Short Stories: "Something of a Bum"

To call an American writer a master of the short story can be taken at best as faint praise, or at worst as an insult... (In Praise of the American Short Story)

Although he earned the highest praise for his short stories, John Cheever was the first to admit that this writing form is considered "something of a bum." Cheever was lucky enough to write (and thrive as a writer) during a time when scads of magazines published short fiction. But today, most of those literary periodicals have vanished, and short stories have come to be seen as preludes to "real" writing.

...I told non-writer friends that my book was a short story collection they were congratulatory but fervent in their expressed hopes that I would someday, finally, write a novel. (Let us Now Praise Famous Short Story Writers and Demand that They Write a Novel)

What does the short story offer that novels don't? One reviewer suggests that short stories are much more like life, where we glimpse the lives of others for a brief span, before the relentless tide of our lives sweeps us apart.  

The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose. 

As we move on from The Stories of John Cheever  to Joyce Carol Oates' collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep, it may help to keep in mind that these two art forms are separate but equal. The relationships a reader develops with a novel may be akin to becoming best friends, but in the words of one Pulitzer Dialogues participant,

You can not only meet acquaintances but also find lifelong friends in short stories. Or at least wonder about them for a long time.