the pen/o. henry prize stories 2012 edited by laura furman (excerpt)

8/2/2019 The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 Edited by Laura Furman (Excerpt)

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The PEN/O. HenryPrize Stories2012Chosen and with an Introduction by

Laura Furman

With Essays by Jurors

Mary Gaitskill

Daniyal MueenuddinRon Rash

on the Stories They Admire Most

A N C H O R B O O K S

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York


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For Elinore and Michael Standard,dear friends for so long

a n a n c h o r b o o k s o r i g i n a l , a p r i l 2 0 1 2

Copyright 2012 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division ofRandom House, Inc.Introduction copyright 2012 by Laura Furman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House ofCanada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Permissions appear at the end of the book.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-307-94788-8

Book design by Debbie Glasserman

www.anchorbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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Introduction

One of the most fascinating, and annoying, questions askedof writers is about the origin of a story. We hope that if wecould pinpoint the real beginning of a story, it would reveal allthat a story holdscertain aspects of the authors personal his-tory; the experience, fact, or image that caught the authors imag-

ination; the path through language from imagination to acoherent work of art. We wish to be able to extrapolate the mys-terious process of writing fiction.

Many stories draw upon either the experience of the writer oranothers experience as reported to the writer. This is not an asser-tion that every story is autobiographical (or biographical), onlythat something of the writers own life is of necessity part of every

story. A number of writers find their stories through research, amethod of educating oneself and also of procrastinating. For stillother stories, and other writers, the inspiration may be as fleetingas a landscape glimpsed from a passing train.

But the process of writing always remains mysterious. Therecan be no definitive answer to a question about a storys originbecause the best stories are manifold and open to multiple under-standings. A single origin doesnt seem enough for the stories welove and reread. Furthermore, a story presents changed meaningsover time to a faithful reader, for the story we read in middle age isdifferent from the one we first encountered in adolescence. A sin-


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gle glance from a train doesnt account for a storys beginningitstoo monocular, too limitedand yet that may be the way thestorys creator remembers it. A story undergoes many changes as

its written, making it a complicated journey from the startingpoint.

We do want to know where a story came from, and by that wemean the whole story, not only the tiny flash that began the imag-inative process. Implicit in the question is the respect we have forthe story, and the answer we suspect: Not even the writer really

knows where the story came from. If that were known, whybother to write?

John Bergers A Brush epitomizes a kind of silence I associatewith the short-story form. In the story, the reader finds a slow,almost offhand perception that presents itself when one is lookingthe other way, or, as W. H. Auden said in Muse des Beaux Arts,

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walk-ing dully along.

We are all self-preoccupied; the narrator of A Brush is noexception. In Paris, he makes his way through his routine, givingno evidence that he is either lonely or happy in his solitude. Weexperience what he wants us tochance meetings, a slow revela-tion of character and history by those he notices, and, finally, the

shock of understanding, a moment of real attention. In the storysending, we understand how much the narrator has come to valueand gain from his urban friendship. The narrator of A Brush isboth the readers informant and a character involved in the storysaction. Bergers masterly writing conveys with equal grace therecent history of Cambodia and the patient skill required in mak-ing art. At the storys simple and exquisite ending, the narratorsummons both fact and feeling.

Salvatore Scibonas The Woman Who Lived in the Househas an eccentric and delightful ending. The story is about manyvarieties of togetherness. smundur Gudmundsson has a few easy

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relationshipswith his father-in-law, and with a sister andnieceand several complicated oneswith a dog whos crazyabout him, an unsuitable lover, and his disgruntled wife. Scibona

throws us right into the story with the announcement from a tele-vision set that smundurs latest investment, the one he and hiswife put everything into, has failed. In no time at all, the marriagefollows suit, in smundurs determination an act of God, who,after twenty years of giving them the stamina and will that makesyoung Eros turn into the companionship of married love, ends it

in a comical street accident. The whole story is a dance of attach-ment and separation, connection and alienation, and, finally, oflove lost and love renascent. The ending is both a surprise and ajoy; the one we didnt know we were waiting for at last is backwith us.

