Welcome to the Cutting Edge

By Rob Kunzig

While John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Nora Roberts stock the bestseller shelves, the American literary avant garde is sustained by the “little magazines,” quarterly publications like Granta, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and Tin House. Four times a year new poems, essays and short stories shoulder their way onto the literary scene, forming the shifting earthquake-ground of contemporary literature. For most of these magazines, any Shakespeare with computer access can have their go at changing the canon.

I work at one of these magazines, and I’m here to tell you that the cutting edge is getting dull.

As a student associate, my job is to shift through the “slush pile”—the vast inbox of unsolicited essays, poems and short stories—and determine what’s worthy of forwarding to the head editor for closer consideration. Of the hundreds of pieces I review during a semester, I forward three. Maybe five. Of those, a single one has yet to be accepted for publication.

Not a big surprise—the magazine I work for solicits manuscripts from Ian McEwan, and has shot down submissions from authors of equal clout. Nor is it surprising that many of the slush manuscripts are bad, or even that many are good. What is surprising is their uniformity, the two or three angst-sloppy ruts authors drive, even pound, themselves into.

Cancer. You’ll find few metaphors more reliable, or more masticated. Cancer, a disease that slowly drives the life from your body by colonizing cells, has appeared in poems and stories as ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, needy parent, needy addiction, love, anger, justice. Very seldom is cancer actually cancer.

Flowers. Gardens. Rotting vegetables, the effluvia thereof. Poison, “Every Rose Has Its Thorns”: You get the idea.

Odes to drink. Like migratory birds, these come to my inbox once a year—Christmas. Nobody loves the author, everybody hates the author, the author should just go eat worms. Or drink a fifth of Maker’s, which, actually, is the author’s friend, a friend with whom the author has made a suicide pact. Sally forth! Ever try to ennoble the town wino? Unless you’re Connor Oberst, it doesn’t work (and even if you are, it’s hard).

The biggest hemorrhage in my inbox—and it bleeds, bleeds, bleeds everywhere—is the alienated twentysomething narrative. Here it is, in a paragraph: the author is the main character. The story starts off in a small kitchen with a single cup of coffee. It moves into a metro station, where the author feels small and unimportant among the crowd—in contrast, of course, to his/her days as Math League champ, editor of the school paper, Summa Cum Laude philosopher, aspiring sculptor. Next is the cubicle job, the bland sandwich lunch, the worker bee busy work, and back on the metro, back to the apartment, back to the small kitchen with the sad coffee. The sun sets on the city outside and the narrator considers phoning their potentially-significant other. They will not. They cannot. They are simply too…alone.

If all submissions were that stark, they might have a chance. Most, however, are festooned like a prize pig with a bouquet of daddy issues, drinking problems, or other, shadier personal demons. The theme is stagnation, manifested perfectly in form: Nothing. Ever. Happens.

A gunshot for a coda would be nice. I’m never so lucky.