Excerpt
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015
IntroductionWhat is great prose to one person is wallpaper to another. As readers, we are all subjective and that is one of the pleasures of being a reader.
This particular reader likes writing best when it is free of the looming presence of the writer, who, reasonably and humanly, wants the work to be liked, appreciated, praised, and rewarded. Sometimes that understandable desire casts a shadow. The best short stories don’t necessarily have the cleverest plots or the most ingenious twists, but they do have the best prose and a full creation of a fictional world.
The reader of the short story often feels two things simultaneously, as with Russell Banks’s “A Permanent Member of the Family.” Just as you’re starting to understand how the characters are put together, you recognize the ways in which they’re unraveling. Banks’s narrator is driven by his desire to keep everything the same at the moment when everything is changing. He acknowledges that his actions are disrupting family life, but he and his soon-to-be ex-wife are working out their arrangements and disarrangements smoothly. A bit of self-congratulation seems only right. The bump comes when the family dog, Sarge, makes it known that she isn’t about to change her ways. The family is her pack, the narrator is the leader of the pack, and so Sarge goes where the narrator does, all human agreements aside. Sarge’s doggy devotion to family life as it used to be is the rift in the lute of the enlightened divorce.
The pleasures of “A Permanent Member of the Family” are many. The narrator wants to “set the record straight, get the story told truthfully once and for all, even if it does in a vague way reflect badly on” him. He is thoughtful, judicious, and still, thirty-five years after the events of the story, hoping for a pass. He’s kidding himself about a number of things. If his version of the truth were the only one, that would be one thing; Banks’s skill and intelligence make it clear that his is only one version among several, and not the most important at that.
The narrator of Emily Ruskovich’s “Owl” is devoted to his wife, Jane. At first we see her as a victim; a neighbor boy shot her, mistaking her for an owl. For much of the story the narrator seems to be his wife’s nurse and keeper, and while Jane appreciates his care, at the same time she keeps secrets and holds herself apart emotionally. Her actions and feelings are as opaque to the reader as they are to the narrator, though she grows less mysterious when we learn the harsh story of how they came to marry twelve years earlier and farm in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.
Several boys from neighboring farms are also devoted to Jane, and the reader senses something dangerous about the boys and about Jane, though it isn’t clear at first if the danger originates with Jane herself, the boys, or the hapless narrator. “Owl” is a triumphant, heartbreaking visit to isolated rural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Occasionally the narrator harks back to worse times, to the one-room, dirt-floored house he grew up in, where dust destroyed his mother’s lungs. The difficulties of frontier life turned him into a workhorse, a man without vision or hope. When he marries fifteen-year-old Jane, who is pregnant by another man, she brings beauty to his narrow life. He tells us: “She was polite to me, my Jane.” The reader intuits that she’s been waiting all twelve years to make her escape, even if her adoring husband doesn’t.
Lynn Freed’s chilling “The Way Things Are Going” is set in contemporary South Africa and California. The story is about transitions, all of them difficult: A fierce mother ages from a resourceful pirate to a fragile and delusional old woman; a country develops from unjust tyranny to lawlessness; love devolves into a memory.
The narrator tries to make sense of her own story, in which she is both victim and perpetrator, an appendage of her failing mother and manipulative sister. She knows that her passivity and her allegiance to an idea of manners make her a witness to her own life, but she will not help herself. The disaster that’s befallen the narrator isn’t the violent incident that sets chaos in motion. It’s the title of the story that defines her. Freed has a gift for exposing the roots of her characters’ individual disaster, roots so deep that each one is inevitable. We might not like where the narrator of “The Way Things Are Going” ends up any more than she does but we can see no way out for her.
Lionel Shriver starts her story “Kilifi Creek” in a more idyllic African setting. Liana, a tourist, is young and pretty enough to wheedle her way around East Africa in the care of distant acquaintances older and richer than herself. “Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious houseguest would require of her hosts.” Shriver narrates with an Olympian knowledge of her character’s fate and way of being; Liana in all her obliviousness is fun to watch as she risks her life and then forgets whatever lesson might have been gained from the experience. The combination of entertainment and lesson-drawing makes “Kilifi Creek” intriguing and, because of its ending, satisfying and shocking. What is the use of lessons in manners when life is so fragile and so temporary, and youth so much fun?
