The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (42 page)

Deal or no deal?

You keep the copy, for reasons that reason doesn't understand. But two and a half months later you wipe out on literature altogether. You're out of time in the graduate program, and still no diss. Your husband says no kids until you finish, but you can't finish. The thesis isn't even embarrassing. Psychoanalytic readings reek of ... six years ago, and this new poststructural stuff gives you hives.

You crash and burn. The house goes to pot. You glue yourself to the Watergate hearings for weeks. The whole mad circus is like a Dickens serial saga. You talk to the screen, cheering and hissing. You even develop a little thing for Sam Ervin.

You get a job adjuncting at a nearby college, intros and surveys. But drumming up enthusiasm for Wharton and Cather is murder. These days, it's all Pynchon and Barthelme, Coover and Gaddis and Gass. The canon goes up in smoke. You realize, belatedly, that you're a co-opted, false-consciousness servant of Empire, a capo of privileged heteronormative white paternalism, but it's too late to retool. Around the fall of Saigon—plagued by those films of people on the embassy rooftop clutching the runners of escaping helicopters—you bail out into law school. It's the only practical choice. And doesn't law, at bottom, involve the same act of eternal verbal negotiation as reading?

The marriage breaks up under the pressure of 1L. Your only recreational reading for the next two years is the
Congressional Record.
You get a good job, with a decent boutique firm, specializing in intellectual property. None of your dozens of bright, well-read colleagues have ever heard of Wotton-on-Wold.

You marry again, this time for real, to a big police-procedural fan in corporate litigation. At the last possible moment, you have kids. Three of them: one reader and two watchers, who get their ABCs from purple and green televised puppets. Nothing will ever light up the cortex faster than cathode rays. Yet, with your reader daughter, the whole awful, gut-wrenching seduction happens all over again. Urban ducklings, Wild Things, Purple Crayons—it doesn't matter. Your daughter, glazed-eyed and body-snatched, chants "Read, Mommy, read," like she's off in Neverland already, even before the first verb. And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old, while something inside you cries, "Woman, woman, let go of me."

A few years pass, and still your daughter is reading furiously. You'll lose her eventually, to the rising flood of film: the swelling archive of video that offers whole new republics of visual democracy. Who knows how long the page will hold her attention? Do you rush her into the good stuff while you can? Maybe, if you time things right, the whole crumbling Edwardian stage set of Wotton-on-Wold will strike her as some kind of hyper-Narnia.

When should you push Wentworth on Jane?

1. Never too early.

2. Never too late.

3. Never gonna happen.

Your children become the heroes of their own plots, timeworn narratives in unrecognizable new bindings. The eighties pass while your energies are spent elsewhere—on building up the collegetuition war chests, on making partner, on helping companies copyright common English words. You still read for pleasure: all kinds of things. The hunger remains, but, as with sex, the costumes must grow ever more elaborate to produce the same transport. You're caught somewhere between reading for recognition and reading for estrangement.

Mostly what you read are reviews. Too few hours left to do more than scan the books that you know you'd love. At least you can read what the gatekeepers say about this fall's lineup. And, often, imagining a book from its synopsis beats what you do manage to slog through.

The reviews accumulate faster than you can flip through them. What you really need is a thumbnail summary of the thumbnail summaries. A year or so after Grenada or Iran-contra or some such thing, while blasting through last year's stack of unread literary weeklies prior to pitching them, you come across the fact that
To the Measures Fall
, long out of print, is being reissued in an annotated Essential Library edition—part of a general renaissance of Wentworth, who, the review laments, has been in a twenty-year decline. The reviewer calls
Measures
the "once celebrated, now forgotten British
Magic Mountain.
" He claims that Wentworth's wartime Midlands still have as much to reveal as any of the marginalized regions of the earth. Can that possibly include Lesotho, Lebanon, the Punjab?

