“No longer on speaking terms”: On “The Box in Which We Live”

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It’s worth considering why publishers so wish short story collections were novels. Agents and editors often say this is because short story collections don’t sell, but as the Penguin Random House antitrust lawsuit revealed, few books sell in any category. Readers prefer novels, publishers tell us (the readers). Perhaps we do. And if we do prefer novels, why do we?

Now many collections label themselves with the unseemly hyphenation novel-in-stories, evoking father-in-law or driver-in-training. Their covers boast of linked stories, as if all short story collections weren’t in some sense linked, the term being the publishing equivalent of free gift or safe and secure. Or take the recent marketing of Tony Tulathimutte’s collection Rejection, whose jacket said only, Fiction, as if William Morrow and Company hoped to hide the words short, story, and collection until a reader had brought the book home and lost the receipt.

Which of those words alienates? Surely it’s not short. Vigil, Transcription, and Orbital sold their shortness, and we bought. Novelists better hope it’s not story, or else they’re cooked too. Maybe there’s something to fear in collection.

As Jane Smiley tells us in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, the novel is for individuals. Smiley wrote Thirteen Ways in the wake of 9/11 and the GWOT, when she was trying to justify her profession. According to Smiley, the novel is inherently political insofar as it endorses a “theory of individuals and groups,” a definition of political so broad as to be inarguable. She takes the assertion a step further: “not only is the novel inherently political, it is inherently liberal—that is, it embraces the rights and obligations of individualism.” Novels revolve around a protagonist, and after all, “novel-reading cannot be a collective experience.”

The novel continues to be the dominant form of fiction in publishing, perhaps because of this emphasis on liberal individualism. In a pop culture of Main Character Syndrome and NPCs, one which declares that half the population has no internal monologue, novels flatter their buyers. You are important, novels say. Your life is not a side quest.

Samuel Barber’s debut collection, The Box in Which We Live, makes a case for the short story collection as inherently political. The Denver-based writer’s second book, following a pamphlet called Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message, won last year’s John Simmons Short Fiction Award and is out from the University of Iowa Press. But the politics of Barber’s short stories stands in opposition to liberal individualism. Barber’s characters come from their systems—education, healthcare, three-letter agencies, and the rest. At least pay attention to which systems form you, the collection tells its readers, because you cannot choose them.

Barber’s “A Kind of Atavism” draws our attention, for instance, to the increasing ubiquity of betting and gambling. The Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling Murphy vs. NCAA found a ban on sports betting to be unconstitutional, and in its wake rose Polymarket, FanDuel, Kalshi, DraftKings, MyBookie, and others. A recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the gambling industry to be one of the few to increase its output from 2019-2024. “A Kind of Atavism” takes the form of a gambler’s pitch to an invisible listener standing outside the casino. Crushed by the meaninglessness of his life, by what the gambler calls “the sadness constant,” he turned to games of chance. The casino has thrown the gambler out for a “misunderstanding,” he explains, and if the listener will bankroll him, he has a system he promises to make them “filthy stinking rich.” All he needs in return is trust and patience.

Much of the humor in The Box in Which We Live arises from the transparent fraudulence of Barber’s narrators. When the gambler of “A Kind of Atavism” asks the reader for their trust, he repeats, “I’m being straight with you now,” the kind of unprompted assurance that signals its opposite, like telling a cop unprompted, “There’s not a body in my trunk.” Eventually the reader learns the system is not card-counting or hand-mucking: the gambler has no system at all. Instead he has committed to “placing my entire future in the confidence of the randomness which dictates where you’re born.” No one has yet backed the gambler’s system, and he “can’t really blame them….”

“Won’t Somebody Please Think of the North American Tree Octopuses?” is an unnamed and similarly fraudulent academic’s op-ed in The Washington Post. The academic relays a litany of grievances, begging, “we need your help, fellow Americans.” They’ve devoted their life to studying the endangered species their mentor, Gordon V. Plumpton, discovered. Some people, the academic admits, say the North American tree octopus is “a hoax intended to further Plumpton’s career.” Yet the academic persists in fighting for the existence of the tree octopus, only to get suspended from their academic position for supplying alcohol to a minor, whom they declare to be a “teen crisis actress.” Taken together, these two stories outline a deep-rooted mistrust of the individual, whose claimed ideals are at their roots nothing but lies sustained by personal hurt.

