"Meet the President!"

By Zadie Smith
~4700 words

In a dystopian future, a cosmopolitan adolescent testing a virtual reality device is interrupted by a pair of downtrodden locals.

Fourteen-year-old Bill Peek knows no nationality other than that of the Incipio Security Group, the global surveillance firm for which his father works. As the story opens, he stands on a desolate beach in Felixstowe, England while his father inspects a nearby facility. Reduced to a squalid little town of 850, Felixstowe sits amid the vast swampland known as England, where "[t]he only people left […] were the ones who couldn't leave." (A clever allusion to the Felixstowe flood of 1958—"A hundred years earlier, almost to the very month, a quaint flood had killed only forty-eight people"—places the story in the year 2058, though the exact nature of the calamity that brings about the bleak landscape is never revealed.) Confronted by two locals, a woman and a little girl on their way to a funeral, Bill Peek is torn between his "empathy for the dispossessed" (prized by his instructors at the Pathways Global Institute) and his desire to participate fully in the sprawling fantasy world of his new toy.

In one sense, this story may be read a cautionary fable about the dangers of technology in the age of the surveillance state. That is certainly a timely message, though not a particularly original one. In a second sense, it might interpreted as a kind of allegory of social differentiation and class privilege. That, too, is interesting but not particularly original.

The story's real potential, I think, lies in its characters, primarily in Bill Peek's character, since everything is told from his perspective. In this third sense, unfortunately, the story comes up short. One problem is that the narrator always refers to the protagonist as Bill Peek, never just plain old Bill, creating a subtle distance that undermines the play for the reader's sympathy:

That's how much my father loves me, Bill Peek thought hopefully, that's how much he wants me around.

Additionally, though there is an admirable amount of complexity in Bill Peek's character, the unfamiliar circumstances of the setting keep us from grasping the full significance. Sure, some of it comes through: he's a futuristic version of the military brat, a supranational being whose entire childhood has unfolded in the protective bubble of the Incipio Security Group. But we need more than that. How are we to interpret, for example, the choices Bill Peek makes in his virtual simulation:

He picked out a large pair of breasts, for reasons of his own, and a long, scaled tail, for purposes of strangulation.

Come on. You can't just throw out a detail like that without the slightest explanation. What are these mysterious "reasons of his own"? Is Bill Peek transgendered? Does he harbor a secret desire to be a mermaid? Maybe he's just a typical alienated teen? We aren't allowed to know, and that's a shame. Besides thwarting our ability to understand his interaction with the locals, which is rich in dramatic and psychological potential, the cipher of Bill Peek's character shrouds the story's final sentences in unnecessary enigma.

"Meet the President!" is an ambitious tale that satisfies on a superficial level but disappoints on a deeper one.

Satisfactory.

"Paranoia"

By Shirley Jackson
~4100 words

A man being followed through the streets of New York begins to wonder if he is paranoid.

Soon after the timid Halloran Beresford buys a box of chocolates for his wife on her birthday, he notices the man in the mustache and light-colored hat. He continues to see him at various points on his way home, despite going to extraordinary lengths to avoid him, at times feeling threatened and, at others, wondering if he is imagining the whole thing. When he arrives home, anxious and exhausted, his wife demonstrates concern over his appearance but then locks herself in the hallway, where he overhears her on the phone: "Listen, he came here after all. I've got him."

I thought this story was reasonably well written, boasting a good dose of tension and intrigue and some interesting psychological insights into the main character. I was disappointed in the ending, however, which seemed far too predictable, and the language is nothing to write home about.

Posthumous stories are kind of like that box of chocolates Halloran Beresford carries under his arm: as Forrest Gump famously quipped, you never know what you're gonna get. In the case of "Paranoia," we get a rich, tempting exterior aound a weak, flavorless center.

Satisfactory.

"All Ahead of Them"

By Tobias Wolff
~3700 words

A man discovers his new wife is a pathological liar.

Bud, whose real name is Thomas, is on his honeymoon with his wife Arden, whose real name is Nedra (Arden spelled backwards). Arden has a habit of inventing excuses to explain why she's perpetually late, and Bud has always explained it to himself as a sort of unspoken agreement, "that she could spin transparent yarns and he would indulge her, would even be amused by their transparency." But a phone call from his brother at the beginning of the story reveals that the problem is much more disturbing, and he spends the remainder of the narrative trying to figure out how to handle the revelation before Arden returns (of course she's late).

This is a story all about intriguing characters. Let's begin with Arden. She rips off her own bridesmaids for $250 each. She neglects to leave a tip for a waitress and then blames it on Bud. She hides her real name from close friends. And of course she can't seem to tell her husband the truth about anything. Which brings us to Bud. Sexually dysfunctional with his wife, he compares her smile to his mother's (who tells Bud about a recurrent dream of hers in which she embraces a strange man) and has a creepy attraction to a portrait of Arden's grandmother (a marijuana dealer who hanged herself in prison—the Nedra that Arden doesn't want to be named after):

In fact, she looked sort of Republican, in the way of his own grandmother and his aunts and their friends, a type he'd always been attracted to—women who smoked and drank cocktails and wore glittering rings and perfume and mink coats, which he liked to hang up for them, stroking the fur that somehow brought in the cold on winter nights.

But Bud's biggest problem is that he covers up Arden's lying to others and refuses to confront her about it. He can't even bear the thought of her knowing he knows: "She would never forgive him for knowing." He's apparently decided that he can't risk losing her because she broke off her engagement to a wealthy art dealer in order to marry Bud. It probably also helps that she doesn't complain about Bud's sexual dysfunction (though he's a little disconcerted by her remark that those things happen to men "all the time").

Both Arden and Bud, it turns out, have a serious problem with the truth, and their relationship is founded on lies. How fitting that neither of them even goes by their real name.

This brief story really sneaks up on you. You start out thinking it's going to be about Arden and her lying, and you wonder a bit about the stakes, which seem pretty low, maybe even humorous. But then it takes a serious turn, and you realize the stakes are much higher, having to do with Bud's enabling of his wife's behavior. Bud, in fact, is the only character to appear in the present timeframe (Arden shows up in backstory only). While that might normally be a problem, it works perfectly in a story about the idea a man has crafted of his wife.

My main quibble is with the mother's dream, which seems a bit shoehorned in and then, at the end, rather forced when Bud makes the comparison to Arden's smile. Actually, it seems more appropriate to compare Bud himself to his mother's role in the dream, as he no longer recognizes the woman he has married but is prepared to embrace her anyway. Perhaps the confusion is intentional, but it didn't work for me. Finally, the language of the story is decent but not exceptional.

"All Ahead of Them" is a sobering tale of co-dependency that gets high marks for its compelling, well-wrought characters.

Strong.

"Stars"

By Thomas McGuane
~3600 words

A depressed astronomer finds herself unraveling after she witnesses a hunter kill a wolf.

When Jessica lashes out against the hunter in the first section of the story, it comes across as understandable given her appreciation of nature as expressed in the opening paragraphs. But as the narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that her angry reaction is part of a general hatred of the world including those who care most about her. In the end she decides to take a leave of absence from work and ends up walking "day after day in the hills and mountains around town."

The story begins with a compelling scene but goes downhill from there. Unlikeable protagonists such as Jessica are always a challenge, but they can be successfully developed in several ways, such as: 1) having them make interesting comments about the world or, alternatively, banal comments with interesting language; 2) having them demonstrate self-awareness about their weaknesses; and 3) having them change or evolve over the course of the story. I'm sure there are other possibilities, but these are some of the most prominent.

Of the three, the only one Jessica comes close to is #2: "She wondered if she was just too inflexible" she thinks at one point and "There was no denying her malice" at another. She even seeks counseling, though of course she ends up hating her therapist and, in the end, never seems genuinely bothered by her failings. They're more of an intellectual conundrum for her. Consequently, she is never more than an intellectual conundrum for the reader.

Regarding the other two points (1 and 3), Jessica shows no personal growth (if anything her trajectory is a downward spiral), and her way of thinking about the world is vapid and pedestrian. Her most significant insights are that "she might have been happier as a dog" (which is quickly contradicted) and that "The way geologists are liberated in time, […] astronomers are freed by space" (though later she wonders why she ever became an astronomer).

Similarly, the story's diction is worn and sometimes puzzling: we read of the "crystalline depths" of the plunge pool, a "minor wave of optimism, ascribable to either caffeine or the sunrise," the "gooberish" manner of the therapist, and Jessica's "sightless" exit through the reception area. There's even a dangling participle toward the end ("shivering and waving her on in disgust," which refers to Andy, not the chill).

I do appreciate McGuane's brevity, as I think that "the longer the better" is a temptation too many authors succumb to. But brevity is one thing; incompleteness is another. And "Stars," with its underdeveloped protagonist and unpolished language, feels incomplete.

Weak.

Crime-Fiction Issue: "Scenes of the Crime"

By Cormac McCarthy
~3300 words

Shit happens along the US-Mexican border: drugs get transported, people die violently, a truck leaks sewage, and not a word is spoken.

Because this is a film script (excerpted and adapted, no less) rather than a short story, I don't feel particularly qualified to evaluate it. Please feel free to register your own opinion using the poll or comment thread.


