The New Yorker offered him a deal

Two months ago, I read a seven-hundred-page collection of short stories by John Cheever. But somehow that wasn’t enough. I went on to read seven-hundred-page retrospective collections from Mavis Gallant, Alice Adams, and John O’Hara. And I still wanted more!

Normally when I get halfway through a story collection I think, “Okay...I’m done now”, but with these authors, it wasn’t like that. I wanted more. Not more of these particular writers, but more work that was like their work in some weird, indefinable way.

What’s even weirder was that although these authors were different from each other, there was also a lot of similarity. They tended to write in a journalistic style, heavy on description, without a lot of judgment. The writing felt like a clear pane of glass, as if you were just seeing through to the life underneath. Their stories also tended to be light on plot—the characters were quite passive, tossed-around by life, and the stories would end in oblique, understated ways.

A classic example is Alice Adams’s “Beautiful Girl”, about a man who visits an ex-lover who’s become an alcoholic. When she falls asleep, he murmurs something about how he’d love her to come home and be his beautiful girl again. The woman wakes up and shouts, “I am a beautiful girl!”

That’s it. Then the story is over.

I know this sounds boring. I enjoy plot. I enjoy story. I enjoy conflict. I enjoy resolution—I never pictured myself as an avid consumer of these plotless, understated stories.

And yet, I kept reading them. All of these initial four writers (Cheever, Gallant, Adams, and O’Hara) were primarily published in The New Yorker. And I could sense that The New Yorker had shaped their outlook. All my life, I’ve heard about this thing, “the New Yorker story”. I hadn’t investigated this term in depth, but I understood it to mean “a short story that is meandering, plotless, and slight—full of middle-class people discussing their relentlessly banal problems”.

And yes, these stories definitely fit that description. But they were also good!

I became very interested in figuring out the essence of the New Yorker story. So I hunted up three early anthologies of New Yorker stories (published in 1940, 1949, and 1960). And whenever I spotted a writer who seemed particularly New Yorker-y, I read more of their work. That’s how I ended up reading ...