experience of having and being a body. But how much should this explain?

I Liked Rex by Diane Williams

What in the world will her name be? Diane!

I should not hurt anybody else I know with this story.

I hope she is not too fake.

At the lake she is often cheerful, although her eyebrows are frequently raised--a common response to the untoward or to the unexpected.

A highly dangerous path leads to the lake. But why say that?

What can you do in a page or two? That's the animating question, I think, of the short fiction of Diane Williams' new collection I Liked Rex. And the answer is plenty, when you toss out some of the drearier literary conventions: "Must there really be a need for harsh realism?" she wonders at one point. Which is not to say that the stories in I Liked Rex are full of space aliens or sea monsters, but that the kind of detail accumulation one thinks of as the stuff of realism is not important here. But that's not to say, in turn, that detail is not important. The story "There You Go" begins like this: "The man entered the lady's house as if it were the most natural thing for him to do. She watched as he exited his car, towing toward her his hard-shelled valise--which held personal articles, which he could not live without--including his oral irrigator." What's important about the oral irrigator? Why is this, out of all the "personal articles... he could not live without," singled out for focus? Who is this guy anyway? A reader weaned on harsh realism has every reason to be outraged, because there aren't really sufficient answers to these questions. But there is a novel and interesting kind of writing, one which flouts a lot of hoary expectations of sense and meaning. (As an extra question, I might ask what the hell kind of point-of-view this is.)

Here's what I'm thinking. A good realistic novel is a kind of surprise engine, a series of advancements or intensifications that come out of a set of ground rules. A short story can do this in miniature, but a piece of flash fiction really can't; there's no time to set the rules, the parameters, and little space for the story to surprise us once, much less several times. But Williams' stories manage to do exactly this, by withholding information, by tossing up red herrings, which are not really red herrings, because why should anything else make more sense than an oral interrogator? I found that, in each of these individual stories, I was surprised at every turn, sometimes by a novel image or unexpected phrase, sometimes by the reveal of some key detail lately revealed. One of my favorites, "Pleasure of the Day," begins: "before things fell apart, she had her first pleasure of the day." What's the pleasure of the day? Well, it comes on a "tin tray, layered with paper that catches and preserves the grilled treat's grease and crumbs." Later: "The even wider grin she received was well worth the cost of the cream horn?" Is the treat the cream horn? I guess! Why mention it more than three-quarters of the way through the story? Well, because it's not the specific cream horn that's important. It's that hell of a ringer at the end: "The world... yes, the world can look pretty shitty when you have finished eating up the Plain Jane, or the Triple Threat, the Big Top, or the Baby Princess Louise."

Williams is maybe best known to the lit mag world as the editor of NOON, a mysterious and well-regarded journal she's edited for years, which--uniquely these days--accepts only snail mail submissions. I've never read her before, but I think--I think--I Liked Rex is really typical of her work. It's like nothing else I've ever read, which is, to my mind, the single highest praise you can give to a book. That said, I don't know how much these stories will stick with me. Their anti-realism, their refusal to cohere to simple themes and narratives, means that it's easy to bounce off of them. They are like pin-pricks, sharp and intense, but disappearing quickly. But I'm sure it won't be the last of her collections I read.

Break It Down by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. "But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel," said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. "But how much better if it were a real house," her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. "But wouldn't a quilt be more practical," said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. "But how much better if you dug a large hole," said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. "But how much better if you slept forever," said her mother.

Everybody thinks they can write short fiction, but I think a lot of writers just aren't good at it. Being good at writing novels, sustained narratives that unfold over several sittings, doesn't necessarily translate into being good at writing short stories. Lucky for us, then, we have authors who choose to make short fiction their medium, like Lydia Davis, who's often held up as one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners. Break It Down is the first of Davis' collections, and it's the first in her big omnibus The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I will be reading over the course of several years and counting each as individual books--sue me.

The impression I was left with was--well, I don't know. I often think of the short story as something that needs to make a quick and sudden impact, like a meteor hitting the earth, but Davis' stories are often quite light. She operates mostly from a bird's-eye view, relying on lots of summary and abstraction--contra the kind of specificity and focus that many writing books push you toward--and avoids fireworks, big changes and resolutions. The stories are full instead of subtleties, as with "A Few Things Wrong With Me," a story about a woman undergoing a breakup who is forced to take a hard look at her flaws. Like many experiences, this one is brief and inconclusive, and ends with the woman deciding she doesn't want to think about herself any more: "But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I'm not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that." No revelation here, no epiphany. But what comes instead is something perhaps truer: a sense that personality is in the eye of the beholder, and that the intensity of a crisis is always fleeting.

For my money, Davis' shorter, weirder stories are her best. My favorite might be "The Brother-in-Law," about a strange, unassuming presence in the house of the unnamed narrators: "The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they do not know." That's great. That's a great couple of sentences. The story, which is about how weird the guy is and how he just kind of "dissipates," contains lots of great sentences: "Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun." These stories, like "Mildred and the Oboe" (she masturbates with it, we think) and "City Employment" ("All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa") are where Davis' talents for the subtle and the strange really shine. I'm aware that, by going through the book in order I'm moving through Davis' career chronologically, so one thing I'll be looking for is how these elements change and grow--does the strangeness win out, or the subtlety?

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed their secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx's Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of the Earth's waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

The first story in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is written from the perspective of a sperm having an existential crisis. How can you have faith when you know that only one "swimmer" among billions will make it to the promised land? And is there even a promised land--an egg--at all? It's classic Barth: first of all, it's funny. Secondly, it operates via layers of irony and metaknowledge; one must understand how the ironies of the sperm's existence point back to the self of the reader. But there's a real humanity underneath in the way that explores the difficulty of understanding one's cosmological place when by their very nature the larger forces, be they God or the universe or the possessors of testicles and ovaries, are beyond our understanding. It is maybe the best story--not a good sign for a collection when the first story is the best--but actually I think I slightly preferred "Petition," written from the perspective of a conjoined twin cursed to ride eternally on his brother's back, asking the King of Siam for help in severing them. Like "Night-Sea Journey," the sperm story, I enjoyed how slowly, by design, I came to understand who and what was speaking to me.

