The Best American Short Stories 2015 Read Free Page A

Joyce’s
Dubliners
stories or Conrad’s “Youth” or Chekhov’s “Peasants,” but that’s not the case. The stories are rudimentary—character studies, anecdotes, tales that exist only to deliver a surprise or the mild glimmer of irony. And they are short, for the most part, more like scenes that might have been contained in the longer narratives of this volume. The shortest of them, what would be called “flash fiction” today, at just 152 words, is by Mary Boyle O’Reilly. It’s called “In Berlin,” and I find it fascinating in its historical context (two years before America entered the First World War) and the way in which the author so nakedly attempts to extract the pathos from her episode set aboard a German passenger train. The scenario: “The train crawling out of Berlin was filled with women and children, hardly an able-bodied man. In one compartment a gray-haired Landsturm soldier sat beside an elderly woman who seemed weak and ill.” The woman, lost in her thoughts—dazed—kept repeating “One, two, three” aloud, which prompted titters from the pair of girls seated across from her. The old soldier leaned in: “‘Fräulein,’ he said gravely, ‘you will perhaps cease laughing when I tell you that this poor lady is my wife. We have just lost our three sons in battle. Before leaving for the front myself I must take their mother to an insane asylum.’” Paragraph. “It became terribly quiet in the compartment.”
    All right. I’m sorry. But if that penultimate line doesn’t make you burst into laughter, you’d better check your pulse. O’Brien read 2,200 stories that year (by contrast, Heidi Pitlor, who, as series editor, does the heavy lifting here, considered 3,000), and his aim was to define the literary story and elevate it above the expected, the maudlin, the pat and declamatory. To give him credit (he is, after all, one of the first to have recognized Hemingway’s talent, including “My Old Man” in the 1923 volume, even though it hadn’t yet been published, and in subsequent editions he recognized the work of Sherwood Anderson, Edna Ferber, J. P. Marquand, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Herbst, among many others), he can play only the hand he’s been dealt, as is the case with all editors of best-of anthologies. “Zelig,” the story he singled out above all the rest, does show elements of modern sensibility in terms of its milieu—Zelig is a working man, a Russian Jew come to America reluctantly because his immigrant son is stricken ill—and in its representation of the protagonist’s consciousness, which moves toward the close third-person on display in a number of stories in the current volume, like “The Fugue,” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, or Victor Lodato’s grimly hilarious “Jack, July.” Still, Zelig is cut in the mold of Silas Marner, a miser and nothing more, and it’s his lack of dimension that artificially dominates the story and propels the reader toward the expected (and yes, maudlin) denouement. I can only imagine what the “technical-commercial” fiction must have been like that year.
    The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius, the biplane of the First World War to the jet of the Second, modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition and this is what makes O’Brien’s achievement so special—and so humbling for us writers bent over our keyboards in our own soon-to-be-superseded age.
The Best American Short Stories
series still follows his template and his aesthetic too, seeking to identify and collect some of the best short fiction published in the preceding year. O’Brien listed 93 stories in his Roll of Honor for 1914–15 and 37 periodicals from which