Convention Sketches

Hello, all. Before we get to this month's short story, I'd like to make a little announcement. I'm going to start publishing these stories, along with my brother (and a few other writers I'm talking to) on the Kindle, for the iPhone, and as PDFs. There will be samples of all the stories still available here as we convert them, slowly, and they will be very cheap and bundled in packages of three or four (maybe 5 or 6?) stories.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that we think our stories are worth paying at least a little bit for and we'd love to have the support from you guys to help us write more of this stuff. For the

This process will take at least a six months or more. We're going to be cleaning up and revising the stories with an editor and packaging them in themes. And hopefully you guys can spread the word and make this a successful endeavor. In the meantime, we'll still be posting stories for free every month until the switchover is complete. And if things go well enough, I might try publishing my novel this way instead of going to a traditional publisher...

In any case, here is the latest: Convention Sketches:

From the moment he stepped out onto the pavement in front of the transit station he was clearly lost. He tapped out the address to the hotel into his phone with one hand and guarded his luggage warily with the other, but to no avail. Confusion washed over his face like a cold sweat and it was apparent to everyone.

“Which hotel you lookin’ for?” A voice called out from the void.

“Huh?” He looked around, wondering where it came from.

“Which hotel you tryin’ to get to,” the voice asked again, revealing itself as a lanky black man in an oversized t-shirt.

“Ummm… The Mariott.” The nerd replied, unsure of himself, his voice breaking.

“You here for the Con, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, man, I could tell jus’ by lookin’ at ‘ya.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, man, come on, the hotel’s this way.”

And without a second to think better of it, the pair of them were off on their way.

“Shit, man, the look on your face, I thought you were stayin’ at some place way out of town, but your place is close, man.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, man. So you ready to party?”

“Ummm…”

“You ever been to this Con, man?”

“No. This is my first time.”

“Shit, man. This place is a par-tay. You guys for the con really know how to party, like, it doesn’t stop, man.”

“You here for the Con?” he asked, naively.

“No, man. I’m homeless. I work the conventions now and again setting stuff up, but mostly I’m just homeless.”

“Oh.”

“This place is always better when the Con is goin’ on, though.”

“It’s a lot of fun.”

They reached the intersection and the homeless man pointed down the street to the right. “Down that way, that’s where the party is all the time. That restaurant, it don’t close. There’s a party going on there from tonight through the weekend, it’s fuckin’ kickin’.”

He pointed down the left, “Now we’re gonna cross down this street, and then your hotel is gonna be right here close. C’mon.”

And they went as soon as the light changed.

“So, man. This is it. This is you right here, man. You just head up that walkway there and you at the Marriot lobby. It’ll be a party in there all weekend, too, for sure.”

“Thanks for the help, man.”

“No sweat, man. But now that I helped you, you think you can help me out, like help me get something to eat tonight?”

“For sure,” he said and without thinking his wallet was out and he had a crisp five dollar bill in his hand.

He gestured for the homeless man to take it.

“For reals?”

“Of course.”

Thankfully, he snatched the bill and offered his hand for a shake. “Shit, man. You’re all right. My name’s Sylvester.”

He took his hand and shook it with “Andrew.”

“Andrew, you should come on down and hang out tonight, man. You’re all right.”

“Maybe. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“For sure.”

“But seriously, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it…”

“My pleasure, man. My pleasure.”

They shook hands again and parted ways, never to see each other again. Andrew left thinking, I feel like that was money well spent, what a way to start a con, and he meant it.

* * *

Of the forty years of the San Diego Comic-Con, Gerald had been to the last twelve, and of the last four, he’d been the proud retailer in booth 1216 who specialized in rare, vintage comics. When he arrived at the convention center on Monday, the exhibition hall seemed deep, dead, and empty. Pallets of materials stood in the center of the carpeted off areas, leaving no hint or promise of what fascinating attraction they might become.

Monday was always spent assembling his makeshift storefront: walls of thin black grating, a table with a white linen cover and a trio of bookshelves that needed assembly to serves as the back wall. This would be his temporary home for the next week. Tuesday was spent sorting through the inventory he’d brought, hefting and sorting long box after long box full of the kind of comics that had brought him joy over his forty-three years of life.

