The poet-critic Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as “a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” The short story might be said to differ from the novel in that there need not be anything wrong with it—perfection, of however narrow a kind, being attainable in the shorter form that is inconceivable in the long. It was probably this that William Faulkner had in mind when he said he turned to writing novels because poetry was too hard and short stories only slightly easier.

Faulkner’s positioning of the short story seems relevant to more than the degree of difficulty involved. The best short fiction presents us with a distillation of internal experience in something of the way that poetry does; less allusive, more grounded in the details of individual lives, it nevertheless tends to center on an epiphany, a moment of intense illumination, that is recognizably poetic in nature.

Perhaps because of its quasi-kinship with poetry, through much of its history the short story has tended to attract a certain kind of temperament—melancholy, lyrical, elegiac. Among those who have done their best work in the form, one thinks of Chekhov in Russia and Katherine Mansfield in England; or, in this country, of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever. Even for “heavier” writers, whose fame rests largely on their novels, working in the shorter form often seems to heighten their virtues without allowing scope for their faults; if Henry James is a perfect example, so too is his literary opposite, Ernest Hemingway.

But none of these observations may be pertinent to the short story as it is conceived of now. Since the late 60’s, there has been a much-vaunted renaissance of the form, in America in particular; indeed, certain critics have theorized—not always disapprovingly—that the short story is ideally suited to a generation weaned on television, and therefore unlikely to have a long attention span. A new breed of “minimalist” story has emerged: flat, laconic, often littered with brand names and descriptions of junk food, it is said to reflect the lack of inwardness, the obsessive consumerism, of the contemporary world. The characters in such fiction, though rarely happy, never suffer very passionately, since passion of course requires inwardness. Instead of wild sorrow or grief or even melancholy, they seem doomed to chronic low-grade depression, a life of permanent Excedrin headaches.

While the minimalist story has gained prominence, there has also been a shift in academic attitudes toward the stories of the past. New critical approaches, most of them more or less sociopolitical in orientation, have redirected attention to stories as critiques of society in a way that used rarely to be the case. The idea of the well-crafted, shapely story; the poetic story; the highly charged story of personal revelation has fallen out of favor in the classroom. Suddenly, these rather fragile artifacts are expected to bear some quite heavy freight.

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Now we have two new anthologies of American short stories, both of which, although edited by accomplished practitioners of the form, wind up seeming less like reflections of their personal tastes than indicia of prevailing literary trends.¹ Indeed, in the case of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, which covers 200 years of American short fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explicitly tells us that she made her selections on the basis of something other than mere individual preference, explaining in her introduction that she

thought it important to present outstanding titles by writers representing a broad spectrum of cultural traditions. . . . I have sought to include more women writers than commonly appear in such volumes . . . my emphasis is on storytelling . . . with a political and/or social theme.

So: a multiculturalist anthology of the American short story, steeped in political correctness. But at least Oates has found a number of stories that serve to vindicate her agenda; however much we may resist the rhetoric of victimology, there have indeed been ethnic writers who deserve a wider audience. Take, for example, Charles Chesnutt—“generally considered,” says Oates, “the first black writer to find a white readership in America.” In “The Sheriff’s Children” (1899), Chesnutt writes about a small-town lawman in the post-Civil-War South confronting a desperate black prisoner who turns out to be his son by a former slave. The tormented emotions of both men are conveyed with such unsentimental precision and eloquence that we can only regret that Chesnutt’s “literary career, by his own decision, was short-lived.” (One wishes Oates had told us what caused him to reach that decision.)

Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), about a black washerwoman’s suffering at the hands of her philandering husband, is as scrupulously observed, with the same lack of sentimentalism. And then there is Ralph Ellison’s horrifying “Blood Royale,” which, in slightly altered form, became the first section of his novel, Invisible Man (1952), and which can still make one cringe in shame for the white race.

These stories remind us that, before anyone was preaching multiculturalism, we always knew that literature had the power to make vivid to us people we might never meet in life—whether a mad Russian civil servant or the child of a slave and her master; to personalize the “political and/or social” by making us feel and believe in one individual’s suffering.

