New American Stories
Ed. Ben Marcus
Granta
At Columbia University, Ben Marcus teaches a seminar called ‘Technologies of Heartbreak,’ that considers the strange machinations a writer can use to get inside his reader. With New American Stories, Marcus appeals to a similar emotional affect as his criteria for curation: he aimed to bring together 32 stories by ‘the most gifted technicians’ in building a ‘chemical pathway to . . . language-induced feelings’. The result is a collection of baffling, moving and fabulous pieces. The stories, then, prowl across diverse generic and thematic space, ostensibly united only in their determination to bend language towards being a kind of sophisticated if unpredictable feelings-hack. A sure highlight is Lucy Corin’s absurdist ‘Madmen’, set in an imagined universe where insanity and aberration are fetishized as ‘Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference’. Various stories deal with alternate realms. Both Charles Yu’s ‘Standard Loneliness Package’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Valley of the Girls’ skillfully speculate on the horrors a biotechnically adept society might want to expel: the former story treats the virtual offloading of negative emotion; the latter shows a world in which celebrity’s potentially embarrassing children are replaced in public by a strange second-self.
Other pieces are less conceptually bizarre, but show striking linguistic inventiveness. Rebecca Lee brings psychobabble to new levels in ‘Slatland’ with her child therapist who counsels little ‘erky-terks’ in a diction all his own and Robert Coover’s stylized syntax shows a stream of time hurtling by the dazed protagonist of ‘Going for a Beer’ who is always a step behind his own life. In territory this ambitious, there are always dangers, and certain works run the risk of being too shouty, showoffy or inaccessible. Marcus has been accused of being too much a writer’s writer, too devoted to wordy surrealism. Yet writerly use of radical form and linguistic revision rarely displace these stories’ ability to communicate or emote. Concerns around the short story being reinvented in this collection through avant-garde critical darlings or MFA-style experiment are purely academic.
Words: Gillian Moore
