Where does the short story take you?

The New York Times Book Review has been doing a lot of things right lately—like, for example, giving my friend Robb Forman Dew's Being Polite to Hitler a stellar review—and I'm intrigued this weekend by the trio of short-story collection reviews that have been grouped under the heading "Small Moments."  Here the new collections by Colm Toibin, Charles Baxter, and Edith Pearlman all get their due in essays penned by Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, and Roxana Robinson, respectively.  I particularly love the juxtaposition of these two opening grafs, the first by Prose and the second by Oates:

Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")

Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the “well crafted” short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive “voices” as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot Díaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart” — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)

What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story?  Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means?  Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?
 

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Wishing for more from Goldengrove

I finished reading Goldengrove yesterday morning, before setting off for another day of friendship and holiday camaraderie. It's a book that I am very glad to have read, for I'd wondered about it in theory and needed to appraise it for myself, in actuality. Goldengrove is the story of 13-year old Nico who loses her older sister, suddenly, in an accident at the lake. Little by little, Nico (the narrator) takes on (at the urging of the sister's boyfriend) the traits and appearance of her lost sister, while the father and mother each fall apart in their own ways.

It sounds promising, I know. But the book didn't sit quite right with me on a number of levels. There was its tone—too adult-knowing, too retrospectively infused, on the one hand, and bogged down with surface teen observations, even cliches, on the other. There was the molasses stick of passages (about, say, the side effects of arthritis medications) that advanced neither character nor plot. There was the promise of entanglement, even outright spookiness, but things moved along at too matter-of-fact a pace to lose this reader in anticipation or wonder.

There was dialogue, long passages of it, that sounded like this:

"How are you, Nico?" (the mother of Aaron, the boyfriend) said.

"Okay," I said. "I guess. How's Aaron?"

Aaron's mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.

"Not great," she said. "It's been hard."

"I know," I said.

"I'm sure you do," she said.

"Say hi to him for me," I said. "Tell him to stop by the store and say hi."

"I will," she said.

"Really!" I said, startling myself. "I'd really like to see him."

"I will," she repeated." Take care of yourself, dear."

Lots of "said's" in that, for sure. Nothing the least bit turgid or lean (one or the other might have spiced it), nothing original, nothing that draws a deeper portrait of the characters (this is a rare interaction with Aaron's mother; should she not have been distinguished somehow here, either by what she says, or how?). To me, this passage, like so many others, feels like placeholder writing—like an author sketching out an outline that will be later embellished or deepened.

Except that the "later" didn't happen.

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Sunday Prose

If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.

I have begun, as you can see, to read the Francine Prose novel Goldengrove. The wind is howling outside, and I spent the day's first waking hour hovering over The New York Times Book Review, admiring the work of David Barber, say, who, in his review of William Logan's new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, writes: "A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim, he's a poet who wouldn't be caught dead trying to dazzle or beguile, recoiling from anything that might smack of lyrical extravagance or bardic pomp."

I mean: Look at that sentence.

Imagine the thought and the knowing that lives behind that sentence.

I digress.

I have begun to read Goldengrove, and though Michael Pakenham, for whom I wrote countless reviews for the Baltimore Sun, once cautioned me never to express an opinion about a book until I was actually finished reading it, I already know and can express two things: This Francine Prose paragraph about Sunday, quoted above, encapsulates a thought I've had since I had the capacity to formulate thoughts (such as they are). I was that child looking out a Sunday window—waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Where is everyone?, I wanted to know. What are they doing? Why have I been left alone, to Sunday?

But then there is this second thought: Not counting the lines that I've italicized above (which are tight and telling and so quintessentially Prose-esque), there is unexpected space between the words in Goldengrove, and I'm not referring to the typesetting. Sentences that feel not yet fully slashed or tightened. I've been spoiled by reading Liz Rosenberg's Home Repair, I know, which is at once taut and affecting, chiseled and heart big. Spoiled by Aleksandar Hemon and David Barber. But still, reading Goldengrove, I want to scrunch up many of its passages—clump them together, break them apart, pound out some of the air.

True: I feel that way every single time I read something that I've written.

Also true: It may be that such airiness is precisely what Prose needs to tell her story. I am intrigued. I am reading on.....

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