Lost in the Funhouse is most famous for its title story, about a trip to the Maryland sea shore where Barth's stand-in, Ambrose, gets--well, you know. The story is famous for its metafictional elements, which call attention to the narrative choices, and the narrative failings, of the author, even going so far as to introduce a diagram of Freytag's pyramid. This is all purposely deflationary; I think even Barth would agree it's a paragraph like the one above, from another story about Ambrose, in which he imagines a relationship with an older girl, that really stir the spirit. But in "Lost in the Funhouse" Barth questions what it that's happening to us when our spirit is stirred, whether that spirit-stirring is an honest exchange. There may not be so much difference between Ambrose tricking himself into happiness by telling himself a story and the reader who lets himself be tricked. Be that as it may, I found "Lost in the Funhouse" to feel stale. It is, as Brent said, "the OG" in a way, but sixty years of postmodernism has produced, I think, more interesting and effective ways of exploring the same ideas. The subsequent stories, "Life-Story" and "Title," which take these ideas to their most abstract and intricate ends, I felt to be absolutely dreary reading.

Much better, then, are "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad," a pair of stories that draw from Greek myth to explore the nature of storytelling. "Menelaid" is a particularly difficult read, in which Menelaus tells a number of stories to Telemachus that involve quoting the discourses of others so that eventually ten or twelve sets of quotation marks are nested inside one another and you don't know who the hell is saying anything. But I really enjoyed the story's suggestion that, when Menelaus wrestles with the shape-shifting god Proteus (as I guess happens in the myth), it destabilizes the entire story, if not the world: how do we know the Menelaus that ends up with Proteus in his arms is not actually Proteus himself in Menelaus' guise? And if Proteus could be Menelaus, why not Helen, or Telemachus--or the reader? 

Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

"You are not dreaming, Zaliwe," says the mop, shimmying out into the light.

The voice is still my mother's. Climbing an octave on the third syllable of my name like she'd spent the whole day laughing and didn't have anything left in her chords to finish the word. Amama could fill up a room with her laughing voice alone. Where mine was kapenta in a bowl of water, hers was tilapia, large and filling. You couldn't look away form her if you wanted.

My favorite story in Zambian writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento's collection Obligations to the Wounded is "Mastitis," about a new mother who's having a real bad time. Not only is she struggling to produce milk for the baby, her mother has just died, and her husband seems to be having an affair with another man. Abandoned and frantic, she considers suicide, or just perhaps contemplates her own death as a way of resolving her troubles. Then, her mother's voice appears in the kitchen to advise her. Her mother's ghost is invisible, but real--look at the way it twirls the mop--and little by little, it coaches the narrator in the act of massaging her breast to provide milk for the baby.

"Mastitis" combines several of the novel's larger themes--motherhood, sexuality, the generational differences between Zambian families, especially emigrants--into a single story. It ought to be messy or overstuffed, but I thought the story succeeded on the strength of these storylines being woven together into something persuasive. Where the stories are simpler, they seem one-note. For example, a story about a young Zambian exploring a trans male identity, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother, seems to repeat and reconfigure an earlier story about a young Zambian exploring her same-sex attraction to a friend, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother.

Much stronger, I thought, was the opening story "Azubah," about an emigrant in America who travels back to Zambia to take care of her mother, who is in the grips of dementia. In her addled state, the mother admits that her own father sexually abused the protagonist, something the protagonist had psychologically buried. This story, I thought, like "Mastitis," brought a complexity to the relationship between generations that other stories lack.

With the addition of Zambia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 120! Still about 75 to go. At a rate of one a month, that will take me about six years.

Airships by Barry Hannah

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers.  They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner was dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

"Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," one of the best stories in Barry Hannah's collection Airships, is narrated by a Confederate officer who meets his hero, Jeb Stuart. General Stuart suggests that the officer shake hands with his Black ensign, George, something the narrator hasn't done and isn't too happy about being constrained to do now. Except George takes one look at the narrator and correctly clocks that his interest in the General exceeds the bounds of simple admiration: "Ain't shaking hands with no nancy." I wonder if a reader from outside the South might find the humor in this, or if it would only confirm certain at-least-partly-true suspicions about the South. For my part, I love the way the story skewers the myths and pieties of the Old South. None of these people--not the officer, nor the ensign, nor even Jeb, a towering figure in Southern legend who's clearly happy with the myths he inspires--is quite what they seem. They're not too far off, in fact, from the whopping fish-tale swappers of the opening story, "Water Liars."

Many of the stories in Airships are about the South, though what they have to say about it is not always easy to parse. Mostly, I think, they tend to see the South as a place where, perhaps contrary to its reputation as a place of rigid social hierarchies, grand collisions happen. I was really delighted by "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," a story about a white guy who chides a Black one for eating a banana with too much enthusiasm, which ends with the Black guy coming over to the white one's house to watch him eat bananas. Some of the stories are snappy and short, but the collection is held up by a series of longer novellas, the plots of which are so ridiculous I'm not sure I even want to waste time describing them. Take, for instance, "Return to Return," a story about a talented young tennis player driven mad by the attentions of his mother's long-time lover; is it even worth talking about how he ends up with a shady doctor named Baby, stabbing people in Central Park? It's a little easier, maybe, to guess how we get from the homemade mortar shells of "The Testimony of Pilot" to the fighter jets of the Second World War. These stories proceed by a strange logic, almost more like an unraveling then a building up--nothing about them is predictable.

