I finished reading "The Best Short Stories of 2012," and while I found it more interesting than last year's collection, there remained a certain disappointment in the stories: a canvas too narrow, a palette too wan.  (I needed a dictionary for that one, since there's palate, palette, and pallet, and I never have a clue which is which.)  There were a couple of stories that I think might live on: Nathan Englander's "What We're Talking About when We Talk About Anne Frank" and George Saunders' "10th of December," but I grew weary reading stories with major characters named Nathaniel/Nathan/Nate (Ethan was a close second).  The stock differentiation between novels and short stories is that in novels we watch a character grow (or not) through a series of actions and their consequences, while in short stories we see an action leading to an epiphany but are left to infer the consequences for the protagonist.  In these stories, I found the endings almost always disappoiting: the action seemed too limited, the realization too vague and insignificant.  After the rich carnival of Vanity Fair, with its huge cast of fools and knaves, I was left longing for variety and richness.

I was searching for what to read next when I came across a review of Adam Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Phillips is described as "Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer," but somehow he had flown under my radar.  The main premise of the book is that rather than feeling we should have a better life or imagining "what if," we should realize that the life we have is what we have, what we are, and what we're going to get.  And that life can be a good-enough life.  Here, I'm borrowing from one of Phillips' mentors, the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott, who introduced the term "good-enough mother" to describe the mothers most of us have, those who sometimes when we're children respond promptly to our demands, but other times can't or don't do so.  For Winnicott and Phillips this is not only the way it is, but is good preparation for life: sometimes we get satisfaction and sometimes we don't.  And no amount of nostalgia or dreaming is going to change that.  Phillips quotes one of his, and my, favorite writers, Randall Jarrell: "The way we miss our lives is life."  The reviewer writes, "In Phillips's view, the quest for understanding is not just an insult to emotional health; it is an intellectual error."  We think we know more about our "unlived life" than about the experiences we actually have.  His views remind me of Sartre and Camus--those existentialists who were so popular when I was in college: we are what we do, not what we think we might have been if only. 

I had been thinking about our national obsession with "following your dream" and the "American dream."  Is there any other country that has so enshrined a phrase like the American dream?  As I watch talent shows like "American Idol," I've been struck how many times a night the judges tell mediocre contestants, "You're not right for this show, but you should continue to follow your dreams."  I'm not talking about the obvious losers of the first rounds who are there for somewhat sadistic entertainment value, but people who have enough talent to, say, sing in their church choir with an occasional solo or sound better than other drunken karaoke singers, but who are never going to succeed as entertainers.  What happened to the reality principle?  It's as if I had tried out for the Lakers, and the scouts said, "Well, you're not right for our team, but keep following your dream."  (One of the saddest and most potent films about the consequences of middling to good talent being encouraged beyond reality is a classic documentary about basketball, "Hoop Dreams.")  Nostalgia for a life we didn't live, dreams about a life we're never going to live--these are dangerous distractions from the good-enough life many of us have the potential to live.

There are great stories in American literature about the unlived life, though with a slightly different take from Phillips'.  I sometimes taught three of them in my American lit. survey courses: Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy," and Saul Bellow's masterpiece, "Seize the Day."  These are long short stories in which nothing happens.  And that's the point--and also the difficulty for the authors: how to keep the reader's interest in a story without action.  The students generally hated all three.  My obviously carefully thought-out strategy was "Goddamn it! These are great stories, and the students are going to appreciate them whether they like it or not."  James was the least favorite for the students; in addition to the fact that nothing happened over eighty pages, there was James' difficult style and a main character who was completely unlikable.  The inaptly named John Marcher (Fitzgerald's main character was named Hunter) thought only of himself and as someone "sublimely unselfish," although he constantly allows himself to be "selfish just a little."  His dream/nightmare is that he is the hero who will confront a beast in the jungle and who will perform some brave and dramatic action; meanwhile, the jungle turns into a desert and the beast that does spring in the story's terrifying ending is simply his realization that the life he has--a life marked by the too common for him experiences of love and eventually death--is the good-enough life that he has missed. 

Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Bellow's "Seize the Day" does act, but foolishly and against his own best interests, and students had little patience with him.  There are two foils in the story, a trickster doctor who sometimes actually gives good advice, but who knows when? which advice is good and which is self-interested?  Certainly not Wilhelm, and often not the reader.  The other is his successful, but smug and sententious father.  The students usually liked his "sensible" and uplifting advice.  Wilhelm has a moment of confused clarity in one of the most beautiful passages in Bellow's writing when he at least understands the potential radiance of the life he does have, but he can't act on it.  James' story ends in a graveyard with Marcher finally understanding, though averting his eyes from what he has learned.  Bellow's story ends almost comically with Wilhelm at a funeral of someone he has not known, sobbing, becoming the inadvertent chief mourner.

All three are difficult stories for twenty-something students to identify with, and I abandoned teaching all three of them the same semester.  For an alte kacker, though, they all ring sadly true.

I went to amazon.com to order the Phillips book, and I've never seen so many hostile reader reviews.  Everyone seems to have expected a self-help book about following one's dreams, taking the road less traveled, and living a life more than simply good enough.