In the Autumn of Life

Posted 15 October, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

October, by Richard B. Wright. HarperCollins, $32.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN: 978-0-00-200689-7.

Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, by D.R. MacDonald. HarperCollins, $34.95 cloth, 366 pp., ISBN: 978-1-55468-063-4.

Two new novels from heavyweight Canadian writers — both of which recently found their way onto this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist — take up the subject of men in the autumn of their lives, albeit from different perspectives and to different effects. The two novels — Richard B. Wright’s October, his second since snagging the triple crown of the Giller, Governor General’s, and Trillium prizes for his 2001 novel Clara Callan, and D.R. MacDonald’s Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, his follow-up to the well-received Cape Breton Road — along with Philip Roth’s just-released Exit Ghost, could easily demarcate fall 2007 as the literary season of old men.

On the surface, these two writers could not be more dissimilar. Wright’s prose is spare and unadorned, virtually bereft of adverbs, flayed to the very sinew and marrow. MacDonald, by contrast, is given to long flights of lyrical description, both of the exterior Cape Breton landscape, and the interior landscapes of his characters’ psyches.

However, beyond the stylistic differences that separate these two writers, the deeper thematic concerns in their new novels are strikingly similar: the dissolution of the body in old age, a kind of wistful pining for the lost or squandered opportunities of youth, and a sense of regret over roads abandoned or not taken.

As October opens, the narrator, seventy-four-year-old James Hillyer, a retired professor of Victorian literature, receives a phone call from Susan, his daughter in England. Susan has just found out that she has breast cancer, the same kind that took her mother’s life twenty-two years previously. James immediately books a plane ticket to England to be with his daughter.

During their time together, Susan tells her father the details of her diagnosis and Wright provides us with a virtuoso dinner sequence — the first of several dinner scenes in the novel — during which Susan confesses that her bedside reading has become cancer memoirs: “It must be a new genre … The bookstores have entire shelves devoted to them. They’re in with the self-help and yoga stuff. Mostly written by peppy women from California who jog ten miles a day and belong to little groups who meet each week and talk about ‘their brush with death.’”

Susan’s descriptions of cancer as a grass fire and a thief come to steal away her healthy blood cells provide a perspective on the disease that is at once unapologetically literary and perfectly apt: “Funny how the only way we can picture cancer is through metaphor. A grass fire. A sneak thief. A little ravaging fiend inside you. But however you want to picture the damn thing, it’s on a rampage, the cells dividing and multiplying, consuming the healthy ones.”

The chapter ends with father and daughter standing together in front of a school chapel while the choir inside rehearses: “For all the saints who from their labours rest, / Who thee by faith before the world confessed, / Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest.” Had Wright stopped there, it would have made a perfect little jewel of a short story. However, the chapter involving James and Susan is merely prologue: the real story has yet to begin. When the scene shifts at the beginning of the following chapter, the reader is brought up hard on the cusp of a realization: the novel isn’t about James and Susan at all; Susan will not reappear in the narrative present until the very end of the book.

Walking through Oxford the day after his dinner with his daughter, James happens across Gabriel Fontaine, an American with whom he was acquainted during his adolescence. As a young man of fourteen, James is sent to Percé, Quebec, to spend the summer of 1944 with an uncle, because his mother has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. While in Percé, James is thrown together with Gabriel, two years his senior and suffering from polio. Gabriel is brash and loud and dying to “get in” with Odette Huard, a French-Canadian chambermaid whom James also fancies.

The story of James and Gabriel in Percé is told in chapters that alternate with chapters set in the fall of 2004. Following their surprise meeting, Gabriel tells James that he too has been stricken with cancer and makes a startling proposition: he requests that James accompany him to Zurich, where he is to be euthanized.

The shifting focus in the book, away from Susan and onto Gabriel, calls forth a series of questions. Why introduce the daughter’s character only to abandon her more or less precipitously at the end of the first chapter? Since the meeting with Gabriel is completely coincidental anyway, was there not another excuse for getting James to England? For that matter, why does the encounter have to happen in England?

Wright is too careful a writer not to have a reason for constructing his story in this way. The alternating chapters featuring James in the summer of 1944 and the fall of 2004 serve as a kind of literary point-counterpoint: the moral education of a young man played off against the grown man’s sense of duty to his erstwhile companion. And certainly James himself finds it easier to cope with Gabriel’s disease than with Susan’s: Gabriel is in his seventies, after all, and is not a figure for whom James felt a huge amount of sympathy during their summer together.

It is to Wright’s credit that he refuses to portray James as anything resembling a saint; he is an admittedly self-absorbed character who confesses early on to being hurt that Susan chose her best friend over him as the first person to divulge her diagnosis to: “Our absurd vanities. Our desperate need to believe that we are always foremost in our children’s thoughts. And this helpless pandering to self-regard invades everything even at the worst moments in life.”

Still, by afflicting Susan with a terminal disease then summarily abandoning her to her fate, Wright has essentially positioned her as a literary MacGuffin: she sets the story in motion, but doesn’t really have any role to play in it. The reader is left to ponder the extent to which Susan’s diagnosis affects James’s response to Gabriel in the narrative present. Does he agree to accompany Gabriel to Zurich as a means of bringing himself closer to his daughter’s experience, or as a means of distancing himself from it?

For the balance of the novel, we as readers must judge the distance between what we know of James as an adolescent and what we know of him as an adult. The simultaneous envy with which James views the young Gabriel’s sexual success with women, particularly Odette, and the instinctual revulsion he feels toward the other boy’s more cavalier attitudes provide the basis for the antipodean responses he experiences in the present. But the seventy-four-year-old James is stricken by a kind of melancholic nostalgia for his lost youth, a sense that, whatever the difficulties he experienced that summer, life was simpler then, less muddy, if only because he had yet to truly confront the crushing weight of loss.

This same sense of regret pervades D.R. MacDonald’s Lauchlin of the Bad Heart. The central figure in the novel, Lauchlin MacLean, was a promising welterweight boxer in his twenties, until his ambitions were stymied by a weak heart. Now in his fifties, MacLean lives with his aging mother in the town of St. Aubin, “not a village as such anyway but the remnants of a run of small farms laid out down a long road.”

Lauchlin’s heart kept him out of boxing when he was young, and now he has retired from teaching and works part-time in the general store that his mother owns. The store is the locus of town gossip and chatter, the hub around which the town’s social network spins: “Locals knew of course just what they could get from MacLean’s and what not, but for most of them what they got was something not for sale — an exchange of mutual concerns and common interests, a connection.” Lauchlin spends the bulk of his days reminiscing with his old friend Malcolm and pining for his first love, Morag, who has moved to Boston. The two maintain an on-again-(mostly)-off-again relationship, which they pick up each summer when Morag returns for a visit home.

In the meantime, Lauchlin occupies himself by bedding various women in the town, preferring the married ones who come with a built-in escape clause. In the words of his brother, Frank, a successful Toronto doctor, “You don’t love women for the long haul, do you, Brother? It’s just not in you.”

The latest married woman to stake a claim on Lauchlin’s bad heart is Tena MacTavish, the blind wife of Clement MacTavish, an occasional drinking buddy of Lauchlin’s. Tena convinces Lauchlin to read to her and to play her audiotapes of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot; as the two grow closer to each other, they attract the attention of the town gossips, who waste no time spreading baseless rumours around the tiny hamlet. At the same time, Clement has a falling out with his business partner, Ged Cooper, a dangerous man who may or may not be stalking the sightless Tena.

MacDonald has torn several pages from the Hemingway playbook for this novel: the story is a whisky-soaked paean to macho masculinity, with its many scenes of boxing and bare-knuckle brawling, and its insistence on the primacy of male virility (the worst thing that Lauchlin can conceive of for his old age is to retain his sexual urges, but lose the physical prowess to follow through on them).

There is an unmistakably elegiac quality to MacDonald’s novel; what Lauchlin mourns is not just his individual youth and potential, which fell victim to the same heart condition that claimed his father, but also “the glory days when Cape Breton was called the Cradle of Canadian Boxing.” The diminution of the town’s fortunes is reflected in Lauchlin’s own nickname: the promising young boxer who everyone called “Lightning Lauchlin MacLean” becomes “Lauchlin of the Bad Heart” after he is sidelined by ill health.

