. Spinning .

There was a recent question raised at the MetaxuCafe forum about story length, and the usual answer would be "when the story has been told and finished."  Or, if must be done, according to the publisher’s specs.  Of course, I (as all of us, I’m sure) feel insulted by the word limit placed on creativity.  It’s like telling a painter that his skies must be bluer, or the canvases limited to 24" x 36" because that’s what sells. 

However, looking at the next story in Best American Short Stories 2005, there was one that ran forty pages long called Stone Animals written by Kelly Link. While it was good, it just seemed that an excess of dialogue and slow buildup of changes within a family who buys a house that seems haunted (unfortunatelly, I immediately pictured Jack Nicholson in Stephen King’s The Shining) did indeed need a bit of tightening up to pick up the pace.  As a matter of fact, the main plot is outlined right within the text.  The wife is pregnant and obsessed with painting the rooms while her husband spends more time away at his job than they’d planned:

He helped Catherine down from the ladder.  "I wish you would stop painting."

"I can’t," she said.  "It has to be perfect.  If I can just get it right then everything will go back to normal and stop being haunted and the rabbits won’t tunnel under the house and make it fall down, and you’ll come home and stay home, and our neighbors will finally get to meet you and they’ll like you and you’ll like them and Carleton will stop being afraid of everything, and Tilly will fall asleep in her own bed, and stay there, and–" 

"Hey," Henry said.  "It’s all going to work out.  It’s all good.  I really like this color."  (p. 96)

There are a few subplots; the wife lies to her husband about an affair, and the children get a little dippy along with their mother as their possessions "feel" haunted, and there are a bunch of rabbits that run around outside this country home, so it is interesting.  But naming off the paint sample colors and much of Henry’s work back in the City just seem to build to nowhere.  There is an odd twist to the end, but I think the impact of the story might have either been built to novel form, or shortened considerably to short story format.

Eight Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon is a series of eight vignettes, each telling a short short story (flash fiction) of an episode in the narrator’s home town (only tip-off to first person POV is usually "our") that are otherwise unrelated.  Each is a complete story within itself, with all the necessary elements of arc and conflict and resolution, and each is a very well organized look into human nature that is self-referential and often disturbing.

This is my favorite story so far, and I’m intrigued by the concept.  I have myself written a series that was posted on Spinning a while ago that was tied into the Seven Deadly Sins (I actually composed eight–one for food gluttony since it’s such a personally precious part of my life), and have just recently been thinking of putting some effort into rewriting them as some are more fairy-tale oriented while some are more contemporary and wanted closer relevance. 

Each of the numbered segments in this work builds up to the final story, and each displays a part of humanity that leaves one wondering.  In the first episode, two rival high schools are defined by their football teams and more clearly by their social and economic status.  Pranks between the two build up each year until due to a lowered population, the two are melded into a single new school.  The question then becomes who to go to war with and a neighboring town is selected and the cycle begins again.

Story #2 is about a poet’s unpublished manuscript that becomes police property and the legal battle over rights turns a policeman into a poet and a fraud.  Story #3 is your mailbox bashing and lawsuits that it entails.  Story #4 is a mis-identity of a pet cat and the misinformation given to its rightful owner.  Story #5 is superstition over a road sign.  Story #6 is a wonderful four paragraphs of story that starts with a group of children in a school play and ends in their traumatic futures based on that play (this was just wonderful!).  Story #7 is of a professor speaking to a group and making fools of them, with the twist of joke coming back to haunt him.  Story #8 is of a local novelist writing a 1000-page story that after required cuts, came down to a single haiku.

Lennon is brilliant.  I’ve got to look him up and locate more of his work if possible.

I’m five stories into this, and the main reason I broke my rule about catching up from the past to the present is because another MetaxuCafe member, gzreads, is also reading this now.  It’ll be interesting to compare notes.

The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face, by Tom Perrotta, may be the same old dad’s side of the divorce story, but there is some deeper insight here into the feelings of fatherhood itself as well as human nature.  The narrator is trying to impress his ex-wife and son and win them back, while a father who is watching his talented daughter play Little League baseball shows no reaction to her amazing skill or the game in general until she is beaned by a ball and he races to her side, getting himself arrested for going after the coach who instructed his player to take her out.  The interesting part is that the narrator lost his family because he couldn’t accept his son’s gay leanings.  The father of the girl playing on a boys’ team showed respect for her decision to play by showing up at each game, was not overly surprised at her ability, and thus more accepting of who she was.  Good action (even though I dislike baseball) that built up on the game.  This was a true example of Aristotle’s belief that character will be displayed in its reaction to events or action (Poetics).

Dennis LeHane’s Until Gwen is another well written action story, although the action is based upon plenty of flashback as a man coming out of prison is picked up by his father and driven around in the hope that he’ll remember where he hid a large diamond that he and his lady, Gwen, had stolen just before he was caught and imprisoned.  The ending is bizarre but well done.

I don’t have any idea why A Taste of Dust by Lynne Sharon Schwartz was first published in Ninth Letter never mind being chosen by Michael Chabon as one of twenty stories to include in this BASS issue.  The writing is mediocre, the story is old–bitter divorced woman who doesn’t get over it, and the ending is tell all, just in case the reader didn’t get it.  Quick briefing:  A woman is invited to dinner with her ex-husband’s and his new wife and family to celebrate the birth of a new grandchild, that of her and her ex’s own son.  The conflicts build up only via little faux pas on the part of the husband, and the ex-wife’s aren’t-you-sorry looks of empathy, and the climax is the new baby throwing up on him. Honest.  And here’s the moral, as promised, in the closing:

He owned all the misery his risks had earned; he was in the thicket of his mistakes, impaled, fending off an excess of feeling, even if it was remorse.  He life was dense and palpitating.   She was clean and dry as old bones.  (Bass, p. 42)

Old Friends by Thomas McGuane is okay.  Well written, interesting, and enough action in a linear narrative with enough backstory to develop the plot.  Nothing I was particularly moved or unsettled by but it was enjoyable enough.

The next story deserves a post of its own.