a short sharp shock

The Elegant Variation has an interesting guest post by Marisa Silver on the short story, and its merits relative to the longer fiction narrative.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as I’m finishing up one class on reading the short story and another on writing them.

I once counted myself among the people Silver describes – the short story haters.  At the time, I had a lot of justifications for this position (short stories are unengaging? oblique? pretentious? I forget my specific grievances), but I’ve since concluded that I didn’t like the short story because I hadn’t read any good ones.  Thankfully, I’ve been cured of that ailment.

Still, that’s not to say novels and short stories are the same, or give pleasure in the same ways.  But what, precisely, is the difference?

One theory I’ve been playing with is that a (good) novel paints character so richly and distinctively, the reader feels as if he actually knows this person.  The short story simply doesn’t have time to offer such a deep and thorough investigation of character, so it tends to rely on recognizable character “types” that are instantly grasped and intuitively understood.  I don’t mean to suggest that short form writers rely on clichés or “stock” characters – rather that they make use of people who already feel familiar to the reader, because we run across them every day.

For example, even though it’s been years since I read Lolita, I still feel like I know Humbert Humbert as well as if he were an old school friend, or my next door neighbor growing up.  (Erm… maybe I shouldn’t have gone there.)  Whereas, even though I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love a couple of weeks ago, I can’t name a single character in the collection – what I have instead is a vivid sense of the kind of people who inhabit Carver’s world.  I don’t need to know every detail about his characters, because their situations – crumbling marriages, alcoholism, anger and hopelessness – are universal enough to be instantly understandable.

So, I don’t know about this theory.  Maybe all I’ve really said is that Raymond Carver is not Nabokov, and Nabokov is not Carver.  But as I work on writing and revising more shorts (and, of course, writing and revising novels), I find myself thinking about which characters belong in which medium.

Anyone else who has dabbled in both forms – have you found any other crucial differences between them?  Or want to dispute this one?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 1:19 am and is filed under books, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.