More The Namesake spoilers
sanyuja said:
Really? I never felt that way. Rather, the ending came as a surprise for me. Because I thought there was more to come.
I never ‘saw it coming’ [the ending], frankly I thought maybe she’d go down the baby-route like we previously mentioned. (I’m glad she didn’t)
I’m just guessing that *she* had the idea that that is how the story will end.
Some writers know the ending and just write into/up to it, others have premise for a story and let it ‘write itself’ and are sometimes as startled by the character development or ending as the reader.
If you think this should have been a short story, try her first book 'Interpreter of Maladies.' Have you read it?
Only a few of the shorts that appeared around (The New Yorker, etc). Pretty good, yes.
If anything, it was nice to see a collection of short win an award such as the Pulitzer.
I think she just took a short story and went on adding pages to it and ended up with 'Namesake.' I am sure you will agree!
That was a bit of my thinking but I didn’t want to outright accuse her of that.
Knowing she was comfortable with the short form may have been in the back of my mind when creating my particular critique (although I can’t think of the last book I read that I didn’t think could use a big edit, I am under the firm belief that any story, with very few exceptions, can be told in 300 pages).
It’s a rare thing for someone working mainly in short stories to not attempt a novel, many, like Raymond Carver, totally abandoned it as an uncomfortable thing.
Amy Hempel, someone who works _very_ “small, concise, precise”, at first thought she had a novel in-progress but it wound up being a ‘novella’.
I can think of very few writers who excel(ed) at both. Maybe William Faulkner. James Joyce.
Hemingway was great at shorts, less so at novels. Same with F. Scott, and John Cheever. And Ann Beattie and TC Boyle, to drop a few current names.
Reality is, a short story needs to be combined with (around, at least) 8-10 _other_ stories for the writer to be able to release it in book form (journal and periodical publishing is nice, but doesn’t pay the metaphorical rent), whereas an overwritten story can be a novel and thereby have potential at film rights, etc.
The art of the short story, as Frank Zappa once said about jazz, “may not be dead, but it smells funny”.
j
