The Short Story Shakes Itself Out of Academe

NYTimes, August 25, 2004

By CHARLES McGRATH

Almost no one makes a living from writing short stories

anymore. The story has to a large extent been severed from

its traditional roots - from popular, large-circulation

magazines, that is - and it has been transplanted into the

greenhouses of the academy. Collections of stories

occasionally sell more than modestly, especially if they're

by new authors, like the recent or fairly recent books by

Nathan Englander, Nell Freudenberger, Z. Z. Packer, and

Maile Meloy. On the other hand John Updike's "Early

Stories: 1953-1975," which came out last year, a monumental

collection by one of the form's great masters, earned

glowing reviews and never cracked the New York Times

best-seller list. Except for books by Louis L'Amour and

Stephen King, the last short story collections to spend

time on that list were Adam Haslett's "You Are Not a

Stranger Here,'' a Today show book club pick, and Lorrie

Moore's "Birds of America," published in1999, which may

have been lofted there on the strength of a single piece,

the knockout, heartbreaking "People Like That Are the Only

People Here," about a children's cancer ward. -

Oddly, though, you can still make a pretty good living by

teaching other people how to write short stories. The form

survives - and even thrives, in a forced, hothouse sort of

way - because it has become the instructional medium of

choice in most of our writing programs. The majority of

people who enroll in these programs want to be novelists,

but novels don't lend themselves very readily to the

workshop format, and so would-be novelists these days spend

at least part of their apprenticeship working on stories.

They're a little like those people who learn golf by never

venturing onto a golf course but instead practicing at a

driving range. The result, or so we are always being told,

is a couple of generations' worth of people - a vast and

somewhat underemployed army - who have been trained to

write competent but profoundly uninspired short fiction

that is unread except by other writers of short fiction and

by the people who hire them to instruct yet more people in

this arcane little craft.

There is some truth to this, but it's also true that freed

from the dictates of the marketplace, short stories these

days are often less formulaic, less imitative than they

used to be. There's no preferred style or mode anymore -

even The New Yorker no longer publishes "the New Yorker

short story" - and there are now dozens of different camps

of short-fiction writing, all happily coexisting. Many of

them are on display in "The Anchor Book of New American

Short Stories," an anthology edited by Ben Marcus, who

teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia.

The volume includes a certain amount of stuff that's so

arty, not to say pretentious, that it seems never to have

been intended to circulate outside the seminar room. Anne

Carson's "Short Talks," for example - a collection of

gnomic and disconnected paragraphs like this one: "On

Disappointments in Music: Prokofiev was ill and could not

attend the performance of his First Piano Sonata played by

someone else. He listened to it on the telephone." Or Joe

Wendroth's "Letters to Wendy's" - the fast-food chain,

apparently: six or seven-line paragraphs, one to a page,

that say things like "It is rare for a baby to be so bad

that it is sentenced to be hanged, and even rarer for the

sentence to be carried out, and yet, when a baby is hung,

what a pleasant surprise it is for the passer-by."

There is also minimalism, as in Lydia Davis's "Old

Dictionary," a single long paragraph about just what the

title promises, and maximalism, as in "Field Events," Rick

Bass's long and carefully exaggerated story about three

young guys who are themselves maxed out, so big and so

strong that they do things like lift cars and carry off

public statues. And there are at least three different

flavors of Southern gothic: traditional (Mark Richard's

"Gentleman's Agreement," about a boy who thinks his father

is going to nail his hand to the shed), funky (Padgett

Powell's "Scarliotti and the Sinkhole," about a young

Floridian who gets clipped in the head by a truck mirror

and, while waiting for the insurance settlement, has sex in

his motorized hospital bed with the girl who delivers his

beer) and extra-Faulknerian (Brian Evenson's "Two

Brothers": dead preacher; maggoty, festering wounds;

socketless, desiccated eyeball).