He spent Wednesday putting comics up for display on the shelves and walls. A Stan Lee Daredevil. A Bob Kane Batman. Spider-man. Superman. The Hulk. The Flash. On and on and on and on.

The last comic to find its way onto the display wall was Gerald’s favorite book, the first one he’d ever acquired to resell. It was an extremely well preserved copy of the first issue of The X-men from 1963. Through the plastic clamshell, one could see the the sharp corners and vivid colors with the first Jack Kirby rendering of what would become one of the most iconic rivalries in modern history: Magneto versus the X-Men.

He’d tried selling it in the past, but it was never in extraordinarily high demand at a show like this, and for the price he was selling it for. He secured it to the metal lattice of his wall with a plastic zip tie at each corner at the end and at eye level so he could glance at it periodically through the day. It would calm him in a way, from the overwhelming nature of the show.

5:30 on Wednesday, the exhibition floor was ready, the doors would be opened, and thousands of four day pass holders would get their first glimpse of the hall, spilling into each aisle, elbow to elbow, a sea of sweaty geeks who had spent all day in line for their passes and then admittance.

Business was always slow for Gerald on Preview Night. The Hall was open only for three hours and the majority of people were on the floor merely to collect swag. At least that’s how it seemed to Gerald. People who stopped by on the first night were there to gawk or browse. For many of those passing by, it was their first in-person encounter with Amazing Fantasy #15, or Detective Comics #27, or whatever. Sometimes, a father would stop with his eight year old son and point to an issue on the wall and say, “That was the first comic book that Wolverine was ever in,” or, “That issue of Secret Wars, yeah, the orange one, that was the first Venom costume, evcr.” It would fill Gerald with a hopeful satisfaction knowing that he was a torch bearer for an art and medium that was important. At the end of the day he was a purveyor of history and culture, “And that,” he’d always add, pointing at his prized issue of The X-men, “Is the first time The X-men ever appeared, and they were already fighting Magneto from the start.”

Things picked up on Thursday and Friday, but Saturday was always the biggest, busiest day of the Con.

Saturday was the day everyone attended. It was impossible to breathe for all the people crammed into each aisle. Traffic would invariably congest right in front of Gerald’s booth every few minutes when someone would catch sight of a rare comic book that was their hearts desire. It was at that moment that Gerald would swoop in, “Wanna see it up close?” he’d ask, always knowing the answer.

He’d be reaching for it before they would have a chance to respond. He could see them straining their eyes for a glimpse at a price tag or marker, and it would always make him chuckle just a bit. He never put a price on it. Not because he thought the asking price would scare people away too much, but because he wanted an excuse to pull it off the shelf and talk to people about it.

It would take a moment for him to loosen the straps that bound it to the wall, but it would always be worth it. Handling it gave him an inexplicable rush.

The sea of backpacks and costumed superheroes was overwhelming by midday. People lapped up on the shore of his booth, interest in his wares waxed and waned with the ebbing tide of potential customers.

Soon, a man arrived carrying a metal attaché case, placing it on the table in front of Gerald. Attache cases always meant business, Gerald knew this game and asked him, “You buying or selling?”

“Buying. Buying plenty.”

Gerald rolled up his sleeves, getting down to business. He was a very focused man and quite honestly didn’t see anything else when he was making a deal.

“What is it you’d like, and what is it you’re interested in paying?”

“Well, I’m looking for four key issues, and I’ve been told you’re the man to see.”

“I may well be, what can I help you find?”

“First and foremost, I’m looking for a Hulk #181, Giant-Size X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #130 and, surprisingly, #1.”

“Well, #130’s are dime a dozen, what is that, Dark Phoenix?”

“First appearance of Dazzler. I’ve got a client and he wants first X appearances. He’s a celebrity, wants to remain anonymous.”

“I’ve got a Giant Size here…” Gerald turned and reached down deep into a box and withdrew a clam-shelled copy of the seminal issue. “Hulk #181 is a little harder. That would take some doing. I can’t think of anyone here at the show who has one. If you give me a week, I can probably track one down, probably for about half of what you can get it for on eBay.”

“And Uncanny #1?”

“You’re in luck, friend.” Gerald turned to his happy place…to see nothing but a blank space on the wall.

The blood drained from his face.

“You okay?” the would-be buyer asked Gerald.

