Grant Faulkner

Writing without Passion

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It seems that people have tired of writing about the death of the novel. Now they’re picking on the poor, defenseless short story.

Stephen King has written the latest obituary in the September 30 New York Times Book Review. “The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were true,” he writes.

He first vividly makes the case that lit magazines have been relegated to the dusty corners of chain book stores, but that’s no surprise. The chain book stores really don’t want to sell lit mags, and very few consumers want to buy them, but, well, it’s a book store, and one must keep up appearances.

Then King makes the piquant point that the only readers who read these damnable lit mags are writers who want to be published in them.

“What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there.”

That’s not real reading, he says, and he’s right. And I suppose you could say that these writers who aren’t doing real reading, aren’t doing real writing, because both are being done in a calculated, passionless way, and he’s probably right again.

But this doesn’t convince me the short story is dead. It convinces me that literary magazines are dead, or many should be dead. It convinces me that consumers would rather read memoirs and other nonfiction than short stories–if they want to read at all. But then consumers haven’t really wanted to read short stories since the 1920’s, before talkies and TV.

It’s not that King doesn’t have a point. Yes, I’m sure the cliche that MFA degrees have ironed the raw truth out of fiction is in part true. Yes, I’m sure that many writers write to succeed rather than write to live–but then hasn’t that always been the case? And does this abject careerism mean that the short story is dead?

If the short story is dead now, when was it alive? That’s the annoying thing about articles like this. They start with the premise the short story was once alive and well, but they don’t tell you when this golden era was. And they insinuate that the death of the art form is because of the two things King harps on: people are stupid now (whine, whine, no one will buy true art) and/or writers (except for the author of the essay and his close friends) just don’t have the right stuff any more (whine, whine, they don’t make ’em like they used to).

Alice Munro. Denis Johnson. James Salter. Robert Stone. These are just several authors who have written great collections of stories in the last ten to twenty years, and there are many more. Why shouldn’t they rank with Chekhov or Hemingway or Carver? I’ll take Jesus’s Son and five points any day.

Lydia Davis: Break It Down

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You might be tempted to read Lydia Davis’s stories in passing, to treat them as quirky, funny entertainments. They are so short, after all, and you can page through one piece after another almost as if you’re reading a joke book.

But the quirky facade is deceptive, and even the humor often causes a chill of tragic recognition.

Take “Break It Down,” the story that gives the title to her 1976 collection of short stories. It’s a simple story on the surface: the narrator is obsessively trying to quantify eight days of love, in which he spent approximately $800. In the process of evaluating the cost, he breaks down the love affair, and arrives at a surprising conclusion.

Initially, he figures that they had sex once a day, eight times total, so he spent $100 each time, or $50 an hour since they stayed in bed for two hours, an experience that he decides is expensive.

But he goes further–the cost must include the small moments as well. “You’re with each other all day long and it keeps happening, the touches and smiles, and it all adds up….” Soon he breaks down the cost to $6 an hour as he tallies up all of those times when the lover is present or absent, because “you can’t forget and it’s all inside you all the time.”

It’s a laughable exercise to try to quantify such an experience, of course, but the narrator’s project also begs many questions as he recounts the number of tendernesses, the beautiful and precious moments that add nothing to economic outcomes or better the world in any tangible way.

His tallies hit a wall when he reckons with the inevitable pain of the affair. Pain has to be part of the equation, but the recognition of it as inherent in the pleasures of relations–whether it’s a pet, a child, or a lover–devastate the entire notion of trying to make this existential equation make sense.

“You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.”

The story reaches this tragic epiphany, but then, to support the cliche that life is nothing but a cruel joke, Davis ends with this denoument. “So I’m just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt.”

Another of my favorites in this collection is “The House Plans,” an odd fable of sorts that also strives to arrive at a tangible value for a pursuit. In this case, the narrator wants to build the house of his dreams on a fairly abject piece of land that he sees beauty in.

The narrator sacrifices so much of his life to purchase the land, which has a ramshackle, practically uninhabitable house on it, and he proceeds to draw up extravagant blue prints–his work of art. By the time he finishes the blue prints, however, he doesn’t have the money to build the house, so it becomes only a dream, one that he shares with a local hunter who randomly comes by–except that the narrator can’t understand the hunter’s country accent and the hunter can’t understand the narrator’s city accent.

It’s a fable of the artist, who is unable to communicate with the world, or even his audience, except through his art or dreams. The hunter understands the blue prints, which become their only sustenance as other houses, cheap and gaudy and hastily built, start to crowd the landscape. They don’t even have food at the end of the story, but they are happy.

Her stories read very much like she describes her process in an interview in Salon: “I don’t write something unless I feel impelled to write it. In other words, I don’t have a regular schedule and sit down every day and say, ‘Well, what do I do today?’ It’s more that an idea or a sentence will come to me like ‘What was he really feeling yesterday while he was walking through my yard and saying nice things about my flowers? Maybe underneath he was really distressed by the overgrown garden.’ And that will make me go on from there.”

In an interview with Francine Prose in Bomb, Davis talks about how she began “Break It Down.” “I started doing these very short stories to break myself out of the rut of not writing or resisting writing. I told myself: You have to write two tiny stories every day. It didn’t matter how silly they were, I just had to finish two one-paragraph stories.”

I just read the review of Davis’s new book in the New York Times: Varieties of Disturbance. She might be best known for her translations of Proust (not her brief marriage to Paul Auster, with whom she had a son). McSweeney’s provides a nice bibliography of her work, as well as links to reviews and interviews.

Antonya Nelson

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In Antonya Nelson’s collection of short stories, Female Trouble, characters are often firmly placed within families or marriages despite the disconnection, if not active rebellion, they feel toward these emotional settings. No surprise the title, I suppose.

The trouble her characters get into is as much against themselves as it is against others. They thirst for love, but they’re usually unable to quite give themselves to another. Sometimes they hesitate, as if they have to hold back in order to maintain their wholeness, even if they’re so obviously not whole. Other times her characters are jarred back and forth in a game of tug of war–strong muscles of selfishness wrapping around the rope and pulling against marriage or motherhood.

In fact, Nelson’s daring as an author particularly shows as she reveals the rather puerile tendencies of mothers in several of her stories. They aren’t bad mothers (no need to call Child Protective Services), but they are women drawn as much to the magnet of self as they are to any sort of motherly self-sacrifice or tendency to nurture.

This is most marked in Stitches, when a daughter calls in the middle of the night telling of a disturbing sexual encounter, but even in these deep moments of confidences exchanged, Edith, the mother, drifts in and out of her thoughts, as concerned at times with the though of making a gin and tonic for herself (at an earlier hour than she’s ever had a drink) as she is with her daugher’s predicament. Consider this passage:

“It was unnerving to be this girl’s mother. She was so forthcoming. So frankly healthy…how had she gotten this way? Ellen felt somehow excluded from the process. She (Ellen) kept secrets–not in drawers or closets or diaries, but in her heart, behind her eyes, on her lips. Tracy’s admirable openness seemed not to have been inherited from Ellen, so it must have come from her father.”

In another story, a couple make love “like two people performing simultaneous monologues, each with a sense of what had to happen next.”

Again, in “Lonely Doll” the lovers can’t cross an emotional chasm, even while they lie next to each other. Marco hesitantly reveals himself, but his revelations, despite their vulnerability, make him seem more dangerous than loving. His stories have made a ruin of him, and telling them to a lover won’t salve the wounds. Nonetheless, Edith, who doesn’t believe in love, tries to love Marco. It is Nelson’s characters’ tendency to act out against themselves that’s always interesting–acting out that is at once impulsive yet quite deliberate, in pursuit of short-term salvation.

It’s her characters’ consciousness of themselves as severed from others, unlikely to be joined, despite their attempts, which makes Nelson a thought-provoking author. And yet, and yet. She doesn’t have the mysterious, arresting voice of Denis Jonson or the piercing intricacy of an Alice Munro story. Antonya Nelson is a good storyteller, but not a great one. She has the potential to be “great,” but so often, her stories droop to their finish.

For more, read reviews or profiles from the following publications: