"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.

"Collectors"

By Daniel Alarcón

~6800 words

Two men from different social backgrounds become lovers in prison.

Rogelio is an illiterate rural kid arrested for transporting drug money for his brother. Henry is a writer jailed for a subversive play about the country's president. (The name of the country is not revealed, but it would appear to be somewhere in Latin America.) They end up in the same cell in the country's most infamous prison, called Collectors, where they become friends and then lovers. Henry is released after a year and a half, but Rogelio dies in a prison riot.

Despite a compelling plot with several potentially poignant moments, this story failed to move me. The problems begin, I think, with the divided perspective. The narrative opens in Rogelio's point of view but switches to Henry's on the second page and never returns. Henry is clearly the main character, which makes the choice of initial perspective rather baffling. And even once the POV switches to Henry, it becomes a bit fuzzy on occasion, for example:

"It was an idea that all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison." How would Henry know such a thing?

And:

"She was perfect, he said, and she was…" Do we really need that secondary narrative confirmation? Ironically, it undermines Henry's POV rather than reinforcing it.

I also found the emphasis on chronological precision (three dates are mentioned: 1980, 1982, and April 8, 1986) a bit odd, especially given that details such as the name of country are never revealed.

Finally, the story felt on the unoriginal side to me. Prison stories are not exactly new, nor are those of prison love, and this one doesn't do much in my view to rise above the competition. In general, Alarcón borrows too heavily from the Latin American writers he clearly admires: the prison lovers from Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman and the sweeping perspective of García Márquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude come to mind.

"Collectors" is a passable story that misses many opportunities to be exceptional.

Satisfactory.

"Mastiff"

By Joyce Carol Oates
~5200 words

A woman's companion intervenes when a mastiff turns on her.

The main character, whose name is Mariella but is always referred to as "the woman," is hiking with a man she has recently begun dating (the man's name is revealed as Simon toward the end of the story). As she hikes, the woman reflects on her ambivalence toward Simon and on her own insecurities. One such insecurity, a fear of dogs she has harbored since childhood, is triggered by a mastiff she encounters on the hiking trail. When the dog later attempts to attack her, Simon intervenes and is critically wounded. The ER doctors save him, and the woman is left to reevaluate her earlier ambivalence.

The story's strength lies in the way in which the woman, who is not a particularly sympathetic character, is forced to confront her prior feelings toward Simon. Unfortunately, various elements undermine the force of this denouement. First, the reference to the characters as "the man" and "the woman," even though their names are revealed (the woman's at the beginning and the man's at the end), is a bit baffling, generating a narrative coldness that retards character development. Second, the POV is rather lazy toward the beginning, drifting from the main character for no good reason ("The friend, closer to the man than to the woman, had said to the man…"; "The man was a little annoyed by the woman. Yet he was drawn to her…" etc.). Third, the woman's canine phobia feels like a convenient stock element—do we need her to be terrified of dogs in order to be attacked by one?—and the choice of a mastiff seems particularly stereotypical (and a bit unfair to the breed, which is not as prone to attack as some others).

Finally, Joyce's language is not at its finest here, from awkward images (the sun sets like a "broken bloody egg") to cliched language (the woman's eyelids "were so heavy she could barely keep them open") to an over-reliance on adverbs (the dog barks furiously, the woman recalls longingly and listens avidly, the man feels sharply, the dog's master shouts futilely, the woman's heart beats erratically, etc.).

"Mastiff" has a good story to tell, but it is burdened by conventional language and unsatisfying narrative choices.

Barely satisfactory.

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."

Crime-Fiction Issue: "Slide to Unlock"

By Ed Park
~1100 words

A man contemplates the logic behind his many cyber passwords.

Most of the sentences in the story explain the logic behind one password or another: "Your daughter's name backward plus the year of her birth" or "Your daughter's best friend's name backward" or "The girl at work backward and lowercase plus last two digits of current year." Every once in a while the flow is interrupted by a two-word sentence in italics: Stop stalling. Only in the last paragraph is it revealed why the protagonist is rehearsing his passwords in this manner.

I liked the premise of this piece, but I have a few objections. First, I don't find second-person narratives convincing when they are really just a substitute for first-person. If there is a good reason—shame or psychological remoteness, for example—for the narrator to distance himself, the second-person can be effective (Junot Díaz's "Miss Lora" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love" come to mind in this regard). But I don't see the justification here; instead it feels like a phony attempt at suspense. Second, the transition into the last section feels artificial for me and, to some extent, defies the general logic of the narrative in order to set up an O. Henry ending.

Though not without flaws, "Slide to Unlock" is an entertaining story built on a unique premise to which we can all relate.

Satisfactory.


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

Crime-Fiction Issue: "Rough Deeds"

By Annie Proulx
~5100 words

A timber rush in colonial New England sets up a confrontation between a French trader and a Scottish mill owner.

