Like Carver and Hempel, Robison’s editor at Knopf was Gordon Lish, whose surgical excisions on Carver’s stories have been argued over ad infinitum. She wasn’t celebrated to the same extent as other members of her cohort, Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel among them, but her early stories-she published five books between 19, including three collections of short fiction-are exemplars of the genre: compact slices of life, written in precise and exacting prose, and mostly set in a lower-middle-class white America far from the coastal elite. These novels arose, in part, in response to the so-called Kmart realism of the 1980s, of which Robison was a practitioner. It was a work of sardonic wit in the post-9/11 climate of magical earnestness, and one narrow in scope during a moment that saw the reemergence of big social novels by men named Jonathan. of Speculation, Rachel Khong’s diaristic Alzheimer’s comedy Goodbye, Vitamin, and the entirety of Tao Lin’s hoodie-clad oeuvre.ĭespite a positive reception (it won the LA Times Book Prize for fiction and drew praise from Cathleen Schine in the New York Times Book Review), Robison’s novel had the bad luck of wrong place and time. It would be bold to claim that Why Did I Ever, Mary Robison’s 2001 novel in 536 short chapters, both predicted Twitter and precociously perfected the form, so I’ll start with an easier proposition: Robison’s novel-reissued this month-is an American classic, the spiritual spawn of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and the missing generational link between those and recent works like Jenny Offill’s aphoristic divorce drama Dept.
Why Did I Ever, by Mary Robison, Counterpoint Press, 205 pages, $16.95
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