A New Way With Words

In my lifetime, the short story's natural habitat has vanished. The fiction magazines have closed, and the other print media seldom run short fiction. Publishers want novels; short story collections don't sell. In response, there are initiatives to save the short story: shortstory.org, the National Short Story Prize, the Small Wonder Festival. These are all splendid, but as a result the debate becomes polarized. Short story versus novel - mutually exclusive, and in conflict.

I think the relationship is more complicated and interesting, and the membrane between them more permeable. In fact, much of the UK's best writing is from short story writers forced to find ways to write novel-length stuff.

Ian McEwan started out as a terse, disciplined short story writer. But "the market demands novels". Now he is seen as a terse, disciplined novelist. Yet a more interesting way to think of him is as an increasingly, and deliberately, sprawling, short story writer. People have murmured that they're not sure if his novella, On Chesil Beach, should have been included on the Man Booker prize shortlist this month.

It's more interesting than that. It's a short story. And it couldn't be a shorter story (skip the next line if you don't want the entire plot revealed): a man has a premature ejaculation which destroys two lives. That's it. Perfect, essential McEwan. Because McEwan has one thing he wants to write about again and again: middle-class lives destroyed by a single, shocking, unfair incident. His readers know that. So, in both Saturday and On Chesil Beach, he uses our knowledge against us, like the director of a good horror sequel. His chapters are now the equivalent of the slow pan around an empty room, with the viewer forced to look too long on every innocent object. Time gets stretched, objects obsessively over described in an almost drugged atmosphere of dread. These are technically fascinating short stories of enormous length. Which is not to say McEwan is not a fine novelist. It's just that he is a writer who very seldom gets novel-length ideas (The Child in Time and Atonement, primarily).

David Mitchell's approach is different. A genius of the unpublishable length, the long short story, the novella, he finds a new structuring principle and assembles a novel from modules of story. He nests six novellas (Cloud Atlas) in a marvelously meta fictive regression. Or he weaves a gossamer-thin line from which to hang nine stories that drift west, around the world (Ghostwritten). It is revealing that the only book of his to have disappointed the critics was his first "proper" novel, Black Swan Green.

I come out of an Irish tradition. Most great Irish novels are short stories assembled on an organizing principle. Historically, so are most successful books - 1001 Arabian Nights, the Bible, Canterbury Tales, the Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Decameron, Train spotting.

What contemporary readers don't seem to like are short stories that don't connect to each other. Why? Perhaps because our lives feel fragmented enough already. Television too has almost abandoned the single, self-contained drama. People like art to make sense out of chaos but without denying the chaos. That demand is a tremendous opportunity for the natural short story writer, who merely needs to come up with an organizing principle. It's just another technical challenge. Story itself is infinitely flexible, and doesn't much care how you tell it or what you call it. These stacks of stories, reinvented for the urban 21st century, could be called the multistory novel.

People worry about the short story, but it's the well-made, single story English novel (the bungalow novel?) that may be scheduled for demolition.