Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: 2010

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is this coming weekend (April 24-25) on the UCLA campus. I am unable to go this year because of other commitments, but I have attended several times in the past, and it is always a pleasure to see so many thousands of people excited about books, especially the kids.

I went one year with my grandson, when he was about four. At that time he was a fanatic fan of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories by the Rev. W. Awdry. He had some of the toys and the books. The Rev. Awdry’s son Christopher, who continued the series, was there signing books. It was a rare delight to see my grandson walk up and get his first book autographed. No direct connection, but now at age 13 he is a very busy reader. He saved up birthday and Christmas money and bought himself a Kindle recently. I am going to wait until the e-book readers shake down before I decide whether I will get one. Books are not “read and forget” items for me. I like to see them on the shelf; I like to hold them in my hand; I like to turn their pages. As my wife laments at the cluttered shelves, I like to keep them.

If you are in LA this weekend and have never been to the festival, you might enjoy it. Admission is free, and parking is about ten bucks. Even if you do not have tickets (also free) to the various panel presentations, there are still lots of authors to see and hear and books to tempt you.

Some of the high points of my previous Festival trips include the following:

Listening to T. C. Boyle mesmerize an auditorium full of people with a cheesy story, but a true storyteller’s delivery.

Watching Annie Proulx play her curmudgeon role and resisting standing up and asking her a question about “Brokeback Mountain,” one of my favorite stories.

Hearing Jane Smile talk about Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel and getting sidetracked to talk about horses.

One time I was strolling up the aisles of tents and did a double take when I passed George Plimpton in front of one of them, all by his lonesome, promoting The Paris Review. I swung around and shook his hand, introducing myself as a professor at a Southern California University. “Oh, Yeah, he said, with a sophisticated and supercilious smirk, “And what, pray tell, do you profess?’ At that particular point, I wasn’t quite sure.

Some of the writers at the Festival this year who I would not mind hearing:

Chitra Divakaruni, on a fiction panel entitled “Writing the Other.”
Dave Eggers being interviewed by LA Times Book Editor, David Ulin
James Ellroy in conversation with Joseph Wambaugh
Yann Martel in conversation with Michael Silverblatt
Bill McKibbin in conversation with Susan Salter Reynolds
Herman Wouk in conversation with Tim Rutten
T.C. Boyle reading a story to thousands gathered around a campfire.
Bret Easton Ellis in conversation with Erik Himmelsbach

And the best panel of all: Susan Straight, Maile Meloy, Mona Simpson, Jane Smiley, and Marianne Wiggins. Wow, if I could, I would go just for this one panel—truly star studded.

Which reminds me of one of the downsides of the Festival. Since this is LA, within which, as the big sign of the hill reminds us, is Hollywood, there are lots of stars, who have little to with literature, that many people will come to gaze at in wonder.

Trisha Yearwood will be there, and Daisy Fuentes, and Pam Grier, and Peter Yarrow, and Carl Reiner, and Bernadette Peters, and Carol Burnett, and even the Fonze Henry Winkler. Granted, these big names are there primarily promoting children’s books, but the parents will be happy to be star struck in the audience.

Nothing much about the short story this year—no panels, and with the exception of T.C. Boyle, no readers of short stories. However, on one bright note, two collections of stories are on the short list for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction this year:

Daniyal Mueenuddin, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.”
Wells Tower, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.”

I posted blogs last year on both of these books: Liked the Mueenuddin, did not like the Tower.

If any of you attend the festival this weekend, I would appreciate your posting a comment to let me know what it was like and what you liked about it.

The Flights of Angels

Here's my latest short story. Be sure to check out my recent collections available on the Kindle.

            Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Peter.  He was a cherubic young man with rosy cheeks and an easy smile, but no smile of his was ever greater or more full of love than the one he saved for his mother and father.  When Peter was in his ninth year, he grew very sick, and it concerned his parents very much because, you see, he was the dearest thing in their lives.  It was his broad, loving smile that set warmth and joy in their hearts. 

