The Eleanor Rigby generation

kw: book reviews, fiction, anthologies

I occasionally pick up a title of "mainline fiction," particularly a short story collection. Each year I read the "O Henry Awards" collection, though the experience has been getting less and less enjoyable over the past twenty years. Nonetheless, I look from time to time to see if a positive trend is appearing.

Thus, I recently read Alice Munro's Runaway collection. Among eight stories, I found one arresting image: "Trespasses", which portrays an ever-more-entangled set of relationships, ends with a young woman whose pajama cuffs are covered with cockleburrs that she can't get off without help...so she ends up waiting... The stories made me think, "Oh, look at all the lonely people; where do they all come from."

Maybe I just don't have the right kind of mind. That cockleburr image is as close to a story actually getting somewhere as is to be found in the collection. Munro's characters seldom make decisions; they do not act but react, or fail to react. They have no goals; they wander at random, not moving but moved. When they do act, they don't know their own motivations.

Perhaps this exemplifies the younger Boomers and the X and Y generations. Burned out by "ME generation" hype and the failed sexual revolution; jaded to everything. They have become one with Camus and his philosophy of emptiness.

This is the black backdrop behind my love for Science Fiction and some Fantasy, and my disdain for those insecure SF&F writers who try to bring "mainstream" elements into their stories. Legendary editor John Campbell gave some advice to a young author whose story consisted of lovingly detailed descriptions of imaginary technologies, but otherwise went nowhere: "Pose a problem, then solve it!"

Yes, I know that "people problems" are often not solvable. I know that politics often produces results that are worse than letting things happen at random. But stories are about results. I may not be able to figure out why this co-worker (or wife or child or neighbor) does something, or change his or her attitude. But I can learn to cope with it, and hopefully make some lemonade out of the lemons life served up.

One of my favorite stories is about the collapes of the Social Security system. After some false starts, the protagonist learns of the value of his elderly friends' memories. They make things better in their corner of the chaotic world around. Did they save the world? They saved a little. Like the guy throwing starfish back into the ocean after a storm. When asked, "What difference does it make?" he replied, "Lots of difference to this little guy," then threw another back.

In the past I've railed against writers (and artists in general) who thrive upon degrading their audience, and argued in favor of ennobling them instead. Much contemporary fiction doesn't either ennoble or degrade; it simply leaves you in an emotional desert. Where is it that God said, "I wish you were hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm, I will vomit you out."?

Ms Munro is a skilled writer. Too bad about her tepid imagination.