Rebecca Rosenblum

Did you happen to catch the funniest book review last year? The Calgary Herald’s reviewer had the following to say about Alice Munro’s Best Selected Stories (M&S, 2008): "Aargghh."

That’s a direct quotation.

Quillblog found the review lacking in, um, "sensitivity and expertise."

Though her tone was startlingly informal, the reviewer clearly felt distaste for Munro’s fiction, something which isn’t unique. An earlier selection of Munro’s stories, for example, provoked an even harsher, though more fully argued, response, which can be found here.

There is a reason, after all, that short story collections are difficult to place with publishers. The reading public for short stories has atrophied. As Steven W. Beattie suggested last year, readers "seem to have lost their affinity for the short-story form; readers no longer seem willing or able to engage with the particular demands and conventions of the story."

At the Salon des Refuses event in August, Beattie expanded on his point. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that readers have perhaps forgotten the joys of the short story, because short stories tend to remind us of life's ambiguities, and Oprah has grown rich selling the belief that all problems can be solved. Short stories don't provide a quick fix, and this frightens people. This is bad news for short story writers.

Or perhaps it is bad news for readers who enjoy short stories. Talking about short stories has become even less socially acceptable than selling heroin to school children. As the Herald’s writer so sharply put it: characters in short stories "do not grow; they merely hang around." "[T]hose idiosyncrasies are there simply for the sake of being there; they do not lead to climaxes or denouements."

Here’s a longer quotation from Beattie, which I provide in response:

While dramatic conflict is at the heart of all fiction, as [Joyce Carol] Oates attests, the conflicts that attend a short story can often be more discomfiting, more unsettling than those in novels, precisely because they are not always – or even often – worked out over the course of a story. Short stories frequently do not present entire arcs or fully realized solutions, preferring instead to focus on a particular moment in time. As Rebecca Rosenblum has suggested, they focus on what was said and done, but often leave out the why.

Stories, more than novels, privilege language: the way the words on the page are organized to achieve effects that might be elliptical or elusive, but are nonetheless potent and moving and, due to the extreme concentration of words that the short form demands of a writer, can be much more immediate and visceral than in a longer, more discursive piece.

Neither is the short story tied to any single or definitive mode of narration. Readers who tend towards the Chekovian or Joycean mode of naturalistic storytelling, stories that work their way slowly to a subtle epiphany at the end, may risk forgetting that there is a whole range of approaches to the short form that different authors have attempted and experimented with. From the minimalism of Raymond Carver to the postmodernism of David Foster Wallace to the word collages of Donald Barthelme, the short story has proven to be an extraordinarily protean and malleable form, and it is in the innovations of a number of its practitioners throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that the short story has shown itself to be most vibrant and alive.

Beattie goes on to provide examples of the broad range of short story writers practicing in Canada. None of whom have a reading audience anywhere near as large as Munro’s.

It is not the best of the times and the worst of times for short story writers. It is simply the worst of times. Though for short story readers, hope springs eternal. Regardez Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once (Biblioasis, 2008), a book Beattie called "the most exciting first book of short stories by a Canadian writer since Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades [1968]."

I read this book over the past couple of months. I didn’t want it to end.

Winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, Rosenblum’s debut consists of 17 stories in just over 200 pages. The dominant theme is youth. The stories are quirky, light, intelligent, funny, well-written, absurd, amusing, insightful, clever, urban, urbane, lovely, contemporary, remarkable – in short, they offer much rewarding reading.

The stories made me remember my twenties with something other than bitterness, which is an achievement, believe me. They made me aware of opportunities of youth that I hadn’t thought of before. What I mean is, Rosenblum has a unique vision, powerful enough to make the old seem new again. She achieves what only the first rank of story writers achieve. She makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

Here’s one moment. Trinity, a pretty girl, says to her friends at a party: "You know, certain people in the sixties thought orgies would have become de rigeur by now, replacing parties like this entirely. Isn’t it weird that after all this time, we’re still repressed? This evening doesn’t even have orgiastic elements."

This is a book about coming of age in the 1990s. It may well be the best book about that experience. I say 1990s, because I don’t think this is a post-9/11 book. The young people in this book are too smart and self-aware not to have noticed that the Bush years were different. Darker. Meaner. They tracked a downward trajectory. The outside world, one hopes, is now harder to ignore. We have left our contemporary Jazz Age behind and have long since taken on new challenges.

I don’t mean to suggest that Rosenblum should have written a different book – or that she should have changed as much as a word. I just don’t think this is a book about our current moment. It seems to capture the anxieties of the young of a period of our recent past, now gone. It is extremely well-written (and edited and published). Cudos to all who had a hand in it. Many are waiting to see what you will come up with next.

The Calgary Herald’s reviewer probably wouldn’t like it, though. Too many subtle moments. Too many well turned metaphors. Too much humour that’s quirky and not slapstick. Too much emotion that’s suggested, not overt. Too many characters bathed in ambiguity, not drawn to represent moral certainties.

Every once and a while someone shows again that the short story form is not exhausted.

Rebecca Rosenblum has done it. Hooray!