Musings

Collected Writings on the Essential Art

Readers often come to the short story expecting an abbreviated form of the novel. The two share the same elements of plot, character, tone, and point of view; the difference seems more in how the novel sprawls and the story contracts. But if readers of short fiction seek the same experience as the novel, with its often tidier beginning, middle, and end, its arc bent toward resolution rather than exploring what cannot be resolved, they forego extraordinary rewards. The short story is its own art form.

The late William Trevor, Ireland’s consummate story writer, distinguishes novels and short stories this way: "If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionistic painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art."

Artful stories—those that withstand several readings, their meanings deepening with each passage—are the ones I explore here. As with the finest paintings, or pieces of classical music, every time I give my attention anew, something shimmers at the story’s edge that I hadn’t noticed before. I never tire of listening to a piano concerto of Mozart’s, looking at a painting of Matisse’s, or reading a story of Mary Gaitskill’s. The analyses below are the culmination of multiple readings, but not the last word. Allow me one more sitting with the pages, and I’m sure to find another seemingly insignificant phrase or character or event that reveals still more meaning.

On Ben Okri

At some point when I’m reading a story for the first time, a brilliant story, neurons leap across old pathways in unique ways, my blood quickens, I pause for a moment, savoring, and think, yes, this is why I read, for this feeling. Or to quote from Ben Okri’s “The Third Law of Magic,” my “heart jumps with delight.” In his story, the narrator is describing that moment when one steps outside into the morning wonderland created by snowfall. Such a moment has gone rare this season in certain parts of the country used to its preponderance.

Margaret HuttonFebruary 19, 2023

On Alice Munro

Alice Munro has said that mood is more important than what happens in her fiction, and she wastes no time suggesting the harshness of jilted love in the opening scene of “Amundsen.” A young woman named Vivien has come to this remote, frigid town, with “air like ice… brittle-looking birch trees… [e]verything austere,” to teach children at a sanitorium who are infected with tuberculosis. Her own health is certainly at risk, but it’s this love that she is unknowingly going to meet—her first—that’s the greater danger.

Margaret HuttonApril 8, 2019

On Thomas McGuane

All the best stories are a kind of riddle, and Thomas McGuane takes on an essential one in this piece. “We don’t remember everything, but I’d love to know who’s in charge of what we forget,” the narrator says. Several events that happened during the course of one evening and morning have haunted him for years, and this story is an effort to make sense of them.

Margaret HuttonApril 8, 2019

On Jane Gardam

Unconcerned with portraying life in all its mundanity, the short story, with its early roots in Edgar Allan Poe, often fixes on that liminal space between everyday and alternate reality. I came across a brilliant example of this in a collection by Jane Gardam. I’ve only recently become acquainted with Gardam, though she’s over ninety years old with dozens of books behind her, and the only writer to have twice won the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award).

Margaret HuttonApril 8, 2019

Collected Writings on the Essential Art

Margaret Hutton is also known as Margaret Griffin and Margaret Hutton Griffin.