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The Best American Short Stories 2007:

“It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times”

Written in 2008

 

In Stephen King’s edition of The Best American Short Stories 2007, there is an entire handful of compelling stories, compelling in that each one, by the second page, hooked this reader into continuing and finishing, often in a single sitting.  The human psyche being what it is—an amalgam of varying interests, proclivities, peccadilloes, and tastes—it’s not surprising that this compilation also contains a small number of stories that might wrap some readers in a blanket of ennui and indifference.

            Roy Kesey’s “Wait” is my least favorite read in BASS 2007. Of course, one can argue that there must have been a reason for my having finished the story. I will say that the story is aptly titled, for wait is what I did throughout: wait to be engaged, wait for something truly surprising (not slapstick, not absurd) to happen, wait for a cogent truth or universal theme to shine through, wait for an epiphany regarding the human condition to emerge. For me, none of these things happened. The story becomes lost in its own fog that threatens to lift from time to time but does not. When Kesey writes, “The fog flexes” (196), it's nice metaphor for what the fog is doing, like a bicep rising slightly into a muscle and giving hope to the reader that the story will go somewhere. It does not happen. Instead, “The girl from China stretches” (196), “a café runs short of creamer” (197), “Children whine” (197), “The fog scurls” (200), “A young Bolivian woman gives birth in the bookstore” (202), and “All the women in the lounge begin menstruating simultaneously” (204).

            I concede that Kesey has, through a series of specific events large and small, demonstrated the absurdity of the human condition, and that a certain percentage of readers might choose this story as a favorite. I do not think of this as a failed story, poorly conceived and carried out; I think Kesey is to be praised for having pulled it off. It’s simply that I am not a fan of the type of story he has pulled off.

            Alice Munro’s “Dimension” is my favorite (with “Pa’s Darling” and “L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story” completing the win-place-show card). Munro’s story is a tour-de-force investigation into the complicated and often inscrutable business of a marital relationship. As she has done in some of her past great stories—“Runaway” is a prime example—the author, through a deft dramatic irony, demonstrates to the reader of “Dimension” the impending disaster that awaits her protagonist if she does not have the courage to make a proactive choice.

            At the opening of the story the reader only knows that Doree, a chambermaid at the Comfort Inn, must take three buses to “the facility.” Soon the author begins the weaving and stitching of the story, giving us a bit of Doree’s background; describing Doree’s meeting her future husband, Lloyd; introducing us to Mrs. Sands, Doree’s counselor; and telling the story of Doree’s marriage to Lloyd. The structure is intricate but entirely comprehensible. At various points the reader feels like taking Doree and shaking her into a understanding of what is happing to her marriage and, specifically, to her as an individual. When Doree befriends Maggie, a neighbor, Lloyd wants to know what they talk about. Doree says, “Nothing, really,” to which Lloyd responds, “That’s funny.  Two women riding in a car.    . . .Two women talking about nothing. She is out to break us up” (277). Later, after Doree has walked out of the house in total frustration over her husband’s smothering attitude, Lloyd kills their children. Questioned by the police, he tells them that he did it “to save them from the misery . . . of knowing that their mother had walked out on them” (281).

            Lloyd lands in a facility for the criminally insane. This, then, is the “facility” that Doree is visiting at the beginning of the story, one of the reasons being to explain to this man who has sucked all the air from her world that she only left for one night and fully intended to come back. In other words, she feels she must defend herself to the man who has killed her children. Lloyd, still insane but milder now and cleverly convincing, continues to control her from inside the facility, only now it’s more insidious because she does not understand what is happening. This is a story that—as Flannery O’Connor has written regarding fiction in general—shows “how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything” (98).  It is a heartbreak of a story, masterful, full of insight into the plight of anyone who cannot, or is not willing to, stand up and demand from her partner what she knows in her soul is right. 

           

                                                        Works Cited

King, Stephen, ed.  The Best American Short Stories, 2007.  Boston: Houghton

      Mifflin, 2007.

O’Connor, Flannery, “Writing Short Stories.”  Mystery and Manners.  Ed. Sally and

      Robert Fitzgerald.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1960.

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