Elif Batuman wrote this great thing a while ago about the State Of The American Short Story. People love to do this, and obviously everything about it is completely the pits. It’s a pits that writers (or whoever, but it’s usually writers) feel that now is the time for yet another referendum on the novel, and Is Fiction On Life Support. It’s a further and more complicated pits that writers (or whoever, but it’s usually writers) see fit to write a Tersely Worded Rebuttal to the London Review Of Books where it is only a matter of time before they use the words “hand-wringing”, my worst, as in: “His hand-wringing inquisition into the state of the modern short story has, to my mind bewilderingly, managed to ignore what seems to be staring everyone else in the face” ETCETERA.
GROSS.
But still this Elif Batuman thing is great, and here it is:
http://nplusonemag.com/short-story
So she’s taken all these short stories and sort of scanned them for the terrible things that they have in common, and tarried especially long over the opening lines, and if I was writing a complimentary review I would say With Scalpel-Like Precision, Batuman Has Exposed The Flaw At The Heart Of The Contemporary Short Story. And it’s all pretty typical, if clever and great, but the bit about the animals’ names is the bit that is a real killer. She says that writers today can’t leave that sort of stuff alone, like there’s no way they would have not been able to name the little dog in the Chekhov story etc. Which I think is an excellent point, because the name of an animal is a way to be all quirks and revealing about your characters without actually doing anything. And obviously human names as well, but this is slightly less of an issue, because no clevs writers agonise too long over the people names because that is something you can sniff out from fucking MILES away. Like you can see straight away when a writer is just thrilled to bits over the perfect names of their characters, and it’s the worst.
The thing is though, when she was little, my mum used to have a cat called Pat Boone. Pat Boone! Never called Pat, or Boone, but only ever the whole thing. She would go out into the garden every night, she says, and shout "Pat BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE", so that it would come and eat its dinner. Once at John and Em’s house I saw a prescription from the vet written out for Tipsy Withers. Tipsy is the Witherses sheep-looking sad dog. My mum’s cat, according to that system, would be Pat Boone Van Schalkwyk. And the thing is with this is that what are you supposed to do? When a small girl in your story needs a cat for the purposes of the plot, and you could call it “the cat” or “my cat”, OR you could call it Pat Boone, what do you do? Restraint says “the cat”, but my heart says Pat Boone.