Crime-Fiction Issue: "Happy Trails"

By Sherman Alexie
~1400 words

A man comes to terms with his uncle's disappearance some four decades earlier.

When the unnamed narrator was seven years old, his favorite relative, Uncle Hector, left the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation on a hitchhiking trip to Spokane and never returned. Forty-one years later, the narrator convinces his mother that it's time to "bury" Hector. As an empty casket is laid into the ground at a Catholic cemetery, the narrator comes to an uncomfortable conclusion about how his uncle died.

The story's strength lies in the narrator's deprecating self-awareness and wry humor as he spins a tragic tale of poverty, alcoholism, and violence. The language, however, is clichéd at times—"I loved her so much," "our worst losses and our greatest beauty," etc.—and the narrative tends to meander. It's unclear, for example, what the narrator's romantic relationship to his cousin has to do with his uncle's disappearance. Such distractions lead to clumsy narrative transitions such as "Anyway…" (used twice). Finally, the long paragraph about Hector's grandmother feels too much like a pretext for slipping in a lesson on Native American history.

Despite its problems, "Happy Trails" is a worthy meditation on the meaning of loss and the many social problems that confront American Indians in contemporary society.

Satisfactory.


Also from the crime-fiction issue: "Brotherly Love," "Scenes of the Crime," "Slide to Unlock," "Rough Deeds," "An Inch and a Half of Glory."

"We Didn't Like Him"

By Akhil Sharma
~5100 words

A man has an uneasy relationship with his father's sister's husband's sister's son.

The narrator doesn't like Manshu from the time they are children because he behaves like a bully. But the narrator's parents are of a generation of Indians that requires a certain deference toward even distant relatives, and thus, "[w]hen Manshu visited, my mother made him sherbet and presented it to him on a tray, the way she would have served it to an adult toward whom the family had to show respect." This ambivalence comes to define the narrator's relationship to Manshu as they grow up together, from the latter's appointment as pandit in the neighborhood temple to his marriage to a non-Brahman girl to the latter's death, when the narrator feels obligated to help with the funeral arrangements.

An interesting feature of this story is that the first-person narrator is not the main character (and doesn't even have a name). That honor goes to Manshu, who is intriguing but, as the title implies, not very likable in the end. What does one do with an unlikable main character? One solution is to show him to the reader through the eyes of someone who gives us permission not to like him. Hence the unnamed, non-protagonist narrator, who describes Manshu as "pathologically selfish." The problem, however, is that because we never get to know the narrator well enough to appreciate him in his own right, we can never totally identify with his opinions about Manshu.

The story's language is passable, though at times it veers a bit too much toward telling rather than showing (the "pathologically selfish" remark being a prime example).

"We Didn't Like Him" has several weak points, but it is ultimately redeemed by the fact that the main character, while not likable, is fairly interesting (an instructive contrast to the main character of "Art Appreciation," who is neither).

Satisfactory.

"Thirteen Wives"

By Steven Millhauser
~5100 words

A man describes his thirteen wives.

The unnamed narrator begins by saying that he and his wives all live together "in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town." The wives get along well with each other, though their relationship to the narrator is "more complex." The rest of the story is devoted to detailed descriptions of each of the wives, one by one. The descriptions are a mix of the tender, the routine, and the odd, with the latter gradually coming to dominate. The fifth wife is always accompanied by a young man, "slender but well muscled, dressed always in a dark sports jacket," who even sleeps between them at night. The sixth wife flies back and forth across the ceiling, "laughing her tense, seductive laugh, brushing my hair with the tip of her foot." The eighth wife is untouchable, separated from the narrator by a sword in the bed. The ninth wife cannot see the narrator. The tenth wife is always ill. The thirteenth wife "exists only in the act of disappearing."

That last line is a not a bad summary of this entire piece. The descriptions are certainly unique, but because the wives are referred to only with numbers—never names—they begin to blur together. Perhaps that's the point, but the narrative voice scrupulously avoids offering any context in which to understand this "point," and the magical realist elements seem to come out of nowhere. The plot itself is nonexistent, for the actions described are habitual and never rooted in a specific moment. The language is above average, with a quaint, affected feel to it, but even exceptional language cannot make up for the lack of plot and character.

As a static narrative description, "Thirteen Wives" may have some merit. As a story, however, it's sorely lacking.

Weak.

"Mexican Manifesto"

By Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy

~4600 words

The narrator and his female companion tour bathhouses in Mexico City, leading to a steamy, unsettling encounter with two youths and an old man.

OK, I’m not always a fan of the New Yorker’s fiction illustrations, but this time they got it right. Through the dark mouth of a grotto, we peer into a bluish haze through which the sprawled, naked body of a young man appears. As our eyes focus—or the fog clears—we realize that the mouth of the grotto is formed by the arms of a person looming above us. Entangled with the body on the floor are other limbs. Deeper in the mist is another naked form. And that blob, off to the left, looks to be more curves and skin.

Just what the heck’s going on here?

That’s the question I asked myself again and again while reading “Mexican Manifesto.” But I’m not the only one who was confused. The narrator was a bit shaky on the details, too. This is how the story opens:

Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love.

Well, yeah, I bet we’ve all had lapses like this. Did we just make love or didn’t we? I forget. (Try asking your partner that question. Get back to me about how it goes.)

