Review: An Arrangement of Economy (A Review of Arrangement by Merridawn Duckler)

The recent explosion of flash fiction in today's literary magazines is attributed by the cynical to the short attention spans of readers and the laziness of writers. I have to admit that when I see a story being introduced as "flash fiction by..." I often skip it. Recently a book for review thumped into my inbox and when I opened it up to the table of contents I saw it was a collection—and soon realized it was a flash fiction collection. I groaned. The conscientious critics at Lit Hub put up a good effort to convince us otherwise, but short story collections are the domain of the dilettante. There are a few exceptions of course (the upcoming All Around They're Taking Down the Lights by Adam Berlin being one), so I entered into this most recent collection of flash fiction a bit reluctantly. And got quite a surprise.

 

* * *

Arrangement is the latest book from Merridawn Duckler. These thirty-five stories (in a volume of only 128 pages) are economical, each word shouldering its own weight throughout the narrative and sometimes pulling double- or triple-duty. The style of economy forces you to read carefully, there are even a few stories sans quotation marks that draw you in even further. We open with a story about a woman working part-time delivering flowers. It's retrospective: "Even to this day I can refold a map with authority, although I couldn't have predicted how useless a skill set that would become." We finish up with this poetic lyric burst: "And yet the memory comes back so powerfully, barreling down the highway, smoke clinging to my hair, surrounded by flowers, as if I was traveling everywhere in a field that moved."

Although the explosion in popularity of flash fiction is fairly recent, the concept is not exactly new. In 1986 Robert Shapard and James Thomas put together an anthology of American "short-short stories" (Thomas didn't coin the term "flash fiction" until 1992), Sudden Fiction. It included some of fiction's heaviest hitters—Cheever, Updike, Langston Hughes, even Tennessee Williams. Seventy stories were contained in 219 pages. The book did well and is still in print today. On line magazines devoted to flash fiction began showing up in the early aughts—3:AM MAGAZINE in 2000, SmokeLong Quarterly in 2003, Flash Fiction Online in 2007, and newcomers are frequently arriving on (and disappearing from) the scene. Flash is not only not a fad, some might even argue it is supplanting the more traditional short stories of over a thousand words.

Duckler's stories reveal themselves without explicitly stating themselves, which is essential to the form and also where so many writers fail. Description often becomes an area of fussiness in short fiction, but here too Duckler shines. In "Window on the World" a group of tween girls peek through the window of a bar they hope to start visiting in six years: "...a depressed, colonial brick-front bar, with neon lottery signs and red vinyl booths for career alcoholics to seat their girlfriends." Duckler often uses metaphor and simile for economy: "When she talks to Gilly, her ideas fly like rocks into a pond; all drama, noise, splash, and then complete disappearance."

Elmore Leonard capped off his famous Ten Rules of Writing with something like an eleventh rule: "If it sounds like writing I rewrite it." Nowhere is this more important than in short fiction where such missteps would glare with obvious obnoxiousness. Duckler's chiseled prose sustains a structure—its "flash" a burst of light and an invitation to the reader to wonder about the shadowed corners. Adjectives are rare, leaving a welcoming ambiguity and allowing our imagination to fill in gaps. Story titles are part of the story.

Flash still attracts the tyro who sees flash fiction as easy pickings to publication credits, stuffing the inboxes of magazines with vignettes so lightweight and superficial they blow right off the page. However, the explosion in the popularity of flash fiction also seems to be forging inroads to the prestige of flash fiction—the longevity of 3AM, SmokeLong, and Flash Fiction Online are a testament to that. Skilled and talented writers like Duckler rising to the top puts a little more shine on it still.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5