Shortly before his untimely death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in his working notes for his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." Fitzgerald considered this observation to be so important that he underlined the first and last words several times each.

What this gifted novelist and short-story writer meant by this pithy statement should be quite obvious, though it seems to have escaped countless writers and critics in the past half-century: an author conveys a character and makes him real through the character's actions, including thoughts, words, deeds, or any combination of the three. (To interpret Fitzgerald's statement as meaning that action flows out of character would also make sense, but it is something that no author should find very useful: Where else could meaningful action come from but characters?)

Fitzgerald's observation would seem to be little more than common sense. As Aristotle noted more than two millennia ago, drama lies in the choices characters have to make. Unaccompanied by depictions of specific actions, statements about a person can hardly be dramatic, convincing, or compelling. On the other hand, most people are inherently interested in accounts of others' actions, in their moral choices, and in the thoughts that bring them to various crossroads and inform their decisions. That is why gossip is a universal phenomenon.

Unfortunately, during the decades since Fitzgerald wrote those words, action—in its most coherent guises of plot and story—gradually fell out of favor among the American literary élite and its multitude of followers. Novelists and, especially, short-story writers took the none-too-subtle hint and duly set out to explore character and let the story come as it might—or might not. By the 1980s and '90s, many of those at the top of the literary heap were minimalist writers such as Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Anne Beattie, and Mary Robison, whose "'around the house and in the yard' fiction," as the decidedly non-minimalist novelist Don DeLillo described it, was widely imitated in writing workshops across the country.

In his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, novelist Michael Chabon rightly deplores this state of affairs. He wants to remedy it by restoring plots, events, actions, human choice—in short, story—to the short story. The present anthology, billed as the first in a series, is his shot across the bow of the literary establishment—a bold attempt to "revive the lost genres of short fiction, a tradition I saw as one of great writers writing great short stories."

This mention of genre is, I think, the key to the thing. While literary trendsetters and critical darlings went their own way, other writers continued to pursue traditional forms of plot, story, action, and character in genre fiction throughout the past half-century: mysteries, science fiction, suspense, gothics, Westerns, and other such works. For all their often fine merits, however, genre novels and stories don't appeal to everyone, and their conventions do limit what writers can achieve without obliterating their boundaries altogether. When authors such as Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Maugham, and Faulkner, whom Chabon cites in his introduction, wrote "ripping yarns" of the type he champions, they were far less deferential toward the conventions of the genres in which they wrote than were most writers who toiled in these fields.

It is nonetheless true that even these authors aimed to write stories with plenty of action, and it seems that the attempt to write within a particular genre can have a salutary effect, however willing and able an author may be to transcend its boundaries. The obvious limitation of genre fiction is that it puts a frame (albeit often a quite flexible one) around a story's possibilities; the underappreciated positive aspect of working in such a form is that it can strengthen the effect of a tale by forcing the writer to eliminate irrelevant material. In addition, the need to fulfill plot expectations of the chosen genre obliges the author to find situations that will force the characters to make difficult choices, both tactical and moral ones. And in the latter lie drama and insight into the human condition.

Story, then, is not something to discard lightly, and Chabon deserves credit for taking up arms in its defense. It is fortunate, however, that the present volume is just the first of a series, because it is clear that most of the authors represented here are still caught between modern literary anomie and the confidence displayed by the writers of the past whose approach and achievements they wish to emulate.

The book begins with a fairly successful attempt to meld contemporary concerns with a reasonably faithful approach to a traditional genre, in this case the adventure story. "Tedford and the Megalodon," by Jim Shepard, set in 1923, documents the attempt of an Australian land surveyor and amateur paleontologist to prove the existence of a gigantic, prehistoric, sea monster he believes to be living in a pond on an island in the Antarctic.

Like several other stories in the volume, Shephard's tale incorporates a good deal of biblical imagery, and it includes an interesting suggestion of the limits of scientific knowledge: "Finding what science insisted wasn't there—that was the real contribution," notes the narrator. Thanks to this underlying concern and Shepard's skill at describing action and setting, the story is reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle's similar efforts. It also employs a theme that is common throughout the book: the search for meaning through action.

That theme seems to be an open rebuke to the minimalists and other plot-haters and psychology-mongers. As the narrator of Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" says, "Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren't going to help you or me one bit, because this s___ is real."

Several other stories are similarly successful in avoiding both pulp and pretension. Elmore Leonard's contribution is a solid crime story, benefiting greatly from this former pulpster's refusal to condescend to his audience. Glen David Gold likewise provides an interesting murder tale, though it betrays a slight deficiency of experience with the genre, as it contains a bad logical flaw. (The author fails to explain why the later victims of the murder plot did not hear about the deaths of the previous ones and hence take steps to avoid being killed in the unique way the author describes.)

