https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iw7vSDCtRE
First published in THE NEW YORKER in 1950, this is the story of a GI near the end of the war who meets a precocious young girl and her precocious brother in a restaurant after observing them at choir practice. He has an engaging conversation with her, finally promising to write a story for her. The second scene is the story he writes and the squalor is the shell shock he is experiencing as the war winds down. He receives a letter from her and enclosed is her dead father's watch, the face broken in transit.
This one is collected in NINE STORIES. Literary writers today aren't as easy to read as the ones of an earlier generation: i.e. Updike, Cheever, Mailer, Bellow, McCuller, Cather, etc. Their style of writing did not call as much attention to itself and the point was usually fairly discernible. At least to me. What do you think?
17 comments:
I think some of your cited examples could be more self-indulgent than others, though perhaps particularly as their careers ran on with success and praise heaped upon them--Mailer, certainly, and the un-cited Hemingway. Also the self-consciously "literary" writers could be encouraged to write for coterie audiences in workshops and MFA programs as mass-market support for fiction-writing fell away in most magazines and similar venues...fiction magazines have smaller circulations than they ever have had before, and the relative few magazines which feature fiction along with nonfiction content are "generous" when they feature one short story per issue, vs. the handful magazines ranging from LADIES HOME JOURNAL to ESQUIRE to HARPER'S to YANKEE might offer. Bobbie Ann Mason comes to mind as an obvious example of someone who can and will write A Plain Story Plainly Told well, but varying degrees of preciousness have been always been prized by too many, the Gordon Lishes and William Shawns of the editing world, and the literature didn't benefit from their excessive sway.
Salinger also had his own, shall we be kind and call them "quirks", that left his work, what there was of it, less impressive to some of us than to others...https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/04/joyce-maynard-on-chilling-parallels-woody-allen-and-jd-salinger
I think that's true, they published in magazines for "regular" people so they didn't pursue adventurous styles, themes, etc. Or maybe I was a better reader then because the typical New Yorker story was more accessible in my youth. It usually had a straight narrative arc to it, a single POV, a theme readily discovered.
I like this choice a lot, Patti. Haven't read Salinger in too long!
I do agree for the most part. I read the Salinger against several years ago and mostly enjoyed it.
Currently reading Pronzini & Malzberg (just finished the second collection of theirs that I picked up recently), Edward P. Jones (who does a wonderful job with time and place in Black Washington), and I have a James R. Benn collection I'm going to read next. And I believe another Ed Hoch collection is coming soon. None of these are what I'd call "experimental" writers.
I need to read Jones' novel but I have read a lot of novels about slavery of late.
I think you read Salinger in your youth and then try him again many years later. For some, I bet he will not hold up.
My parents subscribed to at least a dozen magazines in 1960s: TIME, LIFE, SATURDAY EVEING POST, NEW YORKER, HARPERS, THE ATLANTIC, READERS DIGEST, LOOK, BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS, and LADIES HOME JOURNAL. Plus a couple local newspapers. That all began to change in the 1970s as TV took over and many of these magazines failed. That also changed the audience for "literary" fiction...which got more bizarre and remote.
And most of them published fiction.
In your young reading of THE NEW YORKER, Patti, you still had the legacy of Harold Ross's cluster of writers working for the magazine...William Shawn's supplanting group didn't reach the full strength till the '70s, by which time the magazine's fiction was already gaining a reputation for being about little at length, often adorably so.
Even LIFE and LOOK would carry the very odd scrap of fiction (leaving aside jokes at the expense of TIME and READER'S DIGEST, though the latter did run joke columns), often in a sort of fumetti (photo-comics) form. Even TIME and LIFE stablemate SPORTS ILLUSTRATED managed to commission a science fiction story from Theodore Sturgeon in the '60s, "How to Forget About Baseball"...
Jeff--at times, Pronzini and frequently Malzberg have been praised and damned (particularly Barry, frequently) for work which was rather experimental or at least non-traditional...
Maureen Corrigan gets the background *mostly* right while overenunciating enthusiastically about a certain new Abbott novel, and a first novel by another woman writer, in today's FRESH AIR review:
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/07/1180115847/megan-abbott-beware-the-woman-katie-williams-my-murder-review
I read this story in 2015 and one other from the same book (both rereads). Now I need to find my copy of the book and read more of the stories.
Sorry I forgot to check your post and the other short story Wednesday posts, I meant to. We had two doctor appointments today, Glen had his eyes checked in the morning then I had a follow up appointment with my doctor about my Emergency Room visit on Friday. As I am improving day by day, we decided I will continue the medication that was prescribed by the ER doctor and I will see her again in six weeks if I continue to have problems. I am happy with the results after seeing her but it was a very tiring day.
Take it as easy as you can Tracy...glad you are apparently on the mend.
After a certain age, there are often these medical issues that you can't quite put a finger on. Am I tired from the statin, the cancer drug, the bp meds, the allergy stuff. Of course, I am and all of it is hard on the stomach too. When my grandmother was admitted to a nursing home when they still called it that, they took her off of all of her meds; for instance she took Valium for 50 years, and she immediately felt better. Anyway, let's hope that's the end of it, Tracy. NINE STORIES is very slim and easy to miss.
Thanks for the Megan plug, Todd. She is on the last day of travel for a bit. St Louis. Talk about exhausted with the great divergences in weather.
Thanks, Patti. It is the fatigue that is the most bothersome, I was just getting into more exercise and enjoying it.
Hope you can shake it altogether, Tracy...I can imagine how tiring, even when pleasant, such a tour can be, Patti...and then all this forest-fire pollution, at least in the NE/Mid-Atlantic (we had ferociously bad air on Wednesday, just bad air on Thursday and Friday, and back to more or less normal today).
Fires burning in Canada still look like cheap animation effects, but all too real.
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