The Contest

I had considerable sympathy for Zadie Smith, when she released her explanation for not choosing a winning short story in a contest she was sponsoring.

The boxes of manuscripts for another contest had just begun arriving at my own door, and I’d cracked the first box and embarked on that batch and come up muddied and confused. I’d said yes to reading. I’d submitted to what friends of mine in other disciplines just couldn’t believe. (A journalist friend, when I told her I had to read 116 manuscripts in a month just started laughing. “But that’s impossible. It’s not right.”)

But I’d submitted willingly—no: enthusiastically—because I thought it would teach me something. Like a marathon reveals the body. Such bulk reading presses the bare essentials: What is worth reading? What do I want from a book? How can I say what is wrong with a manuscript—and what is right?

The next boxes had surprises in store, and at my reading’s end, I was left with more manuscripts I wanted to send on for the final round of judging, rather than none. And all of the first questions, and more.

“And who would want to possess independent aesthetic judgment anyway?” asks the writer of the “Hype Cycle” piece in the winter 2008 “Intellectual Situation” section of n+1).

“…in the middle (there’s no end) of the hype cycle, the important thing is no longer what a song, movie, or book does to you. The big question is its relationship to its reputation. So instead of abandoning yourself to the artifact, you try to exploit inefficiencies in the reputation market…. But anyone sensitive to art is also sensitive enough to feel his true aesthetic judgment under continuous assault from publicists, bloggers, journalists, advertisers, reviewers, and assorted subcultural specimens. Hype-and-backlash overwhelm the artifacts that supposedly occasion them…. Never mind the moon; look at the finger pointing at the moon.”

I liked the idea of avoiding all that. I was on my own with eight boxes of moon.

And what did I find?

The easy part is to say what’s wrong with a good deal of them. It surprised me to see that there’s still a resident strain of Carver that taken in such doses is very dull.

And too many short story collections seem called together at random. (For the deadline? The lure of the idea “book”?) Individual stories might be very good, but they don’t reverberate with or amplify their companions (as Carver’s do). By this I don’t mean that stories must be united by theme or by characters or by setting (though any of these might provide a shortcut to a greater unity of vision).

What is this—“greater unity of vision”—a phrase I don’t even like, a fusty complaining construction. My hands make a rounded shape in the air, and I’m not sure if it’s a basket or an egg. But it’s something that holds and can be held.

An atmosphere.

An intelligence.

It’s amazing how much fails to leave any impression at all. A month has passed. It seems to me very difficult to make an impression.

Though I was amazed to think of so many people, alone in their words, creating worlds. What place for us?