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

Crime-Fiction Issue: "An Inch and a Half of Glory"

By Dashiell Hammett
~4700 words

An unassuming man has trouble dealing with the notoriety he gains after rescuing a child from a burning building.

Earl Parish's fame begins when a brief article—"an inch and a half of simple news"—about his bravery appears in the local paper. The congratulations he receives at work bring him embarrassment but also secret delight, which he comes to miss when they die down. He develops a cavalier attitude toward others that leads to his dismissal from work as well as from several subsequent jobs, and his desire for glory leads him into another burning building, only to end up rescuing a kitten.

The psychological depth of the main character is well done. While the overall evolution he undergoes might strain credibility, the description of each point along the way is well worth reading, from his vacillation before the initial burning building, fearful of how his actions will be interpreted; to his awkwardness at work, where he finally learns to accept praise without perspiring; to his feelings of superiority, encapsulated in the mantra he loves to recite ("All their ancestral courage has been distilled by industrialism out of their veins"); to his descent into madness, which leads him to live on the streets until he finds another burning building in which to rush.

The writing is uneven, at times weak and repetitive. "Nevertheless," we are told, "it was pleasant to lie across his bed…" and then, in the very next sentence, "Lying across the bed, he found these things pleasant." Other times, it seems overly enigmatic or out of perspective: "Out of sight, the suspended blow in the child's face was without power." Finally, the last section of the story feels unnecessary. Given the title and the evolution of Parish's character, wouldn't the flurry of artificial snow from the shredded newspaper articles, at the end of the penultimate section, have been an ideal place to end?

"An Inch and a Half of Glory" is an entertaining read that, like many posthumous pieces, has an unpolished feel to it.

Satisfactory.


Also from the crime-fiction issue: "Brotherly Love," "Scenes of the Crime," "Happy Trails," "Slide to Unlock," "Rough Deeds."

"The Fragments"

By Joshua Ferris
~3700 words

A man overhears snippets of unrelated conversations, including one that suggests his wife Katy is having an affair.

The unnamed protagonist receives a call that is clearly not intended for him. The lines seem to have gotten crossed (Does that sort of thing happen in the digital age? A reasonable suspension of disbelief, I suppose.) at a most inopportune moment, and he hears his wife's voice saying things to another man such as "…no, he thinks I'm…" and "…just wish… could spend the night…." Convinced that Katy is having an affair, all the while hearing additional fragments of random conversations, the main character sinks into an ever deeper funk and eventually invites strangers into his apartment to cart away his possessions.

The basic question posed by this story—How much can we interpret from a snippet of dialogue?—is an intriguing one. Clearly the main character's answer—A great deal—is the source of his misery, and while we may suspect that he's jumping to conclusions, we also feel ourselves being pulled along with him. The characterization is quite good, but the story's greatest achievement lies in the "fragments," which somehow manage to feel remarkably pedestrian yet remarkably interesting, brimming with a true-to-life quality that cuts across all sociological strata:

He stood at the crosswalk.
"So we're like a fund of funds, because we take a stake, but we can't, you know, we have, what, a ten, maybe twenty per cent—"
"Right," the other guy said.
"Anyway, he's an asshole, but he knows how to make money."
"Best kind of asshole."
He passed two women without coats smoking outside a building.
"Seriously, girl," the one said.
"I know, I know—but can I just tell you?" She drew close and whispered.
After work, he went to the gym. He sat down in the locker room and was removing his shoes as two guys he knew by sight were on their way out.
"But not female masturbation, just male masturbation."
"So you fap yourself?"
"But just dudes. The word for female's like… no, I don't remember."

My one objection is to the ending, when the story veers into the wife's point of view, breaking the spell created by the fragments, all of which are filtered through the main character's perspective.

Despite the ending, "The Fragments" gets high marks for its thought-provoking premise and compelling language.

Strong.

"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 ___.

"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 ___.

"Zusya on the Roof"

By Nicole Krauss

~4900 words

An aging Jewish scholar, convalescing from bowel surgery, kidnaps his new grandson hours before the circumcision is to take place.

For two weeks after Brodman's surgery, his body waging "a medieval war against double pneumonia" and his life in the balance, the protagonist lives in a hallucinatory state in which he imagines himself hunted by Jews and given safe harbor by Germans:

Enormous things happened to him during those feverish weeks, unspeakable revelations. Unbuttoned from time, transient and transcendental, Brodman saw the true shape of his life, how it had torqued always in the direction of duty. Not only his life but the life of his people—the three thousand years of treacherous remembering, highly regarded suffering, and waiting.

