Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

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Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives!
I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).
If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction, but it's still absolutely kicking poetry's ass on all fronts, and, like poetry, remains in general more adventurous, fluid, and vitally modern than its novelistic big brother.
To review these stories in terms of their quality seems redundant – that they're terrific is a no-brainer. Entering its eighty-fifth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories consistently collects – I won't say the finest short fiction, but it collects inarguably exquisite short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. We'll concede that there may be better stories out there, simmering under the radar or even (gasp!) unpublished, which does nothing to detract from the eminence of the ones collected here. This is a damn good read.
This year's edition was edited and introduced by Laura Furman, with a jury consisting of celebrated writers Cristina Garcia, Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It's dedicated to Chekov upon the centenary of his death, which is forgivably predictable, given his pervasive influence on the short form. Besides illuminating notes from the writers on their work, the 2005 edition contains an essay by each of the judges on their favorite story, and a glossary of literary journals big and small that will be a valuable resource for writers and readers alike.
If quality is a given, it seems the best utility a review of the The O. Henry Prize Stories can have is to pick out the affinities between them and see (a) what writers were compelled to write about in the past year, (b) what editors were compelled to publish, and (c) which literary organs are currently in vogue. Word to the wise: If you'd like to win an O. Henry Prize, relentlessly submit to the New Yorker, which originally published no less than six of the twenty stories here, comfortably vanquishing silver-medallists The Kenyon Review and Zoetrope, who clock in with an admirable (if measly by comparison) two stories apiece.
No less than four stories in the volume revolve around music, all of which are deeply appreciative, none entirely trusting. Michael Palmer's atmospheric tale, "The Golden Era of Heartbreak", is haunted by a lovelorn trucker's song that carries everywhere in a town flattened by the departure of the narrator's wife. "My house filled to the eaves with this song," he states in his spare, lyrical tone, and the story is filled with it as well: The prose, like the town, is "flat as an envelope," and the trucker's song stretches spectrally across it.
A personal favorite of mine, Ben Fountain's "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers", is an elliptical, richly detailed character sketch in the vein of Millhauser or Hemon, about the intertwined destinies of two eleven-fingered pianists in nineteenth century Vienna, steeped in all the paranoia, political and ethnic tensions, and obsolete superstitions of the day.
In Timothy Crouse's "Sphinxes", a remarkably confident and unclassifiable tale, piano lessons, love affairs and subtle emotional maneuvering are braided together with increasing complexity until they become indistinguishable. In each of these stories, music is salvation and undoing, pure force and calculated metaphor: a paradox, a chimera, a sphinx.
And Gail Jones's "Desolation" is about a primal, alienating sexual encounter at a Death in Vegas concert, although it cross-references with the second type of story that heavily informs this year's volume, the community / exile story, which we're coming to just now.
Many stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 revolve around issues of community, but not the traditional, fixed community – these stories are about the provisional communities that arise in times of crisis, and the communities forged by travelers, strangers, souls in spiritual and physical exile.
Judge favorite "Mudlavia", a coming of age tale by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, finds a young boy and his mother in a health resort filled with questionable, exciting characters of colorful mien and shady provenance – slowly, away from their domineering father and husband, we watch them come alive to their own desires, desires that this alien context was necessary to draw out.
Another judge favorite, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's period piece "Exile in London", evokes the faded aura of postwar London by way of the young narrator's recollections of the ragged diaspora in her aunt's boarding house. And Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor" details the tensions, both sexual and cultural, between a prototypically American teenager in Bombay and her native Indian tutor.
But the finest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 has to be Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which describes the plight of a homeless, admittedly "crazy" Spokane Native American as he embarks on a day-long quest to raise one-thousand dollars to buy back his Grandmother's tribal regalia from a pawn shop. That the story's themes are large and poignant is obvious; what's remarkable is that it manages funny, hopeful, angry, and redemptive at once. The narrator's refusal to lapse into self-pity or misanthropy at his pathetic plight is counterintuitive yet rings true, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion, not-at-all inevitable and uncommonly generous of spirit, one feels every inch of his joy.
In the end, this is the short-story function that trumps all the others: The ability to vault the reader into realms of unanticipated joy. While not all the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 achieve this as viscerally as Alexie's fable, each one loudly debunks any nonsense about the short story's obsolescence.

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“Don’t you trust me?” she said sometimes (especially when she was drunk).

Her father smiled. “No. I love you too much for that.”

It was pouring and the rain almost shrieked on Zubin's tin roof, which still hadn’t been repaired. They were working on reading comprehension; a test two years ago had used Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” Zubin preferred “The Garden,” but he’d had more success teaching “To His Coy Mistress” to his students; they told him it seemed “modern.” Many of his students seemed to think that sex was a relatively new invention.

“It's a persuasive poem,” Zubin said. “In a way, it has something in common with an essay.”

Julia narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, persuasive?”

“He wants to sleep with her.”

“And she doesn’t want to.”

“Right,” Zubin said.

“Is she a virgin?”

“You tell me.” Zubin remembered legions of teachers singsonging exactly those words. “Look at line twenty-eight.”

“That's disgusting.”

“Good,” he said. “You understand it. That's what the poet wanted-to shock her a little.”

“That's so manipulative!”

It was amazing, he thought, the way Americans all embraced that kind of psychobabble. Language is manipulative, he wanted to tell her.

“I think it might have been very convincing,” he said instead.

