Story-stretching: A New Yorker trend

(Or:  Hey, kids!  Let’s put out a book!)

Story-Stretching – n. – An unfortunate practice in which a popular New Yorker Magazine story is strrrrretched into the length of a book so that the author (and a publishing company) can make additional money off it and increase its visibility.  See also, Susan Orlean, Philip Gourevitch, Junot Diaz.

It happens often in the New Yorker. One of their writers will pen a rich, vibrant nonfiction piece.  So someone thinks:  Let’s turn it into a book!  Then it will sell and make more money.  After all, you can’t really photocopy your magazine article and sell it separately.

The only problem is, a great article, no matter how long, does not necessarily a book make.

So the author injects a lot more facts, does more research, puffs it up like a new balloon until he simply can’t find another breath.  Then the publisher contributes large, pretty type and wide margins (a skill obviously honed doing high school term papers) and even if it’s still only 200 pages long, the pleasant new tome will attract some buyers.

Offender 1:  Philip Gourevitch, for “A Cold Case”

Philip Gourevitch’s story “A Cold Case,” about a police detective tracking down a murderer in hiding, was riveting reading, perhaps one of the best stories we’ve ever read in the New Yorker when it came out about 10 years ago.  Obviously other readers enjoyed it as well, because we later saw the same title in the book store.  Someone decided to turn the article, which already had everything you needed to know in it, into a book.  Did we mention that it was well-written and had everything you already needed to know in it?  After all, the New Yorker wouldn’t (intentionally, anyway) publish a story with holes.

The result?  Well, as someone commented on Amazon:

“That they were able to squeeze nearly 200 pages out of the original manuscript says more about the printers, triple spacing and wide fonts that it does about the author’s legwork.”

Gosh, that kind of reminds us of our Yale dissertation on William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Offender 2:  Susan Orlean “The Orchid Thief”

Since we praised her use of donor eggs in an earlier post, we are sorry to say that this particular baby of Orlean’s was overfed.  While (again) the movie “Adaptation” was a clever adaptation of her book “The Orchid Thief,” and the original New Yorker article itself was a compelling journey into one man’s obsession with orchidaceae, the book that came from the article did not need to be created in order to take the consumer’s precious pennies away.

Looking at Amazon, we find comments like this:

“The book, which is already printed in large font, has a lot of sections that are obvious filler to increase the page count. I could forgive these off topic filler sections if they were at least entertaining but unfortunately they are not.”

The magazine articles were the length they were because it was the correct length to tell the story.  Even if the editor chopped them from 30 pages to 25, there was not enough on the cutting room floor to push back in for a purty book.  The authors had to add information that really wasn’t needed, and didn’t seem seamless or necessary.  Sorry.

This concept doesn’t just apply to non-fiction, however, and here is where we’re going to get taken to task for bustin’ on an idol.

Offender 3:  Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”…uh oh.

Junot Diaz:  Terrific debut short-story collection, Drown, premiered in 1997.  He is clearly one of the most talented young fiction writers of the century, and he’s in some august company.

But after his collection came out, he didn’t have a follow up.  For years, people waited.  (Especially his agent and publisher, we presume.)  Among the few things he was able to publish was a not-so-short story in the Dec. 25, 2000 issue called “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”  As a long story, it was fabulous:  A nerdy, chubby Dominican kid sees his early success with girls wear off, and as he grows older, he is a man without a country, a lover without someone to love.  He follows the object of his affections to Puerto Rico, where he meets an untimely…challenge.

The story was well received, but as the years continued to pass, there was nothing new in terms of a novel from Diaz.  Thing was, this cat had promised a novel.  Cat owed the world a novel.  Word was that Drown was part of a two-book deal, pretty standard for a publishing house with its mitts on a hot young author.

What would Diaz do?  He could add a lot of political and historical background to his short story in order to stretch it out.  It’ll seem important! It will sell copies and everyone will fall over himself or herself to praise it!  Let’s talk about the main character’s grandparents and their political strife!

Again, Diaz is a top-notch writer.  But anyone who read the New Yorker story first can see where the old meat was fitted around the new meat, and this Wao-burger doesn’t quite come together.  The brutal reign of Rafael Trujillo in the D.R. and its effect on Wao’s relatives really had little to do with this book, but Diaz thought he could fit it in seamlessly.

Perhaps we are being so critical because we loved the original story too much.  (Snarky blogs who love too much?)  And perhaps Diaz was thinking of making it into a book when he started writing it.  But let’s ask ourselves this question:  If it was originally intended to be a novel, would it have taken another six or seven years to write the rest of it after turning in the short story?  No Wao.  Wao!  No Wao.

Tags: A Cold Case, Junot Diaz, New Yorker, Oscar Wao, Philip Gourevitch, Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief