'this recording' published my essay
re 'kmart realism'
relevant links: 'on the new fiction' (1985), 'the fiction we deserve'* (1987), 'the minimalist short story'* (1996), frederick barthelme interview* (2004), kmart, 'kmart realism'—the rise, struggle, decline of (2005), giant 'joy williams' post (2005), dennis cooper re joy williams (2006), frederick barthelme & 'the mississippi review' (2007), noon magazine (2007), james purdy (2008), 'honored guest' by joy williams (2009), 'kmart realism' contextualized (via chart) (2010), 'the future of the novel' essay (2011), extensive 'lecture notes' re 'kmart realism' (2011)
here are books i like that i think of as 'kmart realist' in some way
relevant links: 'on the new fiction' (1985), 'the fiction we deserve'* (1987), 'the minimalist short story'* (1996), frederick barthelme interview* (2004), kmart, 'kmart realism'—the rise, struggle, decline of (2005), giant 'joy williams' post (2005), dennis cooper re joy williams (2006), frederick barthelme & 'the mississippi review' (2007), noon magazine (2007), james purdy (2008), 'honored guest' by joy williams (2009), 'kmart realism' contextualized (via chart) (2010), 'the future of the novel' essay (2011), extensive 'lecture notes' re 'kmart realism' (2011)
*can be read in [this post's comments section] via comments 41, 42, 43
here are books i like that i think of as 'kmart realist' in some way
(1926) the sun also rises by ernest hemingwayeach feels distinct to me; i look at the title/date of one & feel different than when i look at the title/date of any other
(1939) good morning, midnight by jean rhys
(1943) two serious ladies by jane bowles
(1957) color of darkness by james purdy
(1976) chilly scenes of winter by ann beattie
(1976) distortions by ann beattie
(1978) secrets and surprises by ann beattie
(1982) taking care by joy williams
(1982) shiloh and other stories by bobbie ann mason
(1983) cathedral by raymond carver
(1985) tracer by frederick barthelme
(1988) two against one by frederick barthelme
(1990) escapes by joy williams
(1997) bob the gambler by frederick barthelme
(2001) why did i ever by mary robison
(2004) honored guest by joy williams
49 Comments:
yesterday i thought 'i want to read about k-mart realism'
remember when you?
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AND THE NEXT NIGHT WE ATE "MEATY POST"
i like the guide
if anyone has anything to say about kmart realism you can say it in the comments section of this post
my goal with this post was to make it so people from now on come here to learn about and say things about kmart realism i think
wildly inappropriate
i am reading honored guest right now. i like reading it.
It's good but maybe because I'm still asleep, I don't quite understand.
it used to be called 'kitchen-sink realism' also known as 'minimalism' which meant few adverbs or adjectives, no metaphors, the total opposite of 'purple' prose like that of john updike or toni morrison (or henry james).
it's descended from hemingway and distinctly american. via hemingway it has some relation to dashiell hammett and the 'hard-boiled.'
i like it. i've liked some of the writing of ann beattie and mary robison a great deal.
has anyone read or own any books by james, or 'jim,' robison?
i would like to read him, he has been mentioned
it is hard to find him on google, there is another james robison who was born because his mother was raped and now he writes books about hope i think
i have 'rumor' by james robison, short stories, and 'the illustrator,' a novel. he's an excellent writer.
i wonder what happened to him. he was mary robison's husband. i suppose she knows.
i'll send you one of my books or trade you something for those books or one of those books
the second article has a lot of information
"In its most extreme minimalist usage, the primary function of both narrator types is to pass on, without comment, objective narrative "facts": present-time action, dialogue, and only the most essential exposition. An examination of these practices helps amplify some of the rather enigmatic terms in Herzinger's definition such as "spare, terse, trim; tonally cool, detached, noncommittal; `flat,' affectless, recalcitrant, deadpan, laconic," all of which describe the behavior of the narrative voice, whether first- or third-person. "
i'll reread the books and send them once theyre in my head again. it won't take long. your attention will be good for him since hes forgotten.
i ordered 'the illustrator' for a dollar off abebooks
i would like the short story one though, i can trade you something
thank you
"'obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among the people it renders, and a studiedly deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world.'' Just three years later, again in Harper's, Tom Wolfe accused such writers of a preference for ''real situations, but very tiny ones'' and ''disingenuously short, simple sentences -- with the emotions anesthetized, given a shot of Novocain."
i really like this description - especially "disingenuously short, simple sentences."
of all the books on that list "two serious ladies" is ball-trippin' good.
i should read some of those books, the last time i went to a k-mart i was probably in fifth grade or something, after reading your article i read an article about devendra banhart
'tea towel fiction' would be a good name for a press or a band
tao,
jillian brings up a point that I was thinking about last night when I read your original, smaller post about "k-mart realism"
K-mart isn't going to be relevant in about 5 more years. The 10 year old girls now will not know how to reference "k-mart" when they turn 16 and instinctly seek out your blog and books.
100 yen store realism or something
that is a good list, i need to read honored guest
i wonder if any other f barthelme books fit on there
i cant remember its been a long time
i put britney stickers in 4 coffee shop's men's rooms, on several public trashcans, one person's car, my girlfriend put one on a public phone and on her notebook, we are slowly speckling atlanta
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this is really useful. thank you for posting.
i think a lot more frederick barthelme books would 'fit' on there
i wanted to make it a 'tight' list though and i thought of which books i enjoy reading more than once
i like the frederick barthelme story 'driver' which is in chroma
i like 'bob the gambler' and 'elroy nights' and 'natural selection' also, i read 'painted desert' and 'the brothers' but do not remember those two as well as the other three i just said
good job with britney stickers
i am 99% sure that wasn't devandra banhart
Tao,
I have The Illustrator by James Robison. It is one of my favorite books ever. Seriously. Just fucking amazing. I also have his book of short stories--Rumor and Other Stories--it's good, but I like the novel better. I'll trade you Rumor if you would like it.
'ignacio' has offered to send me 'rumors' but thank you brandon that is nice of you
i think i like 'cathedral' more than the other raymond carver books
i'm not sure, i don't own the other books right now
i'm not sure at all i think
stories by raymond carver that i remember clearly are
1. the one where his wife or something sells vitamins and at the end he is trying to get advil and things keep falling out of the medicine cabinet and he says 'things kept falling, i didn't care,' i thought that was funny
2. the one called 'preservation' where at the end the guy feels weird and looks at his wife's feet walking out of the kitchen and doesn't understand it or something which i also thought was funny
3. the one called 'cathedral' but maybe just from reading it in workshops
4. the one where the child is holding half a fish and his mom thinks it's a snake and tells him to take it away and he goes into the garage and it says that he held half of the fish and the story ended or something
5. the one where someone starts thinking their wife is fat
6. the one where they are looking at a baby and then they turn and look at the baby's dad, i thought that was funny
7. the one where someone kills someone
8. some other ones but not as strongly
I wanted to be a writer after reading Raymond Carver for the first time in 1989. I like the story where the guy buys a new pair of shoes, goes home and then he and his wife smoke dope at their friends' house and they later see a cat with a mouse in its mouth. I think it's "What's in Alaska?"--a great story.
I'm guessing you've read about Gordon Lish's heavy influence and even rewriting of Carver's stories up to 'Cathedral'. If not:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E3D71F38F93AA3575BC0A96E958260
If you find used copies of Lish's 'The Quarterly', I bet you'll find a lot in there that you like (if you haven't already).
My favorite Carver story is probably 'Intimacy'.
eric z, yes i know about that
i had an issue of the quarterly and mostly didn't like it for some reason, i think i more like the less 'extreme,' 'longer' stories people not edited by gordon lish but associated with 'k-mart realism' write, they are funnier to me and less 'writerly' or something
tao, this post feels important
i keep looking at it
today there was a lifetime movie on about a woman living with her controlling mother
she had a little white dog named binky and she was going out to dinner
her mother was angry that she wouldn't bring her date by the house so they could meet
i think the mother is scheming something
i think you would enjoy the movie or be able to laugh at it a little
"Put the lotions on its skin or it will get the hose again."
I think the lifetime channel believes all men are the guy from Silence of the Lambs.
lifetime. lol
You are funny jillian. You make me smile. Good times.
jillian, my toy poodle in florida was small and white and 'binky'
i have read very few of these books but now i will-thanks for the list
the first two links require a password for me to read it
do you have login and password you could email me?
hm, i don't
they worked from nyu's library
i'll copy and paste in comments section next time i'm in library
cookie hijacking
brandon,
see if your library is one that supports this service:
here
The Fiction We Deserve
Carol Iannone
TO PARAPHRASE George Orwell on the English language, most
people who bother with American fiction at all seem ready to admit
that it is in a bad way. It is true, as the novelist Walker Percy has
remarked, that the novel "always has been in a mess"; but it is also
true, as Percy adds, that "the present mess is singular."
Recent articles in diverse journals have lamented, from a variety
of viewpoints, the diminished state of contemporary fiction. Most of
the attention has been focused on the shortcomings of what is often
called, albeit not to everyone's satisfaction, minimalism: fiction
that is thin in texture, slight in form, banal in subject matter,
well-crafted, empty, easy to reading short, literature for the age of
television. Bruce Bawer observes of authors working in this mode
that they are inclined to write frequently in the present tense; to favor the
short declarative sentence (very short and very declarative); to
be preoccupied with domestic details (cooking, dishwashing,
laundry), with the most banal of contemporary phenomena (TV
commercials, trailer parks), and with brand names; to transmit
clues to the nature of a protagonist's personal torments as dryly
and emotionlessly as if those torments were just so many trite
domestic details; and to think that surface details, if piled up
high enough, can help us to see through to the heart.
