Janet McAllister: Summer time and it is fraught with short

Janet McAllister. Photo / Greg Bowker

Summer holidays: a cultural snob's worst nightmare. Theatres and dealer galleries are closed, and Outrageous Fortune has taken over Auckland Museum. Only "Literature" can save one from becoming a philistine.

As usual, the magazines tried hard to fill the artistic gap, papering over the silly season with short stories.

This year, nearly all their offerings were written by journo-turned-novelist Tim Wilson.

The Listener felt compelled to spell out it had "exclusive new" work from Wilson to make it clear they weren't just reprinting his "remarkable new" fiction published in Metro a couple of weeks before.

Wilson's surreal, flashy set-ups are original and entertaining enough, although tiresomely he amuses himself at the reader's expense by withholding information.

But in spite of the annual summer crop, I don't usually read magazine fiction. A friend who studies these things believes short stories are much harder to write than novels. They're certainly harder to read.

Maybe the problem is the usual magazine story message: life is dreary - if you try to change that, it'll just make things worse.

Wayne C. Jessop's magic realist tale in Mana magazine is feel-good, but otherwise this year's crop includes: an ex-artist alcoholic in a wheelchair (Wes Lee's Katherine Mansfield Award-winning Furniture); a dreary man fighting with colleagues when his dreary marriage is breaking up (Wilson's The Dress Your Daddy is Wearing, and Why); and a dreary vegan whose compassion has dissolved into platitudes (Pip Adam's Goldfish).

The doom and gloom means a reader's desire "to spend time with characters who do something, rather than relentlessly suffer things done to them" - as Jolisa Gracewood puts it, also in Metro - is usually left unfulfilled.

And the only jokes we get are inadvertent ones. In Mary McCallum's This Seagull Heart of Mine (what does that mean?) a description of a female character includes the simile "nipples like cupcakes". Even Katy Perry bras stop at nipples like cupcake cherries.

Writers of more "serious" stories often hope to make their unanchored imaginings convincing by cushioning them with piles of irrelevant yet laboured sensory detail.

By contrast, in Nicky Pellegrino's domestic story in last week's New Zealand Woman's Weekly, the wife makes an extra effort to please hubby by using the nice dinner bowls even though they don't fit in the dishwasher. That detail is genuine, nicely observed, and telling.

And at least the Weekly's stories have plot, even at their most misogynist. In Sarah-Kate Lynch's tale, a woman tries to have a holiday on her own and ends up humiliated. "Happy" ending, though! She decides to settle for the dork at work.

The well-told, unforced, interesting exception to all this was My Yale and My Harvard by Craig Cliff in the Listener. Relief! No outlandish image in the first paragraph taking another 3000 words to explain. The main character isn't sorry for himself. I liked him and his Dad.

And Cliff respects his readers by crediting them with an imagination. Yes, even the MTV generation can visualise the inside of a taxi, all by themselves, without needing to be spoon-fed every seat crease. That's something most blockbuster novelists seem to know, and many middlebrow-thoughtful story writers don't.

Perhaps magazines could give us thrillers and romantic comedies and science fiction stories in the summer. Even cultural snobs need a holiday, after all.