Anthony Doerr was included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Sto-riesin 2002, 2003, 2008, and now appears, for a fourth time, with

The Deep, a story that combines the authors preoccupationsfirst with the natural world as it is seen through science and thenwith the interior, often secret, lives of his characters. In the case ofThe Deep, Toms interior life is dominated by his heart, a defec-tive organ: Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor saysblood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart willhave to do three times the work. Life span of sixteen. Eighteen if

hes lucky. Best if he doesnt get excited.The voice of scienceand Toms motherurges extreme cau-

tion. Toms spirit looks at those small numberssixteen, eigh-teenand wonders how cautious can he be and live. Toms heartkeeps him slow, careful, and quiet. His life is different from thatof the other children, particularly other boys. The tension in thestory is between the restrictions imposed by his literal organ andthe desires of Toms metaphorical heart.

In Lauren Groffs Eyewall, a hurricane rages outside andinside the narrators three-hundred-year-old house, flinging thisway and that her chickens, furnishings, books, and her past. For

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all that is destroyed, something whole and new is created by therollicking lively narrator. Groffs story is poetical and laced withhumor, as the dead drink excellent wine with the living, and the

storm rocks on.Christine Sneeds The First Wife narrates a story about

inevitability in a doomed relationship, a kind of wry love letterfrom the cautious, somber narrator to her beautiful, unfaithful,and predictable husband. The story is a consideration of a clichthe handsome movie stars infidelity. A reader might well ask the

stars wife: Why is it that we go on asking questions to which weknow the answer, starting things we know will end in failure? Theanswer is what Jean Rhys called Hope, the vulture, and becauseit feels good to bet against the odds.

Often the ending of a short story brings a reversal of fortune,character, or the expectations established at the start. In Sam Rud-dicks well-choreographed Leak, theres a comical reversal. A

man believes hes having a straightforward and, for all parties, sat-isfactory adulterous affair. Before long, its clear that hes the inno-cent in the crowd that gathers, like clowns exploding from a car,at his assignation. The storys title is a definition of what happensin every aspect of this lovers duet, triono, quartet. Ruddick hasa gift for understatement and for moving his characters along inways that surprise and delight the reader.

Its often said that in marriage one partner is the brakes and theother the gas. In Alice Mattisons The Vandercook, the narratoris the caboose and his wife the engine. When the narrator, hiswife, and children move across the country to the narratorshometown to aid his aging father and keep the family businessgoing, the marriages balance of power and love is fatally dis-turbed. The narrators calm, rational voice doesnt conceal thepain of a new understanding of his past and consideration of hisfuture. By the end of the story what was whole seems corrupted.The beauty of the story lies in its sense of the continuity of thelives narrated. The characters will go on, but with a telling differ-

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ence. Mattisons story will be read and reread to trace the narra-tors understanding of his wifes character and his own.

Dagoberto Gilbs moving story Uncle Rock narrates a similar

movement toward understanding, though in the case of Erick,whose difficult, compromised childhood is explored, theres free-dom rather than disillusionment in the end. Confronting cruelty,Erick gains a new understanding of his mother, of masculinity,and of his own strength. The boy who doesnt speak in either ofhis languages ends the story with an evasion that protects both his

imperfect mother and her lover. By speaking, Erick steps towardadulthood. He sees what he didnt wish to, understands the unin-tended consequences of lush, powerless female beauty and malepower, and moves into his own complicated life.

In Kevin Wilsons A Birth in the Woods, the mixture of real-ism and fantasy pushes the reader into a nightmare. A young boysparents isolate themselves in the joyful, arrogant belief that they

can make a new Eden and raise their child in a utopia. The storysnarration of a mothers love, and her manipulation of her weakhusband and young son, mixes with the elements of horror. Theblood announced at the beginning of the story covers the familyby the end. Wilsons story is most brilliant in capturing the inno-cent ignorance of the child and the ways in which every child is avictim of his parents choices.