            But Peter was in bed with a fever for many weeks and no matter how often he told his mother that he would be all right, she would still break down into tears just outside of his bedroom, not realizing he could hear her sadness.  Because he was so young, he didn't understand fully that his mothers tears came not from something bad he'd done, but because she was grief-stricken by the idea that she would lose her precious little boy.  It always seemed to get worse after the doctor would come to pay a visit. 

            "Peter, can you open your mouth wide?" he would ask, peering deep into his throat before stuffing a thermometer inside.

            "Take deep breaths now, Peter," he would say as he listened to Peter's breathing.  Peter would take as many deep breaths as he could before bursting out into a deep, moist cough.

            "Just relax now, Peter," he would say as he felt the glands in Peter's neck and stomach with rough but gentle fingers.

            Whenever he finished his examination, he would always tousle young Peter's hair and laugh, hiding a grim smile on his face.

            Peter would stare longingly out the window while the doctor offered his report to Peter's parents.  Outside Peter's window was the swing his father built for him on the tree in the yard.  Perhaps the most fun he'd ever had in his life that he could remember was the day his father put the swing up.  It was a cool, clear autumn a year past.  The leaves on the tree had mostly dropped to the ground and Peter busily raked them into one giant pile while his father strung up the seat made of a scrap of discarded oak onto a sturdy branch.  Anyone within a mile could hear little but their laughter for hours.  Peter's father would push him higher and higher until Peter was high enough to jump headlong into the pile of leaves, scattering them back over the yard.  With the help of his father, Peter would rake the leaves back up as fast as he could, trying hard to get in as many flights as possible before the sun fell and he'd be sent to bed.

            Now, though, it was winter and the tree was bare-limbed and cold, dusted with snow.

            Peter could not hear what the doctor told his mother, but he knew things must be bad from his concerned murmur.  What told him the most, however, was the sharp, stifled cry his mother let out after the doctor finished his prognosis.

            It was then that young Peter decided that he would work hard to get better and to smile his great, big, loving smile for his mother as much as he could.

            But those weeks were short, and on Monday the seventeenth, Peter went to sleep for the last time.

            His mother had kissed him on the forehead and his father had read him a story before he fell asleep that night, and he had one final, fevered dream eternal.

            "What would you like, Peter?" A voice asked him.

            "I'd like to play," Peter said.  "I've been in bed a long time and I miss playing so much."

            "Then you shall play," the voice said and the blackness gave way to a playground the size and like such as Peter had never seen.  And feeling fit and eager to play, Peter raced about, spinning on the merry-go-round, careening down the slide, swinging on the swings, and clambering up and down the jungle gyms.  But soon he became tired, playing by himself was quite exhausting, but it quickly grew lonesome. 

            As he thought this, he turned to see a young boy, about his age and dressed in pajamas, staring at the park, eager to play.  So long had it been that Peter had had a playmate of any kind that he smiled and went over to the boy as quickly as his legs could carry him.  Peter put his arm around the boy and shook his hand all at the same time.  "I'm Peter.  Isn't this park great?  What's your name?"

            "I'm John."

            "Hello, John."

            And that was it.  They formed the sort of fast friendship that only children are capable of.  For what felt like hours they played and laughed.  The laughed and played almost as hard as Peter and his father on that autumn day in the past.  The only difference was that this was missing the blanket of warmth and care that only a loving parent can provide.  Their fun was quickly cut short, though, when a voice called John away.  "It's time to move on," the voice said.

            "I guess I have to go," John told Peter.

            A sad appreciation crept over Peter, and he gave John a hug and thanked him for playing.

            Peter stared solemnly into the bright distance, waving farewell to John on his way into the beyond.  "Goodbye, John!" he shouted after him. 

            John was only a speck in the distance.

            Peter didn't have long to mourn the departure of his new friend before a voice called out from behind him, across the green.  "He-ey!"

            "Hello!" Peter shouted back.

            The two boys ran toward each other, finally meeting by the merry-go-round.  Both boys were winded badly.

