{"id":688,"date":"2007-04-15T19:28:08","date_gmt":"2007-04-15T23:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/04\/15\/lesley-dormen-favorite-linked-stories\/"},"modified":"2010-07-16T19:32:19","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T23:32:19","slug":"lesley-dormen-favorite-linked-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/04\/15\/lesley-dormen-favorite-linked-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesley Dormen’s Favorite Linked Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first obtained a copy of Lesley Dormen’s collection of linked short stories, The Best Place to Be<\/i><\/a>, 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!<\/p>\n

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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<\/i>. Updike had been writing stories about the Maples since 1956; eventually, all thirteen were collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories<\/i><\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I am passionate about Alice Munro’s work wherever I find it, but The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose<\/i><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open?<\/i><\/a> 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<\/i> 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.\t<\/p>\n

I can’t leave out Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz<\/i><\/a>. Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil<\/i><\/a>, Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven<\/i><\/a> and Kate Walbert’s Our Kind<\/i><\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}