In short, the story opens in a haze. After making love (or maybe not), the narrator and Laura start experimenting with public baths. Usually they’d take private rooms, steeping themselves lengthily in the sauna before exiting: “Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan, where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared.” But the rooms are not so private as you might think: people knock at the doors, and Laura lets them in. There’s some sharing of weed and steam, some possibilities of promiscuity. Then the visit of the old man with the adolescent boys trained to give a sex show. In the fog of the sauna, bodies overlap, voices call out, something almost happens. And then they leave and it’s over.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that the whole story is a sauna. And a dream. Not quite a wet dream, but a moist one. We follow the slack thread of motivations from one scene to the next, unsure where (or if) it leads anywhere, emerging at the end with our pores cleared but our minds still fogged.

I don’t know. If I agree to traipse through someone’s dreamscape, they could at least reward me with powerful prose. But sometimes Bolaño just slips on the tiles. Declaring that “Laura seemed so sweet at that moment” doesn’t convey sweetness any more than “I felt a kind of detached terror” sends a chill down my spine. On the other hand, the more vigorous images have their own problems. What does it mean to “laugh like a housewife”? In what way are beauty and misery “paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves”?

I don’t know. It all left me feeling thick-headed. I think I’ll go take a shower. A long one. Hot and steamy.

Satisfactory (but just barely).

Reader poll: I found "Mexican Manifesto" to be ___.

"The Night of the Satellite"

By T. Coraghessan Boyle

~6500 words

A man ensnared in a rapidly escalating lovers' feud is struck by a chunk of space debris.

The narrator, Paul, gets into it with his girlfriend when, on the way to meet some friends, she wants to intervene in a spat between an unknown couple on a rural country road. Mallory's anger at Paul's refusal to help and his resentment at her anger boil over in a bar that night and, afterwards, in an empty field at 3 in the morning. In the middle of a heated argument, Paul is struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal mesh that he believes to have come from a decommissioned weather satellite. Before he can verify his theory, however, Mallory throws the scrap away, further poisoning their relationship.

This story has many admirable qualities. The characters are richly developed, from Paul and Mallory to the friends they are visiting to the unidentified feuding couple (who return for a delicious final scene involving a wobbly ice cream cone). The plot, despite its ridiculously improbable premise, unfolds with impeccable ease—and I haven't even mentioned the part about the dog and sheep fight—sucking us into the pettiness of the argument between the main characters and forcing us, against our better judgment, to side with the narrator. Who doesn't sympathize with Paul when his little piece of space junk gets tossed before he's able to send it to the jet propulsion laboratory for testing? The sheer absurdity of the situation is matched only by how real it all feels.

The best part of the story, however, is the extraordinary visual imagery, which begins almost immediately, with the end of the opening paragraph:

I could smell the nighttime stink of the river. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead and then shrink down to fit me like a safety helmet. A truck went blatting by on the interstate, and then it was silent, but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song, while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which, thrumming and thrumming, until the night felt as if it were going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.

And so it goes throughout. In the drive to the friends' house, "[g]rasshoppers flung themselves against the windshield like yellow hail." The friends dance with "their arms flashing white and Anneliese's flag of hair draining all the color out of the room." A thunderstorm rolls in "under a sky the color of bruised flesh." Even the quotidian becomes extraordinary with perfectly metaphors: "Next thing I was out the door, out on the street, fuming, the sun still glaring overhead, everything before me looking as ordinary as dishwater."

I do have a few quibbles with the storytelling. Early on the narrator mentions an air-conditioner, specifying that it was "doing its job." At the end, though, he says that "we sat around and sweated and tried to avoid contact as much as possible," alluding only to a fan. What happened to the AC? In the bar scene, he says that "I went to the bar instead and ordered a spritzer for Mallory and a rum-and-Coke for myself"; but in the next paragraph, which is narrated as if it were sequential to the first, he repeats his drink order. Finally, a reference toward the end, about space debris colliding "in two wide bands of low Earth orbit, at six hundred and twenty and at nine hundred and thirty miles up," is a bit confusing. I get the general idea, but the specificity of the image throws me off (and how can the debris collide in orbits so far apart?). It wouldn't normally be much of an issue, but it comes at an important moment, as the narrator is tying together the story's symbolic threads.

These quibbles—the storytelling equivalent of a few typos—do little to detract from the overall impact of "The Night of the Satellite," which draws top honors for its well-crafted characters, quirky but compelling plot, and exceptional language.

Outstanding.

Reader poll: I found "The Night of the Satellite" to be ___.

"Valentine"

By Tessa Hadley
~7200 words

A teenager in 1970s Britain has a sexual relationship with an enigmatic young man known as Valentine.

Fifteen-year-old Stella lives with her mother and stepfather but spends most of her free time speculating about sex with her friend Madeleine. When she meets Valentine (presumably a last name, which Stella shortens to Val) at the bus stop one morning, she feels an instant attraction that she describes as something "more than ordinary love: something like recognition." Val is only a year older than Stella but ages ahead in countercultural savvy: his wears his hair long, reads authors such as Beckett and Ginsberg, and smokes joints at eight in the morning. Stella is completely taken with him, and their relationship has all the markings of idyllic first love except for a disconcerting lack of sex, a mystery that is not explained until the final paragraphs.

