A Robber in the House

I have long been fascinated by the short-short and its relationship to the short story, the parable, the fable, the fairy tale, and - more recently - the prose poem. (A surprising number of poets are also short-short story writers.) While Coffee House Press is promoting its series as offering "literary fiction that can be read before work, on the bus, in the subway, at lunch, while the car warms up, or with the morning coffee," I am convinced that the appeal of the short-short involves more than just a lack of time on the part of the reader. Short-shorts are not just undeveloped or midget stories. They are not just fragments of a "real" story - although in reviews they will often be referred to as fragments, shards, slivers, pieces, bits, splinters, scraps, etc. My objection to these words as descriptors is that they all suggest a deficiency of some sort, and a short-short is no more an incomplete short story than a short story is an incomplete novel.

That is not to say they are not related genres. Any element you can find in short stories you can find in short-shorts: magical realism, romance, fantasy, myth, legend, experimental language, etc. Based on what I've read, however, I would make a couple of generalizations about the differences. First, there is a tendency for characters in the short-short to remain unnamed, giving many of the stories an "everyman" or "everywoman" flavor and contributing to the parabolic overtones I notice in so many collections of short-shorts. Second, short-shorts are overwhelmingly urban (and mostly eastern) in setting. If I have run across one set in a small town, on a farm, in the desert, near a ranch, or in the mountains, I cannot remember it. Whether this is due to writers in other, more rural regions of the country not having discovered or just not liking the genre, or whether the short-short does not lend itself to a rural setting, I am not sure. At any rate, the short-shorts in these three books are full of cafes, busy streets, crowded sidewalks, high-rise apartments, chance meetings, and other trappings of city life.

In Barry Silesky's One Thing That Can Save Us, the central "character" in most of the stories is a middle-aged male. Given neither a name nor a physical description, he represents a kind of "everyman" who is obviously befuddled, confused, and angered by modern-day living. He is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the realities of his private life and those of the larger world in which he lives, unsure which has more significance. "The guy at the bus stop chews his toothpick, walks a circle, steps off the curb to look. Peace treaty signed. Baseball team wins again. No bus in sight" ("Marco's Paradise"). In "Shoes," the man ponders these disparate facts: "nineteen killed at the ancient shrine, broken glass all over the alley crumbling to dust, does anyone still believe? Half a world away wool prices are falling like crazy." In the story called "Love," everyman is faced with "Mortgage car insurance taxes electric day care telephone gas fender for the car I hit last fall, all due the next two weeks on part-time wages. . . . The Khmer Rouge are killing again, taking cities, lines in Poland stretch out with barely a sausage, a loaf of bread at the end." And finally, in "The Rest," everyman reacts with violence: "Dawn, the garbage picker hit me for change & I looked for something to bash him. A baby to throw through a window, the car to drive through the house."

The only complaint I have concerning One Thing That Can Save Us is Silesky's insistence on using language that seems to be carried over from his poetry. Although it may work well there, it makes the short-shorts seem a bit overwritten. In the first story of the book, for example, the first sentence reads: "As in the next plank to continue this oak floor, more than half-laid but already three days, twice what we planned" ("Seek"). In "Snow," the reader is also forced to read the first line over and over, wondering what she missed, before moving on to the rest of the story: "Leaves about to blood, gold, not too hot, anyone could stare forever."

Like Silesky, Kenneth Koch is also a poet, yet the stories in his Hotel Lambosa rely less upon "poetic" language and more upon prose than do Silesky's. Consequently, the images are sharper, the meanings less obscure. Koch also gives more of his characters names, so his short-shorts feel more like traditional stories than like parables for "everyperson." (Those stories that do seem like parables - "Notre Dame and Chartres," "Life and Its Utensils," and "Julian and Maddalo" seem parabolic because of theme and content, rather than character anonymity.) Although Koch's central character is often, like Silesky's, a middle-aged male, he is less likely to be revealed mainly through interior monologue. As in "Libretto," the characters in these stories live in a sophisticated, classy, classical, "literary" world, full of European travel, art museums, and other "beautiful people."