The Mississippi Review, which has devoted an entire issue to the subject,
chimes in that minimalism in literature is "loosely characterized
by equanimity of surface, 'ordinary' subjects, recalcitrant narrators
and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who
don't think out loud." Of course not every candidate for the minimalist label will display
every characteristic in every work, and thus disagreement has arisen over who exactly fits the
mold. Writers broadly associated with this style, sometimes over
their own or others' protests, include Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie,
Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Deborah Eisenberg, Jayne
Anne Phillips, Peter Cameron, Amy Hempel. There are many others.
The fact that there now seems to be a consensus on the existence
of a problem in contemporary fiction does not, however, imply a
consensus as to its source. Walker Percy, for instance, argues that our
impoverished fiction arises from the general surrender of the task of
understanding human experience to scientists, technologists, and specialists.
One critic, Sven Birkerts, sees in minimalism, and in contemporary
literature generally, a "total refusal of any vision of larger social connection" and an "abrogation of literary responsibility."
The writer Madison Bell, more practically, suggests that publishers
have been striving to compete with the undemanding entertainments
available through the mass media.
These are all interesting and even compelling observations, but
the most persistent and surely the most perverse analysis is the one
that defines minimalism as, in the words of yet another critic, a
"symptom of the neoconservative or Republican tide." The minimalists,
remarks a second such commentator, "are stuck in complacency,
stuck without convictions, without alternatives to offer,
holding on defensively to a present they themselves don't believe in.
This makes them, like their characters, emblematic of Reagan's
America." According to a third critic belonging to this perverse persuasion:
"What minimalism doesn't do is embrace grand, inexorable
themes of the heart, or pressing social questions" such as "nuclear
matters, growing social inequity, a base, shameless political administration,
the unreality and immorality of daily life."
Probing for deeper causes, a fourth commentator opines that
"minimalism reflects a human retreat, a breakdown of a shared
conceptual system, a literary passivity in the face of moral confusion."
And responding to the suggestion that readers like this fiction
because they recognize themselves in it, this same commentator
stiffly insists that identification on the part of the
reader is in this case not thepsychological process of connection
with an "other" to find shared human ground not previously
recognized. Instead, it is the process of feeling connected
to a character perceived to be entirely like ourselves, according
to shared surface details. ....
The ironic part is that the surface is the level at which we are
least like one another.... It's only when we go deeper that our
resemblance to one another becomes apparent. In even a casual observer of the
recent cultural scene, such remarks are liable to inspire anything from
bemusement to incredulity. After years of a Left-inspired literary
criticism that attacked the possibility of narrative authority; the
possibility of shared moral and cultural values in literature; the possibility
of rendering a comprehensive world view in fiction; the possibility
of conveying any definitive meaning whatsoever in literary
texts; the possibility of even knowing reality itself through language
-after all this, now we hear denunciations of "literary passivity,"
"moral confusion," and the "lack of a shared conceptual system."
After years of assaults on literary standards as hierarchical and imperialistic;
of assertions that a literary canon supposedly devised
by white males could not reflect the experience of "marginal"
groups; of vehement demands for a separate literary criticism to
evaluate the work of women, of blacks, of homosexuals-after all
this, now we are instructed that identification through "surface details"
is spurious and that we need to go deeper to find "the shared
human ground" where "our resemblance to one another becomes apparent."
What has happened? Literary radicals adopted a set of views that
they believed would further the cause of revolution: since traditional
literary standards were held to support the "system," it was
believed that destroying these standards would help destroy the
system. But the system, though perhaps shaken to the roots, nevertheless
still seems to stand, and, what may be even worse, the radical
views themselves have been "coopted" and defanged. Structuralism
and deconstruction, the intellectual movements especially
responsible for the systematic dismantling of traditional literary
standards in recent years, have emerged as a kind of tired conventional
wisdom. As the critic Walter Kendrick has reported, "Despite the potentially revolutionary
nature" of this kind of criticism, "it has been absorbed without a jolt into the traditional
American academic machine . . .would-be subversive ideas are to be
memorized and applied, so that the student can publish in some unread
academic journal, get a job, and perpetuate the inherited system."
But meanwhile, whatever is happening in the academy, the values
promoted by the deconstructionist movement clearly helped lay the
theoretical groundwork for the new minimalism. This type of fiction
is a grimly logical demonstration project for the "deconstruction"
of literature's pretensions to meaning and range, of its claim to
speak a higher and subtler language than that available in popular
culture or everyday life. Our critics do not like the resulting
dance, but it is they who helped call the tune. In their attack
on the "cultural imperialism" of literary standards, leftist critics
tore down the structures whereby even their own values could be
given proper expression; evidently it is easier now to blame the wreckage
they caused on Ronald Reagan than to begin the task of rebuilding.
INTERESTINGLY, the editors of twonew collections of short stories
both seem to share in the general disapproval surrounding contemporary
fiction. In her introduction to New American Short Stories:
The Writers Select Their Own Favorites,* Gloria Norris concedes
that the American short story now suffers from predictability. And in
his introduction to Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1986,t William
Abrahams echoes one of the common complaints against minimalism
when he observes, "Consciouslyor not there seems to be on
the part of many writers (and their teachers?) a tendency to overvalue
technique, to run away from the possible serious content not only of
the story but of life itself." While both editors claim that their collections
deflect such complaints, a third to a half of each book is devoted
to the work of writers who are at least sometimes associated
with the minimalist school.
But what of- the rest? Since minimalism has already absorbed so much critical energy and aroused
so much critical disdain, it may be appropriate to focus on the
other sorts of stories in these collections. For what it is worth, it
turns out that social questions, although perhaps in muted forms,
do continue to interest writers. There are, for instance, several
historical stories in these collections.
David Long's "The Last Photograph of Lyle Pettibone," set
in Montana in 1917, details the coming of age of a young man
who rejects the values of his small town after he witnesses its brutal
opposition to an IWW labor agitation. Peter Meinke's "Uncle George
and Uncle Stefan" deals with the deterioration of an American family
of Polish-German extraction ravaged by the conflicting loyalties
aroused in them by World War II.
In Anthony DiFranco's "The Garden of Redemption," a timid
Italian priest finds the courage to resist the Nazis who occupy his
town. The problem with these historical stories, however, is their lack
of urgency; they come to us as from a great safe distance. History
in them has the quaintness of a reconstructed village, or the dusty
reassuring earnestness of a memorial battlefield. In "The Garden of
Redemption," for example, the priest begins to enjoy "the certainty
that his death was right and useful. It didn't matter that no one
would know what had become of him; he understood now the
reckless sacrifices of the partisans, their lives thrown like stones beneath
the treads of the Nazi bloodlust-not futile, no, but all part
of a big fundamental struggle...." Or history can be a source of
imaginative quotation, in the sketchy, self-centeredly nonserious
way it is sometimes invoked in postmodern architecture. In Ward
Just's "The Costa Brava, 1959," a young couple is on a holiday in
Spain just after the wife has suffered a miscarriage. In a restaurant
at the story's end, the wife, who is beginning to recover her sense
of possibility, weaves "a dreamy narrative" about a Spanish couple
nearby, sketching the man as "a romantic poet and playwright like
Garcia Lorca, close to the Spanish people" and the woman as "a political,
a young Pasionaria, a woman of character and resolve. They
had been in love for ages," the wife imagines, "exiled together,
now returned to Catalonia incognito." But her husband turns from
this conversation to reflect that although "he had read all the
books" on the Spanish war and "Franco's hard-faced paz," he
"could not imagine what it had been like in Catalonia. He had
thought he knew but now, actually in the country, face to face with
the people and the terrain, he had no idea at all." The sudden access
into history seems to serve no purpose but to underscore the characters'
different capacities for dealing with their present lives.
WHAT of contemporary issues? Stephanie Vaughan's "Kid Mac-
Arthur" records the deleterious effects on a military family when a
son goes to fight in Vietnam. Stuart Dybek's "Blight" is the story of
a bunch of teen-age boys growing up in a lower-class Chicago neighborhood
declared "blighted" during the Johnson administration's
War on Poverty; the story has a refreshing twist, inasmuch as the
boys are seen thoroughly enjoying the riches of their neighborhood
that are imperceptible to the eyes of government bureaucracy. Alice
Walker's "Kindred Spirits," winner of the first prize in the 0. Henry
awards, is the story of a disaffected and unhappy black woman visiting
her family in Miami; it sketches the injustices of segregation, describes
the physical brutality of black men and the emotional brutality
of white men, endorses the Cuban revolution, and ends on a
note of female solidarity between two sisters, albeit with a nod toward
one of their male progenitors.
Feminism or at least a mild version of it is an impulse in other
stories, too. Both "'I Don't Believe This,"' by Merrill Joan Gerber, and
"Crazy Ladies," by Greg Johnson, deal with the emotional and physical
abuse of women, as, on a different level, does Joyce Carol
Oates's "Master Race" (the choice for the 0. Henry special award for
continuing achievement), about a prominent German-American intellectual
and his younger woman companion on a visit to Germany.