“Ummm…”

Gerald looked around, trying to see where it could have gone.

“I’ll come back,” the buyer said as he slid his business card across the table while sliding his attaché case off.

Gerald rose from his stool, not even noticing the customer fleeing. Could he have been responsible? No. That was absurd.

Suddenly, it seemed as though each passer by was a suspect. Could it have been the pimple-faced teenager with the green backpack, the Thor with the bad wig, the overweight Deadpool? Panicked, Gerald went back to the wall, inspecting the ties he’d so carefully unbind each time he pulled it down to see that they’d been cut.

Slowly, it hit him like a kick in the chest.

His book was gone.

Never to return.

He slumped back onto his stool, defeated. His posture left him, he was hunkered down as though his spine was giving out. Someone had just walked off with thousands of dollars worth of one comic book.

Gerald buried his head in his hands and wondered quietly where he would get the strength and inspiration to carry on for the rest of the show.

* * *

The most fascinating moment from the Con was my encounter with perhaps the most socially awkward and retarded human being the world has ever known. There I was, standing next to a friend at an exhibitors booth on the dealer room floor where we were both admiring items we wanted to purchase as much as the reasonably attractive young lady who was helping us. She was blonde, freckled and of a slight frame. Her face was plain but cute and she wore a tight black corset that created a mesmerizing effect with her bosom. In short, she was beautiful.

“I want to get it,” my compatriot told her, of the overpriced Darth Vader snow globe she’d pulled down from the top shelf for him to look at.

“And I’d like to get this,” I added, indicating the shirt I wanted from the table.

“All right, let me find out how much with tax,” she told us in her faux-British accent, no doubt practicing for some Renaissance fair or another.

“Ummm…” A voice interrupted our transaction, clearly begging for her attention.

“Yes, can I help you?” she asked the boy politely. Though “boy” may be a misnomer, the unkempt, mouth-breathing “boy” was easily in his mid-twenties.

“Yes, I would like to know how much that Musha Cloth Heavy Weapons Gundam behind you is,” he said in a voice that was stereotypically nerdy: nasally and unsure despite the matter-of-fact tone. He pointed at a massive gray and red box behind her that looked like it could fit four or five board games inside of it.

“That’s $230,” she told him quickly, “Would you like to see it?”

“No. I have a friend who has one. He already built it, I know what it’s like.”

“Uh-huh,” she said as we emptied money from our wallets to make our purchases.

“I think I might get it. My parents owe me the money.” It seemed painfully obvious he wanted to impress her with his story, but to what end we couldn’t be sure.

“Oh,” she replied, trying to pay attention to our transaction, and not him.

“You see, I need to babysit my grandfather this weekend and they owe me money for that,” he continued his intended courtship.

She nodded at him, still calculating tax for our items.

“He’s 94.”

I suppressed a laugh, realizing that this was about as bad things could get for this poor kid. At least that’s what I thought.

“He’s incontinent and doesn’t like to wear adult diapers.”

My companion and I shared a wide-eyed look as our cashier blushed badly, trying her hardest to make eye contact with us and not the boy. And just as I thought things couldn’t get worse, the boy opened his mouth again.

“Somebody has to clean up that mess. And they pay me to do it.” Completely disarmed, her hands dropped to her side, unable to concentrate on her customers.

“Yeah,” the unfortunate boy continued, “I’ve already spent $400 at this con. I think I’ll get that Gundam. I just need to ask my parents. Maybe I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” the poor girl said, sheepishly, as he walked away without a graceful goodbye of any sort.

After holding our breath for fear of laughing, finally the dam broke. “Wow,” my companion said after bursting into torrent of laughter. “You know where I come from,” he told the girl, “when you want to impress a pretty girl, there are a lot better ways to do it.”

Her face was flushed and red, her eyes were darting about, not sure of herself. She laughed nervously, trying to let some of the emotion escape.

Finally, I asked her, “Does, uh, that happen to you often?”

“I don’t think anyone has ever tried to impress me by talking about poop.”

The tension broke as she said it and we all broke out into a deep and hearty laughter over the whole episode. Once the laugh was over, we completed our intended task, I stuffed my new shirt in my bag and we walked away, wondering how the awkward boy felt about his top game in attracting girls.