Upon awakening, he recalls the story of Rabbi Zusya, who, standing in judgment before God, worries that he did not lead an exemplary life. But God asks him simply, why weren't you you? Brodman's own answer to that question—"Because I was a Jew, and there was no room left to be anything else, not even Zusya"—informs the rest of narrative, leading him to chafe at the faith in which he has always felt "crushed by duty." His rebellion comes to a boil the day of the circumcision, when he whisks his grandson away in his Moses basket and ascends with him to the rooftop of the apartment building.

At the center of this story lies the remarkable character of Brodman, the once-prolific Jewish historian whose fertile understanding has "dried up" and given way to "unspeakable revelations." The touching relationship between the protagonist and his unnamed grandson becomes the emotional anchor of the narrative:

He held his breath, staring at the whorls of the child's perfect ear, luminescent, as if painted by Fra Filippo Lippi. Afraid of dropping him, Brodman tried to shift the bundle in his arms, but the baby stared and opened his sticky, lashless eyes. Brodman felt something being tugged painfully from his decrepit body. He held the boy against his chest and would not let go.

But the relationship is not simply sentimental; it is also deeply symbolic. In his hallucinations, Brodman "half believed that his own mental work had performed the labor. […] he had pushed the idea of the child through the tight passage of incredulity and borne him into existence." He wonders if his grandson will be named after him. Fittingly, that question is never answered, for it is Brodman, in a sense, who has been named after the child: restored to life just as his grandson comes into the world. He even bears a physical scar to show for his rebirth: an "ugly red welt, four inches across" in place of his navel (which was removed in the tumorectomy). In return, he now seeks to spare his grandson the removal of flesh that is the sign God's covenant. To allow Zusya to be Zusya.

"Zusya on the Roof" is an extraordinary story. While I wonder a bit about the extent of the backstory regarding Brodman's parents, especially when it slips into their perspective ("in her mind she went on navigating rooms, staircases, corners, and corridors" etc.), such quibbles do not alter my final assessment: highly original plot, rich and compelling characters, incandescent language.

Outstanding.

Reader poll: I found "Zusya on the Roof" to be ___.

"Mayfly"

By Kevin Canty
~4600 words

A reunion between old friends produces unexpected complications.

The main character, James, drives with his unemployed and rather fragile fiancée, Molly, from Montana to Colorado, where they are to stay at the home of James's college roommate, Sam, his wife, Jenny, and their three kids. Sam, having remembered his friend's arrival date incorrectly, has to depart the next day on a road trip to Denver, on which Molly decides to accompany him. James begins to imagine Molly and Sam running off together and ends up having sex with Jenny. The next morning Molly and Sam return, James realizes that Molly was not unfaithful to him, and things go back to normal.

The highlight of the story is the opening scene, in which Molly and James stop the car in a swarm of migrating Monarch butterflies:

He looked at the tangle of wings and bodies in the grille of the car. Some of them were still moving, or maybe it was just the wind. Butterflies landed on his arm, his face, his hair, creeping him out. But Molly's eyes were wet. Let her sort it out, he thought. Let Molly figure it out for herself.

The writing is strong throughout. Canty is particularly good at capturing the wide-open spaces of the west; in addition to the opening scene there is a gorgeous description of trout fishing. But the storytelling runs aground on a series of aimless clichés: James is bored with his job, he misses his parents (both deceased), he wants to think that he and Molly will "live happily ever after," but he is done taking care of her. Even the epiphany sounds like a cliché: "the cup is already broken, and no one cares," James thinks.

Beautiful writing isn't enough to save "Mayfly" from a banal plot and unremarkable characters.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Mayfly" 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 ___.

"Literally"

By Antonya Nelson
~5000 words

In an affluent Houston neighborhood, a recently widowed father struggles with a high-strung sixteen-year-old daughter and a precocious eleven-year-old son.

The story begins in the daughter's perspective as she frantically awaits the arrival of the family's Spanish-speaking housekeeper: Suzanne needs Bonita to iron her Dairy Queen uniform before she can leave for work. The perspective quickly shifts to the son, Danny, who watches his sister's distress with amused detachment from the breakfast table, before jumping to the father, Richard (also at the breakfast table), on whom it will settle for the remainder of the story. Bonita finally arrives along with her son Isaac, who is the same age as Danny and strongly attached to him. Isaac is ill, and Richard allows Danny to play hooky to keep him company before going off to work, only to be summoned home when Bonita reports that the boys have disappeared. The rest of the story involves the search for the boys, who are found unharmed at Bonita and Isaac's apartment across town, where Bonita's ex-husband makes and awkward appearance, and the return of Suzanne, who is in another tizzy, this time because she's lost her cell phone.