Most of these stories are reasonable efforts and yet pretty forgettable.
It is plain that an engagement with social issues per se is no
guarantee of a distinguished and resonant fiction, if only because
most social issues today come complete with an a-priori interpretative
context that converts them into instant cliches. This may be
why some critics of minimalism are exercised less by its repudiation of
social content than by its repudiation of formal inventiveness. But
even they run into a contradiction, demanding an experimental fiction
that will unmask the old pretensions of literature and then mourning
the results for failing to resonate with wider significance. One
story in the Norris collection, an ironic excursion into experimental
fiction by John E. Wideman entitled "Surfiction," seems almost to
be pointing to this very contradiction. Two of the more satisfying efforts
in these collections manage to suggest a social context without
at the same time succumbing to it. John Updike's finely polished
"Made in Heaven" is about a long-term marriage that grows
materially but shrinks emotionally; Updike charts a social background,
but finally goes beyond it to a vision of individual spiritual loneliness.
In Elizabeth Spencer's Whartonesque "The Cousins," two
middle-aged cousins sit in a terrace restaurant in Rome and reminisce
about the past, particularly a European vacation they took one
summer in their youth. An interesting delineation emerges of different
types of character among the Southern aristocracy, but the
story is really about the inscrutable nature of the past. On the other
hand, Mary Hood's hard little nugget of a story, "Solomon's
Seal," which encapsulates forty years in the painfully ugly marriage
of a pair of rural Southerners, makes no particular effort to
engage a social context, although the backwoods milieu is well
evoked, but becomes instead an effective study of selfishness, stubbornness,
and pride.
"ART is in most ways hostile to ideology," Joan Didion (who has
served both masters) rightly observes, and ideology is most definitely
hostile to art. If we continue to insist that literature fight our
revolutions, then we will continue to get the fiction we deserve.
The minimalist short story: its definition, writers, and (small) heyday
Roland Sodowsky
Studies in Short Fiction. 33.4 (Fall 1996): p529.
A new type of short story peopled, according to many critics, with motiveless characters involved in meaningless actions, began to appear in American publications, notably the New Yorker, in the 1970s and by 1985 had, some of the same critics said, taken over the market. "... Fiction has, in the past few years, fallen into a holding pattern with what has been called minimalism ...," Robert Dunn wrote in 1985 ("After Minimalism" 53). The minimalist fad, Madison Smartt Bell said in 1989, was so dominant "that nothing else could get through into the light" (Koch et al., 61). Minimalist stories were denounced in scholarly journals, literary magazines, and the New York Times Book Review. The minimalist story, Carol Iannone said, was "a grimly logical demonstration project for the `deconstruction' of literature's pretensions to meaning and range, of its claim to speak a higher and subtler language than that available in popular culture of everyday life" (61); its narrator, according to Charles Newman, was "dragged down by his characters, adopting their limitations and defects" (25); its narrative voice, Grace Paley was quoted by Bell as saying, didn't "come from anywhere" (Koch et al. 47).
Although references to minimalism, generally negative, continue in current short fiction criticism, as in Jon Powell's 1994 article which equates minimalism with dehumanization (651), much uncertainty appears to remain as to exactly what the minimalist short story is: who--beyond Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and one of the Barthelmes--the minimalist writers are or were, and where they were published; when the minimalist short story was prevalent; and whether in fact it prevailed at all, at any time. As of this writing, for example, the most recent edition of Holman and Harmon's Handbook to Literature does not define the word, nor do two thick anthologies of short stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (5th ed.) and Fiction 100 (7th ed.); the glossary in another anthology, The Story and Its Writer, at least makes the attempt, "A literary style exemplifying economy and restraint" (a definition that may not be inaccurate but is also a fairly apt description of many sonnets), and names Donald Barthelme, Carver, and Amy Hempel as practitioners (1595). Mark A. R. Facknitz in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature divides minimalist writers into two types, formal and social, the "formal minimalist" being "a technician with a taste for clear, colloquial language and uncluttered plots," using "narrow temporal frames, present tense, and first-person narrators while eliminating editorial or authorial intrusions" (714). These traits, however, aptly describe so many stories in the "social minimalism" category (which Facknitz says is also called dirty realism and Kmart realism) that it would seem to be a subset of the former. When asked about the term, specialists in modern and contemporary American fiction often, in this writer's experience, refer colleagues or students to Shapard and Thomas's Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, obviously equating minimalism with shortness; but Sudden Fiction contains almost no minimalist short stories, not even the stories by Carver and Mary Robison, the only generally recognized minimalist writers included in the collection.
In a 1985 issue of the Mississippi Review devoted to commentary about literary minimalism, Kim Herzinger's introductory article names the stories of Carver, Beattie, Robison, and Bobbie Ann Mason among many others--the list is repeated several times, with variations--as minimalist fiction, "work loosely characterized by equanimity of surface, `ordinary' subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don't think out loud" ("Introduction" 7). A few pages later Herzinger adds other traits to the list: compression, "aggressive lucidity," "spareness and cleanness, above all the obvious `craftedness,'" and a "profound uneasiness with irony as a mode of presentation" (14). Between 1985 and 1989, when Herzinger published a refined version of his definition, numerous writers and critics such as John Barth and Dan Pope contributed to the description of minimalism. It was "terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly plotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced," the "maximalist" Barth wrote; "homely, understated, programmatically unglamorous" (6, 13). Pope pointed to
the fickle, alienated, generic, self-obsessed, family-less,
often-alcoholic, often-divorced characters; the writers' fondness for the
present tense and their concurrent disregard for background or historical
explication; the monotonous use of colloquialisms, the prime-time sitcom
speeches; the unresolved situations and the characters' vague sense of
emptiness and disillusionment; the trendiness evidenced by endless
references to brand names; ... the willingness of these authors to mirror
social and cultural structures without probing towards a sense of the
human spirit. (333)
Herzinger's second definition, published in the New Orleans Review, incorporates many of these traits:
Minimalist fiction is a) formally spare, terse, trim; b) tonally cool,
detached, noncommittal; "flat," affectless, recalcitrant, deadpan,
laconic; c) oblique and elliptical; d) relatively plotless; e) concerned
with surface detail, particularly with recognizable brand names; f)
depthless; g) comparatively oblique about personal, social, political, or
cultural history; h) often written in the present tense; i) often written
in the first person; j) sometimes written in the second person.
Minimalist fiction's characteristic mode is a)
representational/hyperrealistic/superrealistic; b) not fabulist.... [Its]
"subject matter" is a) ordinary, mundane; b) domestic, local; c)
regional; d) generational; e) blue-collar/working-class or white/
yuppie. ("Minimalism" 73)
The minimalist story, then, has two bundles of characteristics, one concerned with form, the other content. These characteristics are all subjective, of course, with the exceptions of person and tense, though the effect of "past" tense may be blurred in some minimalist stories; therefore the short stories discussed below comprise by no means a perfectly discrete grouping, but are those that come closest to meeting Herzinger's description and, when compared with each other, share a common set of characteristics to a greater degree than those that are excluded. Using Herzinger's refined definition, the two bundles, I examined the short stories in the 1975-90 issues of the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, and a handful--Georgia Review, Paris Review, Grand Street, among others--of literary magazines, identifying the stories that met all, or essentially all, of these criteria.
Some characteristics of the second "bundle" such as geographic setting were especially useful in quickly culling many stories that, on further examination, would prove to be not minimalist in other ways as well: in the minimalist stories from these publications, all are set in contemporary time and most have recognizable but unspecific United States settings (Mason's western Kentucky stories are notable exceptions). Paradoxically, Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants," the story most often referred to as a major precursor of the modern minimalist story, would not "qualify" as minimalist because it is set in Spain. The 16-year-old narrator of Peter Cameron's "Memorial Day," Stephen, expresses a typical minimalist character's attitude toward the rest of the world, i.e., anyplace other than the immediate physical vicinity. Reacting to a remark by his stepfather, the boy thinks, "Where did he grow up--Kentucky?" as if Kentucky were as remote as Jupiter (33). Likewise, the "blue-collar/working-class or white yuppie" characters are so pervasive that the appearance of any characters whose interests, speech, or actions placed them outside these categories indicated stories that, on further examination of their form characteristics, would be eliminated from consideration. Some minimalist characters and narrators may know words like languor, for example, but almost no minimalist character uses them. Few minimalist characters--no protagonists--are Russian or any other recognizable nationality except hybridized white American. There are almost no black characters. On the other hand, the fact that a story does have blue collar or yuppie characters is no guarantee that it is minimalist. The minimalist story's subject matter as described by Herzinger ("Minimalism" 73)--ordinary, mundane, domestic, local--was another reliable indicator, in a negative sense, of stories that did not belong in the group: minimalist characters seldom show awareness of or concern about the implications of their behavior or the events in which they are involved with regard to any larger social pattern, nor do their narrators comment explicitly or for the most part even implicitly on such matters.
