PEN/O. Henry: 2012—Favorite Stories, Kindle Problems, and a Footnote on Where the Stories were Published

Yiyun Li, “Kindness”

In her essay on why Yiyun Li’s story “Kindness” is her favorite in this year’s PEN/O. Henry Stories, Mary Gaitskill says that interpretation of any kind seems “disrespectful” to the story.  After having read the story three times, I would say, rather, that “interpretation” is unnecessary.  The very fact that most of Gaitskill’s essay is simply a summary of the plot and a description of the central character of “Kindness” suggests that there is very little else to say about it.  It is a tale about one Chinese woman’s lonely life—fit stuff for a novel, but not a short story.  I have written about “Kindness” earlier on this blog in my discussion of Li’s collection Gold Boy, Emerald Girl when it was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize.   I was not impressed by the story then; I am not impressed by it now.

 Li says in her author comments that she patterned “Kindness” after one of her favorite William Trevor novels, Nights at the Alexandra. She says as she wrote it, she imagined her narrator speaking to Trevor’s narrator, since both characters lead stoically solitary lives. Although the central character in “Kindness” seems an exemplum of Frank O’Connor’s famous characterization of the short story as the “Lonely Voice,” Yiyun Li’s story is not a short story at all—not even, as Daniyal Mueenuddin suggests in his discussion of what the story is his favorite, a “novella.”  It is just a novel that happens to be shorter than most novels, although it is indeed the longest piece in this year’s PEN/O. Henry.  

With all due respect, I suspect that Gaitskill and Mueenuddin’s choice of the story as their favorite this year primarily reflects their preference—and the preference of most readers—for the novel form over the short story, especially if the novel provides some information about a hitherto unfamiliar culture in a linear way.  Both Gaitskill and Mueenuddin emphasize that it is the voice of the character Moyen that holds the story together, with Gaitskill saying it is her “modesty that gives the story its quiet desolate beauty” and Mueenuddin arguing that it is Moyen’s subtlety, which he sees a form of “manners,” that draws us into sympathy with her.

I did not feel that in any of my readings of the story.  What Gaitskill and Mueenuddin admire as Moyen’s modesty and manners, I see only as the simplicity of a character who holds back from any engagement with others because of her timidity, naïveté, and fear.  More acted upon than acting, Moyen is a nonentity who goes through life passively, with little or no emotional reaction to those around her.  Gaitskill says “Kindness” is an “ordinary story.  It is terrible how ordinary it is.”  I agree that it is a very ordinary story, and that is why I do not care for it.  It may be the favorite story of these two writers, but that may be because they prefer novels to short stories. 

Alice Munro, “Corrie”

I have already posted previously on Alice Munro’s story “Corrie,” (Oct. 18, 2010—“Corrie”) and I have written about it in some detail in the introduction to my forthcoming book: Critical Insights: Alice Munro.  I quote two paragraphs from that blog post:

“The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel.  In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place.  We make judgments on those people, as if they were like real people who live down the street or that we know from school or work.  If she were a character in a novel, we might say to Corrie, “Stupid woman, you are throwing your life away on that self-centered man, who will never leave his wife and come marry you.”  We might say to Ritchie, “You worthless bastard.  How could you ruin the life of this woman, while cheating on your wife?”

 But this short story does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments.  Instead, it allows us to contemplate not a particular affair, but rather the quintessential meaning of “affair.”  This is what Chekhov does so brilliantly in “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” a story that Munro knows is the classic “affair” story.  And “affair” is about secrecy, sacrifice, selfishness, retribution, and stasis.  This story does not embody a novelistic complexity about the evolution of experience over time, but rather short story complexity about the revelation of a secret that has sustained an intolerable situation for which someone always has to make payment.  We don’t have to get inside the head of Ritchie to see him scheme, nor inside the head of Corrie to see her suffer.  We only have to stand back a bit and watch this static universal drama reveal its dusty secrets.”

I, like Ron Rash, single out “Corrie” as my favorite in this year’s PEN/O. Henry.  I agree with Rash that short stories are closer to poems than to novels and that “Corrie” is “constructed with the precision of a formal poem.”   Rash says that each time he reads the story he becomes more aware of how “integral each detail is to the whole” with everything from paragraph breaks to commas set down in its “essential place.”  In my opinion, that is how it should be in a great short story.  Rash is just right to quote Muriel Spark’s judgment, “The role of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” That is indeed what Alice Munro has always done so very well.

