Five years ago, when Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was a long overdue recognition not just of the sort the Canadian writer deserved, but also of the short story form. It was not clear if the Nobel Committee for Literature, which is now in such bad odour that there was no Prize this year, had made the 2013 choice by first seeking out the leading practitioner of the genre and giving Munro her due or whether they sought to honour her work and, by extension, a point was made on what the short story can do, as opposed to a longer work of fiction.
Munro’s stories are so powerful in their incisiveness that to go back to them is to appreciate something new each time. As the critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times upon the Nobel announcement, “Set largely in small-town and rural Canada and often focussed on the lives of girls and women, her tales have the swoop and density of big, intimate novels, mapping the crevices of characters’ hearts with cleareyed Chekhovian empathy and wisdom.”
There are very few other contemporary writers I can think of, at least among those whose works are available in English, whose short stories have a similar power. There are writers like Ann Beattie and Lydia Davis, both American. And there is, equally, Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri. With one wistfully expressed thought or observation (for instance, a character nostalgically dunking a biscuit in a cup of tea), her short stories bring alive the entire universe of Indian immigrants in the U.S. in a matter of passages. Lahiri has excelled at many things — her second novel, The Lowland (2013), is among the decade’s best. She has written on the process of writing by learning a new language, Italian, and having that book translated by another into English ( In altre parole to In Other Words ). She has translated from Italian to English, and is currently in the running for the prestigious American National Book Award for her translation of Domenico Starnone’s novel, Trick.
But unlike what happens with other writers of remarkable short stories (from Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami to Anjum Hasan), it’s Lahiri’s shorter fiction (collected in her 1999 debut and Pulitzer Prize-winning book Interpreter of Maladies , and then Unaccustomed Earth almost a decade later) that provides the backdrop to assess her other work. With, say, Murakami, it’s the other way — it really makes sense to know his novels to put his short stories in context.
Contemporary scene
Could we have known more writers of short stories on their own terms than we do currently? In a new volume that he’s edited, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story , English novelist Philip Hensher invites the reader to survey the British scene of the past two decades and “what the short story still does well”, but also to reflect on “the sad fact… that the mechanisms for bringing those masterpieces to a reading public have become grossly defective”.
To decide what’s British contemporary, Hensher settles on 1997 as the cut-off year, for many reasons. It was the year Tony Blair’s Labour party came to power and Princess Diana died in a car crash, marking a change in British “psyche and manners”. In 1997, the Restrictive Practices Court abolished the Net Book Agreement that had allowed publishers to decide the retail price of books. (Prices went down, cutting margins for publishers, and by extension writers, for all time to come.) And, crucially, 1997 was about the time when the Internet and mobile phones came to be widely accessed, starting a revolutionary shift in how we read, how we imbibe what we read, and how distracted we are.
The biggest hurdle to getting a short story to the reader is the contraction in the number of journals globally that carry them. The New Yorker remains a rare good news story — though even it has cut down. As Mavis Gallant, the late Canadian writer who carved out her own space in the short story landscape, told Lahiri in an interview published in Granta in 2009, there was a time when “You opened on to a story. It [ The New Yorker ] was a literary journal.”
There’s hardly any mass publication which you “open on to a story” any more, and Hensher has some suggestions to enable writers to reach their short stories as single offerings to readers more easily, instead of compelling the interested reader to buy a collection. Newspapers could, for instance, publish short stories on their websites, say, once a week. Publishers could publish them as single short stories in digital form. And third, and more controversially, he says it should be possible for a reader to purchase individual stories from short story collections, much as we can now buy single tracks instead of a full album digitally. Certainly, we need to awaken to the potential of the online space to help many more short stories make their way into the world, not as self-published works but as those that have had the benefit of crucial editorial filters.