The contributions by Michael Moorcock, Carol Emshwiller, Kelly Link, and Hornby also combine good genre fun with unusual story elements. Unfortunately, none of these is quite conclusive in expressing some interesting meanings, and they are hence less than fully satisfying. Karen Joy Fowler provides a fairly uneventful mummy story with an amusing, thinly veiled portrait of the young Agatha Christie. Still less successful are the entries that try too hard to transcend genre conventions or ignore them altogether, such as the stories by Aimee Bender, Harlan Ellison, and Chris Offutt.

Across the board, the stories tend to feature central characters in the modern mold; the primary impression one gets is that they are immensely bothered by many things. They are driven by loneliness, anxiety, wanderlust, uncertainty about their place in the world (and family relationships, a very common theme in the volume), other ethnic groups (a surprisingly common theme), and feelings of personal inadequacy. This is very unlike traditional pulp fiction, where characters are not relentlessly psychologized and motives are common human ones such as desire for financial success, love within a faithful marriage, and simple bourgeois comfort.

Most of the stories in this collection are also unlike authentic pulp fictions in that they present some fairly spicy content. Contrary to the belief common among modern readers (perhaps derived in good part from Quentin Tarantino's florid film Pulp Fiction), the cheap magazine fiction that thrived between World War I and the mid-1950s was really very wholesome overall. Despite the often seedy atmosphere and wild histrionics, the good guys typically won, the language was basically clean, and the sexual activity was implied rather than stated. The "Spicy" and "Weird Menace" pulps ventured into some decidedly lurid subject matter, but even those stories were extremely tame by today's standards.

Dave Eggers' "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" is probably the most successful at taking one of these anxious moderns and creating a real story with an interesting setting, steady action, and serious moral choices. A hiking trip up Mount Kilimanjaro provides an opportunity to contrast the protagonist's sterile, unmarried life of little achievement with that of her sister, who is successful in work, marriage, and family and who is thoughtful and kind toward the main character. Eggers' point is clear: a meaningful life is one in which one achieves for others as well as oneself.

Laurie King's "Weaving the Dark" offers a similar and more powerful character contrast. Here the protagonist is a selfish baby boomer with glaucoma (tunnel vision, if anything a bit too symbolic), who is attended by a responsible, even noble, 16-year-old Christian girl. Overjoyed when asked to move in with the protagonist to help her take care of the latter's lesbian lover, who is recovering from a stroke, the girl begins "a whirlwind of busy-body virtue," as the protagonist sees it. But the girl makes no attempt to evangelize the older woman directly, obviously preferring to lead by example. The tale is a tricky one: the author's sympathies appear to lie with the self-seeking representative of the older generation, but the logic of the story points in another direction.

Religious faith is central to many of the stories. In Don Chaon's "The Bees," for example, the protagonist reflects on the positive, transforming potential of faith:

He has been incredibly lucky, he thinks. Blessed, as Gene's favorite cashier at the supermarket always says, "Have a blessed day," she says, when Gene pays the money and she hands him his receipt, and he feels as if she has sprinkled him with her ordinary, gentle beatitude. It reminds him of long ago, when an old nurse had held his hand in the hospital and said that she was praying for him.

Gene has dramatically changed his behavior, giving up alcohol and overcoming—so it seems—the anger and domestic violence it helped unleash, but the state of his soul has remained the same, and the results are appropriately tragic.

The longest, most ambitious, and most successful story in the collection is "The Albertine Notes," by Rick Moody. Reminiscent of the works of Philip K. Dick, it is a science-fiction tale about drugs, corporate wheeling and dealing, crime, terrorism, government corruption, time travel, human identity, the nature of memory, and more. Moody creates layers within layers of reality and memory, which makes for an engrossing plotline and characters who are interesting because of what they do and why. He seems not to feel the need to prove his ability at Freudian analysis or sociology or to shove political opinions at us. As a consequence, his personal concerns work their way to the fore without being forced, and the story succeeds, among other ways, as a fascinating personal reaction to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

If there is to be any great hope for short prose narrative fiction in the future, and indeed for written fiction of any length, it would seem to lie in efforts like Moody's as author and Chabon's as editor. Whether this kind of writing can succeed in the marketplace is an important question well worth answering, and the greatest value of this volume might well be as a test-case.

S. T. Karnick is editor in chief of American Outlook magazine, published by the Hudson Institute.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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