The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2 page)

H
EIDI
P
ITLOR

T
HERE WAS A TIME
when a telephone was something that hung on the wall or sat on a table, and when it rang you had no idea who was calling. “Hello?” People had different ways of saying this, of course. Those expecting disaster (my grandmother) would say the word with quiet dread. Those who wanted to appear friendly (my mother) would say it with perkiness: “
Hel
-lo!” Or a self-conscious adolescent might mumble “Hullo?” It was a question, more than a greeting. Before answering machines and caller ID, that word asked,
Who’s there? What are you calling about? What is it you have to tell me?
Rarely was one more attuned to the sound of voice than in the moment before the answer. Whoever had telephoned had done so for a reason: to deliver bad news or good, to report something overheard in the grocery store, to spread gossip or stop it, or to express concerns about the world. One anticipated the
tone
of the voice as much as the words.

A reader is in the position of saying hello. Tentatively, enthusiastically, or even with trepidation, the reader approaches a piece of writing with the unspoken question
What do you have to say?
And the writer answers,
This. I have this to say, and I want you to listen to my voice, to the tone of my voice, because that will tell you what I have to say
. In fact, in the first story of this collection, the narrator, an out-of-work actor, observes, “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.”

Quite naturally, we choose to listen to certain voices based on personal taste. And these days, as we glance at our ringing phone, we can make a decision:
No, I don’t feel like talking to her right now, she goes on about herself and thinks every detail matters and who cares what her loser of a husband said last night
. Turning away from a solipsistic, unedited voice. Or we think,
Oh, it’s him, yay, I always want to listen to him
. “Hello?” we say, with anticipation, because this guy knows when to spring the surprise, how to make us feel that what he says is confidential and important. His voice pulls us toward him. He lets us in.

So if you wonder why I chose the stories I chose, I would say it had a great deal to do with voice. That sound—if it is working well—has authority, probably the most important dimension of voice. We really hope the writer knows what he or she is doing. And we really hope that this sense of authority will be sustained throughout. We look for this the same way we look for authoritative competence in any other trade. We don’t want to be lying on a dentist’s chair with a wide-open mouth and hear the dentist say, “Oh,
hell
.” We don’t want a plumber to gaze at a broken pipe that has flooded the floor and mutter, “Huh, I don’t know.” And we don’t want a writer whose voice wobbles or becomes false. I don’t think readers think about this analytically, but instead, they experience it as a feeling about the writer that grows stronger as they read:
I want to be in your company, I want to keep going, I like the way you sound
.

This authoritative voice will differ from one writer to the next, which is how it should be; the writers are different people, and each has a singular way of putting words together, developed in a particular culture, place, and time. The authority that Alice Munro brings to the page has a very different sound than that of George Saunders, which is entirely distinct from the sound of Junot Díaz.

I remember sitting a number of years ago in a diner in a small town in Maine with my mother, my small daughter, and her father, the latter two raised near New York City. In the next booth two middle-aged local women, short-haired and wearing flannel shirts, were speaking in the flat unexpressive tones familiar to me; I had grown up in northern New England among such voices. One woman said to the other laconically, as if telling of a leaky faucet, “Yuh. Well, she killed her husband, didn’t she?” And the other woman responded, “Ay-yuh, she did. Shot herself a month later.” And they nodded matter-of-factly.

What is notable to me in these voices is the sense of place and culture. What struck my child and her father as surprising—the utter lack of expression—was not surprising to me. Very big news was swapped in very few words. In terms of storytelling technique, much was left to the listener. Had the same story been told in a different part of the country by members of a more outwardly expressive culture, we might have heard all sorts of details exchanged in urgent tones. Through a change in voice, the same story would have been a different story.

In this way, the sound of the story intuitively and naturally merges with what is being said. Listen, for example, to the breathless voice of the narrator in David Means’s “The Chair,” as his anxiety in watching over his young son unfolds. Or observe how Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night” is exactly that: the almost run-on language and razor-sharp memories that arise when a person lies alone in the hours of darkness—waiting. In “The Provincials,” Daniel Alarcón, writing from the point of view of an actor, suddenly switches from prose and presents the spoken words of characters in the form of a script. At that moment in the story the narrator feels as if he is in a scene from a play, and Alarcón writes it as such, which heightens the moment—literally—in a dramatic way.

I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject. This doesn’t mean that I paid no attention to subject, but rather that subject matter is part and parcel with voice, and if that doesn’t work, the subject is irrelevant. Yet despite this, when we finish a story, it is most often the subject that we remember, or think we remember, and this is the thrill of reading good writing. We are moved by a lingering image or emotion, we can’t get the “story” out of our mind. But it has been conveyed to us through sound; it is the sound we trust, the sound that brings us the subject.

Nonetheless, the subjects that are developed in this collection are wonderful, varied, and full of surprises, because good storytellers know how to surprise. The surprise can seem tiny: perhaps a quiet realization, such as the one that comes at the end of Michael Byers’s story, “Malaria,” or a sudden oddity that feels strikingly believable, as when a madwoman in Prague tells a young bride her future in Charles Baxter’s “Bravery.” These surprises satisfy readers (“Oh, I didn’t expect that!”) but work only if the entire piece maintains its authority. This means that the writer makes and keeps this unspoken promise to the reader,
Go ahead and trust me. Whatever surprise I deliver will not be gratuitous, I won’t lie to you, and I won’t show off. I’ll tell you something you’ll be glad to know; even if it is something painful or discomfiting, you can still trust me
. And readers, I think, want to trust. Or at least this desire, this almost childlike attitude, is in the ascendancy. It’s a tricky thing to speak of honest writing, but part of us knows it when we hear it, and often when a reader loses interest in a story, and so sets it down, it is because the writer did not sustain authority—honest sentences being a big part of that—and in some fundamental way the reader stops believing. What seems a loss of interest is in fact a failure of trust, of shared intimacy.