            "I'm Michael," the new little boy said between heavy breaths, "What's your name?"

            "Peter."

            "How do you do, Peter?"

            "I'm fine."

            "Where are we?"

            "A park, I think, but I don't know where."

            "How'd we get here?"

            "I don't know.  I'm sure it's a dream.  The last thing I remember before I got here was my father reading me a bedtime story.  I was very sick then, though, and now I'm better."

            "I was walking in the woods with my brother and I lost him.  It seems like I've been walking for ages, but I finally came upon this place."

            "Hmmm..."

            "Are there any adults here?"

            "I haven't seen any."

            "I hope."

            "Me too, but I think there's really only one thing to do until they find us."

            "What's that?"

            "Tag!  You're it!"

            With a laugh, Peter chased after Michael; back and forth their game went.  Hours passed.  They chased each other around trees and rocks like dogs chasing their own tails.  The wonderful sound of children playing echoed in the ether for miles around until once again a voice interrupted the merriment, this time to call Michael away. 

            Once again, Peter felt an overwhelming compulsion to embrace his playmate and whisper to him quietly how much he appreciated their time together.  Michael walked off into the distance, turning periodically to wave back at Peter, showing him how appreciated he felt during their brief time together.

            Though his friend was leaving, Peter took heart, knowing that he was able to make him feel welcome and wanted.  Nothing made Peter more sad than the feeling that there were people in the world who didn't have love and care, people who appreciated them.  Then Peter tried to imagine what it would be like to be lost, separated from his family the way Michael had been.  He tried hard to empathize, but he simply couldn't wrap his head around it.  Trying too hard to fathom that sense of abandonment made his brain spin about like the merry-go-round he was sitting on.  Peter liked feeling comforted and loved, and took pride in trying to make others feel that way, and so it was with great delight that Peter noticed a young girl walking toward him from the same direction his other recent friends had come from. 

            She was a few years older than Peter and had dark hair in wavy curls that brushed along the back of her neck.  Her smile was wide and bright, like an angel would smile.  She reminded Peter of his mother, and it made him shed a tear as he wondered where his mother was.

            But the young girl saw his trembling chin and red eyes and when she arrived, she kneeled down and delicately wiped the tears from little Peter's face.  "Shhh," she soothed, "What's your name?"

            Trying to hold back a flood of tears, Peter's chin quivered when he told her his name, but once he spoke he sobbed and the tears flowed freely.

            "There, there," she ran her fingers across his head, trying to comfort him.  "What's the matter, Peter?"

            The fact that he was forced to form the words choked him up and his tears doubled in force, cutting him off. 

            "It's okay, dear heart.  Shhh...   You don't need to cry.  You can tell me what's the matter."

            "I miss my mother," Peter was finally able to say.  "...and my father...  and I don't know where I am."

            "It's all right.  We're together now.  I don't exactly know where we are either, but I'm sure we can find your parents."  She pulled Peter close to her, embracing him, soothing him as best she could.

            He let it all out, crying until he could suppress it.  He pulled away from her, sat up, and wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve.

            "I don't know where we are.  I think this is a nightmare."

            "What makes you say that?"

            "I was sleeping before.  And now I'm here.  And it was fun for a while.  But I want to wake up and be home."

            "Well, why don't we see if there's a way we can wake up?  I'd very much like to be home, too."

            Peter nodded his head to the girl.  She stood and offered him her hand, to help him up.  He accepted it.  All he could think of was how wonderful her soft, cool hands felt pressed against his skin, comforting somehow, like holding his mothers hand.

            "What's your name," he asked the girl leading him toward the edge of the park.

            "My name is Wendy," she said.

            "I'm sorry I cried like that, Wendy."

            "You don't ever have to be sorry about missing your family, Peter."

            They walked and walked for what felt like miles, until they arrived at a stony precipice that looked down hundreds of feet into a into a deep ravine.  A chill ran up Peter's spine.

            "What do you think?" Wendy asked him.