The unique characters of "Valentine" are noteworthy in themselves, but it is the exceptionally crafted language that deserves special mention. The shimmering images and mesmerizing rhythm beautifully complement the sexual desire that oozes from the narrative:

I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body—a glimpse, via his half-tucked shirt, of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button—licked at me like a flame as we waited. [NB: This extraordinary passage is marred by what seems to be a missing article or possessive adjective before "hollowed." A rare TNY typo?]

Hadley is particularly adept at evoking smells, from the girls' dressing room with its "concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat" to Val's own "intricate musk, salty faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter—delicious to me." And her metaphors capture the extraordinary in the most ordinary of circumstances:

They [Val's parents] were polite with me, and their conversation as dully transactional as any in my house, yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

And:

The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open.

And:

He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, as improbable—in his collarless shirt, waistcoat, and broken canvas shoes, with a scrap of vermillion scarf at his neck—as an exotic bird flown off course.

The story's weakness is the ending, where the reason for Val's muted sexual interest in Stella turns out to be a relationship he's been having with a male tutor. When a story can stand on the power of its language and characters, an O. Henry ending—and a cliched one at that—just seems a bit out of place. And as if that weren't enough, we get another twist in the final lines, where it's suggested that Stella is pregnant with Val's child.

Despite the unsatisfactory ending, "Valentine" is a pleasure to read for the unique characters and extraordinary mastery of language.

Strong.

Reader poll: I found "Valentine" to be ___.

"Kattekoppen"

By Will Mackin
~3500 words

A U.S. soldier in Afghanistan discovers the unexpected benefits of Dutch licorice.

The unnamed first-person narrator is an artillery operator in a unit that receives a new Howitzer liaison: the person charged with plotting the angle of the guns to account for external factors such as wind speed. Levi is from the Netherlands, and his mother sends care packages filled with Dutch candies including a licorice called Kattekoppen. The candies are so vile that no one wants to eat them, but on a search-and-recover mission the narrator engulfs them to mask the smell of rotting flesh.

The strength of the story lies in its attention to detail. The author has an impressive command of military jargon (I would not be surprised to learn that he is a soldier) and a talent for describing the starkness of the setting:

We set out from the dog cages under a full moon, which seemed to cast X-rays rather than light. Thus the dogs' ribs were exposed, as was the darkness below the ice on our steep climb uphill. The steel barrels of the howitzer guns were visible as shadows, and the plywood door of the howitzer camp was illuminated as if it were bone.

The story's weakness is character. The first-person narrator is so unassuming as to be almost secondary. The main character would appear to be Levi, but his primary role seems to be introducing the Kattekoppen. When he makes serious observations—as in his expression of concern over his newborn son—the import is undermined by the narrator's insistence on making fun of his accent:

"It is strange," Levi said. "I have never much worried, but sefferal times a night now I wake up afraid the boy is dead. And I sneak into his room and, like this"—he wet an index finger and held it under his nose—"I check his breeding."

Despite the author's excellent command of military vocabulary and eye to detail, the weak voice of "Kattekoppen" leads to a flatness of language that often feels more like narrative nonfiction or embedded journalism. The symbolism related to Bruegel's paintings (pictured on the postage stamps from the Netherlands) is also a bit overplayed. I much prefer the absurdity of the Kattekoppen image, on which this appropriately titled story squeaks by with a pass.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Kattekoppen" to be ___.

"Experience"

By Tessa Hadley
~6500 words

A woman fleeing a divorce house-sits for the friend of a friend and has an encounter with the homeowner's ex-lover.

The narrator and main character, Laura, moves into a three-story London townhouse when the owner, Hana, relocates temporarily to Los Angeles. Jobless and nearly broke as a result of her divorce, Laura has a desire to shed her past "as cleanly as a skin," and she finds the anonymity of her new surroundings—"this nowhere where I was nobody"—appealing. She spends her days wandering through the house and eating through the items in Hana's freezer, venturing outside when the maid comes to clean. In a locked attic to which she discovers a key—"I felt as if I'd found my way into the inner workings of the house, or of Hana"—she finds a porn collection, sex toys, and a private diary containing entries about a torrid affair that Hana had with a man named Julian. Laura is dumbfounded by the passion on display in the diary, and when Julian calls to ask if he can come over to pick up some camping equipment stored in the attic, she attempts to seduce him in Hana's clothes and perfume, only to be ultimately rebuffed.

The story stands out for the impressive complexity of the main character. A master liar and manipulator, Laura is also woefully inexperienced and inhibited, incapable of writing the word fuck when summarizing Hana's diary. So empty is her intimate life, so barren the wasteland of her failed marriage that "after my evening with Julian I know I came across as older and more experienced."

Such a character would come across as unbearably pathetic if she didn't possess Laura's disarming sense of self-awareness:

I've never lived, I thought, as I knelt there, reading [Hana's journal] with my legs cramped underneath me, aware of the rain as if it were drumming on my skin. I've never lived: the words ran in my head. Life was garish and ruthless and exaggerated, and I'd never really had it—I was like one of those child brides in history whose marriage is annulled by the Pope because it wasn't consummated.

And:

Viewed coldly, from outside, how silly Hana's affair was and how demeaning, with its hysteria and its banal props. But who wanted to view things coldly, from outside?

"Experience" is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be, and Hadley has an odd attachment to the parenthesis (though she controls it much better here than in "An Abduction"), but the story still shines on the strength of its compelling characters and skillful language.

Strong.

Reader poll: I found "Experience" to be ___.

"The Lost Order"

By Rivka Galchen
~4400 words

A neurotic, possibly schizophrenic woman spends the day trying not to do things.

Heavily internal and reflective, the story is set in the head of the nameless main character as she obsesses about the mundane tasks that reality places in her path, most of which she tries to avoid. Like eating ("I was at home, not making spaghetti"). Or getting dressed ("For a while, it was my conviction that pairing tuxedo-like pants with any of several inexpensive white T-shirts would solve the getting-dressed problem for me for at least a decade"). Or working (she claims to have resigned from a successful law career involving toxic mold litigation). Hours slip by unnoticed, and suddenly it is dark outside and her husband, whom she refers to as Boo, is suggesting that she did not resign but was fired, and also "something about the rent, and about health insurance."

A key to interpreting this story is the unreliability of the first-person narrator, which is particularly intriguing given that it comes packaged in a seemingly rational, even funny and self-effacing discourse:

I had not always—had not even long—been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal.

Beneath the beguiling veneer, however, lie clues to a profound narrative instability. The main character's brief interactions with the outside world hint at a reality about which she feigns ignorance or indifference: strange men call to order Chinese chicken and accuse her of wearing a silver leotard and ridiculous eyeshadow; doormen and U.P.S. workers regard her oddly; her husband wavers between tenderness and accusations. The narrative discourse, furthermore, is marked by a number of tics, obsessions, and internal contradictions: an almost imperceptible slippage between past and present tense; a curious gender ambivalence ("the clean and flat-chested look I have been longing for for years") despite claims to the contrary ("I don't mean that in an ineluctable gender-disturbance way; it's not that"); a telling fixation with Walter Mitty ("There is a maximum allowance of one Walter Mitty per household, that's just how it goes"); and an extraordinary use of metaphor ("But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can't help people eat cereal any longer").

Reading "The Lost Order" is a bit like straining to see something that never quite comes into focus. It is an interesting but demanding exercise, appropriate for a story that experiments with the limitations of the first-person perspective. Some readers may find it overly solipsistic, but it is a cleverly conceived and well-written piece that deserves a fair read.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Lost Order" to be ___.

"Bull"

By Mo Yan
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
~6500 words

At a negotiation between butchers and cattle merchants, a boy witnesses his father's humiliation and unexpected redemption.

The story takes place during the childhood of the unnamed narrator, who sets about recounting it "years later." The events center on the narrator's father, Luo Tong, and his remarkable ability to estimate the weight of livestock to within a kilo. The talent, combined with Luo Tong's apparent imperviousness to corruption, makes him a trusted arbiter in negotiations between cattle merchants and butchers, and he is able to earn a meager living off the commissions. But his popularity runs him afoul of a corrupt local official, Lao Lan, who shows up at one of the negotiations and urinates on the cigarettes that the merchants and butchers have offered Luo Tong as a preliminary gift. Only when he saves Lao Lan from a castrated bull run amok is Luo Tong able to redeem himself in his son's eyes.

The story's strength is the flawed nature of Luo Tong as seen through the eyes of the son. Comparing his father to a tiger, the narrator notes that he "spent most of this time holed up, eating, drinking, and having a good time, coming out only when hunger pangs sent him looking for income." He blames him for the family's life of extremes, "with potfuls of meat on the stove during the good times and empty pots during the bad." And yet when he witnesses the esteem in which his father is held, "my heart would swell with pride and I'd vow that this was how I would do things, that he was the kind of man I wanted to be." The narrator's conflicted feelings play out perfectly in the scene of the father's humiliation: he initially disowns him as a result of the disgrace but is moved to tears by the way he "washed away the humiliation." To top it off the narrator discovers—though he doesn't understand the significance until later—that the antagonism between Lao Tan and his father is at least partially based on their rivalry over a woman named Wild Mule.

The story's weakness is that it feels like more a condensed novel extract, containing threads that lead far beyond the horizon of a short story. The pace in the first half is slow and meandering, with references to characters and situations that seem to have already been established. The rage of the narrator's mother, as she brandishes a meat cleaver and spews expletives, is presented so matter-of-factly that it seems almost comical.

Part of the problem may be Howard Goldblatt's translation, which often seems a bit tin-eared. Is "dark tool" really the best way to describe Lao Lan's penis in the urination scene? Is there no sense of irony whatsoever as the narrator remembers his father's "wise and courageous action" in the redemption scene? And what to make of the mangled syntax in the following passage:

With a sense of desperation, Father grabbed me by the neck with one hand and the seat of my pants with the other, and flung me up onto the wall only seconds before that damned Lao Lan took refuge behind him, grabbing his clothes so that he couldn't break free, and would screen him from the charging bull.

I generally avoid speculation about editorial motives, but given the author's recent Nobel Prize, it seems clear that this "story" is the result of a hasty effort to introduce TNY readers to a representative sample of Mo Yan's work. Despite the novelistic density and questionable translation, however, "Bull" redeems itself with complex characters, a quirky plot, and a poignant final scene.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Bull" to be ___.

"The Semplica-Girl Diaries"

By George Saunders
~8900 words

In a future world in which low-wage female workers are strung up on high wires as lawn decorations, a family gets more than it bargained for when it buys into the fad.

The narrative is written by the main character in the form of a first-person diary, for reasons he explains in the opening paragraph:

Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now.