Having fled to New France (Canada) from a suffocating existence across the Atlantic, Duquet parlays his frontier skills and connections with refined Bostonians into a small timber empire in the forests of Maine. But his success breeds competition, and when he captures a tree poacher on his land and tortures him, the victim's father plots a grisly revenge.

This is a well-researched piece, rich in historical detail. Proulx is adept at showing how national political rivalries are no impediment to the frontier ambitions of determined individuals. The French Duquet profits from the advice of an Englishman and trades lucratively with Scottish shipyards; and though he meets his fate at the hands of a Scotsman, it is the result of a personal vendetta rather than the colonial rivalries that motivate their mother countries.

Unfortunately, the story's compelling historical dimension is undermined by a serious character deficit. Nothing in Duquet endears us to him. We know that he is ambitious and resourceful, but other than the explosive fury to which he is prone, we know almost nothing of his intimate life. Indeed, it is a bit jarring to learn that the name of his business is Duquet et Fils (which later becomes Duke and Sons) when we've heard nothing about his children or even if he was ever married.

A related problem is the story's stakes. Yes, we are told that "arrangements with the English and the Scots were still secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous," and we witness early on the confrontation between Duquet and the captured poacher, but none of this seems beyond what one would expect in any frontier tale, and with no investment in the main character, we have little incentive to care. When the stakes finally become clear, it feels too late, and the ending falls flat.

"Rough Deeds" passes muster on the strength of its historical dimension, but the mediocre characters and ho-hum stakes weigh it down considerably.

Satisfactory.


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

"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.

"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 ___.

"Marjorie Lemke"

By Sarah Braunstein
~6300 words

A hotel maid with low self esteem has an affair with a guest recovering from bariatric surgery.

At twenty years old, Marjorie Lemke believes herself to be the "major loser" she was first called in the fourth grade. A recovering drug addict and single mother of an infant girl, she sleeps on a pullout sofa in her aunt's basement and carries her baby, Della, around with her on the hotel cleaning cart. One day while cleaning rooms she meets Gabe, who is recovering from a stomach-stapling operation while his wife travels around on a "union busting" job. They strike up a relationship that quickly goes beyond friendship. When Marjorie learns that Gabe wants a child so badly he has sabotaged his wife's diaphragm, she suggests that she will give him Della.

The strength of the story lies in the complexity of the characters and the symbolic ties that unite them: both Marjorie, who has something she doesn't want (a fatherless child), and Gabe, who wants something he doesn't have (a baby of his own). The solution is seemingly simple yet so shocking that it can only be alluded to in the powerful final scene. The figure of Gabe's wife, Violet, rounds out the story with yet another well-crafted character.

Speaking of character, the story presents an interesting problem: how to endear readers to a protagonist who doesn't really like herself. The author attempts this difficult task in three ways: first, by offering a telescoped retrospective of Marjorie's life in the first paragraph, so that we quickly come to see her lost innocence and vulnerability; second, by making the character self-aware, conscious of her own weaknesses; and third, by showing her struggling—and mostly failing—to overcome them. What emerges is a complex portrait of a deeply flawed woman.

While the language of "Marjorie Lemke" is unexceptional and the plot minimal, the strongly fashioned characters make it a worthwhile read.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Marjorie Lemke" to be ___.

"The Judge's Will"

By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
~6000 words

A woman discovers that her husband has made a provision in his will for a long-time mistress.

Unlike the typical wife, Binny accepts her husband's infidelity "as though she had just heard some spicy piece of gossip," sharing the news with her son Yasi, with whom she has an unusually close relationship. When she learns that her husband has ordered Yasi to look after the mistress, she threatens to take him away with her, from the family home in Delhi to her childhood home in Bombay. But Yasi's delicate mood and an illness on the part of the mistress put those plans on hold.

Well-crafted characters form the heart of this story. Particularly noteworthy is the quasi-Oedipal relationship between Binny and Yasi, which prompts Binny to end her one remaining female friendship when the woman comments: "It's all Freud, of course." The coldness between Binny and the judge is nicely complemented by a tender scene at the end. And then there's the mistress, Phul—fool?—delicate and exposed, pushed by her lover into an impossible dependency on his mercurial son and wife.

While the plot of "The Judge's Will" is rather aimless and the language unremarkable, the colorful characters make it worth a read—even as the muddled perspective makes it difficult to identify fully with any of them.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "The Judge's Wife" to be ___.

"Checking Out"

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
~7300 words

A Nigerian man living in London on an expired visa agrees to an arranged marriage to legalize his immigration status.

At home in Nigeria, Obinze Maduewesi dreams of immigrating to America. After several humiliating denials of his visa application, he accompanies his mother to a conference in London as her "research assistant." When his six-month visa runs out, he resorts to cleaning toilets and moving refrigerators under a usurped U.K. identity. He pays a pair of shady Angolans to arrange his marriage to a British citizen, offering him the promise of permanent legal residence, but on the day of the ceremony his illegal status is discovered, resulting in his arrest and imminent deportation.

