The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

Words on Marcus's Introduction

In his introduction, editor Ben Marcus writes of the stories that grabbed us most in childhold. For him, these were the stories that made him want to lie awake and linger in their echoes, to allow the hidden, alchemical  codes of language time and space and silence to do their work. That silence was important - Marcus writes that literature is a silence - as the best stories did most of their work in that silence that occurred after they were read or heard. Questions of what and why and how did not matter, what was most important was the mysterious effects of the telling itself. As he puts it, “The best stories were stun guns that held my attention completely, leaving me paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within.”  It was the story itself that happened, not the events it described.

And the secret making of that effect is how Marcus redefines the notion of "plot". In selecting the stories for this anthology, Marcus was not interested in their plots, but rather, in what they were "plotting for", what was their "tactic of mattering", what were the hidden machinations that rooted the story deep in the reader's active imagination. The effect of these hidden machinations is to carve out new space in the geography of the reader's sensibilities, a geography that had been shaped up until the encounter with that story by habitual patterns of language. Marcus writes,  “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.” 

For Marcus, a plot is what is hidden, the “hide” of the story, and just as an  animal's hide conceals the inner workings of its body, the story should not give up the secrets of these hidden machinations too easily. This “hide” is one way in which Marcus defines "style" and style, especially in the unique use of language, is what Marcus focused on in his selections. Stories – or the sequence of events they describe – are limited, but the possible use of language in re-imagining them is limitless.

It is in this  limitless re-imaginings of their methods through new uses and formations of language that the authors are able to make stories that matter. And it seems that the idea that limitless re-imaginings are possible for all things, may be the most important message such stories carry.

Language is what carves, what is carved is our sensibilities formed from language, and that hidden machinery, that new use of language, the forms carved, is style. Marcus writes,  “a stylist seeks to master that technology [the sentence], to not let it lead or dictate terms, but to control it and make it produce whatever effects the stylist desires..to rescue the sentence...is to do something strenuous and heroic...”

In compiling this anthology, Marcus asked for stories from the many different camps, “the realists, the metafictionists, …  and the fabulist maximalists”  and found that the very best writing in each didn't fit comfortably into any one camp, even made the act of rendering them into categories meaningless.  Any of the fundamental components of story – plot, setting, character – no matter the approach used, was but “a piece of language slapped to life by a writer...These are acts of language rubbed over the air to make people appear...”

Thus, because concerned with language, Marcus sums up his concern as being with style, which he defines as a way to to name the artist at work with language, for “language is ...the way we communicate privately to ourselves, [it is] the true code of our inner lives, and to be a short story writer is to know this, to tap into and reveal those ways of personal address we reserve for the private, necessary messages we send ourselves.”

Sea Oak - George Saunders

What is this story's “tactic of mattering”?  This one seems to be a story about a bunch of losers, something that is well trodden territory. These characters have either poor jobs or no jobs at all; they live a second rate existence in a crime ridden neighborhood. They have a matriarch, the narrator's aunt, a woman who seems to selfless to be possible: no matter how bad the circumstances she reminds them to be grateful for all that life has given them, she never has an unkind word for anybody, and she has been so uncaring for her own needs she has never even had a date with a man in her long life. And then she dies. What comes next moves the story into the fantastical: the woman digs herself out of the grave and comes back to the house as a corpse, rapidly decomposing, but anxious to finally get some living – and sex – in before she has completely fallen apart. This story, embedded in the first, makes both of them work. Saunders uses the tropes of magic realism – the fixation with the physical details of the corpse and the grave – to get us past the limits of credulity. And there is a real urgency. I root for the aunt, I want her to succeed in getting her people succeeding, especially if in doing so she'll finally get to have a lover. But, even as she begins to succeed, she falls more rapidly apart.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower

Tower's first person narrator speaks in the language of classic mid century comic books, although he lives in medieval times as a Viking raider and is given to belief in mythology, superstition, and the deeds of heroes. Hear his voice: “A turncoat Norwegian monk named Haddad had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver.”

What grabbed me in this was the contrast between what the first person narrator had heard of and believed, of magic and the deeds of his warrior leaders, and what he saw firsthand. At first, as he
describes what he knows of the exploits of his leader and other warriors, it seems this story might be an amp-ed up, hyper-violent fantasy. But as the story progresses, he describes only what is happening in the moment, what he actually sees, and it becomes clear this is not a fantastical world at all, it is only the narration of someone who believes magic and myth, and he is beginning to lose that belief. As the raiders row on their mission to destroy Haddad, he notes the obvious contradiction of rowing out to sea to destroy an enemy who has the power to control the sea: “I couldn't help but think that this crossing would have been a fine opportunity (for Haddad) to call up a typhoon and hold a massacre.”  By the end, the belief in the exploits and the magic have seemingly drained away, and he waits at night in horror, knowing that people very much like the man he was at one time may well be bearing down on his own settlement now as he and his wife and children lie in their beds.