A Word from Tamar Yellin, and a Word about Spatial vs. Temporal Form in the Short Story

After posting my last blog on Tamar Yellin’s Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes, I had some reservations about my supposition that she had written the stories as separate entities and then was convinced by her publisher to find a connecting thread that would make the book marketable as a novel.

So, I did something I seldom do; I wrote to her directly and asked her about the organization of the book. She was very kind to respond to my query. I reprint below her response:

“Thank you for getting in touch and for your review. I appreciate it. The book was conceived as written - as a hybrid form between the novel and the short story collection, a form my friend the writer Zoran Zivkovic (who has written many of them) terms a 'mosaic novel.' In this form the stories can stand alone and have the necessary weight to do so, but are bound together (often by the final story) into a whole intended to be greater than the sum of its parts.
The theme of the ten lost tribes informed all the stories and they were written in sequence, with their epigraphs, as a complete work. Quite careful attention needs to be paid to the epigraphs in order to pick up on the thematic narratives that run through them and illuminate both the stories and the book as a whole. However, with a few exceptions, there is no deliberate connection between each story and its epigraphs; I wished to be as subtle as possible.
I t never occurred to me that readers would not realise that the narrator is the same throughout.
I agree that the short story form places greater demands upon the reader and that this is one of the main reasons short story collections don't sell as well as novels.”

I must say, I like the metaphor of a “mosaic” more than I do the usual metaphor of linked stories as a “short story cycle” or as a “composite novel.” For the word, suggesting as it does parts interlinking spatially rather than temporally, is more hospitable to the short story as a form. The short story as an individual artistic unit is more apt to depend on spatial organization than temporal organization, it seems to me.

However, I have trouble thinking of a group of related short stories as a "novel." I am still convinced that short stories are very different than chapters, and that if read as chapters, they will not be appreciated or understood as they should be.

Alice Munro once said that when she reads a story she does not take it up at the beginning and follow it like a road “with views and neat diversions along the way.” Rather, for her, reading a story is like moving through a house, making connections between one enclosed space and another. Consequently, Munro declares, “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure.” At another time, she said, “What happens as event doesn’t really much matter,” Munro replied. “When the event becomes the thing that matters, the story isn’t working too well. There has to be a feeling in the story.”

Now that I am trying to write fiction on a more regular basis, I am finding that I am less concerned with telling a story in a linear fashion than I am with constructing a significant spatial entity out of various parts that seems to “go together.” The real problem is how to find/create feeling out of the spatial relationship between the various parts of the story.

I would be happy to hear from writers who read this blog about their own experience with the spatial versus the temporal construction of the short story.

Tamar Yellin's "Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes": Organizing Short Story Collections

Tamar Yellin’s second collection of stories, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes, was published earlier this year by The Toby Press and has recently come out in paperback. I just had a chance to read it. I have not read her first collection Kafka in Bronteland and Other Stories, so her work is new to me.

I like her stories. They are tightly, thematically organized, as is typical of the well-made Chekhovian short story. They seem perfect paradigms of Frank O’Connor’s thesis in his book The Lonely Voice that the short story often focuses on a “submerged population group,” by which he means a character who is cut off from the mainstream of society and thus who must define himself or herself existentially in crisis moments.

I recommend this collection of stories for their individual emphases on characters who search for something intangible that always lies just beyond their reach—a special language, a special book, a perfect narrative, a homeland, etc.

However, the issue I would like to raise in this blog entry is the author’s effort to organize a collection of stories into a book. What Yellin does is give the names of one of the lost tribes of Israel to each one of her stories and to preface each story with quotes from various historians and theologians about the lost tribes.

I don’t think that Yellin wrote the stories specifically to fit this overall structure. I think she wrote the stories as individual stand-alone stories and then, finding she had enough for a book, faced the usual publisher’s demand that collections of stories have an organizing structure so that it can be marketed as if it were a novel, or at least that the publisher can leave off the subhead “And Other Stories” from the cover.

Most all the stories have a first-person narrator, and the progress of the stories move from a young child through a young student to a teacher to an older person—as if the narrator were the same for each story, thus making the book simulate the coming-of-age novel. However, curiously, the narrator is never named, and, even more curious, the gender of the narrator is never made clear, although some stories strongly suggest a female narrator.

