I have managed, over the last two years or so, to acquire a copy of every issue of McSweeney’s published thus far. That makes eleven oddly formatted journals, of irregular size sitting all in a row on the shelf above my eMac. I have undertaken the project of reading them all, cover to cover, in order, with no other journals interrupting me in the meantime (I am currently a few pages into issue eight). This means several things.
First, it means that I am going out of my mind trying to wrap my head around an astonishing number of bold, original, strange, and occassionally pretentious, works of fiction and journalism. I find it quite fun, actually. But it’s also intellectually taxing.
Second, it means that I get to experience the evolution of the journal in a time significantly shorter than it actually took to happen. In the first few issues, McSweeney’s seemed on the verge of becoming a humour magazine, playing wildly with form and style, and publishing works that were almost all funny in one way or another. As a reader, I found this made them rather difficult to trust. When they began publishing journalism and other pieces of non-fiction (aside from Lawrence Weschler’s “Convergences” pieces, which have, by issue number eight, taken on the feel of a serial/column, with the strange property of none of them making sense if you haven’t read the first one), I was hard-pressed to believe that it wasn’t all fake (particularly the various “Failure” pieces presented by Paul Collins).
Somewhere around issue five, the journal took a sharp turn toward the serious; at times, it was even heartbreakingly sad. By issue eight, McSweeney’s is now a convincing blend of fiction and non-fiction; I have learned the strange and varied ways of its editorial staff, and I have come, more and more, to trust them.
It is also interesting to note that, with a few exceptions, the fiction has become less and less risky in terms of format, and more and more risky in terms of subject matter. Gone are the letters to Fortune 500 CEOs written from the perspective of a dog; in their place we find stories about scatological fetishism, shamanistic pregnancies, gang-bang record-holders, and senators adorable in their child-like innocence, all of which are written in remarkably straightforward ways.
Have they lost their edge? I don’t think so. I think they’ve matured, and they’ve matured in fine, wonderful ways.
