January 6–13, 2000

cover story

Judge’s Comments: Fiction

by Lisa Zeidner

By this point in the history of the short story, we’ve seen a million Slices of Life. A wild party, a haunting childhood memory, a hellacious family Christmas is held up for inspection. We glimpse a character going through a day, more or less ordinary. Through this one slice, we’re supposed to get a feeling for the nuances of the whole pie — the arc of a life, with all of its doubts, disappointments and spikes of hope. Nice idea, theoretically. Trouble is, this approach doesn’t always work. Sometimes the slice-of-life just feels too slight — not substantial or filling enough.

I was heartened, then, to see how many of the finalists in this competition took a bolder approach, moving away from the programmatic, fey realism that has become standard for creative writing workshops. Among the top three stories, we have a child who smells so foul that dogs bark in self-defense and a seductive robot whose dangerous jewelry sends men straight from one-night stands to the ER.

My choice of winner, Elizabeth Rollins’ "The Boy," is a bold yet subtle meditation on consciousness and change. Our narrator, packing up her house after a divorce or death — she’s too hazy and distraught to pause for the details — has an encounter so bizarre that she’s not entirely sure she didn’t hallucinate it. We’re not sure, either, but we’re certainly convinced of how her encounter with the apparition-like little boy shifts her perceptions, refocuses her. The narrative voice here is sure-footed, with some lovely, precise imagery. The story takes chances without showing off — a tricky and satisfying balance.

Two other excellent contenders worthy of mention: Carol A. Cannon’s "Nasty Club Jewelry," a jaunty, futuristic look at The Bad Date from Hell, with a particularly enticing opening ("Ravenue has split. She’s on E Block, gonking the military."); and Luanne Smith’s "Having Words," a taut little Hour-in-the-Life-of story that actually does work, in which a woman, hung over and disgruntled, confronts her mother’s new (tattooed, amply earringed) boy toy over morning coffee.

Anyone in a creative writing workshop can tell you that the character must "grow or change" over the course of a good short story. In a less secular age, James Joyce claimed that short fiction must offer us an Epiphany, and Flannery O’Connor wanted us to "receive grace." Easy as it is to mock the prescription, it’s probably true. For life without growth or change — flat, frustrating, insightless — we have, after all, Real Life. I am pleased that all three of these stories give grace in spades.

Lisa Zeidner is the author of four novels, most recently Layover, which was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Amazon.com and as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. She has also published two books of poems, including Pocket Sundial, which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in GQ, Salon, Slate, The New Republic and elsewhere. She directs the Graduate Program in English at Rutgers University in Camden, and lives in Haddonfield, NJ.