Lauchlin of the Bad Heart is not a novel that can be read quickly. Its pace is languid (although it tends to come alive during the boxing sequences) and there are sections of the novel that positively drag. It may fit into the loose literary subgenre of “Maritime Gothic” thanks to its frankly melodramatic final stages. But for all that there is nevertheless something painfully human and almost unutterably sad at its core. Looking over a life of missed opportunities and contemplating one last chance for redemption, Lauchlin, and the novel that features him, cannot help but succumb to a kind of sepia-toned melancholy, a longing for an imperfect past as a balm to an unforgiving present.

As Lauchlin’s brother writes in a note toward the end of the novel: “It seems you have to sin like hell first, rack up a lot to atone for, and then come to God and the religious life. Are we ready yet?”

And Speaking of Atwood, There’s Always Next Year

Posted 11 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Doris Lessing.

Want to Receive a Love Letter from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?

Posted 11 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

And, really, who wouldn’t? Or how about Leonard Cohen? Or Margaret Atwood? … Okay, perhaps I overreached a bit on that last one.

London’s Times Online is offering literary starfuckers booklovers the opportunity to receive five days’ worth of love letters from writers, sent directly to their inboxes. The letters are taken from an upcoming book entitled Four Letter Word, so they won’t be personalized, but they might in fact be a bit spicy. Then again, the book’s title could just be a tease.

Also, the Times site offers no indication that the three listed authors — Adichie, Atwood, and Cohen — will necessarily be among the five sent to any given user, nor is there any indication of who the other two might be. Imagine opening your inbox one fine morning in October only to discover a love letter from Norman Mailer. The mind boggles.

[UPDATE: These letters may indeed be spicy: Quillblog reports that the Times Online promotion is restricted to people eighteen years of age and older. Which, being an online endeavour, is certain to be strictly enforced …]

My Review …

Posted 10 October, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

… of Curtis Gillespie’s novel Crown Shyness, from the October 7 edition of the Edmonton Journal, is online, here.

Trying Desperately to Hold My Tongue

Posted 9 October, 2007 in Book News | 6 comments

M. G. Vassanji is now poised to be the first person in the fourteen-year history of the Scotiabank Giller Prize to win the award three times.

It is by no means a certainty, however the appearance of his novel, The Assassin’s Song, on the prize shortlist, announced this morning at a press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, brings him one step closer to that milestone.

Vassanji faces some high profile competition. Also on the shortlist are Elizabeth Hay, for her novel Late Nights on Air, Michael Ondaatje, for Divisadero, and Alissa York, for Effigy. The fifth place, traditionally the dark horse spot, went to A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, with a translation by Donald Winkler.

Clearly eschewing last year’s template, which favoured short stories, works in translation, and books published by smaller presses, the 2007 jury, composed of novelists David Bergen and Camilla Gibb, and poet and artist Lorna Goodison, have settled on books by big names, published by major houses. York’s novel is published by Random House, Hay and Ondaatje are published by McClelland & Stewart (which is effectively the same thing),* and Vassanji is published by Doubleday, which published last year’s winner, Vincent Lam. The odd men out here are Poliquin and Winkler, whose novel in translation is published by Vancouver-based Douglas & McIntyre.

The biggest disappointment of the year must be for HarperCollins, which had no fewer than five titles on the longlist, not a single one of which made the final cut.

At the press conference, prize founder Jack Rabinovitch praised the jurors, who read 108 books from forty-six different publishers in order to determine the five finalists.

Rabinovitch went on to mention the longlist, now in its second year, calling it “a wonderful way of letting people know that there are more than just the five shortlisted authors … that there is a tremendous depth of talent in this country that has not only been nationally recognized but internationally recognized.”

John Doig, vice president for marketing at Scotiabank, referred to “the rich culture and heritage that defines our great country,” and asserted that “we are full of pride when we see the Scotiabank Giller Prize come to the attention of media and cultural communities, helping raise awareness of great Canadian authors here and abroad.”