Because the diary headers include months and days but not years, and because the setting at first glance feels like our world—complete with OfficeMax and DVD players and NPR—it's not until several entries in that the reader realizes we're dealing with a futuristic scenario. In addition to goldfish ponds, perfectly manicured gardens, and faux-Oriental bridges, the Joneses of the future hang garish displays of so-called SGs (the Semplica-Girls of the title): young immigrant women who are hoisted up together on thin "microlines" that pass through their temples and the newly-discovered "Semplica Pathway" of the brain. Like fish flopping on a stringer, they hang in this lobotomized state—"Is very gentle, does not hurt, SGs asleep during whole deal"—presumably for all the non-SGs to see and enjoy. When a fortuitous lottery winning allows the narrator to purchase an SG display that would otherwise lie beyond his means, he is initially ecstatic with his purchase, "as if at last in step with peers and time in which living." But things go awry when his youngest daughter begins to object to the cruelty of the lawn display and sets the SGs free.

What to say about this bizarre story? I love the critique of a consumption-obsessed world that exploits its underclasses while patting itself on the back for its humanity; and I love the sheer quirkiness of the plot and setting. Saunders is either brilliant or insane—probably both. The journal format, however, is close to a death sentence in my opinion. First, it drains the story of drama, for we never feel as though we're witnessing events in the heat of the moment; it's always after the fact, like watching a time-delayed sportscast when everyone else already knows the score (an inherent weakness of the epistolary genre in general). Second, reading the main character's prose is about as pleasant as chewing on a mouthful of nails. Presumably the point is the extent to which the English language of the future has been debased and corporatized by an instant-gratification society—tellingly, the narrator's father-in-law, who appears to be the only one who lives within his means, writes in beautiful complete sentences—but surely this could have been accomplished through dialogue.

I have some more minor objections as well. First, the futuristic setting seems out of sync with itself: on the one hand we're still in the world of OfficeMax and Burger King and Home Depot; on the other the SGs suggest a technological evolution far beyond the present. I suppose there's an argument to be made here for suspension of disbelief. A bigger objection is that things seem to happen just a little too conveniently: the lottery win, for example. Why not just make the narrator wealthy to begin with? His financial struggles feel like a transparent attempt to portray the difficulties of the current recession. Finally, though the narrator says his plan is to write for a year, we get only twenty-three days' worth—September 3-26—which makes the story feel incomplete.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit torn about "The Semplica-Girl Diaries." There's much to admire, including the risks Saunders has taken with his form. In the end, however, the defects drag down a great story to a mere pass.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" to be ___.

"The Casserole"

By Thomas McGuane
~1600 words

A disdainful husband gets his comeuppance on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

The story is told in the first person from the point of view of the husband, who remains nameless throughout. He and his wife Ellie are on their way to her parents' ranch to celebrate the anniversary, a journey that involves crossing the Missouri River by ferry. En route the husband seems to have nothing but sour comments to offer about the affair and everyone involved. He also notes several unusual things about his wife during the trip—she has packed an "exalted volume of luggage" in the car and is in a state of "peculiar cheer"—but declines to ask her about them because "I just didn't feel like it." It's only when they arrive at the ranch and are met by Ellie's parents—Dad with a gun and Mom with a casserole in a lunch pail, for the narrator to eat on his way back home—that he (along with the reader) realizes he's being ditched.

This story does a good job of creating an unsympathetic narrator not through any drastic or horrible actions on his part but simply through the general disdain and ill-will with which he encounters the world. Regarding his wife's reaction to his spendthrift nature, for example, he notes:

She once had the nerve to point out that all this saving up for old age was remarkable for someone who had so much contempt for the elderly. I said, "Ha-ha-ha." She was going to have to settle for wiggling her butt in the school corridors until the inevitable day when the damn thing sagged.

About his in-laws he opines:

Believe me, it was Methuselah and his bride at the Grand Ole Opry. 

Even after he's been dumped, his most pressing thought seems to be, "What kind of idiot puts a casserole in lunch pail?"

While it's satisfying to see the rug pulled from beneath this obnoxious character, it also feels like the story has been contrived to pull off precisely this outcome, as if it were all about the ending. The result is that, even with the short length, elements that don't serve the main purpose end up, in retrospect, feeling out of place. One wonders, for example, why so much attention is paid to crossing the river by ferry or to the narrator's "extensive collection of West Coast jazz records."

"The Casserole" is a decent story with an amusing though gimmicky-feeling ending.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Casserole" to be ___.

"Birnam Wood"

By T. Coraghessan Boyle

~7000 words

A substitute teacher and his underemployed girlfriend house-sit at a lakefront mansion.

The first-person narrative begins with the main character, Keith, and his girlfriend Nora living in a summer rental described as "a converted chicken coop from a time long gone." Despite the squalid conditions, when the lease runs out they have nowhere else to go and remain on the premises as squatters until a friend puts them in touch with a wealthy couple looking for house sitters at an exclusive lake called Birnam Wood. After moving in to the new place Nora lands a part-time job as a bartender, which leads to the introduction of a new character, Steve, who shows up at the house one evening with a poem he has written for Nora. Keith storms out and ends up walking across the frozen lake and spying on a couple in a house on the other side.

