Short Story Book Clubs = Better Conversations?

Listening this morning to Olivia O'Leary's lovely programme on one of my all-time heroes (Theodore Zeldin) and his New (Better?) Conversation initiative made me realize that our Short Story Book Club is not intrinsically about great short stories (although of course we are conscientiously and pleasurably focused on the little blighters) but more about facilitating great conversation.


Zeldin-ish conversation, that is: inclusive, honest, genuinely interested in another persons take on a shared topic/story, and supportive.
In a sense, I see the Club's raison d'être as quite different to a lit-crit gathering. I'm sure we've all been-there, done-that, got the withering ("Oh-I-wish-you'd-shut-up") looks from snooty dons and People Who Know Better (Or More) Than Us.  I'm pretty sure though that Zeldin wouldn't see this competitive one-upmanship as a Conversation Killer rather than as a facilitator.


So I wonder if it might be an idea, following the format of his conversation dinners, to explicitly structure the evening a tad. Just so that we don't automatically fall into the groove of convo-stranger-dynamics where a modicum of unease clogs the conversational channels.  With this in mind, we've agreed to have a kind of short-list of stories that we'll mainly be focusing on. 

• Blackberry Winter / Robert Penn Warren (http://www.dancalloway.com/gecko_project/short_stories/BlackberryWinter_Warren.pdf)
• O City of Broken Dreams / John Cheever [my duet-with-drill read aloud version of this story]
• The Magic Barrel / Bernard Malamud (http://nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/5/malamud/barrel.htm)
• Good Country People / Flannery O'Connor (http://faculty.weber.edu/Jyoung/English%206710/Good%20Country%20People.pdf)
• Upon The Sweeping Flood / Joyce Carol Oates [Link]
• The Babysitter / Robert Coover (http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/books/babysitter.sat)

All these stories be great conversation-starters in themselves.But we might also brainstorm before we meet a few (simple, but honest) conversation-starting questions. Just to get the ball rolling:

• Blackberry Winter: Why doesn't the boy tell his father about potentially dangerous hobo who's just rocked up at the farmhouse?
• O City of Broken Dreams: Is this not a very early (1948) prediction of the PoMo surface-no-content culture we're living in NOW?
• The Magic Barrel: Is the final match a double-bluff on the father's part to get the two of them together?
• Good Country People: Who's more cruel in this story, the bible salesman or the writer?
• Upon the Sweeping Flood: Why, in God's name, does he do it?
• The Babysitter: Is the ending a cop-out?

If you fancy adding some questions to our conversation menu, for all the stories, or just some, please do stick those in the comments box either on meet-up, or the blog. Also, t'would be great if you (and friends/family etc.) could head on over and "LIKE" our FB page, as it seems we need 20 followers or more to get a dedicated Page Name, and put ourselves in the running for winning a goldfish.

"In The Zoo", by Jean Stafford (1953)

The beautiful Jean Stafford.

That is, before the "uncouth, neurotic, psycopathic murder-poet" (AKA Robert Lowell) drove the two of them into a wall, conferring upon Jean defacement and hospital traumas that she would go on to sublimate in one of the most gruesome short stories I've ever winced through (The Interior Castle).

Keywords from the Literature, Art, and Medicine Database on that story say it all: Anesthesia, Doctor-Patient Relationship, Hospitalization, Medical Advances, Medical Testing, Obsession, Pain, Patient Experience, Physical Examination, Rebellion, Surgery, Trauma.

David Cronenberg (or Almodovar, if you're a September, 2011 Zeitgeister) eat your heart out.

This one is pretty visceral too. But more in a way that twangs at the heart strings like a raw, ol' blues song. Lots of parallels between this story and Edward Albee's similarly named one-act play - though I'm still not quite sure who got there first, chicken-and-egg-wise. I think it was Stafford.

PS For a reading of The Interior Castle, please make your way over to the preternaturally tasteful Miette's Bedtime Stories podcast.

"City Boy", by Leonard Michaels (1969)

This story makes me laugh, inwardly, or if having consumed beer, I might even use throat, teeth and tongue, and do a proper LOL. Often the laugh (inward, or out) is in different places to the times I'd laughed when reading it before. And it's great fun to read aloud. You should try it. It feels very Portnoy, which was of course published in the same year as this: 1969.

Incidentally (very incidentally), Micheals' protagonist is called Phillip, and Roth's is called Alex(ander), which strikes a similar register to Leonard, although I don't think either Roth or Michaels were tipping their hats (or cocking a snook) at each other.

Even the year (1969) has a scabrous, slightly surreal silliness to it looks-wise: all those beast-with-two-backs sixes and nines. So much so that at the end of the piece I couldn't actually bring myself to read the year, which Ford appends to every story in the anthology. Also, how does one intonate Veronica's demand (entreaty?) to Philip in the last paragraph? My reading of it sounds a little cranky, when presumably she would have uttered the endearment...well, how?

Answers on an MP3, please.

[Download the story] 

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

A great reading and discussion of this creepy story by A.M. Homes on The New Yorker Fiction podcast.

"A Perfect Day for Bananfish" by J.D Salinger

Richard Ford mentions in his intro to the Granta selection that he was unable to include the following story because of the anal-retentiveness of the Salinger Estate. One wonders if they're still so finicky post-mortem. A brief Google-search confirms this may be the case.

So who knows how long the reading I've made of this story will stay on here until J.D's legal rottweiler (Pam Malpas) decides to drop me a line.

Looking forward to getting some mail from the esteemed Harold Ober Associates Incorporated,  425 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

(Pam, please address all correspondence to theshortstorybookclub AT gmail.com. Cheers.)

[Download a reading of the story]

The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Edited by Richard Ford

As I'm something of a sucker for American short story writers, I thought I'd nail our colours (though not necessarily red, white, and blue) to the mast and suggest we get our club a-rockin' and a-rollin' with this superb selection by Richard Ford.

Oodles and oodles of good stuff to be savoured and talked about. Classics and stories-on-the-verge-of- becoming-classics. It also trounces the Joyce Carol Oates Oxford collection, I would suggest, which I find to be a somewhat overtly well-meaning, and didactic affair.

The Ford selection is however, a big fat collection, and I know that one of the undeclared aims of our group is not to have to feel the ponderous heft of Literature weighing down upon us from month to month as we submit to the pleasures of short fiction. So please feel free to read a couple of pieces only; whatever takes your fancy really.

As opposed to novels, which I would expect to hook me in a chapter or two, I usually don't force myself to read much beyond the second page of a story that's not exciting me. However, saying that, there is the odd tale that has won me over on page three or four. Few and far between though. The whole raison d'etre of the form (God bless it) is to grab you from the offset.

More about the September Meet Up and future books we'll be exploring can be found here.