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Necessary Ingredients |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Peter Shaw |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1989 |
| Size: 2,770 Words, 16,590 Characters |
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When an introduction proves to be of greater interest and importance that the book of stories it precedes, contemporary fiction can be said to have relegated itself to insignificance. Whereas once fiction provided the most luminous of all insights into life, it has been reduced to a symptom of its time. Sharply aware of the situation, novelist and short story writer Mark Helprin, editor of The Best American Short Stories 1988, has broken with the genteel tradition of prize-story volumes and, in his introduction, issued a challenge to current fictional styles, attitudes, and values. Among all the laments about the state of fiction that have grown familiar over a period of at least thirty years, this one stands out for its willingness to violate the taboo imposed on fiction writers against discussing ideas in fiction. Indeed, it goes further than this and ascribes fiction's decline to faulty ideology.
Helprin focuses his attack on the school of minimalism. As Carol Iannone has put it, minimalists write "fiction that is thin in texture, slight in form, banal in subject matter, well-crafted, empty, easy to read." Its practitioners are usually said to include Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, and some scores of their imitators writing in close to a hundred little magazines. Joe Queenan has recently poked fun at the genre for its concentration on the incompetents of the world to the exclusion of people who hold respectable jobs, as well as for its obsession with the unpleasant and the grotesque. "By page 29" of a Leonard Michaels collection, Queenan writes, we've had dog excrement, bald women, one death, t...
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...held point of view (even one the reader may reject) are the currently rare ingredients necessary for writing the kind of fiction that deserves to be taken seriously. It is to Mark Helprin's credit that he has held out against the kind of writing that makes a virtue of excluding all of these qualities, and that he has succeeded in discovering a few stories that actually contain some of them. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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