On the decline of the short story, with reviews of Dance of the Suitors by J.M. Villaverde (Oberon Press, 2006, 135 pages, $18.95) and The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla (House of Anansi Press, 2008, 256 pages, $29.95).
[T]he short story is a prose piece that is not a mere concatenation of events, as in a news account or an anecdote, but an intensification of meaning by way of events. Its “plot” may be wholly interior, seemingly static, a matter of the progression of a character’s thought. Its resolution need not be a formally articulated statement … but it signals a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift of consciousness; a deepening of insight.
– Joyce Carol Oates
The modern short story is in retreat. The form that once flourished in monthly general-interest magazines such as The Atlantic and Saturday Evening Post now finds itself relegated to limited-circulation literary journals, usually affiliated with a particular university, and with a readership that is confined largely to academics and other writers. With notable exceptions (Alice Munro being the most obvious one in this country, with Vincent Lam the new kid on the bestseller block), short story collections can be expected to sell slightly better than poetry to the mass audience of book buyers.
In one respect this is understandable. As a form, the short story more closely resembles poetry than it does its more distant cousin, the novel. Like poetry, stories rely on a concentration of language to achieve their effects. Whereas the novel is free to be expansive, to meander and digress, stories depend upon a ruthless paring down, a stripping away of everything that is inessential or extraneous. A reader might allow her attention to wander from a novel and still expect to pick up the thread of the narrative over the long haul; in a well-constructed story every word, every pause and ellipsis is significant. Stories demand strict and constant attention and an active engagement on the part of the reader.
Simply, stories require work.
This might serve as an explanation for a phenomenon that is in at least one respect counterintuitive. In our attention-deficit age, the principle defining characteristic of the short story – that it is short – would appear to be an asset. But the brevity of short stories comes with a trade-off: namely, the added interpretive requirement necessitated by the tautness of the prose. A story by Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway can potentially be consumed in a matter of minutes; it is by no means as clear that these stories can be understood anywhere near that quickly, or that neatly. This is what Mavis Gallant meant when, in the preface to her Collected Stories, she wrote: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Gallant rightly recognized the need for stories to percolate, to work themselves out in a reader’s mind.
Two recent collections of Canadian short fiction – J.M. Villaverde’s Dance of the Suitors, released in 2006, and Pasha Malla’s newly released book, The Withdrawal Method – illustrate the precept that Gallant was elucidating. Both writers employ a variety of stylistic devices, points of view, and narrative voices in their stories, and while Malla displays a broader range in both subject and approach, each writer’s work exemplifies the intensification of meaning and deepening of insight that Oates felt was central to the short-story form.
Of the two, Villaverde’s collection appears at first glance more suited to the accepted mode of fiction in Canada, with its historical setting and soft-focus presentation. However, this has more to do with the unfortunate choice of cover art – the kind of sepia-toned portrait of two lovers embracing that would perforce adorn the work of Jane Urquhart or Michael Ondaatje – than with anything between the covers. The collection boasts one historical piece – “Voglio vivere una favola,” which deals imaginatively with some of Henry James’s early travels through Europe – but the other six stories feature contemporary settings and a relatively frank approach to their subject matter.
Villaverde’s stories all deal in one way or another with the vicissitudes of love and the frailty of the human heart. A typical Villaverde protagonist is just on the cusp of 40 (again, with the exception of the fictional James, who is “[t]wo months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday”), and is trying to achieve some measure of human connection in a world that seems stubbornly resistant to such efforts.
The characters in these stories do not understand their own hearts in the manner that the reader is allowed to; this offers Villaverde the opportunity to inject a bitter ironic distance into the work. In the title story, brother and sister twins maintain an unacknowledged erotic attachment to one another, which manifests itself in sublimated jealousy when each member of the pair is the object of others’ attention at a party. The result is a story of sublime creepiness, which feels all the more creepy for the normalcy with which it is described.
