The short story plays one of the most important roles in all of literature. And it's one of the most difficult forms of literary endeavor to handle well. Many well-known authors have admitted that it's more difficult to work within the bounds of a few thousand words than to wander leisurely while composing a novel.
The short story form became the freckle faced stepchild of writing. A few years ago, magazine short fiction thrived. Today major-league outlets for short fiction have dwindled to a precious few.
To find short stories, avid readers must turn to literary magazines, which are difficult to find, and expensive to boot. Harper's, The Atlantic, and a few other upper-class magazines still publish fiction, but The New Yorker -- once the premium outlet for
quality fiction in this country -- drastically reduced its commitment since expatriate editor Tina Brown took over its reins.
The literary magazines, often with minuscule circulation, are nearly impossible to find on newsstands beyond the big city book stores.
Writer Paul Lisicky discussed the problem for his profession in remarks published on the Blithe House Quarterly web site. "I've thought of myself as a novelist, even though stories were my
first love," he said.
" I've written and completed two novels, putting in eight years at my desk, writing hundreds of pages, throwing out hundreds of pages, before finally stitching together two unwieldy Frankenstein monsters (in which I hope the seams don't show). While taking a vacation from a third novel, a particularly recalcitrant project, I've gone back to shorter forms, if only to experience the satisfaction that comes from completion.
"This happy accident has been an occasion of both comfort and upheaval. I feel more authority within the parameters of a story; my sense of voice seems surer, the stakes seem higher. Or at least it feels that way. Put simply, I'm more at home."
Lisicky asks himself whether he has "squandered years of my energy. Whatever possessed me to turn to longer forms in the first place? . . . How many of us have allowed ourselves to believe that stories are inferior to novels, that short fiction is inevita
bly the genre of the apprentice, that stories are only something you do on the way toward something else?"
The writer says the notion that "bigger is better (oh, so American!) isn't necessarily true in all instances. Think about the work of Grace Paley or Raymond Carver or Alice Munro. None of these writers has ever produced a novel and their contributions to
literature need no defense. Or the output of Donald Barthelme or Joy Williams or Mary Gaitskill, whose best work has been in shorter forms. Or Flannery O'Connor, creator of some of the richest stories in any language (and two okay, novels) who said, "bein
g short does not mean being slight."
Lisicky asks the question: "Is it possible that the short form is the form of the hour, and most of us -- readers, writers, editors, publishers -- haven't seen it yet?"
Incidentally, Lisicky,s latest novel, "Lawnboy," has just been accepted for publication.
The critic Stanley Edgar Hyman furthers these thoughts, although he's far less sanguine about the matter:
When a highly-esteemed short story writer tries a novel and fails at it, in this amazing country, he is rewarded just as though he had succeeded. Thus Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools became a rapturously-received bestseller...and
John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle won a National Book Award. Now, in The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever has again tried, and again failed, to make short story material jell as a novel. As a two-time loser, he can probably expect the Pulitzer Pr
ize.
As Lisicky wrote, "This is what I'm wrestling with: If I experience the world as discontinuous and broken, then why am I working so hard toward synthesis? Would I even want to make, in our troubled moment, an aesthetic whole? Wouldn't it only feel dishone
st and forced? Why not, instead, concentrate on the shards. I recently reread Jayne Anne Phillips' 1979 collection Black Tickets. From cover to cover this book is a richer read than most contemporary novels that I can think of. Though written by a
straight woman, it's still one of the queerest books around--in the largest sense of the word. It's as if the writer herself is trying on so many selves and stances and styles, the individual pieces arguing against each other, in effect resisting a simpli
stic evocation of experience."
All this came to mind when I began reading Bobbie Ann Mason,s "Midnight Magic," (Ecco Press) which collects 17 of the Kentucky author's best short fiction from the 1980s. Mason, who grew up in Western Kentucky, has long been a master of the form. Her hero
es and heroines are the everyday folks of her native state, the lower middle class strivers and dreamers who search for happiness and peace under trying circumstances.
Mason writes with grace, humor and a deep understanding of the human condition. She treats her protagonists and their milieu with respect. Even the bad folks who populate Mason's stories have redeeming qualities. The hills and valleys of Kentucky make a s
olid background for these eternally involving tales of hope, faith, disappointment and occasional deliverance.
Mason's seemingly uncomplicated stories are blessed with moments of sheer brilliance, as this example from "Big Bertha Stories," published originally by Mother Jones magazine.
"It occurs to her that even though she loved him, she has thought of Donald primarily as a husband, a provider, someone whose name she shared, the father of her child, someone like the fathers who come to the Wednesday night all-you-can-eat fi
sh fry. She hasn't thought of him as himself. She wasn't brought up that way, to examine someone's soul. When it comes to something deep inside, nobody will take it out and examine it, the way they will look at clothing in a store for flaws in the manufac
turing."
The shock of recognition comes to the reader time and again in these magnificent stories. For instance, in "Shiloh," there are these two simple but profound sentences: "Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers always are changing."
That ability to capture reality on the printed page, yet manipulate such details into a pattern that speaks to all reader is held by A. Manette Ansay, whose short story collection, "Read This and Tell Me What It Says" has just been published by Bard Avon.
($11). In her novels, "Vinegar Hill," "Sister," and the new "River Angel," Ansay has created memorable characters in believable situations with a skill that often is breathtaking.
In an interview I had with Ansay recently, she talked about how she turned to writing when an illness made it impossible to do "regular work." She never held any ambitions toward writing, she wasn't even a particularly avid reader. She chose the writing a
vocation because it was something she could do sitting down.
(Columnist's Aside: Details of that insightful interview will be published in this space soon, I promise.)
The short story, much maligned, too often ignored, will continue to offer pleasures, insights, and instruction that sometimes gets buried in the verbosity of an average novel. The short story,s ability to distill life into its essentials is what makes the
form something worth treasuring.
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