Fiction – Auxiliary Memory

Rereading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 2026

by James Wallace Harris, 9/23/26

I discovered Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968. I found it on the 7-day bookshelf of the Coconut Grove Library, in Miami, Florida. Being just sixteen and in the 11th grade, the crazy antics of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enchanted the juvenile male in me. Wolfe’s jazzy prose inspired my impressionable pseudo-intellect. Boy, I wanted to run off to San Francisco. At that age, I was just as goofy and naive as the Pranksters (although they were about ten years older than me).

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch these videos.

For some reason, I was drawn to Neal Cassady. This was before I had read On the Road or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Up until then, I had mostly read science fiction, and a smattering of popular science books. It pleased me that Kesey and crew read Stranger in a Strange Land. At that time, Heinlein was my guru.

And this was before I had smoked grass or dropped acid. I worked as a bagboy at the Kwik Chek in the Coconut Grove. My biggest problem as a horny teenager was being afraid of girls. The wild sex life of the Pranksters made me wish I could be like them.

Cassaday spoke like an over-revved engine. The man never stopped twitching and rapping. Cassaday’s thing was flipping a small sledgehammer. I imitated him by walking around my house flipping a large can of pork and beans. My father asked, “What the hell are you doing?” It made me feel self-conscious, but I kept flipping those pork and beans.

My prank at the time was joining the Columbia and Capitol record clubs to acquire albums as fast as possible. I’d get 12 albums for free, promising to buy eight more for full price. Because I was working, I could pay for my commitment quickly. I’d then quit and rejoin to get another 12 albums. That quickly let me build a library of all the back albums of my favorite groups. Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, and all the new groups coming out of San Francisco. I identified with those people.

I knew nothing about Haight-Asbury, the Summer of Love, Acid Tests, or even Monterey Pop. News of the hippie world was sparse where I lived. I remember watching a segment on The Today Show about the light show behind The Jefferson Airplane, and reading about the group in Life Magazine. Besides astronauts, these rock musicians seem like the coolest people on the planet.

What Tom Wolfe described was as far out as fantasy or science fiction. All I knew about LSD was from Popular Science and CBS News reports about Timothy Leary. The Kwik Check was near the park in Coconut Grove, and all the kids who wanted to be hippies showed up there on the weekends. I looked up to these older kids, believing they had special knowledge.

When I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968, I didn’t know about the spiritual side of psychedelic drugs. But I’d soon find out when I read Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy. But that was months later. In the 1960s, drugs seemed about ecstasy, while in the 1970s, they were about exploring spiritual horizons.

Crazy fun is what I saw in my first reading of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I pictured The Merry Pranksters like a trippier version of The Monkees. But I imagined them looking like the kids in the news stories about Haight-Asbury.

A few years ago, when I first rented Magic Trip, I was shocked by how Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters dressed. They didn’t have long hair or weird clothes. They wore the kind of shirts I wore in 1965. In fact, they reminded me of what the Beach Boys looked like before The Beatles.

The Merry Pranksters’ antics were less sophisticated than any episode of The Monkees. I couldn’t believe how silly and uncool they were. Magic Trip uses the 16mm film Kesey and the Pranksters took on their 1964 trip in Furthur. Probably the same film Tom Wolfe viewed to write his book.

And the Acid Tests were childish. No wonder Leary and Albert were anxious to get rid of these guys. And I can’t blame Kerouac for getting drunk and looking so goddamn morose when he had to endure an evening with the Pranksters. I have to admit, after watching Magic Trip, even my young 15-year-old self would have thought the Pranksters completely uncool. I don’t know how Larry McMurtry was so patient with them.

This week I reread The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and rewatched Magic Bus. I supplemented those two with videos I found on YouTube. With this reading, I was impressed with Wolfe’s reporting and writing.

I love books about generational cohorts that create artistic/literary movements like The Beats, The Lost Generation, The Transcendentalists, or the German Romantics. Ken Kesey and the Pranksters inspired that kind of a movement, although theirs was less defined by specific artistic works.

They could even be the headwaters of the 1960s drug counterculture. Many writers have suggested Ken Kesey and the Pranksters were the children of the Beats and parents of the Hippies. However, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Cassady were the tip of the iceberg of Beat-like people emerging all across America in the 1950s. And Kesey and the Pranksters were another visual tip of a new wave of rebellion. Actually, I think it was all one wave.

I was surprised to see so many references to Ken Kesey and the Pranksters in the YouTube videos about The Grateful Dead. I just ordered The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally. I hope his book explores those theories and provides a history of what happened next. Did this movement end when Jerry Garcia died?

I was intrigued by this video from The Shakedown Archives. (That channel focuses on the Grateful Dead’s history.)