The idea of an individual identity in Barber’s work is itself a lie. In “The Sounds a Person Makes,” a young man walks to the woods to bury his bicycle, tortured by his never having learned to ride it, “my greatest deficiency, my greatest failure.” The young man holds a grudge against his father, who was supposed to teach him, and whom the boy claims is nothing like him.  The father was busy, the young man admits, being after all “the vice president of Global Silverware.” That the young man is studying business in college to work in the field of “[f]orks and spoons and otherwise” is, needless to say, a coincidence. He is distinct.

The boy in “The Sounds a Person Makes” derives his identity not only from mimicking his father, but also from his existence as a product. Companies like “Pep Boys, Palantir, and Pepto-Bismol” have sponsored the boy as a dirt-bike rider. They advertise an event where the boy is to ride his bike over “hills of real dirt,” despite his inability to ride, and that his bicycle “is not, in fact, a dirt bike,” but merely imitates the sounds of one. The boy believes this sponsorship comes not from his skill but because of his “tremendous marketing potential, with the eighteen-to-thirty-four male demographic especially.”

Barber pushes this idea of identity, as deriving from capitalist sizzle absent a steak, into farce. Yet he points his readers toward his farce’s historical precedents. The collection opens with an epigraph from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, whose famous opening declares great facts and figures occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Barber points first to tragedy in “Boris Yeltsin Hosts a Tea Party.” The former president extols “the fruits of the free economy” and predicts a bright future for the country’s newfound liberalism. Yet Barber’s narrative voice undermines Yeltsin’s cant at every turn with details about his corruption, taking bribes and traveling with thugs. He was propped up by banksters and oligarchs, “[t]o say nothing of the International Monetary Fund granting a ten-billion-dollar loan for purposes of public support at the behest of the American apparatus.”

“Boris Yeltsin Hosts a Tea Party” also illustrates one of Barber’s stylistic preferences, which is to get as much nonfiction in his fiction as he can. “By sneaking in real-world material alongside the clearly absurd or fabricated,” Barber told the Sonora Review in a 2020 interview, “I hope that readers of my work begin to question the porousness of their own borders.” Barber’s narrators burst with facts and research, compulsively telling the reader the fact of Britain’s “possessing the world’s fifth largest GDP,” or that the “man chiefly responsible for the push for legislation overhauling automobile regulations was systemically harassed and spied upon by General Motors, allegations that were later proven in a court of law.” He mentions Supreme Court decisions like Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (which weakened the power of unions) and Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon (which weakened protection for endangered species).

If Jane Smiley’s definition of the political novel is broad enough to make anything political, the politics of Barber’s stories is particular enough to be personal. He anchors even his most surreal fictions to the current political landscape, never allowing readers to forget what affects their lives. “Google it,” one of his narrators commands. “What’s your excuse? Now we have the internet.” Yet the voice is urgent, not angry. The accumulation of facts and insight in Barber’s fiction emerge from an intelligence that isn’t mandarin and superior but rather energetic, nurturing of thought, noetic.

Barber’s narrators avoid guilt-tripping readers, in part because they don’t believe there is anything to do. His work professes an almost obsessive belief in determinism. There is no agency in The Box in Which We Live, which claims that “were the same scenario played out a thousand times, a thousand times the results would be laid at our feet.” Some characters strive “to maintain the illusion of agency,” and others, like the gambler, surrender to the “inflexible nature of the forces shaping us.” There is nothing these characters, and by extension any person, can do to change their fate.

“The Dignity of Folly,” written in the second person and structured as a choose-your-own adventure story, prompts the reader to consider their own lack of agency. What looks like a murder mystery on the first page becomes a story of fruitless searching and daily routine, unanswered questions and considerations of Rawlsian randomness. The bottom of each page gives the reader dreary instructions, like “Continue ruing the past on twenty-six” and “Dejectedly head to twenty-nine.” Whatever page the reader takes, the story loops back on itself. No choice the story pretends to offer, no page a reader flips to, lets them escape. “Any decision you make tomorrow is a good decision,” the story assures the reader, lulling them into a meaningless routine, adding elsewhere, “Determination is what you need now.” The Box in Which We Live doesn’t believe in libertarian free will any more than it believes in Libertarian free markets.

