OH, A.O., Part I: Mr. Scott endorses the future of short fiction
It’s been two months since A.O. Scott’s article, “Brevity’s Pull — In Praise of the American Short Story,” appeared in the Times. As the fiction editor of Flatmancrooked, reading it for the first time was something akin to falling in love; only if Gabriel Byrne had read it out loud to me while I sat on the In Treatment couch could it have been better. Scott’s article addresses the absurdity of the short story existing as a “minor or even vestigial literary form, redolent of M.F.A.-mill make-work and artistic caution…an étude rather than a sonata or a symphony,” but how, in a time of short-form media, the shrinking attention span, and an even further shrinking publishing industry, the short story is poised for a renaissance (again).
Perhaps it’s only my own inability to tell a story longer than seven thousand words that makes me so passionate about the short form, but the point he raises seems as important as it is perplexing. Sometime after the mini-revival in the 80’s and 90’s-between Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline -the short form lost its luster again. While it’s not yet obsolete—Best American Short Stories still makes the bestseller’s list every year, and literary magazines are proliferating almost as quickly as they’re dying off—the short story is widely viewed as impossible to promote. With the exception of The New Yorker and a handful of other publications, magazines aren’t really paying for stories anymore, and publishers want a novel if they want fiction at all.
The public’s consumption of short stories petered out after the sixties, and with that shift, the ability to make a living publishing fiction in periodicals, the way Fitzgerald and even Updike did, disappeared. Carver, despite all his success, was given an advance to write a novel, and he did try, but it turned into shorts. It has become increasingly the case that readers read novels, so by extension, writers must write them. However, Scott points out that unlike Carver, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme all produced longer works, but are remembered for their short fiction. And our recent past is not entirely bleak: Wells Tower’s debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, has been received glowingly, and both of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, still hold prominent positions on the bookshelves at the local Borders.
Still, it’s clear that the short story is hardly thriving. The question, though, is why? Or, to re-phrase that question, if we’re being honest about it: why is it floundering even faster than the novel? If a masterful novel is impressive for its scope, an exceptional short story is at least as impressive for its ability to achieve comparable emotional pull in an even smaller space. It takes less time, and in essence, it produces the same effect. But the perception remains that reading Dubliners is somehow less of an experience than reading Ulysses, if only because the latter is a single narrative, cohesive and coherent or not.
To be clear, I don’t believe that our historical reverence for the novel suggests that short stories are the lesser form. I only allege that we, as readers, relish the feeling that we have accomplished some great thing by the time we finish a novel, assuming it’s a good one. At the risk of pissing off all of you novelists out there, I give you one last quote from Scott, in reference to the collections of O’Connor, Cheever, and Barthelme:
- “Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel—to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens—start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.
There are sprinters, and there are long distance runners. There’s that torrid quickie in the backseat of a car, and there’s three days in satin sheets with a man named Ogi who might smell like patchouli, but my goodness. The goal is very much the same; it’s only a question of instant gratification vs. protracted gratification, and there’s no need to feel guilty about wanting to get to that climax in less time than it takes to read War and Peace. Next week, I’ll look at what we might do in order to be more egalitarian and less pretentious about it all, and why another short story revival ought to be inevitable, if it hasn’t already started.
By Deena Drewis
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:38 am
Very nice post-but even as a short story writer, I have to say that I enjoy reading novels better because for any piece of prose you begin to read, you spend a little or a lot of time trying to figure out if it is worth your reading further, or if you will enjoy it. Even when I pick up Cheever’s collected shorts, I find 40% of them to be not something I particularly want to be reading; and let’s not even talk about how relatively few of Updike’s are worth the trouble. And then once you do find a story you like, it’s over in less than an hour.
So I would argue that the reason to read War and Peace, and why people do read it, is not to feel a sense of accomplishment, which would be pretentious indeed, but to be entertained, to honestly enjoy reading something so consistently enthralling, that you get to enjoy day after day. That’s what any good novel gives you-once you find a good one. And I think this is especially true of those times when people want to read in order to relax and be entertained. When I’m exhausted after work, riding home on the subway, I like looking forward to diving back into “Emma,” which I’m reading now, and I know will be very good on every page and I won’t finish it in two stops and have find a new story.
So that is my defense of the privilege of the novel as the popular form. But I agree with you completely that the short story should be regarded as equally important in the world of literature.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Novelist: a euphemism for a bad writer who can’t wrap up a short story.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:03 am
Excellent post. I read both short stories and novels, and enjoy both. I marvel at what a well written short piece can accomplish, but also love the successive reading sessions that a book offers. Your metaphors were on the mark. I do wish there were more s.s. markets out there. They really seem to be moving to the internet.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Thanks Mickey, Guinevere, and Frank, for your comments. I should make it clear that I am in no way opposed to novels, or think that they’re an inefficient use of time. Above all, I don’t mean to encourage laziness. I only intended to express curiousity around the fact that if readers are getting lazier, why haven’t short stories become more popular? I suppose part of it is that people who do read short stories are also the people reading novels nowadays (though that wasn’t always the case) and it’s not as relevant to ask a writer, who is dedicated to the craft, why he or she reads novels. So, Mickey, I take your point. A thoroughly good novel is an astounding thing. In fact, I considered using Lolita and “Signs and Symbols” as an example, but had a hard time with it; “Signs and Symbols” is a remarkable piece of fiction, but I couldn’t very well make the point that it accomplishes as much as Lolita, if only because Lolita is what it is. I don’t suppose it’s something to complain about, though, when you have a hard time favoring one Nabokov piece over another, because they’re so damn good.
That being said, there are a whole bunch of bad novels out there that have no business being novels, largely due to what Guinevere pointed out. There’s such a concern for writing that great American novel that a writer’s sense of when to shut up is often compromised. That sort of pressure doesn’t exist in the short form. But more on all that next week. Thanks for reading.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Great post. I’m a much better short story writer than novelist, but I am slogging through my seventh or eighth attempt to write a novel right now, exactly because novels are the only things that publishers want to see. This makes me sad, but still I’m not holding out much hope that short stories are going to be making any great comeback. I guess it’s just because people read and buy fewer books altogether, and the publishers just cannot market a short story collection the same way they can market a novel. Not that they really do much marketing period, but at least there is some cohesive idea they can point to with a novel, whereas a short story collection can really only be marketed by one story, a linked idea, or most likely, the writer’s biography. Since no one cares who I am, and since the publishing houses are more and more betting on the big sellers, not the little books that could, I will be sticking with my novels.
But Deena, I hope you’re right!
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Novels, short stories. Different animals with different objectives, different impetuses (impeti?). Comparing them is like comparing haiku and Shakespearean sonnets. Guinevere has a point, but I wish she’d provided examples to back up her statement.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Thanks for the comment, Andrew. I do agree that comparing haikus to sonnets is sort of irrelevant, but they’re tied to form in a way that short stories and novels aren’t; one is a compression of the other. I’m curious to know how you think the objectives of short fiction compared to longer fiction differ, because I think I disagree. Of course, trying to define objectives of art is dangerous territory in general, but I’d be interested to hear more of your thoughts on it.
Part III goes up Thursday.