Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword ix Introduction by Michael Chabon xiii
Tom Perrotta. The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face 1 from Post Road
Dennis Lehane. Until Gwen 19 from The Atlantic Monthly
Lynne Sharon Schwartz. A Taste of Dust 35 from Ninth Letter
Thomas McGuane. Old Friends 43 from The New Yorker
J . Robert Lennon. Eight Pieces for the Left Hand 58 from Granta
Kelly Link. Stone Animals 67 from Conjunctions
Nathaniel Bellows. First Four Measures 109 from The Paris Review
Charles D’Ambrosio. The Scheme of Things 125 from The New Yorker
Alice Munro. Silence 149 from The New Yorker
Tom Bissell. Death Defier 174 from Virginia Quarterly Review
Joy Williams. The Girls 212 from Idaho Review
Cory Doctorow. Anda’s Game 223 from Salon.com
Alix Ohlin. Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student 251 from Swink
Edward P. Jones. Old Boys, Old Girls 265 from The New Yorker
David Means. The Secret Goldfish 288 from The New Yorker
Joyce Carol Oates. The Cousins 298 from Harper’s Magazine
David Bezmozgis. Natasha 318 from Harper’s Magazine
Tim Pratt. Hart and Boot 339 from Polyphony
Rishi Reddi. Justice Shiva Ram Murthy 356 from Harvard Review
George Saunders. Bohemians 374 from The New Yorker
Contributors’ Notes 383 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2004 394 Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories 398
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people, some of whom write short stories, learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie- house lobby, of karaoke and Jagermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in the corner of an ice-rink arcade, bread and circuses, the Weekly World News. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It sells action figures and denture adhesive. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
I’d like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and Iwrite to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on — God knows I’ve done it elsewhere — about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka’s formula, as the brilliant Lorrie Moore did in this space last year, of a book as an axe for the frozen sea within. I could go down to the café at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler, about the power of literature, off a mug. But in the end — here’s my point — it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.
Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature. In so doing I will only be codifying what has, all my life, been my operating definition.
Here is a sample, chosen at random from my career as a reader, of encounters that would be covered under my new definition of entertainment: the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of an original prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazonian riverboat or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust; a duel to the death with broadswords on the seacoast of ancient Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or mule slaughter in Melville or Cormac McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary’s clubfoot- correcting device; the outrageousness of outrage in a page of Philip Roth; words written in smoke across the London sky on a day in June 1923; a momentary gain in my own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared brokenhearted glee; the recounting of a portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch on the Neva.
The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can’t think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, oof grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still animate ttttthe word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.
At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained generations of guests with banquets and feasts and displays of artifice, the idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure (just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artifice and show — to pleasure, that ambiguous gift. It’s partly the doubtfulness of pleasure that taints the name of entertainment. Pleasure is unreliable and transient. Pleasure is Lucy with the football. It is the roguish boyfriend who upends your heart with promises, touches you for twenty bucks, and then blows town. Pleasure is easily synthesized, mass-produced, individually wrapped. Its benefits do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our taste for them.
The other taint is that of passivity. At some point in its history, the idea of entertainment lost its sense of mutuality, of exchange. One either entertains or is entertained, is the actor or the fan. As with all one-way relationships, grave imbalances accrue. The entertainer balloons with a dangerous need for approval, validation, love, and box office; while the one entertained sinks into a passive spectactorship, vacantly munching great big salty handfuls right from the foil bag. We can’t take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us. But somewhere along the course of the past century or so, as the great machinery of pleasure came online, turning out products that, however pleasurable, suffer increasingly from the ills of mass manufacture — spurious innovation, inferior materials, alienated labor, and an excess of market research — that intention came to seem suspect, unworthy, and somehow cold and hungry at its core, like the eyes of a brilliant comedian. Lunch counters, muffler shops, dinner theaters, they aim to please; but writers? No self-respecting literary genius, even an occasional maker of avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe himself as primarily an “entertainer.” An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing “She’s a Lady” to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage.
Yet entertainment — as I define it, pleasure and all — remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.
The short story maps the most efficient path for spanning the chasm between two human skulls. Cartographers employ different types of maps — political, topographic, dot — to emphasize different kinds of information. These different types are complementary; taken together they increase our understanding. In other introductions to other collections of short stories, I have argued for the commonsense proposition that, in constructing our fictional maps, we ought not to restrict ourselves to one type or category. Science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction — all these genres and others have rich traditions in the American short story, reaching straight back to Poe and Hawthorne, our first great practitioners of the form. One of the pioneers of the modern “psychological” short story as we now generally understand it, Henry James, wrote so many out-and-out ghost stories that they fill an entire book. But the same process of commercialization and mass appeal that discredited entertainment, or the idea of literature as entertainment, also devastated our notion of the kinds of short stories that belong in college syllabi, prestigious magazines, or yearly anthologies of the best American short stories (another victory, in my view, for the enemies of pleasure, in their corporate or ivory towers). In spite of this general neglect by the literary mainstream, however, those other traditional genres remain viable and lively and powerful models of the short story, whether in the hands of a daring soul like Kelly Link or those of a crime novelist, like Dennis Lehane, who takes a brilliant chance on the form that brought us some of the best work that Hammett and Chandler ever did.
I guess that in the end all this talk of pleasure and entertainment is by way of acknowledging the obvious: I have no idea if these are the twenty best short stories published in the United States during 2004, or not. And neither do you. Or rather, you may feel very strongly that they are not, or that some of the stories here deserve the honor and some don’t. But as you make your assessment — as you judge the product of my judgment — you will be relying, whether consciously, unconsciously, or in full-blown denial, on the same fundamental criterion as that on which I relied: the degree to which each of these stories catches hold of you, banishes everything but the interplay of your imagination and the author’s, your ear and the author’s, your solitude and the author’s. That’s entertainment. Short stories entertain; they aim to please. These are the twenty stories that pleased me best.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2005 by Michael Chabon. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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