'A Distillation, a Perfection'

One attraction of short stories over novels is convenience. We can read one in a sitting without blunting the author’s impact. In this, stories are more like lyric poetry. Their compactness suggests a coiled intensity. A good novel can afford to take its time without dissipation – often, that’s part of the pleasure it gives us. Even tautly written novels can afford to unwind slowly and methodically. Less happily, there’s more room for fat and filler in a novel. Some novelists are fatally susceptible of gigantism. 

Since the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, without intentionally setting out to do so, I’ve read stories many times more often than novels. In those baffling early months I reread Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, the three volumes published by the Library of America. I read Malamud, Isaac Babel, Jean Stafford and Joseph Epstein. Then, inevitably, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Henry James and Varlam Shalamov (here and here). More recently I’ve enjoyed Shirley Hazzard’s stories, William Trevor’s, Peter Taylor’s, Elizabeth Bowen’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s. Of late, the latter Taylor especially. My friend D.G. Myers introduced me to her work only a decade or so ago, and since then I’ve been trying to catch up. My guess is she has never lastingly crossed the Atlantic, though New York Review Books has published a collection of her stories and three of her novels.

 

Across three issues in 1969, The Kenyon Review published a symposium on the short story, asking 30 practitioners to write about it. In her contribution, Taylor confirms  some of my recent fondness for stories:        

 

“Short stories require, I believe, a greater concentration from the reader; for every word (if the job is being done properly) must carry weight and help to intensify the impact of other words. There must be an elasticity, too; so that, when it is necessary in the development of the story, there may be either tautness or expansion. They are also a form of contradiction -- an act of both isolation and relationship.”

 

And this – a challenge to writers and a consolation to readers:

“The short story is like a piece of music in that it can be experienced in one go -- and not laid down and taken up, day after day, as novels usually must be -- so that the reading of it may be a curiously intense experience; a distillation, a perfection.”