In Dina Nayeri’s “A Ride Out of Phrao” the main character, Shirin Khalilipour-Anderson, might have learned some lessons along the way but everything in her resists conventional wisdom. Shirin carries her chaos wherever she goes. An exile from Iran after the fall of the shah, she goes to America and lives for fifteen years in Cedar Rapids. After she’s fired from her job, and lies shamelessly about why she’s unemployed, she joins the Peace Corps and is sent to a village in northern Thailand.
The story revolves around a visit to the Thai village by Shirin’s estranged daughter, a young woman so exhausted by her mother’s lies that she believes almost nothing her mother says. Their relationship—tenuous and tentative, loving and hostile—is the heart of the story, for Shirin wishes above all else that her daughter would believe her, though Shirin lies the way other people breathe. As she sees it, her lies are for the convenience or pleasure of others. “A Ride Out of Phrao” is juror Tessa Hadley’s favorite story in this year’s collection, and she explains why in eloquent terms (pp. 351–53).
Brenda Peynado’s “The History of Happiness” is about another traveler, who started her journey with her boyfriend. “We were both computer science majors and once we got a job we would spend the rest of our lives in a five-by-five box controlling machines and we wanted to see the real, human world.” Along the way, when it’s time to move on, the boyfriend decides to remain in India with Hindu monks. The narrator tells us, “I was angry at myself and doing things like couch surfing with strangers, stealing wallets, and lifting bank account passwords from Internet café computers, and I dared some terrible consequence to happen.” She’s absorbed by her dilemma of having no money, and by her loneliness and anger, interested in her boyfriend’s spiritual crisis only to make fun of it. She is tilting toward becoming a criminal perhaps destined for a confinement far worse than the five-by-five box of a computer programmer, or for worse punishment. The story takes place in Singapore, where, as one character says, “no one would be foolish enough to steal anything.”
At the end of “The History of Happiness” Peynado creates an explosion and a revelation: The narrator’s anger breaks open, and she understands that she, like the boyfriend who stayed with the monks, must struggle with questions too large to answer or ignore. The peacefulness of the conclusion is both welcome and unexpected, and explains the word
happiness in the title.
Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” is the story of two women who meet by chance as they travel on the same mission: to find their husbands, who’ve just crossed the US-Mexico border illegally. The narrator, Griselda, knows her way around from long experience. She knows where to go, what shoes to wear, which motel to stay in for the night when her man doesn’t show up, and she knows too that happiness is temporary. The younger woman, Natalia, is naive, wears high heels she can hardly walk in, and has nowhere to spend the night; in short, she needs looking after, and Griselda reluctantly shares what she has. She stops short of advising the other woman to forget her man, and keeps to herself the many difficulties of “the whole drama of deportation and return” and the sacrifices she’s made. “
Do something with your life, Griselda,” an observant teacher once told her, but she couldn’t follow that urgent advice, and she was too shy to ask how in the world she could. Once she fell in love with Timoteo, her options were even more constricted.
In part, the story is about the many difficulties and limits of the particular life the characters—women, Mexican-American, poor—are leading, and that is enough, given the beauty of the writing, to make a fine story. But the story is an even greater gift to the reader for, with grace, generosity, and wisdom, Manuel Muñoz is telling us about the cost of love.
“I, Buffalo” by Vauhini Vara begins on a bus in San Francisco. The narrator is horribly, blindingly, painfully hungover, and she engages in a conversation with a mother and her little boy that ends with the boy lobbing an imaginary hand grenade her way. There are faint echoes of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in its dark humor and edginess.
The narrator, however impaired, is eager to share her story. She’s unlucky in love, she tells us, and now that she’s alone there is “a great and holy emptiness. It resembled the alarming emptiness that cathedrals and mosques hold for those of us who believe in nothing beyond what is proven to exist.” The narrator’s exuberance and delightful language seduce the reader, even as she details her drinking, which is the kind that ends up in blackouts. Slapstick ensues as the narrator tries to hide her condition from her visiting family. Little by little, the reader understands how dangerous the narrator is to herself and others, and the comedy thins and disappears. The mellifluous narrator reaches a stopping point where nothing will do but the silence of truth: “Enough with all these words. Enough with the endless questions and endless answers.”
