Short stories

In a recent e-mail exchange, a friend who occasionally teaches writing asked me if I had any recommendations of great short stories that he might add to his syllabus. Though I have certain favorites--Flannery O'Connor, Kafka, and J. F. Powers, for example--my general preference for the capacious strangeness of the novel makes me a relatively poor resource when it comes to the short story. Especially when set against my friend's classroom-honed knowledge of the form, I figured initially that I didn't have anything to contribute.

Then in quick succession, I thought of three stories . . . one of which, despite its perfection, I can't really recommend for a writing teacher, while the other two aren't actually stories. Clearly I was on to something!

I've written about the first story already: it's "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," from Georgi Gospodinov's And Other Stories (2007). Running to a mere three pages, it's spare and starkly emotional, shot through with loss and the cruelties of fate--yet it shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a writing class. A bare-bones summary, draining the story of its careful language and unexpected perception, will I think make clear the reason: A man and a woman meet in an airport for a couple of hours, during which time they realize that they're soulmates who simply never found each other until that moment, a moment that must inevitably end forever when the woman gets on her plane. See what I mean? My own history as a fiction writing student tells me you're likely to get plenty of that sort of crap without in any way encouraging it. Read and marvel at the story, but please keep it far from any syllabus.

My second suggestion I've also written about recently: it comes from pages 222-24 of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (2007), an account by Joaquin Font of a day's thoughts as he sits in El Reposo Mental Health Clinic in Mexico City. Hypnotic and repetitive, larded with cryptic references, it barely delivers any information to help the reader place Font or the woman whose loss he's lamenting, yet in its obsessive tying of a tragic memory to the creeping progress of the slow seconds of painful thought, it achieves an undeniable power. Is it a short story? Not really, being an important part of a sprawling, 650-page novel--but I could imagine it serving as a bracing example of the possibilities of the form at its most compact.

Compared to my final example, the preceding one might as well be "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," for this last one is not in any conceivable way a short story. And yet . . . over the weekend, discussing PJ Harvey's best album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), with rocketlass and our friend Carrie, I began to describe "You Said Something," the album's most memorable song (excepting perhaps the four minutes of towering lust that are "This Is Love") . . . and I soon realized that the account I was giving of the song was far more detailed than any straightforward reading of the lyrics would allow. Yet I felt that I was only drawing out what was already there, unsaid, perhaps, but deeply felt. Let's see what you think.

I'll respect Harvey's copyright enough to point you to this site rather than reprinting the full lyrics here; it's probably best if you read them before you continue reading this. The song is only twenty-six lines long, seven of which, repeated, form what there is of a chorus, so the simple summary is easy: the singer finds herself on a rooftop in Brooklyn at one in the morning with a friend, looking out over Manhattan. As one does on a rooftop at night, they lean out and take in the view, "acting like lovers"; later (or perhaps another night) they take his car to Manhattan, where they do the same. And somewhere in there, the singer tells us, her companion says something "that I've never forgotten."

Pretty simple, right? But, oh, how much is conveyed by those few facts, by the tone and mood they set, by the minimal details on offer! The setting--late-night Manhattan viewed across the East River--is inherently romantic, but it's not until we get to the line "acting like lovers" that we're sure what's going on: these two are friends . . . but there has always been the tense awareness that more might be possible, and this wee-hours climb has ratcheted up that tension considerably. Even as they both sense what's going on they're leaning against the railings, trying to pretend all is as usual--yet the singer finds herself holding her breath, waiting--and we can't help but share her shudder of anticipation and guilty excitement. It's possible that they've both got other commitments, of which parts of their brains are trying to remind them, and yet here they are, together, drawn inextricably into one another's orbit.

Then the song moves on: they journey to Manhattan, and the singer tells herself, "I'm doing nothing wrong / riding in your car"--the sort of attempt at denial only necessary when patently untrue, a self-deception guaranteed to fool no one, least of all oneself. They take the elevator to the eighth floor, singing all the way to the radio they've just left behind in the car, the singing a nervous yet companionable way to avoid the very real risks posed by speech at that moment, risks topped only by those of the physical proximity that they can do nothing about. On the rooftop again, alone together . . . he says something.

And there the song ends, defying our expectations and in the process nearing the sublime. In her chorus, the singer has told us again and again about her companion's statement, which is "really important" and which she's "never forgotten"; given its place in the structure of the song, we assume we'll learn what he said--yet by denying us that satisfaction, Harvey both highlights the spareness of her story and gives it an undeniable verisimilitude. It takes a rigor that's beyond me to believe that this isn't an account of a real incident in her life; she's willing to turn it into a song, yet unwilling to sully the essence of that moment by sharing--and thus betraying--the private words of her friend. What we get instead is the mood and the feel of an encounter, the frisson generated by the lies we tell ourselves when we're considering doing something we know is wrong. Sung over a churning 6/8 beat, led by a guitar figure that rises, then falls in an embroidered refraction of itself, the lyrics convey that unforgettable feeling of surrendering--almost willfully--one's moorings to what one tells oneself is an inexorable pull.

Perhaps it's the Nick Jenkins in me overpowering whatever tiny bit of Lord Byron I also embody, but I tend to think that what her companion said stopped things where they stood, that this friendship stayed just that. The alternate reading is less convincing: the ensuing events surely would overwhelm that moment of speech, make it ultimately forgettable. But part of what's glorious about this song is that very ambiguity: Harvey offers us just enough to make us wonder, without closing off the wide range of possibilities.