            "What do you mean?"

            "I mean, let's do it."

            "Do what?"

            "Don't you love the feeling of falling in dreams, knowing you'll be safe when you hit the ground?"

            Peter wasn't sure what to think when she closed her eyes and took a step closer to the edge, but the overwhelming sensation that he had nothing to lose washed over him and he followed her lead. 

            "One," she counted down.  "Two."

            There was a long, terribly pause before she said, "Three." 

            But neither hesitated to leap off the cliff.

            The wind sailed through their air and the fell and fell and fell.  And the rush they felt was exactly the same as when you fall in a dream. It's disconcerting but wonderful all at the same time.  But instead of hitting the ground at the bottom of the ravine in a horrible splat, they continued flying through the air as though it were as natural as walking or breathing.

            Still led by Wendy and her hand, Peter soared back to the top of the ravine, hovering over it's middle. 

            "That didn't wake us up, did it?"

            "No, but it was fun, wasn't it?"

            "Let's do it again!"

            And they zoomed around in the air like birds in spring.  More than a few times they came down to the water below and flew over it, reaching down into it, skimming the surface with their hands. 

The whole time, they never let go of each other.

            After a time, they flew back up to the top of the precipice and sat down, looking over the edge.  This filled Peter with an anxiety.  Each of his playmates had been taken from him after their playtime and he didn't want to lose Wendy to the voice and he told her so.

            "I'll be right here," she assured him. 

            She began to sing him a lullaby, very similar to the one his mother used to sing to him and he curled up next her with his head in her lap.  Her voice was so relaxing to him that he drifted off into a fitful sleep.

            But when he awoke once more, she was gone.

            Panic struck him.

            Where could she have gone?  Did she wake up from the dream?  Was that even possible?

            The thing that Peter hated the most was that he wasn't able to say goodbye to her, that he couldn't tell her how much he appreciated her comfort.  If he was going to be here, he thought, and have to have to walk with these other lost children, the least he could do is make them feel not so lonely on their way.

            He resolved then and there to make sure that every lost boy and girl who crossed his path would be met with as much comfort and fun and love as he could muster until he could find a way out of this dream and back into the loving arms of his parents.

            And that was what he did.

            Hundreds of children arrived at the park through hundreds of sleepless days and Peter made sure that every young boy or girl left to the other side with a hug and the knowledge that even though they didn't have very much time, they were loved, cared for, and wanted.  There was nothing more sad, in his mind, than someone leaving his presence without feeling important and cherished.

            But soon this burden grew too much for young Peter.

            Where was his comfort?

            The feeling that he had worked so hard to prevent in all the other children soon began to eat away at him and he spent much of his free time building up the courage to finally ask the voice what his purpose was.  Why was he left here?  Did no one want him after all?

            "Perhaps my parents wanted to leave me here," he told himself.  And that thought made him cry.  What did he do wrong?  What could he have done to deserve such abandonment?

            The gears in his mind worked overtime trying to understand why he was so unwanted by everyone.  Every time another child would come through his park (and he had begun to think of it as his, since he was the only constant there) he would shower them with all the attention and affection to feel warm and loved, but it would never be enough for them to stay with him.  The voice would always call them away and they would always leave Peter, alone and discarded.

            And it made him cry.

            There is nothing sadder than a child (or anyone) crying because no one wants them.

One day, after a long hard day of showing a wonderful time and an unheard of amount of care to a little boy named James, the voice once more called away Peter's playmate.

"Won't you stay here with me, James?" Peter asked as he latched onto him with both arms, hoping that his new friend would show him the same respect given him.

"He cannot stay, Peter," the voice replied for James.

"I'd like to," James offered, "but I guess I really have to go."

James started off on his walk beyond, leaving Peter alone and unwanted once more.

"Why can't he stay?" Peter asked through bitter tears.

"Because it is his time to go."

"When is it my time?"

"That's not up to me, Peter."

"I want to leave here."

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes!  I want to go back home.  I want to wake up, I want to grow up and be a normal kid! I want someone to love me..."