Thomas Pierce’s “Ba Baboon” has a similarly ingenious combination of tragedy and comedy, beginning as it does with a brother and sister—Brooks and Mary—trapped in the pantry of a house they’ve more or less broken into. The house belongs to a former lover of Mary’s and she is there to collect an embarrassing video. Brooks is there because he’s in her care. He’s recovering from a head injury; someone hit him with a brick. “ ‘A random act of violence,’ his mother called it. ‘A totally senseless thing.’ Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is inherently a random and senseless place.”
Mary’s lover is away with his family, but he’s left behind a vicious pair of guard dogs who have trapped Mary and Brooks in the pantry. There are some code words that will make the dogs retreat but Mary and Brooks don’t know them. In a random and senseless universe, the existence of the powerful words makes complete sense, as does Mary and Brooks’s ignorance of them. They won’t be trapped in this situation forever, but the effects of Brooks’s brain injury are probably permanent. He might enjoy a “fuller” recovery, or he might not. His doctor assures him that whatever happens, Brooks will still be Brooks, in some form. If he can accept that, he might be happy. Or happier.
“Ba Baboon” is filled with hopelessness and loss, and also with humor and affection. Maybe there are some magic words that will heal the damaged brain and the old Brooks will return. In a random and senseless universe, can there be limits to what might happen?
Christopher Merkner’s “Cabins” is about men and divorce, written in numbered chapters and set in hookah bars, basketball courts, a men’s penitentiary, a house decorated with the heads of dead animals, and an imaginary cabin where the narrator is alone. (Juror Michael Parker chose “Cabins” as his favorite story and discusses it on pp. 356–58.) The cabin of solitary existence isn’t, of course, an exclusively masculine province. It is imagined in opposition to the elusive intimacy and inexorable commitment of marriage. The narrator is surrounded, he believes, by men who are divorcing, friends he thought he knew and doesn’t. There are other threats to the narrator’s peace: He had a heart attack a year before and his wife is about to give birth to their first child. The story is a disquisition on fear and various ways of trying to talk your way out of being afraid, and it ends with tenderness and loneliness in equal measure.
In Becky Hagenston’s “The Upside-Down World,” Jim has flown to Nice to rescue his sister, Gertrude. The middle-aged pair is not especially close, and the story’s jaunty title is at odds with the emotions at play between brother and sister—crippling anxiety, frustration, fretfulness, and bewilderment. Jim last saw Gertrude three years before but she’s called him in the middle of the night to ask his opinion: “ ‘I just took a seven-hundred-euro taxi ride to Monte Carlo in my nightgown. Do you think I’m losing it again?’ ” Jim’s wife, Jeannie, is offended by his willingness to rescue Gertrude. Jeannie can always predict precisely how things will go wrong, and as the story moves along, her self-assurance works nicely against Jim’s hesitations. He’s come on a rescue mission but his sister is an octopus of evasion. Time and again, Jim tries to understand how she must feel, as though his understanding will bring him closer to getting her back to a psychiatric hospital in America.
The second thread of the story concerns Elodie, a French runaway, and her companion Ted, who spot Jim and Gertrude as easy marks. They have their own form of disorder, not in mental confusion but in lethal mutual misunderstanding. Elodie is running from her mother’s death; she witnesses a terrible accident and perceives nothing but the advantage it might give her. In the end, Elodie is the character most at risk of being turned upside down permanently.
In Lydia Davis’s “The Seals” the narrator mourns her older sister, once beloved and now dead, as are their parents. The narrator questions why she loved her sister so much and wonders what they shared—a love of animals, perhaps, for she remembers “animal-themed presents” and wonders about them. There was a “mobile made of china penguins—why? Another time, a seagull of balsa wood that hung on strings . . . Another time, a dish towel with badgers on it.” She seems to be describing someone she knew only in the distant past but as the story goes on we learn that though she saw her sister infrequently, they always kept in touch.
