You can tell that someone only listens to safe, contemporary,
mainstream music when they say that they like “any kind of music except
country or rap.” Those are not adventurous people. Likewise,
most booksellers can tell that they’re not dealing with the most
imaginative customer when said customer asks for recommendations with
the qualifier “I read anything except for short stories.”
Virtually any anthology of short stories begins with a claim that
the form is in trouble, and of course whatever anthology it
is—wonder of wonders—is living proof that they’re alive and
well. But most are bad: They’re like the abominable NOW That’s What
I Call Music samplers that are always topping the music charts. For
readers who are willing to take a chance, two recent short-story
collections do some excellent, interesting work.
John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is a
pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more
than just science fiction. The title story is a wry, mature
continuation of The Wizard of Oz. The last story, “Pride and
Prometheus,” is a miscegenation of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen wherein Victor Frankenstein tries to woo Mary Bennet. It’s the kind of
writing that only a serious reader could do, and the latter story
avoids the fan-fiction trap by convincingly emulating Austen’s prose.
“The Last American” is a history of America’s poisoning itself to death
with its own ideas, told from years in the future. The last president’s
life ends scandalously: “[t]he cross, the taser, the Shetland
pony.”
Literary short fiction is in worse shape than its genre relatives;
the Raymond Carver–esque short story that concludes with an
ambiguous-yet-slightly-depressing nonending has dominated the
consciousness for decades now. Nobody’s doing more to deliver new ideas
than Israeli author Etgar Keret. In his most recent book to be
translated to English, The Girl on the Fridge, there are almost
50 stories packed into 171 pages, but this isn’t the typical,
unsatisfying flash fiction; in stories of three pages or less, Keret
unveils little universes of weirdness and sorrow, but unlike, say,
Carver’s stories, they don’t feel like they were written 30 years ago.
A woman longs for a lover who is made of nothing. The dumbest Mossad
agent in the world tries to outsmart himself. A scientist develops
a pornographic way to make monkeys play along with her experiments. A
mob boss hosts a child’s birthday party.
Though the content doesn’t resemble Carver’s at all, Keret’s stories
resemble Carver’s in all the ways that matter. They feature people
feeling paranoid, or depressed, or any of the other things that people
feel. But the stories all involve some sort of change, either in the
reader’s perception of a character or in a character’s relationship to
the world, which is exactly what short stories are supposed to
do. 