One could make the case that the lack of name and gender of the narrator universalizes the voice and throws the most emphasis on the character with whom she/he comes in contact, for most all the stories focus on an obsessed character that the narrator encounters. But I am not sure about this.

The striking exception is the last story, which seems very obviously a version of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, with the narrator playing the Marlowe role, going up river to try to find a mysterious, somewhat magical, figure who is possibly the quintessential Wandering Jew. Since the narrator never finds the figure, the focus here is solely on the narrator.

Yellin’s short story collections have not, as far as I can tell, sold widely, nor have they been widely reviewed, especially in the United States. They may have been reviewed more widely in the United Kingdom, for she lives in Yorkshire. If you are interested, she has a website at http://www.tamaryellin.com/

If you have not run across Yellin, I recommend her to you. In an interview that is available online, she has said she is more comfortable with the short story than the novel, for she likes every word and sentence to have weight. “When I write stories I can be as brief as I like. And yet a short story can embrace an entire life, an entire universe.”

She also says a story is not worth telling unless it has some deeper meaning. I agree completely. Any writer who thinks this highly of the short story and continues to write them even though her publisher may strongly encourage her to write novels, or at least to make her story collections promotable as novels, is usually worth reading, as far as I am concerned.

The general issue Yellin’s book raises, an issue I have talked about before, is the difference between a chapter in a novel and a story in an organized collection. In my opinion, short stories differ from chapters in novels in that each short story demands a more careful attention and a closer reading than chapters in novels usually do, since the chapter is merely a part of a whole, whereas a short story must stand completely alone as an individually organized narrative entity.

One reason that short stories do not sell as well as novels is this individual demand that each story makes on the reader. If the stories are good stories, linking them together under some overarching rubric will not eliminate this demand; you still will not be able to read them as if they were chapters. And if you can read them as if they were chapters, they are either not very good short stories or else you are not reading them carefully. As usual, I would appreciate any reaction to my polemics. I have been at this long enough to be hardheaded about it, but not so long that I cannot learn from others.

Pow Wow or Hodge Podge? Ishmael Reed and Race Fiction

Ishmael Reed and his longtime partner Carla Blank edited a collection of sixty-three short fiction pieces early in the year entitled Pow Wow, subtitled “Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now.” Da Capo Press recently issued the hefty volume in paperback, and I have been reading it this past month.

Although the book includes several complex short stories such as Russell Banks’ “The Guinea Pig Lady,” Stanley Elkin’s “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” James Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast,” Bharati Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story,” and Grace Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck,” many other pieces are amateurish and artistically insignificant.

The problem with the book is that Reed and Blank's criteria for selection seems to have little to do with the quality of the writing and a lot to do with the subject of race prejudice. Alongside the fine stories mentioned above are numerous short, clumsy pieces that are too subjective, too polemic, too sensational, too melodramatic, or too sentimental to be of any interest except historical and social.

The problem with stories about race prejudice is they are too often, if you will pardon the inevitable expression, a matter of black and white. Many race prejudice stories feature a victim and a victimizer. The victim is usually helpless and the victimizer is usually ignorant. It is difficult to make an interesting, complex story out of such an obvious and simplistic conflict, don’t you think?

I know, of course, that there are many very fine stories about race conflict—both by white writers and by writers of color. But, the very fine stories that explore race prejudice engage us, at least it seems to me, because the characters are not merely ignorant bigots and innocent victims but because the story probes deeply into those complexities of perceived difference that separate human beings from each other.

I know this is a touchy subject. But reading the pieces in Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank’s Pow Wow raised it for me over and over again. I would appreciate hearing from how those of you who teach stories about race prejudice and those of you who write stories about race prejudice deal with this issue.

Is it risky, or even racist, to criticize a story about race prejudice because it is amateurishly written, because it is subjective or polemical and lacks artistic control and thematic complexity?

Is it difficult to write a story about race prejudice without focusing on a simplistic conflict with a predictable conclusion?

In his long polemical introduction, in which he blames the media for much race prejudice, Ishmael Reed says, “Most American critics concentrate on literature authored by whites, regardless of right-wing propaganda that falsely claims that in American universities and colleges Toni Morrison has replaced Shakespeare.”

Is it really right-wing propaganda that in many classrooms stories about race have taken the place of stories by white writers regardless of the quality and complexity of the writing?

