The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017

Introduction by  Laura Furman

In the summer of 1917, the artist Vanessa Bell read “The Mark on the Wall,” a short story by her sister Virginia Woolf that appeared in the first publication from the Hogarth Press, recently founded by Woolf and her husband, Leonard. “Why don’t you write more short things,” Vanessa wrote to Virginia, suggesting that “there is a kind of completeness about a thing like this that is very satisfactory and that you can hardly get in a novel.”

Virginia Woolf sought her older sister’s artistic approval always. Still, I wonder if the future author of a great novel like Mrs. Dalloway really needed to be urged to favor the short story over the novel as better suited to her talents. A novel’s charm can lie in discursiveness and its richness in variety, while tak­ing highways and byways can ruin a story. If you think of the novel and the story as containers holding images, characters, relationships, and settings, what makes a stark novel might be an overstuffed story.

So many years after Vanessa Bell’s note to her sister, it remains easier to say what a short story isn’t than what it is: it isn’t an anecdote and it isn’t a section of a novel and it isn’t an essay.

Short stories sometimes end ambiguously, but they can’t end indefinitely and still be a complete story. Short-story endings are sometimes a sore point with readers, who feel they’ve been thrown off a cliff. What happened? What’s going to happen next? If these are the reader’s questions at the end, the story might not be right yet. Even when I don’t understand the mean­ing and stretch of an ending, if I don’t feel the same finality that I do when someone walks out the door, then something’s gone wrong.

Short-story beginnings are even more demanding of writer and reader. The reader must be immediately involved. This doesn’t mean that we as readers necessarily understand the beginning. It just means that the writer has succeeded in plac­ing us in the world of the story, and we don’t want to leave until it’s over because we feel involved, curious, and committed.

The beginning and the ending of a short story are part of the wonderful secret of the form and why it’s neither a novel nor a novella nor a footnote nor an anecdote. The short story has a formal completeness—Vanessa Bell chose exactly the right word—but one that doesn’t call attention to itself.

The story’s present, its ongoing action, and its past—call it background or ghosts—sometimes push against each other. Sometimes the past sneaks in front of the present and tries to block the way forward. But in stories by master writers—Mavis Gallant, Katherine Anne Porter, William Trevor—there is always a path to follow through the deep forest of the fictional world.

A story that begins by retreating into the past has the cart before the horse. In a good beginning, the reader is right there in the story’s world, in the present, and when the past comes lurch­ing from behind, the reader knows the difference between now and then. More and more, short-story writers give little weight to characters’ past, to pedigree, to war stories. Yet time is such a powerful force in the short story that even if we don’t know the specifics of a character’s background, we know something of the burden of the character’s past by the way he or she acts and reacts in the present.

In the short story there’s always a shadow cast on the present by what has just been said or not said, by what was imagined but not accomplished, or even by a wish. While the plot develops, past and present wrangle, and the characters struggle against that tension. At the end, there’s the peace that comes with the release of tension, for good or ill.

The greatest success comes when the writer’s skill permits the reader to ride on the narrative current without noticing form or technique. Michelle Huneven’s “Too Good to Be True” is such a story. For the parents of Gayle, a junkie in recovery, the past is all about their young daughter’s alcoholism and drug addiction. Their housekeeper and friend, Harriet, is herself in recovery and sees Gayle through that lens. Gayle has tried and failed at sobri­ety before, disappearing into the depraved existence that she describes cheerfully to Harriet on their way to support-group meetings, pointing from the car to a place where she once had sex with a dentist in exchange for pain meds, or where she did worse things—a tour of Gayle’s own private Pasadena. She’s become a jaunty expert on meetings. “ ‘I like N.A.,’ Gayle says, ‘because people there get paranoia. They’ve done enough illegal stuff, and have the arrests to show for it. I mean, their paranoia is earned. . . . But A.A.’s more fun.’ ”
 
The trio of imperfectly loving adults watch Gayle like hawks, simultaneously wanting to trust her and to preserve themselves from repeated heartbreak. They think they know the future because they’ve lived through the past. In time, the reader sees that they’re blinded to the present, for the ending of “Too Good to Be True” exposes their conspiracy of hope and despair. The future is unknown, Huneven shows us, whatever the past. Juror David Bradley chose “Too Good to Be True” as his favorite.

