Does the short story have an identity crisis?

I love short sto­ries, even though aside from Carver and Chekhov I can’t think of any­one who knows how to write them. It’s clear that the audi­ence for short sto­ries is dwin­dling, too. So I was sur­prised to see an essay at NYTimes​.com by Steven Mill­hauser on “The Ambi­tion of the Short Story” yes­ter­day. The essay, which was appar­ently also printed in the Sun­day Times, attempts to divine the nature of the short story by endow­ing the for­mat with a beguil­ing per­son­al­ity and then pit­ting it against that unre­pen­tant bully, the novel.

Rarely has one form so dom­i­nated another. And we under­stand, we nod our heads know­ingly: here in Amer­ica, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incred­i­ble Hulk, the jumbo jet of lit­er­a­ture. The novel is insa­tiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cul­ti­vate its gar­den, prac­tice med­i­ta­tion, water the gera­ni­ums in the win­dow box. It can take a course in cre­ative non­fic­tion. It can do what­ever it likes, so long as it doesn’t for­get its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always duck­ing for cover.

I’m not sure the author’s ever read a novel or a short story. His flam­boy­ant writ­ing style reminds me of a cir­cus per­former. He is try­ing to jug­gle a hand­ful of ten­u­ous notions that expand and con­tra­dict each other while they’re flung through the air from one hand to the other. His des­per­ate eyes watch them turn on each other like an ouroboros.

The novel is not a bully. The short story is no wilt­ing wall­flower. Millhauser’s argu­ment seems to be that, because the novel form is so long, it is unable to attain per­fec­tion and instead goes for epic grandeur, leav­ing the short story with the con­so­la­tion prize of doing very much with very lit­tle. There are few prizes awarded for sub­tlety in any endeavor these days, but I think this premise gives short shrift to both the novel and the short story.

One of my col­lege pro­fes­sors told me that the way to iden­tify a great novel was to open it to any page and read a sen­tence. In great nov­els, each sen­tence should do sev­eral things:

1. Pro­pel the nar­ra­tive forward;
2. Offer insight into the novel’s characters;
3. Weave together the novel’s themes;
4. Say no more and no less than is nec­es­sary to pre­cisely make its point; and
5. Sing.

If that seems like a tall order, it should be. I don’t think we should judge the novel as a form by the count­less exam­ples that sim­ply go through the motions of telling a story. If we’re try­ing to set a stan­dard, shouldn’t we eval­u­ate the form in light of its best prac­ti­tion­ers? I’ve read the kind of nov­els Mill­hauser describes, and their sen­tences fail on a num­ber of my professor’s points. They aren’t the best we have. Open a novel writ­ten by Cor­mac McCarthy or Mar­i­lynne Robin­son and you will find an orches­tra of sen­tences res­onat­ing in sup­port of the whole. That’s how you write a novel.

The Times essay recon­sid­ers the short story in its con­clu­sion, and on this point I can agree with the author.

The short story con­cen­trates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the uni­verse .… It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mys­tic expan­sion, when the macro­cos­mic flower bursts from the micro­cos­mic seed, the short story feels its power .… It exults in its short­ness. It wants to be shorter still.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to me is the dichotomy between the novel as macro­cosm and the short story as micro­cosm. In my own attempts to cod­ify the essen­tial ele­ments of the short story, I have often cited this delin­eation. The short story excels as a med­i­ta­tion on the briefest of events: the death of Chekhov in Carver’s “Errand,” or the after­math of a den­tist visit in Jan­ice Galloway’s “Blood.” Must a novel, there­fore, sur­vey the events of a cen­tury as in One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, inten­tion­ally over­look­ing the fine details in order to show us the grandeur of the scheme? Or can a novel also be a series of stitched-together minu­tiae that, once con­nected, reveal the same majesty? Is one approach to the novel inher­ently more rev­e­la­tory than the other? Do either of them shame the short story, or pale in com­par­i­son themselves?