Hearing whispers of poetry
LaSalle, Peter
SHORT STORIES: THE SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES Hearing whispers of poetry PETER LaSALLE THE press that the short story has been receiving in America in the last dozen or so years reads like...
...The story is "Hot Ice" by Stuart Dybek...
...In other words, fiction that is moodily pretty, like the magazine's pastel covers of Manhattan in the snow or beach umbrellas on Long Island, but not much more than that...
...two young couples, one the bona fide owners of a condo and a Volvo wagon, confess sadnesses ("Society of Friends...
...and she is reunited with her estranged husband Jack in "Listening," making love and talking politics in an unexpected and beautifully golden little time of understanding with the man who has put her through much pain...
...Throughout these stories the motifs are intense sexual longing and the lost feeling of the traveler, the latter aptly expressed in the opening of the story "Zadar": "There are times when to be alone is to be seized by panic...
...SHORT STORIES: THE SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES Hearing whispers of poetry PETER LaSALLE THE press that the short story has been receiving in America in the last dozen or so years reads like the extinction warnings for some rare bird...
...However, all can be forgiven after reading "Slow-Motion," a tender, comic portrait of the world of the teenage male who doesn't know how to handle the advances of a precocious girl and tries to weasel out of inevitable combat with a bullying kid from gym class...
...In short, these stories feel as if they can heal in themselves...
...The human feeling and empathy that lie in just the floating presence of so many voices is something very special in what can frequently seem a dehumanized technological world...
...The serious short story will never have the mass appeal of the novel...
...The quotidian for an apparently perfect young California couple starts to seem strange and altogether haunting, like an ongoing vision from ongoing sleep...
...Baby Have a Good Cry," etc...
...PR1ZE STORIES THE O HENREY AWARDS 1985 William Abrahams, Editor Doubleday, $16.95, 319 pp...
...Paley's instinct as a story teller is so true it is almost primal — at once as simple and as magically complicated as that often cited first act of narration when the hunter clad in animal furs returned to the cave and grunted to those listening the equivalent of "Let me tell you what happened...
...Well, if Price's thoughts on the story's demise were exaggerated, then this rash of current reporting on the boom may be overstating the case as well...
...and Mrs...
...The real low was probably marked by Reynolds Price's review of The Best American Short Stories 1979 in The New York Times Book Review...
...First came reports that the story was an endangered species...
...Notice the wonderful, sometimes outright funny detailing, like that expressed in this male character's telling lines: "She really gets up this time...
...Schwartz opts for the traditionally realistic, his characters either confused children or confused young marrieds from that class usually called Yuppie Americanus...
...In his opinion, contemporary readers wanted their fiction in novels...
...Price suggested that if the story was endangered, it should just as well be left to quiet extinction...
...Needless to say, such language is quite handsome...
...In ' 'Mr...
...And overall Strand succeeds in this fiction debut, except for a couple of stories that are just comedy skits straining for laughs, the very weakest about an out-of-work general reduced to listening to taped sounds of war...
...as the highly touted Raymond Carver, a current celebrity of the genre...
...Nevertheless, it is true that more books of stories are appearing, and they are drawing considerable attention...
...Baby is a first collection by Mark Strand...
...And fortunately so for us, because she is among the current virtuosos of the form, along with (on my list) Andre Dubus, Donald Barthelme, and Joyce Carol Oates...
...Simply enough, the man knows a lot about how people live today...
...It happens usually in places far from home where the language is unknown, where one is without friends and where none of the props by which emptiness is concealed or disguised are at hand...
...LATER THE SAME DAY Grace Paley landscape of the dream, where life is pared down to the symbolic and universal, to these prose pieces...
...That the story originally appeared in the literary magazine Antaeus is significant, because it must be admitted that the bulk of the serious work in the story today is in numerous such publications (call them literary, little, or quarterly, many of them relatively new), as opposed to the remaining big-circulation organs that still publish fiction...
...They are a little older now and have been through the wilds of marriages and children, left-wing activism, and New York City's vanishing neighborhood life...
...BABY AND SOTHERS STORlES Mark Strand knopf, $11.95 112 pp...
...Later the Same Day is only her third collection in over twenty-five years, so it doesn't seem an overstatement to label its appearance an event...
...The others have lost ground, most notably The New Yorker, also represented admirably by John Updike's "The Other...
...AND NRS...
...What struck me about reading these books, along with the several other recent releases that arrived in the mail as substance for this essay, is how poetic an entity a good short story is, and how there looms a very large chasm between the short story and the novel...
...and Mrs...
...But it is very healthy today, and its continued well-being is probably ensured in this time when the electronic visual media encroaches more and more on the novel's territory of the pure narrative...
...Not only are there well-received volumes of stories from the long careers of elder American masters, such as Peter Taylor, but many trade publishers seem to be forgetting the old rule that a younger writer who wants a collection published better have a successful novel first...