Beginning with these "content" criteria and then further testing against the traits in the "form" bundle, I found 114 short stories that closely aligned with Herzinger's definition of "minimalist" in the publications named above for the 16-year period 1975-1990. Of these, 91 were in the New Yorker, 11 in the Atlantic, six in Esquire, four in the Paris Review, and two in the Georgia Review. Of the 23 minimalist stories not in the New Yorker, Carver accounted for seven (two in Atlantic, three in Esquire, two in Paris Review), Mason for five, all in Atlantic, and Richard Ford for two in Esquire. Sixteen writers produced the minimalist stories in the New Yorker, including Beattie (26), Frederick Barthelme (18), Mary Robison (10), Peter Cameron (nine), Judy Troy (seven), Carver (six), Mason (five), Alice Mattison (two), and eight others with one story apiece. Most if not all of the writers named here also wrote or continue to write stories that are not in the minimalist style. Beattie, for example, published 11 New Yorker stories during the period that were not minimalist; her first in the magazine, "A Platonic Relationship," is conventional in style. Troy, whose stories in the same magazine during the mid- to late 1980s were all minimalist, published a conventional story in the Summer 1994 New Yorker fiction issue. One of Carver's New Yorker stories, "Blackbird Pie," is non-minimalist.
When did the minimalist story take over the market, if that in fact happened, as some writers and critics have claimed? Carver's collection Where I'm Calling From fists a dozen copyrights for short stories published between 1963 and 1974, most of them in "little" magazines except for Esquire, including "They're Not Your Husband," a minimalist story, but 1975 seems to be the year when minimalist fiction first appeared significantly in the "slicks," with the publication of Beattie's "Dwarf House" and "Wanda's" in the New Yorker in January and October, respectively, and Carver's "Collectors" in Esquire in August. Beattie had the only minimalist stories in the New Yorker in 1976, three; Robison's stories began to appear in 1977, followed by Mason's in 1980. The "heavy" years in the New Yorker began in 1981 (12 minimalist stories) when Beattie, Robison, and Mason were joined by F. Barthelme and Carver. Twelve were published in 1982, 14 in 1983, eight in 1984, and nine each in 1985 and 1986. By the time the outcry of writers and critics such as Dunn, Iannone, Bell, Newman, and many others against minimalism had gained some momentum, the phenomenon--or literary phase, or fad; all of these terms have some validity--was over: only three minimalist stories appeared in the New Yorker in 1987, one in 1988, and three in 1989. There were none in 1990.
The claim that minimalist fiction dominated the market during this period is difficult to substantiate if one considers the publishing record from 1975-1990 of the New Yorker. While the magazine was publishing 26 minimalist stories by Beattie, it also ran 45 stories by Donald Barthelme, whose postmodernist work with its metafictions and quirky, self-conscious narrators may be "cool" but is not minimalist; it published 37 stories by John Updike, 32 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, 29 by Mavis Gallant, and 24 each by Penelope Gilliatt and Edna O'Brien, none of whom would be mistaken for minimalists. During this period, the magazine published a total of 1,094 short stories (by my count; the distinction between "short story" and other types of writing such as satirical and personal essays is, like that between conventional and minimalist short stories, not always clear-cut), of which, as noted above, 91 were minimalist, accounting for slightly over 8%, a figure that hardly suggests domination of the market. The New Yorker does not constitute "the market" in and of itself, of course, but the sheer volume of its short fiction production, about 68 stories per year during this period, plus the quality of the stories as evidenced by the selections of publications such as Best American Short Stories and various short fiction anthologies, makes it, for contemporary short story readers and probably for those in the future who will read the short fiction surviving from this period, the major portion of the market.
Using the works by those writers who published two or more minimalist stories in the publications named above during 1975-90, a total of 97 stories, I examined them for some of the presumably countable but statistically unsupported characteristics in Herzinger's definition, such as "often written in the present tense," "often written in the first person," and "sometimes written in the second person" ("Minimalism" 73).
The difference in tense usage is slight: 51 of the stories are for the most part (three Beattie stories and two of Mason's mix tenses) in present tense, 46 in past tense--53% and 47%. The usage by author, however, is not so evenhanded: F. Barthelme uses present tense in 12 of 18 stories, Mason in eight of 10, while Robison uses past tense in nine of her 10 stories. The difference in the impact of present or past tense in minimalist stories, seems unimportant in that, while the purpose of using present tense in fiction may be to achieve a sense of immediacy, the fact is that minimalist stories, always contemporary in their settings, convey a sense of simultaneity whether they are in present tense or not. "Simultaneous fiction," or "now-fiction," in fact, might be good names for these stories. Robison's "Doctor's Sons" is a good example of a story written in past tense that carries a sense of present, "happening now" time. Only one New Yorker page in length, it opens in the kitchen (like many minimalist stories: cf. Ford's "Sweethearts," Cameron's "Memorial Day," Beattie's "The Burning House") with immediate, insistently specific images: "Dick was sitting at the kitchen table with his left hand resting flat, fingers spread, on a linen placemat decorated with Coast Guard flags. He was trimming his nails with a pinch clipper and crying." After several intervening actions--his mother humming along with "Porgy and Bess" and reading a paperback, a pregnant woman striding up the drive, Dick speaking through the window to his brother--all happening while Dick continues to cry, we learn two facts about the past, literally the only ones the story will give us: Dick says, "I'm thinking about my wife," to which his mother replies tersely, "Which wife?" indicating Dick has been married before; and when Dick says his wife is "living somewhere in the Oldsmobile you and Dad gave me," the reference to the past suggests he is still dependent on his parents. Otherwise, the story is concerned only with the present time of immediate physical action: the mother talks about turning off "Porgy and Bess" and eventually does so; Dick taps on the window, his father sprays water on the drive, his brother gives Dick's shoe an unwanted shine; the images of the brothers suggest idleness and purposelessness. Minutes later, upstairs, when Dick's brother asks him what their parents are laughing about, Dick says as the laughing continues, "Probably not about us." Nothing has progressed, has been resolved: the fictional time for the action of the story, perhaps 15 minutes, is in effect not even that long because the characters are unchanged, continue exactly as we see them when the story opens--existing and doing things now, right now. The narrator of Judy Troy's "Geometry" also provides readers a very laconic "history" in the form of a modifier in the first sentence: "A week after Denny Long left me to move in with another woman and her two children ..." (33). As abbreviated as the information about the past is in both Robison's and Troy's stories, however, it does provide a framework within which we may understand in "Doctor's Sons" the protagonist's awareness of his parents' perception of his and his brother's shortcomings and in "Geometry" of the narrator's feelings of loneliness and inadequacy when her sister, surrounded by family, becomes a mother.
Fifty-eight (60%) of the stories have first-person narrators; 37 (38%) have third-person narrators, and only two, both by F. Barthelme, use second-person voices. As is the case with tense, usage varies widely by author: F. Barthelme uses first-person in 15 stories, third- in only one; Beattie's narrators are almost evenly split, 14 first-person and 12 third-; all of Cameron's stories are first-person, as are most (11 and two) of Carver's; Mason's are all third-person; Robison uses third-person in eight of 10 stories. These stories bear out Wayne Booth's assertion that the distinction between first- and third-person narrators in fiction is not crucial (151): minimalist third-person narration is, with isolated, minor exceptions (never extended to a whole story) tightly focused on one character's viewpoint, so that the degree of narrative omniscience in a third-person story is rarely broader in terms of time, space, exposition, or introspection than it is in a first-person story.
In its most extreme minimalist usage, the primary function of both narrator types is to pass on, without comment, objective narrative "facts": present-time action, dialogue, and only the most essential exposition. An examination of these practices helps amplify some of the rather enigmatic terms in Herzinger's definition such as "spare, terse, trim; tonally cool, detached, noncommittal; `flat,' affectless, recalcitrant, deadpan, laconic," all of which describe the behavior of the narrative voice, whether first- or third-person. F. Barthelme's first-person narrator in "Grapette," for example, is surely tonally cool, detached, noncommittal, flat, affectless, deadpan, and recalcitrant (in the sense of "hard to handle") when, noting that he slept with the daughter of his friends Herman and Margaret four years ago when he was 33 and she was 13, he says, "One of Margaret's therapist friends wondered if it was such a good idea to encourage this; I told Herman that it was wearing on me, too" (26). The information is offered as fact, nothing else; the reader may conjecture about the meaning of "it was wearing on me too"--morally? emotionally? physically?--but will get no help from the recalcitrant narrator. The first-person narrator in the same writer's "Instructor" is "terse" and "laconic"; he is "surprised and pleased" (28) that he has been invited to interview for an instructorship in biology at an Alabama university, and he has four brothers; these facts are the only "personal history" or exposition we are given in the story. We do not know where he is from, whether he has a job now, what his qualifications are, or whether he is married, although we develop some notion of his personality, seemingly incidentally, through what he observes and how he describes it: a restaurant is dismissed as "a fish place down by the channel"; he notices "the violet and green neon from shop-windows that lined the street" and, at a convenience store, "the skinny girl in the red jumper covered with 7-Eleven patches" (28). He is "tonally cool" and "noncommittal" as well, saying only "Fine" when a professor, Sonia, who has taken him to dinner and apparently planned to spend the evening with him, suddenly decides to go for a drive with another man, Burt, leaving the narrator with her brother (29); later in Sonia's apartment, when she volunteers the information that Burt is married and "not good in bed," the narrator merely asks about a pot of cooking french fries: "Is this peanut oil or regular oil?" (30). When Sonia tugs at the narrator's coat as he starts to leave and her brother asks if he is coming, he replies, I don't know" (31), and, as in the early instances, reveals nothing about what he thinks of Sonia or her actions, i.e., does not "think out loud" at all.