The voice made no reply. 

"Can I?" Peter asked.

But still no reply came.  And Peter was even more alone and left feeling twice as unwanted and rejected as before.

And that's when he got up, smudged the hot tears away from his eyes and moved forward in the same direction James and John and Michael had left him for.  He walked with a fire and determination that was out of character for so gentle a boy.  He practically marched.  And soon the march wasn't enough and he galloped, hoping to come to the end of this place and somewhere he could be with people who loved him again.  Perhaps he could find someone to replace his parents since they obviously didn't want him anymore.

Further and further he went until finally he came upon something he'd never seen before in all of his time there.  It was a house, much like his own house, the one he lived in before all this.  In the front was a mighty tree very similar to the one his father had put the swing in. 

Peter's heart grew faint.  Could this have been his house?

He doubted it.  Nothing in his dream (which is what he came to think of it as) ever turned out to be what it seemed.  But at the same time, his mind was spinning with the possibilities. 

He raced to the front door of the imposing house and knocked heavily on the door, hoping someone, anyone was home.  He was prepared to ask the inhabitants to take him, they didn't need to do much, just love him.  That's all he needed.  That's all any child needed: to be loved.

The door creaked open and a woman opened the door, a woman ten years older than his mother was, at least.  But when he smiled his beautiful smile, happy that an adult was here, happy that they might have answers, happy that they might be convinced to love him, the woman shrieked.

"Peter?" She asked.

How did she know his name unless she knew him?

The door opened wider and Peter could see a figure on an arm-chair through the banister.  Soft yellow light poured in and the man sitting in the chair looked up and it was unmistakably Peter's father.  He looked up from his paper at the mention of Peter's name to see his little boy, back to normal; happy and smiling like the sweet, bright boy he was because for the first time in ages Peter no longer he felt he was living in a nightmare.

He stood and adjusted his glasses to be sure the sight before him was no illusion.  And looking into the face of that beautiful, little boy, that he cherished more than anything else in the world, he knew finally that he was in heaven. 

Said Sayraefiezadeh's "Appetite": How I Read a Story

In response to my last post on several New Yorker stories, Elissa, one of my readers, made the sort of “comment” that professors, young and old, can never resist: “I would love to know what you thought of….” Since I have spent my professional life telling folks what I think of short stories, and since Elissa wanted to know what I thought of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s story “Appetite” in the March 1 issue of The New Yorker, I dug it out from the pile of mags by my bed and reread it.

After I first read the story, about a month ago, I laid it aside without much thought. I am not familiar with Sayrafiezadeh’s work, although I vaguely remembered his name associated with a memoir about skateboards. At Elissa’s prompting, my second reading (which--I never tire of saying--every short story deserves) made me consider some guidelines for reading short stories that I have always followed.

When I read a story for the first time, after I have read the first paragraph, I stop and start over again. It takes a little time to make a transition from the real world around you to the fictional world you have entered. Sometimes I feel tempted to skim and thus do not get attuned to the voice of the story, fail to grasp relationships between characters, and cannot quite picture the setting. As a result, I begin to flounder and rush through the story, finishing with a shrug and a sense of puzzlement or a feeling of “so what.”

When I finish a story that interests me, I read it again. This time, the details of the story have more significance and weight because I have the whole story in mind. I know, somewhat vaguely as I begin the second reading, that “Appetite” is a first-person story about a young guy with a routine, low-paying job, who wants to ask for a raise, but doesn’t have the confidence, who wants to ask a waitress out, but lacks the nerve, who feels that he is a loser.

But in my opinion what the story at first seems to be “about” is not really the story. The story is the “means” by which the author transforms this ordinary character facing this ordinary sense of failure into a meaningful language-constructed narrative. I am interested in how the author uses language to transform a series of temporal events, i.e. “one damn thing after another,” into an aesthetic totality, existing all at once. The primary way an author performs this transformation is by the process of redundancy, that is, the obsessive repetition of similar motifs. The way I read a story is to identify these repeated similarities or echoes, to arrange them into bundles that constitute themes, and then to try to understand how these bundles of themes relate to each other.

