BASS 2012: "North Country" by Roxane Gay

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and am only holding out until March to get my hands on some more (I cannot resist the lure of Karen Russell, particularly after Michael Shaub called Vampires in the Lemon Grove "magnificent" and "flawless.") and I am loving it. I've never gorged myself on short fiction, but I've always enjoyed it. I think one of the things that really strikes me is that with good short fiction, I can get everything I get out of a good novel, but in concentrated form. Perhaps this is why, as a huge Stephen King buff, I love the novels but adore the short fiction. The last novel I read of his was Under the Dome, and I was massively impressed as usual by his talents as a world builder, but there is something to be said about a writer who can spend a few hundred pages setting up an elaborate literary ecosystem and can also do it in a single-serving chunk.

Currently I'm working my way through The Best American Short Stories 2012, which gets me out of my comfort zone a little since I'm not picking and choosing authors, or even subject matter--I pretty much go into the stories blind, with the exception of a couple that have since become title stories in anthologies of other works by their authors.

The latest story I've read in the anthology, and my current favorite* is Roxane Gay's "North Country." I really wasn't sure what to expect based off of the title, and I think even part way into the story I still wasn't sure if I was going to really get absorbed in this one, but as snippets about the narrator began to came through I started to fall in love.

After reaching the end of the story, I wonder if that was kind of Gay's point. "North Country" is a first person narrative, told from the point of view of a woman who is a minority in her job and her new town in multiple ways, who is dealing with loss and major change in her life, and who feels very much the outsider. She makes a slow and seemingly unlikely connection with another person in the story. And she made a slow connection with me. It was a good way into the story before I learned her name, or much about her beyond the fact that she had just moved to a place that was quite different from the one she had lived in before, and bits and pieces about her job. Gay does not feel that we have to know her character right away, and that in fact her story is much stronger when we get to know her at the same rate as the other character in the story. It allows us to identify with the narrator, as well as with the person she forms a connection with, even though he says little, since our relationship with the narrator develops in the same way.

*I've read fewer than half of the featured stories so far, so this is likely subject to change.