The Long and the Short of It

In 1825 Edgar Allen Poe invented the short story by setting down the rules for the form.  And yet, in the almost 200 years of its development, the story has been the baby sister of the novel -- a fledgling waiting to grow up. The 2013 awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature announces to the world the absolute foolishness of that idea.

Alice Munro is the world's greatest living short story writer, single-handedly elevating that achievement into world-class rank.  She does it, not by writing "mere" stories but by compressing the world of the novel into the space of the story.  Her success depends on her wonderful facility with language, the depth of her psychological insight and the fact that as a woman it was the natural fit.

In the 19th Century, men wrote of chasing white whales, women of baking bread.  Lives of women were held securely within four walls.  In the 20th and 21st, with the wide world open to both sexes, we discover there is no advantage to working on a global landscape.  The human experience is available right at home -- between taking care of the children, running the household, finding our sexual selves and relating to others.

Like the work of Fra Angelico, the miniature is often more impressive for the very intimacy of the effort.  Women's lives, homebound though they may be, are as fascinating and inclusive as anything in nature.  But wait just a minute.

Alice Munro is 82;  Eleanor Catton is 28 (I love the symmetry of it).  Catton has just won the Man Booker 
Award for 2013 with the longest manuscript over to prevail.  Her book, The Luminaries comes in at over 850 pages and joins other massive tomes, notably The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt that have garnered recent  interest. Does that tell us anything, I wonder, about the enormous change in women's perspective in recent times.  Or perhaps Catton has yet to learn what an eminent professor once told me:  it's infinitely harder to write small.  Incidentally,  anyone who wants to tackle the Tartt book and give me some feedback, have at it.  Maybe it's something we can read over the summer.  A new addition to the giant book craze -- a book heavily touted by Cynthia Ozick-- is The Elixir of Immortality by Gabi Gleichman.  This is a historical novel that tells the history of the Jews in Europe in almost 800 pages.  For the intrepid, a fascinating concept.

(UPDATE)  First responses on The Goldfinch are in.  Readers generally like the book a lot but are finding the last 200 pages a slog.  I put it on my kindle so I wouldn't have to lug a "doorstop" around with me, or be aware of how much I had yet to read.  It's so easy to fool the mind!  But the Pulitzer committee seems to have had no such problem as it is this year's fiction prize winner.  In this case, however, size does not seem to mean range. Tartt's book is a coming-of-age story that simply uses the device of a world-famous painting as it's leitmotif.  So in general I have not been convinced that "writing big" must be more meaningful than the short stories of the incomparable Munro.  Let me know what you think.