When I first read a shorter, less avuncular version of King’s essay in The New York Times Book Review, I took it for pure provocation, the last-ditch effort of a revivalist preacher throwing down the fire and brimstone, anything to get a rise out of his tent full of apathetic backsliders. Because I write short stories and have only published in literary magazines, I took him seriously. I was pretty sure that, by King’s reckoning, I was one of the reasons short fiction is circling the drain.
King bases his diagnosis on the disappearance of short fiction from all but a few general interest magazines and the subsequent relocation of the form to literary magazines. This is bad for the form, he claims, because stories in literary magazines are read by a shrinking audience made up primarily of writers, teachers of writing and editors. Young writers end up writing “airless” and “self-referring” stories targeted at that small audience.
But there’s evidence that the size of the audience for literary short fiction today isn’t much smaller than it’s ever been. Three hundred and forty literary magazines are members of the Council on Literary Magazines and Presses, “a small fraction of what’s out there,” says the CLMP’s Jay Baron Nicorvo. Fifty-nine online literary magazines are CLMP members, and Nicorvo estimates that there are “at least 10 times more” who aren’t members.
If literary magazines are flourishing, there must be an audience for the work, even if, by King’s definition, it’s the wrong audience. The short stories on life support, and what King is pining for, are the genre stories that were the fictional mainstays of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post: crime, lost love, war, seafaring adventure, you name it. Yes, The Post published Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, but more often it published writers like Clarence Budington Kelland, a workhorse who churned out 10 million words for The Post alone, collecting $1 million for his efforts, and who referred to himself as “the best second-rate writer in America.”
King’s wistfulness for the “days of the old Saturday Evening Post, [when] short fiction was a stadium act,” conjures a well-known image among writers: The Post as standard bearer for an idyllic age in which, cigarette in mouth and Underwood at the ready, writers could make an honest wage writing short stories for magazines. At the same time, King bemoans the popularity of another (perhaps former) stadium act, Britney Spears. He even makes an offhand remark about the “disposable” nature of his own best-selling stadium acts, yet he seems unaware of the distinction he’s making between middlebrow work for large audiences and the high-quality work he’s chosen for this year’s “Best American Short Stories.” Granted, to a best-selling author, a small audience is a very bad thing. But while King may not be wrong about the results of writing in a vacuum, he’s looking back to a golden age that never existed for literary fiction.
The literary form is today no more or less mainstream that it ever was, and there probably are no more, no fewer, badly written literary short stories than there have ever been. And haven’t literary magazines always been on the bottom shelf at chain bookstores—if they were available at all? We may have lost the would-be Clarence Budington Kellands to writers’ rooms at “Law and Order,” “CSI” and “House, M.D.” (a character based on the king of genre fiction, Sherlock Holmes, no less), but I’m unconvinced by King’s argument that American short fiction is terminal.
There’s no doubt that short fiction has disappeared from the zeitgeist. Today, stories are communicated to wide audiences only if they’re made into movies. Any publisher will attest that short story collections don’t sell well. In an attempt to sex up the form, the literary magazine McSweeney’s has devoted two issues to pulp fiction. Guest editor Michael Chabon wrote in his introduction, “I think we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be.” True, genre fiction can be enormously entertaining, but as William Gibson said in a recent New York Times Magazine interview, “in genre, you’re sort of buying a guarantee that you are going to have essentially the same experience again and again.” That’s the idea behind sitcoms. If a reader wants an experience that transcends entertainment, he or she looks to literary fiction, where we hope that, serious or funny, the stories will surprise us—not superficially (the mother was the murderer!) but by presenting the unpredictable human condition, fleas and all.
Even if many contemporary short stories are, according to King, “show-offy rather than entertaining … self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious,” I’m not convinced that they’re symptoms of a dying form. They sound more like strained imitations of Nabokov, Roth and Munro. Just as fledgling painters copy the works of the masters, and emerging pianists try to replicate Horowitz’s octave technique, young writers will imitate, usually badly, established writers. And if young writers flock to writing programs and end up producing what King refers to as “some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner,” have faith that those with the gift, or the curse, will struggle through those pale imitations to find their own voices.
Regardless of what declarations come down from King or anyone else, short-story writers will keep on writing, just as they’ve always done, no matter the size of the audience, the existence of a market or opinions about the right or wrong-headedness of their work. King, provocateur, knows this. “What happens to a writer when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily?” he asks. “Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless.” He certainly got that part right.