The visual quality of the details is one of the story's highlights, from the menacing characters who loiter in the streets of Bonita's neighborhood to her bleak apartment building:

Now it was a shoddy ruin, a place with broken balcony railings and pocked with a hundred ugly satellite dishes, a dry swimming pool filled with forsaken furniture and fenced off with concertina wire. Bonita's apartment was both too high for the rickety balcony to seem safe and too low to keep out a persistent climber. A breeding ground of anxiety and temptation.

And then there is Bonita, with her orange-streaked hair, impractical high heels, pink leopard-spotted bag, and barely passable English, attempting to negotiate the awkward tension in her apartment when Richard shows up to find her ex-husband repairing a sprinkler head.

The strongly crafted characters are a model of showing without telling, perfectly dramatizing the right-place-wrong-time messiness of human relationships:

Tears: they did not require translation. How convenient it would be, Richard thought, Bonita's wiry hair against his neck, her face on his shoulder, how terribly useful if they could simply wed, he minus a wife, she with her problematic ex-husband, and regroup together like a sitcom family in the fortified comfort of Richard's house across town, an arrangement that would be possible if they could just ignore that troubling enigma of love.

The messiness extends to the narrative itself: the confused initial perspective, the meandering storyline, the ghostly presence of Richard's wife, who does not acquire a name—Eve—until the final paragraphs, where it is revealed that her tragic death may not have been an accident after all. The story's cryptic title, alluded to only once in the text (it is Danny's favorite word, which Richard likes to use incorrectly), adds a final unsettling element to the mix.

"Literally" offers much to admire, including beautiful language and complex characters, but the narrative obfuscations are at times a bit overdone.

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

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

"Demeter"

By Maile Meloy
~4900 words

In a retelling of the myth of Persephone, a mother comes to terms with the separation agreement that gives her half-year custody of her thirteen-year-old daughter.

The story begins in late summer, as the eponymous main character delivers her daughter Perry (whose real name is Elizabeth) to her ex-husband Hank. Demeter has chosen this schedule specifically to avoid "giving [Perry] up in the dead of winter"; in the summer the hand-off is marginally bearable "with a little pharmaceutical help." And indeed, after a brief breakdown in the car outside Hank's house, Demeter manages to drag herself back home and then off to the municipal pool, where a thunderstorm and a bit of horseplay with a lighthearted crowd of teenagers succeed in lifting her spirits.

The humanity of the main character is one of the story's strengths. While clearly attached to her daughter, Demeter also allows herself to admit that

if she had a time machine she would go back and erase the conception. Then there wouldn't be this agony, there wouldn't be the black times. She would have found other sources of love, and she wouldn't have this gnawing emptiness. One tiny erasure and everything would be different.

We also learn that, in the 1970s, Demeter had an affair with Hank's business partner Duncan "as a matter of course. It was just an extension of her ordinary love." When Duncan died unexpectedly on a scuba-diving trip with Hank, Demeter imagined first that Hank had murdered him and then that he had killed himself out of guilt. Near the end of the story, at the municipal pool, she is overcome with emotion by an encounter with Duncan's teenage daughter.

Demeter's humanity is also an irony of sorts, since she is clearly portrayed as a modern-day equivalent of the Greek goddess of the harvest. This, I believe, is the story's weakness. While clever, the correspondences are too heavy-handed, even down to the names (though we are told that naming Elizabeth Persephone "would have been unfair," she still ends up with a suspiciously similar nickname). The problem is that the most glaring parallels set up an expectation of one-to-one correspondence with the myth, which ultimately has a shackling effect on the interpretation. Is Hank Hades? If so, why is his house on a hill rather than underground? Is Perry's consumption of red meat and sugar in Hank's company supposed to allude to the mythical pomegranate seeds? Or is it simply a contrast to Demeter's goddess-of-grain vegetarianism? Etc.

The broader question is: what does the story gain through these mythological parallels other than a kind of sophomoric elitism (clever author encodes story with clever classical references to be decoded by clever readers)? Wouldn't it be preferable to sow the parallels on a deeper, structural level, borrowing from the myth's inherent drama rather than its superficial contours?

In short, the rich characterization of "Demeter" is marred by the story's self-conscious classicism.

Satisfactory.

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

"Ox Mountain Death Song"

Runner-up, 2012 Criticus Award!
(View announcement here. Winner here.)

By Kevin Barry
~3200 words

A soon-to-retire police sergeant stalks a terminally ill sociopath.

The omniscient perspective in this third-person narrative moves between Sergeant Tom Brown and a young rake referred to as Canavan (presumably his last name). Brown's determination to have Canavan "looked after" before his retirement in three weeks becomes a morbid obsession that drives the narrative. Meanwhile, Canavan's cancer diagnosis encourages him to act with impunity, pillaging widows and "planting babies all over the Ox Mountains." His preternatural knowledge of the landscape—"He knew the bog roads, the copses, the cypress arbors. He knew the recesses of the hills and the turlough hides. He knew the crannies of the coasts"—keeps him one step ahead of Brown for most of the tale.

