Legal Ramblings
[ Friday, September 24, 2004 (7:09 PM) ] ( link )
Three "mainstream" short stories: Yesterday I wrote about three of my favorite science-fiction stories. I thought that today I'd also briefly list my three favorite "mainstream" short stories.
1. "Everything That Rises Must Converge," by Flannery O'Connor
When I first read this story in seventh grade, the conclusion made me feel as though something had just hit me in the stomach. "Everything That Rises" seems like a very simple story: it takes place almost entirely on a single bus ride, and most of the dialogue takes place between two characters, an old-fashioned and very racist old lady, and her bitter, resentful son.
For several years after I read this story, I actually tried to analyze exactly how O'Connor managed to escalate the relationship between mother and son so that its explosive conclusion seemed both natural and devastating. I still haven't quite figured it out. "Everything That Rises" is a really masterful example of how to gradually drop character details into a story, through dialogue and even some blatant exposition, until the final conflict--and its transformations of the two main characters--seems almost inevitable.
The story is also I think one of the best portrayals of a sympathetic racist who truly believes that she's just being nice.
2. "Cathedral," by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver is, I think, the single greatest American short story writer ever. His stories are written with a disarming simplicity and are severely grounded in reality, yet he manages to capture in crystalline detail the most complicated, inexplicable emotional moments.
"Cathedral" is a case in point. The narrator is the husband of a woman who has befriended an older blind man; the woman has invited the blind man to dinner, and the husband is, shall we say, somewhat derisive. As with "Everything That Rises," the cast of characters is extremely small. But the relationships between the three characters are exquisitely rendered: the testiness between husband and wife, the genuine friendship between the wife and the blind man, and the watchful wariness between the husband and the blind man. Even moments that would be comical with any other writer--for instance, at one point the three of them pass around a joint--take on a deeper significance in Carver's hands.
What really makes "Cathedral" wonderful, however, is its ending, which gives the story its title. I have to admit that when I first read "Cathedral" at the start of freshman year in college, I thought it was pretty boring. But something changed between the beginning of freshman year and the end of first semester--when I read "Cathedral" again, I felt shivers running through me at the last few paragraphs of the story. I don't know what it was--whether I had suddenly realized what Carver was trying to convey, whether I had done some growing up, or whether I had simply slept more the night before, but from that point forward I have not been able to read "Cathedral" without thrilling at its simple but very moving conclusion.
3. "Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin
Out of these three stories, "Sonny's Blues" took me the longest to appreciate. It's also the longest story here, which is probably related.
I first read "Sonny's Blues" in seventh grade (in fact, for the same class where I read "Everything That Rises"). It bored me to tears. And no wonder: the story begins with the narrator's younger brother coming back from prison, seemingly transformed; it ends with the same brother playing piano at a local club. Whoop-dee-do.
But when I read the story again in college, I found it to be the single best portrayal of brotherly love that I have ever read. The seeds of tension are scattered throughout the story, too subtle for a seventh grader to pick up, but obvious enough for a slightly older reader who had gone through his own ups and downs with his brother. The ending of the story marks the release of all of that tension, a flood of warm good will that makes the reader (and the narrator) realize, "Everything will be all right." It feels great.
Footnote on Epiphanies
It must be pretty evident that all three of these short stories feature some pretty significant epiphanies: in fact, it is the epiphanies that really make these stories special. Here's what Michael Chabon has to say about epiphanies in his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which I am still struggling through: Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half-century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre--that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance--would have paled somewhat by the year 2002. Over the last year in that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, would be laying down Michael Chabon's Dr. Kavalier and Nurse Clay with a weary sigh and crying out, "Surely, oh, surely there must be more to the novel than this!"
Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little Gedankenexperiment with "jazz" and "the bossa nova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now, go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment -of-truth revelatory story."
Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.
That's a pretty harsh (if amusing) indictment of the epiphanic short story. But while I agree with Chabon that the pure plot story could use a revival (although I'd say that the McSweeney's collection is not quite it, with one or two exceptions therein), I don't think it's a coincidence that the stories I've felt have been most meaningful to me have all been epiphanic ones. Sure, plot stories have amused me, but they have rarely been as moving as, say, the three stories above.
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