This video accuses Tom Wolfe of spending too little time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. That because he only did acid once and didn’t like it, he couldn’t have fathomed what it meant to be on the bus. In another video, Kesey said The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a good book, an accurate book, but it just didn’t understand everything about him.

I’m fascinated by how history is reported. Is it ever 100% accurate and complete? I often ask people who lived in the 1960s to name books they feel captured those times. No one book stands out. I wasn’t there, but for some reason I feel this book might be the best for what it covers. I compare its quality to The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, a book I might use for the 1970s.

One reason I back Wolfe on this is that he doesn’t editorialize about his subject. He doesn’t judge. He observes. He got to interview many of the principal players and see all the films. Just because he did all this work in three weeks doesn’t mean he couldn’t grok it. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters could never edit their own film.

But there’s one other clue. Throughout the story, Kesey and the Pranksters judged people by whether they were on or off the bus, and then by the acid tests. Tom Wolfe graded them in one place. He compared them to Hermann Hesse’s book, Journey to the East. I read that back in the 1970s. I completely understood what Wolfe was saying, but to be sure, I reread the book this week.

Hesse’s book is about H. H., who remembers being on a pilgrimage with a special group of spiritual people. He was on the bus. Somehow he got lost from the group. He was off the bus. Eventually, H. H. finds Leo, the leader of their group. H. H. wants to write the history of their group, but can’t. He’s even been given access to the group’s vast library of mystical documents. Leo even tries to show him that the documents are worthless by burning some of them. It’s not until H. H. sees two figurines that represent him and Leo that he understands. He sees the light from each figure merge.

Tom Wolfe put Ken Kesey on the Merry Pranksters on this higher plane. He knew that just seeing them wasn’t enough. On the outside, they looked goofy and stupid. Maybe he was saying that unless people merged together with some inner light, it was impossible to understand. Wolfe knew he was never on the bus, in real life or spiritually, but he guessed what it meant.

I remember back in the 1970s belonging to a group of people who did various drugs. We all moved to the same street. We pursued many wild, creative projects, which we were very good at. We dressed in silly clothes and played silly games. Years later, I was in a second group. They were about mysticism, meditation, and spirituality. More like what Ram Das taught. In both cases, it’s about being in the group, exploring the edge of consciousness. In each case, we had our own version of being on the bus.

In another YouTube video, one I can no longer find, the narrator felt that being on the bus meant you were moving and part of a group. That Jack Kerouac’s failure was that he had stopped moving and became solitary. He said these artistic/literary movements ended when individuals branched off to be by themselves. I liked that idea. They also said being a Deadhead was all about being part of a group.

When I was a kid reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I think that’s what I wanted. To be part of a group. I wanted to find my own kind. I did that several times over my life. I don’t have that now. It’s sad.

JWH

The Next Five Short Stories in The Best American Short Stories 2025

by James Wallace Harris, 8/25/26

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a science fiction writer because I loved reading science fiction. I began thinking about writing after subscribing to science fiction magazines in 1967 and learning how they paid writers. Science fiction magazines and anthologies were my introduction to the short story.

I’m pretty sure they introduced us to literary short stories in junior high, but they made no impact on me. In the 12th grade, I took a creative writing class. I can’t remember any of the stories I wrote for that class, or even the teacher’s name. In college, I also took creative writing classes as electives for my English major. In the 1990s, I got into an MFA program for creative writing. I still have some of the stories I wrote for it.

In all those writing classes, my teachers discouraged us from writing science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and other genre-type stories. My teachers pleaded with us to write about what we knew. I didn’t tell them that what I knew most was science fiction.

In 2002, I went to Clarion West Writers’ Workshop for six weeks in Seattle, Washington. Its focus was science fiction, including a week’s instruction from Gardner Dozois, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction at the time. Saturday, I received a packet from Clarion West of my old stories. I haven’t had the heart to open them. It was not long after that I gave up hope of ever publishing a short story or writing a novel. Writing fiction was a lifelong dream that I never worked hard enough to make a reality.

In 2020, I joined a Facebook group that read one science fiction short story a day. For almost five years, I kept up with that pace. I had hoped it would inspire me to write again, but it never did.

Most years, around October, I get the latest volume of Best American Short Stories, believing it will inspire me to write again. That hasn’t worked either. However, it does show me what’s going on in literary fiction. It seems that since the 1990s, literary writers have sometimes embraced writing ideas and techniques from genre writers. But then, I feel genre writers have become more literary. I wonder how many of them go through MFA writing programs.

The short story was replaced by the television show in the 1950s. The short story used to be the primary source of 30- to 60-minute doses of fiction. That was the primary product of broadcast television. Streaming television has changed things. Its product is now eight to twelve 30- to 60-minute episodes that tell one story. People often binge-watch them. They’re novel replacements.

An episode of The Big Bang Theory or Law and Order is essentially a short story.

On the other hand, many people have switched to short videos that run a few minutes. They are the equivalent of flash fiction.