Not even language can save us. In “Report from Dresden,” a KGB agent named Major Poroshenko writes to a superior to ask for Vladimir, his oafish partner, to be punished. Vladimir smells, Poroshenko complains, and has violated the terms of their “television agreement, the ninth amendment to our workplace constitution written on the wall.” Vladimir will not listen to reason, regardless of Poroshenko’s avowed “capacity for verbal fireworks.” When the two hold a vote to “officially designate Vladimir’s refutation of our freely negotiated deal a treacherous act,” it ends in a stalemate of 1-to-1. The more language Poroshenko uses, the less effective it is: “the very skills so crucial to the work become impoverished in their endless exercise.” Poroshenko’s language only helps him to appeal to the higher authority of the state, whose presence the reader feels in the various and random redactions marring the report. Power nullifies and obscures language at every turn. Liberalism’s cherished solutions, both the democratic process and the incessant plea to have a conversation, do nothing.

The ideas of Box in Which We Live constitute its style. If language accomplishes nothing, and if Barber’s people have no real agency, there is no point in having a conversation. The systems dictating our lives are not asking for our input. As such, aside from one uncharacteristic story in the book’s latter half, The Box in Which We Live contains not a single line of dialogue. Dialogue assumes change is possible—at least to change someone’s mind—and that language has potency, an idea dispelled within the book’s first ten pages. It is not only himself and Vladimir that Poroshenko refers to when he says, “We are no longer on speaking terms.” Barber’s fiction’s form is not the dialogue but the monologue. Boris Yeltsin, the boy with the bicycle, the gambler, the academic—all speak to an invisible listener who cannot or will not respond. Why would they? In the collection’s title story, a protagonist reads off a series of index cards to a captive audience. “Of course,” the protagonist confesses, “I cannot see you.”

Likewise, the stories do not take the standard form of a series of actions resulting in a change in character. Barber’s fictions instead come in the form of delayed revelations, expressed in language that seeks to tell rather than show. What keeps the reader’s interest is a mystery dangled early on in each story and delayed by digression. A man in “The Animal with a Conscience” stares at an old and important photo and loses himself in memory, saying, “I’ll get to the contents of the photo in due time.” The gambler of “A Kind of Atavism” promises his listener a “meticulously designed foolproof system,” not unveiled until the final two pages. Major Poroshenko takes so long to explain why he’s writing his report that he wonders in the final paragraphs if the reader has “skipped to the end.”

In addition to lacking action, aside from Major Poroshenko, Barber’s narrators do not have names either. The book makes a point of their anonymity, the pointlessness of individual distinctions. “Now and Formerly” does follow a character named Tim, but Tim becomes interchangeable with everyone else around him. Tim’s real name is Thomas, and his friend’s name is Tom. Tim’s cat’s name is Tom, and another of them is unnamed. Tim and Tom both cry over their cats, both dabbing the other’s eyes with a handkerchief. Doubling in literature often connotes death, and the story does lead its characters there, but which particular character dies is unimportant. “What,” the narrator asks, “does it matter? A life is a life is a life is a life.”

There are no solutions in The Box in Which We Live. The language of one person—the writing of a writer—cannot fix our systems. The book promises no way out. We each live in our own box, each of us a “union of one.” We are without agency and isolated from one another, subjected to “the unstoppable forces ceaselessly raging on the periphery of self-reflection.” The despair that results from these conclusions infects every story. The gambler admits that for most people, himself included, “every day is affected by an identically precise degree of melancholy.” In “The Sounds a Person Makes,” the narrator and his father “recognize a shared melancholy.” Even in the choose-your-own-adventure structure of “The Dignity of Folly,” the narrator informs us we have a “genetic predisposition for depression inherited from your father.” This too is not chosen.

Our systems crush us, our language fails us, and our choices mean nothing. The outlook of The Box in Which We Live is bleak and unremitting. None of these stories could fuel a viral George Saunders interview, and none of them offers his or Smiley’s comforting liberal faith in one person’s power. Yet far from spreading its bleakness to the reader, the book induces a kind of paradoxical reaction. The form of the book itself—the politics inherent in its form—becomes not a palliative but a collective. Despite himself, Barber has crafted not a miserable book but a validating one. The narrators have no one to speak to in their individual stories, and no idea of a future. But within the collection, bundled together, they speak to each other.

Boris Yeltsin, like the boy, cannot ride a bicycle. Just as the boy has trouble with his father, so does the gambler, and the choose-your-adventure protagonist. Academic voices bounce off those of students, and sibling rivalries find sister rivalries. The stories’ voices and preoccupations speak to and echo off each other, and find company with each other. As Jane Smiley reminds us, “the mere existence of the narrative voice implies a teller, a listener,” a reader. As you read Barber’s collection, you find not a fix but a grouping.You place the voices side by side and join them together. “It’s a very intimate thing,” the gambler tells you, “to exist in someone’s general proximity.” You exist beside them. You add your voice to theirs. You are a part of something.