Elif Batuman claims the
“American short story is a dead form” (“Short Story & Novel”). She defines the American short story as… what?
Her dipstick is the Best American Short Stories series, specifically from 2004
and 2005. She evokes science—“In the name of…”—but does so idiomatically only.
There’s no method to her argument. She feels that the American short story is a
dead form because she’s annoyed by the majority of short stories she’s
encountered; her essay is not an argument but an airing of pet peeves.
For example: “Nowhere is the
Best American Barrage of names so relentless as in the first sentences, which
are specific to the point of arbitrariness….” To clarify, she cites the first sentences
of two stories, the first by Trudy Lewis, the second by Tom Bissell; here’s
Lewis’s: “The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine
skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the
accident scene instead.”
Most of Batuman’s pet peeves
are elements of style subject to fashion. Lewis writes that first sentence
because she’s seen others like it. Maybe she’s thought about it and decided she
likes it, or maybe she hasn’t thought about it, but instead absorbed it. Either
way, she identified a template. Batuman assumes Lewis (and other American short
story writers) learned the template in an MFA program or by reading the Best American.
That a majority of American
short story writers are bad at short story writing—or worse, are dull—is not
evidence that the form is dead. If it’s evidence of anything at all, it’s that many
people who write short stories don’t read enough of them and that it’s hard to
write a good short story. But it’s much more cocktail-party exciting to declare
something as “dead.”
Of the stories Batuman read
in the two volumes of the Best American she perused for the sake of science,
she found only one of interest. What stood out to me—and is unremarked upon by
Batuman—is that story is a fantasy story, bordering on horror, and it’s written
by an author who exclusively writes short stories (not a novelist promoting a
novel by dashing off a short story; not a budding novelist writing short
stories in workshop as some kind of practice). Fantasy isn’t bound by the
strictures of realism and thus may, by accident or by design, avoid the clichés
of realistic (AKA “literary”) short fiction. (Fantasy has its own clichés.) An
author committed to the short story form is (hopefully) reading a lot of short
stories. More, perhaps, than the novelist who dabbles.
(Please note, I do not mean
to suggest that great short stories and great novels can’t come from the same
author.)
The way Batuman dismisses
that one interesting short story is to claim it’s not actually a short story,
but “really novelistic plots crammed into twenty pages.” It’s bad science (and
sloppy essay writing) to take data that doesn’t fit your claim and call it
something else; her claim needs to be adjusted. The American short story isn’t
dead. The American short story just isn’t obligated to read like Chekov anymore.
Batuman’s observations are
funny. I only wish she didn’t insist they mean more than they do. But her
observations are funny and maybe even sharp.
She ends her essay with a
mini-manifesto, that will no doubt dog her forever: “Write long novels,
pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things.” (Setting
up her declaration, she writes, “American novelists are ashamed to find their
own lives interesting….”) She’s giving herself permission to shoegaze, and I
dig it. Sure!
(Last night I opened up the March 4th issue
of The New Yorker [for which Batuman is a staff writer] and read the first sentence
of Jonathan Lethem’s short story “The Starlet Apartment” and lo: “When Peter
Todbaum and I were twenty-five, and three years clear of Yale, I lost track of
him for a short while.” It’s a model of the Who What Where Why When & How
first sentence Batuman finds so irritating—going strong, thirteen years after
she published her American short story post-mortem.)
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