Is it really true that most American critics nowadays concentrate on literature written by whites when so many recent critical studies seem oriented toward the cultural rather than the universal?

I probably should not even bring these things up, for I know that I will be called a right-wing bigot for doing so. But since Ishmael Reed has brought the issue up in Pow Wow’s introduction and table of contents, I reckon I have the right to challenge both his remarks and his anthology choices.

As usual, I would love to hear from those who read this blog regularly or who stumble upon it accidently.

The Accidental Date

It was time to leave and I wasn’t sure what to do or say, or how to act. I’d spent all day with her almost by accident. Never before had I run into an acquaintance by happenstance and have it turn so quickly into an impromptu date.

I paid for the drinks and we sat down next to the front window of the coffee shop. The bright, hot sun of the early afternoon shone on the seat opposite her like a magnifying glass zeroing in on a picnic-invading ant. Despite the glare from the light, I got my first real look at her features and was delighted by her. Short, dark hair framed her face around a pair of black glasses that framed her deep, dark eyes. Every so often they would catch a reflection in the window and would glow warm and with a quiet ease. She grinned slyly and off to one side the entire time we spoke. The word to describe her, the one I’m looking for is “enchanting.”


To read the rest of this story, you can purchase it here for the Kindle in the collection "The Accidental Date and Other Stories of Longing, Romance and Woe", or click the button below to order a .PDF of the collection.

The collection contains 11 other stories from me, Bryan Young.

Jay McInerney's "How It Ended": Shallow Characters and the Question of Suitable Subject Matter

As an introit to her interview with Jay McInerney in The Observer, Rachel Cook says, “There are some men who you wish would grow up, and some men you hope will remain forever the same: boyish, eager, occasionally ridiculous…fun. Jay McInerney is one of the latter.’’

Well, that may be true when you are having lunch with him in one of New York’s best restaurants. But when you are reading his latest book, a collection of stories that span his career from his 1982 debut Bright Lights, Big City to the present, he is definitely one of the former.

It took me a long time to get through this collection, entitled How it Ended in America and The Last Bachelor in England. I just found it too easy to put it down, and my shoulders sagged when I picked it up. There are twenty-six stories here, and they all begin to sound tediously the same. There are just too many characters, to quote from “It’s Six A. M. Do You Know Where You Are?” who think “decadence” and Dexedrine” are the “high points of the language of the Kings James and Lear.” As Janet Maslin, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, says, “This is the kind of guy whose idea of etiquette is to hold a girl’s hair while she snorts cocaine.”

McInerney’s first novel, and the film on which it was based, brought him a great deal of fame in the 1980’s, for which he was slammed by a number of critics who identified his own lifestyle with that of many of his characters—parties, women, drugs. I don’t think one should condemn a man’s writing for the way the man lives his life. The writing should be judged by the writing. But it’s hard to resist, after reading his story “Sleeping with Pigs,” the obvious observation that if you lie down with pigs, some crap will inevitably rub off.

McInerney says he knows that critics have questioned the legitimacy of his subject matter. “There’s a socialist bias,” he says, “to the consensus of the literary world: a 30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.” But I don’t think it is just that. After reading story after story of drinking and drugs, infidelity and cheating, men who seek serial relationships and one-night stands, and women who seek to marry powerful executives and politicians, I just get tired of it all.

I guess what really bothers me about McInerney’s stories is that whereas sometimes you think he may be satirically making fun of his shallow characters, other times you sense that he really envies the life they lead. Too often, he just just seems to be setting up wish-fulfillment fantasies of a narcissistic life without commitment.

I am not saying that such is not a suitable subject for story. I think everything that humans can imagine, or find unimaginable, is suitable for a story. The secret, however, is that all subjects must be redeemed or refined by style and form. I don’t always like the characters of Henry James or Flannery O’Connor, or Raymond Carver, but all three, in their quite different ways, use language to make their characters revelatory of the unspeakable complexity of what it means to be human. F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom McInerney has often been compared, could be as much a hack writer as McInerney, but at other times, when he found just the right voice, such as in “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” or The Great Gatsby, the result was a magical transformation of superficial characters into shimmering significance. McInerney is often clever, turning a phrase in a witty way, e.g. “You have traveled from the meticulous to the slime” and “Eat, drink, and remarry.” But he does not either love his people enough to make them more than two dimensional pawns fitted out with noses to snort and genitals to exploit. And he does not seem to love the language enough to make them more than mere flesh and foolishness.

