The Best American Short Stories 1998
(as selected by Garrison Keillor)
This one is about the 1998 edition of the Best American Short Stories series. I stole this anthology from my grandparents’ house about a decade ago, and it’s sat on my shelf ever since, accumulating dust and smells.
They let Garrison Keillor pick the stories that year. I admittedly knew nothing about Garrison Keillor when I picked up the book, so I looked him up. He was the host of A Prairie Home Companion on Minnesota Public Radio until he was fired for being a sex pest. He looks like the sun-dried doppelgänger of Hugo Habercore, the meddlesome health inspector from Bob’s Burger’s:
He writes an introduction to the collection in which he lays out what he believes good fiction to be:
People want stories to be real. Reality is what we crave, as Thoreau said. If you tell a story and people like it, they don’t compliment you on your narrative style, they say, “Is that true?” That is the highest praise for a writer, that he or she is truthful. People don’t like it if you use a story merely to express your feelings, if you start out with real Salvation Army furniture in a one-bedroom cinderblock apartment overlooking an asphalt parking lot in south Minneapolis and a Persian cat lying on the Sunday comics spread out on the table as a snowstorm rages outside and your lover is stranded in Chicago and Chopin is on the stereo and you suddenly decide to do a terrible dishonest thing and open your lover’s dresser drawer and take out the shoebox that contains her old letters and you read one from her previous lover, a single page, typed, in which he recalls a month with her in northern California, and your face burns with jealousy —people don’t like it if this tale then turns into an essay and you to the window and grieve in some high-falutin literary way about the impossibility of love and wind up with a set-piece description of the winter landscape. You can publish this story and your friends will tell you they liked it, but anybody who reads it will stop midway and think, Oh, get out of my face, and throw it aside.
This is nonsense. It’s weird, faux-populist pablum and the kind of thing a Public Radio Guy might say. Bizarrely, he somehow manages to shoehorn Monica Lewinsky and Anne Frank into other parts of this introduction, but that’s besides the point.
The point is that this attitude is reflected in the stories that populate the collection. They are all good stories, the best American short stories of 1998 we are told, but just about every one is about a protagonist licking the wounds of their broken heart, or very specific memoir-ish slice of life pieces one might hear on shows like This American Life: tales of illness and death, personal failures, the chaotic collision of parenthood and childhood. Maybe there are only so many things a story can be about, but they are almost all works of high realism, and stacking so many similar stories upon each other left me craving something else. Keillor did not save much room for the absurd, the surreal, or for more than a hint of genre, and the collection is poorer for it.
Rather than keep on complaining, I’ll pull out two highlights that threatened to deviate from the rubric, and therefore have stuck most in my memory
“Every Night for a Thousand Years” by Chris Adrian
Walt Whitman volunteers at a field hospital, attending to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War. He hangs out with a whisky-soaked physician who has renegade new ideas about medicine, such as washing hands and sterilizing surgical equipment. During bouts of insomnia, he visits the moonlit monuments of D.C. He falls in love with a young soldier named Hank, who eventually loses his leg, and then his life.
This is the seventh story in the collection and it is the first one that feels like a departure from the norm. It’s still a contemplation of heartbreak and death, but it’s a period piece and it tends toward the kind of literary digressions that Keillor seems to hate so much. I wouldn’t go as far to claim that it’s fantastical, there is nothing here that transgresses the laws of nature, physics, or logic, but it has a certain dreamy magical realist quality. It feels like a ghost story without any ghosts.
“The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx
Three brothers grow up on a ranch in Wyoming. One of them gives up the country life and moves to New England. The ranch is bought and sold and bought and sold again, eventually turning into an Australian-themed tourist trap called Wyoming Down Under. One of the brothers works on the theme park in his old age, and is killed by an angry emu. In a flashback, an old girlfriend tells the story of a half-mad rancher who kills a steer, only for it to up and walk off, halfway through being skinned. The New England brother decides to drive home for the funeral, and is stranded in a blizzard. Abandoning his car, he crosses paths with the half-skinned steer.
I like Annie Proulx’s short stories and had read this one before. They don’t take themselves too seriously and do a good job of playing with the absurd mythology of the U.S. West and the place it occupies in our cultural imagination. Proulx also published “Brokeback Mountain” that year and the story was included in the honorable mentions section of the anthology. While that story is obviously more famous now, I think “The Half-Skinned Steer” is a better example of what it is that Proulx does well.
There are some honorable mentions for me among those that hewed closer to the Garrison Keillor Rules of Storytelling. Of the pieces about heartbreak and its aftermath, Akhil Sharma’s “Cosmopolitan” may be my favorite, or at least the most interesting. For mediations on family, I liked Antonya Nelson’s “United Front” and Poe Ballantine’s "The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue" the best. For those who read the big names, John Updike’s “My Father on the Verge of Disgrace” and Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are The Only People Here” were included in this anthology, but I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone so I won’t provide links.
This is probably the first of these ‘best of’ collections that I have actually read front to back, so I have no idea if the tendencies I’ve whined about here are endemic to the medium or not. If anyone knows of a good vintage for the Best American series or some other annual anthology, please let me know.
I have no clue what will be next, but I will see you in a couple weeks if all goes according to plan.