Other Stories in PEN/O. Henry

 I have only discussed half the stories in this year’s PEN/O. Henry.  I read all the stories, but some of them just did not teach me anything, and I would find it tedious to talk about them.  I do, however, recommend the following three stories:  John Berger’s “A Brush,” Mark Slouka’s “The Hare’s Mask,” and Anthony Doerr’s “The Deep”—all three which seem to me to be models of what the short story does best—create a universal complex human experience by the careful poetic use of language.

Reading Stories on the Kindle Fire

One final word about my experience reading these stories on my Kindle Fire:  I prefer the book to the pad for reading short stories.  In fact, now that I have read PEN/O. Henry 2012 on the Kindle, I will probably order a paperback copy of it for my library, for I just do not trust the existence of the stories on a hard drive or in the cloud.  I know that when I buy a book, I buy the words and ideas, not the paper pages and covers, but there is something very comforting to me to be able to look at my shelves and see those books lined up there.  I can trust that nothing short of flood or fire will destroy them, whereas a hard drive is volatile and vulnerable and a cloud is downright flighty and undependable.

Another problem with reading these stories on the Kindle are the highlighting and note taking functions.  I did purchase a stylus and have found highlighting is much more accurate with it. Taking notes on the small touch screen is also easier with a stylus, though I still cannot take notes on the Kindle as easily as I do in the margins of my books.

The most troublesome problem I have had is that after highlighting and taking notes on several stories, I opened my Kindle one morning to find all the highlights and notes had disappeared.  And I cannot seem to get them back.  I checked several discussion groups and discovered this is a common problem with the Kindle Fire.  I do not know why Amazon has not dealt with it. My highlights and notes are all available on the Amazon website at kindle.amazon.com/high_lights, but they exist there simply in a list; they no longer exist where I want them—in the stories themselves on my Kindle hard drive or in the cloud. This is a serious problem for folks like me who read short stories interactively rather than passively.  I appeal to Amazon to fix this.  If anyone out there has a solution to this problem, I would love to hear it.

Footnote on Sources of the Stories in PEN/O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories

The Cumulative Indexes volume of the ten-volume fourth edition set of Critical Survey of Short Fiction that I edited recently for Salem Press includes the tables of contents for all the volumes of the Best American Short Story Series and the O. Henry Award series (named the PEN/O. Henry Award since 2009). The Best American Short Story series began in 1915; the O. Henry Award series began in 1919. (Note:  If you are interested, the first BASS volume of 1915 is available as a free Kindle download from Amazon.  If you do not have a Kindle, you can download a Kindle player on your computer and then download and read the stories in that first volume.)

I did a casual survey of the BASS and O. Henry volumes for the past twelve years just to see where most of the chosen stories were originally published.  You might be interested to know that approximately 50% of all the stories in the last twelve years in both annual volumes come from just eight different sources:  Here they are, in approximate percentages:

The New Yorker—20%

Harper’s—6%

Tin House—6%

Atlantic—4%

Ploughshares—4%

Zoetrope—4%

Granta—3%

McSweeney’s—3%

No surprise that The New Yorker accounts for the most prize-winning stories: 

They publish over fifty a year compared to usually no more than twelve in the others.

And they pay better than any of the others; thus, well known writers submit there.

Novella, Short Novel, Long Story: Four Contemporary Examples

You can bet that whenever a critic reviews a new collection of short stories that includes a long story, or what the reviewer sometimes terms a “novella,” he or she will usually argue that the long story is the best, most complex, story in the collection. This is often a result of the unexamined assumption that a novel, by its very length, is more complex than a short story and that since the word “novella” has the word “novel” embedded in it, it must be that a novella, by its very length, and thus its similarity to a novel, must also be more complex than a short story.

