While grocery shopping...

A blessing of the free-lance life is grocery shopping during a week-day afternoon. For me, it's Monday, preferably around two or three, when everyone has cleared out and left the stores bare-looking and roomy. Even the muzak seems better. I charge up and down the aisles with my lists and my menus, eagle-eyed for a deal but with enough brain-power to think about other stuff.

Today I thought about short stories.

This week's New Yorker has a story by Hari Kunzru called "Raj, Bohemian". Thing about New Yorker short stories is, you either like them or you don't. I do but as a cautionary note, my taste was formed during the 1950's and 60's when my parents subscribed to The New Yorker and the king of short story writers was John O' Hara. John O'Hara was considered the inventor of an archetypal New Yorker story: a snippet of real life, caught in the mid-point of its happening, and largely defined by the dialog, which was important because of what wasn't said, rather than what was. It's a tricky type of story to write, much harder than it looks. O'Hara never thought he got his due as a writer and died a bitter, nasty old man. Today he's pretty much gone out of time and mind. On the genre front, his type of story is now deader than Elvis and not a minute too soon, from my perspective.

O'Hara was a bridge figure though, between the Saki-type yarn and the much more internal writers of today like Lorrie Moore or Mary Gaitskill. As a writer, although I tried valiantly to imitate them, I never felt comfortable with writers like Shirley Jackson, or even J.D. Salinger. I breathed much more easily reading Virginia Woolfe and Katherine Mansfield even when I didn't understand what they were getting at.

Reading Kunzru's story today, for some reason I was reminded of Shirley Jackson and how much I hated her stuff, even when she was wildly popular. Story magazine, before it folded, was crammed full of Jackson-esque pieces every month, and when I read them I'd feel like weeping out of rage and frustration because, as a writer, I just didn't think like that. I couldn't dream up a scenario out of whole cloth, then drag it ::clackety-clack:: through an armature of plot development to an air-tight conclusion. Or rather, I could and did...well-enough to win an honorable mention in a Story competition. I was awarded a weighty three-volume dictionary and every time I looked at it I felt like a fraud.

Kunzru's story, by the way, is nothing like Shirley Jackson's tidy little tales, and I enjoyed it a lot. What Jackson always left out of her cardboard constructions and what Kunzru puts in, is the sense of a living, breathing internal life...the odd motivations that propel a character through a situation, half aware of what's going on, often not.

Like life.