What We Talk About When We Talk About Short Stories

Tom Perrotta, editor, The Best American Short Stories 2012

I keep hitting the same problem reading new short story collections: they’re not short. I first noticed this problem in 1996, though it probably began much earlier. As the magazine market contracts, well-funded glossies find they can sell 50,000 extra copies by slapping a famous novelist’s name on the cover. It doesn’t matter if the story reads like an unfinished outline, or an orphan chapter from a phantom manuscript. Fame outranks content every time.

Meanwhile, critical theory has put forth increasing evidence that short stories—real short stories, I mean, which are actually short—are a different order of beast than novels. Short stories aren’t compressed versions of full-length books, or mere incidents that authors could string together to make a novel. Critics like Charles May and Susan Lohafer show that authors create, and audiences receive, well-made short stories completely differently than they do novels.

This makes it frustrating when TC Boyle or Haruki Murakami pulls an unfinished novel outline from a bottom drawer, sells it to McSweeney’s, and make more for one half-assed sale than I’ve ever made for all my writing combined. The Best American Short Stories, published annually by Harcourt since 1978, has sometimes compounded this trend by spotlighting the wrong works, sometimes resisted it. And sometimes, as in this year’s edition, it does a little of both.

In his intro, editor Tom Perrotta contrasts his early short story influences, tightly controlled writers like Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, with more recent writers, specifically David Foster Wallace. Where Carver and Wolff drill down on one viewpoint and hold taut focus, Wallace’s sprawling, digressive stories use egregious erudition to display the postmodern tragedy. You can view it that way, sure. Or Wallace was an unreadable smart-ass. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

I stand amazed at how fast this collection rockets from laser-focus insight to unsightly mess, apparently without intended irony. On one page, you can have something like Mike Meginnis’ “Navigators” or Julie Otsuka’s “Diem Perdidi,” stories in which not one word is wasted, nor one narrative beat adrift. Then you George Saunders’ “Tenth of December” or Taylor Antrim’s “Pilgrim Life,” both of which feel like outlines the authors haven’t gotten around to writing yet.

Tom Perrotta

The twenty stories in this collection come from writers at different stages in their careers. Some, like Edith Pearlman and Jennifer Haigh, are mid-career journeyman writers, who write to get paid with little expectation of pop cultural acclaim. Others are younger in their careers, with only a few publications, or even Taiye Selasi, whose first professional sale ever is reprinted here.

Importantly, seniority doesn’t affect story quality. Alice Munro, probably this anthology’s best-known writer, turns in “Axis,” a story that is more idea than narrative, so lacking in through-line that I got to the end and shrugged. But Nathan Englander, a jack-of-all-trades who writes so slowly that he goes a decade between books, describes a mighty collision between past and present in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.”

It would be easy to blame the sources Perrotta culled from. Several stories debuted in glossies like The New Yorker and Granta, or well-funded literary journals like Ploughshares and Tin House. These magazines’ large subscriber bases make them naturally leery of offending sponsors. Smaller, funkier, less risk-averse rags like Hunger Mountain, Denver Quarterly, or n+1 see their stories appear in the Honorable Mentions appendix.

That would be easy, but it would be facile. My two favorite stories in this collection, Mary Gaitskill’s psychological thriller “The Other Place” and Eric Puchner’s touching science fantasy “Beautiful Monsters,” first appeared in The New Yorker and Tin House, respectively. Both strike cobra-quick, every sentence quivering with potential. I never sensed, reading either story, that any details needed filled in or that any iota of type was wasted.

The problem lies not in the purveyors, but in the marketplace. Working writers have lost interest in short stories, because novels pay the bills. And readers who eagerly embrace long, discursive novels, have grown unaccustomed to short stories’ inherent intimacy. It’s easier to shield our hearts from sprawling romances and epic conflagrations, which are too big to comprehend anyway, than to lay ourselves bare to one moment of intimate frankness.

Perrotta does an admirable job trying to peddle shorts under those circumstances. I don’t blame him for the stories which leave me unmoved, and I thank him for bringing the best stories to my attention. He only suffers for his milieu. I just wish more short stories today were actually short.

