Best American Stories 1986 – Completed!

Goodbye to the Best American Stories 1986

Some numbers –

To read and report on these stories it took me 5 months and 1 day.

That also works out to:

22 weeks

Or

154 days

Or

110 weekdays.

While we are looking at numbers, I’ll dial it back a bit and see where we are with this little BASS project.

My first post dropped on:

May 29^th 2008.

That was –

3 years 3 months and 4 days ago. I can’t even begin to tell you how my life has changed since then.

1191 days. Pffffffff….long sigh.

How many of these volumes have I read and reported on in 3 years, 3 months and 4 days?

Nine.

Some more numbers? Well, it looks like I spent about 4.3 months per volume. To be more exact, 132.33 days per volume.

I think it goes without saying that I need to speed things up.

Let me now discuss my thoughts on this volume.

The introduction can be found here:

http://yearsofbass.blogspot.com/2011/04/introduction-raymond-carver.html

If you haven’t read the intro – please do, I’m actually proud of that post!

Here are a few words from that introduction.

I highlighted this from Carver’s intro:

“Stories from the New Yorker predominated, and that is as it should be. The New Yorker not only publishes good stories – on occasion wonderful stories – but, by virtue of the fact that they publish every week, fifty-two weeks a year, they bring out more fiction than any other magazine in the country.”

Well, I have discovered a new love for The New Yorker and that love has partially been the reason why I have failed to read stories from this volume. I’ve been too distracted by that magazine AND with working on a database that already existed AND attempting to buy, and eventually succeeding in buying a nice 3 volume set of collected short stories from that magazine.

There were 20 stories in this volume – 3 were from the New Yorker. See previous indexes from past BASS collections and you’ll see the NY’er dominating the collected stories!

Carver goes on to say

“One of the things I feel strongly about is that while short stories often tell us things we don’t know anything about – and this is good, of course – they should also, and maybe more importantly, tell us what everybody knows but what nobody is talking about. At least not publicly. Except for the short story writers.”

Yes – perfect. I’d say there were more than a couple of stories in this collection that did just that. They told us what everybody know but what nobody is /was talking about. The stories were wonderful – the majority of his selections.

Further-

“I deliberately tried to pick stories that rendered, in a more or less straightforward manner, what it’s like out there. I wanted the stories I selected to throw some light on what it is that makes us and keeps us, often against great odds, recognizably human.”

I mentioned in several of my posts the above quote. Carver succeeded.

So how do I feel about Carver’s collection?

Well, I feel that I did the volume a disservice. I took too long to read it and I didn’t fully commit my heart and mind to the project. I gave about 50%.

That, in short, is unsatisfactory.

Therefore, I do not feel I can faithfully pass judgment on this collection. The milk has been spilled, no need to cry. Let’s clean it up and pour another glass.

The Rich Brother – Tobias Wolff

I was happy to finish this volume of The BASS with a story from Wolff. I really enjoy his writing.

Speaking of finishing…man…what a struggle to get through this volume.

I’ll break down that struggle through nimbers in the next post. I really need to get a handle on my reading.

As they say…”Too many books, too little time”.

I am fortunate in life not to have been faced with a decision such that the main character must face in this story. My family life has been pretty uneventful – even as I grouse on and on about the divorce and how I hold certain feelings against my father, all of which now I am reconsidering seeing that it ain’t quite fair to hold them against a sick man…and honestly, perhaps he was sick a lot longer than anyone of us realized. Not with what is eating his mind away now…but just sick with the inability to do the right thing.

I think the closest thing that we have in our family bordering on something similar to this story would come in the form of my step-brother’s son.

Good kid…this step-nephew of mine…just can’t get his shit together. Dropped out of Basic Training – yup, they actually let him do that…during a war! I figured they would look to keep as many trigger pullers as they could.

He had a job with the federal gov’t…man, think of that, a job with the feds! The benefits, the retirement! He quit because he didn’t like the attitudes of some of his co-workers!

What!

Of course, you ask him now, how he likes work, and he’d go on and on about his current place of employment.

He’s a bouncer.

Secure future there for sure!

Now I mentioned that I have never had to deal with a situation like the “Rich Brother”, but my step- brother has. He has really had a hard time dealing with his son. I think that every father that cares for their offspring wants to see them become successful and be happy with the life they live.

My step-brother has, as far as I know, cut off all communication with his son. He is very upset with his behavior and all of the mistakes he has made in life.

I can’t imagine the pain and the hurt that both of them must have gone through and could still be going through today.

I doubt that my step-brother feels any relief having rid himself of the “burden”.

I would think that the burden of the situation he is in now would be heavier.

Health – Joy Williams

“Williams's fiction often portrays life as a downward spiral, and the failure of life in America, from a spiritual as well as economic perspective, as a virtual certainty. Her characters, generally from the Middle Class, frequently fall from it, at times in bizarre fashion, in a form of cultural dispossession. Characters are usually divorced, children are abandoned, and their lives are consumed with fear, often irrational…”

Yup – I say the above pretty much nails the overall feeling in Health.

It is a bit creepy to read about the pre-teen main character going into, and being briefly spied on during a tanning session.

Mid-80s teens tanning?

I can’t seem to remember any girls that were in the 8^th or 9^th grade with me going to tanning sessions. Sure, I think they spent time at the pool…or in their back yards working on a tan – but not at tanning salons.

Williams does a great job dropping hints of the future “youth-worship” society we live in today.

The kids are working too hard to look older and the adults are working too hard at looking like kids, and there is this weird mid-point where the two ages intersect.

The downward spiral of America…spiritually and economically and you might as well throw in culturally, academically and morally…yup I think we are well enough seeing that now.

Lawns – Mona Simpson

This was a hell of a read.

First, researching the author and finding her connection to Steve Jobs (Apple) and one of the writers for the Simpsons was pretty interesting. Look her up if you’ve got a moment.

Carver picked a winner with this one. Once again he chooses an author that turns over a rock that has too often been left undisturbed and shows us, whether we want to see it or not, the nasty creepy crawly things that dwell in those places of our world/society.

Simpson writes a disturbing story, a story where you are pulled through the scenes and become quite comfortable living in that story only to find yourself really not wanting to be there. You feel pretty uncomfortable about what you are reading. Disturbed, and sad, sorry for the character and sorry for those who have been through what she has.

Then you place the book aside and think about the story, and realize that there’s a good chance that Simpson has written about something that you have thought to be pretty rare…like one in a million rare, but is actually more common than you realize.

You then start to think back to past friends, girlfriends and their behaviors. Could their behaviors have been attributed to something similar to what happens to the main character?

Abuse weather it be physical, sexual or psychological surely must shape the personality of the child/individual being abused. There can be no doubt that there has to be a pretty significant “rub off”.

Too often, I forget to look at the background of a person that I am dealing with. I need to remember to take into account their history. Professionally and if the relationship develops…personally.

That of course takes time and a great deal of communication – which is something that I have long been a huge proponent for many years.

Great story – tough to read, but a great read, one that I won’t soon forget.