Troy's first-person narrator, Beverly, in "Geometry" also leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Beverly's sister Charlotte has just had a baby. Calling her mother to tell her the news, Beverly reveals that her boyfriend has left her, then describes how Charlotte's in-laws were all at the hospital when the baby was born; in turn, her mother, who lives in Las Vegas, talks about going to a Wayne Newton show and describes his costume. The "flatness," the lack of distinction as to the importance of the types of information exchanged, is left for readers to perceive--Beverly does not react to it--and to form whatever opinions about the characters' social and familial values or morality they wish. In Robison's "Doctor's Sons," the third-person narrative voice, effaced almost to the point of being a sound camera, avoids introspection, retrospection, and exposition by using surface detail: through dialogue we find out that Dick is crying because he is thinking about his wife, and we see his mother's lack of concern for both his grief and the wife when, before replying, she wets her fingers and turns the page of her paperback, the parallelism of the actions thus "flattening," as in Troy's story, the important to the level of the trivial. Similarly, a conversation about his wife's plight deteriorates into indecision about turning a tape player off and Dick's mother's appreciation of the pattern of his shirt. We must interpret what the characters think and feel from what they do and say because we are never directly privy to their thoughts; or, particularly in the case of F. Barthelme's uncommunicative narrators, we may decide that they do not react at all. This lack of reflection by minimalist narrators and characters along with the reluctance to flesh out descriptions (cf. F. Barthelme's "fish place"), constitutes, one would assume, the primary and most obvious sources of Herzinger's "depthless" trait.
More often, however, minimalist narrators use exposition and relate at least some of the protagonist's thoughts or to some degree interpret or interpolate those thoughts, but nearly always "objectively" in that they are passed on without comment and flatly, that is, without narrator embellishment, in the same language that the characters speak. Mason's minimalist stories--"Shiloh" and "The Retreat," for instance--illustrate the other extreme from the examples above, having narrators that come close to being intrusive. In "The Retreat," while she is at a religious retreat, Georgeann, a country pastor's wife, becomes fascinated with video games. The third-person narrator provides exposition ("When Georgeann married Shelby Pickett, her mother warned her about the disadvantages of marrying a preacher" [40]), sometimes translates the protagonist's thoughts and feelings ("Georgeann realizes that Shelby is going to compose a sermon directed at her" [46]), and sometimes interpolates (as in "Writing this, Georgeann felt peculiar, as though a gear had shifted inside her" [41]), where it is not clear whether the simile is Georgeann's or the narrator's. In "Shiloh," the narrator tells us more about what the protagonist is thinking than he knows himself: "Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her. They have known each other so long they have forgotten a lot about each other.... But when the oven timer goes off and she runs to the kitchen, he forgets why he wants to do this" (54). The first-person narrator of Cameron's "Memorial Day" employs both introspection and retrospection: "I love this time of day--early evening, early summer. It makes me want to cry. We always had a barbecue on Memorial Day with my father .... She [the narrator's mother] has no sense of sanctity, or ritual" (34). As Ianonne correctly points out, the refusal of minimalist narrators to use "higher and subtler language" (61) constitutes a significant difference between them and conventional narrators. Even Cameron's precocious 16-year-old narrator, who knows words and phrases like "serrated," "macabre," and "delicious anticipation, is unable to articulate his reasons for not speaking to his mother and stepfather beyond "I have nothing to say to anyone here" (32).
Ford's narrator, Earl, in "Rock Springs," is unusually loquacious in his introspection for a minimalist story, but his "thinking out loud" is the primary means by which we learn how unperceptive or outright stupid he is: he has stolen a highly visible red Mercedes with the intention of driving his daughter and girl friend from northwest Montana toward Florida, he says, because "I thought it would be comfortable over the long haul, because I thought it got good mileage ..." (88). Earl's conventional middle-class phrasing ("comfortable," "good mileage") in the same sentence with "I stole it" illustrates another sort of flat, deadpan language; he is unaware of any incongruity, any irony in what he is saying. Earl is also (again using Herzinger's terms) "oblique and elliptical," telling us he "had gotten into a fight on the county farm where a man had lost his eye. But I hadn't done the hurting ..." (88). We realize as we accompany Earl from Kalispell to Rock Springs that his introspection is not so much thinking as a tedious, continuous rationalization of his sometimes criminal, always short-sighted actions. In a sense he is an honest, reliable narrator in that what he tells us appears to be what he believes. The irony lies, of course, in the difference between his perception and ours, but that irony is, as I understand Herzinger to mean when he says irony is not a characteristic of minimalist fiction, outside the consciousness of the narrator and any other character in the story.
The minimalist use of brand names mentioned by Herzinger ("Minimalism" 73) varies considerably by author. F. Barthelme's "Instructor," for example, has Chevette, Buick, Dodge Polara, 7-Eleven, Coors, Stroh's, and Crisco along with half a dozen other brand names, while Beattie's "Burning House" has four; Troy's narrator in "Geometry" works at a Toys "R" Us, Norma Jean in Mason's "Shiloh" at a Rexall drugstore. Assuming one is familiar with them, brand names such as Chevette and Toys "R" Us effectively concentrate layers of connotation (Chevette: small, slow, tacky, produced in vast numbers, not yuppie, unsporty, presumably American made, lower class or second car; plus whatever personal biases the reader may have, such as "I always/never buy General Motors products") about the character who uses the product or works in the store. An obvious drawback is that many such topical names lose their compressed connotative value quickly. Chevette, no longer produced, is a good example; a little over a decade after "Instructor" was published, young readers today might replace most of the list above with something like "quaint."
Herzinger's "relatively plotless" characteristic of the minimalist short story applies universally in the stories considered here. Even so slight a plot device as that of an omniscient narrator withholding some information about a 35-year-old woman married to a 78-year-old man who is reviled by his relatives differentiates Robison's "Yours" in Sudden Fiction, mentioned earlier as being non-minimalist, from her minimalist stories. Many minimalist stories consist of a single scene, as does, for example, Alice Mattison's "They All Went Up to Amsterdam," in which a mother's efforts to get a half-dozen children to bed and asleep at the same time comprise the entire story. The narrator in Carver's "Intimacy" stops by to visit his ex-wife; with the exception of four or five short paragraphs, the story consists entirely of the woman's cliche-ridden tirade punctuated by the narrator's perfunctory responses. The minimalist short story generally does not build on causal action toward a conventional resolution, or toward an ending at all, much less a moral--a "fabulist" ending, as I assume Herzinger means ("Minimalism" 73)--such as Robison's "Yours" provides, not spelled out but clear, when we learn that the old man's young wife is dying.
The lack of plot in the minimalist story and most of the other "form" characteristics in Herzinger's definition may be summed up by the term "non-literary": whether first- or third-person, the narrators of minimalist short stories seldom rise above the linguistic registers of their characters, nor do they call attention to themselves by interpreting or interpolating--by summarizing or elevating--what the characters think and feel but may be unable or unwilling to articulate. These narrators are effaced to the point that they often are reluctant to interrupt narrative flow with changes in time and scene, i.e., with flashbacks or retrospection, or even introspection. The minimalist writer's concern with effacement, the opposite of some highly self-conscious postmodern fiction writing, extends to a reluctance to use any form--such as unconventional punctuation, paragraphs, or italics--that reminds the reader that the story has a writer, that someone shaped it. Susan Minot's "Lust," which is sometimes cited as a minimalist story--its clear, essay-like concern and social statements about the sexual plight of the female alone "disqualify" it--actually exemplifies what the minimalist short story does not do in terms of form: the self-consciously repetitive, almost stanzaic paragraph structure calls reader attention to its organizational pattern as a chronology of sex-related experiences and to how the story is being presented, thus adding a narrative condition that minimalist stories do not have.
Herzinger's lengthy definition functions fairly well in isolating the stories and authors considered here, with the exception of the terms "hyperrealistic/superrealistic," which, unless they are meant to apply to the flat, colloquial language--representational language--of most minimalist narrators and characters, I do not find descriptively useful. Minimalist writing is simply representational. If we take note of setting and of the importance of narrative voice in many of the "form" traits named by Herzinger, a somewhat more concise definition is possible: published primarily between 1975 and 1989, most minimalist short stories are set in present-time America; their effaced narrators report action and dialogue, some exposition, and occasionally introspection in the same non-literary language used by their self-focused blue collar or yuppie characters.
The effaced narrators of minimalist stories ultimately do call attention to themselves, of course, as this essay and many of its citations prove. Even some of the severest critics of the minimalist short story have acknowledged the craftsmanship of writers who can convincingly render the language and convey the world and the stories of narrators who work at Toys "W' Us and characters whose milieu is Kmart and 7-Eleven. Perhaps we should view the minimalist story with the understanding, as Barth says, that writers are always looking for "a new way of getting the old job done" ("Interview" 113). The minimalists found a way that, positively or negatively, won much attention for a few years. The best of their work will be with us for a long time.
WORKS CITED
Barth, John. "A Few Words about Minimalism." Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 4.2 (1987): 5-14.
