NP: [Short] Story Time

[alice wellintown]

I'm not sure why Monte selected this quote from what is, certainly, a
P related essay; the quote says nothing to me because it merely
states, in the lazy language of our times, the old question: Why does
size matter?  The short story, the novella, the novel, forms and
genres, classifications, and definitions aside, the essay discusses
several far more interesting issues that are germane to our reading of
BE.

Here is a quote from the same essay:

Around 1990, say, the manner of circulation of the short story began
to change: particular stories began to gain even greater fame than
their authors, for the dark oddity or hilarity of their hooks, or
premises, or données—pick your vocabulary. Think less quiet craft,
more punk provocation.

Now, as is our habit we will spend a great deal of time talking about
the opening of P's new novel. This is part training and convention, so
how we read, re-read as Nabokov sugsests, novels like college
professors, the opening is a key, packed with foreshadowing and the
like, and part training in reading postmodern fiction with modern
lenses, expecting our expectations to be knotted into extra-textual,
intra-textual lines tangled.   Of course, as the essay explains, the
exposition in shorts is usually dense by necessity. Just re-reading
The Invention of Morel, a novella(?), and there we see the author
providing what seems to be traditional exposition--setting,
motivation, character, point of view, conflict.

The other pertinent topic of this essay is the market place for
fictions, long and short, and how the circa 1990 a shift in reading
habits accompanied more interest in, perhaps more respect for the
short.

But P has not shifted. Nor has yielded to the new American realism, to
the new Hemingway sentence, and, most importantly, to more realistic
characters.,

But he has clearly shifted, in the Pynchon-Lite books to a market that
prefers not to read Against the Day.


On 9/15/13, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> "It turns out that there are touchy feelings, and serious considerations
> about the fiction writer's mission, wrapped up in the question of the short
> story's correct place in our aesthetic regime."
>
> http://publicbooks.org/fiction/story-time
>
>