Evidently, the short story, whether written or filmed, is no longer appealing. Literary magazines and genre magazines struggle to find audiences larger than several hundred to a few thousand. That’s a shame, because fiction at that length is rather distinctive.

The variety of story types and writing styles is striking in any anthology. In the time it takes to read or listen to one average bestseller, you can read or listen to twenty short stories. A good short story makes an intense emotional impact on the reader. Novels do this too, but require a longer commitment. And I don’t know if all those extra words pay off any more.

The main reason I failed at writing was that I couldn’t create that emotional impact. Here is the next set of stories I read in The Best American Short Stories 2025. I’m going to try to entice you to read them by describing the setup for their emotional impact.

“Maritza and Carman” by Lyn Di Iorio

Maritza was taken in by Juancho after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. She didn’t know who she was or where she came from. Juancho let her work in his cafe, and over the year she found a kind of inner peace working in his garden. Then, Juancho saw Maritza’s picture in the newspaper. It was a picture of a policewoman named Carmen Sandin de O’Farrell. She had rescued people during Hurricane Irma, but was described as having died trying to save her daughter, Taina O’Farrell, in Hurricane Maria.

They contact Taina, who comes to visit. Carmen is told who she was, and that triggers some memories. But as Taina recounts how her mother saved her and her boyfriend, Carmen remembers something different.

Did Carmen lose her memory because of physical injury in the hurricane, or because of what her daughter did? Will she return to her old life?

“Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges” by Isabelle Fang

May is a college girl who sells her worn underwear to men with fetishes. Then she gets a job working with Bridget on a reality TV show and decides her underwear-selling days are over. May has avoided meeting any of her customers, but her best customer, Bill, asks to meet her after she informs him that he will no longer be getting her panties in the mail. She puts him off by telling him she’ll be out of town on location for three months.

The TV show is about an older white man, John, who has divorced his imported Asian wife and is marrying 19-year-old Ally, who is flying in from the Philippines. May befriends Ally. Her job is to help pull off a wedding for the show, but she identifies with Ally because her father left her mom for a young woman like Ally.

The impact of all of this conveys the icky compromises women have to make with men. Yet, readers are surprised at the decisions the women make. May does meet with Bill, and the ending is an interesting surprise.

“Time of the Preacher” by Bret Anthony Johnston

Holland builds wooden fences, pergolas, decks, and even tree houses. He’s doing great business during Covid because everyone wants to isolate themselves but spend time outdoors. Holland is divorced and misses his ex, Mandy, who is about to remarry. Mandy texts Holland, asking him to come get a snake out of a house she’s renting. A house rented by a preacher who skipped out on her.

Holland goes right over, and they don’t find the snake. He wants to think Mandy just wanted his company and made up the story about the snake. The story is really about how Mandy sees Holland and how he sees her. Holland is not like the icky men in the previous story, but he’s disappointing to Mandy in other ways.

Love the ending, but wonder what it implies.

“Underwater” by Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Sam, the wife, is married to Sam, the husband. Sam, the man, has a twin sister, Lizzy. Sam, the woman, is jealous of her husband’s relationship with his sister. They might be too close.

Sam’s family is jealous that she spends all her vacation time with his family. Sam’s family is just as weird as her in-laws. Sam’s sister, Sarah, has a son who wants to saw off her legs.

This story is a comedy about strange relationships. It asks: who is fucked up? Or should ask: who is fucked up the most?

We’re only given more and more proof of weirdness. My favorite part deals with Lizzy’s weird dog, Dotty.

I’d love to see this story as a TV series.

“Drapetomania” by William Lohier

Drapetomania was a fake, racist mental illness proposed in 1851 by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright. He claimed that enslaved Black people who tried to run away from bondage were suffering from a disease.

William Lohier turns “Drapetomania” into an allegorical horror story.

Nina is in class when Jackson asks to leave class. He leaves and begins running. He keeps running until he dies. We’re told the world has been hit by a condition that makes black people start running and keep running until they die.

Nina has already lost a sister, Demetria, to this condition. Nina is introduced to a senior, Jai, who is a reporter for the local public radio station. She wants to follow Nina to cover the running mania. Nina takes Jai home to meet her mother and brother TomTom.

Jai’s father is Japanese, but her mother is Guyanese. She doesn’t know if she’s black enough to catch the mania.

From here, the story becomes bleaker and bleaker. “Drapetomania” is really a genre story, with a good plot. It has a surreal, nightmarish ending. There’s enough here to make a movie.

It shuddered and rumbled and moaned. Beyond TomTom’s lithe back I could see only a weltering sliver of sun. Runners, I realized. I edged into a sprint. The motel and the moon and the world behind me—it all fell away. Beside me Jai stumbled and slowed, but I couldn’t turn back. We were neck and neck, TomTom and I, blood and blood. The sun enraged the sky and I saw them, before us, haloed in the rising dust. Their feet played the earth like an enormous drum. We ran toward them, enraged, and sweat stung my eyes but I didn’t need to see TomTom to know what his face looked like. Mine looked the same.

