shortcuts

As I get older, and my years of hardcore television-watching start to catch up to me, I admit that my attention span is shot. If entertainment isn't broken down into manageable chunks, I whine and drag my feet like a third-grader faced with long division homework. So I've determined that short stories/essays are pretty much the ideal literary format. When magazines like The New Yorker make an extra effort to drop short fiction in my lap, I'm always thankful.

Their holiday fiction issue is especially strong this year, with stories from Alice Munro and Colson Whitehead. But my favorite was Another Manhattan by Donald Antrim. It starts out as a modern update on the kind of bantery, upper-class neuroticism that Woody Allen has practically trademarked in film (a little bit of covert spouse-swapping, and everyone seems to be a doctor or therapist of some kind). But then it turns darker, more serious, into a reflection on intense unhappiness among people who appear to have everything under control. The pacing is good, the nuances are there, and...it's short.

Of course, this fondness for brevity might not mean that I'm losing my attention span. It might just mean I'm turning into a Japanese teenager. The New Yorker also has an intriguing article about the latest literary fad to hit Japan: the cell phone novel. My first reaction was to scoff at the idea of full books written in text-message-speak, but the further I read in the article, the less absurd it seemed. Maybe teenage girls shouldn't be dismissed so easily--after all, they turned a lousy vampire book into a major phenomenon in about ten seconds flat. And after watching my own company scramble to figure out what kids want, what iPhone/Kindle users want, I don't think it will be long before you see oddly formatted books popping up here in the U.S. as well. Maybe this means I should start working on my Twitter-formatted memoir.