A similar collusion between hope and despair appears in the very different circumstances of Tahmima Anam’s “Garments,” set against the grisly garment trade of Dhaka, capital of Ban­gladesh. The workers in “Garments” are young women who’ve come to the city to make something of their lives. It’s hard for the Western reader to understand that sewing slimming under­garments for women who are overfed to a degree far beyond the workers’ experience can be a tenable path to advancement. Pressured to meet their quotas of finished garments, working in unventilated heat, three young women are willing to marry an unknown man because his gender will give them a tiny boost of social power—the ability to rent a living space for themselves.

For those of us whose grandparents or great-grandparents worked in similar conditions in nineteenth-and twentieth-century America, the story has a special resonance, but for any reader, the young women’s dreams are moving in their audacity and the high price paid for their fulfillment. The Dalai Lama said in November 2016 that compassion is only felt between equals. In order to respond to the story with compassion, the reader must feel herself the equal of the story’s heroines.

Alan Rossi’s “The Buddhist” is about a monk, ill with an unnamed and debilitating disease in a monastery in Sri Lanka, who is determined to continue as normal. He must at all times pay strict attention in the Theravada Forest tradition. He was “not shirking his dharma-related responsibilities, was not skip­ping meditation, was not failing to practice in each and every moment.” While he prepares for a Skype tutorial session with an American student, we learn something of his personal pres­sures. He is Canadian by birth and has been ordered by Ajahn, the leader, to return home, which above all he doesn’t want to do. Though he strains to concentrate on the present, he can’t resist reliving his past failures and desires. He counts the ways in which he now considers himself unsuited to be back home with his family and old friends. He is no longer who he was: he has his daily practice and his devotion to the Buddhist tradition he’s chosen; this—and escape from Canada—is all he wants.

Alan Rossi balances the pain of his story with the inevitable comedy of the monk trying to be only in the present while his mind wanders through past and future. He struggles to perform what he sees as his dharma duties while the reader comes to know his troubled heart. Throughout the story, illness presses on the monk and the narrative until nothing is left but fever and dream.

Amit Majmudar’s “Secret Lives of the Detainees” is another story in which the deadly serious—in this case torture and ille­gal detention—mixes with the comic. “Secret Lives” sounds lightly humorous here but “detainees” doesn’t at all. Majmudar’s first detainee is Ansar, who is frustrating his interrogators. Their techniques can’t compete with the pain he is suffering from kidney stones. Ansar despises the Western doc­tors who work with the interrogators:

Ansar had never been treated so kindly by other men in his life. White men, the old ones with silver, the young ones with light-brown hair. Their kindness interfered with his hating of them. He had to remind himself: they are saving you to pass you on. They are fixing you so there is something to break.

The next detainee, Marwan Malik, also experiences constant torture inflicted by his own body, in his case by the restlessness of his hands, which are happy only when they are repairing or making something. It doesn’t matter to them what it is : “Tasks are their food.” The third detainee is Nadeem Nadeem, who has been imprisoned in error; he must inflict harm on his body before he can be liberated. The comedy pertains both to prison­ers and torturers. Each believes the other’s lies. Neither side is able to feel compassion for the other’s pain, whether inflicted or self-inflicted. “Secret Lives of the Detainees” is Elizabeth McCracken’s favorite.

In Mary LaChapelle’s “Floating Garden,” the reader immedi­ately feels suspicion and dread. After a festival, people are lined up for their rides home. An army truck is labeled “taxi,” and, oddly, women are being ush­ered into the truck ahead of men. It’s explained that there’s no room in that taxi for men, but why not? The answer can’t be heard. The narrator’s mother climbs into the truck first, then turns to receive wooden statues of gods: the Water Father who guards the lake where they live, and the Road Guardian. The reader suspects that those in the truck—the narrator with his mother and two lovely girls in festival clothing with their mother—will need all the help they can get. And something else is not what it seems—our narrator. Suspicion and dread lead to the ache of loss.

Then “Floating Garden” takes us by surprise. In its begin­ning, it is a local story, held in place by its details of costume, set­ting, and the narrator’s home and family. For many writers, the injustice and tragedy of the story’s beginning would have been enough, but Mary LaChapelle expands her narrative beyond those moments and creates what the reader wouldn’t guess to be possible—scenes of beauty, peace, and time well spent.

