BiblioAddict

On Chinese astrology, The Year of the Short Story, healthy salads, Hemingway, Jeffrey Eugenides, middle class ethos, The New Yorker, and lapsed subscriptions:

If I were to classify the significance of my passing years in the pattern of Chinese astrology I would call this year “The Year of the Short-Story.” Nothing has impressed me more this year than the power of the short story – a power, which until recently, I either willfully ignored or wasn’t particularly susceptible to.

Either way, as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, most short stories tended to fly completely over my head. They often left me wondering what the point was, and why I’d wasted ten minutes bothering to get to an end, which often wasn’t an end in the first place – at least not in the novelistic sense – but was actually more of a fade-to-black, never-to-be-continued incomplete finish. Pre-”The Year of the Short Story” I found short stories to be either too long or too short, rarely ever satisfying, and uniformly bleak – full of cold, cloudy days, and people who expressed their fundamental unhappiness through public eccentricities.

Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that I can now appreciate short stories in a way I never could before. Perhaps it’s analogous to the day I stopped sneering at salads because I thought they were too healthy (“Year of the Salad: 1999″); or, perhaps it’s similar to that near future date when I will, with further maturity (this, I’ve been told), learn to appreciate Hemingway for the great American writer he’s been purported to be (“Year of Hemingway: 2023″).

But for now, Hemingway isn’t the story, the short story is. I think it may have all started with – and, forgive me because I know I’ve said this before – The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. I couldn’t recommend this anthology more. The stories included in this invaluable tome are the yardstick by which I’ve begun to measure all other short stories. They’re that good. They unfolded the way I suspect all short stories are supposed to unfold: with slow majesty, inspiring that buzz of anticipation one feels when you know the drop on the roller-coaster is just around the corner. And when the drop does come, oh what a beautiful experience it is, even if you’ve seen the plummet coming a mile away.

“The Great Experiment,” a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides in the March 31 issue of The New Yorker, was one of those stories. It wasn’t the best I’ve ever read, but Eugenides’ story of a middle-class family man who embezzles money from his job to make ends meet (with the inevitable consequences) came pretty darn close. It accurately captured the current ethos of the struggling middle class American family.

Rising gas prices, a house market gone bust, and an economy in recession that’s not really in “recession” – everyone has been hit hard these last few years, but arguably no group more than the borderline middle class folks. Those are the folks who didn’t know until recently that while they were cutting themselves a bigger piece of pie the components were going rotten on the inside.

In one scene, while standing in the doorway to his unglamorous bedroom, Kendall, the story’s protagonist, wonders what happened to the American dream which promised a better life than the one his parents had lived:

How had it happened in one generation? His parent’s bedroom had never looked like this. Kendall’s father had a dresser full of folded laundry, a closet full of tailored suits, and, every night, a neat, clean bed to climb into. Nowadays, if Kendall wanted to live as his own father had lived, he was going to have to hire a cleaning lady and a seamstress and a social secretary. He was going to have to hire a wife. Wouldn’t that be great? Stephanie could use one, too. Everybody needed a wife, and no one had one anymore.

But to hire a wife Kendall needed to make more money. The alternative was to live as he did, in middle-class squalor, in married bachelorhood.

This story was pitch-perfect from beginning to end. It makes me wonder if I really want to let my The New Yorker subscription stay expired. My, what a difference a year makes. This time last year I was complaining about how I found the The New Yorker’s short stories uninspiring and probably a little pretentious. Now, it’s the very thing that may convince me to come back for another year.