Once upon a time, I could write a short story. None of them started with "once upon a time," but they did get through a plot in 10,000 words or less (you can read an excerpt from one of my stories here). These days I'm afflicted with novelist's disease. It's an awful syndrome where you find yourself incapable of laying out a simple tale without telling everyone's background, and maybe that of their twenty closest kin, throwing on some local color, and perhaps the explaining the history of the avocado. In short, I'm finding it very hard these days to write short.
Which is a shame, because science fiction and fantasy are lucky enough to retain some really nice short story markets. But besides having a pay day, there's real satisfaction in wrapping up a plot in a minimum number of words. Francine Prose said that it was the writer's job to "put every word on trial for its life," to weigh it in the balance for appropriateness and necessity. Though Professor Prose is the author of several novels, she also has a trio of short story collections to her credit, along with numerous books of reviews and essays, and in these shorter works that awful stricture really comes into play. Every single word needs to justify its presence on the page.
Unless, of course, you're broke and being paid by the word (a situation with which I'm familiar). In that case, a bit of padding is understandable.
Making a living as a short story writer was never easy, and it's damn near impossible now. Even if you were to unload a new gem in the best markets available month after month, you'd likely make less than you would uttering the immortal phrase, "want fries with that?" Not only are short stories a hard sell as individuals, they're tough to place when pressed together in a volume. Even authors with a number of bestsellers under their belt find their publishers less than joyful when presented with a collection of shorts, and it's pretty much a given that any short story collection will drastically under-perform a novel from the same writer.
Which is a shame. Because some writers really are best at short length. Fredric Brown, though the author of novels in several genres, was unmatched when whittling a story down a handful of pages. Edgar Allen Poe isn't known for his single novel, and Washington Irving delivered some of America's best known characters within the lengths of a short story. Even some of the writers we know best for their novels -- like John Updike or Stephen King -- are arguably at their best when writing the least.
There is one variety of short work that sometimes catches hold and manages to make a dent in the marketplace -- a collection of short works that twist around the same theme. Here are two such books. One is a collection of religious speculations by a neuroscientist. The other a mix of nostalgia and a peek into the nature of genius delivered by a physicist. Both books are guaranteed to make you think, make you laugh, even make you weep. These are books whose ideas are doled out in small doses, but the ideas themselves are far from small. In both cases, you may find that you need a bit of time to digest each short work before moving on to the next, which is precisely one of the large pleasures that reading a collection of short stories brings.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
David Eagleman is a professort of neurosciences at Baylor College of Medicine. That might not seem like the best basis from which to engage in metaphysical speculations worthy of a Talmudic scholar, but Eagleman's forty quick glimpses into the world after this one are jolting, endearing, and frightening. Occasionally all at once.
These works are more vignettes than short stories -- essays told from the point of view of, well, that's hard to say. A passionately dispassionate observer in some cases, a deeply involved character in others. The voices of these fables are as varied as the fables themselves. The only thing I can promise is that you'll find nothing you expected, nothing you ever heard in the sweaty back rows of a tent revival or mulled over in the morning coffee klatch.
In each iteration, we're given one possible view of what an afterlife might be like. Eagleman doesn't offer these up with a ladle of doctrine or scare tactics. Instead they're brought out to you on a tray with the feeling of "what if you faced an eternity of... this" where this can vary from a long dawdle in a pleasant antechamber where you wait for your name to be forgotten among the living, to the sad emptiness of a world populated only by the circle of friends you've made in life. Some of the stories do feature God -- as a curmudgeon, a chief executive, or a cipher -- but none of these "heavens" is centered on a throne. Read them all, then stop to wonder: if there is an afterlife what would you want it to be like?
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
This little volume has been on my shelf for more than five years now, but none of those years has passed without me pulling it out for a fresh peek at one of the mini-wonders within. As with Sum, these really aren't so much short stories as fictional essays. You'll find few with the standard collection of protagonist and rising plot line. You'll also find that, in the right hands, the material is not one bit less involving.
Technically, this book is a novel. There's an overarching story of the young Albert Einstein, on the brink of glory, going through a sleepy summer as he puts together the thoughts that will change the world. But that story is just a recurring bit of glue between the "dreams" that make up the bulk of this book. Each of the dreams explores a world in which the physical laws -- especially time -- obey different rules from those we usually experience. This may sound like an excuse for dry extrapolations on physics, but Lightman never lets the stories become more technical than touching. There's a warmth here, the kind of sunny nostalgia that you see in movies about old baseball games. In this golden glow, Lightman brings you worlds where time runs slower at higher altitude, driving age conscious inhabitants to lead thin, dry lifetimes clinging to the highest peaks -- while rebels spend their short lives frolicking in the valleys. There's a world where time stands still near a certain spot, and where parents and lovers must fight the awful temptation to freeze a perfect moment for eternity. There are stories of worlds with physics run amok -- where artists are more capable of describing cause and effect than any scientist -- and of a man tossed through time, living in terror that his fractured life will wreck the future he has already seen.
I'll give you a challenge: get both volumes, then try taking them on as parallel reads. Tear through one of Lightman's distorted dreams, then tackle one of Eagleman's improbably fresh takes on a topic that men have been writing about since there's been writing. By the time you've finished the two books, you may not have a better understanding of either physics or religion, but I'll bet you get some personal insights into your own thoughts. And a better appreciation for what can be done with just a few well chosen words.
Reminder: Next week is the first installment of our front page book club, in which we'll be discussing Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. There's still time to grab a copy and join in.