There’s no science to the saying that while two things are just a coincidence a third makes a trend, but the last three collections of short stories I happen to have read have all been full of open narratives, bursting with transcendence.
It started with Colin Barrett’s lyrical Young Skins, which won the Guardian first book award last year. Set mostly in County Mayo, these stories follow a cast of bouncers, drifters and drug dealers as they criss-cross the streets of a fictional small town – the threat of violence always at their shoulder. On the night of the award, the judges and his editors lined up to praise not only his striking voice, but also his deft touch with narrative.
“Barrett is very good at the unexpected,” said Anne Enright. “You’re working through something that’s feels gritty and hard but by the end, each story has turned into something almost lyrical and open. That’s real writing.”
Another author who seems to be after a bit of real writing is Eliza Robertson. She won the 2013 Commonwealth short story prize with a slippery story of sibling rivalry, We Walked on Water, in which the eventual disaster is gradually revealed in a series of echoes which begin in the second paragraph. A similar process of accretion is at work in Wallflowers, a first collection of short fiction published in the UK just last month. The flood announced in the first line of the opening story duly arrives as the story comes to a close on page 17, but offers little in terms of any resolution. There’s no easy moral captured in the trip to tag hummingbirds towards the end of Worried Woman’s Guide.
One of the stories in another January debut, SJ Naudé’s The Alphabet of Birds, lays out a recipe for this kind of fiction when the protagonist retires to the garden to write a “belated journal” of a holiday he took two years before.
“He is trying to remember, to figure out what happened during the trip, if anything, and what it has to do with what is happening here now.”
In Loose, another character despairs of a relationship without any “fixed shape”, feeling it’s not enough, that he needs “proper beginnings and endings, structure”. A Master from Germany features a beautiful room on the third floor of a ruined castle, an unsupported “box within a box” surrounded by dizzying space with “cellar stairs disappearing into the darkness below … [and] pigeons flashing through columns of light” above. This protagonist’s complicated relationship teaches him “One may linger in a beautiful room as long as possible. One does not have to open the door,” that “one must learn to live with open endings”.
There’s nothing new in a lesson that can be traced back to the “uncontestable father of the modern short story”, Anton Chekhov, and no shortage of 20th-century writers who followed Chekhov’s lead in refusing to tie their stories up in a great, big bow. But the hollow chorus of all those empty endings from Barrett, Robertson and Naudé sent me back to Virginia Woolf, and her description of how Chekhov leaves us feeling that “we have overrun our signals … as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it”.
An authorial strategy now so widespread to have almost become the norm in literary fiction was so “unfamiliar” back in 1925 that Woolf suggested readers “need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune”. These days popular and genre fiction are still full of the “lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed” she evokes, but what about the effect she describes of tuning our ears to Chekhov’s strange melodies on the rest of our reading lives?
“Once the eye is used to these shades, half the ‘conclusions’ of fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparencies with a light behind them – gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together. On the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves.”
Way back in 1925, Woolf’s daring and alert sense of literature was already so accustomed to Chekhov’s sophisticated inconclusiveness that the conventional conclusions which found in most of the fiction that surrounded her had faded “into thin air”. What would she make of our own era, in which literary journals and prize shortlists are dominated by stories that might have seemed to many of her contemporaries “casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles”? Can you read the current fashion for open endings as an indication of literary progress? Or literary progression, at least. I’m not suggesting you could compare contemporary writers with the classics and say that one is better than the other, rather that Enright’s straightforward identification of open-ended stories as “real writing” might mean literary culture has covered some ground since the 1920s.
Speaking on the phone from South Africa, Naudé evokes the large numbers of contemporary writers and critics who feel the dramaturgy of traditional fiction has become largely irrelevant.
“Modernism and late modernism often attempt to go beyond that,” he says. “They often try to eschew the empty performance and find something which feels more authentic, which has some sort of new authority.” As the numinous receded from everyday life after the Enlightenment, he continues, it became harder for writers to imbue fiction with meaning. “One cannot write without grappling with this notion of where one finds one’s authority, and I’m not sure it’s found in the more traditional forms or shapes of novels or short stories at the beginning of the 21st century.”
He’s less convinced by the suggestion this shift reveals any kind of literary advance.
“Different readers have different temperaments,” he says. “There will always be readers, perhaps a majority, who are keen to have neat narrative resolution and read in order to experience a certain kind of escape. And there are other readers who are more interested in what is new, and what new modes of being might be explored through new forms, or new modes of writing.”
Writers who follow Chekhov’s lead may certainly find it harder to “catch the ear” of a public “used to louder music, fiercer measures”, as Woolf suggests, but I’m not sure the division – between those who appreciate what she called his “little stories about nothing at all” and those who don’t – really captures the richness of our reading lives. My own, such as it is, stretches from SJ Naudé to Nick Harkaway, from Eliza Robertson to Alastair Reynolds and covers a fair amount of ground in between. Sometimes I’m looking for subtle harmonies, the glimpse of a fleeting melody, other times I’m after something a little more emphatic.
Perhaps all these musical metaphors are something of a clue. Maybe developing a taste for Chekhov is more like getting into a new band. Our playlist musical culture – patchwork listening driven by YouTube, Spotify and iTunes – seems unashamedly eclectic, straightforwardly unafraid to mix the highbrow and the low. Just as a passion for Bartók doesn’t rule out a keen appreciation of Beyoncé, there’s nothing to say an ear for Chekhov’s delicate resonances should prevent a reader from tapping a foot along to the stirring cadences of Ann Leckie. If we find in Chekhov that “as the tune sounded so he has written it” as Woolf suggests, then maybe all the progress literature requires is that authors should carry on singing whatever song they hear – just so long as they can keep from hitting any false notes.