In Joseph O’Neill’s “The Trusted Traveler,” a retired couple have moved from New York City to Nova Scotia, where they plan to stay for a year and then make plans. As they adjust to a new daily life in a beautiful place, they invent titles for the memoirs he’s not writing about lives they haven’t lived. “In this subjunctive world we are adventurers, spies, honorary consuls, nomads.” One reason they’ve uprooted themselves is to avoid mean­ingless, time-eating, and unavoidable social events such as the persistent annual visits from the husband’s former student Jack Bail. Or is he a former student? The narrator can’t remember—over the years he’s taught two thousand students—nor can he figure out how to get Jack Bail to cease and desist from inviting himself over. Nova Scotia is a long way to travel from New York for a dinner but this isn’t discouragement enough. Nothing the host does will dissuade his blockheaded guest.

Along with the genuine comedy of unwanted social interac­tion, “The Trusted Traveler” is a story of change. There are two passages describing the narrator’s view from his house, and a comparison gives the reader a sense of time and place working on the narrator. The first is general: “It’s my intention to investi­gate this vista systematically, since it feels strange to look out the window every day and basically not understand what I’m look­ing at.” The second is specific: “Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar.” And on it goes, for the narrator is now able to name his world and by doing so perhaps make it his own. With such specificity comes the quiet joy of knowing where you are and why. Best of all, there’s always something left to learn: “The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.”

For Glory, the protagonist of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s vivid story of that name, joy is one of many emotions she does not customarily feel. Hers is an uncomfortable existence as she avoids her parents’ expectations and contemplates her “caul of misfortune.” At her birth, Glory’s parents pinned on her “every hope they had yet to realize,” and gave her the first name of Glo­rybetogod. But her grandfather calls her “that girl,” and proph­esizes her misfortune. As a child, her instincts tell her to stick her finger in a sleeping dog’s mouth; that caul of misfortune her grandfather alone sees “would affect every decision she made, causing her to err on the side of wrong, time and time again.” Glory’s disastrous instincts are deeply satisfying for the reader. There’s something reassuring about watching her take one wrong turn after another. Glory doesn’t know why she acts out of spite and resentment; she can’t seem to stop herself. She’s a self-defeating Cinderella, single at thirty, working at a mort­gage call center in Minneapolis that’s an outer circle of hell both for its workers and the soon-to-be-homeless callers. Soon, Glory meets Prince Charming. Like Glory, Thomas is Nigerian. He is quite good-looking, the son of two doctors, and on his way up in America as surely as Glory is on her way nowhere good. He is everything she isn’t, and he pursues her, much to her surprise. She despises and adores him, and waits throughout their court­ship for the expected disaster. It’s up to the reader to decide whether or not Glory’s fate is to be once more herself. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s strong writing keeps us enthralled from Glory’s first mistake to the many possibilities of her last.

Courtship of a kind is also the subject of Jai Chakrabarti’s “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness.” Like Glory, Nikhil finds a way to shoot himself in the foot. His lover is Sharma, who beams into the story with his “oiled hair shining in the late-afternoon light,” as handsome as a Bollywood star. The match of an older, rich, and indulgent man with a beautiful, poor, and manipulative younger lover is a classic formula for trouble. The disaster in this case is caused by Nikhil’s greed and blindness to things as they really are, and to his lover’s feelings. “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness” is a parable illustrating the limits of money and power. By the end, the reader knows that poor Nikhil never really had his lover at all.

Martha Cooley’s “Mercedes Benz” begins with a car acci­dent and turns into a disquisition on the place of accident in the characters’ lives, and our own. Cooley sets the reader squarely in a mountainous scene before bringing on the car crash: “Huge clouds bloomed and drifted above them. Twisting below, the wide rocky riverbed of the Taro was intermittently visible, lit­tle streams emptying into it: Erbetello, dei Cani, Pizzarotta. Descending, the streams cut stony runnels that zigzagged errati­cally downward, as though someone had scored the earth with a huge sharp stick.” Here is nature in its orderliness; water falls from the Apennines and carves a downward path that’s com­pared to a casual violence. Water through rock also reminds the reader of time, of which the characters might not have a sufficiency. Theirs is a second marriage for each, and a happy one. They’re in the husband’s native Italy, having used all their money for the purchase and renovation of a house in an almost deserted village. The region is emptied of people in their prime and their children, all of whom live in the cities and return only for holidays. The title of the story refers to the wife’s newfound interest in fancy cars. She and her husband drive a hand-me-down Golf, but she finds herself looking at Mercedes and Porsches with uncharacteristic interest. This too relates to the accidental: lux­ury sedans, she thinks, “offer their owners an illusion of safety, neatly packaged as exclusivity.” The same thing, of course, can be said about marriage. In its beneficent ending, Cooley’s story moves past the car accident toward acceptance of the accidental.

