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edited by Michael Chabon Vintage, 2003 480 pp.; $13.95, paper |
Shortly before his untimely death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in his working notes for his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." Fitzgerald considered this observation to be so important that he underlined the first and last words several times each.
What this gifted novelist and short-story writer meant by this pithy statement should be quite obvious, though it seems to have escaped countless writers and critics in the past half-century: an author conveys a character and makes him real through the character's actions, including thoughts, words, deeds, or any combination of the three. (To interpret Fitzgerald's statement as meaning that action flows out of character would also make sense, but it is something that no author should find very useful: Where else could meaningful action come from but characters?)
Fitzgerald's observation would seem to be little more than common sense. As Aristotle noted more than two millennia ago, drama lies in the choices characters have to make. Unaccompanied by depictions of specific actions, statements about a person can hardly be dramatic, convincing, or compelling. On the other hand, most people are inherently interested in accounts of others' actions, in their moral choices, and in the thoughts that bring them to various crossroads and inform their decisions. That is why gossip is a universal phenomenon.
Unfortunately, during the decades since Fitzgerald wrote those words, action—in its most coherent guises of plot and story—gradually fell out of favor among the American literary élite and its multitude of followers. Novelists and, especially, short-story writers took the none-too-subtle hint and duly set out to explore character and let the story come as it might—or might not. By the 1980s and '90s, many of those at the top of the literary heap were minimalist writers such as Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Anne Beattie, and Mary Robison, whose "'around the house and in the yard' fiction," as the decidedly non-minimalist novelist Don DeLillo described it, was widely imitated in writing workshops across the country.
In his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, novelist Michael Chabon rightly deplores this state of affairs. He wants to remedy it by restoring plots, events, actions, human choice—in short, story—to the short story. The present anthology, billed as the first in a series, is his shot across the bow of the literary establishment—a bold attempt to "revive the lost genres of short fiction, a tradition I saw as one of great writers writing great short stories."
This mention of genre is, I think, the key to the thing. While literary trendsetters and critical darlings went their own way, other writers continued to pursue traditional forms of plot, story, action, and character in genre fiction throughout the past half-century: mysteries, science fiction, suspense, gothics, Westerns, and other such works. For all their often fine merits, however, genre novels and stories don't appeal to everyone, and their conventions do limit what writers can achieve without obliterating their boundaries altogether. When authors such as Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Maugham, and Faulkner, whom Chabon cites in his introduction, wrote "ripping yarns" of the type he champions, they were far less deferential toward the conventions of the genres in which they wrote than were most writers who toiled in these fields.
It is nonetheless true that even these authors aimed to write stories with plenty of action, and it seems that the attempt to write within a particular genre can have a salutary effect, however willing and able an author may be to transcend its boundaries. The obvious limitation of genre fiction is that it puts a frame (albeit often a quite flexible one) around a story's possibilities; the underappreciated positive aspect of working in such a form is that it can strengthen the effect of a tale by forcing the writer to eliminate irrelevant material. In addition, the need to fulfill plot expectations of the chosen genre obliges the author to find situations that will force the characters to make difficult choices, both tactical and moral ones. And in the latter lie drama and insight into the human condition.
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