The following assertion would have to run past the author for verification, but then again literary analysis is about interpretation and does not necessarily require factual confirmation. As long as evidence from the text is introduced to support an interpretative assertion, all the requirements have ben met. And so, here is an assertion regarding this particular collection of short fiction: the title is a joke.
Now, obviously, the title Best Worst American Stories is intended as ironic humor aimed at the publication of those anthologies with titles “Best American Short Stories of (insert year here)” but that is not the joke being referenced here. The title seems to be a joke on another level because the works of short fiction contained within the volume do not really meet all the expected conventions and expectations one usually brings to the concept of what makes a “story.” For the most part, these are not really “stories” in the traditional sense everyone is taught very early on in school. You know the routine: A story has a beginning, middle and an end defined by action that rises to a climax and before concluding with denouement. The best stories will have some sort of character development and everything works together to pursue one or more themes. Any honest assessment of the fiction in this collection will be such that pointing to rising or falling action, much less anything approaching a climax, becomes a desperate search for missing treasure.
Not that there’s anything wrong that. More than one reviewer has applied the term “vignette” to one or more of the tales in this tome. And that seems more appropriate in general though certainly it is not universally applicable. Definitions of “vignette” usually engage conditional terms like evocative or illustrative to appropriate locate the difference between a short story and short work of fiction. Vignettes tend to be the shortest types of short stories; Australians call them yarns while many popular American authors of the 19th century were described as writing “sketches.” That a story can be a remarkable achievement without rising and falling action, a climax or character development can be proven simply by reading the 500-word yarn by Aussie writer Henry Lawson, “On the Edge of a Plain.” Despite lacking all the typical qualities associated with the convention definition of a “story” it is not going too far to suggest that “On the Edge of a Plain” may well be the single most impressive short story ever written in the English language. Everything that one could want from a story is remarkably fitted into those 500 words by Lawson; it is simply an extraordinary accomplishment and points to how one need not consider what Martinez does within the pages of Best Worst American Stories a cheat simply because the title may be a joke.
In fact, it may well be because the title is intended as a joke that his accomplishment is ever greater. There is a method to the madness of Martinez writing something like “The Lead Singer is Distracting Me” or “The Spooky Japanese Girl is There for You.” That methodological madness is directed tied to why novels published in the 21st century are much shorter than novels of the 19th century and yet can still pack as many characters into equally complex plots taking place over the same expanse of time. When Dickens or Bronte or Austen wanted to take their readers out of the circumstances of their own lives and transport them to a world they’d had never seen, thousands of words were devoted to long passages of description. The invention of photography and the facilitation of cheap travel merged to make such long passages moot. Martinez is working from that evolution, but in a different way.
“The Lead Singer is Distracting Me” is only around six-hundred words long and is narrative thin with no climax. It is an interior monologue by the lead guitarist in a band who is complaining about the stage theatrics of the lead singer and presents a world that is far removed from that which most of us in habit. And yet, despite that, it is a world we all immediately recognize from having seen Mick Jagger do it with Keith Richards, Robert Plant do it Pete Townshend and any number of lesser imitators. It is a standard convention of rock concerts: the lead singer drawing the attention to him even he’s not singing, prancing and strutting and making sure the spotlight stays on him. It is ridiculously easy to understand frustration of the narrator and that is all that is required. The rest of the story is just gaps that we can easily fill in precisely because we can all empathize with either the guitarist or the lead singer.
Somewhat less familiar in a universal way, but certainly very familiar to young readers is the imagery of the title character in “The Spooky Japanese Girl is There for You.” It doesn’t even matter that this now globally iconic figure—technically known as an “onryo”—is a type of haunted specter familiar to many Asian cultures and not just relegated to Japan. But it is through Japanese horror films specifically that non-Asians came to learn of her existence. Today, the young woman with the long black hair draped around her face like seaweed who seems to exist only in monochrome despite appearing in color films and living in a colored world is as familiar an entity of horror as vampires or zombies to much of the world. This story is almost half the length of the guitarist’s monologue despite the fact that its lead character is still somewhat less universally recognized than the interaction between rock stars. The point being that if written for an American audience even as recently as the late 1990’s, “The Spooky Japanese Girl is There for You” would absolutely have required a word count in excess of that of “The Lead Singer is Distracting Me” because that title figure would have had to first be explained to non-Asian readers. It is a story that could only have written in the way it is at the precise time that it was written.
This is the fundamental basis of the vignettes contained in Best Worst American Stories. They can be as short and sparse and lacking in conventional narrative elements as they are because they are dependent upon reader interaction. Martinez deconstructs the process of writing short fiction in order to do away with many of the things that were once absolute required but have become extraneous or superfluous. The modern reader brings a wealth of information to the reading process that allows connections to be made without the author initiating them. These are definitely stories, but the joke remains that they are stories that can only make sense if the reader is part of the creative process. In many cases, Martinez’s vignettes approximate a recipe list: all the essential ingredients for a traditionally constructed story are there, but the reader has to do the cooking.
