The Contemporary American Short Story
(Written in 2006)
While reading contemporary American short stories I sometimes feel at a disadvantage, similar to my frustration some twelve or fourteen years ago when I bought my first computer, having worked before that on an electric typewriter and then on a word processor. It seemed as if my high school students knew, innately, how to speed through the computer learning curve at two hundred miles an hour, while I moseyed along at thirty-five. Analogously, my early short story experiences were “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Scarlet Ibis,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “A & P,” and the like. They were as easy to read as an electric typewriter was to type with. Introduction (characters, setting), conflict, rising action, climax, denouement. A plot line that progressed from start to finish. Exciting, poignant stories that had a point to them—a moral, if you will—and believable (if a bit heroic at time), empathetic characters.
Today, it’s hard to find this kind of old-fashioned, plot-driven, character-rich story. In The Best American Short Stories, 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore, for example, there are titles like “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (Sherman Alexie), “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” (Annie Proulx), and “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence” (John Edgar Wideman). Now, I understand that you can’t judge a short story by its title, but in some cases the uniqueness of the story does, in fact, match its title.
Take the Alexie story. Set in Spokane, Washington, in the present time, it is parceled into chronological sections, beginning at noon on one fall day and progressing, hour by hour—(section by section)—to noon of the following day. The protagonist and narrator, Jackson Jackson—also known as Jackson squared—is a homeless Interior Salish Indian who pals around with his buddies Rose of Sharon and Junior. The conflict begins when they happen to pass a pawnshop which has an old powwow-dance regalia hanging in the window. Jackson recognizes it as his dead grandmother’s regalia, and the pursuit to redeem it begins in earnest. The problem: Jackson and his friends have five dollars among them, and the pawnbroker says he needs $999.00 for the outfit. That’s a special price for Jackson, who proves that the regalia once belonged to his grandmother by identifying the flaw his family sewed into their handiwork: “…Because only God is perfect… my family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on our regalia.” The pawnbroker, a gentle soul, would like to give the outfit to Jackson, but says, “I can’t afford to do the right thing.”
Thus Jackson Jackson sets out on an all-night quest to earn the redemption money for the regalia, his new Holy Grail. This reader, however, was more interested in Jackson’s personality and obsessive sharing of every dollar he was able to scrape together. Indians, Jackson implies, are bound by a principal of charity, thus exacerbating the difficulty of any monetary quest. At one point a saintly cop gives Jackson a crisp new twenty, and Jackson takes it to a 7-Eleven to buy three “bottles of imagination,” one for himself and one for each of his friends. For most of the afternoon they huddle beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and try to figure out how to raise the rest of the money.
Is Jackson able to raise the money? He does come up with a number of schemes, some clever and some not. Eventually, though, this is not a story about the difficulty of overcoming some of life’s challenges. Rather, it’s a story about the dignity of the human spirit—in the person of a homeless, semi-alcoholic Salish Indian from Washington state.
While I found this uniquely titled story effective, moving, and successful, there are a number of others in this anthology that I was unable to negotiate easily. The banks were too steep, the routes too tortuous. In the Wideman story, the nameless narrator, a self-absorbed n’er-do-well, decides that he needs to travel across the country to tell an imprisoned man that his father has died. The problem is that the narrator was not much of a friend to the father, doesn’t know where in Arizona the son is incarcerated, and doesn’t understand why he wants to do this, or why he cares. And neither does the reader, for this is a man who is usually cynical, sometimes maudlin, often critical of everyone he meets (even his dowdy Asian lover, whom he has seduced—she must be incredibly desperate—because of her legal expertise), and almost always pessimistic and mean spirited. How fitting when he arrives two days late for his approved meeting with the son only to find, at the last minute, and behind the last locked door, that the meeting has been canceled by a brainless computer.
What a waste. I have wandered all over this winding road trying to discover the proper route and looking for the destination, but I end up peering at “the undramatic nothingness beyond the far edge of wrinkled terrain,” to use the author’s own words. Yes, out of context, and yes, unfair, but. . . . Finally, I do admit that the story and its title are a match.
One of my favorite stories in this work will come as no surprise to the reader after I’ve gone on like this. It is John Updike’s “The Walk with Elizanne.” His story in this anthology speaks of a high school’s fifty-year reunion and the brief encounter between two of the graduates, Elizanne and David, who, when they were juniors in that high school, dated one another. Elizanne, in a quiet moment at the reunion, reminds David that he was the first boy who ever kissed her after walking her home. “You were very important to me,” she says, and he tells her he remembers that walk. She laughs, “a suburban woman’s knowing laugh,” and says, “It got me started, I must tell you, on a lot of, whatever. Kissing, let’s say.” And from that point, David is hooked, trying to rekindle the memory of the walk that he only vaguely recalls. He thinks about it for days, for weeks, but it was something from over fifty years before, and he cannot recall the details that led to the kiss. He knows he can’t call her, “for there were spouses, accumulated realities, limits.” Besides, he figures that “the questions he was burning to ask would receive banal answers.”
So the reader feels the melancholy of a memory not quite remembered until Updike, with the wave of his magic wand, takes us back to the details of that walk on the last page of the story. I must say that it was a totally unexpected ploy, and that it worked beautifully. Updike is still a master.