There are many repeated motifs that cluster together to create themes in Sayrafiezadeh’s story. A careful reader becomes intuitively aware of them as the story becomes transformed from a temporal flow of events into a spatial pattern of meaning. It is not necessary to identify all of them unless one is writing an analytical article, so I am only going to identify the central theme here. (I am trying hard to avoid being the pedant here; I just want to respond to Elissa’s request and characterize how I read a story).

In my opinion, the primary theme of “Appetite” is announced in the first sentence: “Things were not going as I had hoped.” This is, of course echoed in the first sentence of the second section of the story: “Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me.” The speaker/protagonist of the story is always making plans for future events that never quite pan out as he hopes they will. He is not quite sure what figure he should strike in the world, so he is always posturing, posing, and he is always self-consciously aware of the gap between how he wants to look and how he fears he really looks. In other words, he lives in a world that seldom corresponds to reality.

The key phrase in the story, the phrase that is repeated obsessively, is “as if.” According to my count (not that I am urging anyone to count such things), the phrase is repeated 14 times. Forgive me if I risk playing the professor for a paragraph here. The most famous coiner of the phrase “as if” is Hans Vaihinger, a German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, whose book The Philosophy of As If argued that because we cannot really know the world, we construct useful fictions and behave “as if” the world matched those fictions. The literary theorist Frank Kermode, in his book The Sense of an Ending, argued further, “I see no reason why we cannot apply to literary fictions what Hans Vaihinger says of fictions in general, that they are mental structures.” The implications of this notion have been pushed further in poststructuralist theory to suggest that what we call reality is always a fiction, an elaborate construct that we continually make. Thus, if one wishes to study reality, one should study the means by which human beings construct reality, for reality is a process, not a product.

However, the theory of “as if” that I have chosen to help me understand Sayrafiezadeh’s story was popularized by that well-known twentieth-century Valley Girl philosopher Alicia Silverstone in that classic masterpiece movie “Clueless." Any time she wished to suggest that something that someone thinks is going to happen is never going to happen is to state the assumption or plan, and follow it with an emphatic “as if.” e.g: “He thinks he’s so hot. As if!” or “He thinks I am going to go out with him. As if!”

This disjunction between what the narrator/protagonist of "Appetite" hopes/thinks/plans will happen and what really happens constitutes the central theme of the story. This Bobby Burns idea of “The best laid schemes of mice and men” is echoed by the narrator/protagonist’s reference to himself as a hamster. He knows others may think of him, “What are you—a man or a mouse?” This central disjunction appears throughout the story in many ways.

This kind of character has always been a favorite one for the short-story writer. Whereas the novel, springing from the epic, may have an heroic figure with whom the reader can identify, the short story, springing from the folk tale, as Frank O’Connor has noted in his wonderful little book The Lonely Voice, is most often about the little man, citing Gogol’s great story “The Overcoat” as one of the first modern short stories.

I could go on at length about Sayrafiezadeh’s story, but that is a professorial occupational hazard I will resist at this point. I suspect many of my students often wished I had resisted it much earlier and more often.

So, Elissa, in answer to your request, this is what I thought about “Appetite.” I would love to know what other readers think about it.

New Yorker Stories by David Means, Junot Diaz, and Joyce Carol Oates

Although I get behind occasionally, I try to keep up with the fiction published weekly in The New Yorker. I don’t care what some critics say about the so-called standardized New Yorker story; issue for issue, the magazine consistently publishes some of the best short fiction being written nowadays. And at a story per issue (not to mention a couple of special fiction issues), they certainly publish the most.

During March, I read three stories in The New Yorker, back to back, and the experience got me to thinking about those age-old issues of critical judgment versus plain old personal taste. The stories are:

“The Knocking” by David Means, March 15
“The Pura Principle” by Junot Diaz, March 22
“I.D” by Joyce Carol Oates, March 29

I have commented on all three of these authors in previous blog entries. So, if you have been following me this past year, you know that I think Junot Diaz is more of a novelist than a short-story writer, that Joyce Carol Oates is a formulaic short-story writer, and that David Means is a short story writer of originality and brilliance.