Why Forbes, Capitalism, and Journalism Still Matter

At times, Stewart Pinkerton’s The Fall of the House of Forbes reads like a modern parable. As the third generation inherits a mighty dynasty, founding principles become dilute, and some sons love the family principles while others love the family money. At other times, Pinkerton’s tell-all resembles the “kiss of death” journalism that draws the very lurid audiences the author decries. It’s up to the committed reader to separate one from the other.

Scottish expat Bertie Charles “BC” Forbes founded his eponymous magazine in 1917 as a mix of stock tip sheet and fawning profile rag. BC’s son Malcolm made it a showcase for America’s glittering postwar aspirations, and Forbes set the tone of economic debate for a decade after Malcolm’s death. But in the new century, Forbes has foundered, becoming an in-joke and pale shadow of itself. It exists now as yet another tawdry blog platform and “content farm.”

Pinkerton, who clawed his way to managing editor, produced his book mere months after Forbes unceremoniously “retired” him in 2009. This explains the bitter edge to Pinkerton’s voice. But that edge gives his narrative a punch that rises above mass-manufactured crisis memoirs to make this book really work, when it does. Though he applies journalistic acumen, he also tells the story he lived.

BC Forbes left his media empire to his sons, but only Malcolm had balls enough to leverage his influence and seize control. The Forbes name rose alongside its flamboyant owner-editor. But none of Malcolm’s four sons captains the ship, though Steve inherited a controlling share. Pinkerton compares the resulting split vision among relatives to “having to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner every day.”

Pinkerton identifies only two specific missteps: Steve Forbes’ two tragicomic Presidential bids, and the failure to integrate Forbes.com with the print Forbes. Rather than one Sophoclean downfall, Pinkerton describes a pattern of mismanagement. Good writers and editors got squeezed, the heyday vigor fell prey to timidity, and the Forbes brothers’ compromises proved worse than the problems they solved.

Malcolm Forbes

My problem arises not with Pinkerton’s facts, which are robust, but with his storytelling. Pinkerton narrates the decline from 1990 to 2010 with no sense of the rise. BC and Malcolm Forbes are mere ciphers. BC alienated his wife through high-handed dicta that exiled most of his sons. Malcolm was personally, politically, and sexually ambiguous.

Both drove their company with their larger-than life personalities. And that’s all she wrote. Pinkerton spins transgressive anecdotes about Malcolm, whom he admits he never met, but never explains how that personality translated into media success. Rather than savvy, Malcolm appears merely squicky. Forbes, for Pinkerton, simply exists to decline.

Pinkerton introduces a cast of thousands with little regard for clarity. Keep notes on the endpaper. He has trouble keeping all the names in play. Lewis D’Vorkin, the villain of Pinkerton’s final chapters, disappears from the narrative for 140 pages, then again for another thirty. With such long gaps, Pinkerton has to introduce characters multiple times. Eventually, he should ask if every personality really advances the story.

Considering that Pinkerton blames Forbes’ decline partly on diminished editing and fact checking, he could use some of both. For instance, if the magazine hit its revenue peak in 2001, after Steve’s costly campaigns, after the worst of the print/digital feud, and over a decade after Malcolm’s 1990 death, I need an explanation of the gap into decline. An editor like Jim Michaels, whom Pinkerton lionizes, would catch that.

Likewise, his grammar, usually solid, occasionally turns haphazard. A few hours with a copy checker could save Pinkerton from some embarrassing moments. For instance, Pinkerton admits cribbing one-liners from David Letterman, billed in the bibliography as “David Le Herman.” Such a crude mistake suggests Pinkerton’s iPad can’t read his handwriting.

Reading what I’ve written, it sounds like I dislike this book. Not so. Pinkerton spins an interesting, if rocky, yarn about the pitfalls of capitalistic journalism. He shows why media enterprises need a solid defining vision unifying diverse parts. In an era of digital decentralization, he persuades me that journalism remains important: “Most people need an expert to filter, prioritize, and context [sic] information. A firehose of information without that is useless.”

But Pinkerton doesn’t connect the dots. He does what he accuses Forbes of descending into, if on a more professional scale. He cries out for someone to ask the question behind the question. Because if nobody does, Forbes will not be the last journalistic titan to crumble under its own weight.