The return of the short story

SPEAKING VOLUMES

There's a piece on writing by William Saroyan that I return to every time I need to be reminded why writers write at all, why they write short stories in particular and why we read them with such naked, voluptuous greed when we're going through the rougher bits of the old life cycle.

"How do you write?" Saroyan began with that old chestnut, an apparently rhetorical question, and then offered an answer a paragraph down. "How do you die, write, live, sicken, heal, despair, rejoice?"

Look at those words: die, live, sicken, heal, despair, rejoice. All in neat couples, paired off with each other, perfect complements, the rhythm broken only by the spiky insistence of the verb 'write' on its claim to be there, to interrupt the dance and choose any and all of the above as its partner for this particular waltz.

It's one of the largest claims ever made for the act of writing: you write because you live, you write because you will die someday, you write because you have sickened, you write out of a need to heal, you write from despair, you write with rejoicing.

When he was twenty-five, Saroyan wrote what he recognised as finally, a good story. It was accepted by Story magazine, who sent him a cheque for $15.

Saroyan replied to them: he said that starting on January 1, 1934, he would send Story magazine a brand-new story every day for the entire month.

It was his way of staking claim to a new identity: he was a writer. He sent them perhaps thirty-six stories that month, writing sometimes two, sometimes three a day. It's the craziest coming-of-age party any writer ever threw for himself.

And he couldn't have done it with any other form but the short story. If he'd offered to write the magazine a novel in instalments for a month, he'd have been just a magician's assistant trying to pull a balding white rabbit out of a moth-eaten hat.

It's like those 'writing competitions' online that challenge contestants to write a novel in three days: it can, technically speaking, be done, but who cares about the result?

You can, however, turn out a short story a day for thirty days and conceivably produce at least five good ones. (Saroyan managed at least fourteen minor classics, but then he's Saroyan.)

Through the relative drought of the last few months, where the abundance of mildly entertaining fiction has been matched only by the paucity of truly good fiction, what's kept me going are short stories, in a season of disappointing novels.

If you're looking for truly remarkable work, I have just two words for you: ZZ Packer. This young American writer just had her first short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere shortlisted for the NBA awards, but the issue of whether she'll get to wear a tin medal of some kind is almost an afterthought.

Packer's been compared to Flannery O'Connor, which is one of those things you get used to if you're a young woman writer with a flair for the macabre and a sense that you'd like to get beyond both, the theme of marriage and the form of the monologue, but she's got a flavour and a style that is inimitably her own.

Don't take my word for it; this is just the first paragraph from one of her short stories, and by the time you're finished reading line three, you should know that you're in the hands of an adept:

"By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatised with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled."

Edwidge Danticat couldn't be more different from ZZ Packer. Danticat made a mark first with Breath, Eyes, Memory and now she's back with a linked collection of short stories set in Haiti, called The Dew Breaker.

There's something about the short story form that matches the coup-ridden history of the island in a way that the more sprawling spaces of the novel cannot quite accommodate: you need the constant stops and starts, the breaks as someone else's narrative takes over, along with the linked experiences, in order to make sense of Haiti's constantly interrupted, always on hold history.

The third short story collection caught my attention because it's by Manjula Padmanabhan, and I'm a sucker for the mental universe she seems to inhabit, where utter weirdness exists side by side with an awful clarity.

Kleptomania has some of the delicious nastiness of vintage Roald Dahl, and even the one or two stories that seemed slight in comparison to the rest contained the seed crystals of interesting, titillating, compelling ideas.

In her introduction to Kleptomania, Manjula explains that some stories were written at the behest of magazine editors, some grew out of news stories, some mirrored real-life incidents.

"I usually don't set out to catch ideas or lie in wait for them," she writes. "However, if one floats past my observation window, I watch to see if it's reasonably robust, and if it is, I make a brief note of it in my diary. Many ideas are too slight to be worth recording, so I don't make the effort unless they're at least strong enough to last in my memory for a few days before being pinned down and I often hoard ideas for many years before filling them out as stories."

If you're looking for a banquet of reading, I'd suggest the Danticat as a first course, the Packer as a main dish, and Kleptomania as the final coda. As I read these three very diverse collections, I felt myself rediscovering the joy of the short story after a very long time.

Packer will rock your world; her stories are delivered in precisely measured lethal doses, and I can imagine her transforming future generations of writers in the way that O'Connor and Joyce did with their very different short stories.

She makes you ask the classic writer's question: "Is it legal to write like this? And when can I start?" Danticat opens the door to the idea that sometimes history is better read in small doses, and lets you know gently that neither the newspapers nor the novels always have all the answers.

And Manjula's stories, masquerading as amusements, deliver their payload of uncomfortable questions with lethal accuracy.

None of the hyped novels by the big guns, from The Namesake to Khushwant's Burial At Sea, have really delivered the good stuff this year; but these three collections provided enough of an anaesthetic jolt for me not to care all that much.

nilroy@lycos.com