Short Story Review: Rabioux Rising

I've been reading the Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold. I do this with some trepidation, as I found Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones (now a major motion picture directed by Lord of the Rings uber-master Peter Jackson) to have been amateurish, shallow, and written with such poor, dead-eared prose I threw the book across the room four times. I only picked it up three. And so, she has been let loose on BASS. How is her editorial taste?

Judging by the first few stories, her ear for stories is as dead as her ear for writing novels. The book's centerpiece may be Rabioux Rising, by Steve De Jarnatt. This was De Jarnatt's first published story, though that fact is skewed by him being an established Hollywood player (he's directed or written several major motion pictures you may have heard of (or not)), and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. There may be talent involved in those two things, but it's not necessarily the talent of writing fiction.

You'd think with that pedigree, the story would make some sense. And a synopsis makes the story sound better than it is. Rubiaux is an double-amputee Iraq war vet and addict who has been locked in his mother's attic for a home-cooked detox session. At the same time, the floodwaters of Katrina are rising, forcing him to consider he just might drown. Perfect Hollywood plot, I'll give you that. But De Jarnett knocks words together and falls back on cliche after cliche rather than developing a writing style, and his character remains a cipher. And the climax, I can't help but give away the ludicrousness of the climax: This guy pulls the metal plate from his own head and uses it to focus the rays of the setting sun on the inside of the attic, thus burning a hole for his escape to the roof.

I can't think of any events in supposedly realistic fiction less realistic than what this guy does with only one arm and one leg. Somehow he manages to a) pull tomato vines into the attic (these are magic tomato vines, by the way - volunteer heirlooms that have climbed 20 feet up the house and kept several perfectly ripe tomatoes as the floodwater beat the hell out of them, but whose roots are weak enough to give when he needs food) b) stacked crates and get on top of them c) crawl through the magically burned roof hole (How is the hole large enough for him in less than half an hour, then extinguished enough for him to crawl through?) And remember that he's also weak from heroin withdrawal in the last three days. How did no one stop this story from getting this far?


I don't know. This whole thing feels written from a sense of entitlement, and anger at the Bush administration (Iraq war BAD! Treatment of homecoming vets BAD! Handling of Katrina BAD!), rather than from an honest investigation of character and situation. Which is another way of my calling it a sell-out, pandering to what people expect to read, rather than what people don't know they need to read. But I can't fault De Jarnett - he's Hollywood, this is what he knows. I can fault Sebold and the series editor Heidi Pitlor. And I can't really care that they have a politcal agenda, but I do care that they have lousy taste. 

End rant.