Hannah shares DNA, I think, with a writer like Charles Portis: both write shaggy-dog stories about Southerners that are wildly funny. But Hannah's stories have a disquieting strangeness underneath them that begins with the way they pack a truly staggering amount of information into a paragraph, a sentence: check out that first paragraph above from "Green to Green," which piles absurdity upon absurdity. As a result, Hannah's prose is decidedly clunky and unmusical, though I don't even mean that as a criticism. The shorter ones have the air of someone flipping over a bag and letting all their bobs and bits onto a table; the longer ones can be said, by their end, to make a certain kind of sense, though I would challenge you to identify that sense at their beginning. All in all, I found them frequently difficult to penetrate, but always incredibly funny, energetic, and fun.

You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

He switched off the lamp. In the dark, as he suspected, the salt became an incandescent snow. He rubbed at that substance and the glow spread over the palm of his hand. Awed and puzzled, he observed the celestial combustion. There between the blue glow and the shadows of the scrap metal behind him, an idea began to emerge in his brain like the head of a mushroom pushing up after showers. He would make a gift for his wife; the most beautiful, shimmering, unusual ring. He smiled.

The title story of Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's collection You Glow in the Dark reimagines the true story of a Brazilian scrap metal dealer who came upon a bit of uranium. Not knowing what it was, he fashioned a piece of jewelry out of it for his wife, with predictable results. Colanzi tells the story through a series of brief vignettes from different vantage points and in different registers: not just the scrap dealer or his wife, but a young receptionist who, evacuated and bused out to a different town, where the fate of her own has already become known, is pointedly asked: "Do you glow in the dark?" Another, heart-rending section, details the numbered lots of buried radioactive ephemera that had to be abandoned: a doll, a dress, a diary, and even the remains of family pets. In this way, Colanzi circumscribes the rippling effects of the disaster, like the spread of the radiation itself, and the havoc brought on innocent people by capitalist neglect.

Many of the stories here are in this polyphonic mode. Some of them take big swings that don't connect, as with "Atomito," a story very reminiscent of "You Glow in the Dark," which imagines a nuclear fallout in the Bolivian community of El Alto as being in the shape of, perhaps enspirited by, the cute cartoon mascot of the local plant. Much more successful, I thought, and perhaps the best story in the collection, was "The Cave," about a single cave over the course of thousands of years. In prehistory, a cavewoman paints the handprints of her newborn twins before killing them (such births are taboo); later these same handprints are wondered at by tourists and interlopers. A fungus grows in the cave that turns out to be the birth of White Nose Syndrome, the disease which has been decimating bat populations for years, or something like it. In the future, the cave becomes a node in a teleportation game. What might have been cheesy or forced is, I thought, quite effective, turning the cave which is at heart a kind of absence into a historical presence. Perhaps it works because the manifold nature of the stories keeps them from being too easily summed up or resolved; the best ones feel as if something else is going to happen next, just out of reach of the story.

With the addition of Bolivia, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 118!

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin

When Sara turned back to us, the bird wasn't there anymore. Her mouth, nose, chin, and both hands were smeared with blood. She smiled sheepishly. Her gigantic mouth arched and opened, and her red teeth made me jump to my feet. I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the toilet.

In "The Digger," a story from Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin's collection Mouthful of Birds, a man rents a vacation house that comes with a digger, a man whose job seems entirely devoted to digging and maintaining a hole in the yard. In a moment when his digger has taken a break, the man accidentally caves in part of the hole, but his attempts to fix it seem to be more inappropriate than the fact that he caved it in--"It's your hole," the digger says menacingly, "you can't dig." That's the whole story. The next story, "Irman," describes a couple who stop at a late night diner to find that the proprietor, a large woman, has died and lays on the kitchen floor, while her--husband? coworker?--Irman struggles to keep the diner going, not able even to reach the ingredients on the high shelves. The couple berate Irman, force him to cook for them, and steal from the diner. These two stories, I think, have something to say about the indignity of labor, the way that people are exploited for the most trivial of needs, or perhaps no needs--simply to enforce a hierarchy of those who pay and those who work.

The digging comes back again in a story called "Underground," in which a traveler hears a story about a town whose children had become obsessed with a large pit. When the children disappear, the townspeople find that he hole has been filled in--become a mound--and they tear up the town's floors in search of their children, who have disappeared into the earth. Perhaps here the digging is a metaphor for death--the mound like a grave, like disturbed earth--or perhaps it is a symbol of the strange and terrifying world in which we are forced to send our children. 

I liked all three of these stories to various degrees: "Irman" is the best of them, with its strange unfolding of menace and neglect. The others work, though they are a little one-note; others in Schweblin's collection I thought failed to really present more than a premise. That includes the title story, about a young girl who eats birds, and stories like "The Merman," about a narrator who falls in love with a Merman. I thought these stories struggled to move past the significance of the premise, and when they tried to become slightly more complex, like the story "Onigiris," that takes in multiple points-of-views of customers and masseuses at a strange spa--more labor--became almost inscrutable. I'm thinking of Mariana Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, another collection of surreal/horror stories from Latin America. I think horror, if that's what these stories, is a genre particularly at risk of not doing enough with its premises, especially in the short story, and I found Mouthful of Birds fairly disappointing compared to Schweblin's novels, which have the space to develop and mutate in more effective ways.

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

He perched on the chaise, in the muted light of the small lamp next to it, his lovely, dark farmhouse floating near him, the night just beyond the room's closed shutters... Perhaps the nervous American schoolteacher was sitting on her balcony like a sentinel at the prow of a ship keeping them from harm... How many wonders there used to be for him! The miraculous human landscapes! Long, brilliant nights... Was he never to be one of those again? Whatever role he'd been assigned in the girl's drama--her drama of triumph, her drama of degradation--it was certain to be a despicable or ridiculous one. There was no chance--at least almost no chance--that she would receive from him what he so longed to provide: even a tiny portion of pleasure or solace. And when she remembered him, no doubt she would remember him with contempt.

The first and title story of Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a snapshot of post-9/11 New York. Nathaniel and his group of friends have been renting an incredible top-floor apartment, procured through the help of his uncle Lucien, from an absent Japanese businessman, but the experience has been deeply tainted by the bird's-eye view the apartment has given them of the collapse of the towers. "Twilight of the Superheroes" is an attempt to capture a kind of ennui that comes in the wake of destruction, and the feeling of things deteriorating around you: the Japanese businessman is returning and Nathaniel and his friends must scrounge again, like everyone else, for their refuge; though the apartment is poisonous, it's worse somehow to let it go because one has to let the dream go as well. Even the hero of Nathaniel's indie comic strip, Passivityman, seems to have curdled; his passivity is turned against himself, toward submission to the forces of capitalist warp against which his passivity was once a rebellion.

I didn't quite get what Eisenberg was doing in this story. I had to read the others in the collection to see that these stories often lack a center--it's a story about Nathaniel, but also Lucien, but also a half-dozen people besides. They shift to new perspectives, without attempting artificially to bring those perspectives to an intersection or resolution. I thought this worked much better in "Like It Or Not," a story about a meek American schoolteacher who allows herself to be taken out for a single day by a rich art collector in the Italian countryside. It's a story about the teacher's, Kate's, feelings of inadequacy against the backdrop of the luxurious and ancient Mediterranean, but it pauses for a long beat to capture her host's, Harry's, liaison with a spoiled barely-legal teen in the next hotel room. I was struck by how sympathetic the portrait of Harry was (quoted above), how lacking in judgment, and thus more powerful than prudishness or condemnation might have been. The story returns to Kate's perspective and continues chugging along; what Harry has done is largely irrelevant to her, but the story has captured a multiplicity that makes it richer. For this reason, I suppose, the stories are longish, languid things: in a book of 230 pages, there are only six.

The final story, "The Flaw in the Design," was one of my favorites, and I thought it returned to some of the themes of "Twilight of the Superheroes" in a more successful way. Here, two parents struggle with the mania of their young adult son, whose verbal floridity and unpredictable attitudes are in part a reaction to the father's work with some nameless--but certainly evil--multinational concern. To me, this captured much better a post-9/11 feeling about the world being constricted by forces of power and greed, and the hopelessness one feels against them at a personal level. And the final scene--in which the mother seeks out an anonymous tryst on the D.C. metro--complicates and estranges it even further. I liked all the others to varying extents, including the boldness of "Window," about a woman who falls in love with a single father who also happens to be a violent gun-runner. Here, as in the other stories, the pleasure is in seeing the story unfold, not chronologically necessary but in layers, though here I thought Eisenberg was less successful in hiding that authorly hand.

Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

When did I start placing myself in the fable? At first I kept my distance--and maybe a certain mocking grin had even settled into the corners of my lips, the smirk of someone who's not fooled and wants everyone to know it, someone who puts on airs--up until the day when I was at Folks (the renowned main-street store that was also mimicking something, for example the grocery and hardware store of a pioneer town, and smelled like floor wax, onions, and ground coffee) and a woman with her hair braided into a crown hands me a brochure, points to Kid and then up into the air: you should go up there with the little boy! On the ceiling, all I saw was a row of pinkish neon lights. Then I peered closer at the brochure while the woman looked on, probably impatient to see my reaction: Buffalo Bill is buried at the top of the mountain that overlooks the city, the summit of the panoramas, Lookout Mountain, he's right there. I didn't know Buffalo Bill was a real person and not just a fictional character, a figure of the Far West portrayed some fifty times over in the movies, nor did I know that in 1882, he'd created Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a history of the "conquest" of the West under the Big Top, which toured in North America and Europe and was seen by more than seventy million spectators--the re-enactment depicted the version of the victors, focusing on the great mythical epic, the moustaches, gold nuggets and guns, using fictional pioneers in Stetsons, but real "natives," who played out their own attempted genocide while the federal army was massacring them in real life.

The protagonist of "Mustang," the novella that anchors French author Maylis de Kerangal's Canoes, is a French woman whose husband has relocated to Golden, Colorado, to work as an engineering professor. Her only task is to look after their young son and adjust the new American landscape, which is a demanding task indeed. She becomes obsessed with the minerals in the window at the rock shop (my God, what's more American than a rock shop?) and captivated by the mythologies of the Wild West, the cowboys and the Indians, at the same time she casts toward them a skeptical, European eye. Her husband buys a car, a green vintage Mustang, a good, garish American car, and learning to drive gives her a sense of limited freedom in this isolating place. In one very funny scene, she opens the driving instructor's glovebox to find a gun, which she then has to hide under her buttocks, and which then slips into her bag, taking it away with her because she's too embarrassed to admit to prying. That's America: the gun gets in your bag whether you like it or not.

This story got close to the magic of de Kerangal's novel Painting Time, with its liquid but precise sentences, its dogged but determined prose, that marches so unflappably through the inner workings of a mind. And I loved how, like de Tocqueville, "Mustang" gives a sense of America from an outsider's perspective, one characterized by fascination and revulsion, and the shock of being absorbed into a place that you're not sure you want to be absorbed into. America will assimilate you, whether you like it or not. The central image of the Mustang is a little on the nose, perhaps, as is the astounding crash-up that ends the story, but I was, as they say, very much along for the ride.

The other stories in Canoes are a very different sort. They're much shorter, naturally, but pointedly vignette-like, without much in the way of plot or dynamism. Sometimes they are only snapshots, some which work, and others which fall a little flat. I liked, for instance, the contrast between the recent high school graduate undertaking primal scream therapy with her friend group and her brother's halting stutter in "After," and the strange shiftiness of "Ontario," about a visit to Toronto on Decoration Day, although--or perhaps because--I'm not really sure what it's about. I was less interested in a story where a man agonizes over whether to delete his wife's voice from an answering machine, one of a few that felt very one-note. De Kerangal is deeply interested in voices and sounds: a narrator meets an old friend to discover that her voice has changed; a woman is tasked with reading Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" into a microphone and finds herself estranged from her own voice. Rooms are filled with other noises, and de Kerangal is especially sensitive to the ebb and flow of ambient noise, which either conceals or makes space for voices. 