But too many stories Oates presumably chose for their sociopolitical themes or for the genetic composition of their authors fail to serve that function very effectively. “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1899) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ensconced by now in the feminist canon, might be described as a breathless 19th-century Diary of a Mad Housewife; the narrator’s affected, portentous tone finally seems more irritating than stirring. “The Ghost in the Mill” (1872) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which even Oates admits is “quaint by contemporary standards, and hardly adult fare,” goes a long way toward refuting the claims for Stowe’s place in the literary pantheon. Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby” (1934) is lame and labored and totally predictable from the first page. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s hokey “Old Woman Magoun” (1891) is pure soap opera.

In her introduction, Oates writes that another of her chief aims was to avoid standard anthology pieces; instead, she sought out

virtually unknown yet fascinating works by certain of our classic American writers . . . that, while reflecting these authors’ characteristic styles, visions, and subjects, suggested other aspects of sensibility.

This sounds like an admirable idea, and such writers as Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton, and Henry James are indeed represented here by lesser-known stories that give the flavor of these authors’ best work. But in the case of Herman Melville, for example, what we get instead of the much-anthologized but indestructibly wonderful “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a virtual tract about ruling-class smugness and the unfair treatment of women, while Fitzgerald’s “An Alcoholic Case” (1937), a bleak and enervated portrait of a man drinking himself to death, seems totally uncharacteristic of his “style, vision, and subjects.” One can only imagine that Oates preferred it to his more fanciful writings because of the “seriousness” of its message. Since these stories give us but a dim sense of their authors’ gifts, it is hard to imagine anyone unfamiliar with their other works rushing to seek them out on the basis of what he finds here.

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It is when we arrive at the contemporary section, however, that the limitations of Oates’s criteria become most evident. Consider the last seven authors included here: John Edgar Wideman, a black; the Calcutta-born Bharati Mukherjee; the Chinese-American Amy Tan; the part-Native-American Louise Erdrich; David Leavitt, who has made a career out of being a homosexual writer; Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican-American; and Pinckney Benedict, who might be designated a hillbilly writer—at least Oates is at some pains to tell us that he “was born and continues to live on his family’s dairy farm north of Lewisburg, West Virginia.”

Except for Mukherjee’s, none of these stories possesses any great literary interest, though Erdrich’s and Tan’s rise somewhat above the tedium of the others. Cisneros, described by Oates as having a “gift for the luminous image, the revelatory phrase,” seems barely literate. Here is one of her stories in its entirety:

A House of My Own

Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.

Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.

This sounds like nothing so much as the journal entry of a sensitive adolescent—the sort of thing an English teacher would be delighted to receive from an eighth-grader. But its solemn banalities, its awkward alliterations, its juvenile straining after poetic effect hardly warrant it a place beside Henry James.

It seems ironic that Cisneros is a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. So, too, is Benedict, who writes in backwoods English:

Hunter’s up on the porch, strippen away at a chunk of soft pine wood with his Kaybar knife, and I’m setten out in the yard to get away from the sound, chip chip chip like some damn squirrel.

Benedict also has a B.A. in English from Princeton (where Oates teaches), so his are not the naive outpourings of some diamond-in-the-rough yokel; this is highly self-conscious primitivism. In fact, one is tempted to conclude that self-consciousness is destroying ethnic writing today as it has destroyed many another literary movement in the past. Zora Neale Hurston wrote about blacks because they were the people she knew best; Cisneros and Benedict seem to be parading their deprived backgrounds to earn themselves a place among the righteous. There are better young ethnic writers than these—the black writer Edward P. Jones, for example—but, since they make no point of serving up victims, perhaps they do not serve Oates’s purposes so well.

What seems most notably absent from this anthology—a lack that may be due not just to Oates’s political stance but also to some temperamental distrust of a certain kind of artistry—are any truly elegant stories, those that afford what Vladimir Nabokov called

aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

There is, for example, nothing here by Shirley Hazzard, by William Maxwell, or even by Truman Capote, who sometimes attained to that standard, too. With few exceptions—Cheever’s lyrical riffs in “The Death of Justina” (1960) chief among them—the stories here are decidedly pedestrian, distinguished more by earnestness of intent than by any imaginative grace.

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But if grace is in short supply in Oates’s anthology, it is almost wholly absent (in the spiritual as well as the aesthetic sense) from The Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. Ford is one of the most accomplished practitioners of what has come to be called “dirty realism,” and Granta, the English magazine under whose aegis his anthology was put together, has been one of the leading showcases for this type of writing.