--. An Interview with John Barth." Short Story 1.1 (Spring 1993): 110-18,
Barthelme, Frederick. "Grapette." The New Yorker 16 Aug. 1982: 26-31.
--. "Instructor." The New Yorker 25 Jul. 1983: 28-34.
Beattie, Ann. "A Platonic Relationship." The New Yorker 8 Apr. 1974: 42-46.
--. "Dwarf House." The New Yorker 20 Jan. 1975: 34-38.
--. "The Burning House." The New Yorker 11 Jun. 1979: 34-40.
--. "Wanda's" The New Yorker 6 Oct. 1975: 37-44.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Cameron, Peter. "Memorial Day." The New Yorker 30 May 1983: 32-34.
Carver, Raymond. "Blackbird Pie." The New Yorker 7 Jul. 1986: 26-34.
--. "Collectors." Esquire Aug. 1975: 95-96.
--. "Intimacy." Esquire Aug. 1986: 58-60.
--. Where I'm Calling From. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988.
Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1991.
Dunn, Robert. "After Minimalism." Mississippi Review 40-41 (Winter 1985): 52-56.
Facknitz, Mark A. R. "Minimalism." Bennet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. George Perkins, Barbara Perkins, Phillip Leininger. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 714-15.
Ford, Richard. "Rock Springs." Esquire Feb. 1982: 88+.
Herzinger, Kim. "Introduction: On the New Fiction." Mississippi Review 40-41 (1985): 7-22.
--. "Minimalism as a Postmodernism: Some Introductory Notes." New Orleans Review 16.3 (1989): 73-81.
Holman, C. Hugh and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
Iannone, Carol. "The Fiction We Deserve." Commentary 8 3.6 (1987): 60-62.
Koch, Stephen, Tom Jenks, Madison Smartt Bell, Mary Gaitskill, and Meg Wolitzer. "A Round-Table Discussion: Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism." Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose 14 (1989): 42-61.
Mason, Bobbie Ann. "The Retreat." The Atlantic Monthly July 1982: 40-46.
--. "Shiloh." The New Yorker 20 Oct. 1980: 50-57.
Mattison, Alice. "They All Went Up to Amsterdam." The New Yorker 29 July 1985: 24-25.
Minot, Susan. "Lust." In The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1991. 987-95.
Newman, Charles. "What's Left Out of Literature." The New York Times 12 July 1987: (Book Review, Sect. 7) 1, 24-25.
Pope, Dan. "The Post-Minimalist American Story or What Comes after Carver?" The Gettysburg Review 1 (1988): 331-42.
Powell, Jon. "The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty." Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 647-56.
Robison, Mary. "Doctor's Sons." The New Yorker 22 Aug. 1977: 27.
--. "Yours." Shapard and Thomas 55-57.
Shapard, Robert and James Thomas, eds. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1986.
Troy, Judy. "Geometry." The New Yorker 9 Feb. 1987: 33-34.
--. "Ten Miles West of Venus." The New Yorker 27 June/4 July 1994: 101-03.
The minimalist short story began to appear in the "slick" magazines around 1975 and later other more prominent publications such as the New Yorker. In 1989, minimalist literature became a dominant fad. However it was denounced by scholars as meaningless. Anthologies published in the 1990s often do not even recognize the genre and when they do their definitions center around form and content and are sometimes inaccurate.
Source Citation: Sodowsky, Roland. "The minimalist short story: its definition, writers, and (small) heyday." Studies in Short Fiction. 33.4 (Fall 1996): p529. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 14 July 2008
Frederick Barthelme Interview
Frederick Barthelme studied with John Barth at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and has for some years taught writing and directed the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has won numerous awards, including an individual writer's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous grants as editor of Mississippi Review, the literary magazine he has edited in print since 1977 and online since 1995. He is the author of fourteen books, including Moon Deluxe, Second Marriage, Tracer, Two Against One, Natural Selection, The Brothers, Painted Desert and Bob the Gambler. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, released in November 1999, was coauthored with his brother Steven and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded his retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages, which was published by Counterpoint in November 2000. His novel Elroy Nights, published in October 2003 by Counterpoint, was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. He will publish a book of all-new short stories in the fall of 2005 with Harcourt.
This interview was conducted in 2003. [End Page 40]
Interviewers: Your recent novel, Elroy Nights, like much of your work, is deeply personal. You take the reader into the mind of the narrator. Yet throughout the novel, the larger cultural context is present, with talk about 9/11, political and cultural figures, styles and attitudes with political overtones. Do you believe writers should engage social and political circumstances in their work?
Barthelme: It seems inevitable. Publication puts a book in a historical context, and invariably the book is, in part, about that context. The distinction between writers who are politically engaged and those who are not seems specious, though much of what passes for politically engaged fiction is hapless, sort of a pop magazine's version of political dialogue or the stuff that TV commentators do. So overtly or covertly, the writer's always entering the political dialogue. Since everything is a politically charged act—everything we do and say, every reaction to public and private event—fiction that carefully develops and rounds its characters will inevitably present very complex arguments about the culture to the culture. These arguments embedded in texts are rarely mined and not much discussed, but they are present, waiting for history.
Interviewers: How does this play itself out in your fiction?
Barthelme: Well, the characters live in a world like ours. By and large they're alienated from regular politics; they find formal politics silly and bankrupt and thus not worth arguing about. For a lot of people, even as they try to participate and help, and change things for the better, formal politics is just more sometimes charming television, a break from CSI and CSI: Miami. [End Page 41]
I echo that, and then I do the overt stuff—the 9/11 business in Elroy; the whole of Painted Desert, where the characters' ideas tended to be aggressive and somewhat antisocial, and yet they shrink from acting on those ideas. They're unsure where best to attack, and they are equal-opportunity vigilantes, but they end up voting with their feet, or their tires, to be more precise, and opting out of the game to assess a political or social issue for themselves.
Interviewers: So what is the place of literary writing in today's culture?
Barthelme: Not exactly central, is it? And as it approaches centrality, it seems to veer away from literature and toward, as my brother Don famously said, peanut butter. This is a commonplace, I suppose, but one that sometimes gets lost on whole generations of writers. It's charming, not to mention ironic, to see John Grisham, a wonderful mainstream writer, working hard to cross over and get just one solid literary credential, while, at the same moment, any number of young literary lions are breaking their backs to make of themselves household words. I guess literary writing is a pretty recondite pastime, an endeavor for the few, not the many, so literary fiction isn't much in demand.
Interviewers: And yet more writers than ever are committed to doing it, wouldn't you say?
Barthelme: Appears so. The pleasure of writing, which is pretty much the same as the pleasure of reading, by and large, can still be had, and can still be productively pursued, though by now it's a sidebar to the main story, whatever the main story is today on CNN, which is still, as I said years ago, the contemporary equivalent of the ultimate sociological novel.
I should add that a lot of putatively "literary" writing isn't really all that literate, but because the consuming readers and reviewers are even less literate, a new hybrid writing takes over and occupies the space previously allocated to literary art. For example, it is easier for a reader to understand and accept some supposedly torrid social criticism as literature precisely because it's identical to what the reader is accustomed to—TV news, talking heads, magazine writing. Such work operates at the same level, addresses the same subjects, exhibits the same kind and quality of mind that one finds in TV specials that want to sum up our situation at this moment. I'm not a fan of this kind of newsy, pretentious literature, especially when it is condescending without having anything to be condescending about, which seems [End Page 42] common now. We're all routinely and constantly exposed to the full range of social and cultural ideas of the moment. To make these ideas the heart of your fiction these days is to make fiction that mimics television. People still do it, of course, famously and at great length (for that ensures that the work will be taken "seriously"), but while I admire the audacity and the energy, the sheer mountain of effort, I still prefer the smaller "art" novel, something about people, in a place, doing a thing.
Interviewers: Does the serious writer have any hope of getting recognized in our cultural climate?
Barthelme: Sure. There's always the flavor-of-the-month thing. I don't suppose that's too encouraging, though. In twenty-five years in the academy I've met hundreds of English professors, almost all splendid folk, but their interest in literary art seems nominal. In fact, they seem interested in anything but literary art. Moby Dick as a "novel of the whaling industry." As a maker of literature, I don't think it's too much to ask that a literature professor profess literature. He or she is, after all, not really trained as a philosopher or a cultural critic, and to adopt the mantle may be a tad, uh, presumptuous. So here are my two axioms: (1) pop culture is not literature; (2) you can stray too far from the text. I encourage the attention of literature professors everywhere. If they ever come home, maybe we'll have someone able to write a history of our literature, when and if the moment arises.
I'm worried about history anyway. How far from the actual experience will the recorded version be? All anecdotal evidence suggests that history is often some considerable distance from the reality it represents. I was in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, in body and in mind (more or less). All depictions of that time, in film and literature, are false. Period. Nothing comes remotely close. This personal experience makes me suspicious of history in general—who is making all these [End Page 43] bogus reports about the Summer of Love? Who missed the point so radically then and is busily recounting flawed versions of events now?
Interviewers: Who are writers you consider contemporary treasures?
