When an introduction proves to be of greater interest and importance that the book of stories it precedes, contemporary fiction can be said to have relegated itself to insignificance. Whereas once fiction provided the most luminous of all insights into life, it has been reduced to a symptom of its time. Sharply aware of the situation, novelist and short story writer Mark Helprin, editor of The Best American Short Stories 1988, has broken with the genteel tradition of prize-story volumes and, in his introduction, issued a challenge to current fictional styles, attitudes, and values. Among all the laments about the state of fiction that have grown familiar over a period of at least thirty years, this one stands out for its willingness to violate the taboo imposed on fiction writers against discussing ideas in fiction. Indeed, it goes further than this and ascribes fiction's decline to faulty ideology.
Helprin focuses his attack on the school of minimalism. As Carol Iannone has put it, minimalists write "fiction that is thin in texture, slight in form, banal in subject matter, well-crafted, empty, easy to read." Its practitioners are usually said to include Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, and some scores of their imitators writing in close to a hundred little magazines. Joe Queenan has recently poked fun at the genre for its concentration on the incompetents of the world to the exclusion of people who hold respectable jobs, as well as for its obsession with the unpleasant and the grotesque. "By page 29" of a Leonard Michaels collection, Queenan writes, we've had dog excrement, bald women, one death, two rapes." The first lines of minimalist stories, he reports, tend to refer to alcoholism, material abandonment, death, blindness, rape, and child abuse. One first sentence offered by Queenan as an example of both the subject matter and affectless tone of minimalism reads: "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house."
Helprin can be as hilariously outraged as Queenan over the habits of minimalism. "What are they doing with characters that chafe a million square miles of ass-leather on diner banquettes and vinyl-covered chairs?" he asks. And he sums up the moment with the exasperated declaration:
How so many people can be sitting in so many diners,
trailers, and pickup trucks with so many ingrown toenails,
varicose veins, corns, bunions, boils, warts, skin
infections, impetigo, itches, scars, blackheads, and scabs
is the secret of the Sphinx.
In fact, Helprin understands very clearly why these affections litter the minimalist landscape. The writers uniformly aim to ridicule "effort, perfection, devotion, fidelity, honor, belief, love bravery et al." The writers, it may be added, are part of a cultural trend aimed at the denigration of American culture. The depressed, feckless types they concentrate on are calculated to at once expose the heartless, brutal unfairness of an American civilization taken to be responsible for their misery, and to advertise the concerned, compassionate nature of the writers and their coterie audience.
Somewhat roundaboutly, Helprin implies all this by discussing not the literary culture but rather the allied academic culture. The latter
...
Read Full Article
|