The retrospective appreciation feels like one of those lifetime-achievement awards that you get for having the courtesy to stay dead. The new cover for the Essential Library edition is dazzling; it makes Wentworth look like the next Alice Walker. You're not sure what constitutes a decent interval between "much revered national asset" and "unfairly undervalued." For the reviewer, the revival proves the one universal truth about literary merit: quality will surface, in the run of time. The trick is to stop time at just the right moment.

Who is Elton Wentworth, exactly? Choose one.

1. The currently most unjustly underrated author of his generation.

2. The formerly most justly overrated author of his generation.

3. The soon-to-be least unjustly rerated author of his generation.

New annotated editions flood the market. Does your boat go up? You break down and pay an appraiser ten times what you would have, ten years ago, to look at your copy. Churchill's marked-up volume, it turns out, went for eight hundred pounds at Sotheby's, just as the new Wentworth renaissance hit. Your copy belonged to a Cotswold sheep farmer named H. H. Cleanleach. The appraiser offers you ten bucks off his fee.

The boys in Information Processing install a terminal in your office that fulfills your old dream: rapid access to abstracts of all the articles that you can no longer find time to read. In between researching briefs, you follow the boomlet in Wentworth studies. The reader-response people take him up, then those who study reputational revision. There's a minor heyday in swarming any author still in the state of pre-post-exhaustion, just before the idea of single-author studies gives out.

A modernist at New Mexico State proves that
To the Measures Fall
was really written around 1928, suppressed by Wentworth for two decades, then published, despite his objections, in a form he didn't want. A Barnard associate prof proves that half the novel was the work of Wentworth's longtime mistress. A graduate student at Indiana proves that the book is riddled with historical error. Scholars of all ranks show how Wentworth was the product of a thousand horrific cultural blindnesses and Eurocentric brutalities.

Write a brief letter to no one, about what you once thought the book might mean.

The Berlin Wall falls, and the Evil Empire falls with it. The Cold War ends, and for a moment history does too. You stop reading anything that is more than two months old.

You don't exactly remember the nineties. The Gulf, of course. Something about Somalia and Sarajevo. Smoke everywhere. Lots of colored ribbons tied around America's trees. The firm keeps dangling the promise of senior partnership, but it never quite happens.

The 1993 feature film adaptation of
To the Measures Fall
stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson. There's an extended hallucinatory sequence depicting the suicidal "slow walk" at the Somme (filmed in Scotland), graphically matched to a torrid sex scene on the heath outside Wotton-on-Wold (filmed in a Hollywood sound studio). A tie-in paperback edition appears, with a glossy movie-still cover featuring the gorgeous leads.

Rate the film:

1. Worth the price of a movie ticket.

2. Worth videotaping, when it comes on TV.

3. Worth denouncing at a dinner party.

4. Worth a class-action suit by readers everywhere.

On your fifty-fifth birthday—the age at which the terminally ill Sarah Beck must identify her son's body at the foot of the South Downs gravel pit—you join a book group. The kids are grown, the career's on autopilot, the husband is off playing paintball, and it's time to read again. Books are back, in more flavors than ever. Cool books, slick books, innovative remixes, massive doorstops, funny jeux d'esprit, weepy Uighur bildungsromans, caustic family sagas from Kazakhstan. Books in every market niche and biome: avantaprès-post-retro. Back too is the long-dead art of communal reading. Okay: maybe a few of your book group members are in it for the finger food. But you'd forgotten what a pleasure it is to discuss out loud—aimless talk about love and lust, responsibility, hope, and pain. Together, over two years, you read the major national selections. Your fellow members bring their old secret freight out of deep storage. You take nine months to work up to your request. You're unsure of your friends. Unsure of your ability to reread. Unsure ofjust what's in that treacherous book these days.

You read it slowly this time, a chapter a night, over the course of weeks. This time through, the book is no more than a grand, futile gesture of
nevertheless
in the face of human frailty: Francis Beck's refusal to believe that his wife is ill—a feckless cowardice that turns, by insistence, almost heroic; Alice Wright's paralyzing premonition, which she can't act upon without destroying the man who would destroy her; Trevor's premeditated signal to Alice, ready to launch itself from beyond the grave.