Barthelme: "Contemporary treasures" would be hard to do. But there are writers I like. I always thought David Shields was something special. Mary Robison. Amy Hempel. I like Barth and Hawkes and Don, and Peter Handke, from that moment, the obvious Latin Americans, and the couple-of-generations-ago Japanese like Kawabata and Tanizaki, and wonderful writers like Jane Bowles and Jean Rhys, who are among my all-time favorites. I read with pleasure William Trevor, Thom Jones, Stacy Richter, Ben Marcus, Vicki Hendricks, Bret Ellis, Kiki DeLancey, Antonya Nelson, Elizabeth Tallent, David Alexander, Rick Bass, Barry Hannah, Elizabeth Gilbert, Charles Baxter, Ethan Canin, Tom Drury, Mary Gaitskill, John Holman (terribly underappreciated), Courtney Eldridge, Ann Beattie and lots of others. If I were reading for pleasure now I'd be rereading—Gogol, Göethe, Proust, James, Jarry, Chekhov, Hemingway, Malamud, Machado de Assis, Wilde—and all those names you find in college anthologies. I've been far too long away.
Among contemporary writers, the list of people whose work doesn't much interest me is longer and more grand than the list of people whose work I admire. Most of all I love to read the work of my students in the workshop because it's new to them. It's fresh; they're just starting and, blessedly, they lack polish. Polish may be the enemy. Polish, in the wrong hands, is most certainly the enemy because it makes not-very-interesting work appear interesting to the untrained eye.
Interviewers: Could you talk more about the literary world of the '60s? You spent several years of that decade in New York, at the same time your older brother, Donald Barthelme, was living there. [End Page 44]
Barthelme: It was simpler. I was a painter/conceptual artist when I moved to New York in 1967, and the world seemed more genuine than is even possible today. What we argued about and the ways we argued would be the stuff of cheap parody now, the way the Beats were in the '60s. The art issues of the middle and late '60s—the primacy of the "framing edge" in painting, the formal concern about the art object, the split between formalists like Robert Morris and Carl Andre and Dan Flavin and their next-generation counterparts among the concept artists—these were real and vital-seeming arguments. People were about the business of making art, and doing that was a serious, historically consequential work that could be directly addressed and responded to.
Interviewers: You're speaking of it as almost a Golden Age.
Barthelme: That might be overstatement. But in the intervening thirty-five years, there's not been so much of that direct discourse in the culture. There was the "discovery" of camp, and then kitsch, and then irony. And because everybody could do irony in one way or another, it became a universal language and has continued to dominate discourse of all kinds since then. This is a tragedy for discourse.
New York when I was there (1967-1971) was a place full of energetic, bright artists, unironically engaged in the work they were doing. We had dinners at Don's house with various literary luminaries and dinners at my apartment uptown with soon-to-be luminaries of the art world. Some of the people I hung out with were devoted careerists, but they were also truly peculiar folks. Joseph Kosuth used to sweep into the apartment and rush to the john, where he'd wash his hands for minutes on end, which might not have been unusual save for the smudges all over his face and the comically dirty clothes he routinely wore. Larry Weiner, who was forever talking about leasehold property outside the city, could not keep food out of his beard, where it lodged during long and not-very-playful discussions about the roots and reminders of concept art. Seth Siegelaub was going to be our Leo Castelli, and he was continually setting up a show here or there, making arrangements, but always because he believed in the art.
The thought was, you could make art and you could add to the culture this way, and it was a worthy way to spend a life. No small dreams were tolerated. It wasn't the Cedar Bar, but it wasn't so far from it. There was a lot of hope: real, up-on-the-surface, honest-to-god hope, spiritual hope, the kind that fills you with the will to live. Unless I'm much mistaken, there's less of that now. [End Page 45]
Interviewers: You were a visual artist to begin with. How did you get started in literary writing?
Barthleme: When I started writing for publication, in 1968 or thereabouts, I worked out of a model that Don sort of created. He had a ragtag background (academics, visual art, music) and patched together some idea of fiction. In short, the job was to reimagine the experience of reading and writing, reinvestigate what a story might be, what a text was, how words worked, what could and couldn't be in a piece of fiction, what a book could or couldn't be, how a written thing was different from a visual thing or an aural thing, what "thingness" was, what dissonance was and how some intentional dissonance might work for you to increase the complexity of a work, how meaning was carried, the limits of the joke, the uses of satire and wackiness, the pleasures of found texts, etc. I did years of what would today be called "experimental" work, though back then you wouldn't say "experimental" because that would give you away. I wrote stories that turned around in the middle and ran word-for-word backward to the end. I wrote diagram stories and captions stories, picture stories, faux-science stories, I copped stuff from philosophy books and Scientific American and travel guides and children's books and crap newspapers and advertising, etc. I made stories on boxes, stories without particular letters, stories with no verbs, stories that were, in fact, advertising copy recast as literary works (when I tried to sell one of these to the New Yorker, Don's editor, Roger Angell, wrote in his rejection note how terrifying it was; that was somewhat satisfying). I wrote all kinds of stories, and mostly what mattered was the language and what kinds of things you could wring out of it. The hope was to make something startling and fresh, sufficient to weather some little bit of scrutiny. The method was: do anything. And: see what happens.
Interviewers: Were you applying that "model," as you called it, to your novels?
Barthelme: My first two books, Rangoon and War & War, came out of the world of visual art. I liked the "book" as a container. I was interested in Daniel Spoerri's Anecdoted Topography of Chance (since renamed, I believe). My first two are hard to read now, in part because my literary interests were minimal, in part because they're often clumsily written and adolescent and in part because plastic art ideas didn't translate very comfortably to the literary form. In defense of these books, I can say that a lot of people have done the same things a lot better since. [End Page 46]
Interviewers: Could you discuss the difference, as you see it, between postmodern writers, like your brother Donald, and minimalist writers, a label that's been attached to your own work?
Barthelme: I always thought that I was doing the same thing I'd learned to do in the first place, only using different materials—ordinary materials. Apartment dwellers instead of Indians. Later I became much more engaged in the language of character, thinking almost any human being was more interesting than almost any idea. That's the shortest answer ever given to this question.
Interviewers: You went to Johns Hopkins University in the late '70s, is that right?
Barthelme: At the time, I was working on a novel based on the way language was used by people with brain damage. I'd read a few books about the speech of these people and about experiments with others who had suffered traumatic brain damage, and I was fascinated by the almost miraculous elegance of some of the things they said, the way the words fit together, the sequences of words, the way these utterances made a kind of sense that seemed to me beyond and more interesting than conventional sense. My book was called The Gymnasium. It was a hundred or hundred and fifty pages of typescript on cheap yellow paper that people used for drafts. My characters lived on the coast of Florida in an airplane hangar in a latter-day commune run by a guy named Klousterman. There was a woman with cancer named Signe, a young girl named Magicka, various others and a couple hundred mannequins—store dummies. The text slid into and out of itself; sometimes there were no dialogue attributions, no dialogue markings of any kind, no punctuation, just an endless flow of language, and other times in the book there were conventional literary events. Altogether the ebb and flow of things in that work was kind of, well, confusing. [End Page 47]
Interviewers: You were studying with John Barth at that time. How did that affect your work?
Barthelme: In my year at Hopkins I got tired of all the magic, all the reliance on peculiarity, all the oddness of the thing. The magic required a faith I was losing—it was the kind of literary work you had to be predisposed toward in order to value. I was having a hard time mustering the belief. One good, simple sentence began to look like a breath of fresh air. Working with Jack Barth, I saw the virtues of traditional literary values—suspense, for example. I remember Jack marking up a section of a piece and writing something in the margin about not rushing—Why not drag it out? he said. So at that point my view of the work, and indeed of literary work in general, started to change. I'd theretofore studied only with Don, and our entire effort was about the surface of the work, getting the words right. It was a lot about abstraction and spiritual, emotional and intellectual tokens. At Hopkins, another way of looking at things emerged.
Interviewers: When do you think you hit your stride with this work?
Barthelme: Soon, I hope. But what happened back then was that I bought a rotisseried chicken and wrote the story "Shopgirls." This was 1981. That story changed everything for me. I loved every inch of it, every minute, every line, every joke, everything that happened in it, every sentence, every aside and every piece of punctuation. There was something perfect about it for me. It said, in some shorthand way, everything that I believed about the world then. It was the right stuff—and different from Don's work in almost every way. It did not shy away from the ordinary. It argued that the ordinary was only ordinary if you did not look at it very closely and that looking closely was the responsibility of the thoughtful individual. It put forward the primacy of people over language. It said, everyone is infinitely complex and [End Page 48] fascinating, and spiritually rich and profoundly valuable. It said the tiniest gesture can have the most huge meaning. It was like film acting, where the flicker of an eyelid can tell you everything. I was stunned to have written it.
If there's a guiding difference between "Shopgirls" and the work I'd studied and done previously, it was scale. The '60s postmodernists were all like brilliant stage actors, given to the big gesture, the sweeping, elaborate, artful high-wire act. They were brilliant performers, and in their attitude they embodied a change from the mainstream literary fiction of the 1950s—Mailer and Company—and, to a lesser degree, a change from Cheever and Updike and the other representational writers of that moment. By contrast, the work a number of us started doing in the mid-'70s was against performance; it was a reaching-back to people, to characters, to the quiet, subtle, small things. We were more like nonactors, or film actors, interested in laying open a moment between characters, letting it breathe, letting it be seen for what it was, letting the stillness reveal everything.
Interviewers: Your characters, in novels from Tracer (1985) to Two Against One (1988) to Elroy Nights (2003), are often struggling with the limitations and boundaries of marriage, and your novels often begin with the breakup of a marriage. What interests you about this?