Then we were among them, and I could barely see through the grit. Soon it blotted out the sky, and the trees, and left only a red sun and our persons. It was so beautiful, I lost my breath. My feet pounded against the ground until I could no longer feel them.

If “Drapetomania” were stretched out to novel length, would it have a greater impact? I don’t think so. The story isn’t realistic, but it does have great symbolic impact. I can easily imagine Holden Caulfield being so disturbed that he started running and kept running until he died.

Wrapping Up …

I’d love to have written any of these stories. There’s a reason that at least three editors have chosen them. The single most important thing I learned at Clarion West Writers’ Workshop was “great fiction is the accumulation of significant details.” It’s all those details that make us feel for the characters. I seldom could gather enough details to make my stories ignite.

I still have the fantasy of writing science fiction. I’ve thought for years, “If I could only write one good story that got published.” I even know the story and characters I want to write. I’ve attempted that story many times. But I can never finish it in any form that works as well as these five stories.

JWH

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” by J. D. Salinger

by James Wallace Harris, 8/18/26

It’s been almost seventy years since I’ve cried — well, the boo-hooing, body-shaking, snot-slinging kind of crying. For most of my life, I was in control of my emotions. However, since I’ve gotten older, movies, books, sappy commercials, and even old songs will make my eyes water a bit. Reading “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” gave my eyes a soaking and even stopped up my sinuses.

That’s my concrete review of this story. Now for the verbose version.

I’ve developed a literary theory that I call the “Message in a Bottle” theory. All humans live inside their heads like living alone on a deserted island. Writing, especially fiction, is one solitary individual putting a message in a bottle and throwing it upon the ocean, hoping someone will read it.

However, messages in a bottle have an inherent limitation. Language is a poor tool for describing what we feel. I doubt I’d want to experience what was in J. D. Salinger’s head when he wrote: “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” It would have been too intense, too painful. Actually, it might have killed me to have had telepathic contact with Salinger. So, in that regard, we should be thankful for the limitations of words.

On the other hand, I think we wish we weren’t alone. I’m not sure even the closest of lovers ever get that near to each other. I suppose if telepathy existed, it would allow us to share feelings and maybe feel we weren’t alone. I’ve often wondered if twins achieve anything close to telepathy. Theoretically, those poor souls who have multiple personalities could share their feelings, but from everything I’ve heard about such folks, they only occupy the body one at a time.

Most writers create works that don’t attempt to describe what’s inside their heads. They either paint with words something they see outside of themselves and hope readers recognize it. Or imagine something they hope readers will recognize.

J. D. Salinger worked to describe exactly what he felt. I assume that’s why he’d get so furious with editors when they tried to alter his work. He knew the limitations of words, so he used them very carefully. Like any message-in-a-bottle story, the words are going to fall. However, Salinger knew that if he could use just the right words, they could trigger pale imitations of his emotions in us. The key was coding his message just so.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is about a staff sergeant in London just before being shipped out on D-Day. And that same sergeant after the war ends. J. D. Salinger endured five brutal WWII campaigns, from D-Day to walking into a concentration camp.

There is no way readers can understand what J. D. Salinger experienced. Salinger’s biographers, David Shields and Shane Salerno, in Salinger, said: “Of the 337 days the war lasted for the American soldier in Europe, Salinger was in combat for 299.” We could read every history of WWII combat in Europe and never come within light-years of what Salinger experienced. Salinger had a nervous breakdown after his company discovered the death camp.

How can anyone write about that experience? The thing is, we can’t, not in any definitive or rational way. Salinger continued to write throughout the war, carrying around chapters of Catcher in the Rye with him in combat. He obviously wanted to express himself. And after the war, he disavowed the stories he had written before it.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is merely a postcard from hell. It was published in The New Yorker, April 8, 1950. You can read it online here. Or buy a copy of Nine Stories, one of four official Salinger books. (One famous novel, and three story collections.)

After the war, it was obvious that Salinger had what we now call PTSD. Of all the stories I’ve read by Salinger, this one is his most direct attempt to convey his war experience.

After 1945, Salinger had a thing for children and young people. The people who knew him felt children represented pre-war innocence to Salinger.

In the first half of the story, an American staff sergeant visits a children’s choir in London and then goes to a tearoom. This part is told in first person.

While drinking his first cup of tea, the thirteen-year-old girl, Esmé, who had been the standout singer in the choir, her little brother Charles, and their aunt arrive in the tearoom and seat themselves near the narrator. Esmé and Charles come over to his table, and the sergeant and children have a charming conversation. (There are many parallels in this story’s structure to Salinger’s more famous story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”)

In the second half of the story, it switches into the third person. The setting is Bavaria several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X is barely hanging on mentally. His buddy Clay says, “I wrote Loretta you had a nervous breakdown.” X is sitting at a table with mail and packages addressed to him. Salinger is conjuring Kafka.

When Clay leaves, X opens a package and discovers it’s from Esmé.

This is when my eyes get watery. They are watering again as I type. It is a very effective message in a bottle. I can never know what was inside Salinger’s head, but it must have been beyond intense. Reading his biography is incredibly intense. The poor bastard was fucked up for the rest of his life.

My theory is fucked up people resonate with Salinger, and that’s why he’s sold more than 60 million copies of his famous novel. Many of those readers drove Salinger to hide from the world when they tried to chase him down. He even came to regret publishing The Catcher in the Rye.

I believe Salinger was so successful because he was so damn good at writing messages in a bottle. The question is: Are readers still successfully decoding his stories?

Many literary critics believe a story has to stand on its own. And I can understand that sentiment, but I disagree quite strongly. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye twice in my lifetime. Both times it made a great impression. But I need to read it again since I’ve read Salinger. My earlier impressions weren’t even close.

Before now, I had no idea how tortured Salinger’s soul was when I read The Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden Caulfield was a tortured teen, not to the level GI Salinger was. There are novels by certain writers, like Thomas Wolfe, Jack Keruoauc, and Philip K. Dick, that you can’t really understand until you read several biographies about them. What they have in common is tortured souls.

I doubt I would have teared up for “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” if I had not read Salinger. If you’ve read the story, or will read it, let me know how it affected you. Let me know if you’ve read about Salinger.

By the way, if you’re not willing to read a 600-page biography, there’s a documentary based on the book. Watch it on Amazon Prime. It conveys only 1% of the information and intensity of reading the biography, but it does help you understand J. D. Salinger.

JWH

“Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess

by James Wallace Harris, 8/12/26

“Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess is available to read online. Or buy a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2025.

One of the essential challenges of being a professional writer is developing ideas. Ideas come to a writer all day long. I get two or three every time I take a shower, and a few more when I read the morning news. You have to pick one and work at it like painting in oil or sculpting in marble. Developing an idea means making hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. That kind of art takes days, weeks, months, even years.

During my time taking fiction writing courses towards an MFA, I wrote over thirty stories. They encouraged us to write new ones every week. And that is a certain kind of learning experience. However, I thought my program should require workshops in which you rewrote a story every week for a semester. Because that’s how good stories evolve.

Back in the pulp magazine era, professional writers often prided themselves on being able to churn out a first draft that an editor would buy. To make a living, you had to regularly sell stories. If you read these stories today, they aren’t very good. Often I think that if they had only rewritten this story two or three times, it could have been a classic.

“Unfathomably Deep” feels like it has been rewritten many times, lacquered with many layers of varnish.

Going through the contributors section of The Best American Short Stories, you often see comments about how long the writer worked on a story, sometimes even putting it away for a time to rework it later. That’s because literary stories have so many layers.

Because these discussions of stories are not reviews, I’m going to reveal things that many readers will consider spoilers. Read the story. The link is above.

At the simplest level, “Unfathomably Deep” is about a young delusional woman named Izzie who falls in love with a handsome doctor, feels spurned, and kills him. The backstory reveals the death of her sister Danielle. To confuse matters, the doctor’s name is Daniel. And it’s not until you are into the story that you realize that Izzie isn’t talking to the reader.

The idea for “Unfathomable Deep” was just a passing bit of info. Sophie Madeline Dess said this in her contributor note:

A friend of mine is getting his MD, and from him I learned of the existence of the Gynecological Teaching Assistant—a person trained to use her own body as a teaching tool to instruct medical students on administering breast and pelvic exams. I was immediately obsessed by the thought of this job. To bring “performance” into the exam room; to be probed and prodded, to pretend. The job struck me as perfect for a voice that had been floating around in my head, the voice of Izzie in “Unfathomably Deep.” Izzie’s passion, grief, and spunk all took shape as I imagined her as a GTA, lying on an exam table, surrounded by handsome, untalented medical students. Eventually that career choice became secondary to the main thrust of the story, which is to do with allegiance, violence, and fate. It is a story born of the question: What forces and passions possess us in the wake of grief?

Dess was given an idea accidentally. A million writers would have written a million different stories with that idea. Ideas count for nothing. Dess had a character she had been developing in her mind. Character is the foundation of literary fiction, not the idea or plot. How many data points would you need to define your own character? Writers have to think up those details for the characters they create.

Yet, a good idea and character aren’t enough. You need a conflict. Readers keep reading to see how a character solves a problem. And you need to start everything with a hook. The first sentence of “Unfathomably Deep” is:

“Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out.”

