In acknowledgment of the times, the 20 volumes each contain exactly one Middle East story, each featuring a character called Hassan. Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American). For maximum specificity and minimum word count, names can’t be beat. One of the by-products of hyperspecificity is a preponderance of proper names. The result is celebrated as “lean,” “tight,” “well-honed” prose.
Writers appear to be trying to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words. An indiscriminate premium has been placed on the particular, the tactile, the “crisp,” and the “tart”-as if literary worth should be calibrated by resemblance to an apple (or, in the lingo of hyperspecificity, a McIntosh). Many of these stories seemed to have been pared down to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns. In the name of science, I recently read from cover to cover the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 20. Today’s short stories all seem to bear an invisible check mark, the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory the very sentences are animated by some kind of vegetable consciousness: “I worked for Kristin,” they seem to say, or “Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious.” Meanwhile, the ghosts of deleted paragraphs rattle their chains from the margins. And yet I think the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukács once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.” Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propagated in America by a purely formal apparatus: by the big magazines, which, if they print fiction at all, sandwich one short story per issue between features and reviews and by workshop-based creative writing programs and their attendant literary journals. “New American fiction” is, to my mind, immediately and unhappily equivalent to new American short fiction.