Barthelme: It is personal and intimate. Everything's close to the bone. In collapsing relationships most of us look the other way, only wanting to find some relief. Yet we still have the nights with the queer light coming into the room, the scent in the sheets of the partner who isn't there or the oddness of the new partner, and there's a deadness. The new partner's scent is wrong, the touch coarse by comparison to the lost partner's. We are especially vulnerable and utterly human, at our richest in terms of feeling. It's a time to pay attention. There's also the triumph of marriage, not so much in Tracer and Two Against One, but in Elroy, surely. That sense you might have about a marriage, that whatever its limitations, the spouse is somehow so dear that even with opportunity stretching before you, the price of losing him or her is too great. The intimacy between spouses, lovers, intimate companions, is among the most charged experiences; it's where much that shows us to be human shows itself most clearly. And it's very hard to write, so there's excitement in that—you have to get close to the truth because all your readers have been there, and they'll know instantly if you're faking it. [End Page 49]
Interviewers: Much of your new novel, Elroy Nights, takes place in the "New South," with settings like parking lots, shoulders of unfinished highways and condominium complexes. What appeals to you about these spaces?
Barthelme: I'm always thrilled by the vacantness and hollowness of the world we build for ourselves, in the spaces between buildings. I got this from my father, Donald Barthelme, Sr., who was a highly regarded architect. I was trained first as an architect. Most of the buildings we build are tripe, from the most expensive to the most utilitarian. The entire modernist hope of a built world bettering mankind has turned out, alas, a pipe dream. The allure of the parking lot, the roadside, the vacant spaces in apartment buildings, has something to do with them being untouched—they are accidental spaces, by-products of the culture that builds hard and fast and with no thought but money. These spaces are unspoiled by the "art" of architecture. For me they're the churches of this moment. They produce the feelings associated with churches—awe, wonder, freshness, unaffectedness, clarity, fairness, lightness of being.
Interviewers: In the essay "Welcome, Mysterious Stranger," released upon the publication of your most recent story collection, The Law of Averages (2000), you say, "If you're going to work the high wire of writing, it's better to do it with a partner, and there is no better partner than a careful, thoughtful, imaginative reader." How present is the reader for you when you write?
Barthelme: I'm always aware that it doesn't hurt to make your work intelligible. The ideal reader is bright, literate, culturally conscious—someone who gets all the jokes. This reader does not exist outside of your family or, if you're very lucky, your editor or agent. When I worked with the surpassingly wonderful Veronica Geng at the New Yorker years ago, the most stunning part of the experience, other than the hundreds of things I learned from her about art and writing, was that she "got" everything. Broadest joke to tiniest gesture. This is lovely for a writer.
I worked with Veronica for eight years, until the rubes then at the New Yorker showed her the door, and I worked with her privately after that, and if there ever was a perfect reader, it was she. I am not alone in thinking this. I can still recall her making some peculiar little chirping noise over the telephone or delivering that distinctive pleasured laugh when some bit of business worked perfectly or went somewhere [End Page 50] she had not anticipated. I suppose Veronica is always present in my head in some way as I work. I am terrified of disappointing her; I am thrilled that some line, some character or description might genuinely please her.
Interviewers: In the same essay, you say you've been using dictation as a way of drafting. Why did you turn to this mode, and did you stay with it for Elroy Nights?
Barthelme: I started dictating fiction almost twenty years ago with Two Against One. The idea was to loosen up the prose, to allow it to ramble a little. Dictating worked wonders that way, and Two Against One was published just about as it was dictated. That is, I did not come back and do a lot of editing after it was put to paper. A few touch-ups and it was out the door. All the ones since then were dictated, though they were also very heavily revised. Dictating freed me in a way. I'm not a lightning-fast typist, so the dictating gave me a way around that—the stuff comes out in rushes, sometimes paragraphs, sometimes whole pages. It's a great way to get material to work with, though the real work is always in the revision.
Interviewers: Elroy Nights, the narrator of your new novel, tends to focus on his students. He says, "So I got less interested in myself, in 'my art' . . . I turned my attention to the students who I found saving . . . they were complicated and sensitive and more genuine than I would have imagined it was possible for a young person to be now." How true is this of your own experience?
Barthelme: It's close. I've found, particularly in recent years, that I like the students a great deal. I don't see them that much outside the classroom, but I worry about them all the time; I think about things that might be helpful to them. I am saddened by their setbacks and thrilled [End Page 51] by their many successes. They constantly amaze me, and the stories they write are often more interesting than the work in the New Yorker or Atlantic or any of the thousand-and-one literary magazines. These stories have a freshness that I rarely see in published work, an authenticity and quickness. Reading their stories is sort of like reading someone's letters—the work is always very personal and revealing, even if the students labor mightily to erase the traces. They give me hope.
Interviewers: In an interview with The Paris Review, Frank O'Connor said of teaching, "I didn't write a word while I was at Harvard. You've nothing left over to write—I'd just get involved with the students all the way. I was far more pleased with a student's successes than I would have been with my own, and that's wrong. You've got to leave a bit of jealousy in yourself."
Barthleme: The first part is right, but I think the "jealousy" part is kind of posturing. You write your work, you read and react to theirs. Theirs feeds yours. Their excitement is catching. So you marshal your resources, bide your time, tuck your work in where you can. After you've been at it twenty years, doing this is not so difficult. The students are universally lovely, and they count on you. You want to give them everything.
Interviewers: How would you describe your teaching style?
Barthelme: Chaotic. I like to talk and listen endlessly; I like to say everything I can think of about a story, and I encourage my students to say everything they think of. It's exhausting and exhilarating. Sometimes we talk about a four-page short-short for ninety minutes. Often I'm inclined to rewrite a story in workshop using the original as a base and adding in bits and pieces of all the students' critiques. I want to demonstrate, with this method, that the story is an art object outside [End Page 52] of the original author, a thing apart that can be revised, rethought, that benefits from not being held too tightly by its author. The students are often shocked at first, at how fast and loose we play with their stories, but they soon become accustomed to it, and I think they like the critiques—like seeing the work through other eyes and then having the opportunity to go back to it with a much-broadened view.
Interviewers: You became the editor of the Mississippi Review when it was a regional magazine and have turned it into one of the most respected literary journals in the country. What have you enjoyed most about being an editor?
Barthelme: Finding wonderful work. I remember the day Larry Brown's story "Facing the Music" came to the office. We called him and accepted the story within the hour. It was one of his first published stories. A Rick Bass piece we published was wonderful, as were pieces by so many other writers. We did a whole issue on Barry Hannah. We did a wonderful little Padgett Powell story and a whole issue of Jim Robison's stunning pieces. Stacey Richter. Some notes from Ray Carver. Odd and incomprehensible work from many different places. The list would be long because it would contain much of what we've published since I took over.
And there are regrets, too. There's the "mud town" story that Kim Herzinger and I thought was too peculiar at one point, so returned it without keeping a record of who it had come from; for twenty years since, we've been upset about that error. If you're out there, you who wrote the mud town story in 1978 or thereabouts, please send it back, whoever you are.
Interviewers: What kind of fiction do you find yourself drawn to while reading submissions?
Barthleme: More now than ever, when most of the published writing is so drab and pretentious, just give me a voice on the page—a voice with authority and sure-footedness that takes me wherever it wants to go, as long as where it wants to go is not someplace I saw on TV last week. It's hard to read this way and to find readers who will read this way. People are always looking for what they've already seen, what they already know. Too often our reading is about personal validation. I want to see stuff that I can't imagine, that looks funny, smells funny, acts funny on the page.
Nathan Oates's fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, Fugue and other magazines. He is a creative writing fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he is working on his Ph.D.
Amy Day Wilkinson's fiction has appeared in Literal Latte, 3rd bed and other magazines, and one of her stories was recently anthologized in Falling Backwards, a collection of father-daughter stories published by Hourglass Books. She is a creative writing fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is working on her Ph.D. in English, and is a fiction reader for The Missouri Review.
can someone explain this to me a little more?
"More now than ever, when most of the published writing is so drab and pretentious, just give me a voice on the page—a voice with authority and sure-footedness that takes me wherever it wants to go, as long as where it wants to go is not someplace I saw on TV last week. It's hard to read this way and to find readers who will read this way. People are always looking for what they've already seen, what they already know. Too often our reading is about personal validation. I want to see stuff that I can't imagine, that looks funny, smells funny, acts funny on the page."
tao,
nice. good stuff. i hope you don't get in trouble though for copywright blah blah.
matthew,
I interpret it as: I am tired of the same old bullshit. I want something new and distinct and direct. A clear vision.
Although I find it contradictory. If you cannot imagine something (beyond imagination) than how can you comprehend the words and emotions on paper?
But I am an idiot. So my opinion should be dismissed.
i enjoyed reading the articles and most of the interview with fred barthelme. when he started going into raptures about teaching, not so much.
I think Helen Hodgeman's "Blue Skies" written in 1976 should also make the list, perhaps in its own special category of a book with the greatest impact and influence, as far as a book that not many people read, could have impact and influence.
i also want to nominate Arthur Bradford as a pioneer practitioner of magical kmart realism
im trying http://iwantyoutohurt.me/tagged/short
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