Suzanne Boyce, president of creative content for CTV, the network that will broadcast the awards ceremony live on November 6, said in her comments that “there is nothing more delicious than to pick up a book by an author one does not know and just to go into that world.” (Which seems like an odd thing to say, given the preponderance of names such as Ondaatje and Vassanji on this year’s shortlist, but nevermind.)*

Rabinovitch went on to mention a conversation he had at Word on the Street in Toronto with last year’s winner, Vincent Lam, who had just returned from a publicity trip to the States, where he said that people were “envious” of Canada’s Giller Prize and the focus it brings to the literary community. “Traditionally Canadians have looked south,” Rabinovitch said, but when it came to “that televised show on literature in Canada,” Lam was surprised to be told that “what we’re doing here, they haven’t done there.” (Which strikes me as yet another instance of a kind of insidious parochialism on the part of Canadians — particularly those of us who work in the arts — who seem to assume that our culture has little value unless we’re able to make Americans take notice. But, again, nevermind.)*

So, let the horse-race begin. There is sure to be much chatter, conspiracy-theorizing, cavilling, and grandstanding in the days ahead, so stay tuned. This year, your humble correspondent will take it upon himself to read the five shortlisted titles and provide some chatter (and probably no small amount of grandstanding) of his own.

*I tried, okay, I really, really tried.

I’m a Bit Late with This One …

Posted 5 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

… but, in case you’re interested, my review of Dave Margoshes’ Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories is online, here.

The Winner of the 2006 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award …

Posted 5 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

… is Vancouver-born, Quebec-based Madeline Thien, for her novel Certainty. Congratulations to Thien, and to the five other nominated writers (Peter Behrens for The Law of Dreams, John Degen for The Uninvited Guest, Annette Lapointe for Stolen, Heather O’Neill for Lullabies for Little Criminals, and Adam Lewis Schroeder for Empress of Asia).

A Crazy Idea that Just Might Work

Posted 5 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Jacob McArthur Mooney, a twenty-four year-old Nova Scotian now doing graduate work in Toronto, has found an innovative potential solution to the perennial problem of literary journals’ declining readership. His idea? Transplant a literary journal onto the hottest social networking site around.

Welcome to The Facebook Review.

According to the bumpf on the review’s Facebook page, “Our manifesto is humble and somewhat weak-kneed. Apologies. All we want is to publish the best work by Facebook members and to do so free-of-charge, free-of-cost, and completely within the confines of the Facebook network and software environment.”

Mooney, who is no stranger to literary journals, having upcoming poems in Zygote, Prairie Fire, and the Literary Review of Canada, and being himself the poetry editor for the online journal ThievesJargon.com, decided on Facebook as a platform for his new literary review “because it is a massively popular social phenomenon that seems to serve no purpose except to be a massively popular social phenomenon. I’m interested in what Facebook can do, what its outer limits might be. Without moving outside of its narrow parameters of shape, size, colour, and scope, what kind of art can it contain?”

To this end, Mooney is soliciting submissions of poetry, prose poetry, short fiction, and drama. (And, before you ask, no, the contributors will not get paid.) The content for the first issue will be edited by Mooney, but subsequent issues will be edited by what the site calls an “editorial train” of writers from the previous issue.

For example, lets [sic] say issue #1 features work by 15 pink fluffy bunny rabbits. Once issue #1 goes live, our managing editor will forward the contents of his inbox to each fluffy bunny. The bunnies will read through the pile of would-be contributors and decide if they like any of them. Each bunny will then send the managing editor a “vouch” list of work they liked from the submitted pile, and the, say, 15 or so submissions with the most vouches will make up the content for issue #2.

Mooney’s inspiration for this rather iconoclastic editorial set-up was the nature of Facebook itself. “It’s essentially about taking the ethic of open-source and laying it over the necessity of running a literary journal.” He is aware that he is giving up a certain amount of control over the journal’s contents as a result, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. “It’s exciting (and, obviously, terrifying) to be associated with something that I will soon have next to no control over the ‘quality’ of.”

The relative strength of each issue, content-wise, will be determined not by Mooney, but by “the revolving door of editor-writers.” This idea could, indeed, result in a diversity of content from issue to issue, since the sensibilities of the editorial staff will be in constant flux. It also could be a recipe for anarchy. But, ultimately, it’s not the work itself that interests Mooney in this particular online experiment: “My interest is not in publishing great work (although that would be nice). My interest is more in how the organism survives. How it sees itself.”

