Why are Contemporary Short Stories So Bland?
Since every publication I pitched it to refused to publish this review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for a Another World, I’m posting it here. I’ve been forcing myself to read lots of contemporary short story collections recently, in preparation for Bad Americans. Reading through them, I still have the same question I had on my mind more than a decade ago: Why Are Contemporary Short Stories So Bland?
Ottessa Moshfesh’s work was mentioned in a review (
https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/good-americans
) of my own short story collection Good Americans (2013) (
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Americans-Human.../dp/0988351935
), so I decided to read her short story collection “Homesick for Another World” (2017). It has been a while since I’ve read a contemporary short story collection — I used to read them many years back when I was writing mostly literary stories and found most of them well-written but content-wise pretty bland, which is why I decided to up the ante in Good Americans.
But with my new collection Bad Americans in development, I realized I need to read more contemporary short story collections to see if the “acclaimed” major published stuff is still as bland as it was back then, and perhaps to learn from these “masters” in terms of technique and of course, to see if I can up the ante again. Since Moshfesh’s writing was compared to my own, I figured perhaps she bucked this trend, so I started with her.
She definitely does write about obnoxious people who lie and often cheat, though almost always they stop themselves before doing anything truly transcendent, criminal or revolting. It more or less abides by the common aesthetic philosophy that nothing truly significant can occur in a short story, hence it not be “literary” enough, which is more of a marketing and classification strategy than an artistic one. I wouldn’t say any of the characters are truly unlikeable; they are mostly unhygienic and selfish.
Almost every short story follows the same basic formula, but just switches up genders or marital statuses. One unhygienic, lightly obnoxious person has an encounter with another unhygienic, lightly obnoxious person. Many of my stories in Good Americans have a similar setup, though I do change up structure and style a lot more, especially if it fits the content, and you can say every short story writer repeats the same aesthetic over and over again to some extent (see Hemingway, Carver etc.) so I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. One thing I did find to be lame were the endings. I usually like ambiguous, complex or unhappy endings, but those usually provoke thought, reveal character or make one reconsider what one has read. Or it just says, this is life, or it reveals something else about the author’s world (and/or ours).
Moshfegh’s endings usually just have the main character do something weird, which doesn’t really fit in with their character, what they’ve gone through or with the mood of the rest of the story. It just feels like she needs to end it to make it short enough to be in the Paris Review (where many have appeared) or some other journal, so she tacks on something weird. You could make the argument that this is original, but they didn’t really seem like it worked most of the time.
There are many positives too, of course. She does write beautiful sentences (though some phrases like “and so forth” seem to be repeated among characters in different stories when it wasn’t clear they would necessarily use them). I did expand my vocabulary by reading it. She describes the urban and/or suburban wasteland which is most of America (not New York City, as much, where I live, so I guess I’m spoiled) fairly well, though her settings don’t jump off the page. The stories themselves are easy to read, though I did force myself to get through the latter half of the book, since as I said most of the stories are very similar in terms of structure.
Is she a talented writer? Yes, I suppose, but she still needs to develop more compelling, differentiated content, like most other writers of my generation, work on character development and up and diversify her storytelling skills on the whole.
Does she have something to say? Generally, perhaps. The characters don’t seem to have any motivation to behave as they do other than the fact that they hate the world they are in and/or come from, but I believe that is the point. The world is too empty for them to behave any other way, or have any other choice, so there is a strong naturalist and fatalist element here. However, there aren’t really any interesting insights or even drama in terms of race, and while there are definitely class conflicts in many of the stories, it’s not clear what we are to take from them, and none of the stories really tackle these social discrepancies head on.
Considering the blurbs are telling me she is one of the most celebrated short story writers on Earth today, did the collection blow me away? No, it didn’t. I did find it generally entertaining, though I didn’t really care what happened to the characters either way, and I usually knew nothing of significance would likely happen and rarely did. My personal favorite story was Mr. Wu, and for once the weird ending somewhat worked for me. A Better Place was relatively memorable but somewhat out of keeping with the rest in terms of style if not message, and probably had the best ending overall, but again it wasn’t clear why the characters felt as they did.
But there was no story that I really thought: Wow, that was such a great, memorable story! I’ve definitely felt that way with Raymond Carver (Fat, Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and others), Herman Melville (Bartley the Scrivener), Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Up in Michigan, Fifty Grand, Hills Like White Elephants, The Killers etc.), even Faulkner (A Rose for Emily, A Justice), Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find), O. Henry (Twenty Years Later, The Gift of the Magi), Joyce Carol Oates, etc.
Many of the stories, including The Beach Boy, Slumming, A Dark Winding Road etc. have somewhat interesting characters and setups in them, but on the whole, they weren’t brilliantly structured stories. So why is this writer so popular and acclaimed, published majorly and widely? She probably just got lucky and rode a wave that came up for her at the right time, as most famous writers these days have.
But could it be, also, because she depicts slightly decrepit worlds devoid of any real race or class conflict, bland enough to be acceptable to white upper middle class readers but raw enough to think, they, this is groovy and fresh! Or is it truly because unstructured, self-centered lives full of ennui is how most millennials who read live today?
But literature isn’t just about aiming your work at a narrow demographic to make money. We can, and should, depict a diversity of worlds and use styles and structures that reflect them. Certainly in a time like our own, when it is so clear that the world is in conflict due to race, class, education, politics and many other demographic dividers, we can use literature to reflect on those conflicts as well, and break the dividers within the literary world that mimic those of the real world. And that would truly be worthy of acclaim.