An intriguing feature of this story is the way in which the narrator withholds more than the customary amount of information. When does the story take place? We know only that it is some point after 1969 (the publication date of Slaughterhouse Five, which Keith and Steve discuss on one occasion), "when people our age wore beads and serapes and cowboy boots and grew their hair long for the express purpose of sticking it to the bourgeoisie." What is the history of the relationship between Keith and Nora? We know only that he "sent her a steady stream of wheedling letters begging her to come back." Why are they so desperate for cash? We know only that neither of them much like their jobs. Where is Birnam Wood? We know only that it's somewhere with lakes that freeze solid enough for a man to walk across. What happens between Nora and Steve? That is left completely up for grabs, for the story ends before Keith returns home.

This is a puzzling and ultimately uneven story. The plot is quirky and interesting, but its meandering nature (first the chicken coop, then Birnam Wood, then Steve, then the odd ending) combined with the obliqueness of the background information produces an unsettling—though not necessarily undesirable—effect. The language is generally good, but the narrative voice comes across as strangely subdued. It's never really clear what, exactly, is at stake for the main character. He says he wants to provide for Nora, but the passivity of his reactions and his flaky behavior in the end would seem to betray his words. 

"Birnam Wood" is somewhere between weak and satisfactory, probably a bit closer to the latter.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Birnam Wood" to be ___.

"Amundsen"

By Alice Munro

~9500 words

During the Second World War, a young teacher from Toronto is assigned to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Canadian hinterland, where she falls in love with the resident doctor.

The first-person narrative consists of the protagonist's reflections, presumably in the present day, upon her experience in the sanatorium and, in particular, with Dr. Alister Fox. Fox is unremarkable in almost every respect, "a spare man of ordinary height, whose reddish-fair hair was cut very short" and who "was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into." Somehow, nonetheless, Vivien falls in love with him, loses her virginity, and rushes into wedding preparations until, for unexplained reasons, Fox calls it all off and sends her packing. Over a decade later, now married, she runs into him on the street in Toronto and still feels the pangs of love.

The story is at its best in its descriptions of the bleak Canadian landscape:

Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some small, untidy evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. And the building, with its deliberate rows of windows and its glassed-in porches at either end. Everything austere and northerly, black-and-white under the high dome of clouds.

The cheerlessness invades every crevice, from the "smell of winter clothing that never really dried out" to wretched meals of Postum, canned salmon, and cold apple pie to the sacrifices inherent in the wartime effort. Life in the sanatorium is particularly dismal: the students are "quiet and tractable but not particularly involved," and when they miss class it usually means that they are feverish, undergoing surgery, or dead.

The story's main characters are as dreary as their surroundings. Yes, this is surely the point, but that doesn't mean it's an advisable one. Fox is about as forgettable a character as there ever was, and the narrator makes no effort to explain how she can fall so hard for a man who serves up boxed mashed potatoes and, on their first sexual encounter, "did not want me to say anything" and "provided a towel, as well as a condom." She, too, is a lifeless creation, with almost no unique or endearing qualities. She states that "My passion was the surprise, to us both," which comes as a great surprise to the reader as well, for there is no evidence of it anywhere in the story—except, perhaps, when she confesses to wanting to feel "my spine crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter." But that's one sentence in a 9500-word story, at the end of which we're supposed to understand why Vivien, over ten years later, still feels the sting of loss.

In my personal hierarchy of characters, which faithful readers of this blog will have come to recognize, deeply flawed but ultimately sympathetic beings reign at the top. This is the case of "The Cheater's Guide to Love" and "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy." (It's also key, by the way, to Aristotle's concept of the tragic hero.) In the middle are characters we can't ultimately love but who nonetheless prove unique and intriguing (often with a touch of humor or morbidity), as in "Expectations," "Ever Since," "The Golden Vanity," and "After Ellen." At the bottom are specimens so colorless and insubstantial it feels as if they'd tip over if you blew on them: behold "Someone" and, unfortunately, "Amundsen," whose beautifully rendered ambiance is insufficient to redeem the bloodless souls that populate it.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Amundsen" to be ___. 

Sci-Fi Issue: "Monstro"

By Junot Díaz
~8500 words

During the outbreak of an unknown disease in Haiti, a student chases after a girl he is unlikely ever to get.

“Monstro” is set on “the Island,” which means Hispaniola, the land mass composed of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—a kind of monstrous creature itself, with two very different cultures joined at the hip. Our time is: the future—but perhaps not very far. It’s true that people now glypt instead of text, the Web is the Whorl, and global warming seems a little more advanced. But there’s just been (another?) economic collapse, and Haiti seems to be the place where, no matter what you do, shit just keeps happening.

Our narrator, a student at Brown, has returned home to the D.R. for the summer to help take care of his ailing mother. Only he doesn’t take care of her, because he’s too busy hanging out (janguiar, a monstrous Spanish word formed from the English) with his pal Alex and the troubled Mysty, into whose shapely pants he would dearly love to get. Alex is wealthy beyond imagination, half prick, half go-getter.

The weird thing is the illness that breaks out. It starts as a “black mold-fungus-blast” that spreads slowly through the population, afflicting only those already weakened or sick. People are quarantined. But gradually it worsens, and those suffering from la Negrura are drawn together by a powerful herding instinct. Health care providers struggle to keep them separate so their bodies don’t actually fuse, like disparate patches of coral growing into one. Worse yet, the patients all begin screaming in unison, wherever they are. And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, thermal imagining reveals that nearly everyone in Port-au-Prince is affected.

The authorities nuke the place, but our main characters, still in the D.R., hear tell of twenty-foot monsters clambering about, gobbling down bodies. The descriptions read like late Goya paintings. Our trio heads for the border, cameras in hand, hoping to see some of the action.

It’s probably safe to say that the first thing you’ll notice in “Monstro” is the title “Monstro.” You might have noticed that it’s not in English, but it’s probably close enough that you’ll get the gist. And you’ll be pleased with yourself for understanding the Spanish. Only it’s not Spanish. (In Spanish, the word is monstruo.) Already there’s something not quite right. This story is a monster, all right—a thing crawling with both English and Spanish, though even these languages seem to have caught a bug. Victims are viktims. Photos are fotos. Monstruos are monstros.

Díaz knows how to create an engaging character. Our narrator is romantic and self-deprecating. He berates himself for not taking better care of his mother, and he knows he is outclassed by Alex and Mysty. But at least he is genuine and loyal. And Díaz endows him with marvelous language, teeming with hip and colorful expressions. However, the narrator is a little monstrous himself: out of place in the D.R. (his Spanish is lousy, his skin surprisingly dark), pulled between social classes (he’s a scholarship kid at Brown, but hangs with one of the richest young men in the Americas), he is left pining (Mysty will never be his, and he knows it). In short, he’s the one who straddles all the borders, not one thing but many, the linchpin between two worlds—princely and healthy playboys versus the disease of the proletarian.

It’s fine to read “Monstro” as a mini sci-fi thriller, a kind of puffed up version of zombies in the wilderness. But it’s hard not to hear the allegorical echoes: while the rich party on, the down and out who are afflicted with la Negrura (the Darkness, yes, but more bluntly the Blackness) are issuing their primal scream, they are fusing together, and they are beginning to rise up as a colossus.

As in all the best science fiction, “Monstro” is not really science; nor, in fact, is it really fiction.

Outstanding. Strong (modified 24 December 2012, explanation here).

Reader poll: I found "Monstro" to be ___.

Also from the sci-fi issue: "Black Box," "My Internet," "The Republic of Empathy."

Sci-Fi Issue: "My Internet"

By Jonathan Lethem
~1400 words

A man reveals the existence of an elite Internet within the Internet—and then an even more selective one nested inside of that.

Tired of the Web as you know it? Well, you should be, since you’re stuck with the run-of-the-mill version that split off from its more elite twin long ago. This other Internet has evolved differently, and it is richer than our own—not in money (in fact, both money and animals are forbidden), but in texture and feel and speed.

And yet there’s trouble afoot. The leader who created this alternate Web-existence has a strict code of conduct. There have been defectors. And replacements. Others may be watching. Or not. Paranoia is on the rise, which has led our narrator to create yet another Internet within the secret Internet—so private that its use is restricted to one.

Lethem’s brief tale reads like a faintly comical fable about current communication, replete with all the contradictory notions that accompany it: the Internet is the death of culture, it is the life of culture; it’s what separates us, it’s what binds us; it’s purely commercial, it’s purely free. Even the elite version in “My Internet” turns out to embody many of these contradictions, which is why our feckless and technologically challenged narrator creates his personal Internet (from which he nevertheless communicates to our own). Like a purloined letter, this secret Internet is concealed in the open, “hidden like a grain of sand on the shore of the larger Internet”—which is to say that it’s just like our Internet, the vulgar one where all of us little people exist, our privacy protected by the simple fact that no one is looking, and no one cares.

Tongue-in-cheek and mildly dystopian, “My Internet” could do with a bit more of an edge (especially regarding human communication). There doesn’t appear to be much at stake in this story, but it gets good points for cleverness. (I find myself saying that a lot these days.)

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "My Internet" to be ___.

Also from the sci-fi issue: "Monstro," "Black Box," "The Republic of Empathy."

"Nero"

By Louise Erdrich
~5600 words

A dog named Nero stands at the center of an odd courtship dispute in the rural Midwest.

The unnamed first-person narrator tells the story, a memory from age seven, when she goes to live with her grandparents while her mother recuperates from the birth of a new baby. Her initial impressions center on Nero, the dog who guards her grandparents' grocery store, but gradually expand to include the courtship between her uncle Jurgen and her grandparents' bookkeeper Priscilla. Priscilla's jealous father challenges Jurgen to a wrestling match when the couple gets engaged, while Nero's own fascination with Priscilla's dog Mitts leads him to escape his pen on multiple occasions.

This is an odd, meandering story, but it works for the most part on the sheer quirkiness of the characters, from Uncle Jurgen's "skinny, awkward figure in steel-toed boots" to the grandmother's interjections in Polish to the future father-in-law's near-death experience as he lies in Jurgen's vise-like grip. There is also an eerie beauty in the parallel the narrator draws between the human and animal worlds, best encapsulated in her relationship with Nero:

As I looked into his eyes, which were the same brownish gold as mine, I had my first sensation of self-awareness. I realized that my body, my human life, was arbitrary. I could have been a dog. An exhilarating sadness gripped me, and then I felt the first intimations of sympathy for another form of creation, for Nero, who had to eat the guts from an old pie tin. […] I had a confused sensation that we were both captive—in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out.

As evidenced in this passage, the language is generally strong, and though one section of the story—about an exotic animal show the narrator witnessed in high school—goes on for a bit too long, "Nero" passes muster on the strength of plot, character, and imagery.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Nero" to be ___.