“Protection” by Paola Peroni is also set in Italy, not the unpeopled countryside this time, but Rome. The narrator returns from her home in New York to spend a last Christmas with her grandmother, who might die at any time. Though too weak to cook the traditional meals, the grandmother is sharp and accurate when she accuses the narrator of avoiding commit­ting to her own life and marrying and bearing children. When the narrator asks her grandmother if she never made mistakes in her long life, the answer is that she made plenty, “But I did not run away from them.” The narrator has run away and half-lies about it to her beloved grandmother. Exposed to the oncom­ing death and the loss therefore of her past, home, and family traditions, the granddaughter faces her own life and memories. “There is no predicting who can protect us and who can attack us, nor whom we will harm and whom we will save.” There is also no knowing if such a thing as protection exists.

In Keith Eisner’s “Blue Dot,” the reader waits for misfortune to strike. An unfamiliar drug is taken: “ ‘Do we chew or swal­low?’ ” The drug is called blue dot but what a blue dot can do is unknown. Despite its undercurrent of foreboding, “Blue Dot” is a sweet story, filled with nostalgia. Its lack of sentimentality allows the reader to savor the experience of the drug trip and gives strength to the recollections of innocence and lost con­nections.

Innocence is also on display in Kevin Barry’s “A Cruelty,” an innocence that is an outgrowth of the limited intelligence of the story’s protagonist, Donie. The author leads us into Donie’s world of deliberate and reassuring sameness through the details of his day as he leaves home and takes a customary round-trip train ride. For Donie, making the same joke about the weather rain or shine, as well as checking the schedule of his train to Sligo, are a kind of job that pays him in security and self-confidence. When the cruelty of the title is enacted on Donie, his routine is changed and his world seems broken. The love expressed in the story’s last line gives the reader hope that Donie’s world can be rebuilt and his joy in it restored.

Kate Cayley’s “The Bride and the Street Party” features Mar­tha, twenty-eight-year-old mother of four children, married to Denton, “a big, jovial man.” Denton “was liked. . . . He liked himself.” Martha is less sure of her own worth, especially in comparison to the other mothers on the street. She compares herself especially to Bronwyn, her house to Bronwyn’s, and her troublesome wild son Noah to Bronwyn’s Max, “a vigorous and noble busybody, like his mother,” and Noah’s only friend. Mar­tha’s discomfort around Bronwyn is mixed with gratitude that Noah has a friend, a bit of shame that her life doesn’t measure up to Bronwyn’s, and, as it develops, a rare sureness that she knows better than Bronwyn how to handle a conflict with their Por­tuguese neighbors in their gentrifying neighborhood. The story succeeds so well in sinking the reader deep into Martha’s point of view that the ending comes as a surprise. The one thing that seemed sure about Martha is her sturdy motherliness, which is undermined in two short words. All at once, we feel the weight of her family bearing down on Martha.

In “The Reason Is Because” by Manuel Muñoz, teenage mother Nela has dropped out of high school in her junior year to live with her mother. Her baby’s father, Lando Quintanilla, is none too bright and takes no responsibility for the baby, yet Nela’s mother harps on marriage with him as Nela’s only hope: “ ‘His elevator don’t go all the way to the top,’ her mother said, ‘but at least he’ll go places.’ ” Where he’ll go we can’t imagine, but in their world he has more possibilities than Nela. Nela’s world has become very small. “Nela took to sitting at the top of the stairway leading up to their second-floor apart­ment. She held the baby and longed for the boring days at the high school. At least there, her daydreaming didn’t seem so pointless.” Everybody else in their public housing apartment complex has somewhere to go. Nela is stuck.

“The Reason Is Because” is Manuel Muñoz’s third O. Henry story. He is a writer of great patience, in no hurry to push his characters either into drama or into reaching false conclusions. He draws the limits of their lives so that the reader understands them viscerally. Muñoz finds the truth of his characters and uses it to write stories in language so plain and straightforward that it becomes beautiful. The core of Nela’s character is her intelli­gence, the way she notices the lives of others and is conscious of her own changing perspective. Drama comes by the end of the story, in an unanticipated rush. What seemed benign is revealed as vicious. Now Nela has even more trouble than she knew but she also has something important to consider.