Dirty realism might be defined as the working-class arm of minimalism. While it deals with the same sort of impoverished experience, in the same sort of impoverished language, its characters tend to be not only alienated and depressed but desperately broke; often drunk or stoned, they are just as likely to be petty criminals as not. Yet whatever the limitations of this school, it has at least produced some better stories than middle-and upper-middle-class minimalism. Ford’s own work, for example, is more compelling than the chronicles of affluent alienation fashioned by Ann Beattie or David Leavitt, both of whom he includes in this anthology while leaving himself out.

Unfortunately, the temperament that makes someone a better-than-average minimalist may not make him a better-than-average anthologist. In his introduction, Ford tells us that “the stories I’ve included are finally simply ones I like,” and there is no reason to doubt his word. All we can conclude as we read his selection of short stories from the past 50 years is that, perhaps more than he knows, his taste in literature has been shaped by his own involvement with a certain type of writing (or maybe it is the other way around). For despite his allusions in the introduction to Frank O’Connor, the author of some of the sweetest and funniest and wisest stories produced in this century, Ford seems strangely attracted to a certain kind of bleakness and flatness on the one hand and to emotional superficiality on the other.

This is most noticeable in his selections from writers of his own generation; among earlier writers his choices seem, at first, cheerfully eclectic, ranging from Shirley Jackson’s middlebrow classic “The Lottery” (1948), to Bernard Mala-mud’s powerful and poetic “The Magic Barrel” (1954), to a wonderfully rhapsodic early Harold Brodkey story, “The State of Grace” (1954). But it is striking how joyless, how finally inert, this collection is for most of its 700 pages—how underpopulated by vivid human beings (Brodkey’s and Malamud’s characters are exceptions, as are Jean Stafford’s in “In the Zoo” [1964], Stanley Elkin’s in “A Poetics for Bullies” [1965], and Flannery O’Connor’s in “Good Country People” [19551); how short on intense emotion.

Instead, we get various elaborate mannerisms, hollow substitutes: in Cheever’s “O City of Broken Dreams” (1948), about a family of innocent rubes among the sharks of New York—surely one of the worst things he ever wrote—an embarrassingly sentimental facetiousness; in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957; included also in Oates’s anthology), a willed hysteria, a tendentious insistence on the heroism of a jazz musician’s pain; in John Updike’s “Here Come the Maples” (1976), uncharacteristic coyness. And in “playful” entries by the ham-fisted Kurt Vonnegut and the even more ham-fisted William Kotzwinkle, cutesy eccentricity.

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Then we come to the minimalists themselves, in many of whose stories the characters seem hardly individuated at all, more like absences than presences, and emotional flatness takes over with a vengeance. Again, there are exceptions. The late Raymond Carver, who might be called the founding father of minimalism and is probably its best practitioner, manages in “Are These Actual Miles?” (1972; also Oates’s choice among Carver’s stories) to make us believe that more is going on inside his inarticulate character—a man whose wife is off sleeping with a used-car dealer in order to get the best price possible on their only remaining possession—than he tells us explicitly; at its best, Carver’s laconic prose seems not so much flat as tense with unexpressed pain. And in “The Rich Brother” (1985), Tobias Wolff, whose work always exhibits a tenderness and humor that distinguish him from the run of dirty realists, beautifully evokes the involuntary love that a prosperous, down-to-earth businessman feels for his exasperating brother, a holier-than-thou hippie loser. In these stories, the epiphanies—for minimalist stories have epiphanies too, of however tenuous a kind—are genuinely earned.

But in the stories by Mary Robison, by Ann Beattie, by Richard Bausch, by David Leavitt, by Joy Williams, by Lorrie Moore, the emotional tone is simply numb rather than suggestive of banked-down feeling, and the epiphanies mere dull blips along our screen of vision. Then, too, the revelations experienced are predictably dismal: this depressed woman is going to leave her husband, that depressed woman is going to dump her unappetizing fiancé. In neither case do we quite understand why, but it is hard to care very much, either. The emptiness of these stories leaves one feeling not so much that modern life is unutterably dreary as that modern literature is unaccountably so. For all the ills of our society, the bloodlessness of such writing seems more a function of artistic and/or emotional laziness than of any profound insight into the alienation of American life.

