THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF BANANA REPUBLIC’S TRIPS
William Young
Self (177 pp.)
$12.95 paperback
ISBN: 978-1734423679
March 31, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A veteran author explores contemporary American culture and politics in this genre-bending anthology. As the founder of the creative writing program at Arizona State University and author of multiple compilations of short stories and plays, Young is known for artistic experimentation. Here, he offers readers a commentary on contemporary politics and culture through multiple genres. The book begins with five essays, which include two memoiristic vignettes that center on two of the author’s five brothers. Another essay centers on the failed publication Trips, a magazine published by the Banana Republic clothing chain. Dedicating itself to “re-vision[ing] our world,” the publication claimed to offer “authentic” stories that eschewed traditional travel writing to tout travel as “a great teacher” about the human condition. The fact that the magazine was discontinued after a single issue, Young writes insightfully, is related to its failed approach toward authenticity. Just as Banana Republic’s clothing boasts names of fictious organizations, such as the “Ivory Coast Safari Club,” American consumers, despite declarations otherwise, “don’t want ‘authentic’ immersion in a foreign culture,” Young asserts. The book’s second section, a collection of 15 poems, is similarly perceptive on topics that range from the value of cooperation to teenage Instagram culture. “Pandemic,” a poem centered on responses to Covid-19, satirically targets those who refused to wear a mask and submit to “the tyranny of evidence.”
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In the first year of the pandemic, our Best of Indie list favored transportive fiction. We wanted an escape, and novels that took us to other eras and places ruled. This year, what resonated with Indieland reviewers and editors were books about discovery, imaginative works that explore identity or culture via great storylines. Some of 2021’s notables: tales of the recently fledged having lots of sex and feelings, an essay collection that fizzes with observations about Jewish artists and thinkers, and a memoirist who unearths her family’s skeletons. Here are a few exemplary titles; you’ll find the complete list of 100 Best Indie Books of 2021 here. In William Young’s Blue and Other Stories, a cast of 20-somethings is “adrift and dissatisfied, full of ruminations about their lives and larger political and racial tensions, and they’re usually pretty horny and avid for sex as a transformative or at least edifying experience.” These well-told tales reveal the numinous in the everyday: “She laid out the bedroll, opened the wine, and watched as the light from the sunset curved and spread throughout the valley, like the hand of a god.” Overall, Indieland calls this one “a richly textured, engrossing collection of tales about people discovering who and why they love.”MORE FEATURES
Donald Trump has no interest in fighting an invisible enemy. He likes to hurt things. Hurt people. He likes to brand and rebrand things and people. Nothing he likes more than to say such things as “she is going to go through some things” as he did about a lifetime diplomat, who’d served in places Trump wouldn’t step foot in, unless it was at a palace or a private golf club. It’s more than pathetic.
To the extent that he has an imagination, it is entirely oriented toward the visible. Beautiful women. Beautiful buildings and tourist destinations. A beautiful wall. By stopping (in a limited way) entry from China, he thought he could wall off the virus, in a manner not unlike his attempt to wall off Mexicans. In the latter case, it’s not just a matter of limiting immigration, not even a matter of believing one can, in this age, still live in a walled-off community, but rather primarily about putting walls around people, putting children in cages, throwing protestors in jail–always about buildings, in one way or another, over people. Here’s a guy who can admire a big, beautiful prison. (And executes people on the way out the door.)
When Trump sees North Korea he sees a place for development. Does he see the suffering of North Koreans? When he sees Greenland he sees a beautiful skyline. Does it even register that Greenlanders have a thousand-year-old culture? I remember my brother looking out at the vast Pima Indian Reservation many years ago and seeing vast development–which indeed has subsequently come to pass. And to some extent the Pimas are better off for it. Nor can we thrive without developers, inventors, builders…not to mention scientists. But if one is so dominated by a single sense, the visual, as he and so many others are these days (Fox News among the first to catch on to this); if one’s imagination extends no further than fantastical, masturbatory projections of triumph over schoolboy rivals, then one is doomed to ever go in search of an enemy, to ever see the world in but Manichean split screen. An invisible enemy won’t do. The thousands dying, away in hospitals, is no recognizable battlefield.
The short story is a rural art form. It concerns, generally, small-town people with small-town minds. People who grew up in the sticks. People who don’t have much in the way available to improve themselves or change their lives, as Frank O’Connor has argued in his classic study of the short story, The Lonely Voice. Hemingway is something of a city boy and he is a great story writer, but most of his best stories take place up in rural Michigan and many of the other good ones are part of Hemingway’s attempts to re-ruralize himself. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” for instance.
The case could be made that most of our great writers are provincials, but certainly among story writers the number is highest. Two great contemporary North American story writers, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, both fit the bill. One of Carver’s achievements is to bring a plainspoken rural sensibility to the burbs. Novelists are often from cities or move to them at the first opportunity. As do their characters–Sister Carrie, a classic example. Someone writes a novel out of a desire to fit into society, its progress. A story writer however is behind the times; he seeks to hold on to a locality. But of course, he fails. He finds himself at large.