Do Short Stories Belong on This Substack?
I Was Dithering when I posted "Hunger." And Then Came This Response
Many of the most successful Substacks focus deeply and well on a single topic: politics international, politics of the United States, recipes from America’s South or from India, visual arts, literature or theatre, diet and weight issues, how to get through middle-age and/or old age. But after years of grading student papers, writing for editors, or editing reporters myself, and having discovered this wonderfully freeing platform, I just couldn’t bring myself to limit content. Still, I worried about posting fiction here. It did seem a bit of a leap.
However, there were some wonderful comments on “Hunger,” a short story which I shared a couple of weeks ago, including from writers I’ve long admired, and I couldn’t resist sharing one of them.
John Thorndike is a novelist who has won all kinds of accolades and several awards. I’ve always admired his strong and elegant prose and his fascinating narratives. John is also a longtime friend who has often been kind enough to critique my work over the years. Yes, he’s usually positive, but I do still have a page of my first book—a memoir—on which he’s written along a margin in large letters: B-O-O-O-ring.
That’s not what he had to say here. Here it is:
I rarely read short stories. Never a book full, and of those I start in The New Yorker I finish perhaps one in three. Not my form, not my fascination. But of course I read “Hunger”—and I loved it.
It wasn’t even a topic that I have much interest in, day by day. Well, the ending—that’s closer to how I eat. But you are great at eliciting that fascination.. What draws me, of course, is the writing. Some lines I loved:
Because no matter how meticulously the staff maintained the kitchen, that edge of corruption was always present.
Dolts and dullards, all of them, salivating stupidly, shoving forkfuls of potato into their faces.
Now he carefully topped a robin’s egg and filled it with layers of mousse—saffron, shrimp, tomato: “They can take one layer at a time and let it melt on the tongue, or slide the spoon all the way in and sample the flavors together.”
(A robin’s egg?! It’s the size of my thumb or less! Very small spoon. But it’s another step into that wild obsession, and it draws me in.)
...an urbane little man with a head shaped like a plump olive, shiny black hair, and an air so smooth and oleaginous that he might have been stroked all over with duck grease.
And the grocery store is at 95th and Broadway! So close to where I lived, during my year in the city: 96th and Riverside. Quite stylish today, I daresay. My rent was $75 a month. I kept my VW bug on the street, used to drive down to the Village at night, rather than take the subway.
It’s a crazy notion: a dinner without food to eat. And the end, or the end of the restaurant, is so logical. Eventually some big, hungry, discontented brute would crush the whole project. And Henry winds up on the street, kind of. The gourmand becomes more like Diogenes. Yes, a great story.
--John
You can find John Thorndike’s work at https://www.johnthorndike.com, along with his biography, descriptions of all his books, and enough rapturous reviews to make all his writer friends wildly jealous—even those of us who love him.
John’s latest is The World Against Her Skin, and you can order it on Amazon. I admire all his work, and here are a couple I’ve found unforgettable over the years:
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