In the same way, it seems intellectually lazy of Ford to have rounded up the usual fashionable suspects rather than casting his net a little wider; he could so easily have heightened the energy level and broadened the range of this collection by including, for example, an emotionally charged story like Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon” (1985), or one of Kelly Cherry’s lyrical, meditative fictions, or even something from Deborah Eisenberg’s Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), in which highly modern states of mind take on some of the delicate permutations of old-fashioned feelings. Perhaps depression, at least in art, is doomed always to seem merely trivial. If it is impossible to summon up rage or grief or horror, a writer might be better off being simply cheerful.

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Which brings us to a third recently published collection of American short stories—this one limited to Jewish writers.² Compared with Ford’s in particular, this anthology exhibits a quite surprising emotional liveliness. Inevitably, there are some merely slight or tedious entries—including a minimalist story by Michael Chabon in which the protagonist achieves the revelation that no one ever finds the love of his dreams—but over half actually traffic in passionate human feeling.

Even those stories which touch on the Holocaust are never merely bleak. Cynthia Ozick’s powerful, half-mystical “Bloodshed” (1976) rises to a kind of mad elation; Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug” (1989), which also deserts straightforward realism in grappling with its theme, is too full of eloquent sorrow to be depressing; and Deirdre Levinson’s “April 19th, 1985” (1991), in which a mother’s moral exasperation with her “light-minded” children gives way to an experience of overwhelming love at a memorial gathering on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, is perhaps the most purely moving story in the book.

Indeed, depression is so much not the prevailing mood in Writing Our Way Home that it seems worth asking why that should be so. Of course, the preferences of the editors are largely responsible—clearly, they are not drawn to the literature of impoverishment—but what might be called the consolations of religion have something to do with it as well. The alienation of characters in minimalist fiction is often accounted for by the fact of their being inhabitants of an eternal present—adrift in the world with no sense of their roots, their history, a connection to their community. Indeed, it has been argued that whereas traditional fiction explored the interrelatedness of people in a stable society, now the social fabric has been rent permanently asunder, leaving no possible framework within which characters can play out their lives.

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In many of the stories in Writing Our Way Home, such a framework is provided by religion—although it may be a matter less of religious belief per se than of religious identity, or attachment to the heritage of a tribe. In Max Apple’s “The Eighth Day” (1983), for example, a thoroughly modern young man in love with a zealous advocate of therapy allows her to persuade him that he must reenact the trauma of his circumcision. When he and his Gentile girlfriend seek out the man who circumcised him—a sort of gloomy holy fool—the conversation that ensues may not make him go home and pray, but it does restore his peace of mind without benefit of therapy.

On a different note, the fussily self-important nonbeliever in Allegra Goodman’s witty “Variant Text,”³ although he refuses any relationship with God, nevertheless scrupulously adheres to Jewish law and has a definite, belligerent relationship with every human being around him that is defined by his stance toward Judaism. And in Johanna Kaplan’s Sickness,⁴ the young narrator’s dreary life in the Bronx is lent a romantic splendor by her immersion in several millennia of Jewish history. Even in Philip Roth’s richly imagined “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting” (1973)—in which we are given Franz Kafka as Roth might have known him if he had not died in 1924 but emigrated to New Jersey right before the Holocaust—Roth’s love of Kafka, his sense of him as someone uncannily familiar, is very much grounded in the (secular) Jewishness they share.

It may seem unrealistic to propose that religion will be the savior of the short story (although one can imagine a similarly satisfying collection of Catholic and lapsed-Catholic stories). But it is heartening to be reminded that strong stories do continue to be written—and it is likewise heartening to contemplate the increasing disaffection with minimalism, which may now have run its course. Is it too much to hope that, barring the emergence of some new and even more trivial fashion, real diversity—not of gender and race, but of individual experience—may yet take over again in the short story, and that we will be treated to a variety of distinctive voices, rather than a generic drone?

¹ The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Oxford University Press, 768 pp., $25.00. The Granla Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. Granta Books/Viking Penguin, 710 pp., $27.50.

² Writing Our Way Home: Contemporary Stories by American Jewish Writers, edited by Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rappoport. Schocken Books, 380 pp., $23.00.

³ First published in COMMENTARY, June 1986.

⁴ First published in COMMENTARY, December 1968.