Heather Monley’s “Paddle to Canada” is about “a family of risk and adventure,” whom we meet while the father is paddling a rented boat like mad in the middle of a lightning storm to get them off the water. Afterward, the father lightheartedly asks his wife and children why they had been required to leave a deposit for the paddleboat. “ ‘What do they think we’re going to do? . . . Paddle to Canada?’ ” That phrase becomes a family joke, told and retold along with stories of other near disasters. The fam­ily seems able to accommodate danger and adventure and keep on going without fear. Then comes the divorce and not only their future but their past changes. The story ends right where it began, on that stormy lake, but everything is exposed in a whole new light.

“The Family Whistle” by Gerard Woodward is set in eco­nomically stricken post-War Germany in 1949, and it starts at a high happy point: Florian has had an unusually success­ful day of shopping around town. Back in her apartment, she lays out her hard-to-come-by prizes on the dining-room table. “She spent a while arranging them, as though she were an artist preparing a still life. The tin of coffee formed the centerpiece. The silk stockings, still folded, shimmered beside it. A packet of eggs. A handful of black cherries. A block of butter. Everything so perfect, beautiful, promising.” A knock at the solid oak door interrupts her admiration of the goods and by the end of the story there’s no more beauty, no more promise of anything but punishment for her survival. The war has come home to Florian.

Genevieve Plunkett’s “Something for a Young Woman” per­forms the short-story magic of encompassing a great deal of time. It’s also a story in which the characters you’d expect to be major—the protagonist’s husband, for example—are minor, while the owner of an antique store where she works as a teen­ager turns out to be major. We first see Allison as an irritable adolescent, confiding her sexual trials to her boss. In fact, the author at first seems to be leading us into a story about an affair between the two; Allison breaks up with her boyfriend partly because of “the hook of suspicion” she detects in his gaze. Allison is a naive girl, newly sexual and still innocent. She wants to know everything and also to protect herself from such knowledge. When, after mar­riage and having a baby, she starts to make choices, it surprises the reader. Very slowly, Allison begins to live her own life, not the one others expect of her, part of the gift from a man she’d forgotten.

The narrator of “Night Garden,” Shruti Swamy’s second O. Henry story, is afraid: in her backyard, there’s a standoff tak­ing place between her dog, Neela, and a cobra. “The cobra had lifted the front of its body at least two feet from the ground. I had never seen one so close, even separated by four strong walls and a pane of glass. I could see her delicate tongue, dart­ing between her black lips. Her eyes were fixed on the dog, and his on hers. Their gaze did not waver.” As the fascinating story continues, we too are fixed, watching and waiting to see what snake, dog, and woman will decide to do. There is even more at stake for the narrator than her pet’s life: in watching the silent confrontation between her dog and the cobra, she’s bearing wit­ness as well to the failure of her marriage and the question of how she will face the rest of her life.

Wil Weitzel’s “Lion” begins with a death. The narrator’s landlord, a man “as old as old trees,” had once been a great teacher, one who’d “reached people, even the most remote, and left a mark on their lives.” In his extreme old age, he’d become forgetful and forgotten, someone there and not there, “a herald of brighter times which had faded until he had faded.” The nar­rator, a graduate student, lived with the old man during his last two years and entertained him by telling a story again and again about a lion in southern Africa who is raised as a pet in a rich household, then released into the wild, and the boy who years later goes to search for him. The student would always tell only part of the story, claiming to have forgotten the rest—until the time comes when the end of the story finds its way out. This tale within a tale holds inside it a treasure of emotion and vivid rela­tionship, and the secret of the narrator’s feeling for the landlord.
 
“Buttony” by Fiona McFarlane reminds the reader of how the world of the classroom absorbs young children. (“Buttony” was the favorite of juror Brad Watson.) The classroom is filled with emotional sparks observed by the formidable teacher, Miss Lewis. She’s a figure both distant and all-knowing, and she disciplines and indulges the children as it suits her whims. She’s invented a game she calls “buttony,” which she uses to amuse and control the children. Miss Lewis has a favorite, Joseph, who is everyone’s favorite for he’s “both kind and beautiful, and they loved him.” Joseph’s beauty gives him an extraordinary power that he wields over the other stu­dents and their teacher, who knows a lot less than she believes she does.

The stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 give their read­ers the privilege of involvement in another life. Each story has what Vanessa Bell called “a kind of completeness” that allows the story’s readers to feel deeply about people they don’t know and places they’ve never been.

It would feel incomplete to end this introduction without not­ing that in November 2016 we lost William Trevor, a writer of deep intelligence who gave us for so many years stories and novels in his unobtrusively beautiful prose that his death feels like deprivation of an essential good.

—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas