The Short Story Faces Long Odds
he short story, writer V.S.
Pritchett theorized more than a decade ago, "seems to be right for the
nervousness and restlessness of modern life." Certainly modern life is
not becoming any less nervous or restless. So why has the short story,
which enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s, fizzled in recent years?
Writers blame the change of climate on two related trends: the dearth
of magazines devoted to short fiction and the inclination of publishers
to reject story collections unless the author is a name- brand
novelist.
Against these odds, Stanford authors are helping to keep the short story genre alive. Brief reviews of four new collections:
Goodman published
her first book of short stories when she was a 21-year-old Harvard
senior. Now 29, she has written a collection of 10 interwoven tales
about three generations of an archetypal Jewish-American family. The
book spans 15 years in the lives of Rose, cantankerous matriarch of the
Markowitz family, her two sons, Ed and Henry, and Ed's daughter,
Miriam. With an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, Goodman deftly
sketches the rituals of family life--weddings, hospital vigils, holiday
dinner squabbles. Rose overdoses on Percodan, Ed battles the
indignities of scholarly life, and Miriam unexpectedly embraces
orthodox Judaism. Goodman's stories, most of which were first published
in The New Yorker or Commentary, touch on a sometimes-tense reality in
Jewish America: While the children of East European immigrants have
successfully assimilated, many of the grandchildren seek a more
Old-World religious life.
In his first
collection in a decade, Wolff reconstructs the remarkable texture and
pathos of unremarkable lives. The protagonists here are ordinary people
confronted with their own delusions, weaknesses and unaccountable
desires. Wolff deploys the story as trap. Most of these 15 tales beckon
innocently, draw you into their darker depths and finally close with a
twist and a tidy snap. He's at his best evoking the dilemmas, pain and
strange joys of childhood and adolescence. In "Powder," a boy is won
over by his father's mischievous and haunted sense of adventure as they
drive together on a stretch of snowy road. In "Smorgasbord," a
boarding-school teenager tries to impress a classmate's rich
Latin-American stepmother--with hilarious and touching results. This
story's first-person narrator looks back on his own youth with an
unsentimental honesty characteristic of Wolff: "We're supposed to smile
at the passions of the young . . . as if they were no more than a
series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up
to." Wolff steadfastly refuses to wise up.
"hair the
color of boiled cabbage," accuses a young college lecturer, Mark
Butler, of stealing the fuel pump from her Volkswagen Beetle. It is a
farce that becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare when Butler turns into the
deranged thief he's accused of being. One after another, Spencer's
characters negotiate tortuous and comic twists of fate. "At last you
love your life," Spencer writes at the end of his first story. His
talent is that you also learn to love their lives.
boarder who moves into her mother's house after her
father dies; in "I Never Said a Word," Jean is jealous of her brother,
the favored sibling; in "Ecuador," Jean's former boyfriend returns to
town, arousing the suspicions of her husband. The stories stand
alone--many have been published individually--but also form a cohesive
story, giving the collection the feel of a novel.