Different types of writing can be served best by different kinds of reading. Although it didn't strike me immediately, once I became a teacher and started deconstructing reading strategies, eventually I realized this applies to me as an experienced reader as well as those a lot younger, just embarking on their reading journeys.
Short stories became more meaningful when I started reading them in one sitting, and not reading more than one at a sitting. I didn't do this during my first joyful short story binge. When John Cheever's stories were published together in that glorious Ballantine paperback edition in red in 1980, I devoured as many as five or six in an evening. It was like discovering steak and lobster were fine, mighty fine, and getting sick on gorging oneself.
It took decades, but I started reading them one at a time again in the aughts. This was after discovering Alice Munro in the '90s and realizing how I appreciated that they were published one at a time in The New Yorker. Putting the magazine down and savoring the impact made each story all the more special.
And that's how I still read short stories. But it wasn't until I went into education that I realized this was a deliberate reading choice, aka a strategy. It's my version of slow reading. I want to take the time to connect ("Only connect ... live in fragments no longer" as E.M. Forster wrote), to see how this new experience fits in with what I already know and have read and have felt.
Short stories are perfect for this. They demand to be read in one piece, but so many also deserve that push back from the table, to not read another, to not gorge.
John Cheever was born 100 years ago on Sunday. His short stories, although not contemporary, are still relevant to our contemporary reading experience. "The Swimmer", for example, shows how Neddy, a man of importance, of means, has fallen so far without him realizing what he has done. As he swims home through the neighborhood pools, the reader sees how much Neddy lost and how much he took for granted. Neddy, who has nothing, at the beginning of the story "had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure," as Cheever put it.
Recent short story collections that honor Cheever's work are proving to be a fulfilling part of my current reading. I've already diaried about Alan Heathcock's Volt. Nearly opposite in characters' background, the setting and tone is the collection by Elissa Schappell. Blueprints for Building Better Girls, however, is also, like the Volt collection, a wistful examination of where we are and where we thought we would be. Both collections feature recurring characters, although the stories as a whole are not necessarily only about these characters. (The connected stories in Melissa Banks's Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing is one of the first times I came across this technique. Those were about the same character during different times of her life and it worked very well in that book.)
In Schappell's "Are You Comfortable?", Charlotte has suffered a traumatic event that isn't revealed until the end of the story. Home early from college, and unlikely to return, she is coddled by her mother until she and her father go out of town. Charlotte is charged with going to see her grandfather at the nursing home. She takes him out for a drive, sees how far downhill he has gone and takes him home. While telling her secret to her grandfather, who may or may not realize that he's back home and this is his granddaughter, Charlotte tells him:
"And I'm still scared," Charlotte said. "Who am I? Minute to minute I don't recognize myself. Canyou understand that?"
"I can." He nodded sympathetically.
She thought so. He knew. He reached into his coat pocket and drew out his comb, examining it like an artifact. Then, turning it over in his hands, not looking her in the eye, he asked again, "Where will I sleep?"
The West is proving fertile ground for literary writers these days, including short story writer Melinda Moustakis of Washington state. Her connected Alaskan stories in
Bear Down Bear North start off with a heartstopper in "Trigger". It's brutal, earthy and completely on target in putting into context how the latest generation was made (in a hunting blind) and how that life must be justified:
They say, you came into the world with a bang.
Which means: Do something to deserve us.
The stories that follow certainly deserve their existence.
Another Washington state writer, Shann Ray, sets his stories in Montana, which, as Charles Kitteridge named it, is The Last Great Place (an older anthology but a classic in the sense of place vein). Ray, who spent time growing up on a reservation and who now is a professor of leadership and forgiveness studies (an academic career that floors me in its elegant search for humanity's better nature), writes about people with hardscrabble lives. The collection begins with "How We Fall" and reminds me of some of the best of Sherman Alexie. A Northern Cheyenne man is director of youth programs at the Billings YMCA. He has married a white woman. They drink, she leaves him, she hurts him. He recovers, he perseveres. Her journey is similar to the one taken by the narrator of Alexie's magnificent "What You Pawn I will Redeem", a story that gets me every time I read it. At the end of Ray's story, his hero (for hero he is) watches two golden eagles in flight.
He followed them as they reached an impossibly high apex and with a quick strike locked talons and drew near each other and with a quick strike locked talons and fell. ... They gripped one another and whirled downward, cumbersome and powerful and elegant. He followed them all the way down and at last the ground came near and they broke and seemed suddenly to open themselves and catch the wind again and lift. Their wings cleaved the air as they climbed steadily until at last they opened wide and caught the warm thermals that sent them with great speed arcing above the mountain. There they dipped for a moment, then rose again on vigorous wingbeats all the way to the top of the sky where they met one another and held each other fiercely and started all over, falling and falling.
Edith Pearlman was one of those writers that not many people knew about for years. But those who knew her work loved it. With the publication of
Binocular Vision, her renown started to spread. Ann Patchett read Pearlman's "Self-Reliance" roughly 20 times to prepare for a public reading of that short story. As she notes eloquently in the introduction to this collection of Pearlman's new and selected stories:
There are very few things that hold up to being read twenty times aloud, and very, very few things that improve with every pass, but the more I subjected "Self-"Reliance" to repetition, the more it bloomed. I felt like a junior watchmaker taking apart a Vacheron Constantin. I knew the story was good when I first read it, but when I had read it twenty times I could see that it was flawless. Every word in every sentence was indispensable, every observation subtle and complex. The rhythm of the language carried the reader forward as much as the plot.
Patchett's last observation quoted is one of the hallmarks to literary fiction. It's not just story, it's not just plot. It's also characterization, tone, voice, language, complexity, layers, taking the reader's intelligence for granted. Pearlman possess all of these gifts and gives them to her readers. "Self-Reliance" is the swan song of a woman who has had a fairly good life as a mother, wife, lover and doctor. Most importantly, she has been respected. She has lived on her own for several years.
We first learn she has cancer. Then, we learn something else in a devastatingly simple manner:
"And there's that lovely wig from that last time..."
From that point on, what happens is inevitable in her worldview. Pearlman leaves no dobut about what that view is. As the inevitable happens, the story takes on an entirely different tone to describe a journey one can only take once. The strength of Pearlman's writing lies in that there is never any doubt that the protagonist would ever have it any other way.
And then there is Alice Munro. The treasure from Canada has a new story in the Summer Reading issue (no. 52) of Tin House, "Dolly", and a new collection of short stories, Dear Life, due out this fall. (Why, yes, I've pre-ordered a copy.)
New discoveries and known treasures are available in today's literary journals, although not every work will appeal to every reader. Still, it's thanks to publications such as One Story -- which consists of a single story each issue in a volume that fits in one hand -- and Tin House that I've discovered Lauren Groff and first read Amy Hempel, where Sherman Alexie publishes poems and Marilynne Robinson essays. Short stories and literary journals can contain miniature, complete and complex, universes within.