I have subscribed to THE NEW YORKER since I was a teenager. I also subscribed to THE NEW REPUBLIC and a few teen magazines then. Over the years, there were times when we subscribed to 25 magazines. Phil liked cooking and gardening magazines as well as many scholarly ones. We got THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE ECONOMIST, THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, ATLANTIC, HARPERS and many more. Now it is just the one.
The short stories used to be my favorite part of the magazine. That was back in the day when the stories tended to be by Updike, Cheever, Munro, Carver, Beatty, etc. Those were stories I understood even though I didn't come from that milieu.
Now I rarely read the stories because they puzzle me. For instance in 'Just a Little Fever" a young woman washes her hair in cherries, goes to work at the bank and becomes interested in a customer old enough to be her grandfather. It is a long story about their courtship, which never explains her attraction (or his) beyond a degree of comfort she experiences in his company. The story ends, many words later, with their breakup which appears to relieve her. The writing is fine, but shouldn't we understand by the end the point of the story. Is it enough just to offer a portrait of a relationship?
This is the knock on a lot of literary stories. That nothing happens. But in a good one, things do happen or you come to a greater understanding of the human condition. This offered none of that for me. Both characters were unknowable. Was that the point? Another thing: I am reading more and more novels and stories with a quirky central character . Or an autistic/aspergers character. When did we become to fascinated with this? Was it Sheldon on THE BIG BANG that started this trend. The other trend would be characters with dementia. Hardly a story goes by without a character with dementia.
17 comments:
I am going to the eye doctor early Wednesday a.m., and then my eyes will be dilated forever, so I am leaving a comment now.
We used to get a lot of magazines although maybe not that many. My grandmother loved to read (she even read Rex Stout mysteries) and loved magazines. She lost her sight (at least to the point where she could not read) when I was in my twenties and she asked me if I could imagine not being able to read magazines any more. At the time, I couldn't.
Convenience Store Woman was a book with a more than quirky character, probably Asbergers. I enjoyed that a lot and it did motivate me to look for more books like that. I now have Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and want to get The Maid. From my perspective, I think I am interested because I always felt like I did not fit in and mostly did not like to socialize unless necessary.
In high-profile literature, it would probably make more sense to "blame" Jonathan Lethem. Though we've had Asperger's folks going back at least as far as "Bartleby the Scrivener" and all those Kafka characters several decades later. The minimalists taking over the writing programs and the first-reader jobs at various journals, not least THE NEW YORKER, probably has some effect on the slice of eccentric but only quasi-boho life stories you find there and in a fair amount of similar markets. I can find them kind of fascinating...particularly when they aren't excessively cartoonish, as with one of my least favorite examples, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, or most of what I've tried of John Irving's work. Attempts to do a more sophisticated, more internal, as plotless as possible prose version of, say, BROAD CITY has been a goal since writers started to note how airless what we can call "classic" minimalism too often was, while the lazier surfiction and magical realism could devolve to Irving or LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE.
Good luck with the eyes, Tracy!
I'm not sure I could list all the magazines my folks took for themselves before I began adding o the tinder in the household...I didn't get too far with RADIO-ELECTRONICS nor BETTER HOMES & GARDENS, except in an emergency pit stop of some duration. Claire also added (and eventually edited one of) a few computer-related magazines, but was mostly of he more digital generation.
But the magazines I would read were those with fiction in them, even if most of the fiction so labeled in READER'S DIGEST was in the jokes columns. Donna took in mostly punk rock fanzines when we lived together; Alice would like to stop getting anything, after recently try THE NATION and TNY again.
This is a really thoughtful critique, Patti. And I enjoyed your comments about magazines. I used to subscribe to a few, but not so much anymore - not sure why, really. There are still a few good ones out there.
And you do wonder how they survive. A woman told me yesterday that she was getting PEOPLE MAGAZINE for the first time ever (at age 86) and now knew who the Kardashians were. She was paying almost nothing for it. It's about advertising rates, I guess. THE NEW YORKER is always offering me VANITY FAIR for $6 a year but it's too much advertising inside for me.
I share your dismay with many contemporary stories. Nothing happens. There's no development. Perhaps that's why genre fiction like mysteries and science fiction and romance continue to be popular...and sell.
Someday I will write a 16,000 word story about paint drying and THE NEW YORKER will publish it.
Seldom read a story in the New Yorker unless it is by T.C Boyle. I think a lot of these types of stories are generated by writers who have taken college creative writing classes were plot and story were downplayed, and character and language were emphasized.
That's true, Steve. Having taken 3 workshops at WSU plus attended Breadloaf, that is the goal.
As I mentioned above, the Triumph of Minimalism in workshop culture.
And cheap subs, particularly at Conde Nast, will, it's hoped, lead to full-price renewals. I'm getting (mostly! One or more might be missing) a free sub of WIRED that my friend Laura aimed at me, as a Bonus for her for renewing her sub.
Lethem, maybe on some level, but THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME probably more widely read. There is certainly a lot of it now.
We used to subscribe to a few magazines. Now I am thrilled (I guiltily admit) to get none. When I was a teenager working in a Midtown office, a friend introduced me to Billboard, which I subscribed to (I LOVE lists) for a number of years. Then it was The Sporting News (I love baseball and statistics). But if you fall behind on these weekly magazines, you can never recover. There was briefly Newsweek. There was New York magazine for many years, until all the critics I read and liked left one by one. There was EQMM and AHMM for years. (I subscribed for a friend in England, and before sending the magazines on to him, I read the stories that interested me.) Never, ever crap like People or Entertainment Weekly. The ones I hate are where you unknowingly get a "free" subscription by ordering concert tickets (hello, Rolling Stone) and sweat blood trying to unsubscribe.
I've never subscribed to The New Yorker. I've read many, many collections of stories culled from their pages, however. I'm sure there were others which escape me now. To be honest, I miss none of them.
I do read a lot of straight fiction stories, and whenever I find an author I really like, I will read everything available. But in general, I'd mostly agree with George about mystery stories. I'm reading Bill Pronzini's SMALL FELONIES 2 now. Graham Swift's ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES had a few good stories towards the end (not the title story), but overall I was not very impressed.
I will say this much for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...in the early years, they would hire an occasionally interesting reviewer, such as Thomas Disch, for a brief while at least, and Stephen King's column wasn't bad while it lasted. That was a lot of years ago.
And, of course, the MILLENNIUM trilogy, MEN WHO HATE WOMEN/THE GIRL (sic) WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and its following volumes.
We got EW from the first issue almost to the last. It was useful for informational purposes more than the quality of the writing.
I never felt Time Inc. (and the variations) ever got fully behind it...they had tried in the '80s to launch a more or less direct competitor to TV GUIDE with EW-like articles (as in, taking up more of the pages than articles did in TVG) and it was a colossal failure, and I'd wondered if the ghost of that collapse had lingered in the boardrooms as Time/Warner and AOL Time/Warner and so galumphed into destiny.
Which is why I read genre stories, I want a story, not "literature".
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