Part of the beauty of “The Seals” is the slow meditative consideration of the sister, of her death, her life, her gifts, her witholdings, and then of what it feels like to miss her. “There was also some confusion in my mind, in the months afterward. It was not that I thought she was still alive. But at the same time I couldn’t believe that she was actually gone. Suddenly the choice wasn’t so simple: either alive or not alive. It was as though not being alive did not have to mean she was dead, as though there were some third possibility.”
Molly Antopol’s “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” is also a meditation on the past punctuated by brief returns to the present, during which the grandmother-narrator questions why the granddaughter wants to know about the part she and her husband played as teenagers in the Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Belarus, and how she met her husband, and how they came to America. Her granddaughter’s curiosity is as incomprehensible to her as it is that she hasn’t made an adult life for herself and clings to family history as if there’s an answer in it for her own young troubles.
Though the grandmother has a war story of courage and daring, of risking death and surviving when so many died, she doesn’t have a love story to tell. Whether or not she even likes her husband, the courageous resistance fighter and immigrant failure, is in question. The raw passion we feel in the story is for her lost youth and opportunities, for a world gone by, and for her choicelessness in the world she’s in now. The story ends with a final harangue at her granddaughter’s failures to make friends, find a husband, make her way, be happy, her insistence on “scratching at ugly things that have nothing to do with” her. The granddaughter is silent, yet we argue on her behalf that these things have everything to do with who she is. All these “horrible things that happened before [she was] born” speak to trust and love, and to the damage that was done and preserved like a sacred relic.
In Percival Everett’s “Finding Billy White Feather,” set in Wyoming, Oliver Campbell finds a note on his door, left maybe by a ghost; Oliver’s dog doesn’t alert him to a visitor. The note is from Billy White Feather, which sounds like an Indian name, though Oliver finds out soon enough from people in town that Billy White Feather (not his real name) is “a tall, skinny white boy with blue eyes and a blond ponytail and he come up here a couple of years ago and started hanging around acting like he was a full blood or something.” Or he’s “a big guy with red hair and a big mustache.” Or else he’s “an Indian. Got a jet-black braid down to his narrow ass.”
Still, Billy’s note told the truth about twin Appaloosa foals born on the reservation. The story rolls on, taking Oliver to the unusual twins and their mother, and to more stories about Billy White Feather’s shortcomings. Little by little, in the vastness of the western landscape, Oliver comes to see the elusive Billy as a threat. He tells his wife, “He came to our home, Lauren. Stood on our porch.” The story pulls you right into the life of the characters and to the odd pursuit of a phantom by the solid citizen Oliver Campbell. The shift in the story’s tone from beginning to end is a demonstration both of Percival Everett’s mastery and of the difference between the pull of curiosity and the power of the shape-shifting unknown.
Emma Törzs’s “Word of Mouth” is another Western, this one set in Montana. The narrator, Jenny, tells us: “I’d been raised in the city . . . and I still couldn’t believe I was allowed to live here among healthy streams and molting birches and the constant upsurge of rocky earth. The land made me feel blindly cared for.” Recently, Jenny was the caretaker of her grandmother, a woman who didn’t take anything easily. When her grandmother dies, Jenny is free, though for what she isn’t sure. She finds a job as a waitress at the Whole Hog, an unsuccessful restaurant whose owner abhors advertising and waits for word of mouth to kick in, showing a faith in things invisible. There’s a woman missing from the area, possibly murdered, and her husband, possibly her murderer, comes to the Whole Hog.
Törzs’s story deals with various forms of power: one lover over another, men over women, a terrible disease over a body, Jenny’s grandmother over her. The writing is clear and down-to-earth, and “Word of Mouth” ends with a great tenderness that encloses the story, the characters, and even Montana.
In Elizabeth Strout’s “Snow Blind,” the Appleby family is a study in secret-keeping. The youngest child, Annie, is an imaginative chatterbox:
“Our teacher says if you look at the fields right after it snows and the sun is shining hard you can get blind.” Annie craned her neck to see out the window.
