Bear and His Daughter

"I chose Bear and His Daughter because, although Stone is better known for his novels, this collection contains some of the best things he’s ever done. Nobody writes as well as Stone does about primal psychological states like terror and rapture and dread. It may be that that particular combination of states is what’s best suited for confronting our 21st century. There’s a story in Bear and His Daughter called “Helping”, which is one of the greatest stories of the last 30 years or so. It’s about an alcoholic social worker who is contriving to get his hands on a drink and pitch himself off the wagon. One of the amazing things about the story is the way it undermines what I call the tyranny of the epiphany. The epiphany is usually understood to be that Joycean moment of illumination in stories when the protagonist and the reader, or maybe just the reader, understand something more about the world. Stone’s stories understand the tyranny of that device, and the limitations of the assumption that an enhanced level of self-awareness is inherently liberating. In other words, the idea that once we realise we’re doing something self-destructive or stupid we won’t do it again. We all know from the rubble of our own lives that’s not always the case. Stone is great at writing about characters who are intricately self-aware and yet geniuses at self-destruction. He’s also great on the difficulty of bringing common sense and common decency to bear on things. And he’s easily one of our best writers when it comes to how the personal and the political intertwine in America. He never forgets that personal acts have political ramifications, and that’s a very valuable thing for us to keep in mind right around now. When I’m working on something, I’m so happy if it’s not entirely inert that I don’t dwell on whether it will be a novel, novella or short story. As the shape of the thing takes form, I start to envision how long it will be, and lately that usually means not more than 40 pages. That’s when I realise that – yet again – I’ve come up with something that’s not going to put any food on my children’s table. For me, a short story might take four or five months and a novel might take two or three years. That’s a very big difference in terms of a time commitment. I’ve been doing a lot more stories lately and I don’t know if a factor is being at a teaching-intensive place like Williams, where if you’re working on a novel it’s always being interrupted. Or if it’s because I’m imagining myself into very strange characters and I’m thinking: I can spend five months with this narrator but I don’t think I could take it any longer."