"Hand on the Shoulder"

By Ian McEwan

~7800 words

A woman recalls how she was recruited into the British security service (MI5).

The first-person narrative is told by the main character, Serena Frome. In the present day she is sixty-one years old, and the events she narrates are said to have taken place forty years earlier, when she was a student in her final year at Cambridge. The story opens with Serena's boyfriend Jeremy and her inability to please him sexually. One day she meets Jeremy's history tutor, Tony Canning, with whom she is soon having an affair. Canning proposes Serena for an MI5 interview but eventually leaves her over what appears to be a trumped up misunderstanding.

As can be gleaned from the short summary, McEwan's storytelling is a bit meandering—some might even say misleading. The reader never learns anything about Serena's work in the MI5, despite the fact that it figures prominently in the first sentence. Jeremy's presence in the story feels like a too-transparent means of introducing Canning, and his homosexuality a too-convenient means of getting rid of him once he has served his purpose (he runs of to Edinburgh to purse a PhD after falling in love with a German violinist named Manfred).

The main flaw of the story, however, is that the relationship between Serena and Canning, which becomes the plot's central thread, is just not that interesting. On the contrary, it feels oddly like what Serena feels when she gazes upon Canning's naked body:

And in a certain light, though it may have been the bedroom curtains, Tony had a yellowish look, like an old paperback, one in which you could read of various misfortunes—knee and appendicitis operations, a dog bite, a rock-climbing accident, and a childhood disaster with a breakfast frying pan, which had left him bereft of a patch of pubic hair.

In the end neither Serena nor Canning makes for a compelling character, and the prose, despite an occasional glimmer, is for the most part forgettable.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Hand on the Shoulder" to be ___.

"P.E."

By Victor Lodato
~6900 words

An obese man receives a visit from his father, whom he hasn't seen in over two years.

The story is narrated in the first person by the main character, Freddy, who lives in Tucson. His father is visiting from New Jersey, and the occasion is a source of great anxiety for Freddy. As a means of coping, he coaches himself through the strategies of Parallel Energetics—presumably the "P.E." of the title, although Freddy's obesity enables an ironic allusion to "physical education"—a New Age group whose core belief holds that "there are other versions of you and they're pretty much walking right next to you at all times."

A great strength of this story lies in the unique characterization of both Freddy and his father. Freddy's obesity, his belief in parallel selves, his close (perhaps intimate) relationship to his P.E. "mentor" Salvatore, and his hostility toward his father make him a prickly, complex character:

What I wanted to tell you is that extraordinary things have happened to me. Are happening to me. You wouldn't think this is something I could easily get off track about. But as Salvatore says, most of my blubber is around my eyes. Apparently, I'm still very angry. I'm always blown away when people tell me that. I mean, I know I'm impatient and irritable and occasionally judgmental, but I really do have a great deal of love in my heart. And not just for my other selves, but for people who have nothing to do with me. People who aren't me, I mean. Strangers. 

Through skillfully executed backstory, we learn one source of Freddy's anger: both his parents were junkies, and his mother hanged herself at least partially in response to the father's philandering. "I came home more than once," Freddy recalls, "to find him with a strung-out stranger with her pants down. He loved women, all makes, all models. Let's just say, my mother became depressed."

For his part the father, despite all his flaws, has apparently come to Tucson out of worry over Freddy:

     My father looked down and shook his head. "Helen said this, but I didn't want to believe her."
     "Said what?"
     "Come on, buddy, sit down. Whatever you need, I'm here to help you."
     "Help me?" The ha-ha in my throat was so big I started choking on it.
     "She thought I should check up on you. See how you're doing."

As might be feared, the family reunion does not go so well—despite a brief bonding as father and son share a stash of Freddy's marijuana—and the story ends with the father wiping tears from his eyes.

"P.E." has a lot going for it. The language is crisp, the characters are unique, and the messy combination of tenderness and dysfunction feels poignant and real. The story's weakness lies in the rather chaotic final scene, where things seem to go off in too many directions at once. Still, this is a strong TNY debut for Victor Lodato.

Satisfactory. Strong (modified 24 December 2012, explanation here).

"Haven"

By Alice Munro
~6800 words

In the 1970s, while her parents are teaching school in Ghana, a 13-year-old girl spends a year with her aunt and uncle in a small Canadian town.

The unnamed first-person narrator and main character is presumably telling the story in the present day—"All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now"—but the perspective is infused with the innocence of her 13-year-old self.

The narrator's guardians, Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jasper, are respectable citizens of the town in which they live. A strength of the story is the way in which their bourgeois existence is defamiliarized through the gaze of the adolescent main character, who finds her new environment to be a mystifying contrast to the more liberal, easy-going world of her parents:

Not to mention the sherry that succeeded the coffee. Sherry or port in crystal glasses of the correct shape and size, and also little cakes topped with shredded coconut, diamond- or crescent-shaped shortbread, chocolate wafers. I myself had never seen the like. My parents gave the kind of parties where people ate chili out of clay pots.

Through the eyes of the narrator the reader comes to discover, beneath the veneer of upper-class respectability, a domain of family secrets and mild dysfunctions and quiet pleasures. A perfectly normal world, in other words, populated by perfectly normal characters who, while competently portrayed, fail to grab the reader for much of the story. The generally flat diction does not help, nor do the jarring switches between the past and present tenses. The strong ending, however, redeems an otherwise marginal story.

Satisfactory.