Reading these three stories only reaffirmed these opinions. What does that say about me?

1. May is close-minded and unable to read these three authors without prejudice.
2. May has a personal preference for tight, language-intense lyrical stories.
3. May doesn’t like rambling first-person novelistic, ghetto memoir-type monologues.
4. May thinks Joyce Carol Oates is a compulsive professional story-making machine.

All these accusations may be true to some extent, but I would prefer to think that as a “guy who has read and written about a lot of short stories,” I am making an experienced, knowledgeable, objective critical judgment when I say that I think David Means’ story “Knocking” is a better short story than Junot Diaz’s “The Pura Principle” and Joyce Carol Oates’ “I.D.” Maybe not.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, I wish you would read these three recent stories and tell me what you think. Here’s what I think:

“The Pura Principle” seems like just another chapter in the never-ending story told by Yunior, the young Dominican Republic voice of Diaz’s short story collection Drown and his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In this installment of Diaz’s New York ghetto soap opera, Rafa, Yunior’s brother, is just home from eight months of radiation and chemo in the hospital. When Rafa brings home a new Dominican girlfriend, Pura Adames, his mother is “super evil” to her. After the two get married, she kicks them out of the apartment. Then when Rafa sneaks back to steal money from his mother, Yunior stops him, prompting Rafa to warn, “I’ll fix you soon enough, Mr. Big Shit.” But Mami knows about the stealing and gives Pura some more money when she claims that Rafa owes her two thousand dollars. Yunior says:

“The girl really was a genius. Mami and I both looked like creamed shit, but she sat there as fine as anything and confident to the max—now that the whole thing was over she didn’t even bother hiding it. I would have clapped if I’d had the strength, but I was too depressed.”

Yunior is even more pissed when Mami welcomes the prodigal Rafa back. Finally, on the way home from the store he gets smashed in the face by a mysteriously thrown Yale padlock. The story ends with Rafa saying to Yunior, “Didn’t I tell you I was going to fix you? Didn’t I?”

I know that a plot summary and a couple of quotes are inadequate to convey the significance and texture of the story. But, in my opinion, plot and voice is really all the story is. And of the two, voice is the most engaging. The voice of Yunior is, admittedly, hard to resist. But the story does not “mean” anything. It is just an anecdote about DR life in the ghetto. That may be all right for a chapter in a novel, but Diaz just does not know how to write short stories, or he doesn't want to.

Now there is no question that Joyce Carol Oates knows how to write short stories. She has written hundreds of them (and maybe even hundreds of novels—who really knows?). The problem I have with Oates’ story “I.D.”, and it is the problem I often have with her stories, is that it seems too pat and predictable, too disengaged and carefully crafted. The story is about a seventh-grade girl named Lisette Mulvey whose mother works as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Atlantic City. Halfway between being a little girl and a woman, Lisette passes a Kleenex lipstick kiss to a boy in her class, knowing that it means, “All right, if you want to screw me, fuck me—whatever—hey, here I am.”

After establishing the quality of the life of the young girl, much as she did in her most famous story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates then focuses on the girl’s inevitable coming-of-age encounter. She is called out of school to I.D. a dead body the police have found in a drainage ditch. Oates handles the pacing carefully and slowly to make the reader fear that the body is that of the mother. Then when Lisette is taken into the refrigerated morgue room, “quick—it was over. The female body she was meant to I.D was not anyone she knew, let alone her mother.”

In the last five paragraphs of the story, Lisette insists, “This is not Momma. This is no one I know.” The police show her a dirty, bloodstained coat that resembles her mother’s red, suede coat, but was filthy and torn. "It was not the stylish coat that Momma had bought a year ago, in the January sale at the mall.” When the police want to take Lisette to Family Services, she insists on being taken back to school. Although she feels she is in a “roaring sort of haze,” when her girlfriend asks her if she is O.K., she says, “laughing into the bright buzzing blur, ‘Sure I’m O.K. Hell, why not?”

