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PARTISAN REVIEW
BEYOND MINIMALISM
DUSK AND OTHER STORIES. By James Salter. North Point
Press.$14.95.
EMPEROR OF THE AIR. By Ethan Canin. Houghton Mifflin Co.
$15.95.
WHERE I'M CALLING FROM. NEW AND SELECTED
STORIES. By Raymond Carver. Atlantic Monthly Press. $19.95.
A plethora of articles in literary journals and mass-circulation
newspapers alike have recently railed against the perfidious influence of
something called minimalism on the American short story. At the same time
there've been an approximately equal number of articles celebrating the
quantity of fine stories being published, articles which refer to our time as a
veritable renaissance of the short story. I side more with the second position,
for I think our time is rich with good stories, much more so that it is with
novels, and that perhaps this has always been so. Morever, I seriously
question the validity of the term "minimalism" insofar as it's supposed to
represent a bona fide literary movement or new aesthetic. The best writers
associated with it (Frederick Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann
Mason) are quite original writers after all, far more distinct from each other
than they are similar. At any rate, assuming that the term has a kind of
practical meaning, no more than a handful of "minimalists" exert a discernible
influence on the contemporary short story.
It
seems to me that we are living in a period where no single concep–
tion of fiction dominates, a period that is open, to an unprecedented degree, to
many different conceptions of the story. The writers under consideration
here are cases in point. Although the celebrated novelist James Salter may
write enough short declarative sentences to be misconstrued as a minimalist,
in many respects his work takes an opposite approach. In his first collection of
stories,
Dusk,
almost all are written in the third person past tense (as opposed
to the minimalist's favorite first person, present tense) and in the best ones–
"American Express," "Foreign Shores," and "The Cinema" - he shifts point
of view interestingly from one character
to
another. The writing here is
precise and elegant.
At times, however, a tone of world-weariness prevails. Instead of the
tension and vitality of "The Cinema," for instance, there's an all too knowing
irony and an enervating sense of defeat before the battlc's been fought. This
tone is most troublesome when it exists in stories with insufficiently devel–
oped characters. In the title story we witness the final loss of Mrs. Chandler,
a divorced middle-aged woman. We are told: "She was a woman who had