“Then don’t look,” her grandmother said. What should the Appleby children look at? What should they avoid seeing? There’s a mystery in their family life that’s like the rumble of far-off thunder. At first, “Snow Blind” seems to be about the whole family and their rural world. In a swerve in narrative direction, the story concentrates on Annie, the only one of the Appleby children to notice that an unnamed shame holds the family together. Annie leaves home and establishes a celebrated life far away, returning to face the revelations of her family’s secrets. By the end, she knows what it costs to dare to look at the light.
Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus” is told in first-person plural, appropriate because the community’s eyes, hearts, and voices are one—all are the immigrant mothers of daring young men. In Greek tragedy, the chorus sees all, knows past and present, and is helpless to change anything. “We had done what we could, all the things we told ourselves we could have done. We resigned ourselves to our windows. We wiped down the glass. We waved.”
The tragic hero enacts and embodies the community’s dangers and suffers for everybody. In the Armenian community Kuzmich has created, the enormous sacrifice of one mother resonates through all of them and makes them question if indeed they really did all they could or if they lacked the courage of their love.
Another community comes under scrutiny in “The Golden Rule,” by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a previous O. Henry winner. Every aspect of the dictum “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is examined through the story of Amanda, a sensible, chic widow who seems to be doing unto herself very well. She has her own business, a successful boutique, a boyfriend whose company and lovemaking she enjoys, and a good relationship with her only child, a daughter who lives abroad. Amanda “felt herself in a permanent battle with time and nature, and though in the end she would lose, as everyone does, she resolved to fight valiantly to the death.”
Amanda is good to the “frail old neighbor” who lives on the same floor in their apartment house, and does Maria the kind of small favors that can make another’s life easier and cost one little to perform. Maria is a complainer, ten years older than Amanda, and a little bit paranoid; such qualities don’t seem at first to matter. “How could she refuse?” As Maria’s health deteriorates and her demands grow, Amanda begins to compare herself to Maria, and, it seems, her own troubles also increase. She misses her daughter but refuses to ask for more contact. She might be faced soon with closing her business. The boyfriend is fine but at heart Amanda is haunted by the illness and death of her beloved husband; worst of all, she misses him. As Schwartz moves the story along irresistibly, the reader begins to see Amanda’s own demise coming, if not actually caused by her querulous neighbor. The ending of “The Golden Rule” is a convincing cry of courage against inevitable defeat.
Joan Silber has been an O. Henry winner before, and her work is widely praised for its honesty, ingenuity, and beauty. The reader is immediately involved in the questions Reyna, the narrator of “About My Aunt,” asks about life in general and in particular. There’s a lot to say about Reyna’s aunt Kiki—the eight years she lived in rural Turkey, her ability to recover and even triumph in tight spot after tight spot, including Hurricane Sandy. Reyna, who has a young son, Oliver, is less adept at landing on her feet. In talking about a new tattoo, she says, “Some people design their body art so it all fits together, but I did mine piecemeal, like my life, and it looked fine.” Reyna’s boyfriend, Boyd, is in jail on Rikers Island, and the complications of visiting him bring Reyna and Kiki together in a new intimacy. Eventually, Kiki tries to get Reyna to leave New York and Boyd. As the conflict plays out, the reader contemplates the differences between the women. Both are worth caring about, and each has wishes for the other one’s life, wishes that, the reader knows, will never come true.
“Birdsong from the Radio” by Elizabeth McCracken, according to juror Kristen Iskandrian, who chose it as her favorite (pp. 354–56), “has the aura of a fairy tale.” Fairy tales fascinate, enchant, and frighten us. Leonora is a loving mother who wants to eat her children. “Children long to be eaten,” the authorial voice tells us. “Everyone knows that.” But Leonora terrorizes her children, Dolly, Marco, and Rosa, and then she becomes another kind of monster altogether, a monster of grief. McCracken merges the impossible with the all-too-real in her story of a woman bolstering herself against the worst of all possible losses.
“Details,” V. S. Pritchett tells us, “make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”
As you read
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, look for the details that fill all the stories with human beings.
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas
