Lesley Dormen’s Favorite Linked Stories

When I first obtained a copy of Lesley Dormen’s collection of linked short stories, The Best Place to Be, I realized that although I’ve been inviting short story writers to pay tribute to their own favorite authors for a while now, I’d never addressed this particular branch of the genre. Well, I thought, here’s a great place to start—and Lesley had plenty of ideas on how to do it!

I’d been reading and loving “linked story” collections long before I wrote one myself—in fact, long before the thing itself (novel? story collection?) had even been named. Like other readers of a certain age, I discovered John Updike’s sophisticated, neurotic, ambivalent Everycouple, Joan and Richard Maple, in the early 1970s, in The New Yorker. Updike had been writing stories about the Maples since 1956; eventually, all thirteen were collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. These exquisite explorations of young marriage (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”), middle marriage (“Giving Blood”), broken marriage (“Twin Beds in Rome”) and divorce (“Separating”) were thrilling to come upon one at a time. Collected in one volume, the Maples stories are collected glimpses of 1960s marriage, allowing a reader to drop in and out of one couple’s intimate life through their experiences of parenthood, infidelity, and divorce, while preserving a unique time and place, all refracted through that Updikean narrative dazzle.

The extraordinary first sentence of “Twin Beds in Rome” is carved into my brain, probably forever: “The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come.” I see myself in my tiny apartment on West Eleventh Street (one block away from where the Maples themselves once lived!), puffing at a cigarette and pecking away at my Smith-Corona, trying to replicate the amazing confidence, rhythm, psychological complexity and surprise of that one sentence. These were the first stories that captured my heart as a young female reader new to New York City, to Greenwich Village, to her own life. They were the first stories that taught me to read as a writer.

I am passionate about Alice Munro’s work wherever I find it, but The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose is a linked collection that tops my list of Munro favorites. I dip in and out of these stories about a stepdaughter and her stepmother year after year. When the book was released, the writer John Gardner said he didn’t know whether it was a collection of stories or a new kind of novel, “but whatever it is, it’s wonderful.” Amen. He pointed out their psychological precision, the leaps in time—feats I think linked stories can accomplish more deftly than a novel (no fat in this collection). Like Updike’s, Munro’s stories were crafted one by one, then collected. Their pattern emerges after the (often lengthy) act of creation, and that’s what I find most amazing about them when they work as a whole. We glimpse these rich characters in self-contained glances, each glance containing the world, including the spaces left blank, and together making a universe.

Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open? is one of those books I keep on my desk as a kind of totem. When I first came across Hecht, I about fell over laughing. I laugh over and over. They never get old. Each story, narrated by the same hilariously neurotic, existentially inclined female narrator, appeared one by one in The New Yorker before being collected as a whole. If Alice Munro is (as the cliché goes) our Chekhov, Hecht is our Samuel Beckett. If you haven’t met her in print, hurry up and do so. Her narrator’s experience of a certain slice of American life at the end of the twentieth century is riotously black.

I can’t leave out Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz. Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil, Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven and Kate Walbert’s Our Kind. All of these books do something readers (like me) love. They allow us to observe a world of characters through the eyes of all the characters in that world. Walbert’s use of the first person plural—the “we” that was 1950s female life; Goodman’s third-person immersion in an American Jewish family through different characters’ eyes; Silber’s sly conceit of lifting a character from the margins of one story into his or her own story a few pages later; and Cronin’s interconnected tales in which the title characters don’t even appear in the same story until halfway through is deeply satisfying.

Novels in stories are standing on their own. Having taken their first wobbly steps, they are ready to be exactly what they are, not what they aren’t. No apologies necessary.

15 April 2007 | selling shorts |