You Think That’s Bad

"My stories aren’t all about distant times and places. There’s one story in this new collection, called “Boys Town”, that’s about the contemporary underclass – people who can’t quite tell whether they’ve let themselves down or whether their country’s let them down. Having said that, you’re right that my stories do range all over the place. Part of what coheres them is their emotional centres. The same person is writing them, so the same person is coming back to some of the same obsessions – obsessions that show up in the stories across centuries and across continents. One of my obsessions, for example, is complicity with power that is being ill-used. I’m also interested in the ethical costs of passivity – with what happens when, as Edmund Burke put it, good people do nothing. Reviewers are also starting to catch onto the thematic and emotional links that draw my stories together. They used to just say: These stories are all so different. But now, having seen a few collections, they say: These stories are all so different… and yet there are similarities. Publishers have been hoping for that for a while. It’s hard to understand why short stories don’t catch on, given that they seem to be suited to our frenetic modern lifestyle. I wonder whether that’s partially because readers feel that if they’re going to invest their imagination, they really want it to pay off in terms of time. They think: If I’m going to get invested in a world, I don’t want that world to go away so quickly. They want a trilogy or an 800-page novel. Part of it also might be the mostly unfounded suspicion that short stories are like homework, that they’re closer to poetry than a novel. When you tell readers to read a poem, I think their impulse is often to think: Am I going to understand this? Nobody feels like picking up something for pleasure that will make them feel stupid. So maybe there is a little wariness about short stories, a little worry that they’ll be oblique and unsatisfyingly open-ended. But those are just theories. I don’t think anyone has an answer for why short stories aren’t doing better. For the reason that people read any kind of literature. Short stories at their best show us how we live and why we live the way we live. If you want to learn about the world, and about how other people operate, and about your own inner life, short stories are as good a way as any of getting started. There is nothing about short stories that’s inessential. There is no dithering or throat-clearing in short stories. They dive right into the middle of the matter. Everything in a well-built short story is doing two or three things at once. That kind of density is very, very cool. It means you can get in and get out very, very fast. As I say, they’re like guerrilla warfare in that way."