Well, and Your Humble Blogger has read twelve of the fifteen stories in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, and I’m going to return it to the library tomorrow, so I think I’ll go ahead and add this to the list, even though it’s possible I will read one of the remaining stories afterwards. I doubt it, though; I glanced that the three I didn’t read, and they didn’t seem to reward more time, even if I wind up, as I did with a bunch of the others, ceasing to read carefully about halfway through.
So, the question is, why didn’t I enjoy more of these stories? Is it because (a) I simply don’t like the short story form very much, as I am beginning to think is the case, (2) these stories are designed to appeal to other people, who value other aspects of the short story over plot and character, or (iii) these stories are crap? I suspect it isn’t the last, but I don’t really know. If you asked me to defend the stories against the accusation of craposity, I would be hard-pressed to identify what actually works for them. However, this may well be because, not liking short stories very much and not appreciating those things that do work for them, I am just missing stuff.
Now, I did like one story in the collection, and surprisingly enough it was by China Miéville. It’s called “Reports of Certain Events in London”, and although I could probably detail half-a-dozen things that annoyed me about it, I was charmed by the way it evoked a world quite different from our own, just beyond sight. Most of the stories, although they appeared to be straining for the evocative effect, didn’t actually evoke anything other than a sense of the evocative. Well, and a sense of madness, or of something that appeared to be madness but wasn’t.
Even the stories that had what seemed to me an interesting seed didn’t evoke a world out of that seed. Steve Erickson’s “Zeroville” had a nice seed in a door appearing in a single frame in a zillion different movies, that combined to a slow zoom in to a slowly opening door to ... well, that’s the thing, or one of the things. We don’t get that, and we get short shrift of the hunt for the frames, in favor of the naturalistic depiction of the breakdown of the central character, a film editor (of course) for whom I haven’t the slightest sympathy. He doesn’t do anything, and as a result, nothing happens. There’s no sense that he really had caught on to something, and the world where that thing might make sense isn’t evoked at all. Similarly, Daniel Handler’s “Delmonico” nearly evoked a world where the World’s Smartest Barmaid dispenses world-weary and spookily accurate advice in a rundown saloon, but lost it in a tedious case where the Barmaid and the Narrator couldn’t help knowing the answer to the so-called puzzle, any more than a three-year-old child could.
The other story that seemed as if it could have worked was Jason Roberts “7C”, which had a clever idea about a quasar-related disaster leaving scars backwards in time, experienced by the characters before the event, with faded scars growing angrier and more painful as the event grows nearer. Very clever, yes? Only he hands that idea to a main character whose sanity is rather boringly in question, and whose marriage is even more boringly in question. It’s as if the writers were all aiming for some sort of stereotypical New Yorker plotless story about “character”, where characters don’t do anything and develop only in the sense that they deteriorate, and were hoping that we didn’t really notice that there were supernatural elements in the scene as well.
And, of course, that stereotypical New Yorker story is well-loved, just not by me. And I can mock the idea of Literary Merit from year’s end to year’s end, and it won’t have any effect on the actual literary merit of the stories. But perhaps I ought to rethink my idea that I ought to start reading short stories again.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.