Two Paths of the Short Story

Last year, Zadie Smith wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that pointed to the two paths that the novel could head toward today. The first path, that followed by Joseph O’Neill, is that of lyric Realism. The main tool is the sentence. The main goal is to create a believable world using believable characters. The sentence must strike the right tone and mimic what a real person would observe and think. The second path, that followed by Tom McCarthy, is wholly postmodern. The main tool is the unreliable narrator. The main goal is to cause the reader to question what he’s reading. If O’Neill and McCarthy represent these two modes in the novel world, then their counterparts in the short story world could be David Vann and Miranda July.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is a collection of five stories and a novella that won him the Grace Paley Prize. Based on his father’s suicide at the age of forty, the six tales are loosely connected around a father, Jim, a son, Roy, Roy’s mother, and Jim’s second wife, Rhoda. Vann’s stories are mostly told from the perspective of the young Roy. Since he’s a child, many of these stories are impressionistic. They are entirely believable and are meant for us to get inside Roy’s head. Each of his stories have a psychological oomph to it. In one, a grown-up Roy goes to visit the woman with whom his father once had an affair. Roy finds the woman and the woman’s husband and invites them to dinner. We see him deflate as the woman confounds his initial expectations; instead of being a cheap whore, she seems to be extremely intellectual. We also see Roy gain a new respect for his father for being attracted to such a cultured woman.
The opus of the collection is a 100 page novella about Roy and his father living on Sukkwan Island, off of Alaska for a year. An old-fashioned story of redemption, the descriptions evoke Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While the course of events seems somewhat too perfect to be believable, Vann’s story is grounded in the tradition of legend, or myth that Melville followed. When the series of events concludes, we understand it’s about a father losing his son, and how he then tries to reclaim him.

No One Belongs here More than You by Miranda July strikes an entirely different chord. Many of July’s characters reveal ulterior motivations that make us question their reliability. For example, the narrator of one story prefaces it by saying that she is telling her ex-boyfriend in an attempt to impress him, but it happened long ago so she doesn’t really remember the details. Then she goes on to narrate a short tale about teaching elderly people to swim in her kitchen. She would make them lie down on the floor with their faces in a bucket of water to mimic a pool. Highly skeptical. Through this technique, July asks us to put aside our biases toward reality to search for a higher meaning beyond the literal interpretation of what happens on the page. For instance, another story called “The Sister” is about the protagonist’s constant inability to meet his co-worker’s sister. With each thwarted attempt, the protagonist’s fantasies become more acute. He ultimately finds out that the co-worker is gay and was merely trying to lure him into a relationship. The two men then sleep with each other. Instead of being creeped out, I like to see this as July’s attempt to force her readers to think of how genuine their own relationships are, and what our expectations are of each other.

Both Vann and July excel in their crafts. Though I prefer lyric Realism, July’s darkness and creativity are still worth reading.