It’s a well-done story, but it is completely predictable, right down to to the fact that when Lisette says that the dead body is not her mother, we know that in some calculated thematic way this is true. Furthermore, we know that the “bright buzzing blur” at the end of the story is like those “vast sunlit reaches of the land” that Connie goes toward at the end of “Where Are You Going?” "I.D." is a story that beginning college instructors will be happy to teach in their introduction to lit classes. It can be, as theorists like to say, “unpacked” so easily because it has been built so academically. I’ve said it before, and I say it again: If you want to learn how to write short stories, study the stories of Joyce Carol Oates. She knows how to do it by the book.

David Means’ story “Knock,” (which I assume will be in his new collection of stories, entitled The Spot, due out on May 25, from Faber and Faber) is the shortest of the three stories I am considering here—about a New Yorker page-and-a-half. The first page (consisting of three long paragraphs), introduces us to a first-person male teller who complains of knocking noises from the man who lives in an identical apartment above him. We read nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—ranging from tapping heels, pounding nails, thudding printer, wheezing bedsprings. This has been going on for the two years the narrator has lived in the apartment, beginning with a brief meeting in the hall in which the two men develop a mutual distaste to each other. The knocking is not merely random racket, but meaningful menace. “He not only took knocking seriously but went beyond that, to a realm of pure belief in the idea that by being persistent and knocking only for the sake of knocking…he could increase his level of concentration, achieve rapture, and, in turn strengthen his ability to sustain the knocking over the long term.”

Three quarters through the story, we suddenly learn something personal about the narrator when he says that the knocking often comes late in the day when the man above knows that he is in his deepest state of reverie, “trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions,” feeling the “deep persistent sense of loss; Mary gone, kids gone.”

In the last two paragraphs of this six-paragraph story, the narrator thinks, “Go on, old boy! Pound away! Get that nail in there!” He speaks to the man upstairs as if speaking to himself, recalling long afternoons when he was engaged in handyman projects about the house. Becoming more intense in his concentration on the knocking, he thinks each knock speaks directly to him. “A man who had lost just about everything, and was channeling all his abilities into his knocking. He was seeking the kind of clarity you could get only by bothering another soul…trying to put the pain of a lost marriage behind him…when there had been a great exchange of love between two souls, or at least what seemed to be, and he had gone about his days, puttering, fixing things, knocking about in a much less artistic manner, trying the best he could to keep the house in shape.” And with this identification between the knocker and the listener, the story ends.

I can more easily say what I don’t like about the Diaz and the Oates story than I can say why I like the Means story so much more. "Knock" has something to do with loneliness, something to do with having nothing worthwhile in your life at a given time, something to do with engaging in an activity that goes on and on, an activity that is annoying, but that you cannot cease doing, because you have nothing else to do. You want to scream, to grit your teeth, to hit someone, to repeat some curse or obscenity over and over again. The rhythm of the story somehow echoes these repetitive annoying, meaningless, endless, actions when it seems that such repetitive actions are all that you can do.

There is a timeless universality in Means' story missing in the Diaz and Oates stories. You don’t laugh at the character, although you might; you don’t sympathize with the character, although you might. Mainly, you become the character, or rather for a short time you become deeply embedded in the story, and its rhythm becomes your rhythm.

An indivisible bond exists between the action of the story, the character of the story, and the language of the story. You do not feel you are hearing a voice recounting an anecdote of something that just happened, as you do in the Diaz story, or of being cold-bloodedly manipulated by a skilled but heartless craftsman, as you do in the Oates story. Rather, you feel caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a wildly personal obsession and an carefully controlled aesthetic creation. This transformation of mere “stuff” into art work is what makes the short story, as practiced by a master like David Means, the highest form of narrative art. At least for me, it does.