The Problem with Short Stories

One problem with short stories is that you can read a great many at a time and if an author has certain recurrent themes, one is likely to get the impression that the repetoire is extremely limited.  Such an evaluation, on the face of it, is hardly fair, especially if that author specializes in the novel.  Such were some of my thoughts while reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck.  A lot of the stories end up sounding much the same.  It is a tendency I noted as well in Jhumpa Lahiri's most recent book of short stories--there we have tales of marital disquiet and alienation. Here we have tales of alienation and marital disquiet, but there are others as well, and so, my statement about too many stories clustered giving too narrow an impression of an writer's work.

I was impressed, as I often am, by the insights provided in such works into ordinary American life, and suggestions of why things might be the way they are.  In Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, some of the statements of the person who dealt in human hair were like this.  Here's Adichie's take:

from "On Monday of Last Week"
in The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from diappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule.  It used to amuse Kamara, watching women on television talk about how much they loved their children, what sacrifices they made for them. Now, it annoyed her.

More about this collection when I've had a chance to read the whole and analyze.