Arguably, authorial voice is more important in a short story than in a longer piece of fiction. The ride is quicker, the reader must be engaged right away, and less space is available to absorb patches of soggy writing or gratuitous detail. Where I came from in northern New England, talking too much was considered incontinent, and respect for a person might lessen considerably if he or she was disposed to chatter. I remember how family members agreed that “Uncle Norris talks just to hear the sound of his own voice.” As a result, no one listened to him; I myself cannot remember anything he said, though I recall the thin drone of his voice. In my childhood those who had the power of voice managed it with good timing and economy of detail, just like those two women in the diner. They did not find it necessary to say how the woman had killed her husband, why or where she shot herself, or whether she left children behind. The writer chooses details in accord with the narrative voice most fit to tell the story, sensing how much is needed and what might need to be cut.
In Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Strange Animals,” the details are compact and sharply precise. In only a few pages he delivers the dilemma of a father losing his illusion of control. In “Nemecia,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, the narrator is a Hispanic woman looking back on her life as a young girl, and the child’s puzzlement is conveyed through carefully chosen, telling details that bring the reader into that experience.
Just as voice and subject are not separate entities, form does not stand on its own either. Like subject and voice, it is closely tied to a particular historical time and place, and is, necessarily and naturally, always changing—especially now. Certainly for many decades, the American short story typically involved one incident, one narrator, and one point of view. This is no longer true. As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack in as much material as a short novel might.
Today stories are being written in the midst of an enormous upheaval in the way we communicate and transfer and receive information. Think of this: the agricultural revolution took three thousand years to unfold, the industrial revolution three hundred. These were slowly unfolding developments compared to what we experience now. People alive today have gone through more changes more quickly than at any other time in history. What is to be made of this? I think we don’t know. But we do recognize that the wide world is not as “foreign” as it once was. Faraway places appear in our hands as we hold our cell phones, international crises are texted within seconds, and classes and conferences and family conversations are Skyped across the globe. The American experience is broadening, and so are its stories. They touch down in Boston, South Africa, Peru, and Canada, but even more than variety of location, the spectrum of voices is the strongest indicator of change.
Yet a few stories in this collection look back in time. For an early-twentieth-century character in “Nemecia,” a move from New Mexico to California feels as changeful as a move to a different continent might today. Alice Munro’s “Train” begins right after a young man returns from World War II, and his transition, years later, from a rural life to the city of Toronto is written with such clarity, we feel this “modern” world crash into us too. But it is “The Wilderness” by Elizabeth Tallent that brings us to where we live right now, with machines—or information devices—occupying us a great deal of the time. And though they threaten to increase our sense of isolation, they likewise offer the hope—whether false or not—of connection; the story heartbreakingly whispers the word me, as though it is the self we may be losing.
But it is the self we are always looking for, or always trying to escape, and fiction provides us with both options; they are wrapped together, these flights to and from who we are. We read because we are looking to see what others are thinking, feeling, seeing; how they are acting out their frustrations, their happiness, their addictions; we see what we can learn. How do people manage marriage and loss and illness and sex and parenting? How do they do all this? Often, the emotions that fill our inner lives are too large to make sense of; chaos and irrationality jump around inside us. To enter the form of a story is to calm down, or excite ourselves, within a controlled space.
In a world where telephone calls are made less and less frequently, where a tweet makes e-mail seem a little antiquated, we have more information, yet fewer voices. These changes, I suspect, make us desire the sound of a true voice even more. And we still want that news from the front. Not just the war front, or the economic front, or the navel-gazing front. We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world. What are we without this curiosity? Who in the world, and where in the world, and what in the world might we be? So we pay attention to that inner demand, the pressure of that question. Hello? Please—tell me.
DANIEL ALARCÓN
The Provincials
I’D BEEN OUT of the conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.
I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road; a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.
We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a few dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud; two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over moto-taxi. Its front wheel spun slowly but did not stop. It was like a perpetual-motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word Joselito.