The Closing Window

Fiction that examines the lives of ordinary working people was particularly fruitful in the 1980s and 1990s, when writers of short stories—such as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Toni Cade Bambara—were published alongside novelists—such as Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, and Richard Russo—who wrote about working-class settings, characters, and problems. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, though, it seems that fewer and fewer writers (or perhaps publishers) are exploring working-class people and issues in fiction. Occasionally, a novelist will appear on the scene with a naturalistic view of working-class life, as Philipp Meyer recently did with his debut novel, American Rust. But fiction that gazes intently upon the lower and working classes has had a difficult time surfacing in the new century.

In an essay called “Never Give an Inch,” published in the Fall 2010 issue of the literary journal Tin House, Gerald Howard states that this infrequency of attention in fiction may have something to do with the social class of those who generally work in publishing houses:

As relatively modest as their salaries may be, people in publishing are still by birth and education and cultural assumptions members of the emerging American overclass, self-replicating and increasingly isolated from the conditions of American life outside the big cities and campus enclaves . . . All of which means that voices from and on behalf of the working class have that much harder a time getting read, understood, and published.

Absent some unforeseen cultural shift, these voices are likely to remain unfashionable. Other factors may contribute to Howard’s analysis, but the claim that working-class fiction is unfashionable or misunderstood by editorial gatekeepers may apply primarily to large, corporate publishing houses, because working-class fiction is alive and well at small presses and university presses. Even more interesting is that short story collections outnumber working class-oriented novels from such publishers. Maybe that reflects Raymond Carver’s explanation of the short story form: “Get in, get out. Don’t linger.” For a writer whose life may require a job (or several jobs) beyond writing in order to live—the sort of writer who may be more likely to write about working-class issues—the short story can be especially attractive. Small, yet allowing a writer to focus with precision on characters whose lives are also circumscribed by work (or the lack thereof in some cases), the length of the short story allows working writers the benefit of accomplishment within the limitations of their freedom of time. Two writers who have recently turned to this form are Michael Zadoorian and Bonnie Jo Campbell.

In his 2009 collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, Zadoorian delivers a showcase of characters that ranges from a woman who puts animals to sleep at a pound—slowly accreting an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness in her daily tasks—to a young man who “had left his wife back in Detroit and had heard that she was looking for him. Not to kill him, or even to hurt him, though sometimes he told people that because it sounded a lot more interesting” (p. 18). He befriends a woman who suffers from dyskinesia and has used her loss of muscle control as a way to create rather than suffer, flinging paint on a canvas, Jackson Pollock-style. She calls her paintings “meaningless” but later tells him: “You’ve got to use it . . . Otherwise it’s just wasted energy, nothing.” The advice seems especially appropriate for a young man who couldn’t understand how to be married and hold a steady job.

This line of dialogue might sum up the theme of Zadoorian’s fondly assembled cast of Detroiters, who live in particular sections of the city. Zadoorian has parceled out their stories into a West Side, East Side, and Downtown structure, giving the book a feeling of being a small world contained unto itself, mapped, known. An...