Vegetable love?”

“It's strange, and that's what makes it vivid. The so-called metaphysical poets are known for this kind of conceit.”

“That they were conceited?”

“Conceit,” Zubin said. “Write this down.” He gave her the definition; he sounded conceited.

“The sun is like a flower that blooms for just one hour,” Julia said suddenly.

“That's the opposite,” Zubin said. “A comparison so common that it doesn’t mean anything-you see the difference?”

Julia nodded wearily. It was too hot in the room. Zubin got up and propped the window open with the wooden stop. Water sluiced off the dark, shiny leaves of the magnolia.

“What is that?”

“What?”

“That thing, about the sun.”

She kicked her foot petulantly against his desk. The hammering outside was like an echo, miraculously persisting in spite of the rain. “Ray Bradbury,” she said finally. “We read it in school.”

“I know that story,” Zubin said. “With the kids on Venus. It rains for seven years, and then the sun comes out and they lock the girl in the closet. Why do they lock her up?”

“Because she's from Earth. She's the only one who's seen it.”

“The sun.”

Julia nodded. “They’re all jealous.”

People thought she could go out all the time because she was American. She let them think it. One night she decided to stop bothering with the outside stairs; she was wearing new jeans that her mother had sent her; purple cowboy boots and a sparkly silver halter top that showed off her stomach. She had a shawl for outside, but she didn’t put it on right away. Her father was working in his study with the door cracked open.

The clock in the hall said ten twenty. Her boots made a loud noise on the tiles.

“Hi,” her father called.

“Hi.”

“Where are you going?”

“A party.”

“Where?”

“Juhu.” She stepped into his study. “On the beach.”

He put the book down and took off his glasses. “Do you find that many people are doing Ecstasy-when you go to these parties?”

“Dad.”

“I’m not being critical-I read an article about it in Time. My interest is purely anthropological.”

“Yes,” Julia said. “All the time. We’re all on Ecstasy from the moment we wake up in the morning.”

“That's what I thought.”

“I have to go.”

“I don’t want to keep you.” He smiled. “Well I do, but-” Her father was charming; it was like a reflex.

“See you in the morning,” she said.

The worst thing was that her father knew she knew. He might have thought Julia knew even before she actually did; that was when he started letting her do things like go out at ten thirty, and smoke on the staircase outside her bedroom. It was as if she’d entered into a kind of pact without knowing it; and by the time she found out why they were in Bombay for real, it was too late to change her mind.

It was Anouk who told her, one humid night when they were having their tennis lesson at Willingdon. The air was so hazy that Julia kept losing the ball in the sodium lights. They didn’t notice who’d come in and taken the last court next to the parking lot until the lesson was over. Then Anouk said: “Wow, look- Papa !” Bernie lobbed the ball and waved; as they walked toward the other court, Julia's father set up for an overhead and smashed the ball into the net. He raised his fist in mock anger, and grinned at them.

“Good lesson?”

“Julia did well.”

“I did not.”

“Wait for Bernie to finish me off,” Julia's father said. “Then we’ll take you home.”

“How much longer?”

“When we’re finished,” said Bernie sharply.

“On sort ce soir. ”

“On va voir,” her father said. Anouk started to say something and stopped. She caught one ankle behind her back calmly, stretched, and shifted her attention to Julia's father. “How long?”

He smiled. “Not more than twenty.”

They waited in the enclosure, behind a thin white net that was meant to keep out the balls, but didn’t, and ordered fresh lime sodas.

“We need an hour to get ready, at least.”

“I’m not going.”

“Yes you are.”

Anouk put her legs up on the table and Julia did the same and they compared: Anouk's were longer and thinner, but Julias had a better shape. Julia's phone beeped.

“It's from Zubin.”

Anouk took the phone.

“It's just about my lesson.”

Anouk read Zubin's message in an English accent: CAN WE SHIFT FROM

FIVE TO SIX ON THURSDAY?

“He doesn’t talk like that,” Julia said, but she knew what Anouk meant. Zubin was the only person she knew who wrote SMS in full sentences, without any abbreviations.

Anouk tipped her head back and shut her eyes. Her throat was smooth and brown and underneath her sleeveless white top, her breasts were outlined, the nipples pointing up. “Tell him I’m hot for him.”

“You’re a flirt.”

Anouk sat up and looked at the court. Now Bernie was serving. Both men had long, dark stains down the fronts of their shirts. A little bit of a breeze was coming from the trees behind the courts; Julia felt the sweat between her shoulders. She thought she’d gone too far, and she was glad when Anouk said, “When are they going to be finished?”

“They’ll be done in a second. I think they both just play ’cause the other one wants to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, my dad never played in Paris.”

“Mine did,” Anouk said.

“So maybe he just likes playing with your dad.”

Anouk tilted her head to the side for a minute, as if she were thinking. “He would have to though.”

The adrenaline from the fight they’d almost had, defused a minute before, came flooding back. She could feel her pulse in her wrists. “What do you mean?”

Her friend opened her eyes wide. “I mean, your dad's probably grateful.”

“Grateful for what ?

“The job.”

“He had a good job before.”

Anouk blinked incredulously. “Are you serious?”

“He was the operations manager in Central Asia.”

“Was,” Anouk said.

“Yeah, well,” Julia said. “He didn’t want to go back to the States after my mom did.”

“My God,” Anouk said. “That's what they told you?”

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