The story does a good job of portraying the life of illegal immigrants in the U.K., but I feel that it veers into clichés that should be avoided. Cleaning toilets and moving refrigerators are jobs that almost everyone envisions immigrants carrying out; they feel unoriginal even if they are accurate. Another issue is that Obinze as a character is too virtuous—he has no flaws except possibly overachievement—and his exploitation is too predictable. What is set up as a tragic ending feels more like stale melodrama, unredeemed by the author's competent but unexceptional command of language.

"Checking Out" passes muster as a hard-luck immigrant's tale, but it pales in comparison to Zadie Smith's "The Embassy of Cambodia," which tells a similar story with much greater complexity.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Checking Out" 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 ___.

"Summer of '38"

By Colm Tóibín

~6900 words

An elderly woman recalls her affair with a Nationalist soldier during the siege of a Republican stronghold in the Spanish Civil War.

Montse learns from her daughter Ana that a man from the electric company, who is writing a book about the civil war, wishes to meet with her. She is reluctant to do so but relents when he shows up at her doorstep. The man explains that a former general of Franco's, Rudolfo Ramirez, is coming to town for an interview and has asked to see Montse when he arrives. The news triggers a long flashback in which the young Montse has an affair with Ramirez as her village is besieged by the Nationalists. When the town is near surrender, Ramirez disappears and Montse discovers she is pregnant. She marries a local boy named Paco, who raises the child, Rosa, as his own. Montse comes to feel genuine fondness for Paco and has two more daughters by him, including Ana. The final scenes return to the present, where it becomes clear that Montse has never told Rosa that Paco (now deceased) was not her real father. Montse declines to have lunch with Ramirez.

The story is characterized by the type of quiet narrative that has been a staple of Irish literature since at least the time of Joyce's "The Dead": a highly reflective, internal meditation often revolving around a secret love or unfulfilled desire. In this case, it is Monte's muted love for Ramirez, whom she continues to see, long after he is gone, in the eyes of Rosa's three sons. In keeping with the theme of loss, Tóibín employs a classic framing device to embed the main narrative in a distant past that, despite the violence of the war, evokes a certain nostalgia for a lost way of life:

One night, there was a full moon and a clear sky. When the crowd moved to the edge of the water and let the fire die down, neither he nor she moved with them. When he spoke to her, she could not hear him, so he moved closer. She realized that no one had noticed that she had not joined the others by the water. Some of the soldiers there had stripped down and were swimming and splashing. Away from them, close to the dying embers, he touched the back of her hand and then turned it and traced his fingers on the palm.

For the most part, then, the story succeeds on its quiet terms. The characters are well drawn, the tension subdued. The storytelling, however, meanders a bit too much. We are introduced early on to two characters, Ana and the electric company man, who never reappear and thus feel contrived as a means of introducing the main narrative. It is debatable whether even one of them is necessary; we definitely don't need both. Would it not have been more effective to have the flashback triggered by a conversation between Montse and Rosa, given that the latter is the daughter most affected by the secret? As it is, Rosa is introduced very late in the story, and the reader does not have a chance to sympathize with her before learning the news about her father.

Another weakness is language. The understatement that Tóibín aims for in the plot is not reflected in the often clumsy and heavy-handed diction. Below are three examples with suggested deletions, followed by my comments in brackets.

Montse nodded calmly and then looked toward the window, as though distracted by something. 

[Nodding is calm by default; hence the adverb is redundant (as adverbs often are). "Then" is also redundant when used with "and" (one or the other is all that's required). Finally, there is a problem with the "as though" phrase. Since the narrator is in Montse's perspective here, he/she should know whether she is distracted and not have to speculate. At any rate the whole phrase is unnecessary because the distraction is implied in her looking out the window.]

And if he, who had been so enthusiastic, did not want her, then she was sure, absolutely sure, that no one else would want her, either.   

[A sentence choking beneath commas and unnecessary qualifiers. It feels as if the author is simply trying to fill the page.]

"The war was a long time ago." She was going to say something else and then hesitated. "It was fifty years ago. More."

[The fact that she was going to say something else is implied in the hesitation.]

Finally, it should be noted that the name Rudolfo (as opposed to Rodolfo) is extremely uncommon in Spain and most of the Spanish-speaking world. The American author Rudolfo Anaya is a rare exception. Also, Ramirez carries an accent over the i: Ramírez.

"Summer of '38" is a tender story with compelling characters. Many of my objections amount to quibbles, but the cumulative effect is enough to weigh down an otherwise strong effort.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Summer of '38" 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 ___.

"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 ___.

"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 ___.

"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 ___.