The story has a fable-like quality that comes across in references to the characters as "particulars" but also as "types," and in allusions to the cyclical nature of the struggle in which they are engaged:

The years gave in, the years gave out, and only the trousers changed—breeches of sackcloth gave way to rain-soaked gabardine, gave way to tobacco-scented twill, and on to the denim variations (boot cut; straight leg; at glamorous times, beflared), and then to the nylon track pant, and then to cotton sweats. The signal gesture of a Canavan in all this time did not change: it was a jerk of thumb to the waistband to hoick up the pants.

The symbolic dimension is enhanced by consistent animal imagery. Canavan is compared on several occasions to a ferret, "the forked spit of the tongue lapping at the neck blood, the pointed teeth taking tendon and bone apart." Brown himself is a large, sweaty man who sucks honey straight from the tub, a fitting denizen of the eponymous Ox Mountains:

It was a place haunted by desperate mammals since the hills and mountains had cracked and opened—as the province of Connaught formed—a place with a diabolic feeling sometimes along its shale and bracken stretches; a darkness that seeped not from above but from beneath.

As the narrative progresses and Brown nears his much-coveted goal, it becomes clear that Canavan is not the only "desperate mammal" lurking in the Ox Mountains.

"Ox Mountain Death Song" is a unique story written in hauntingly beautiful language. One can practically hear the author's Irish lilt in the ebb and flow of the syntax, and the effortless lyricism pushes the piece into the realm of prose poetry. Despite the quasi-mythic dimension, however, the narrative manages to produce a pair of remarkably complex characters.

Outstanding.

Reader poll: I found "Ox Mountain Death Song" to be ___.

"Fischer vs. Spassky"

By Lara Vapnyar
~3700 words

The death of Bobby Fischer triggers a string of memories related to a woman's emigration from the former Soviet Union.

The frame of this third-person narrative takes place in the near-present (2008), in which the main character, Marina, still feels the loss of her husband Sergey, who died thirty years earlier. On the way to the house of an elderly cancer patient, Elijah, for whom she is caring, Marina hears the news of Fischer's death. The revelation leads to the story's inner narrative, which unfolds at the time of Fischer's famous match against Spassky (1972). It turns out that Sergey, like many liberal Russian Jews of the time, was a fan of Fischer because he represented the public face of America and "the promise of everything that was good." Sergey decides that if Fischer wins the match then he, Marina, and their son will emigrate from the Soviet Union. As the match proceeds, however, Marina comes to realize that she does not want to leave, and the conflict crystallizes in her as an irrational hatred of Bobby Fischer.

The story does a fine job of conveying how seemingly obscure people and events—in this case Bobby Fischer—can cast long shadows over our lives. In the past, Fischer's defeat of Spassky changed Marina's life forever. In the present, his death revives the memory of her husband and prompts her to reassess her old animosity toward the chess champ. The many ironies—that Marina never wanted to leave the U.S.S.R. in the first place; that her husband died shortly after arriving in America; that Fischer, who represented the hope of many American-loving Russian Jews, became increasingly anti-Semitic and ended up dying in Iceland; that Marina's cancer patient prefers Spassky to Fischer, leading her to defend the man she once loathed—add rich texture to the narrative.

One weakness is that Marina's character feels underdeveloped. The lack is especially noteworthy in contrast to the opening paragraph, in which the main character's sense of loss is described in such vivid, visceral terms:

For a long time after her husband died, Marina used to scream. She'd feel the scream rushing up from her stomach, choking her from the inside, and she'd run out of the room, stumbling over her kids' toys, and hide in the hallway, in the narrow space between the coatrack and the mirror stand, biting down on her right forearm to muffle the sound. After the scream had passed, and she unclenched her teeth, there would be little circular marks on her arm that looked like irregular postage stamps.

Yet the inner narrative does not portray Marina as particularly close to Sergey (on the contrary, there seems to be a good deal of tension between them), and the frame narrative is not long enough to expound on her sense of loss (nor on the precise nature of her relationship with Elijah).

For someone who learned English as an adult, Vapnyar's command of language is astounding. "Fischer vs. Spassky" is a fascinating and poignant story that could be excellent with a bit more character development.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Fischer vs. Spassky" to be ___.

"The Third-Born"

By Mohsin Hamid
~4700 words

Through the accident of his third-born status, a young boy seems poised to rise out of squalor.

