Best American Short Stories 2000

Introduction Here in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of the lyric poem. Given the great story writers Chekhov, or Joyce, or Hemingway we might wonder about this, except that Hemingway turned to novels after In Our Time just as Joyce didafter Dubliners. Chekhov in his maturity turned to drama. While there are exceptions Isaac Babel or Grace Paley, for example, writers-for-life of brilliant, tightly sprung prose designedly inhospitable to the long forms we may say that short stories are what young writers produce on their way to their first novels, or what older writers produce in between novels. The critic of fiction will hold title to all its estates, and the novel is a major act of the culture. Apart from that, it may be that the short story, as it has shifted historically from the episodic tale to the compressive illumination, can't sustain that much formal analysis. Some years ago, the late Frank O'Connor published a study of the genre entitled The Lonely Voice. O'Connor, himself a masterful writer of short stories, wanted to find some means of distinguishing the form from the novella and the novel. His title suggests the nature of his conclusion: it is not any particular technique of the short story that sets it apart, because as a selective rather than an inclusive art, it can construct itself in an endless number of ways. Nor is its length definitive, for, as he points out, not a few of the great examples of the genre are quite long. What makes the short story a distinct literary form, says O'Connor, is "its intense awareness of human loneliness." Sprung from Gogol's seminal story "The Overcoat," in which an impoverished clerk in winter manages to buy a warm overcoat only to have it stolen, a disaster that drives him to his death, the modern short story is a genre that deals with members of "submerged population groups," excluded by one means or another from living in the certainties of civilization people of a minority, outsiders, marginalists, for whom society provides no place or means of self-respect. By contrast, according to O'Connor, the fiction of the novel assumes that man is "an animal who lives in community, as in Jane Austen and Trollope it obviously does." But one can think immediately of stories rising from nonsubmerged populations, stories of people centrally located in community as they are in many of Katherine Mansfield's or Henry James's stories who are not of the alienated and marginalized, though they may come to be from their own actions. Perhaps anticipating this problem, O'Connor modifies his thesis to include in his submerged population groups people who are notmaterially but spiritually isolated artists, dreamers, idealists, antiheroes, visionaries, and so forth. But then who does not belong to a submerged population group? The lonely voice is a universal chorus, and we are left with the not terribly useful truism that the story as a form deals with the human condition. Besides which, one is immediately able to cite novels not at all as societally rooted as Austen's or Trollope's: Sartre's Nausea, for example, or Richard Wright's Native Son, or Samuel Beckett's Molloy trilogy, among others. These works bring their awareness of loneliness to a pitch that the word "intense" hardly begins to describe. So finally O'Connor's attempt to differentiate the short story as a genre by virtue of its sociology doesn't hold up under examination. On the other hand, if we deny it as a thesis, we can still accept it as an insight. We can acknowledge the tendency of the short story to isolate the individual paradoxically, perhaps, from the technical factorsDoctorow, E. L. is the author of 'Best American Short Stories 2000' with ISBN 9780395926871 and ISBN 0395926874.