I like to read short stories. I wouldn't say I am a terribly well informed reader, but I read WSJ articles when I am at my parents' place, The New Yorker when it is sitting around, creative non-fiction to pass the time, and short fiction as a break from novels.
Collection and series such as Best American are great because they curate my whole experience and take the work out of subscribing to thousands of journals and blogs just to find something decent to read. I get to read across a range of authors and themes. However, as of late, I have a serious bone to pick with the editors of these collections: every story I read is depressing as hell.
Have any of you seen Wendy and Lucy? Imagine a film festival where every entry was like that. How about an endless loop of the last 10 minutes of Nights of Cabiria and The Bicycle Thief? That's what these anthologies seem like: a broken record of hopelessness and heart ripping grief.
I know that some amount of conflict is necessary to drive a story. Obviously a 100% positive narrative would not make a compelling story - but why does every anthologized short story that I read leave me with a pit in my stomach? Lee Gutkind's Becoming a Doctor, a collection of creative nonfiction written by doctors, almost had me crying myself to sleep. Three of the first five entries in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories made me feel so dejected that I lost my appetite.
In my high school Spanish class, we read a lot of Mexican literature, There too, all the stories followed the same pattern: tragedy besets family (vital livestock/family member dies), youth goes on a journey to better his circumstances, tragedy befalls youth again, tragic end. I wish I could find the book we used so I could quote some of the examples to you, but I recall one story where a cow was killed by a snake, another with a recurring comparison of a man's hands to worms, a long drawn out tale documenting the aftermath of a grand mothers death. There was just no positive message anywhere. In fact, these may be the most terrifyingly depressing stories ever.
Editors - I'm not asking for a cute romantic comedy (I have bittorrent for that) - but would it kill you to include a few chuckle worthy tales in your neatly collected volumes? Can't the guy get the girl every now and then? Does fire/war/pestilence/disease/CANCER have to ruin every narrative? Why even bother foreshadowing or irony when your peer authors have already extinguished any possibility of optimism?
The Bottom Line: Who decided that short stories can't end in anything less than general malaise?
Interesting thoughts. I've mostly avoided contemporary, literary short stories for the past few years, maybe not so much because the stuff is depressing per se as that it seems so samey. The collection that really put me off of it is Adam Haslett's "You Are Not a Stranger Here" [http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385720724&view=rg], which I read in 2004 or '05. That burn-out was probably a long time coming, since I read so much of the stuff in college fiction workshops, but the Haslett just struck me as so dour. I remember a couple of the stories as being pretty bad, by the standards of such a critically well received book -- one, about a young doctor talking to a small-town mother with a meth-addicted son, seemed like he wrote it for an undergraduate workshop a week after reading a Reader's Digest feature about methamphetamine -- but mostly they just seemed like the same nuanced, bleak character studies I'd been reading for a couple of years. To quote my brother (and your Culturology contributor) Pete, talking about beer rather than literature: He said he once amused a beer distributor in Boston who had him taste some kind of small-batch craft microbrew, by reacting with, "Yeah, it's an excellent beer. So what?" As in, sure, it's really finely made, but there's nothing to distinguish it from any other really well-made beer, of which there's plenty. Similarly with literary short fiction. Yeah, it's a shaded, quietly devastating cameo portrait of the accumulated disappointments and only partially bridgeable emotional distances between us that characterize our modern lives. So what?
I haven't read George Saunders lately but his short fiction, while also unremittingly bleak, is also be really damn funny; his collections, if you haven't read them, might be a good antidote. I don't really want to return to the humorless sad-sack type of story yet but at the end of the day I still don't want to read something happy.
And to be fair, I read and entirely enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" a summer or two ago, which is generally both unfunny and rather depressing, but also just really well written.
I think Lahiri is a good example of why so many stories that are published are dour, which is partly because it's possible to enjoy even a sad/bleak/depressing story at the craft level with really good authors. I'd say, for instance, Lahiri's story "A Temporary Malady" from Interpreter of Maladies, while a brutal story emotional, is so exquisitely structured that I'll read it again and again.
But, Neal, the real answer to problem goes back to Aristotle. In his Poetics, he basically lays out reader expectations that have never really changed in the history of Western literature. It's a short enough book that you should just read it (everyone can stand a little classic theory here and there). But here's a relevant chunk from Section XIII:
So there, you can see, that's "literary" fictions model. It's about complicated humans going through some kind of reversal of situation, and it tends to be easier to do this with dour shit than with comic plots.
As for other books you might try reading, and these certainly contain their fair amount of downer content, but are overall quite enjoyable are Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You and David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
Way to go books category!
David Foster Wallace, like Dave Eggers, belongs to a category of writers whose style I find offputting. That said, I did see John Krasinki's adapation of Hideous Men - which did have a couple of funny interviews with hideous men (but not much else).
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i think short fiction pretty much blows, except for Super Foot to Head.
Super Foot to Head >>> David Foster Wallace & Dave Eggers
recently, i borrowed another anthology of poems/stories/essays from work called "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams"
there isn't a spirit lifting word in the entire volume. it was like reading a never ending poe ballantine book.
i mean, poe is actually fairly entertaining, but he writes you into fist clenching tears sometimes.
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