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:
- Propel the narrative forward;
- Offer insight into the novel’s characters;
- Weave together the novel’s themes;
- Say no more and no less than is necessary to precisely make its point; and
- 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?