The story is a kind of a monologue directed at the unnamed main character, told in the second-person by a narrator—possibly the protagonist at a later stage in life—with direct knowledge of the future. The main point seems to be that the desperate conditions in which the boy lives (he is suffering from hepatitis E when the story opens) do not doom him to a life of misery:

As you lie motionless afterward, a jaundiced village boy, radish juice dribbling from the corner of your lips and forming a small patch of mud on the ground, it must seem that getting filthy rich is beyond your reach. But have faith. Your are not as powerless as you appear. Your moment is about to come.

But the narrator never reveals this "moment," preferring to dwell on the luck of the draw that makes it possible:

There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do do with chance, and the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village [like the firstborn sister]. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant [like the second-born brother]. Third means you are not, like your parents' fourth child, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.

While "The Third-Born" is beautifully written and abounds with fascinating characters and rich descriptions of the setting (an unnamed developing country, perhaps the author's native Pakistan), it is weak on plot and feels more like a novel excerpt than a self-contained story.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Third-Born" to be ___.
Reader challenge: This week's story by Mohsin Hamid is written in the second person, a once-unusual choice that appears to be gaining in popularity. Off the top of my head I can name four other second-person stories: "Forever Overhead" by David Foster Wallace (1999), "Miss Lora" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love" by Junot Díaz (both from this year), and, thanks to a previous comment on this blog, "The Places You Find Yourself" by Jerome Edwards (2010). What other second-person narratives (short story or novel) are you familiar with? Please answer in the comments.

"After Ellen"

By Justin Taylor

~4200 words

A d.j. flees to San Francisco after abandoning his girlfriend in Portland, Oregon.

The narrative begins with the main character, Scott, in the driveway of the house he sublets with the eponymous Ellen, packing all his possessions into the car on which they both rely. He can't explain precisely why he is leaving and is plagued with doubt about it (especially since Ellen is away and has no idea of his plan), but he carries through with his intention, leaving behind only an ill-composed note beneath the pepper mill on the kitchen counter. We follow his flight down Interstate 5 to California, where he makes his way to San Francisco and eventually begins a new life with a barista named Olivia and a lost dog that turns out to be pregnant with nine puppies.

The language and imagery are strong throughout, and the narrative offers excellent examples of how different points of view can be effectively incorporated into a limited third-person perspective. Consider the following:

When he turns his phone back on, he learns that Ellen called him sixteen times in the first two days he was gone. Her initial messages are desperate and imploring—baby whatever I did wrong; baby I don't understand; baby TALK TO ME—but that tone is soon supplanted by frustration, then rage. "You pussy!" she screams in one of them. 

And the following:

Andy's profile picture is a closeup of him and Ellen in a staring contest, eyes wide open and nose tips touching, in what Scott believes to be the master bedroom of the house he fled.

And:

Olivia, naked in the bedroom doorway, draws a sharp breath when she sees why Scott is frozen. She sidles up behind him, her belly against his back, and slides her arms around his waist—thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans.

The main character is also well crafted, but, in contrast to the others, he seems deliberately designed to repel the reader's sympathy. He can't bring himself to close his goodbye note to Ellen with "Love." In phone conversations with his parents, he manipulates details about Olivia to cause the greatest distress possible. He constructs bizarre fantasies about the owners of the lost dog he has claimed for himself. And so on.

Deeply flawed main characters are perfectly acceptable, even desirable, as long as they possess significant redeeming qualities (see, for example, "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy" or "The Cheater's Guide to Love"). But the few tokens of sympathy in Scott—his initial misgivings about leaving Ellen and his tearful departure—feel forced and insufficient to counteract all that comes afterward.

"After Ellen" gets points for language, imagery, and perspective, but the risk it takes with the main character doesn't ultimately pay off.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "After Ellen" to be ___.

"Another Life"

By Paul La Farge
~4200 words

A disaffected husband cheats on his wife with a sexy young bartender.

An interesting feature of this third-person narrative is that the husband and wife remain anonymous throughout; only the secondary characters, including the bartender (who becomes central by the end), have names. The point of view is primarily that of the husband as he accompanies his wife on a heavily-sedated drive from New York to Boston; attends his father-in-law's sixtieth birthday party; leaves the celebration early; and skulks about in the hotel bar, where his wife eventually joins him and, by all appearances, runs off with another man in front of him. The husband then makes a move on the bartender, whose name appears on his receipt as "April P," and the narrative slips into her point of view for the denouement.

The piece stands out for its storytelling and characterization. The present tense gives the plot an immediacy that draws the reader in from the beginning, and despite being told in two massive paragraphs of roughly 2000 words each, the narrative tension never flags. The characters themselves are thoroughly unloveable specimens, too petty and self-absorbed to command our sympathy yet sufficiently ironized to permit our enjoyment. The husband, for example, wallows in self-pity:

I'm a fuckup, he says. […] I'm nearly forty years old and I don't know anything about Emily Dickinson, or Kate Chopin, or Stendhal, or Hardy, or Fielding! I've never read Turgenev! […] The truth is, he says, my stories suck. The reason no one reads them is because they're awful, they have no point, they go on and on and then, then they stop.