So no, "You Said Something" is not a short story--but it carries many of the glories of the form, elliptical yet forceful, evocative rather than explicit, suggestive and stark. If one of the characteristics of art is that it opens rather than closes interpretation, leads to questions rather than offers answers, then "You Said Something" certainly qualifies.

Telling tales

From "The Man of Many Names," collected in And Other Stories, by Georgi Gospodinov (2001, English translation by Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy, 2007)

He said that he could tell us the stories of all the books he had read, that he could talk until morning interpreting the stories he had just heard, but no matter how he searched his memory, he couldn't come up with a single story of his own.

"And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game. And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end. Even if they are stories about failure."

From In the Night Garden (2006), by Catherynne N. Valente

On an evening when I was a very small child, an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of jet on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the wind. Together they make a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me.

From Somebody Owes Me Money (1969), by Donald E. Westlake

"Sid, when you go to the bathroom, you're going to have a lot more to tell your boss than just where he can find Abbie and me. You're going to tell him who killed Tommy McKay, and you're going to tell him about the lawyer I went to see on my way to town, and you're going to tell him about the letter I dictated to that lawyer, and you're going to tell him why his boy and Droble's boys both should lay off both Abbie and me permanently and forever. This is all going to be very interesting, Sid."

"They had met only a few hours before."

I came to New York on Tuesday with five books, which was too many.

I'm leaving with ten.

The silliest part is that four of them were bought when I was in full command of myself, during visits to St. Mark's, Book Culture (the former Labyrinth), and McNally Robinson, at times when, despite knowing that I had a book (or several) in my bag to read, I found things on the shelf I'd been thinking about . . . and now my luggage is that much heavier.

But perhaps at least tonight's book can be excused? I'll set the scene: I spent much of this rainy, rainy evening at the extremely welcoming cocktail bar Death & Co., having three drinks (two of which were not martinis, which should give anyone who knows me a sense of how convincing the bartender's skills were), with only my marathon-honed willpower steeling me against the desire for a fourth. As I drank, I read Oblomov, which led the aforementioned bartender to recommend Maxim Gorky, whom I've not read. So on my wander back to the subway I stopped in St. Mark's. They didn't have Gorky, but in the place where Gorky might otherwise have been was a very slim volume in Northwestern University Press's Writings from an Unbound Europe series, And Other Stories (2007) by Georgi Gospodinov. As someone who will remain forever grateful to that series for introducing me to Mesa Selimovic, I'm perhaps extra-susceptible to its charms . . . so I walked out with the book.

I work in publishing, so I know the considerations that go into the pricing of a book. The cost of production comes into play, but the overriding consideration is what the market will bear: how are other books of this ilk, aimed at this audience, priced? Can we get a price near that and still make money? But as a reader, there are times when the price I pay seems to bear absolutely no relationship to what I get from a book--what price Anna Karenina, after all? Or Labyrinths? In Search of Lost Time?

I of course wouldn't claim, on the basis of the one story from And Other Stories that I read twice in succession on the subway tonight, that this volume is on a level with those works. But there's no question that that lone story, "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," was all by itself more than worth the $14.95 I spent. Extremely brief--less than 1,500 words--it relates an airport encounter in Bulgaria between strangers: a man, who has a package, perhaps illicit, that is to be delivered to America, and the woman who is to carry it for him. As Gospodinov explains, "It was a five-minute job," but the two hit it off, and they talk and talk as the time until her flight leaves winds down:

And the silence was becoming unseemly. The small table in front of them was piled with empty plastic cups that had acquired most unexpected shapes after being fumbled at for hours. The coffee stirrers had long been broken into the smallest possible pieces, the empty sugar bags turned into tiny cornets and little boats.

It occurred to him that he could turn this table into a ready-made object, an installation, so to speak, that he could title An Apologia for Embarrassment (plastic coffee cups, stirrers, empty sugar bags, a white table.)

Inexplicably--and certainly unexpectedly--they've found something, someone.

"Let's talk," she said, as if they hadn't been talking nonstop for two hours.

The remaining hour was too little time to be wasted in beating around the bush and making boats. But since he wouldn't start talking, she said simply, "We have to accept it that sometimes people just miss each other."

"The whole irony of it is that they realize it the moment they meet," he said.

"Maybe we've met before. We've lived in the same city for so long. It's not possible that we haven't passed each other at some traffic light or other."

"I'd have noticed you," he said.

"Do you love her?" she asked.

"Do you love him?" he asked.

It's a formulaic conceit, unequestionably, and that, along with the sheer unlikeliness--these things don't, after all, happen, right?--should sink the story. But Gospodinov's spare language and emotional restraint affords the scene a melancholy, almost chilling power. The crux of the story comes just after the midpoint--after the pair have acknowledged their mutual attraction--when Gospodinov unexpectedly propels us into an already dimmed future:

Later he couldn't even remember who was the one who had come up with the life-saving (or so he thought then) idea of inventing shared memories, to make up a whole life together before and after their meeting.

That very concept ought to be laughably cliched, reeking of low-level fiction-writing classes--but the blunt parenthetical, "(or so he thought then)," throws the whole story into heartbreaking relief, making us believe--and care about--the pair's futile efforts to pretend their lives have been different. The rest of the story serves as a coda to that moment, agonizingly recounting their sincere, doomed efforts to cement their unexpected connection.

It's a hell of a story, and a good way to end a week in a city I've come to love but don't live in. See you next time, NYC.