Themes of despair, optimism, domesticity, war collide in 29 short stories
Of the infinite pieces of advice given to aspiring writers, William Strunk Jr.’s demand in “The Elements of Style” to “omit needless words” is perhaps one of the most vital while being one of the hardest to follow. In poetry, conciseness is one of the main features of the form, while novels are permitted to meander at will: As such, the short story benefits the most from the omission of needless words, yet its compressed narrative risks suffering from a lack of emotional development.
Combining the brevity of the poem with the profundity of the novel makes short stories surprisingly difficult to do well, despite the fact that most aspiring fiction writers begin with the short story as they learn to develop their personal voice. A good short story evokes a reaction all its own: Like a sharp blow to the solar plexus, its ability to pack emotion into a few pages, or even a paragraph or two, can take one’s breath away.
“How to Write an Emotionally Resonant Werewolf Novel,” the first short story collection by former Pittsburgh-based writer and former Post-Gazette staffer Alex Miller, contains 29 stories ranging in length from 16 pages to one (admittedly long) sentence, though most fall halfway between. Mr. Miller may have taken Mr. Strunk’s exhortation to heart, despite the title’s indication to the contrary.
While some stories may fall flat — at 29 stories, the odds of perfection decrease quite a bit — the author’s dedication to portraying slices of everyday life with pithy compassion means there are enough moments of startling beauty to make the 150-page journey worthwhile. Each story explores a moment in time where a protagonist wrestles with their choices, both monumental and pedestrian, and what those choices entail. Mr. Miller often returns to the concepts of unrequited love, infidelity, war — all part of a larger discourse on the gap between what one’s life is and what one wants it to be.
In “Gestation Crate,” the opening story, this tension between “what is” and “what could be” is suffocating: The unnamed narrator, pregnant and living with her boyfriend, is unhappily floating through life and losing hope for something more. “My life isn’t the kind where good things just suddenly happen, like lightning out of a clear summer sky,” she thinks, yet her decision to leave that uneventful life behind is a great gasp of optimism; even if things haven’t gone right so far, perhaps there is still a future where they will.
Conversely, that dissatisfaction with one’s life is often punished in Mr. Miller’s stories. “The Loneliness of the Retail Banker” looks at the aftermath of an affair: While a new, secretive relationship carries its own form of optimism, the reality is usually the opposite, as marriages end and the dopamine rush of falling in love wears off. This leaves the adulterer to face the idea that searching for greener grass is, in itself, a symptom of unhappiness that can only be solved by oneself.
The disconnect between real life and fantasy becomes explicit in “Kandahar,” one of a handful of stories that explore the difference between civilian life and the reality of war. Jeremy, a childhood friend of the narrator, has died in Afghanistan on active duty, and the incongruousness of the mundane life the narrator leads and the constant sense of danger Jeremy dealt with is overwhelming. Though the protagonist longs to give meaning to the death of his friend, and feels dismayed by the indifference of the world at large, he also understands his role in this form of societal complacency when it comes to war: “But instead I just roamed the sidewalks for a long time, looking and thinking but never once saying or doing much of anything, because, to tell you the truth, I’m just as useless as everybody else.”
“How to Write an Emotionally Resonant Werewolf Novel” isn’t a particularly uplifting story collection, nor is it really trying to be. Instead, Mr. Miller aims, while omitting needless words, to give voice to a generation raised in the aftermath of Sept. 11, where job insecurity reigns supreme and the American dream feels more like a nightmare. Yet, even as his protagonists face one discouraging event after another, the overall feeling of the book is one of cautious optimism. As the author writes in the title story — with characteristic succinctness — “Now it’s over . .... And it’s OK.”