I picked this up on impulse because I saw that The Best American Short Stories was edited this year by Salman Rushdie, who is, of course, British. Amused by the incongruence, I decided to see what was so American about these short stories.
Very little, as it turns out. The qualifications for inclusion in this volume were apparently 1) that the story be written by an American or Canadian or 1a) that the story be written by someone who has made America or Canada his home and 2) that the story be published in an American or Canadian magazine some time within the past calendar year. In English. But the settings can be anywhere, the characters anyone – and they are.
What impressed me most about these twenty stories was their beauty, their variety, and their effect. It is hard to deny that each of these writers is performing with a high level of technical skill; otherwise no sentence as perfect and intriguing as the first line of “The Worst You’ll Ever Feel” by Rebecca Makkai.
When the nine-fingered violinist finally began playing, Aaron hid high up on the wooden staircase, as far above the party as the ghosts.
The selection of stories will take you from Pakistan to a wartime girls’ camp to unnamed American cities or towns. The characters range from murderers and adulterers to students and children, funny, tragic, lovely people with strange and wonderful stories. (There was a surprising bit of magical realism, which delighted me.) Each story concludes with an elusive quality of ambiguous completeness: some questions are not answered, but you knew some of them were meant to be. The narrative is over, yes, but the story, somehow, goes on. Read the conclusion of Makkai’s story of Aaron and his ability to apprehend the past from out of the violinist’s music:
Behind him, among the drunken guests, the ones who’d heard the story of Bonn at dinner, who’d seen the quiet, pale boy grow paler and fall, rose a murmur: He has seen a vision, they were saying. The young rabbi has seen a vision.
I might rhapsodize about the beauty of the predicate subject “a murmur <– rose” and the haunting repetition of “pale boy grow paler” and the success of the colon to anchor the guests’ quotation-less dialogue; but the real beauty is in the verb tense of the last line. The strength of the present perfect drives the theme of the story right into you. What was Aaron’s vision? you ask. (And how clever, the meaning behind the name Aaron – the young rabbi!) To appreciate these intricacies, you must read the story. Read all the stories.
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