Divorcer by Garielle Lutz

Divorce, I kept forgetting, is not the opposite of marriage; it's the opposite of wedding. What comes after divorce isn't more and more of the divorce. What came after, in my case, was simply volumed time, time in solid form, big blocks of it to be pushed aside if I ever felt up to it, though more often than not I arranged the blocks about me until I had built something that should have been some sort of stronghold but in fact was just another apartment within the apartment in which I was already staying away from mirrors, shaving by approximation, bathing in overbubbled water that kept my body out of sight.

The title story of Garielle Lutz's collection Divorcer begins with a woman leaving her partner and moving in with the narrator. They live a short and fitful marriage--we learn later it was only five weeks--before divorcing him. While signing the papers, the divorce lawyer beckons the narrator below the table, and then reveals his penis. ("No need for you to touch it... But can you at least admit how much you've gladdened it? it's not been glad like this all day. It's a gladiolus. So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?") A reminder, perhaps, that the old dreary rigamarole of marriage-to-divorce is only one of the many ways that people couple. Yet so many of us do it. We are compelled to marry, compelled to divorce. All of the stories in Divorcer feature narrators going through the process of coupling and then parting. Though in several important ways they are all different--they are men and women, gay and straight--the alienating effects of divorce and separation strike them all.

The second story, "The Driving Dress," begins with a man trying to lose weight to fit into his ex-wife's dresses. (A symbol of isolation and alienation, the need to become self-sufficient, that echoes, I would note, the cafe owner in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) Amateur gumshoes might read this, and the small detail in "Divorcer" about how the narrator uses the creams and deodorants his wife has left behind, as foreshadowing of Lutz's own transition in 2021. (I'm sorry to say I saved a few dimes by buying a used copy of Divorcer with a deadname on the cover.) But I think it also points to a richness and fluidity of gender that the novel captures well, the ways that our needs and desires of having and being spill out over the containers of gender and sex. The abstraction of Lutz's language--maybe "abstraction" is not right, but a fleeing from the staid writerliness of the object and the moment--makes it so that the lesbian narrator of "To Whom Might I Have Concerned?" seems like they might be the same as the narrator of "Divorcer," with only that one minor aspect of their identity changed.

What makes these stories so incredible, really, is the language. Lutz is one of those few writers--Joy Williams is another--who demands that you take every sentence slow, read every word, because every word is a shock and a surprise. The prose is full of misprisions, words used incorrectly but somehow perfectly, and neologisms: sloppage, quillwise, rumpus-assed. Turn the page and find a brilliant, strange sentence: "The sister's kids smelled like pets." Sentences that take an unforeseeable turn: "All she did, I think, was take one gracious, simple, short-lived piss while I stood by." Sentences that go on and on, in wonderful swervings: "To cut things short: she was mortally thirty and was drown now to the uncomely, the miscurved, the dodged-looking and otherwise unpreferred, so my body must have naturally been a find--breasts barely risen, putty-colored legs scrimping on sinew, knees that looked a little loose, teeth provocative and unimproved." After all this time, it's amazing to find that there are writers out there who can write in ways that you've never thought possible, or even imagined.

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Such frights will come and go.

Then there'll be one that won't. One that won't go.

But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

And Alice wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In "What Do You Want to Know For?," the narrator--here, clearly a stand-in for Munro herself--undergoes a mammogram that reveals a lump in her breast. She prepares for the biopsy, and perhaps worse, but it's postponed twice, until the doctor responsible tells her that the lump has always been there, on every mammogram she's received, and it hasn't grown or changed. It's not worth cutting out. Routine accretes again around her life, which was briefly opened up into frightening possibilities, but as she writes, one day there will be a fright that doesn't go away. They're sobering words, one year after Munro's death, after the fright that did not go. And of course they are made more complicated by the revelation of Munro's complicity with the ongoing sexual abuse of her daughter. but not, I think, invalidated. Munro seems to have lied for a long time about her life, but in her stories, what she wrote had a way of being deeply true. So it's with a mix of sadness and relief that I can say there are no more Alice Munro stories left for me to read.

The View from Castle Rock may be Munro's most personal collection, even moreso than the autobiographical "Finale" that closes out Dear Life. The long first section, titled "No Advantages," is a history of Munro's Scottish family, which emigrated to Canada and the United States after the Highland Clearances in the 18th century. The title image of the book comes from one of those ancestors, who, as a little kid, was taken up a prominent hill in Edinburgh and jokingly told by his father that the body of water across the bay--really, Firth--was America. It must have seemed so close, so full of promise and threat, and it must have felt a little like fate, too, because that ancestor did become an emigrant, to the real America. These stories are fascinating and rich, although I had trouble keeping the different Williams and Andrews apart, and drawn from life as they are, they resist a kind of completeness that Munro's stories do, I think, typically possess. They are more ragged, diffuse. I loved the moment when a young boy, walking from Canada to the United States, sneaks his baby sister away from his mother and hides her in a shed, then blames the disappearance on an Indian servant they left back in Canada. (Suspicions of Indian magic make this a persuasive accusation.) The little girl is found, and the boy is never blamed, and so there is no hammer fall of the kind that Munro usually doesn't shy away from. Instead, the moment is another thread in a tapestry of immigrant life, the fabric from which the writer herself is woven.

From there, the stories move down the generations. Familiar images come back again. There's Munro's father, with his silver fox farm. There's her mother, who falls prey to a debilitating disease. We've heard these stories before, in The Lives of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But Munro had such a knack for making the same story seem new each time. She changes the name of the Ontario town--here, it's Blyth--and somehow, that's all it takes, for the story to be revived and refreshed. And of course, we get aspects of these lives we've never seen before, like the introduction of her father's new wife, a foolish and insensitive woman with the improbably name of Irlma. To what extent do the old stories develop and explain the new? Is it about historical contingency only, the obvious fact that, had these people not emigrated to Canada, there would be no Alice Munro? Or is it something else, about the way the old Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name) carved out a new home for themselves so far from Scotland, something we must always do for ourselves, no matter how far from our parents' doorstep we get? There is no permanence, of course. The lump in the breast reminds us of that. We fashion home for ourselves out of what's at hand, and even then, it's only for a little while.

