I have a few rules for reading stories. I read them in the morning. I read them in their entirety in a single sitting. I read them one at a time, letting at least 24 hours pass between the end of one story and the beginning of the next. Short stories are like little worlds, and I do not want to jeopardize my ability to get maximum mileage by mixing them up. Finally, in the Best American Short Stories series, at the back of the book are the author bios along with a short (usually) statement from the author. Some of these statements are thank you notes to the editors who published them, others offer an explanation about how a story that was initially about a house fire evolved into one about fireflies. I do not read the author’s biography or statement until after I’ve read the story because I want to read the story without any interference.
Which brings me to a story in the 2010 anthology called The Hollow by James Lasdun, by far the weakest story in the collection. The story concerns yuppies moving to a neighborhood where control is being relinquished slowly, awkwardly by people who like motorcycles, like chopping down trees, people who take a mix-and-match approach to family infrastructure, people who go up into the woods, or what’s left of them, to get away from it all. On the surface, my main issue with this story is that it’s a cliché: Here are some uneducated people who do weird, sometimes scary shit. A little bit beneath the surface, my distaste for this story isn’t its reliance on amateurish stereotypes but the condescending, bitchy tone of it. These people are weirdos, the story seems to say, and they’re friendly, sort of, but their friendliness is always conditional. Many of them are missing teeth. I finished the story, originally published in The Paris Review, and turned to the bio section: James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York … His story “An Anxious Man” won the inaugural UK National Short Story Award in 2006.
After reading that, I was pretty pleased with myself. Even without knowing anything about the author’s background, I find the British tedious. I realize I’m wading into the waters of bigotry here, but I spent two months in London in 2005, and here’s my take on it: The British are still bitter about losing the American Revolution, and the dour condescension that runs through the blood on that soggy little island is but a horrific sneak preview of what the U.S. will look and sound and sing and write like before too many more decades pass.
And for some reason, we cannot get enough of it. Any day now I expect to hear that Tina Brown has taken over not only Newsweek but NPR as well, where she’ll no doubt amp her accent up to the highest volume possible so that she can explain us to ourselves. The adoration of the accent is alive and well right here in Portland as well, with our British reporter doing stories on OPB in which his main accomplishment seems to be inserting as much British phraseology as possible into what come across as little more than a recital of press releases. Is the accent supposed to be charming? I think it’s hideous. Actually, that’s not quite true: What I think is hideous is the way people who have never crossed the Indiana state line – or broken free of the confines of the northwest corner of Oregon for that matter – swoon over it.
That brings me, of course, to the wedding. If a country that isn’t exactly in sound shape wants to throw millions of dollars at a sad reenactment of its long-gone days of glory, I suppose that’s the country’s problem and not mine. But seriously, this week the U.S. networks are anchoring their evening newscasts from London because there’s going to be a big wedding in town? That sort of foolishness makes the sex confessions of a professional golfer or a staged balloon flight over Colorado seem newsworthy.