One story, Jhumpa Lahiri's "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,"

about a young Indian girl living in America who learns

about loss and suffering from watching a family friend, is

so traditional, so well made, so clear and unassuming in

its writing, that in this racy volume it seems almost

retro. The best, and best-written, story in the book,

Deborah Eisenberg's "Someone to Talk To," might seem so

too, if it were not laced with a timely and scathing

subtext of anticolonialism.

What qualifies a story to be "new" here is not entirely

clear; some of them are more than 10 years old. Nor are all

the authors young; some are middle-aged, in fact. In his

introduction Ben Marcus says that what is new about this

work is that the authors are all "laboring in an entirely

new stylistic moment" and are trying to "puncture our

inattention." These are stories, in other words, that are

written from a certain sense of anxiety about an audience -

about whether anyone is paying attention - and with just a

few exceptions they tend to divide into two general camps.

There are stories, like the ones by Ms. Carson and Mr.

Wendroth, that in the face of a dwindling audience for

stories claim a kind of purist's high ground and disdain to

offer the reader anything as cheaply entertaining as

narrative; instead they give us fragments to ponder, bits

of many plots to assemble for ourselves.

And then there are the stories - most of the contents of

the anthology, in fact - that seem almost frantic in their

eagerness to please, to strike unusual poses, to seize the

reader's attention and hold it. A couple were originally

published in The Quarterly, a defunct publication that used

to be edited by Gordon Lish, the former fiction editor of

Esquire, and was a showcase for his theory of fiction,

which was that the reader - or Mr. Lish, anyway - would

quit the moment he came upon a sentence that didn't

interest him. Stories of this sort, exemplified here by

Aimee Bender's "Girl in the Flammable Skirt" and Dawn

Raffel's "Up the Old Goat Road," proceed line by arresting

line, and sometimes deliberately hide the narrative thread

and turn themselves into puzzles.

But the most striking stories in the volume are those that

are built around conceits or narrative pyrotechnics and

that create little parallel worlds. It's probably no

accident that the anthology opens with "Sea Oak" by George

Saunders, who made his reputation writing funny and

inventive stories about theme parks, which prove to be

distressingly similar to the world that encloses them. The

narrator of "Sea Oak" works in an aviation-themed male

strip joint called "Joysticks," and the story unfolds in a

dystopian landscape where the dead come back to life, or a

sort of decomposed version of it, wanting more sex, and

where mothers watch television shows like "How My Child

Died Violently" and "The Worst That Could Happen." In a

similar vein are Matthew Derby's "Sound Gun," about

soldiers fighting in a war someplace where the enemy

attacks with both sticks and VCR's, and where their own

weapon is one that kills people with noise; and Wells

Towers's "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," about

raping, pillaging Vikings who happen to talk like slacker

dudes ("Just as we were getting back into the mainland

domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop

blights from across the North Sea.")

These and similar stories are so energetic, so filled with

invention, that they seem almost hyperactive; they also

seem to assume a reader whose taste and interests have been

formed by television and by the movies as much as by

literature. Yet in their gimmickiness and occasional

luridness, their jokiness, their quickness of pace, their

way of developing a single clever idea, there's something

old-fashioned about them too - a trace of the pulp

magazines, say, or of some of H. G. Wells's tales.

For most of the last century, short-story writers in

English - or the great ones anyway; writers like Hemingway,

O'Hara, Salinger, Cheever - were busy dismantling the

Victorian machinery of the story, dispensing with surprise

endings, for example, and eventually with beginnings too,

and even with plot itself, to create a kind of story that

was deeper, quieter, moodier: the kind of story that on the

evidence of this anthology, many of these "new" writers

don't quite trust anymore. Or rather they seem not to trust

that we - or the editors who publish the collections and

assemble the anthologies - any longer have the patience or

the attention span for them. You could argue that it's the

readers who are in need of rehab, but these writers appear

instead to have checked the short story itself into the

clinic for a face peel, forced oxygen, and some steroid

injections. The patient would probably be happier outside

the sickroom, but the cure succeeds at least to the extent

that there are stories here that won't let themselves be

put down.