I'll really miss reading a Munro story for the first time. At this moment, it's a hard thing to talk about her writing as writing. It might be nice to take a break from her for a year or two. But I can't imagine never returning to these stories again, and I do plan to come back to them someday. They'll be tinged with a double sadness--dismay or disgust on top of the lack of newness--but they are too much of home for me, too, to be left totally behind.

The Burnt Ones by Patrick White

At first it was impossible to believe their personal lives could be reduced by a shuffle of history, which is what happened, monetarily at least, on the deck of the destroyer, after the sack of their city. Because it had been personally theirs, which was now burning by bursts, and in long, funneling socks of smoke, and reflections of slow, oily light. As he ran looking for that other part of him which was lost, he gashed his shin on a companionway. But he did not know. Calling her name. None of that rabble of sufferers--wet, dry, singed, bleeding, deformed by the agony of their first historic situation--none of them knew any more, as they stood in their fashionable rags and watched their city burn.

My favorite story in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones is "Down at the Dump." Set in the suburban Sydney town of Sarsparilla, it tells the story of two young people finding an unexpected connection. One, a young girl, is at the cemetery for the funeral of her eccentric aunt. The other, a boy, is from a family of poor bogans who go searching for things to sell in the dump. It just happens that the cemetery and the dump are right next to each other, separated by only a fence, across which the two teens meet and connect, or not quite, and then over which they start making out. It's a perfect Patrick White story, about the rottenness and spoil beneath suburban gentility. There's a fantastic moment when the spirit of the dead aunt looks out over her mourners, symbolically mixing the spiritual realm with literal trash. And there may be no more setting where White is more at home than the dump, which he describes in his characteristic way: "At the last dip before the cemetery a disembowelled mattress from the dump had begun to writhe across the road. It looked like a kind of monster from out of the depths of somebody's mind, the part a decent person ignored."

About half the stories are set in Sarsparilla, about another half are set in Greece or are about ex-pat Greeks. The title The Burnt Ones refers to the Burning of Smyrna, a moment in which the Turkish regime set a massive fire to the Greek quarter of what is modern Izmir, killing tens of thousands. Nearly all of the Greeks in the novel experienced this, and it colors their experience of their new homes, whether in Greece, Australia, or America, and the immediacy of its horrors contrasts with the petty psychodramas of the collection's suburban Australians. Yet, we see too how easily the Greeks, having fled this "shuffle of history," are re-subsumed into polite schemata of respectability and repression. (White writes often about Greece and Greeks, presumably inspired by his longtime partner, a Greek named Manoly Lascaris.) My favorite of these stories was "Being Kind to Titina," about a boy who tortures an awkward young girl whom he has been instructed to be kind to. She grows up and, of course, turns out to be hot, and though she only remembers him as being kind, his own cruelty tortures and keeps him from being with her. It's a story that reminds you that White can be funny:

But Titina stuck. She stuck to me. It was as if Titina had been told. And once in the garden of our house at Schutz, after showing her my collection of insects, I became desperate. I took Titina's blue bead, and stuck it up her left nostril.

'Titina,' I cried, 'the holes of your nose are so big I'd expect to see your brain -- if you had any,' I shouted, 'inside.'

But Titina Stavridi only smiled, and sneezed the bead in to her hand.

Other stories I liked: "A Cheery Soul," about a woman who annoys everyone she comes in contact with; "Clay," about a boy whose mother worries about him being unusual--a bourgeois anxiety, of course, but then he turns out to be legitimately mad. And I especially liked "Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover," about a young female door-to-door salesman who chucks everything for a slovenly Bulgarian she meets on her route, and who turns out to have a huge fetish for being whipped. I didn't think it was as strong, generally, as his other story collection The Cockatoos, though it's been many years since I've read that one. Sadly, I can see my stock of White's books dwindling--three leftover stories, a half-finished novel, and his memoirs are all I have left. 

To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova

She put the pieces of dry dung into the sack, brought it to the house, opened the wood stove door, and emptied the sack into the firebox. My siblings and I had gathered the dung over the summer, often getting into fights with other kids. There was a story behind each piece of that dung. That thin whitish piece, dipped in diesel to make it ignite at once, had been produced by the cow with a broken horn that belonged to our neighbor Qambar. After finding old Qambar's cow eating the hay saved for our own cows, I chased it away, telling, "Botflies on you and blackleg too!" and every other curse I knew. When the wet flop she'd dropped as she walked away dried up in the sun, I picked it up and placed it against the wall of our cow pen. Yes, each piece of dung had a story like that.

In "The Black Colt," the story that opens Kazakh writer Baqytgul Sarmekova's collection To Hell With Poets, a man arranges a wedding for a longtime local bachelor, for which he is paid a fine black horse. He's never owned a horse before, but it becomes his pride and joy; no longer does he care for his many cows. But when the bachelor dies before the wedding, his brother comes to reclaim the horse. When the man demands the cost he paid in keeping the horse, he's paid by the brother--in horse feed. It's these little ironies, the kind that might happen all over the auls of the Kazakh steppe outside of where most literary eyes can see, that are the subject of To Hell With Poets.