However, the word “novella” did not originate as a generic term for a long fiction, but rather for a short one. The word "novella" comes from the Latin word novellus, a diminutive of the word novus, which means "new." It first became associated with the telling of stories in the thirteenth century with collections of "new" versions of old saint's tales, exempla, chivalric tales, and ribald stories. Eventually, the term became associated with tales that were fresh, strange, unusual--stories, in short, that were worth the telling. The most decisive historical event to establish the term "novella" as a designation for a "new" kind of fiction was Boccaccio's decision to give the name "novella" to the tales included in the Decameron in the fourteenth century.

What made Boccaccio's stories "new" was the fact that they marked a shift from the sacred world of Dante's "divine" comedy to the profane world of Boccaccio's "human" comedy. However, the resulting realism of the Decameron should not be confused with the realism developed by the eighteen-century novel. The focus in Boccaccio's tales is not on a character presented in a similitude of everyday life, but on the traditional world of story, in which characters serve primarily as "functions" of the tale.

With Cervantes, in the sixteenth century, as with Boccaccio before him, something "new" also characterizes the novella. First, Cervantes in his Exemplary Novels (which are of the length we usually associate nowadays with the “novella,” i.e. a long story) does not present himself as a collector of traditional tales but as an inventor of original stories. As a result, he becomes an observer and recorder of concrete details in the external world and a student of the psychology of individual characters. Although plot is still important, character becomes more developed than it was in the Decameron, and thus psychological motivation rather than story motivation is emphasized. Characters do not exist solely for the roles they play in the stories, but also for their own sake as if they were real.

In Germany, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the novella began to detach itself from the notion of the form inspired by Boccaccio and Cervantes and to be supported by a theory of its own and also to be associated with a long story and termed novelle. It is this form that Henry James refers to in his preface to Lesson of the Master, calling the “beautiful and blest nouvelle” his “ideal,” adding that the “main merit” of which is “the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity—to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control.” James’s conviction is that the novella may be more complex than the short story, but that it has the brevity and control of the short story—that it is not “complicated” in the same way the novel is.

One of the best suggestions I have read about the difference between the “complications” of the novel and the “complications” of the novella was made by John Gardner and Lennis Dunlap in the textbook collection of short stories they edited in 1962, The Form of Fiction. They refer to the long story as a short novel.

“Because the short novel writer tends to follow a single character, the rhythm of the short novel is usually like that of the story, not like that of many novels, in which points of tension arise first in an episode concerned with one character, then in an episode concerned with another. Also, action in the short novel—almost necessarily—tends toward symbolic meaning. Whereas the short story writer characteristically explores meaning in some basic situation, the short novel writer concerns himself with a protracted action; and since the short novelist usually cannot enrich the protracted action he is presenting by juxtaposing it against another protracted action within the work, as would the novelist, he tends to enrich and the same time unify the total action by exploring it in symbolic terms. That is, in addition to imagistic symbolism, the short novel writer is likely to use symbolic juxtapositions of action, either within the total action or between actions in the work and actions lying outside it.

“Since the use of action as symbol is often apparent only in retrospect, that is, only after the pattern is established, symbolism borne by action, unlike imagistic symbolism, is not likely to leap out at the reader each time it appears.

“The point here is not that the short novel must be symbolic on the level of action or that the short story and novel may never use symbolism in this way. But such symbolism is far more common in good short novels than in good short stories and novels and may therefore be considered a common, though not an essential, feature of the form.”

Irving Howe, in his introduction to Classics of Modern Fiction: Eight Short Novels, (1968), has also suggested this notion of symbolic action in the short novel or novella:

“Whereas the short-story writer tries to strike off a flash of insight and the novelist tries to create an illusion of a self-sufficient world, the author of the short novel is frequently concerned with showing an arc of human conduct that has a certain symbolic significance. The short novel is a form that encourages the writer to struggle with profound philosophic or moral problems through a compact yet extended narrative. In fact, it seems to be the one literary genre in modern times capable of performing the functions that in earlier ages was the privilege of allegory. The material in a short novel is full enough to allow its symbolic significance to emerge with greater complexity than could be expected from a short story; it is brief enough to ensure the work’s being self-contained, compressed, and disciplined.”