...Several of the best feature a middle-aged, sometimes separated woman aptly named Faith...
...The everyday speech is rendered with perfect pitch, often left on its own and without quotation marks, until the talk itself, in an avant-garde way, becomes a major statement...
...Yet both are noble (despite Reynolds Price's grumbling, mentioned earlier), and one of the two first-prize stories that the longstanding O. Henry editor William Abrahams selected this year is so brilliant and moving that his critical acumen remains solidly affirmed...
...Baby at Breakfast," "Mr...
...The houses are bringing out first and second collections by those who write only short stories, such peter LaSALLE is the author of a story collection and a novel, Strange Sunlight...
...The Best American probably draws more attention, especially now that it has a policy of rotating the editorship...
...But suggestions of poetry seemed to be whispering to me at every turn — for instance, Strand, the poet, and his clear, rhythmical language...
...Which is to say, short stories have the ability to reflect our lives in their everyday mystery, the way they really are...
...GRACE PALEY writes only short stories...
...With the intensity of a prayer, it builds on a local legend of a girl who drowned and who haunts an ice house, maybe as a saint and maybe as a ghost, in a gritty South Chicago neighborhood...
...But possibly those workshops proved a wildlife refuge for the short story, one of the places where the species' shaky existence was protected...
...But more often, in the week-to-week reality of it, The New Yorker seems to be favoring chicly quiet, formulaic attempts by younger writers usually imitating the popular Ann Beattie...
...Not that the story is a poem (something that Flannery O'Connor pointed out a while back, when she defined the short story by listing several things that it definitely isn't), and granting that the caveman's instinct ("Let me tell you what happened," the narrative base) is the essence...
...Overall observations...
...Stories about writers can be boring enough...
...A grade-school boy encounters insomnia ("I Can't Sleep Anymore...
...Baby," there are pat sections — "Mr...
...Ward Just's story, "About Boston," gives good evidence of that, and the magazine remains the acknowledged leader in the "slick" category...
...He does commit the darkest of sins in offering a story about students in a Commonweal: 376 creative writing program...
...Her protagonists are usually women...
...Actually, "Slow-Motion" was chosen for the annual anthology, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, a couple of years ago, and no larger consideration of the contemporary American short story is complete without some mention of this anthology and its companion annual of fiction selected from periodicals, The Best American Short Stories...
...Sure, you can find gems in The Atlantic...
...University presses now see it as their responsibility to publish both poetry collections and story collections, like Schwartz's, without a similar responsibility to the novel...
...Schwartz's effects are smooth and understated, movingly so...
...I think she must be a woman's libber, they don't like remarks about nightgowns...
...In "Under Water," the narrator seems to be swimming through the blurred scenes of his past, moving effortlessly, liquidly, to Nova Scotia, to Rio, to New York, to Italy, while friends and loved ones as easily appear and disappear...
...For the last few years, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and the whole literary gang have been pronouncing that the short story is back...
...The literary magazines are where both serious poems and stories usually first appear (though not to be too hard on The New Yorker, I should mention that some of the pieces by Strand and Paley originally came out there...
...And when stories are truly special — several of Paley's and Dybek's O. Henry winner — they possess almost the texture of a poem...
...It annually presents a first collection, and this year's is To Leningrad in Winter by Steven Schwartz...
...One of the most respected enterprises is the University of Missouri Press's Breakthrough Series in fiction...
...TO LENINGRAD IN WINTER STORIES Steven Schwartz University of Missouri, $7.95, 88 pp...
...Bathrobes she didn't mind...
...Many of the bigcirculation magazines that used to feature the genre had folded, and the old strongholds, like Esquire and The New Yorker, were cutting back on the number of stories in each issue, devoting more space to non-fiction...
...and Mrs...
...and Mrs...
...Author of several very respected volumes of poetry in the surrealist vein, Strand brings the same eerie MR...
...stories about would-be writers yearning to be writers go well over the line of common decency...
...she runs into a crazed pharmacist from the old neighborhood in "Zagrowsky Tells...
...They are always stories above all, but with the compactness, the verbal music, the ability in their brevity not to have to say too much and without all the often forced plot structure that has to propel a 300-page novel...
...In "Dreamer in a Dead Language" she visits her father, "one of the resident poets of the Children of Judea, Home for the Golden Ages, Coney Island Branch...
...University presses are almost as active in publishing short story collections today as they are in publishing poetry collections...
...And the story hadn't already died only because it remained the staple, easily executed exercise for graduate writing workshops at universities, where teachers weren't being frank with student writers by not telling them that the form was hopelessly passe...
...Dialogue serves as the major vehicle of narration throughout...
...Yes, stories have that extra poetic element, the conjuring power of words and words alone...
...a young and unemployed husband accepts his wife's infidelity ("Monkey Business...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