Two club members report flinging the book across the room in a rage. Another demands her three days back. Accusations multiply: it's mawkish, it's cerebral, it's meandering, it's manipulative, it's cold and cunning and misanthropic, it's wrecked by redemption.
How are we supposed to care about these characters ? I just wanted them all to get a life.

But a few people in the group don't know what hit them. One friend hated the first fifty pages but wanted fifty more after the end. The quietest man in the group comes back from Wotton-on-Wold wrapped in brittle bewilderment at his own existence.

It's a custom of the group—introduced by the male minority—to assign every book a letter grade. Yours gets a C+.

What percentage of your pleasure has gone out of the book forever? Fractions permitted.

Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin. It's a chance to recapture everything you've ever lost: college friends, out-of-print rarities, quotations that had vanished forever. Your on-line hours must come from somewhere, and it isn't from your TV viewing. You lose whole days on the roller coaster of real-time eBay auctions. Volumes of Wentworth go off at every price, from triple digits down to a buck ninety-nine. You rescue a few, to give to friends, someday, or whenever.

It thrills you to discover a site where all the shameless, recidivist Wentworth readers in the world gather to post their guilty pleasures. You subscribe to a feed. Six months later, the community spirals into civil war as a thread between sock puppets and anonymous avatars goes up in flames.

You watch the Amazon ratings for
To the Measures Fall
drop steadily, from a high of four and a half stars to a low somewhat below that of a defective woodchipper. The wisdom of crowds means to send Wentworth into a third and final eclipse. You consider logging in at Comfort Suites across the country, creating all kinds of personae to rescue the book for another generation of Wentworth readers, whenever they dare to come out of hiding.

How many aliases do you create to rate the book?

1. Just enough to boost the book back to its rightful rating.

2. Sarah Beck would never create an alias.

Then the new century. Terror and sci-fi become life's dominant genres.

War turns perpetual.

The last print newspapers head toward extinction.

More words get posted in five years than were published in all previous history.

Global warming threatens to flood coasts inhabited by half a billion people.

Most of the planet suffers from drought or tainted water.

Name the book that best captures life as now lived.

Two months before you plan to retire, you learn that you have a massive hilar tumor, nestled up in the stem of your lungs, where nothing can reach it. It's right where Sarah Beck's is, if you're imagining correctly.

Your daughter the reader brings you the book, to keep you company in a state-of-the-art cancer center, in your bed next to a window that looks out onto a brick wall ten feet across a cement courtyard. You read it again. Not the whole book, of course—you couldn't possibly read a whole anything. But you manage a few pages, searching for a creature that recedes in front of your gaze.

This time, the book is about the shifting delusion of shared need, our imprisonment in a medium as traceless as air. It's about a girl who knew nothing at all, taking a bike ride through the Cotswolds one ridiculous spring, mistaking books for life and those roiling hills of metaphor for truth. It's about a little flash, glimpsed for half a paragraph at the bottom of a left-hand page, that fills you with something almost like knowing.

A freak snow hits late that year. You lie in bed, an hour from your next morphine dose, your swollen index finger marking a secret place in the spine-cracked volume, the passage that predicted your life. For a moment you are lucid, and equal to any story.

Score the world on a scale from one to ten. Say what you'd like to see happen, in the sequel.

FROM
Harvard Review

M
ORNINGS HE FINDS
Mrs. Kang upright in bed, peeling invisible ginger with an invisible knife. She watches her hands with rapt attention, picking up the stalks from a pile at her right and dropping the peeled pieces into a bowl on her lap. A cloud of white hair rises from her scalp, fine as spun sugar. The first time he tries to raise her, putting his hands gently beneath her armpits, she bats them away; the second time she forgets to resist. She weighs eighty-eight pounds on a good day. In the wheelchair she sits up, ramrod-straight, and waves a finger at him.
E na pun no ma!
Her voice like wind in a crevasse. You are a bad boy!