Cath in Keith Ridgways Rothko Eggs lives in London withher mother. Caths parents are divorced, and she feels like theircaretaker, more knowledgeable about them than they are aboutthemselves. She loves art and thinks about it, but just as oftenthinks about how to think about it. The storys diction is striking;simple sentences, repeated, varied, until theres a pileup, a fenderbender of thoughts and words. The narration is a close-up thirdperson, so close that we are nearly in Caths mind as she puzzles outmatters of art and sex, and, oddest of all, her parents shared his-tory before she was born. Cath is central to them, but, she finds,only part of their relationship and not the whole of it, as she once

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thought. Ridgways story plays with articulating inarticulateness.For Cath, an intelligent and sensitive young woman, the impossi-bility of describing abstract art is nothing next to the impenetra-

bility of other peoples motives and emotions, and her own.As in Kevin Wilsons and Keith Ridgways stories, Hisham

Matars Naima has at its core a child trying to accommodatehimself to his parents choices and secrets. You need adulthoodto appreciate such horror, the narrator tells us. A useful questionwhen reading first-person stories is, Why is the narrator telling this

story?A general answer is, To understand what happened. In thecase of Naima, the narrator is trying to understand his parentsmarriage, his mothers death, and the place in his life of Naima,the familys servant. His parents so overshadow Naima that thereader also initially wonders why the story is named for Naimarather than the mother or father. The beauty of Matars story liesin the narrators delicacy as he seeks to slice through memory

without destroying the past.Adulthood doesnt much benefit the narrator of Ann Packers

Things Said or Done, nor does the wry humor with which shecopes with her fathers egomania and hypochondria. Other peo-ple throw parties; my father throws emergencies. Its been like thisforever. When I was a kid I thought the difference between myfather and other parents was that my father was more fun. It took

me years to see it clearly. My father was a rabble-rouser. He wasfun like a cyclone. And then there is the narrators mother, amodel of distanced cool, an escaped prisoner who refuses to riskher freedom to help her daughter. If the father were all monstrous,the story wouldnt be as good as it is, nor would the narrator be assympathetic a victim of herself and her family. The storys inter-twined characters are testimony that there are no easy answers forthose trapped by love and loyalty.

For the second year in a row, fiction by Mark Slouka and JimShepard is included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.

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Last years story by Mark Slouka was about an estranged fathertaking a terrible chance with his young son; this years story is alsoabout a father and son. In The Hares Mask, the narrator begins

by announcing how much he misses his beloved father, then goeson to tell a complicated tale of himself as a boy trying to imaginehimself into his fathers past. Something primitive is stirred as thenarrator realizes that the world existed before he did. He piecestogether a terrible loss his own father suffered at his age. The nar-rator tells us he had a precocious ear for loss and misheard

almost everything. In this brief, layered, beautifully told story,the narrator moves from a childs innocent inability to compre-hend the pasts sorrows to an adults wonder that human beingsdare to risk such pain again.

The narrator of Jim Shepards powerful Boys Town lacks,among other things, the capacity to weather loss and sorrow. Hismother is a foulmouthed bully, and he is incapable of freeing

himself from her. Boys Town is the story of a person withoutresources, internal or external, who has neither the education northe emotional means to grow beyond his limiting circumstances.When he looks outside of himself at a movie seen long ago, hesees a hero who has nothing to offer but empty promises.Mostpeople dont know what its like to look down the road and seetheres nothing there. You try to tell somebody that, but they just

look at you.The hero/narrator of East of the West by Miroslav Penkov is

named Nose for his ugly snoot, the result of his cousin Veraspunch, which crushed it like a plain biscuit. In other ways, too,Nose is broken into pieces by Vera. East of the West centers onthe river that divides Nose from his cousin, as it divides Serbiafrom Bulgaria. The river brings tragedy and heartbreak. The rivercovers the past, and Nose gathers his courage and swims to adrowned church with his cousin. The question of identitywhosa Serb? whos a Bulgarian?rides through the story and becomes

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a larger question: Who will dare to change?When you finish read-ing some stories you feel youve listened to a song. MiroslavPenkovs East of the West is such a story.

