MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
A FTER RAIN.
By
William Trevor.
Viking.
$22.95.
THE
C OLLECTED STORIES.
By
Mavis Gallant.
Random House.
$45.00.
S ELECTED S TORIES.
By
Alice Munro.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$30 .00.
S hort stories aren't novels-they're shorter. Short stories snatch at life and
give us only a concentrated episode or several moments-or thin out an
epic chronicle to the bareness of a Bible parable. The point in either case
is that this quick read (done at a sitting, as Poe insisted) isn't just a crumb
from a loaf; it's a round bagel with a mysterious hole of implication, a tale
whose strength, as William Trevor says, "lies in what it leaves out just as
much as what it puts in"-quite a clifferent thing. Writing short stories is a
high and special art, and only some novelists are good at it; most are not.
Many great writers are better when they write briefly than when they
don't. Faulkner, who wrote well either way, thought it was harder to write
a good short story than a good novel. In a novel, he said, "you can be more
careless; you can put more trash in it, and be excused for it. In a short story
that's next to a poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right."
Just the same, we are likely to rank the accomplished short story writer
under the novelist. We meet short stories in quickly thrown out magazines,
while novels, though they used to appear in installments in monthlies or
weeklies, now come to us directly in the presumably permanent form of
expensive books. It may be years before a story is gathered up wi th others
in a book. Meanwhile, a story seems less serious than a novel even when
exhibited in that high chic showcase, the
NewYorker-sandwiched
between
fact pieces and cartoons and hyperbolic ads for Versace clothes or Absolut
vodka-reading for the odd moment, or to pass time in a dentist's waiting
room, or on a plane. How often I have tried vainly to find again, in copies
of the magazine still around the house, some jewel by William Trevor,
Mavis Gallant or Alice Munro, all three of whom have appeared there reg–
ularly! This master and these two mistresses of short fiction have also
reprinted their stories in periodic small collections-some of these already
out of print-but only in a late gesture have decided to wrap up a parcel
the size of a b ig novel-Gallant and Munro just now, Trevor four years ago
(The Collected Stories,
Viking,
1992, 1,261
pages). Trevor and Gallant are