The story is narrated in the first person by the male twin, who engages in the postmodern conceit of highlighting the written nature of the story: he dismisses talk about their parents by saying, “this paragraph was all it was getting.” But this awareness of writerly technique is at odds with the author’s occasional lapse into clichéd language, as when the narrator describes his sister as “the apple of our parents’ eye,” or when he says that he “paused to darken her door.” Caught in the grip of a migraine, the fictional Henry James in the later story lies “as still as death” as though “to demonstrate that he isn’t above making the obvious comparison,” but this recognition of the pallid nature of shopworn language is not sufficient to excuse its careless deployment elsewhere.
Similarly, arbitrary or jarring shifts in the psychic distance of a given narrative – in some cases within a single paragraph –occasionally impede the momentum of these stories. This is particularly true in “Suits of Woe,” about a struggling writer who is hired on as a script doctor for an egotistical director’s new movie. The story is told for the most part in a third-person-limited perspective from the point of view of Dyer, the screenwriter. But this narrative perspective frequently bounces around – now to the screenwriter’s wife, now to the director, now to a female production assistant – evincing a lack of authorial control over his material.
Such cavils may appear churlish given the overall strength of the collection’s thematic cohesion and patterns of metaphor. Silence and absence are recurring motifs throughout the book, as is appropriate for stories that deal with the elusiveness of human love. Time and again characters are described as being absent or as having pieces missing. In “All of a Piece” – one of the most technically adept stories in the collection – the title is at once an explanation of the story’s fragmented structure and an ironic commentary on the lives of its characters. The opening section is written as a letter from an anonymous man to a woman named Gabi. The unnamed correspondent spies a woman in a café and imagines her name to be Caroline. The woman, who turns out not to be named Caroline (in yet another level of absence, her actual name is withheld), wants to be a writer because she views narrative “as a gift,” and a puzzle, “pieces of which she suspected were missing.” In the course of the story she gets picked up by a man in a bar who takes her home and has perfunctory sex with her, following which she experiences “a phantom orgasm.” This phantom orgasm is a mirror of the physical pain that the male letter-writer suffers, a pain for which his doctor can find no cause.
The pattern of absence that runs through these stories extends to their resolutions, which frequently open outwards beyond the point at which the story stops, or else are vested with the reader. This may indeed signal another reason for the short story’s declining fortunes in recent years: audiences weaned on the quick-fix of televised self-help shows or sitcoms in which difficult or intransigent problems are neatly solved within a prescribed span of 22 minutes may find the disinclination to provide compact or tidy resolutions that is one of the hallmarks of the modern short story to be troublesome or discomfiting.
According to Oates, one of the properties of a short story is that “it achieves closure – meaning that, when it ends, the attentive reader understands why.” Villaverde’s stories offer closure, but little solace: his characters rarely find what they are looking for, nor do they experience the kind of epiphanic moments that would allow for them to recognize their own fractured conditions. Villaverde’s characters are psychically wounded, and the human connections that they attempt to make as a balm to these wounds often serve only to reinforce their general loneliness and sadness.
Pasha Malla also writes about wounded characters: men and women wounded in their spirits and, often, in their bodies. Cancer is a recurring motif in The Withdrawal Method, making its first appearance in the opening story, “The Slough,” which begins with a woman telling her boyfriend that for the seven years they’ve been together she has been using a topical cream that will allow her to shed her skin like a snake. This admittedly rather bizarre set-up becomes a metaphor for the cancer that ravages one of the story’s characters.
“The Slough” is a flawed story – its emotional resonance is ultimately diluted by a structural bait-and-switch that resembles Philip Roth’s tactic in My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. But, by choosing to open his collection with this story, Malla is signalling the reader to be on the alert: these stories are not straightforward linear narratives, or not always. Malla plays with the form of the short story in a way that Villaverde does not. Malla’s stories variously eschew traditional notions of character development (“The Film We Made about Dads”); track their events over the course of an entire century (“The Love-Life of the Automaton Turk”); or engage in postmodern games by imagining incidents from the lives of historical figures (“When Jacques Cousteau Gave Pablo Picasso a Piece of Black Coral,” which bears a certain affinity with Villaverde’s fictionalized tale of Henry James, although Malla’s story more closely resembles an existential vignette).
