The best short stories of 1919, and the yearbook of the American short story — A Closer Reading

The Seance as Narrative Engine

The seance in the first excerpt is not a gimmick but a structural device that drives character revelation. Lizzie Tuoey, the operator of the talking-machine, becomes a reluctant gatekeeper between worlds. The medium Stepan speaks in 'mystical and borrowed magnificence,' his language shifting from faint whispers to dramatic pronouncements. The mother, Mrs. Kraemer, oscillates between hope and horror, her German exclamation of thanks turning to a demand to 'Kill him quickly.'

The narrator's skepticism—'I am congenitally incapable of belief'—creates a tension that the story does not resolve. Instead, it lingers on the aftermath: the blaze of light, the rigid circle of listeners, and the coldness that makes flesh crawl. O'Brien's inclusion of such a scene suggests a fascination with how ordinary people process the inexplicable, especially in the shadow of war.

War's Spectral Presence

Though the war is never named, it saturates the excerpt. August is identified by 'rank and regiment'; Stepan describes 'men in a green gas' and 'hundreds passing over.' The mother's pride in her son's uniform collides with the medium's vision of a soldier 'unnaturally hanging in a traditional and very highly sanctified manner.' The story refuses to show the battlefield, instead filtering it through spiritualist static.

This indirect treatment aligns with O'Brien's editorial eye for psychological realism. The war becomes a force that distorts communication—Stepan cannot hear August's voice, the record ends abruptly, and the final revelation is a misidentification. The dead soldier's cry, 'Mummer,' suggests a plea for the mother he did not have, a detail that undercuts any patriotic framing.

Skepticism and the Unreliable Narrator

The narrator's voice is marked by impatience and intellectual distance. He dismisses McGeorge's 'consuming dread of perpetual being' and compares the seance to a 'stagnant marsh of spiritism.' Yet his own account is riddled with gaps: he admits he 'could see no connection' between frozen fish and the column of light, and he relies on McGeorge's description of events he did not witness.

This narrative layering—a skeptic reporting a believer's report of a medium's performance—creates a hall of mirrors. O'Brien's choice to include such a story suggests an interest in how truth is constructed through testimony. The reader is left to weigh Lizzie's certainty against the narrator's disbelief, with no authorial verdict.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the ways O'Brien juxtaposes the supernatural with the quotidian. The seance scene rewards close attention to its sensory details—the sound of the violin, the coldness, the light—as they carry the story's emotional weight. The war, though never depicted directly, shapes every character's longing and dread. O'Brien's editorial hand favors ambiguity over resolution, making this a volume for those who prefer questions to answers.

I’ve often returned to that 1919 volume, where the medium’s trembling mistake unearths a truth no one wished to speak—war’s cruel arithmetic counted in broken seances. Years later, The smear — A Reader’s Guide sat beside it on my shelf, whispering of quieter deceptions, the way grief learns to misremember. They share that hush between testimony and forgetting, a companionship I’ve come to cherish.