Judith Leibowitz, in her book Narrative Purpose in the Novella (1974) says that the generically distinct nature of the novella is its double effect of “intensity and expansion.” She notes that all the thematic motifs in the novella are interrelated, which creates an intensity of focus: “This outward expansion from a limited focus is the effect of the typical plot construction of the novella. The action in a novella does not give the effect of continuous progression, of a large area being covered as in the novel, but of a limited area being explored intensively. The action is generally compressed by means of a repetitive structure.”

Anyone familiar with the classics of the novella form in the nineteenth and twentieth century will sense the rightness of these suggestions about symbolic action, intensity of focus, and compression. Consider the following, for example:

Kafka, Metamorphosis

Conrad, Heart of Darkness

James, Beast in the Jungle

Lawrence, The Fox

Mann, Death in Venice

McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café

Porter, Noon Wine

Melville, Billy Budd

Roth, Goodbye, Columbus

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Joyce, The Dead

Steinbeck, The Pearl

Salinger, Franny

Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever

Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

Alice Munro, Love of a Good Woman

Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours

I have already commented in early blog posts on Yiyun Li’s “Kindness,” Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending—contemporary novellas/short novels/long stories (what you will) that have bee critically well received. All three have some of the aspects we often associate with novels; for example, all three deal with the whole life of a central character—well, not the whole life, but rather significant chunks of the whole life of the character, and all three seem firmly contextualized within an historical epoch or era. They also exhibit some of the aspects we associate with the short story; for example, all three, in addition to being organized historically, are also organized thematically, with episodes selected to symbolically echo the central theme; and all three are relatively tightly organized, with few of the extraneous asides and subplots that we often associate with novels.

Much the same can be said of Anthony Doerr’s novella-length title story from his prize-winning collection, Memory Wall. Doerr’s story covers the whole life of its central character, seventy-four-year-old Alma Konachek, by using a futuristic concept of storing her memories (rapidly fading from her mind by dementia) on recorded cartridges. Thus, the concept of a whole life, which is embodied somewhat chronologically in the other three novellas under consideration here, is concretely embodied.

At one point, Alma’s doctor tells her: “Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.” Doerr echoes this notion of memory with Alma’s husband Harold’s obsession with a rare fossil, and with the general notion of time being compressed/preserved in a spatial way. When one character stares at a photo of Harold, he thinks he is “doomed to repeat the same project over and over, hunting among a thousand things for a pattern, searching a convoluted landscape for the remains of one thing that has come before.”

The question of whether these four works are long stories, short novels, or novellas is first of all a marketing issue. If the work is marketed in a single volume, as it is for The Sense of an Ending and Train Dreams, the publisher, appealing to the public preference will label it on the cover as a novel. If it is in a collection or short stories, it may be labeled as a novella, e.g. subtitled something like “Selected Stories and a Novella.” The phrase “short novel” has no real marketing value.

In my opinion, there is a critical difference between a novel that is short and a story that is long. Both in its tradition and in its way of meaning, the novella is closer to the short story than to the novel. Indeed, any time the novella begins to veer away from short story technique and closer to novel technique, it is perhaps better to use the term “short novel” to refer to it. In other words, in my opinion, a short novel is just a novella badly done, or a novel that just happens to be short.

Which of the four cited works would I call short novels and which would I call novellas? I think Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a short novel, for Barnes too often indulges in the novelistic temptation to ruminate, pontificate, and wander about in seemingly interesting, but not really thematically essential sidebars. I also think Yiyun Li’s “Kindness” is more like a short novel than a long story, for it mostly just charts the lonely life of a single character within the context of her social life in the Chinese army.

However, I see Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” as being more like a novella or long story in its use of myth, legend, symbolism, and in its thematic organization around repeated motifs. I also see Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall” as more like a novella or long story in its single-minded focus on the theme of memory, although I find it much more self-consciously constructed and less magical than “Train Dreams.”

Why are these generic terms important? Well, as I have suggested before, you cannot really read a work in any meaningful way unless you have some orientation as to “how” it means and thus what to expect from it. Of course, generic expectations can be exploded by a good writer, who always manages to create a new thing out of an old thing. But, the reader still has to have some familiar starting point in order to understand the new thing. Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner talk about this dual process of assimilation and accommodation in a child’s development. And E. H. Gombrich discuses it in relationship to art in Art and Illusion, 1960.