Not all of Malla’s technical experiments pay off to the same degree. “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out,” one of the strongest stories in the collection, is told in the voice of a nine-year-old girl who appears to suffer from a kind of autism. She goes to bed at exactly 9:00 p.m. and will not get out of bed until exactly 8:00 a.m. When counting sheep does not work to put her to sleep, she calculates how many seconds there are in a week and a year. Her mother has died from breast cancer and she lives with her father (whom she always refers to as “my dad Greg”) and her younger brother, Brian. The story is virtuosic: it begins with an image of April and springtime, the world “green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain,” and ends with a tableau of father and daughter in the mud at dawn. The voice is flawless and the story’s technique complements its subject matter nicely.
By contrast, the structure of “Dizzy When You Look Down In” feels heavy-handed and overly mechanical. The story of a basketball prodigy’s brother who meets an old high school buddy in the hospital while waiting for his brother to come out of surgery, it is structured as a series of contrasting scenes that take place in the present at the hospital and in the past during the two brothers’ days in high school. This counterpointing of past and present detracts from the immediacy of the hospital scenes and feels too neat, too calculated to be completely effective.
Two of the best stories in the collection – “Long Short Short Long,” about a young boy who exacts revenge on his classmates for teasing him and their music teacher, and “Being Like Bulls,” about a young man in Niagara Falls who has inherited his dead parents’ souvenir store – dispense with structural pyrotechnics and proceed in a relatively traditional manner, unfolding chronologically and involving recognizable characters.
However, although the characters may be immediately recognizable – the bullied kid in school, the listless young man in a small town yearning to get out – what happens to them isn’t. One of Malla’s great strengths is his ability to carry his reader along through a story, quietly building tension through an accumulation of almost picayune incidents, until finally releasing the tension in a fury at the end. The finales of these two stories are simultaneously surprising and inevitable, which is a combination that many writers of much more advanced years than Malla strive for and yet fail to achieve.
Malla is an ambitious writer, and if some of his technical experiments fall short of the mark, it’s nonetheless impossible to fault him for the attempt. Like Villaverde, he offers little solace, but at their best, his stories provide a rewarding emotional experience together with a technically adept presentation.
Both of these collections – at their best – testify to the protean nature of the short story form and exemplify the kind of heightened emotional experience that can be wrought from a carefully considered concatenation of language. Oates’s “intensification of meaning” is on full display here and, although most of these stories are short on comfort and solicitude, they are long on emotional resonance and an artistically rendered depiction of honest human experience.
However, for this very reason, they may prove unpalatable to the mass audience that made Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures such a runaway bestseller. Whatever their technical flaws – and there are many – Lam’s stories fall within a comfortably recognizable template: they unfold in a traditional, chronological manner, and they don’t take readers (at least those with a passing familiarity with ER or House) anywhere they haven’t already gone before. Lam reassures readers, if not through the content of his stories, then through their execution.
Villaverde and Malla, on the other hand, appear conscious of Kafka’s dictum that a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea inside us. These writers are not concerned with easy answers or pat resolutions, often preferring to leave their readers with a feeling of creeping unease or sadness. That this is done, in many cases, with a fidelity to the exigencies of technique and language only serves to make the best of these stories even stronger. Ironically, this is also what may prevent them from discovering the mass audience that they deserve.
This would be a shame. Canada – the country that produced Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and Leon Rooke and Bill Gaston – has always excelled at the short story. Along with comedy, it may be one of our most successful cultural exports. It is the area in which our writers seem to feel most free to express themselves imaginatively, and to engage in interesting experiments in form, technique, and subject matter. Anyone who doubts this need only take a look at Austin Clarke’s masterpiece “When He was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks,” or Rooke’s “A Bolt of White Cloth,” or Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love,” to name just a few. That this tradition seems to be atrophying is distressing, that interesting new writers like Villaverde and Malla must struggle mightily to find an audience is one of the cultural watermarks that we should do everything in our power to change, before people stop reading short stories altogether.