No Retreat, No Surrender

Friends,

Right now, my current bathroom book is the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (which has the story A Vintage Thunderbird by Ann Beattie that happens to be very good, and will go on that anthology list once I get the time to complete it). I'm currently stuck on the Carol Bly story Talk of Heroes. It's set in Minnesota. It has Norwegians. But I just can't get into the damn thing, and I've only managed to get a few pages into it, despite a few trips to the loo.

It's a story that's been collected a few places, so it's not like some filler story the editors of the VBCASS got because the budget for obtaining the rights was strained. The dialogue just sounds false to me, and there's exclamation points aplenty in places to denote mildly excited speech not shouted speech, like it's some damn comic strip, so that irksome to me as well.

Anyway, my question isn't about whether or not you like that story, but I wonder on average, how much time do you give a story that you don't care for before you say "blech!" and move to the next? Now I'm talking short stories, not novels because novels, sometimes you need to get halfway into it before it gets interesting (I'm looking at you Empire Falls). Also, I want to clarify that I am not asking about student/workshop stories.

I want to know, on average, how long will you let yourself be bored, aggravated, perturbed, by a short story before you want to move to the next?

viva el mustache