That’s a shocker. I imagined open-heart surgery because I’ve seen so many medical shows where the doctors use a rib spreader. But Dess quickly diverted me away from that image. “As the men locked me in my stirrups, they told me their names, which now I’ve forgotten, but I do remember that one was blond, the other blonder.” Okay, she’s in for a pelvic exam. That’s a different image of spreading altogether.

See how Dess’s imagination is controlling what we imagine? Movies are a series of photographs. At 24 frames per second, we see an illusion of reality. Writers have to create the illusion of reality with words. The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words doesn’t apply to fiction. It doesn’t take 24,000 words a second. Fiction is an accumulation of significant details. Each sentence should add details to the story. (Read “About 5,750 Words” by Samuel R. Delany.)

This paragraph should clarify the setting and situation in the reader’s mind:

It was my job to intervene. Formally speaking, I was a GTA: a Gynecological Teaching Assistant. Really just a body lender for medical students. Their one task was to perform a partial gynecological exam on a pretend patient — me — who had pretend gynecological problems, which were the result of a pretend sex life, which was the result of a pretend desirability. I had a script and everything.

Personally, I would have begun the story with that paragraph. I think it’s a much better hook. However, some literary writers like to play around with the reader’s head.

Sophie Madeline Dess is attempting far more than I imagined on the initial reading. Like reality, fiction can connect to many realms, or levels. At first, “Unfathomably Deep” feels like a simple comedy about a woman paid to be a gynecological patient falling in love with the student doctor.

But I didn’t tell you about the epitaph at the beginning of the story:

I know indeed what evil I intend to do,
But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
— Euripides’s Medea, 431 B.C.E.

Now I need to use a reference from a movie that many people consider offensive. It’s when Robert Downey Jr.’s character tells Ben Stiller’s character in Tropic Thunder to not go full retard. He explains that you can create award-winning roles about cognitively damaged people if you don’t play them as too damaged. That’s an apt analogy for going too literary. James Joyce was fine with many readers with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but lost a lot of them with Ulysses. But he lost most of his readers with Finnegans Wake by going full Joycean. There are only so many layers of allusion that some readers can handle.

My friend Linda said she didn’t like “Unfathomably Deep” because it was too strange. I wondered if Dess had gone full-Joycean for her. I still enjoyed the story, but I’m not sure how many times I’m willing to reread it to get all the allusions and foreshadowing.

Karen Carlson said at A Just Recompense, “I had to read the story several times to feel like I knew what was happening in various places, and I think I’ll be milking subtext and metaphor for the next thirty reads at least.” And at Jake Weber’s Workshop Heretic, she said in the comments that this was her favorite story in the anthology. Karen’s post went down the Medea rabbit hole. I recommend you read it.

I ignored the Medea angle while reading the story. That means I missed a lot of what Dess intended. I loved Joyce’s Portrait, but never could finish Ulysses after several tries. Dess is somewhere between the two with literary allusions. Karen said she’s currently obsessed with Greek literature.

Jake went down the Freudian rabbit hole. And I recommend you read his piece too. I wondered about Freud while reading the story and considered researching that angle. Weber is careful to point out that Freud is considered useless for modern psychoanalysis, but is still popular for literary analysis.

“Unfathomably Deep” is a smorgasbord of stories. I latched onto Izzie falling in love at first sight. Yesterday, by coincidence, my friend Anne texted me about how gorgeous her doctor was. She was quite taken. And I’ve remembered other times when women friends told me they were knocked out by male beauty. For men, beautiful women are everywhere. It comes in all varieties. But with women, Mr. Beautiful is as rare as black swans. I was hoping the story would explore the differences between women and men and their view of beauty, but it doesn’t.

Izzie stalks Daniel. The second time Izzie gets to work with Daniel, he completely lets her down. Then she stalks his neighborhood. But why. Well, she kills him. This falls in with the Medea thread. Izzie wraps her legs around Daniel’s head while holding him underwater, fondling his face and hair. Some readers discuss this story’s humor. And I could picture this story made into a movie, and even imagine the scene of Izzie drowning Daniel being funny.

But when you reread the story, with all the Medea and Freudian layers, you realize Izzie is quite cognitively damaged. You have to ask what Robert Downey Jr. asked so crudely. Does Dess go too far with Izzie? That’s hard to answer.

I suppose there’s an audience for humor about insanity, like some readers who seek out stories of body horror. Dess’ humor isn’t like Heller’s in Catch-22. It’s somewhat like J. D. Salinger’s if you ignore all the Medea stuff. And I’m leaving out whole gobs of the story, especially the weird humor about Danielle.

There’s a subplot that satirizes concepts regarding female bodies. I believe hordes of readers could read “Unfathomably Deep” without ever connecting with what Karen, Jake, and I saw in the story.

JWH

“Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein

by James Wallace Harris, 8/11/26

We humans have several cognitive tools for understanding reality. The early ones were myth, folklore, and religion. The only ones that can consistently describe reality are math and science. But a popular one today is fiction. I don’t just mean short stories and novels. But also television shows, movies, comics, video games, manga, poetry, lyrics, etc. I think reading and analyzing literary stories are a unique kind of microscope for studying reality.

The thing about fiction is everyone interprets it differently. I like that. It helps to consume other interpretations. Luckily, I have Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense and Jake Weber at Workshop Heretic to follow behind in reading The Best American Short Stories volumes.

For most of my life, I’ve read science fiction. I review it on Classics of Science Fiction. Science fiction is mostly genre fiction. Genre fiction is like modern art; it doesn’t try to portray reality, but create an artificial reality. Genre fiction is admired for creating something beautiful that doesn’t exist in reality. Literary fiction is beautiful for describing reality.

When I was growing up, science fiction fans would call literary fiction mundane fiction. “Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein describes a very mundane situation. Now that I’m older, stories about interstellar travel bore me, and I’m more fascinated by the mundane.

You can read or listen to “Abject Naturalism” at The New Yorker if you have a subscription. If you have a Spotify account, you can listen to the story read by the author. And, of course, you can read it in The Best American Short Stories 2025.

Toni is the mother of 10-year-0ld Amalie. My guess is Toni is around 44 because she gives two backstories ten years apart. The first jump is twenty years earlier, when Toni first met Amalie’s father in graduate school. The second jump is ten years back, when she briefly reunited with Amalie’s father and got pregnant with Amalie.

Jake Weber at Workshop Heretic did an extensive analysis of the title: “Abject Naturalism.” I recommend reading it because I don’t want to repeat his work. Weber says:

This emphasis on the “physiological” nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity’s grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It’s borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term “the abject” from theorist Julia Kristeva. I’ve delved more deeply into the meaning of “the abject” in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I’ll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our “naturalism.” If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like “Abject Abject.” A double dose of abjection. Weber gives plenty of evidence to support this with quotes from the story.

Weber cites plenty of points in the story to support this view. Especially connecting it with Toni’s desire to write literary horror stories when she was in writing school. By the end of “Abject Naturalism,” Toni feels positive about writing again, and we have to wonder if “Abject Naturalism” is something she would have written?

But that is not how I focused on “Abject Naturalism.” For me, it was about two things: freedom from fear and writing. Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense was closer to my view when reviewing “Abject Naturalism.” I completely agree with this.

I once took a class with a professor who insisted that every poem Robert Frost wrote, no matter what it was about, was really about writing poetry. Two roads in the wood? Poetry. Woods on a snowy evening? Poetry. Walls, birches, death, gold, choosing a star? All about writing poems. I got the sense, after I’d read this story a couple of times and looked up the title, that this story is all about writing a story.

I believe all literary fiction is about writing, but it seems more obvious when the protagonist is a writer, or in Toni’s case, a failed writer. It’s even more revealing when we get a title like “Abject Naturalism.” To me, literary fiction is always a kind of metafiction. While consuming a literary story, I always ask myself, “Why did the writer write this story, how did they write it, is any of it autobiographical, and what is the writer really telling us?”

I couldn’t find much about Sarah Braunstein, but this paragraph from her contributor’s page is very revealing.

Some years ago, my elementary-aged child went for a jog in the neighborhood, promising to stay alert and to avoid strangers. He returned with a telescope a stranger had been throwing away. The man, he said, had told him he could buy a new part for it on the web. My son and I ordered some plastic mirror thing for $3 on eBay, but we could never get it to fit, and the telescope now sits in the basement wrapped in cobwebs. From the day he came home with it, the telescope radiated with meaning. It felt like the set-up of a short story on my front stoop, the kid and the object. The telescope lets the child see the cosmos, a world beyond the household, beyond what the mother knows. I imagined a mother who would feel threatened by this, who would wonder about the man . . . who might even go to his door to complain. She would be lonely, half-aware of her motivations. When she knocked on his door and I saw the entryway to Marco’s living room, his reading glasses, I realized this might be a story about real estate, or friendship, or love . . . the narrative opened up to me, a Venn diagram of these elements. I began to imagine a daughter who is prickly and tart, always one step ahead of her mother. She has a band on her wrist that counts steps, another device Toni did not give her, and downloads apps without permission on Toni’s phone. Poor Toni! It began to make me laugh, the Sisyphean task of controlling a young adolescent with a burning mind. Well, what about her own burning mind? Toni as a former creative person came into focus then. I wanted to write about so many things, to say something about grief, creativity, doubt, fear . . . finding my way to the end of this story was a challenge. At one point Toni says she stopped writing because she never could figure out how to end things. “Abject Naturalism” sat in a file for a long time until I could understand what its ending needed to do.