An aul is a kind of fortified hillside village, as I understand it. Sarmekova's collection, which is more a collection of character sketches or vignettes than a collection of short stories, I think, goes back and forth from the aul to the city, whether Almaty or Astana, and the tension between the two is often at the book's center. The title story is about a naive young girl from the aul who dreams of being a poet (her poem is pretty good: "There's life in you, hard-shell egg. / Make the most of it. / In a moment, I'll smash you to pieces. / I'll have you over easy.") and who becomes caught in the whirlwind attentions of an older male poet from the city. Their tryst disillusions her from pursuing poetry; in a post-script, she has become a successful urban woman when she recognizes the former poet as her taxi-driver. The despair, the sense of inadequacy--which, it must be said, cannot entirely be blamed on the poet in the first story, whose attentions seemed genuine enough--are flipped around. The poet-taxi-driver looks at the now elegant woman, who is flipping him off, and thinks, "How could a fingernail be this long? Bright-red, as though dipped in blood, and pointed like a spear, the fingernail seemed to pierce his heart."

Overall, both book and stories have a slightness that prevents them from being truly memorable. But I appreciate the way they never try to do too much; "The Black Colt" is, even with its simple one-two-three plot, the most complex of them. Taken together, they offer a really fascinating glimpse into the tensions and contradictions of modern life in Kazakhstan. Which, by the way: with the addition of Kazakhstan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 104! I have to say, I really appreciate the work of Tilted Axis Press, which goes to such lengths to find translated literature from places not usually represented on American bookshelves.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

He said he had never really thought about her sexually. He said he had to spend a lot of time getting to know a person before he had sex. He said this was all very unexpected and he needed to digest it. He asked if she would like to see a movie with him next week. She understood his words. She understood the sentiments that would seem, at least, to lie behind his words. But she felt something beneath those words that she didn't understand. She said she didn't want to see a movie. She said that if they got to know each other, they probably wouldn't want to have sex. She told him that if she'd waited to get to know people before having sex, she'd probably still be a virgin. She didn't understand what moved beneath her own words. It seemed too big to be chipped off in word form, but it didn't matter' she kept talking until the dentist stepped forward and embraced her.

Is it OK to say that I find relationships, and dating especially, to be a particularly boring subject for fiction? The relationships in Mary Gaitskill's short story collection Because They Wanted To are incipient, short-lived, doomed. The central theme seems to be the difficulty of true communication between people, the complicated back-and-forth of desire and revulsion that occurs when two people collide in intimacy for the first time. A woman dating an older man, a woman dating a younger man, a woman dating a woman. The protagonist goes out with someone despite misgivings, misgivings they don't quite understand, as they don't understand the desire. Sex ultimately complicates things even more; a desire for roleplay and debasement always ends up crossing a line: in one scene, a woman throws a hunk of non-consensual tapioca pudding at her lover's genitals. To Gaitskill's credit, she does all of these scenes very well, and the push-and-pull of desire and cruelty is well done, but on the whole the subject seems sort of television-tedious to me. Maybe it's my stage of life; maybe it's being married.

The stories became most interesting, I think, when they dealt with the thornier issues of consent and even rape. In one story, "The Girl on the Plane," the narrator strikes up a conversation with a younger woman who reminds him of an old friend. The old friend long nursed a crush on the narrator, which was not reciprocated, until she submitted to a drunken gangbang, in which the narrator ends up, to her--what? joy? surprise?--taking part. The woman on the plane opens up about her alcoholism, he reciprocates by admitting he took part in a rape. Was it really a rape? Or was the idea of the rape a fiction they engaged in, something titillating, that perhaps had the benefit of giving them both they wanted--for the girl, the guy, and for the guy, a way to have his cake and his cruelty, too? (The woman on the plane, of course, stops talking to him immediately.) Another story deals with a couple whose transgressive sexual habits include fantasies of control and domination, but where do the rape fantasies end and actual rapes begin? It's a difficult topic, and requires a great deal of writerly calibration; the ambiguity holds, and the stories never collapse into certainty or simplicity.

I think my favorite of them, though, is one of the most straightforward, the first story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," written from the perspective of a man who learns that his daughter has written an essay about him in a popular magazine. He spends the story fuming, resentful of his daughter; before he reads the article, he is sure that she has been unfair to him, and describes a kind of happy, safe childhood in which she grew up to be sullen and rebellious. Such things happen. Only at the story's end, when we are still unsure about how seriously to take his claims, does he recall the time when he said to her: "You're a lesbian? Fine... You mean nothing to me. You walk out that door, it doesn't matter. And if you come back in, I'm going to spit on your face." It's a pretty simple story, really, an old trick, the first-person POV that we're not sure whether we can trust, but it works really well here.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro

Maureen is a young woman yet, though she doesn't think so, and she has life ahead of her. First a death--that will come soon--then another marriage, new places and houses. In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she'll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking at an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.

The final story in Alice Munro's collection, Open Secrets, is called "Vandals." As with so many of Munro's stories, it has several layers, so that it's difficult to tell--or tell at first--where the center lies. One layer is Bea, a woman who leaves her staid boyfriend for Ladner, a gruff taxidermist who keeps a maintains a kind of self-made nature trail on his rustic property. Another layer is Liza, who lived across the street from Ladner and Bea as a young girl, and who now, as Ladner is in the hospital dying, is asked to watch after their house. With her husband in tow, she enters the house and proceeds to smash everything in it. We must read between the lines to make sense of this shocking act, and the truth is only glancingly suggested--that Ladner sexually abused Liza and her brother when they were children. Here--content warning--is our only clue:

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose form its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

To say the least, I was floored by this story. I expected some of the stories in Open Secrets to mirror in uncomfortable ways the recent revelation that Munro stuck by her own husband for years after he sexually abused her daughter. But I didn't expect to read a story that so perfectly mirrored it that it left me with the discomforting feeling that it must have been drawn, with horrible clarity, from Munro's own life. 

For me, nothing more really needs to be said about Munro the person beyond what Brandon Taylor wrote in his thoughtful substack post about Andrea Skinner and her abuser, Gerald Fremkin. "People can justify anything to themselves," Taylor wrote. "Is that so interesting?" The story is a horrible one, and it is primarily horrible because of what happened to Andrea Skinner; what it has done to Alice Munro's reputation, or our image of her, is so comparatively unimportant it almost feels like an insult to focus on it. But contrary to what other people have said, I don't find it very surprising. Why should it be surprising to me? I never met Alice Munro the person; what do I know about what she is capable of? Actually, I think that those who say it is surprising because Munro writes so eloquently about abuse and our capacities for repression have it exactly backward. Who better to write about particular failures and flaws than someone who shares them? To put it another way, is there any reason in expecting an author to be better than the characters they write about?

