There's a gorgeous essay about the short story by Steven Millhauser in the Oct. 5 New York Times Book Review. Much of it compares the short form and the novel, with the former coming off as a sort of David to the latter's Goliath. And you know who won that fight.
As I read it I kept thinking of the working class and the ruling class. The one perpetually underestimated yet ultimately the holder of decisive power; the other apparently unvanquishable yet actually doomed to oblivion. There is in Millhauser's essay some exquisite writing about the short story's essence, its you might say calling, as the distiller of all the world's truth into the smallest possible kernel containing everything. That's the workers and oppressed, I thought, we hold the living world in our hands while the rich hold only its ruin.
But then I had to rein myself in. Wait a minute, I told myself, all this workers vs. bosses stuff has nothing to do with the comparison between short story and novel. Yes the short story has a nearly mystical potential for compressed vastness but that doesn't make it virtuous as opposed to the evil novel crushing all the life out of the universe with its horrid massive tentacles. I love the long form. It's what I mostly read. It's the form I've mostly worked in over the last 10 years. I've written one novel and I'm at work on another. I think the novel is a grand quest for writer and reader. A story may approach closer to perfection than a novel ever can. But I'm a sucker for a great big thick sprawling mess, drawing me along, brilliant sentence by brilliant sentence. A great story can be a perfect pearl. A great novel is a string of them.
So nah, there's no metaphor for the class struggle here. Only another reminder that, four weeks on after eye surgery and still some weeks away from getting new glasses, being unable to read a book is driving me nuts.