Do Not Disturb - A.M. Homes

I did not like this one on the first pass – it is in fact, deeply unpleasant and unsettling  – but there was no doubt that it gripped something in my imagination. On the second pass, I could admire this work and the author's mastery.

The very beginning is a nice piece of prolepsis that pulls me right into the narration: “My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end, she could be dead.”  I'm telegraphed past the immediate scene into the wife's serious illness, and also know from this sentence that, by the end of the story, it will not yet have killed her.

Homes is able to stay in scenes, weaving in enough details that come out in dialogue or asides to fill in as much of the back story (and no more) as is needed to make the story work.  It was a story I might have preferred to have not read, but I lay there in that shocked silence Marcus wrote of.  (Still, I now know too much, and in much too vivid detail, about what happens when a woman has a hysterectomy.)

There is a great exchange that happens after the husband (who narrates the story) has heard the specialist explain the operation to the wife. It jogs a memory of a time when the two of them talked idly about what method each would use to kill themselves if they were forced to do it with their bare hands. He begins by remembering her method:
     “...you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”
    “What's your point?”
    “No point – I just suddenly remembered it. Isn't Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”
    “I doubt he's going to throw it across the room,” she says.

I've read about great stories that they cannot be paraphrased. The story is the paraphrase, it is already all essential. I was tempted to try to find an “about” for this story, or to draw a parallel to the wife's cancer and their hostile marriage, but I could not. I'm intrigued by a what Homes drops in at the end of the piece, a little snippet that undermines the narrator's credibility. He has told us repeatedly that his wife is full of malice and spite, feels that one of her own great failings was that she could not fix him, but he depicts himself as giving no reason for it. Yet in this last scene he is on the floor with a maid who is stroking his naked chest and giving him champagne to drink. As he tells the story, this is the maid trying to help him recover from physical paralysis brought on by his back spasms.

But is there enough for me to say that it's not the wife who's the creep, it's him? The story does not suffer from this, is not in any way vague or muddled – it is, in fact, sharp and clear, I forget there is a story or a writer.  The effect for me was that a series of questions came alive after the read, and I was haunted by both the hostility and malice in their marriage, by their strange inability to let each other go, and by even stranger, more remote echoes of love and tenderness humming in the background.

The Caretaker - Anthony Doerr

This one reaches to forty five pages, more a novella than a short story. I'm taken by the way the author changes pace and focus - in the beginning five pages, the protaganist's country has been shattered by a civil war, he has lost his mother and his own livelihood (selling stolen goods), and was wandered through Liberia witnessing shockingly violent scenes. In the remaining forty five pages, he is in Oregon, having worked on a freightor for his passage there. One thing that is of interest - Doerr writes convincingly about the protagonist's life in Liberia, but by bringing him into Oregon for larger part of the piece, is able to also bring this character into a setting the author will presumably know more.

Doerr's images are strong, surreal and it seems the story is organized around them: the violent scenes of the civil war; the whales beached, then sawed open for the medical examination of their organs; the protagonist's taking of their hearts for burial on his employer's land; the images of the employer's resort home falling apart as the protagonist charged with its upkeep lies in his own emotional paralysis; and the garden he grows over the buried hearts of the whales. Doerr also uses echoing: the man, in self-exile from Liberia, is effectively exiled in Oregon by his employer and comes back to almost literally haunt his employer's land; in Liberia he has lost his mother to an unknown fate, while in Oregon it is his employer's deaf teenage daughter, a girl with whom he forms a kinship, that goes missing. The girl has known some horrors, also, and I can guess that it was abuse, but Doerr remains silent on this.

Where the mythological sense  rises most strongly is in Doerr's descriptions of the natural world. After the man has lived as a vagrant in the elements for weeks and then months, he connects with the girl and he wants to tell her what this has taught him: "He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day's light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight - every second of every day has its own magic".  Wow, makes me want to take up the vagrant life in some remote forest myself.  (Does the above sentence have a dangling modifier? I'm not sure whether "every second of every day has its own magic" is the promise of twilight, or whether it is meant to modify the entire sentence...)

Doerr calls attention to his images and their intended workings in this story, particularly that of the buried whales' hearts and how the garden grows above them. He even has his protagonist speak directly on how things that die give rise to something else.  In that sense, unlike Marcus's introductions, he does reveal how his story works. But it does work for me through the empathy - perhaps romanticized - with his character, the scope of the story (stretching over two continents), and the vivid, surreal quality of his protagonist's experiences.