The wife, for her part, runs off with a sleazebag while her husband looks on. The sleazebag (whose real name is Jim LaMont) is, well, a sleazebag. And April P, while poised to be the most sympathetic of the lot—she is described as caring for an invalid sister—turns out to have had a one-night stand with the sleazebag and ends up leaving the husband for dead on a park bench.

The narrative voice and perspective, while mostly spot on, do have a few glitches. When the wife leaves the bar, for example, we read the following:

The bartender, too, looks surprised that the wife has gone running after the total sleazebag. But what if this was how things worked with the husband and wife? What if they had an arrangement that they could sleep with whomever they wanted? What if they were brave, free people whose love for each other could not be damaged by a random hotel hookup? God, what if?

It is unclear where this voice comes from and what purpose it serves. It certainly does not speak the truth, for the husband and wife clearly do not have such an arrangement. Are these April P's thoughts intruding into what has been exclusively the husband's perspective? Or are they supposed to express some sort of wish on the husband's part? Whatever the case, the point is lost and never pursued again, turning this odd little digression into something of a narrative red herring.

Finally, the switch into April's P's perspective at the end of the story is a bit awkward. It first happens as the husband blathers on to her and she begins thinking about Jim LaMont. Then we're back in the husband's head as he leaves the bar with her, but when he loses consciousness on the park bench we return to her point of view, and it is there the story ends. While the shift isn't totally disorienting, it's not entirely clear what it accomplishes except to show us a bit of April P's callousness, which has already become clear.

"Another Life" is an entertaining story that, like "The Golden Vanity," "Ever Since," or "Expectations," succeeds on strong writing (with a few question marks) and morbidly interesting characters.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Another Life" to be ___.

Sci-Fi Issue: "The Republic of Empathy"

By Sam Lipsyte
~5000 words

Interrelated stuff happens, from six different points of view.

Poor William. His wife wants to have another kid, but he’s just getting used to the first one. While he moans about his plight to his artist pal Gregory, the two of them witness a brawl on a city rooftop. A man falls to his death. Then it’s Rip Van Winkle time: Gregory wakes up in the middle of the next night, only to discover he’s in a different era (and maybe a different world). Damned if he doesn’t already have a second kid, and there’s a third bun in the oven. William wanders through his now unfamiliar home, stepping out onto the moonlit front lawn. Little does he know, but a drone fighter is bearing down on him in the night sky, missiles loaded.

That summary leaves out a few tidbits. Like the story of Danny, the embittered child of a sexually frisky (but somehow neutered) homicide detective. And don’t forget Leon and Fresko, the two janitors who roughhouse on the roof of the building they clean, play-fighting until one of them is accidentally winged off the edge. And there’s Zach, the gazillionaire who wonders about authenticity, and wants to hire a hack named Gregory (remember him from the first paragraph?) to paint in the style of a famous artist. And we shouldn’t forget Reaper 5, the chatty drone aircraft preparing to fire on William.

Lipsyte’s tale starts simply:

My wife wanted another baby. But I thought Philip was enough. A toddler is a lot. I couldn’t picture us going through the whole ordeal again. We’d just gotten our lives back. We needed time to snuggle with them, plan their futures.

Soon the tender tone slips, and we find ourselves edging into sarcasm and sass. The world turns increasingly unreal, and the narrative wheels through six vignettes loosely connected by the rooftop murder and a universal anxiety about authenticity. Each story is too short for the characters to evolve very much—although that doesn’t really matter, since all the characters are basically the same, at least in terms of attitude. Each is endowed with snappy dialogue that might have boiled over from Dashiell Hammett. True, it seems a bit arch at times, but it’s also aware of its own archness—a feature that will irritate some and entertain others.

The surprising thing about “The Republic of Empathy” is that it more or less works. Each vignette builds on some aspect of the others, and gradually something akin to a story emerges. The murder isn’t a real murder, but rather a pretend murder gone wrong. The artist refuses to produce knock-offs for the gazillionaire, preferring to paint works that stand in for the “original” work of pretend artists in films and TV shows. Even the tone is complicit with unreality: after all, what is sarcasm if not the copy of something authentic, pronounced with a hint of inauthenticity (though I’m sure you already picked up on that, didn’t you)?

Not a moving piece, but a fiendishly clever one.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Republic of Empathy" to be ___.

Also from the sci-fi issue: "Monstro," "Black Box," "My Internet."