The main character in Mickey Mouse by Karl Taro Greenfeldis a Japanese artist in wartime Tokyo assigned the task of creatinga cartoon character to represent his country and displace the glob-ally popular American rodent. The atmosphere of war, survival,and danger is so skillfully created by Greenfeld that it isnt untilthe end of the story that the reader understands what the artist

hasnt about his peculiar and impossible assignment.Steven Millhausers Phantoms is about the memory of awhole community as it lives with its all-too-present past. Thephantoms, or ghosts, appear and reappear, a continuity after deaththat brings little comfort to the living. The presence of the pastcreates problems for the parents of the town: to tell or not to tell?What frightens a child moreignorance or knowledge? Humor-

ous, wise, and smart, the first-person-plural narrative covers thelife of the haunted town and its people, making its consciousnessof its phantoms and its willful forgetfulness seem more or less likeour own relationships with our own ghosts. As ever, the strange-ness in Steven Millhausers fiction pulls us in, intrigues us, enter-tains us, and makes us reflect on our own odd lives.

Steven Millhausers work has appeared in The PEN/O. Henry

Prize Storiesbefore, as have the stories of Wendell Berry, who isalso well known as a poet and essayist. Nothing Living LivesAlone is about Berrys recurring character Andy Catlett, in sev-eral stages of his life. As ever, Berry meditates on the qualities ofhome and the relationship held by generations to the place theythink of as their own, the home place. In this lovely, slow story,Berry is particularly interested in the entrance of the mechanicalinto the lives of the animals and people there, and he examinesdifferent ideas about labor and freedom, including the freedomsome feel to destroy the planet on which they live. The story con-cerns worlds gone by and their place in our present. Once more

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Berry gives us intelligent, vibrant fiction, the product of his ownexcellent labor.

Each year, three jurors read a blind manuscript of the twenty shortstories Ive chosen for the collection, and each picks a favorite.This years jurors are Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, andRon Rash, three wonderful short-story writers who could hardlybe more different from one another. The fiction of all three jurorshas been celebrated in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Each has

written an essay on a chosen story, and I invite you to enjoy themin Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, pp. 41118.The favorite stories for 2012 are by Yiyun Li and Alice Munro,

two writers whose work has been included before in The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories.

Kindness by Yiyun Li is the confessional autobiography of awoman whos lived in isolation and recalls those few who noticed

her, ambivalent attentions she regards in the end as kindness. Thenarrator is humble, modest, and calls herself an indifferent per-son, which can be taken in two ways, that she is like many oth-ers and that she is immune to others. Her isolation stands out inher crowded Beijing neighborhood, in school, and during hertime in the Red Army. Her life is circumscribed; the reader recog-nizes a war between her individuality and the demands of her

society and of other people. Both the sourness and loneliness ofKindness are more predictable than the narrators final declara-tions about the kindness of others, hinted at in the storys begin-ning when she says, I have few friends, though as I have never leftthe neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them ageneration or two older. Being around them is comforting; neveris there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging. Her apartmenthouse is derelict, threatened with destruction by Beijings newlyprosperous developers, but the life she lives and has led has filledher with stories, which alone keep her company.

Alice Munros Corrie is also about a woman without husband

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or family, a rich girl in a small town. Corrie, lame from polio, hasa quick mind and self-possession to a remarkable degree. She takeswhat she wants from the life shes been given, at least in one way,

and she looks her losses and gains in the eye. Corrie is not senti-mental, which saves her. The ending of her story is its most sur-prising part, and Corries reaction to a revelation seems bothexactly what the reader would expect her to feeland its oppo-site. Reading the story, I didnt want to be anywhere else, doinganything elseonce again receiving a gift from Alice Munro.

Laura FurmanAustin, Texas

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