"Vandals" begins with a letter. (Open Secrets is unique among Munro's collections for how many letters there are, I think: "Carried Away" focuses on a series of letters between a librarian and her secret admirer; in "The Jack Randa Hotel," a jilted wife secretly follows her husband to Australia and writes letters to him under an assumed name; "A Wilderness Station," about a murdered frontiersman and his suspect wife, is entirely epistolary.) This letter is from Bea to Liza, and it describes a strange dream: Bea is at a Canadian Tire (think lumberjack Sears) where buckets of bones have been laid out for purchase; she takes what she thinks are Ladner's bones, but which are too light. They prove to be the bones of a young girl, or boy, or both. This, we suspect, is the subconscious admitting to Bea that she knew exactly what was going on with Ladner, and did nothing to stop it. The conscious Bea admits it, too, buried deep in the exculpatory language of dreams. This is the most, we sense, that we will ever get from her. In retrospect, it is chilling to think of "Vandals" as a story that functions in the same way that Bea's letter does within it. Munro's knowledge, and guilt, are buried here, jumbled up but in plain sight--an open secret.

"Vandals" is, for better and worse, the best story in the collection. I also really enjoyed "The Jack Randa Hotel"; the letters the wife writes, pretending to be a recently deceased Australian to whom her husband has reached out, thinking they may be related--Munro was always one to write a plot that's hard to stuff into a sentence--are very funny in their playful cruelty. Of another tone and spirit entirely is "The Albanian Virgin," a fascinatingly un-Munro-like story about a woman who is trapped in a rustic Albanian village after a horse accident and nearly sold into marriage with a Muslim traveler. The woman saves herself by becoming a "virgin," a woman who refuses marriage and lives as a man. OK, I said it was not Munro-like, but that's a very Munrovian image, isn't it? It's just one of several images in the collection of women who escape the trap of bourgeois life by "going wild" in some way. Such a list would also include the frontier wife of "A Wilderness Station," as well, I think, as the strange young neighbor of "Spaceships Have Landed" who disappears from her home and comes back telling people that she's been abducted. 

In a way, that's the message of a lot of Munro's stories. You can play along, or you can get out. Both are a kind of madness, but you get to choose your flavor of madness. You can go up with the spaceships, maybe, or shave your head and eat at the men's table. Or you can tell yourself and others the kind of self-soothing lies that keep the monstrosity of domestic life going. You can judge for yourself which way Munro herself chose.

Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong

We notice Bi at the same time, in front of the prayer mat. When we lift our forehead from the floor, we see a trail of damp, muddy footprints leading to Bi's long, webbed feet. Bi is a gift from above. Heaven's answer to our prayers. Bi is all sinew and bone, dry and shriveled, scales almost too big for her body, like a frog just returned from the desert. Why does Bi look so strange? With our back to the light, we watch Bi fade away, like watching a shadow fall across a mirror. Who made Bi like this, amphibious, dual, neither of earth nor water? This is the question, hidden like frogspawn in the sand of the hourglass. We did, is the answer. Aminah and I. And the understanding undoes us, what to do, what to do. Go back to yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that--time is like a steamroller, crushing everything flat as a card and vanishing it into endless blackness. Aminah and I prefer to pretend that Bi fell from the sky. Fell like rain from on high. Imagine how far Bi must have come.

In "The Wall," the first story in Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong's collection Lake Like a Mirror, a wall is built to protect a row of houses from a nearby road, leaving a backyard space that is just inches wide. A woman, whose daughter's car crash death preceded the wall, builds a garden in the long, skinny space, and even becomes skinny herself. Her cat disappears in the space, and then she herself, into the marginal place between the house and the highway, between the home and the world. The cat is discovered--a moldering corpse beneath the leaf litter and trash that such places collect--but the woman is never seen again.

Such uncanny moments are the highlights of this collection. Some are more subtle than others, subtle enough to disorient you, and make you wonder whether you have missed something: In "Summer Tornado," a woman follows a man and his children around an amusement park. Is she a stranger, being slowly absorbed into their domestic life? Or has she been the children's mother, suffering a strange alienation and detachment all along? She is, maybe, like the woman in "The Wall" who disappears into that neither-here-nor-there space. Another, more overt image is Bi, the imaginary froglike guardian who watches over Aminah and her friends in the oppressive girls' school where she is brought up to be a good Muslim. Bi, a frog, an amphibian, a creature of the land and water, home in both but in neither, may be a perfect guardian for a girl who feels neither here nor there, neither fully inside the mesh of power the school represents nor fully free from it.

Ho's stories often deal with the oppression of the Malaysian state. In another story, Aminah ("The name 'Aminah' is very common in Malay society," she writes, "as with Sarah or Mary, there can be many Aminahs") finds herself in a reeducation camp for those who wish to legally renounce their Islamic faith. The title story deals with a university professor who finds herself in the crosshairs of the Islamic censors, only to breathe a sigh of relief when another colleague finds herself fired instead. In this story, such rigid reactions encourage a kind of soft oppression in which people stifle themselves ("You should be more sensitive than they are," an administrator remarks), but Ho makes it clear that these systems are as insidious as the violence and rigidity that keep a character like Aminah imprisoned.

Some of Ho's stories are too cryptic: I felt like I was missing something in "Radio Drama" and "The Chest," some secondary layer that lurked in too much obscurity behind plainspoken prose. The collection may not get any better than that first story, "The Wall," though I did like the last story as well, "March in a Small Town," in which a young girl working at a seedy motel becomes obsessed with a man who checks in every night, seemingly without remembering he'd ever been there before. 

With the addition of Malaysia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 93!