What do you think?

Do authors have to have some respect for their characters?

Do the characters have to be deserving of respect in some way?

Do readers have to like characters to like the stories they are in?

Can just the right form and style transform even the most meaningless people into meaningful literary significance?

What is a literary character anyway? What transforms real into literary?

Are there fictional characters you love, but that if you met in real life you would despise?

How is that possible?

Hard Gemlike Flames and Loose Baggy Monsters

Jay McInerney says in the preface to his recent collection of stories How it Ended, “Like most novelists I cut my teeth writing short stories,” as if writing short stories were a painful childhood prerequisite to the really adult task of writing novels. You would think that a man who studied short stories under Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, two masters of the form, would have a bit more respect for the short story than to refer to them as “warm-up exercises.”

To give him credit, McInerney says he has always been “more than a little daunted by the short story.” He rightfully acknowledges: “Whereas even a medium-sized novel—let alone the kind Henry James described as loose baggy monsters—can survive any number of false turns, boring characters and off-key sentences, the story is far less forgiving. A good one requires perfect pitch and a precise sense of form; it has to burn with a hard, gemlike flame.”

The "hard gemlike flame" phrase is from Walter Pater’s Renaissance. I reprint both the Pater and the James quote in context below, for they are, I think, worth considering.

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

--Walter Pater, The Renaissance

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form.

--Henry James, Preface to The Tragic Muse

Serendipitously, on my morning walks with my aging dog Shannon (The walks take longer now than they used to), I have been listening to Tobias Wolff’s memoir-like novel Old School about a boy who attends a boarding school and who aspires to be a writer. It’s a very fine, compact little novel about the seductive nature of literature and reader worship of the author. The school has periodic competitions in which boys submit poems and stories, which are then judged by a famous writer, who visits the school and has a private audience with the boy who wrote the winning piece. At one point, Robert Frost is the invited guest. After giving a poetry reading, Frost responds to a question from one of the teachers about whether a rigidly formal arrangement of language like Frost’s poetry is adequate to express the modern consciousness created by industrialization and war. “Should form give to more spontaneous modes of expression, even at the cost of a certain disorder?” the teacher asks. Frost responds by telling about writing a poem for a friend of his who died in the Great War. He then challenges the teacher:

“Would you honor your own friend by putting words down any how, just as they come to you, with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss? I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, that famous terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed toe cry. Sincere maybe for what that’s worth, but no depth or carry, no echo. You may have a grievance, but you do not have grief. And grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”

I do not know if Frost ever really said this or if Tobias Wolff invented it. I don’t really care. What I do care about is the truth of the assertion that in art, “Form is everything.” This is truer for the hard gemlike short story than it is for the loose baggy novel.

The highly formal nature of the short story has always been criticized by those critics and novelists who have argued that literature has a responsibility to be socially aware and involved. The short story was attacked by realistic writers in the nineteenth century, such as William Dean Howells, for being false to reality. James T. Farrell criticized the form in the 1930s for its failure to be a vehicle for revolutionary ideology. Maxwell Geismar lashed out against short story writers such as Salinger, Roth, Malamud, and Powers in 1964 for the narrow range of their vision and their stress on the intricate craftsmanship of the well-made story. In 1971, Malcolm Cowley criticized short story writers for having nothing to write about except their own effort in finding it difficult to write about anything. And in 1992, John Aldridge scolded short story writers for being too much technique and too little significance. All these complaints boil down to the same thing--that the short story is too much a matter of form and too little a matter of what social critics define as "real life."

But as Jose Ortega y Gasset says, "The material never saves a work of art, the gold it is made of does not hallow a statue. A work of art lives on its form, not on its material; the essential grace it emanates springs from its structure [which] forms the properly artistic part of the work." This seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. The problem, of course, arises when such a statement leads the critic to ignore the human content of the work. The related problem is how to attend to the human content of the work without lapsing into the gratuitous oversimplification that the artwork is merely an information medium for the replication of everyday life or the rhetoric of ideology.