V.S. Pritchett spoke in an interview of how Chekhov’s gifts were limited to short forms because he lived in an anarchic and chaotic society, diagnosing the same state of genius to Irish writers like Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty that came after him. Pritchett said, “the novel depends enormously upon its sense of a stable social structure and the short story does not really depend on there being a social structure at all.” To give form to our fractalizing 21st century chaos, traditional short stories are too neat, wishfully formal, consoling. Adorno believed art worth its salt does not aspire to console. So it may be in the fragments, flash fictions, micro fictions, that we’ll find the form of our current chaos aestheticized.
Meg Pokrass has mastered the shortest forms, but her work is no small thing. Flash Fiction, and its many subgenres, too often run the risk of being no more than whimsical. Either relying on Joycean epiphanies or surreal imagery to carry them, very short fiction can reliably be compared to miniature painting. Stand too close to an amateur’s miniature painting, and the details blur into nothing much. In contrast, focus on a miniature by a master and their world opens and enlarges. Collected in her new book of fiction, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories, are stories that are each a peephole into worlds rendered larger. Each peephole has a particular intimacy, brought into the light with details such as this: “I sat with him in a café and we ate potato salad and drank Italian sodas. All around us, sad-looking people walked happy-looking dogs.” Sadness and want succinctly consummated at the end of this 11-line story with: “On my birthday, my last pair of reading glasses broke and I let him have the rest of me. While he did that, I thought about Laffy Taffy, the candy I loved as a kid. How it ruined my teeth, but I wanted it anyway.”
Pokrass’s characters fit so perfectly into flash fictions, because the tensions giving each piece structural and spiritual integrity comes from their being both aware of their limitations as a small life occupying a small space, and the fear of life’s expanding beyond those confines.
In a longer story, a quartet of four fragments, a woman is surprised that her partner Jim announces an old friend is visiting. “He had spoken of friends from his past, but never this one.” The intrusion of surprise immediately jeopardises the small order of her life. Bob, Jim’s friend, enters their life with geodes and geology, and first-class flights, drinks their vodka. Bob becomes a figure who threatens the narrator’s picture of herself, her house, her husband. Noticing Bob, she says, “He looked like a once-in-a-lifetime person, his face fallen down and old but sweet.” Ending the piece, she stands in her kitchen topless, after sawing an itchy tag off her top, and wonders what she’d say to Bob if he entered: “And what might she say? She’d say that this had something to do with the hole she had long ago dug herself into. And how she imagined that somewhere inside herself, she still glowed.”
Pokrass resists whimsy. None of the stories or prose poems in The First Law of Holes fall back on the temptations of shallow topsy-turvy tales that too often wrap up flash fictions. Through delicate contrasts, subtle gestures, minute characterisation, flash fiction is elevated from being a mere mood, or colorwork, into a medium that’s able to touch on the intrinsic fractures and shattering that make us 21st century humans. To highlight Meg Pokrass’s master-miniaturisations, here in one of the prose poems in the later section of the book (my favourite very short piece).
Guest Star
Rain is starting. My sister stands next to her groom, and to the rabbi, exotic animal, her special guest star. The groom, hawk handsome, is shelter. The yard is protected by a huge palm a fig tree sprouting out between its roots. Guests are cooing unanimously, as if rooting. I’m nineteen, slouching, holding a wilting bouquet. My mother and I feel light, as if drunk, as if we could lean forward forever and not fall. And in the air, the luck smell of wet grass.
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The First Law of Holes
by Meg Pokrass
Dzanc Books; 251 p.
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