So far, the response has been very favourable. “We’re at the twenty-four-hour mark of the pre-issue one review and we have about 225 members and about twenty submissions. Which is more than we get in a day at TheivesJargon.”

As to how the journal grows or develops, Mooney says that’s not up to him. But he rules out any later life off the Facebook platform. “I’d much rather kill it than take it off Facebook. The internet is full of great sites doing the same thing as us in a less site-specific environment.”

So where The Facebook Review goes, and how it metamorphoses under the aegis of its ever-changing editorial board, is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch its progress as it rolls out its inaugural issue.

[UPDATE: This kind of project does come with certain copyright considerations, as Sam Worthington, of Halifax, NS, points out on The Facebook Review page. Worthington quotes the following from Facebook’s privacy policy:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Mooney acknowledges this rubric, but writes that there’s no evidence that Facebook is using user-generated content for their own purposes. Mooney writes: “Certainly, a person would want to consider this when submitting work, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we’re saying that FB would move on ownership rights of individual works. Whatever would they want it for?”

Nevertheless, the potential for Facebook to assert these rights is there and writers submitting material should be aware of this before they press “send.”]

The Novelist at Play

Posted 2 October, 2007 in Book Reviews | 3 comments

The Girls Who Saw Everything, by Sean Dixon. Coach House Press, 304 pp., $21.95 tpb, ISBN: 978-1-55245-184-7.

Of all the words one could marshal to describe the pantheon of Canadian literature, playful would never top the list. Dour, yes. Inward, certainly. Sombre, for sure. But not many Canadian novels, or Canadian novelists, have tried to be playful. There are exceptions — Ray Smith comes to mind, as do Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler — but by and large the common perception seems to be that playfulness in novels should be equated with frivolity, which is not befitting an important work of literature. Literature, it is assumed by Canadian critics and prize juries alike, if it is to have any value, is meant to be about weighty subjects: war, famine, familial strife. If an author is playful in his or her approach, by implication, that person can’t be engaged in any serious literary endeavour.

Which makes Sean Dixon’s debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, something of an anomaly. Here is a novel whose opening scene features a young couple seeking asylum in a Montreal warehouse in March 2003 to negotiate the transfer of sex for money, only to be interrupted by a young woman falling through the ceiling. The victim of the unfortunate tumble, Runner Coghill, is a member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, a cadre of females — and one transvestite — who gather to enact the books they read together.

For The Autobiography of Red, for example, the cabalists painted themselves from head to toe before giving a public reading of the text at the Montreal airport. When they read In the Skin of a Lion, officially their favourite book, they “headed down to Place des Arts on a Sunday and tried to depict the scene of the nun swinging from the bridge builder’s broken arm … One of our members nearly hanged herself.”

On the day that Runner crashes through the warehouse ceiling, she is planning to bring to the group her suggestion for their next reading experience. She and her younger brother, Neil, have come into possession of the ten original stone tablets that make up The Epic of Gilgamesh, long believed to be the most ancient book in the world.

As the young women begin to act out the episodes contained in the stone tablets, they unleash a chaotic whirlwind that involves, among other things, the leader of the group canvassing the local dives in search of promiscuous sex in order that she might conceive a child; the expulsion of the book’s own narrators; a cameo appearance by the Baghdad Blogger; and the fitzbot, an artificial intelligence device “programmed initially to seek cover and comfort in the shadows and avoid other ambulatory creatures (including humans).”

All of this surface chaos is handled deftly and lightly, and although the novel is briskly paced it never feels rushed. This has much to do with the underlying structure, which follows the source material fairly closely (it is helpful, although not essential, to have at least a passing familiarity with The Epic of Gilgamesh before reading Dixon’s novel, in order to fully appreciate the extent to which he has incorporated it). Dixon also references a number of different, sometimes competing, translations and interpretations of the original text to underscore his persistent critique of the nature of storytelling and the shifting reliability of narration and interpretation.