So she had a kid about Amalie’s age, but how old is she? In 2010, the National Book Foundation recognized her as “5 Under 35.” I guessed that Toni was around 44, so Braunstein could be of a similar age. From what little I did find about her, I could imagine Braunstein following Toni’s path, as well as the path Toni didn’t take, the one Amalie’s father took. Braunstein attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Mecca for MFA students. And “Abject Naturalism” was published in both The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2025. Braunstein has two novels and a collection available at Amazon, and she teaches creative writing at Colby College in Maine. Doesn’t that sound like Amalie’s father?

Literary fiction gives writers a chance to work things out. I’m currently rereading J. D. Salinger, and I consider his stories metaphorical roman à clef. I want to believe literary writers are telling us something about their lives, even when the plot and characters don’t match their own.

“Abject Naturalism” really begins when Amalie, at ten, claims she’s old enough to go jogging by herself. This terrifies Toni. Amalie wants her freedom. Toni realizes she must give her freedom, but knows that she, herself, is not free. Toni resents that Amalie’s father chose to become a successful writer rather than being a parent, but was that freedom?

Now, I identify with Toni in two ways. First, I’m also an MFA dropout who eventually gave up the dream of becoming a writer. Even though we never had children, the thought of letting a kid go out of the house on their own terrifies me.

Which is odd, because in 1957, when I was just 5, I walked to my first day of 1st grade by myself. My parents asked me if I knew where the school was. I said yes, but I didn’t really. I just went outside and followed all the other kids in the neighborhood, heading somewhere. By the time I was 6 and 7, I was roaming the neighborhood for blocks. When we moved to New Jersey in 1959, and I was 8, I roamed across farms and woods. One day, I led my 6-year-old sister into the woods to see how far we could go and ended up in town. By chance, my father was driving home from work and saw us.

My father was surprised to see us. He asked us how we got into town. But when we explained, he didn’t yell at us. He just drove us home. I’ve always wondered what I would have done if he hadn’t spotted us. Probably returned the same way we came. I was good at not getting lost.

The first half of “Abject Naturalism” dramatises Toni’s fears of letting Amalie roam free. If I had had kids, I don’t know if I could let them out of my sight. In today’s New York Times, I read “Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?” By today’s standards, my parents would have seen jail time.

To make matters worse, Amalie comes back from her jog lugging a broken telescope. She tells Toni a man gave it to her. Toni freaks out at the thought of Amalie talking to strangers.

The next day, when Amalie is in school, Toni goes down the street and confronts the man, Marcos. He’s described as an old guy in his mid-to-late sixties. Toni calmly tells him that he shouldn’t talk to children because it conditions them to feel safe talking to strangers. Marcos explains he hadn’t really struck up a conversation. He said Amalie was looking at the telescope he put out on the street in the trash. He merely told Amalie she could have it, and that it was missing a part that could be bought cheaply on eBay.

This calms Toni some, but she still worries.

Then the story takes a different turn. Toni keeps returning to visit Marcos. In a way, she slowly gives herself freedom too. The hard part of the story for me was believing a woman in her forties would be romantically attracted to a guy in his sixties. Toni does worry about losing her low-rent apartment in a gentrified neighborhood. Does she want Marcos for his house? She imagines her and Amalie moving into it. But she also believes Marcos loves her, but she’s too embarrassed to say that to her friends.

Toni is constantly running a script in her head about her fears. When Amalie demands some very limited freedom, Toni starts allowing herself a small bit of freedom.

The ending of the story is happy, and even kind of sappy. Toni even fantasizes about writing again. She pictures herself setting up a writing location in Marcos’ house.

There is actually too much to analyze in “Abject Naturalism.” In the beginning of the story, we’re given Toni’s backstory with Amalie’s father. This is one kind of love story. But we see another kind of love story at the end, with Marcos. Unfortunately, we are only told what Amalie’s father and Marcos might be thinking.

It would have been a whole other level of naturalism/realism if we had their points of view. Some writers do attempt such multiplex perspectives.

There was something else I wanted to analyze. Like many MFA-type literary stories, there are lots of flashbacks. This means we’re often told information rather than experiencing it dramatically.

I just reread “A Perfect Day for Banafish” by J. D. Salinger. It was an exquisite example of showing rather than telling. It was so concise. So immediate. Reality glittered. I’m sad that we don’t see this style of writing much anymore. Most of my bookworm friends that I try to get to read The Best American Short Stories tell me they don’t like that kind of writing. I will admit that “Abject Naturalism” conforms to a modern MFA-style of writing that feels like a genre of its own.

Like I said, everyone reads a short story differently; just read the comments here. Some of them said they normally get tired of this kind of story, but this one is a good one of that type.

If you read this story, let me know what you thought about it.

JWH