Jim Shepard’s “The World to Come” is so exquisitely intimate that we feel almost as if we have trespassed upon the purity of a woman whose voice reveals the deep loneliness of upstate New York farming life more than a century ago. It doesn’t matter that we don’t live that way, or didn’t live back then, any more than it matters that we are not made to wear a scarlet letter these days. The story still
takes
us away, brings us to a time and place in which women were isolated by their losses while their husbands worked the unrelenting land.

Isolation, just like storytelling, comes in many forms. In Lorrie Moore’s “Referential,” set in contemporary times, a mother is kept to a limited life because of loyalty to a son who is ill. The story holds no note of complaint or judgment: life is what it is, people endure what they can, and they turn away from what they can’t. In the best stories that sense comes through: it is what it is. The writer brings the news from his or her corner of imagined experience.

So what news is included in these pages? Our excessive worry about status, aging parents who require care, trips to A.A. meetings, job losses and mortgage crises, divorce and its upheaval for the kids, the arrival of computers and cell phones in the classroom, the distance between generations, and between the city and those left behind. Spelled out like this—nothing but thin subject matter—the richness of experience and voice is lost, which is to say the experience of reading the story is lost. Antonya Nelson’s “Chapter Two” gives us the A.A. meeting and the variety of ways to tell a story there, as well as the drink had after it and the life lived before it; the naked woman at the door is heartbreakingly believable, and the first-person narrator knows enough to step to the side and let that character make her final bow. In “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” George Saunders, in his inimitable voice, shows us poignantly and satirically the lengths we go to make our children happy, even if it means buying immigrant girls to decorate our front lawns. Junot Díaz leaves us with the image of Miss Lora in her red dress, so real that I expect to bump into her when I walk down the sidewalk. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain” sets out the irony and confusion that arise when an ill and aging mother simply will not die.

Arguably, authorial voice is more important in a short story than in a longer piece of fiction. The ride is quicker, the reader must be engaged right away, and less space is available to absorb patches of soggy writing or gratuitous detail. Where I came from in northern New England, talking too much was considered incontinent, and respect for a person might lessen considerably if he or she was disposed to chatter. I remember how family members agreed that “Uncle Norris talks just to hear the sound of his own voice.” As a result, no one listened to him; I myself cannot remember anything he said, though I recall the thin drone of his voice. In my childhood those who had the power of voice managed it with good timing and economy of detail, just like those two women in the diner. They did not find it necessary to say how the woman had killed her husband, why or where she shot herself, or whether she left children behind. The writer chooses details in accord with the narrative voice most fit to tell the story, sensing how much is needed and what might need to be cut.

In Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Strange Animals,” the details are compact and sharply precise. In only a few pages he delivers the dilemma of a father losing his illusion of control. In “Nemecia,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, the narrator is a Hispanic woman looking back on her life as a young girl, and the child’s puzzlement is conveyed through carefully chosen, telling details that bring the reader into that experience.

Just as voice and subject are not separate entities, form does not stand on its own either. Like subject and voice, it is closely tied to a particular historical time and place, and is, necessarily and naturally, always changing—especially now. Certainly for many decades, the American short story typically involved one incident, one narrator, and one point of view. This is no longer true. As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack in as much material as a short novel might.

Today stories are being written in the midst of an enormous upheaval in the way we communicate and transfer and receive information. Think of this: the agricultural revolution took three thousand years to unfold, the industrial revolution three hundred. These were slowly unfolding developments compared to what we experience now. People alive today have gone through more changes more quickly than at any other time in history. What is to be made of this? I think we don’t know. But we do recognize that the wide world is not as “foreign” as it once was. Faraway places appear in our hands as we hold our cell phones, international crises are texted within seconds, and classes and conferences and family conversations are Skyped across the globe. The American experience is broadening, and so are its stories. They touch down in Boston, South Africa, Peru, and Canada, but even more than variety of location, the spectrum of voices is the strongest indicator of change.

Yet a few stories in this collection look back in time. For an early-twentieth-century character in “Nemecia,” a move from New Mexico to California feels as changeful as a move to a different continent might today. Alice Munro’s “Train” begins right after a young man returns from World War II, and his transition, years later, from a rural life to the city of Toronto is written with such clarity, we feel this “modern” world crash into us too. But it is “The Wilderness” by Elizabeth Tallent that brings us to where we live right now, with machines—or information devices—occupying us a great deal of the time. And though they threaten to increase our sense of isolation, they likewise offer the hope—whether false or not—of connection; the story heartbreakingly whispers the word
me
, as though it is the self we may be losing.

But it is the self we are always looking for, or always trying to escape, and fiction provides us with both options; they are wrapped together, these flights to and from who we are. We read because we are looking to see what others are thinking, feeling, seeing; how they are acting out their frustrations, their happiness, their addictions; we see what we can learn. How do people manage marriage and loss and illness and sex and parenting? How do they do all this? Often, the emotions that fill our inner lives are too large to make sense of; chaos and irrationality jump around inside us. To enter the form of a story is to calm down, or excite ourselves, within a controlled space.

In a world where telephone calls are made less and less frequently, where a tweet makes e-mail seem a little antiquated, we have more information, yet fewer voices. These changes, I suspect, make us desire the sound of a true voice even more. And we still want that news from the front. Not just the war front, or the economic front, or the navel-gazing front. We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world. What are we without this curiosity? Who in the world, and where in the world, and what in the world might we be? So we pay attention to that inner demand, the pressure of that question. Hello? Please—tell me.