The novel is infused with sex and literary in-jokes and the postmodern device of self-reflexive footnotes to spice up the story. But its surface playfulness masks a deeper seriousness: there is death in the novel, and war (the story’s setting, March 2003, uses the backdrop of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to add an archly political aspect), and a recognition of human fragility and loneliness. These themes, which are deeply and inextricably embedded, put the lie to the notion that a Canadian novel must affect a stentorian pose in order to be worthy of consideration. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death”; Sean Dixon would surely agree.

The Girls Who Saw Everything can be read variously as a raucous comedy, a work of literary archaeology, and a wry commentary on our uncertain, postmodern era. But above all, it serves as a welcome corrective to all those who believe that in order to deal with serious subjects, Canadian literature must itself remain unblinkingly serious and remote.

Life on the Bottom Shelf

Posted 1 October, 2007 in Writing Life | No comments

Stephen King’s experience editing the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories leads him to write a thoughtful New York Times Book Review essay about the current state of the American short story. In taking the pulse of the short story today, King finds that there are still stories being written, but the audience for them is dwindling.

This is not news (although it does frequently surprise me that in our current attention-deficit culture the shorter form is not embraced more wholeheartedly). Nor is King’s assessment of one key reason for this state of affairs, notwithstanding the fact that very few commentators are courageous enough to point it out publicly.

The largest market for new short stories is literary journals, which are confined to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack at big box stores such as Barnes & Noble, or Indigo here in Canada. This in itself is a problem, since browsers are not likely to scour the bottom shelf of the magazine rack for the new issue of Grain or Fiddlehead, preferring, as King points out, the more accessible mainstream publications at eye level. (Of these, the titles not devoted to cover profiles of Britney Spears’s latest travails or the speculations about J-Lo’s tummy bump largely don’t feature fiction; Harper’s and The New Yorker are exceptions, and the Atlantic now publishes short fiction only once a year, in its summer issue.)

But that’s not the whole problem; what’s significant is what King sees as the net result of consignment to the bottom shelf. King goes on to point out that much of the fiction that appears in the smaller journals is written in a kind of echo chamber, with MFA-laden writers scouring the pages of stories written by other MFAs to find out what sells, then crafting more of the same. These stories feature a kind of creative-writing-school-induced mustiness that might appeal to writers who have emerged from the cocoon-like embrace of a writing workshop where they learned about “the 5 essential elements of dynamic story structure” or “the 3 secrets of building powerful, unforgettable characters.”* But it’s by no means clear that they will appeal to anybody else. Why? Solipsism is rarely appealing to anybody other than the solipsist. As Virginia Woolf said in different circumstances, “life escapes.”

King puts it this way in his essay:

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

And that seems about right to me. Where I would respectfully differ from King’s analysis is in the reason for this kind of story dominating literary journals. King feels that the bottom shelf is to blame. If the organs that publish short fiction are placed out of the easy access of a mass audience, King argues, the only people willing to hunt for them will be those with a vested interest in what they offer: specifically, other writers, who will then begin to reflect in their own writing the same kinds of things they read in the journals. Thus, the echo chamber.

However, there may be a kind of chicken-and-egg effect here. Perhaps the journals’ consignment to the bottom shelf has as much to do with the kinds of stories that get published in them — that is, the “airless,” “show-offy,” and “self-important” kind that King bemoans — as with the dwindling audience. In other words, perhaps King has it backwards. Perhaps it’s not the placement of the journals and the consequent dwindling audience that resulted in the echo chamber. Perhaps it’s the echo chamber that resulted in the dwindling audience and the consequent consignment to the bottom shelf.

This being the case, there is a relatively simple approach that might have some positive effect in luring people back to the short form: stop writing for the echo chamber and start writing for readers. This would not result in an automatic 180-degree reversal of the short story’s fortunes, but it would be a good start. So long as the stories that get accepted for publication in journals continue to feature a parade of empty formalism and pale, self-satisfied navel gazing, the vibrancy that infused the great stories of the past — think Poe, think Faulkner, think Hemingway, think O’Connor, think Cheever — is likely to remain absent, as is the audience for the short form.

*In case you think I’m making these up, I’m not: they are part of what you can learn at what’s being billed as “Writer’s Boot Camp,” a two-day seminar offered by the Toronto Writers’ Centre.