The Great American Short Story

America tends to be quite good at cornering the market in whatever pursuit takes the national fancy. There’s baseball, of course; not to mention a movie business worth billions, a fast food industry that keeps a stranglehold on the world’s health, and really awful daytime TV.

America has also produced some of the greatest works of short fiction being read today.

 

Cue jokes about attention spans that couldn’t outlast a goldfish; I can already hear hecklers in the back rows sniping at a sitcom culture where mind-bendingly complex crises are routinely resolved within half an hour (twenty-two minutes if you count commercial breaks). Go on, get it all out. Americans are good at starting unpopular wars and crushing beer cans against their heads, but when it comes to short stories they can’t hold a match to Maupassant, Kafka, Joyce or Chekhov.

 

Wrong.

 

When it comes to judging the well-being of the short story in the twentieth century (it’s a bit early to comment on the twenty-first), we’ve got to give it to the ol’ U.S. of A. British publishers now produce far fewer short story collections than they used to – and when one does turn up, you can bet that it will be the work of an established author rather than a newcomer. Stateside, things are rather different (despite fears registered by Stephen King, himself an author of nearly 400 short stories: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that short stories still feature on most high school curricula. Perhaps it’s the fact that short story collections are reviewed alongside novels in the national press (there’s nothing particularly low-profile about, say, short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, which recently inspired a major Hollywood film). Perhaps it reflects the popular taste for straight-talk (no dilly-dallying about the bush: see the penchant for prompt resolutions, above). Whatever the reason, when asked to consider my favourite short stories – and these include works by Roald Dahl, Cate Kennedy and Nadine Gordimer – at least half the list is attributable to American authors.

 

Distilling this to my ten favourites has not been an easy task, and the result is by no means definitive. I decided to narrow the field to works published in the twentieth century, which is why I’ve not included The Turn of the Screw (which, with an 1898 publication date, missed by a hair). Neither Edith Wharton nor O. Henry made the cut, which is as shocking to me as it will no doubt be for many readers. But such is the nature of lists, and it is a dirty business.

 

So here, in no particular order, are my ten favourite American short stories of the twentieth century:

 

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

This is one of O’Connor’s most highly regarded stories, and for good reason: it demonstrates her remarkable capability for combining violent action with carefully drawn characters and biting humour, and is underscored by a strong sense of her devout Catholic faith. A grandmother tries to convince her family that they shouldn’t holiday in Florida, given the recent escape of a dangerous convict from a local penitentiary. The family ignores her, and they embark on a drive through beautiful Georgia. An accident ensues, followed by the appearance of three armed men… Suffice it to say that the final scene has been a source of controversy since its publication in 1955.

 

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

I first read this at high school in Toronto, where the short story remains a staple of the English curriculum. In a Spanish train station on an oppressively hot day in the 1920s, a man and a woman drink beer and talk. It soon becomes clear that the man is trying to convince the woman to have an abortion, although this is never made explicit. At the centre of the tale is the woman’s pointed observation of the aimlessness of their lives: “That’s all we do, isn’t it-look at things and try new drinks?” A brilliant study in scene setting and dialogue, expert in its simplicity and unequaled in its impact.

 

Patricia Highsmith, The Terrapin

Based on Highsmith’s difficult relationship with her own parents, the story features a young boy, Victor, who is emotionally neglected by his proud and distant mother. After witnessing the agonising death of a tortoise that she brings home for dinner – the boy is haunted by the sound of its screams as it is dropped into a pot of boiling water – Victor determines to seek revenge. As one might expect, Highsmith was an intriguingly disturbed individual, and I’d highly recommend Andrew Wilson’s recent biography for those interested in the darker corners of her genius.

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

I do seem to gravitating toward slightly grisly tales, and for that I apologise. But it would be criminal of me not to mention this one, which was inspired by the Tucson, Arizona murders committed by Charles Schmid. The story features Connie, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who has been left at home while her parents attend a barbecue. Two men pull up in front of her house and address the girl, telling her that they have come to take her away. At first she resists, but one of the men becomes increasingly threatening. The ambiguous ending shares much in common with my other favourite Oates story, Where Is Here? in which a stranger asks a couple if he can see the inside of the house where he claims to have spent his childhood.

Richard Yates, Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired

Told from the point of view of a grown man reflecting on his Greenwich Village childhood, the story is an extended character study of his mother, a second-rate sculptor with delusions of greatness. I challenge any reader not to be reduced to tears by the ending. Yates was a master at capturing the postwar age of anxiety, and this piece is as much about creating a sense of time and place as it is about plot.

Donald Barthelme, Me and Miss Mandible

This story shares a similar premise with Billy Madison – in which Adam Sandler plays a grown man who is sent back to primary school – although it predates the film by roughly thirty years. The first line says it all: “Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child.” Written in an episodic format, the story demonstrates the tight style perfected by Barthelme in his novels and journalism, and which presaged the rise of flash fiction.

Eudora Welty, Ladies in Spring

One of Welty’s best known stories, this could be described as a tragicomic fantasy (how’s that for genre bending?) about an African American postmistress who dabbles in rainmaking when work allows. Her tale runs in tandem with that of a father and son who are caught in a storm while on a fishing trip. If it sounds a bit odd, that’s because it is – but in a gentle, whimsical way.

Kevin Canty, Blue Boy

A teenage lifeguard who has spent the summer daydreaming about an older woman screws up the courage to act on his fantasies. Shadows of The Graduate; painful consequences ensue.

Robert Olen Butler, Mr. Green

I’m always interested to see how male writers tackle the female voice, even though I know that this is hopelessly sexist (no one blinks when a woman writes in a man’s voice, do they?). Butler does a fine job in this story, which is narrated by a Vietnamese woman who inherits her grandfather’s parrot. When Mr. Green starts to pluck out his own feathers, the narrator must decide if she is prepared to do as her mother taught her: kill the bird by wringing his neck. Themes of gendered values, generational clashes and cultural dislocation dominate.

Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer

Alternately titled, Or, Have you Earned this Cliché? this gentle piss-take is just what it says on the tin. Contains such gems as, “First, try to be something, anything else”, “Write a story about a man and a woman who, in the very first paragraph, have their lower torsos accidentally blitzed away by dynamite”, and “Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in – in – syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.”

 

Recommended reading: five of the stories on this list can be found in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, ed. Richard Ford, Grove Press, 2007